One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  The Provos were steadily inching towards engagement with electoral politics, but they were still in no mind to question the armed struggle, and insisted that any campaign in support of the prisoners would require ‘two sharply differing, but mutually reinforcing aspects: one peaceful, the other involving physical force’. Mass demonstrations, industrial action and lobbying of Nationalist politicians should be combined with ‘popular street riots, the erection of barricades against the British forces, and other violent acts of civil disobedience building towards the establishment of no-go areas in the nationalist ghettoes; plus, of course, the armed action of IRA Volunteers.’69 On the political front, their main goal was to force what republicans called ‘the three cornerstones of the Irish establishment’ – the Catholic bishops, the SDLP and the Dublin government – to come out in support of the prisoners.70

  Thatcher’s abrasive style made life a great deal harder for those who had been holding the line against the Provos since the conflict began. As the NIO’s David Blatherwick observed at the beginning of June, the prime minister’s speech on 28 May went down ‘like a lead balloon’. The Catholic hierarchy ‘ostentatiously avoided’ Thatcher during her visit to Northern Ireland, on a tour which only managed ‘further to alienate Catholics, and to cause even some moderate Protestants to wonder what we are at’. The prospects for containing nationalist anger grew dimmer by the day: ‘Unless the hunger strike ends soon, probably before the next hunger strikers die and certainly before the beginning of the marching season, the situation will begin to deteriorate rapidly.’71 When John Hume met with Humphrey Atkins, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, he bitterly reproached Thatcher’s government for ‘treating the SDLP with contempt’. Hume feared that Sinn Féin would make an electoral breakthrough on the back of the protests and urged Atkins to negotiate with the prisoners.72

  In his assessment of the strike, the British ambassador to Dublin, Leonard Figg, described it as ‘one of the most difficult periods in Anglo-Irish relations for many years’.73 The embassy had to deal with two different governments during the crisis. Fianna Fáil’s Charles Haughey was in charge when Sands began his fast: Haughey privately assured Figg that he would do his best to help, but urged the British government to resolve the dispute as soon as possible by ‘seeming to make concessions without actually doing so’.74

  Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael then became Taoiseach after a general election on 11 June. The poll gave the National H-Block/Armagh Committee the chance to run a slate of prison candidates, winning two seats and over 40,000 votes. A stunning achievement for such a hastily improvised campaign, the result came as an unpleasant shock to FitzGerald and reinforced his desire to end the crisis. According to Figg, this was the point when tensions reached their peak. FitzGerald’s overriding concern was the threat to domestic stability: ‘The Irish Government’s pressure on us to end the strike grew in proportion to their fears that they might not be able to control events and that the institutions of the state might collapse.’75 That was precisely the dilemma with which the Provos had wanted to confront FitzGerald and his colleagues.

  There was always a fundamental contradiction embedded in the H-Block campaign. Its activists wanted to end the phenomenon of ‘spectator politics’ for good, yet their campaign ultimately relied upon the mental fortitude and physical endurance of a tiny group of men in Long Kesh, whose willingness to risk death made it possible to organize the biggest protests Northern Ireland had seen since the early 70s. A self-sacrificing elite created the necessary conditions for the revival of mass action, before the collapse of their fast in September 1981 precipitated its decline. On 20 August the INLA’s Mickey Devine became the tenth and last hunger striker to die, just as Sinn Féin’s Owen Carron won the by-election triggered by the death of Bobby Sands.

  ‘Red Mickey’ had followed a winding path to Long Kesh, joining the first civil rights marches as a teenager in Derry and canvassing for Eamonn McCann in the Stormont election of 1969, before enlisting in the Official IRA with the rest of his young Labour comrades. He lined up with Seamus Costello when he launched the IRSP in 1975, along with the great majority of Derry Officials.76 The IRSP put on a display of strength at Devine’s funeral, the last real opportunity it would have to do so. The party’s chairwoman Naomi Brennan described her martyred comrade as ‘a revolutionary, a soldier, but above all a socialist’, who ‘realized that to have national freedom, we must have socialism, and that, also, to have any chance of socialism, we must have national freedom’. Brennan stressed the importance of united action in support of the prisoners: ‘We have learnt by the mistakes of our revolutionary predecessors, and our campaign has been built on unity of all those who support the five demands. Such unity must not be taken lightly.’77

  Behind the scenes, the picture was much less edifying. There had been a dispute on the National H-Block/Armagh Committee over the recent by-election, as the IRSP wanted Bernadette McAliskey to go forward and take her seat at Westminster if elected. The Provisionals had no desire to give an unpredictable maverick such an important platform and insisted on running their own man instead.78 McAliskey’s remarkable talents as an agitator had been a huge asset for the campaign, but the time was fast approaching for the Provos to leave their allies behind. Reporting on Owen Carron’s victory, An Phoblacht announced that Sinn Féin would now be ‘stepping firmly into the electoral arena, taking on the SDLP (already badly shaken by the events of recent months), and establishing its undisputed leadership of the nationalist people’. The paper told supporters to prepare for a war on two fronts: ‘This new confidence within the Republican Movement, that now is the time – as never before – for its militant politics, is fully complemented by the IRA’s continued ability to take on the military might of the British presence.’79 The SDLP’s Seamus Mallon lashed out at Thatcher after the result, suggesting that her government had ‘almost destroyed the democratic process in Northern Ireland’.80

  On 28 August, Carron held a meeting with Michael Alison, a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office, to discuss the prisoners’ fate. The minutes recorded a ‘calm and friendly’ discussion, at the end of which Alison ‘expressed the hope that a situation would arise when Mr Carron felt that he could attend the House of Commons’.81 But there was no sign of agreement. Fearing that the stand-off would continue indefinitely, the prison chaplain Denis Faul began urging family members to order medical assistance for their sons when they lost consciousness. This external intervention proved decisive in breaking the impasse. Over the weeks that followed, the hunger strike gradually collapsed, and Mickey Devine turned out to be the last fatality in Long Kesh.

  The campaign’s inability to push the ‘three cornerstones’ of Irish nationalism into supporting the prisoners was a crucial factor behind its defeat. The threat to stability feared by Garret FitzGerald never really materialized in the South. The largest disturbances came in July, when police officers blocked the route of a march in Dublin to prevent it from reaching the British embassy. A full-scale riot broke out, with bricks and bottles thrown at the police, who dispersed the protesters with a baton charge. