Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  Controversy over the use of the SAS and their tactics, particularly over whether it was necessary to kill those whom they had ambushed, was inevitable. However, Sinn Féin's ability to exploit it was limited by the IRA's spiralling list of ‘mistakes’ in which it had to admit that it had killed the wrong people. Most politically damaging was the detonation of a bomb at the Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen on 8 November 1987, which killed eleven people. The IRA admitted that this had dealt a ‘body blow’ to hopes of a ‘broad-based front against imperialism’.20 The eight-month dialogue with the SDLP in 1988, so important for Adams in his quest for pan-nationalist unity, was called off by John Hume when the IRA accidentally killed two of his constituents.21 By the end of the decade hopes of military victory had been relinquished, although the republican movement was far from discarding the application of violence or the threat of it as a tool for political bargaining.

  The intensification of republican violence after 1986 showed the limitations of the attempt to combine the armed campaign with the search for more electoral support. Sinn Féin lost sixteen seats in the 1989 local government elections and some of its councillors began to point out publicly the irony of its criticisms of direct rule's failure to deal with unemployment levels in West Belfast while the IRA's bombing campaign continued to put people out of work and scare off new investors.22 The impasse of the ‘Armalite and ballot box’ strategy and the knowledge of internal republican debate gained by intelligence services led to a two-track approach on the part of the British, by which hints of flexibility in the event of a ceasefire were combined with the threat of inter-party talks aimed at a centrist settlement that would isolate and marginalize republicans.

  As early as the end of March 1987, Thatcher felt that the security returns following the Agreement were inadequate: ‘I told Tom King [Northern Ireland Secretary] there must be a paper brought forth setting out all the options. I was determined that nothing should be ruled out.’23 The election of the Haughey government served to cool the atmosphere even further, as did the announcement in January 1988 by the Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, that there would be no prosecutions arising out of an inquiry into an alleged ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of the RUC that led to the deaths of six unarmed men in County Armagh in 1982. John Stalker, Assistant Chief Constable of Manchester, who had been brought in to conduct the inquiry, complained of resistance and sabotage by some in the RUC and was taken off the inquiry in suspicious circumstances.24 Although he did find that there was no official policy of ‘shoot-to-kill, the controversy surrounding his replacement and the Mayhew decision led to the resurgence of the megaphone diplomacy between London and Dublin that the Agreement was supposed to have consigned to the history books.

  Thatcher and Mayhew had little sympathy with an approach to policing that seemed to them to impose standards appropriate to a liberal democracy untroubled with a terrorist campaign on a society in which the IRA's main target was the RUC. Thus in the year that the ‘shoot-to-kill’ incidents took place, republicans had killed eight members of the RUC and four of the RUC Reserve. In the year that the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed twenty-three members of the RUC and RUC Reserve had been murdered, nine of them in one IRA mortar attack on the Newry RUC station. In the 1982–5 period republicans were responsible for 70 per cent of the deaths from political violence, while the security forces were responsible for 13 per cent.25 Even the most right-wing members of Thatcher's cabinet would have accepted that the state should not debase its standards to those of the terrorists, but there was none the less little inclination to see the issues raised by Stalker as more than blemishes on what was fundamentally a disciplined and lawful response to an organization that, as Hume pointed out, had killed twice as many Irish Catholics as the security forces in the first twenty years of the ‘Troubles’.26

  Thatcher's annoyance with Dublin grew as Irish politicians condemned the decision of the Court of Appeal to reject the appeal of the six men convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. Convinced that she had signed the Agreement to facilitate more Irish cooperation against the IRA in such key areas as policing and extradition, she now complained that Haughey's government provided less cooperation in the security field than any other European country: ‘Our concessions had alienated the Unionists without gaining the level of security cooperation we had a right to expect.’27 This was the context in which she directed her new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, to begin the search for a new and more broadly based agreement.

  As the republican movement both intensified its military campaign and gave public hints of a new-found flexibility over the next five years, British policy assumed an increasingly pro-Union public posture while at the same time giving substantive private signs of an interest in republican revisionism. Peter Brooke launched the search for a new agreement through inter-party talks in January 1990 and managed to achieve some progress by the eve of the 1992 general election. An offer to suspend temporarily the workings of the Anglo-Irish Agreement proved enough to ensure the participation not only of the Ulster Unionists but also of the DUP. After the election the talks continued in a more serious vein with a new Secretary of State, Sir Patrick Mayhew. The UUP approached the talks in a slightly more confident frame of mind: their proposals were certainly considerably more advanced and elaborate. Under John Major, who had succeeded Thatcher in late 1990, the government gave even more explicit signs that it wished to reduce the unionist sense of isolation and anxiety. The Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, told the 1991 Conservative Party Conference that the debate on partition was over. The Anglo-Irish inter-parliamentary tier was presented in early 1992 with a critical British analysis of the working of the Agreement. In the run-up to the election in April 1992, a Tory Prime Minister rediscovered the Union as a political theme. After the election there was the appointment of a team at the NIO that was just about as unionist in political sympathy as the current Conservative Party could produce.

