The governing coalition's popularity slumped in the two years after the election. A pre-election spending spree had been followed by a series of cuts in services and the postponement of the implementation of some key election promises in areas like hospital beds and Garda numbers. Fianna Fail paid a high price for these adjustments in the local and European elections in June 2004. Its share of the vote fell to 32 per cent, its lowest since 1927.159 While Fine Gael's vote declined slightly, they won a number of extra seats and their new leader, the Mayo TD Enda Kenny, had the added compensation of winning an extra seat in the European elections, where Fine Gael emerged as the largest party, with five of Ireland's thirteen seats: 160 Labour's performance was strong in Dublin, where it emerged as the largest party, and it did well in the east of the country and the larger urban areas. Perhaps most importantly, its vote held up in spite of a surge in support for Sinn Féin. This was the most dramatic feature of the elections, with the party's support more than doubling and the acquisition of a European seat in Dublin.
Sinn Fein's vote was distinctive in geographical and class terms, being particularly concentrated in the working-class districts of major urban centres and in the border constituencies – its largest support was in Monaghan (31 per cent) and Dublin city (18.5 per cent). Its gains were strongly correlated with losses in Fianna Fáil support, suggesting that, although it is often presented as a left-wing alternative in Irish politics, it is more interested in moving into the territory of the mainstream Irish parties. Here it benefited from the media's focus on the central role of its leading members in the northern peace process. Adams ranked as one of the most popular political figures in the country, getting higher satisfaction ratings than either the Labour or Fine Gael leaders in an Irish Times poll conducted a month before the Northern Bank robbery in Belfast that was attributed to the IRA.161
After the electoral bruising in June 2004, Bertie Ahern announced that the government would listen to the voters. One result was his public declaration that he was a socialist. Another manifestation of Fianna Fáil's repositioning was a ‘think-in’ of the parliamentary party, addressed in September 2004 by Father Seán Healy of the Conference of the Religious of Ireland, on the subject of ‘social inclusion’. Healy's address, which advocated greater income and wealth redistribution, was followed by the departure of the Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, for Brussels. McCreevy was blamed by backbenchers for contributing to the election losses because of his ‘right-wing’ tone, and it was hoped that his replacement, Brian Cowen, would re-establish the party's social-democratic image.162
By early 2005 there had been a marked recovery in the popularity of the government. This reflected an improvement in the economy after the post-election slippage. But the government still faced high levels of criticism on a range of issues, from inadequacies in the health service to ill-treatment of patients in state-funded nursing homes. More important was the intent on the part of Labour and Fine Gael to work out a pre-election pact. Ahern's response to the emergence of a more coherent opposition was to allege that it would be dominated by Labour's ‘tax-and-spend’ philosophy and would ‘bring us all back to the Third World in “jig time’”.163 This pronouncement came during another ‘think-in’, which was addressed by the American social theorist Robert Putnam; his analysis of social capital and the decline and revival of community in the US was declared by the Taoiseach to be of ’central relevance to Ireland. Rabbitte immediately responded to Ahern's attack by making it plain that a government of which Labour was a part would not increase income or corporation tax, although it would address the issue of tax loopholes for the rich and would consider a wealth tax. As one political scientist noted, there were few significant differences between the policy positions of Labour, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on the economy. But she also noted, on the basis of a survey of election candidates in 2002, that, while there was a convergence of economic and social policies, there remained a long-standing difference in the political identities of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. This difference was a product of the parties’ different positions on the ‘national question’ and Northern Ireland. Fianna Fáil's self-image of being more authentically republican than the other main parties was connected with a tendency to appropriate the Northern Ireland issue and suggest that both Fine Gael and Labour were less trustworthy custodians of the national interest.164 Ahern did not let his eulogy for Putnam divert him from pointing out that Fianna Fáil was ‘“The Republican Party” devoted to achieving unity by consent… because I am an Irish Republican no issue means more than this to me.’165
There had been since the 1920s a struggle between Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin to appropriate the identity of ‘true’ republicanism. The peace process had given a major boost to Sinn Féin in this competition. Nevertheless, Fianna Fáil could claim to have played a key role in bringing republicans into the process, while the continuing evidence of repub-can involvement in paramilitary and criminal activity put a limit on Sinn Féin's appeal to the electorate. However, if the IRA statement of July 2005 renouncing armed struggle turned out to be as historic as Ahern claimed, then not only would Sinn Féin be likely to win new Dáil seats at the next general election, but it would also have removed the major objection to its inclusion in government. Already one member of the government, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and TD for Louth, Dermot Ahern, had floated the possibility of Sinn Féin being in government after the next general election. This was a prospect with profound implications for North–South relations and unionist attitudes to the Republic. Although Ahern subsequently proclaimed that Sinn Féin's ‘Marxist’ economic policies would rule it out as a coalition partner, his decision to revive the official military parade to celebrate the Easter Rising and support for extending speaking rights to Northern Ireland MPs demonstrated the success of Adams's party in ‘Ulsterizing’ political debate in the Republic. Whether such a tendency would be welcome to an electorate whose patriotism had a traditionally twenty-six-county focus remained to be seen.
10. Between War and Peace: Northern Ireland 1985–2005
Direct Rule with a Green Tinge 1985–1993
Unionism was traumatized by the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Molyneaux had until the last believed that nothing would come from the ongoing Anglo-Irish negotiations.1 He had been over-impressed by Thatcher's rejection of the three main proposals of the New Ireland Forum and perhaps relied too much on the views of Ian Gow, who had been Thatcher's Parliamentary Private Secretary but was excluded from the small group who negotiated the Agreement. But his miscalculation was buried in a wave of Protestant rage that manifested itself in the massive crowd of over 100,000 that gathered at a protest rally outside Belfast City Hall on 23 November. Tellingly, it was Molyneaux who warned the crowd that the campaign against the Agreement would be a protracted one.2 The campaign in its various manifestations – from a mass resignation of Unionist MPs to council boycotts and a one-day general strike and ‘Day of Action’ in March 1986 – had little effect. The institutions of the Agreement had been specifically designed to be impervious to a loyalist reaction à la 1974. The UUP was soon divided over the wisdom of a council boycott, which would in some cases leave its political opponents in control and in others lead to legal action. The Day of Action ended in violence, and in the by-elections caused by the resignations the Unionists lost Newry and Armagh to the SDLP.3 The Agreement's fundamental unpopularity with Protestants was to remain one of the core facts of Northern Ireland's political life, but this was to co-exist with a growing awareness that the institutions of the Agreement, like the hated Anglo-Irish Secretariat at Maryfield on the outskirts of East Belfast, were becoming more or less permanent features of the governance of the province.
Another notable feature of the post-Agreement landscape was the weakening of the DUP; the party's intransigence could be credibly presented as part of the reason for the imposition of the accord itself. It continued to dabble in the militant fringes of loyalist politics. In 1986, when a group o
f grass-roots loyalists formed the paramiitary-tinged group Ulster Resistance, Paisley and Peter Robinson were seen parading in the organization's red berets. Robinson got himself arrested in the Republic after leading a farcical loyalist ‘invasion’ of the County Monaghan village of Clontibret in August 1986.4 The DUP's practice of resistance to relatively marginal concessions to the Catholic community was in any case rendered futile when such a substantial concession as the Agreement was already in place. The party entered hesitantly into a pact with the UUP from which it emerged in a weakened state, shorn of some of its best-known leaders. In the 1992 general election it achieved a mere 13.7 per cent of the poll, although its decline stabilized somewhat at 17.2 per cent in the May 1993 local government elections.5 The DUP's difficulties went hand in hand with a steady rise in Protestant paramilitarism: loyalist paramilitaries killed only two people in 1984, but by 1991–2 they were more active agents of death than the IRA.
