Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  His role at Drumcree would certainly have appealed to the many Orangemen who were delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council that met to elect Molyneaux's successor. Yet those in the upper reaches of the NIO who were aghast at Trimble's election misread both the man and the circumstances of his victory. In a party as bereft of intellectual ballast as the Ulster Unionists, it was no great compliment to Trimble to point out that he was by far the most cerebral of the candidates for the leadership. He was the only mainstream unionist figure who had the intellectual and strategic capacity to enter into a serious contest with Hume and Adams.

  Trimble had been in William Craig's Vanguard movement and had supported the idea of an emergency coalition with the SDLP in 1976. This willingness to share power with nationalists was one indication of Trimble's basic political realism: his acceptance of the fact that no British government would return devolved institutions to Northern Ireland except on the basis of power-sharing. At the same time he found Molyneaux's trust in Thatcher dangerously naive. A law lecturer at Queen's University until he won the Upper Bann seat in 1989, Trimble was also an omnivorous reader of books on Irish history and had published two serious works of amateur history.65 This historical perspective provided him with a useful corrective to the overly pessimistic view of the British state that gripped many in the unionist community in the early 1990s. For if unionists were mistaken to rely on Thatcher's supposed innate sympathy for their cause, it was equally mistaken, if more understandable because of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, to become consumed by fear of British betrayal. Trimble was convinced that only a proactive strategy on the part of unionists would prevent further British concessions to nationalists and republicans.

  For Trimble the IRA ceasefire was an admission of the failure of armed struggle:

  Even though the cease-fire may be merely a tactic, the fact that they have had to change their tactics is an admission that the previous tactic [armed struggle] has failed. Although there are elements in the republican movement that desire a return to violence, they will be returning to a tactic that was not working… So, in that sense the republican movement is being defeated slowly. It is a slow process but that is what is happening. From our point of view, what we have to ensure is that while their campaign is winding up it does not cause any political or constitutional change which is contrary to the interests of the people of Northern Ireland. And we also want to do everything possible to ensure that the Union is strengthened.66

  This was a sophisticated analysis, too sophisticated for many unionists, who still preferred the Paisley–McCartney vision of a republican movement with almost demonic powers that was moulding Anglo-Irish policies to its will through the continuing threat of force. Such views were strengthened in February 1996 with the exploding of a massive bomb at Canary Wharf in London, marking the end of the IRA ceasefire.

  In the autumn of 1995 Major and Bruton had agreed to establish an international body to find a way forward on the arms issue. Chaired by a close Clinton ally, Senator George Mitchell, its report in February 1996 suggested waiving the British government's precondition – the beginning of decommissioning before republicans got into talks – and instead put forward the notion of decommissioning progressing in conjunction with the talks. There had already been signs that the balance of forces within the republican movement had shifted against the ceasefire, as exaggerated hopes for rapid movement towards all-party talks and the creation of ‘transitional’ structures were disappointed. Despite a demand by President Clinton, on a visit to Belfast in November 1995, for an end to paramilitary ‘punishment’ beatings and shootings, by the end of the year the IRA, using the nom de guerre ‘Direct Action against Drugs’, had killed six alleged drug dealers. Major's lukewarm acceptance of the Mitchell Report and his emphasis on the way forward being through an election produced a bitter denunciation from Hume in the House of Commons – and, within days, the bomb at Canary Wharf.

  Despite Canary Wharf, Trimble maintained that for unionists to retreat into a posture of resistance to dialogue would be disastrous. Neither London nor Dublin had given up on the republican movement and a simple denunciatory response from unionists would guarantee that they became the passive victims of political change. He could also point out that one of the main reasons for the republican relapse was anger at his success in persuading Major of the need for elections as an alternative way into dialogue with republicans.

  In the elections for a Northern Ireland Forum held in May 1996, the UUP vote at 24.2 per cent had declined by 5 percentage points, compared to the local government elections of 1993, while support for the DUP at 18.8 per cent had increased by less than 2 points.67 The limited rise in the DUP vote reflected inroads made into its support base by the two parties linked to Protestant paramilitary organizations: the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), linked to the UVF, and the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), linked to the UDA. Both organizations had responded to the IRA's ceasefire with one of their own, declared on 13 October 1994. Then the ‘Combined Loyalist Military Command’ had declared that assurances had been sought from the British government that no secret deal had been done with the IRA and that ‘the Union is safe’. They also offered ‘abject and true remorse’ to the families of their many innocent victims.68 Although members of both, particularly the larger and more Balkanized UDA, would soon be involved in sectarian attacks on Catholics and, like the IRA, continue to use violence to defend their many profitable criminal activities from drugs to cross-border fuel smuggling, the ceasefire did enhance the credibility and political acceptability of the PUP and the UDP amongst the Protestant working class.

  Concerned that politics could be seen to work for the loyalist paramilitaries, the Northern Ireland Office provided a mixed electoral system for the Forum, which allocated an extra twenty seats to be filled on a regional list system, giving two to each of the ten parties with the highest votes. The PUP with 3.5 per cent, the UDP with 2.2 per cent and the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition with a mere 1 per cent were all allocated seats. However, the Forum elections also gave a major boost to Sinn Féinn, which won its largest-ever share of the vote: 15.5 per cent. The narrowing of the gap with the SDLP and the party's strong performance in the Republic's general election made a second ceasefire very likely. At the same time republicans were waiting for a British general election to deliver a Labour government with a secure majority that would, they hoped, push forward with a settlement that could be portrayed as transitional to Irish unity.

  Trimble was untroubled by the prospect of a substantial Labour victory. He had established good relations with elements of ‘new Labour’. Shortly before he became Prime Minister in 1997, Tony Blair had sacked Labour's Northern Ireland spokesman, Kevin McNamara, who was seen as being on the ‘green’ wing of the party, and replaced him with Dr Marjorie (‘Mo’) Mowlam, who was initially welcomed by unionists. Blair's first trip outside London as Prime Minister was to Northern Ireland, where, on 16 May at Balmoral, he declared that unionists had nothing to fear from his government: ‘A political settlement is not a slippery slope to a united Ireland. The government will not be persuaders for unity. The wagons do not need to be drawn up in a circle.’ He also declared that he valued the Union and that ‘none of you in this hall today, even the youngest, is likely to see Northern Ireland as anything but a part of the United Kingdom.’69 Such sentiments were profoundly distasteful to republicans, yet they were soon given a very practical compensation when the government declared that a renewed ceasefire would get Sinn Féin into talks within six weeks. The decommissioning precondition had gone.

  From the earliest days of Blair's administration the attractive and repulsive aspects of the deal on offer to unionists were relatively clear. Central to any settlement was an acceptance of the consent principle. This was to be copper-fastened by full constitutional recognition of Northern Ireland by the Republic. There would be a return of devolution to the North, now in the context of Labour's commitment to constitutional change in the res
t of the UK. This would spell the end of the Irish government's ‘interference’ in the governance of the North in the form of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The price to be paid for these political and constitutional gains was an Irish dimension embodied in a North–South Ministerial Council and the insistence of Dublin, London and John Hume that republicans must be integral to any settlement.

  The Good Friday Agreement

  The IRA did not return to full-scale ‘armed struggle’ during the sixteen months between Canary Wharf and its declaration of a second ceasefire on 21 July 1997. This was little consolation for the families of Detective Garda Gerry McCabe, shot dead in June 1996 during an IRA robbery of a mail van in County Limerick, or Stephen Restorick, a British soldier shot dead by a sniper in south Armagh in February 1997. Most IRA activity occurred in Britain, with a series of bombs in London and the devastation of the centre of Manchester by a 3,500 pound lorry-bomb in June 1996. As the general election approached, the attacks focused on disrupting road and rail networks as well as the Grand National steeplechase. Such violence served a number of purposes. It reminded the British government that should a ceasefire be restored, republican demands had to be seriously addressed if the peace process were not to be put in crisis again. Adams's ‘peace strategy’ continued to have a coercive element. It maintained the unity of the republican movement by showing restive elements in the IRA that involvement in negotiations had not made them redundant. By keeping the level of violence low and mostly outside Northern Ireland, it did not damage the continuing electoral expansion of Sinn Féin. In the 1 May general election Adams won back West Belfast from the SDLP and Martin McGuinness won Mid Ulster from the DUP's William McCrea. Three weeks later in the local government elections Sinn Féin increased its vote to 17 per cent, cutting the margin between it and the SDLP from 75:25 of the nationalist vote in the 1993 local government elections to 55:45 in 1997.70

  But if republican violence, or the threat of it, continued to perform important functions for Adams's strategy, it was difficult to see it as more than a means of increasing the ‘green’ façade of what was a partitionist settlement. Adams was now writing about ‘renegotiating the Union’ rather than ending it.71 The new Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, had already declared that ‘irredentism is dead’ and that it was not ‘feasible or desirable to attempt to incorporate Northern Ireland into a united Ireland against the will of a majority there, either by force or coercion’. He also rejected joint authority as a realistic option.72 It was possible for republican leaders to depict the North–South institutions as mechanisms for creeping integration, but there was no guarantee that their version of North–South links would be the accepted one.

  Republican optimism was encouraged by the way the new Labour government downplayed the decommissioning issue. There was also a commitment to ‘confidence-building measures’ in areas such as the reform of the RUC and the strengthening of fair employment legislation. Although the government had initially proposed to deal with the arms issue along the lines of the Mitchell Report – by decommissioning in conjunction with political negotiations – this was dropped after a flexing of IRA muscle. On 17 June two RUC men were shot dead by the IRA in Lurgan, County Armagh. Within days an Anglo-Irish paper on decommissioning implied that all Sinn Féin would have to do was agree to discuss the issue during the talks.73 This approach, while it permitted the successful completion of negotiations, could not prevent the issue returning to haunt the early life of the new devolved institutions.

  Some on the Tory right had denounced the internationalization of the search for a settlement involved in British acceptance of Senator George Mitchell as chair of the talks process, claiming that American involvement would simply strengthen the nationalist cause.74 In fact, for Mitchell as well as his sponsor, Clinton, it was accepted that the talks could only be successful if, as well as bringing in republicans from the cold, they did not drive the majority of unionists into the rejectionist camp. At the centre of Adams's pan-nationalist strategy there had been the over-optimistic assumption that Clinton's involvement would follow an Irish-American agenda. While there was no doubting the deeper emotional sympathy of the Democratic administration with nationalist Ireland, Clinton's substantive political interest was the attainment of a deal that could be trumpeted as ‘historic’, and this necessitated keeping Trimble's party on board.

  Paisley and Robert McCartney had led their parties out of the talks when Sinn Féin entered in September 1997, thus making the negotiation of an agreement possible.75 While the leadership of Sinn Féin claimed a victory over unionist ‘intransigence’ and British ‘prevarication’, some members of the IRA, at both leadership and rank-and-file levels, were increasingly apprehensive about the implications of the peace process for traditional republican objectives. To gain entry to the talks process, Sinn Féin had to sign up to the ‘Mitchell Principles’, which committed them, amongst other things, to ‘democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues and to the total disarmament of all paramilitary organizations’. They were also committed to urge an end to punishment killings and beatings – the main rest and recreation activity of IRA volunteers on ceasefire – and to take effective steps to prevent them taking place.76 Decommissioning was to be treated as an issue to be addressed during the talks, and although unionist sceptics predicted that it would be fudged, there were some in the republican movement who feared that the military integrity of the IRA would be sacrificed on the altar of Sinn Féin's electoral and governmental ambitions. To quieten such voices a senior IRA spokesman had told An Phoblacht that the IRA ‘would have problems with sections of the Mitchell Principles’ and that the IRA was not a participant in the talks.77 This was a fiction, as senior members of the political wing of the republican movement, including Adams and McGuinness, were also members of the Army Council of the IRA, but it did reflect real tensions in the movement created by the political leadership's increasing envelopment by the process of political bargaining.

  Already the Continuity IRA, the military wing of Adams's former comrades who had seceded in 1986 to form Republican Sinn Féin, were attempting to attract disgruntled Provisionals by a series of car-bomb attacks on RUC stations. In November an attempt by Adams's supporters in the IRA to centralize control over the ultimate disposition of arms with the IRA Army Council resulted in a split when the IRA's Quartermaster-General and a number of other senior IRA figures in the border area resigned from the movement and went on to form the Real IRA.78 The dissidents established their own political wing, the 32-County Sovereignty Movement, which, although it initially had the support of only a few disillusioned members of Sinn Féin, made up for this in ‘movement’ credibility by having the support of a sister of Bobby Sands. Given the epochal resonance of the deaths of Sands and his comrades for the Provisional movement, it was acutely embarrassing for Adams to be condemned by Bernadette Sands-McKevitt for entering a talks process that could only result in a ‘modernized version of partition’. As she witheringly put it, her brother did not die for a cross-border tourism authority.79

  If republicans were going to embrace a settlement that left the North inside the UK for at least the medium term and accept the principle of consent – the ‘unionist veto’ in the movement's traditional language then it was important that it should be presented to their supporters as ‘transitional’. Acceptance of new devolved structures of government at Stormont needed to be balanced by a set of strong, free-standing North-South institutions along the lines set out in the Framework Document. But in January 1998 even these consolatory structures were put in question by the British and Irish governments’ joint document, Heads of Agreement, which, in setting out their understanding of the likely parameters of any final deal, proposed North-South institutions that would be mandated by and accountable to the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Irish parliament. A Belfast-based journalist knowledgeable about republicanism described Heads of Agreement as a triumph for Trimble and a disaster for republicanism.
80 But, as Trimble himself pointed out, the process of bargaining, which led to an agreement and subsequently to the formation of an ‘inclusive’ government for Northern Ireland, was a ‘white-knuckle ride’ in which an apparent victory for one side produced such a bitter response from the other that it was soon provided with a compensatory ‘victory’ of its own.

  Republican displeasure was soon evident in another ‘tactical use of armed struggle’ when first an alleged drug dealer and then a prominent loyalist were shot dead. Although the violence resulted in Sinn Féin being temporarily excluded from the talks, it may have contributed to the determination of Bertie Ahern's government to press the British for a return to the bolder version of cross-borderism of the Framework Document. The result was a final frenetic four days of negotiation, kick-started by George Mitchell's presentation to the parties of a draft of the agreement on 7 April. This included a section on strand two (North–South institutions) that the governments had drafted, which reflected the strong cross-border dimension of the Framework Document. Mitchell himself recognized that this would be unacceptable to Trimble and, with the leader of the Alliance Party, John Alderdice, predicting disaster if the proposals were carried out, Blair and Ahern descended on Stormont for three days and nights of what James Molyneaux disparagingly referred to as ‘high-wire act’ negotiations.