  However, the talks process foundered on the rock of the SDLP's refusal to depart from its original policy document, which argued for a form of joint authority with an added European dimension. It was clear during the talks that the NIO was impressed with the flexibility of the Ulster Unionists. Although they had originally insisted on an agreement in ‘strand one’, which dealt with the internal structures of the North's governance, before the start of ‘strand two’, dealing with North–South relations, they proved willing to make the crucial transition without agreement having been reached in ‘strand one’. The unprecedented willingness of the Ulster Unionists to go to Dublin to discuss North–South relations was made possible by a private letter from Mayhew to Molyneaux indicating the former's lack of enthusiasm for the SDLP document. Nevertheless, Dublin's apparent unpreparedness to respond to the Unionist flexibility, together with Hume's refusal to budge from the original document, led to the collapse of the talks.

  Deeply ingrained distrust of unionist motivation and an acute awareness of the potential republican cries of ‘sell-out’ for anything smacking of an ‘internal solution’ forced the SDLP away from a historic compromise with unionism. The Anglo-Irish Agreement had created a context in which it became logical, almost compellingly so, for constitutional nationalists to argue for a form of joint authority. British dissatisfaction with the Agreement's domestic failures – nobody questioned its international success in fire-proofing British policy in Northern Ireland – produced the usual frenetic tactical ingenuity, but this simply served to obscure the fundamental shift in terrain that the Agreement had produced. Even if a Sunningdale-type agreement were now possible, it was too ‘internalist’, too dependent on unionist goodwill, to be attractive from the SDLP's point of view. Both constitutional and revolutionary nationalism were convinced that the Agreement was a clear indication that the tide of history was running their way.

  Major's increasingly precarious position in the House of Commons – where he was dependent on the nine UUP votes – brought
about an increasingly pro-unionist tone in government statements. Yet the failure of the talks also pushed the government back towards an Anglo-Irish approach and into the intensification of private communications with the republican movement that had been initiated in October 1990.28 Republican interest had been stimulated by hints of a new flexibility in speeches by Brooke. In an interview to mark his first 100 days as Secretary of State, Brooke had conceded that it was difficult to imagine the military defeat of the IRA. The following year he made a more direct appeal to republican strategists when he declared that the British government had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’.29 This produced a number of public indications of possible republican flexibility on some of their more fundamentalist postures – particularly that Britain should withdraw in the lifetime of one parliament. A ‘scenario for peace’ emerged in which an IRA ceasefire might be forthcoming in exchange for a British commitment to withdraw in a ‘generation’ while, in the interim, structures of joint authority would operate. Ultimately it appears that, despite the intensification of IRA activities in the North and Britain in 1991 and 1992, it was republican rather than unionist flexibility that was found most impressive.

  Only the impact of serious intelligence work can explain British willingness to wager on these hints of a new republican flexibility at a time when IRA violence was intensifying. The IRA launched a renewed campaign in England in the early 1990s. At first aimed at ‘Establishment’ figures and institutions – Ian Gow, MP, a close friend of Thatcher and former adviser on Ireland, was murdered in a car-bomb attack in July 1990, and, in January 1991, 10 Downing Street was mortared while a cabinet meeting was taking place – the campaign developed into devastating bomb attacks on key financial and commercial centres. On 10 April 1992, the day after the British general election, two IRA bombs exploded at the Baltic Exchange in London, killng three people and causing £800 million of damage. More attacks followed over the next year. In March 1993 a bomb in a shopping centre in Warrington killed two young boys, and in April a massive explosion at the NatWest Tower in the City of London killed one person and caused over £1 billion in damage.30 There was also an upsurge of IRA attacks in Northern Ireland. In 1991 the IRA planted more incendiary devices in commercial premises than it had in the previous nine years, as well as launching some massive car-bomb attacks in Belfast. The year 1992 began with the slaughter of eight Protestant building workers whose van was destroyed by a bomb at Teebane Cross in County Tyrone as they returned from working at an army base. During the year that followed the centres of a number of predominantly Protestant towns were destroyed by IRA car-bombs.

  The Provisional campaign was increasingly matched in murderous intensity by the main loyalist paramilitary organizations. The UDA had experienced a palace revolution in the late 1980s as a leadership considered too middle aged and corrupt had been pushed aside by a younger and more single-mindedly ruthless cadre. Working under the nom de guerre of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), it had responded to the Teebane Cross atrocity by an attack on a bookmaker's business on Belfast's Lower Ormeau Road in which five Catholics were murdered. In 1992 and 1993, for the first time since the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’, loyalists were responsible for more deaths than republicans.31 The campaigns of the UFF and UVF, although ordinary Catholics were still the main victims, were notable for their successful targeting of Sinn Féin activists as well as, for the first time, IRA members. Claims of security force ‘collusion’ soon became a major issue. However, the main result of the intensification of loyalist violence was a further weakening of electoral support for Sinn Féin. It lost ground to the SDLP in the 1992 general election, and Adams lost his West Belfast seat to Joe Hendron of the SDLP. Although the immediate cause of his defeat was the decision of a substantial section of the 3,000 unionists in the constituency to vote tactically for Hendron, there could be no disguising the fact that republican complicity in the violent sectarian atmosphere of the early 1990s had cost them votes. However, Adams's disappointment at his loss of West Belfast was mitigated by ongoing negotiations with Hume to construct a pan-nationalist alliance that would apply pressure to the British government for a radical shift in policy on Northern Ireland.