While the Agreement led to an increase in support for integrationist ideas amongst the Protestant middle class, Molyneaux advocated a strategic minimalism based on twin perceptions of the need to maintain UUP unity and of increasing Conservative disenchantment with the Agreement. While deeply averse to the more traditional NIO objective of power-sharing devolution, Molyneaux was nevertheless determined that mainstream unionism would not be imprisoned within a public posture of inflexibility. If the British government were to raise the possibility of a new and more broadly based agreement, Molyneaux would not adopt a rejectionist stance.6
Meanwhile, constitutional nationalism was profoundly divided, and not entirely because the UUP leadership still found it unpalatable to speak of power-sharing devolution. The SDLP had, by 1988, shown signs of moving decisively beyond the demands of Sunningdale. This was, in part, the result of the failure of the Agreement to marginalize Sinn Féin. Although that party's support had peaked before the Agreement, it had consolidated at around 11 per cent of the electorate. While the Agreement had accelerated those tendencies that made direct rule the ‘best possible shell’ for an expanding Catholic middle class, it had delivered neither the final decisive defeat for unionism nor the concrete economic benefits for the impoverished urban Catholic ghettos that might have reduced republican support in a more substantive way. It was also a reflection of the failure of Hume's own belief during the early phase of the Agreement – from November 1985 to mid 1987 – that since Thatcher had ‘lanced the Protestant boil’ by imposing the Agreement on the majority community, the unionists would have no alternative but to negotiate with him. He had predicted in an Observer interview that this would occur by the end of 1986.7 The failure of the prediction and the lack of a Sinn Féin meltdown impelled Hume towards a political engagement with the republican movement. The ‘pan-nationalist front’ was beginning to emerge.
The first sign of this was the seven-month-long dialogue between the SDLP and Sinn Féin in 1988. This was faciliated by Sinn Féin's desire to avoid the political isolation and marginalization that were the objective of the Agreement. Gerry Adams recognized that as long as the Sinn Féin vote was contained at around 30 to 40 per cent of the Catholic electorate – as seemed likely – the impetus of the 1982 electoral surge might well dissipate. Adams was also concerned that Sinn Féin's attempt to build up an electoral base in the Republic had so far proved fruitless. The breakthrough of their bitter enemies, the Officials – now known as Sinn Féin–The Workers’ Party – into Dáil politics was noted with some envy by Adams and his comrades, particularly after the three SFWP deputies had forced Haughey to cut a deal with them in order to form a government in 1982.8 Convinced that the party's maintenance of the traditional policy of refusing to take their seats in the Dáil was a major obstacle to political advance in the Republic, Adams and his allies had waged a campaign against abstentionism, which culminated in the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis voting in 1986 to remove the ban on attendance at the Dáil from the party's constitution.
The removal of the ban had provoked a final break with the traditionalists led by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill, who resigned from the party and created Republican Sinn Féin. Adams's critics claimed that, despite his continued public support for the ‘armed struggle’, the logic of increasing political involvement would eventually lead the Provisionals down the same road as the Officials and Fianna Fáil towards incorporation in the ‘partitionist system’. In 1981, when Adams was starting the process of building up the political side of the movement, Danny Morrison had brilliantly anticipated the complaints of the more militarist elements in a speech to the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis in which he asked: ‘Who here really believes that we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’9 Although tremendously effective as rhetoric, the ‘Armalite and ballot box’ strategy put a severe limit on Sinn Féin's capacity to grow electorally in both states. Adams was soon criticizing IRA ‘mistakes’ that killed ordinary people and deterred northern Catholics from voting for his party. In the first general election in the Republic after the decision to abandon abstentionism, support for Sinn Féin was a mere 1.9 per cent.10 The connection with northern violence was a formidable obstacle to Adams's aim of Sinn Féin acquiring a pivotal role in the Dáil.