  The Origins of the Peace Process

  During the 1988 discussions between Sinn Féin and the SDLP the core difference between the parties, apart from the issue of violence, was the SDLP's interpretation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. In one of their papers for the talks, the SDLP argued that the Agreement showed that Britain was now neutral on the partition issue: ‘she has no military or economic interests and if the Irish people reached agreement among themselves on, for example Irish unity, Britain would facilitate’.32 Although even in 1988 the extent of the British financial subvention made it difficult for republicans to argue that Britain had an economic interest in maintaining partition, they claimed that a strategic interest did exist:

  Strategic interests are now the most important consideration in Britain's interference in Ireland. Quite apart from the very real, if somewhat exaggerated fear, among the British establishment that an Ireland freed from British influence could become a European ‘Cuba’, even the prospect of a neutral Ireland is regarded as a threat to British and NATO's strategic interests.33

  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ in Russia and Eastern Europe instituted a new world order within which only one hegemonic power, the US, existed. The end of the Cold War removed any lingering credibility from the notion that Britain remained in Northern Ireland for strategic reasons. It had a related effect noted by Michael Cox: ‘it was inevitable that as the global tide of radicalism began to retreat after 1989, this would feed into republican thinking.’ 34 With former ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘national liberation’ forces in Central America, the Middle East and South Africa opting for negotiations rather than for the continuation of armed struggle, the international context helped to foster hitherto heretical thoughts amongst leading republicans. Thus the republican propagandist Danny Morrison reflected on the fall of the Berlin Wall in a letter from prison:

  If there is one thing last year in Eastern Europe should have taught us it was the bankruptcy of dogmatism… The lesson has certainly helped me rethink my politics and become more pragmatic and realistic in terms of our own struggle. If we all lower our demands and our expectations a peg or two we might find more agreement.35

  But this new realism did not mean that republicans had come anywhere near accepting that there was a democratic basis for partition, nor even that they were prepared to countenance Hume's argument that the British state was neutral on the issue. During their discussions with republicans in 1993, the British had specifically rejected the republican demand that, in return for an IRA ceasefire, they should adopt the role of ‘persuading’ the North's majority population of the merits of a united Ireland.36 However, this notion would be central to what became known as the ‘Hume–Adams’ negotiations.

  Hume had approached Adams in October 1991 with a proposal, the idea for which had come from the same Catholic cleric who had opened up contacts between republicans and Charles Haughey in 1987, for a joint declaration to be made by the British and Irish governments. This would set out the agreed principles that must underlie any final settlement and was aimed to be open enough to republican aspirations to allow for an IRA cessation of its campaign. Republicans were unhappy with Hume's reformulation of the principle of Irish self-determination, which made it dependent upon ‘the agreement and consent of the people of Northern Ireland’. This was flawed from a republican point of view, as it gave unionists, who were a majority in Northern Ireland, a ‘veto’ on the achievement of national unity.37 But the fact that Hume had obtained the support of Haughey for the draft of the joint declaration encouraged Adams's leadership group to envisage the construction of a pan-nationalist front that might be able to shift the British towards a more proactive position.

  A crucial devel
opment that affected republican calculations was the election of Bill Clinton as the new President of the USA in 1992. The end of the Cold War had drained the ‘special relationship’ of much of its significance for Washington and made it easier for Clinton to intervene in what had up until then been regarded as London's business. During the presidential campaign Clinton had supported the granting of a visa to Adams and also the idea of sending an American ‘peace envoy’ to Northern Ireland. Central to this more interventionist approach was the emergence of a new elite Irish-American lobby that aimed to transcend the existing division between Noraid and other pro-IRA groups and the ‘Friends of Ireland’ (for instance Senator Edward Kennedy) who were closely allied with Hume.38 ‘Americans for a New Irish Agenda’ was a powerful group of well-funded, business-oriented Irish-Americans39 whose leaders included ex-Congressman Bruce Morrison, Niall O'Dowd, editor of the Irish Voice, and two millionaire businessmen, William Flynn and Charles Feeney. A native of Drogheda, O'Dowd believed that Irish-American leverage was weakened by its association with support for IRA violence. A leading member of ‘Irish-Americans for Clinton and Gore’, he travelled to Belfast early in 1992 to talk to the Sinn Féin leadership about the American scene.40