It also made impossible the creation of a broad ‘anti-imperialist alliance’ proposed by Adams and including the SDLP and Fianna Fáil. The aims of such an alliance were to pressurize the British government to declare in favour of a united Ireland and use its influence to move the unionists in that direction. For, although the Anglo-Irish Agreement had been denounced by Sinn Féin as an attempt to build up the SDLP and marginalize republicans, there was a recognition that the British state had made a substantial concession to constitutional nationalism and undermined the unionist position in Northern Ireland.11 Using his friend Alec Reid, a Redemptorist priest from the Clonard Monastery in West Belfast, as intermediary, Adams informed Haughey that he would support an IRA ceasefire if the Irish government would pursue the issue of Irish unification.12 During 1988 Adams was involved in secret discussions with Martin Mansergh, Charles Haughey's adviser on Northern Ireland. The price for pan-nationalist negotiations was an IRA ceasefire, and this was, publicly at least, said to be out of the question by Adams, who declared that ‘the British will leave only when they are forced to leave.’13 However, behind this public reiteration of the continued centrality of ‘armed struggle’ an intense debate on future strategy had opened up amongst the republican leadership.
By the mid 1980s the conflict between the IRA and the British state was stalemated. The reorganized, slimmed-down and militarily proficient terrorist organization – the product of the ‘Long War’ strategy promoted by Adams and his supporters from 1977 - was far from being defeated by the security forces. Yet its campaign was obviously containable. Its main victims had long ceased to be British troops: as a result of the policy of ‘Ulsterization’, it was local Protestants in the police and the Ulster Defence Regiment who bore the brunt of Provisional attacks. In the year of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, of the sixty-four deaths from the conflict only two were of British soldiers, whereas twenty-seven were members of either the RUC or the UDR.14 Adams has subsequently described the situation in which republicans found themselves after the Agreement: ‘There was a political and military stalemate. While republicans could prevent a settlement on British government terms, we lacked the political strength to bring the struggle to a decisive conclusion. Military solutions were not an option for either side.’15 There were, however, still those in the leadership of the IRA who believed that the ‘war’ could be won.16 A serious attempt was made to break the stalemate with the help of three shipments of arms and explosives from the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in 1985–6. These included two tons of the powerful plastic-explosive Semtex, surface-to-air missiles, heavy machine-guns, and rocket launchers. The more militaristic of the IRA's leadership, including its Chief of Staff, saw
in the Libyan material the possibility of a major shift in the balance of forces that would lead to an end to British rule.17 In July 1986 the list of IRA ‘legitimate targets’ was widened to include civil servants, building contractors, caterers and British Telecom employees who did work for the security forces. Republicans had killed forty-two people in 1985, while in 1987 they killed sixty-nine and in 1988, sixty-two.18 But if the intensification of ‘armed struggle’ gained it some gruesome headlines, with the murder of a leading Northern Irish judge and his wife in a car-bomb attack in April 1987 and a landmine at Ballygawley, County Tyrone, in August 1988 that killed eight off-duty soldiers, it also had high military and political costs.
The ‘Long War’ strategy, by reducing the number of IRA activists, had made it easier for the security forces to concentrate their resources against known activists. The Special Air Services (SAS) was first publicly committed to action in Northern Ireland in 1976 to combat the IRA in south Armagh, an area with a centuries-old tradition of anti-state activities and a republican stronghold that the security forces could only enter in strength and with helicopter backup. Now its activities were expanded to Fermanagh and Tyrone, where the IRA was attempting to create another ‘free zone’ like south Armagh. In May 1987 it wiped out an eight-man IRA unit that was in the process of attacking the RUC station at Loughgall. This was the IRA's largest loss of ‘volunteers’ in a single incident since the Civil War and a major blow to its East Tyrone brigade, one of its most effective units. The same brigade was further weakened in August 1988 when the three men responsible for the Ballgawley landmine were killed in an SAS ambush as they attempted to kill a lorry driver who was a part-time member of the UDR. In March 1988 three of the IRA's most experienced operatives had been shot dead in Gibraltar while unarmed. It was alleged that they were preparing a bomb attack on a British Army band.19
Ireland Since 1939 Page 44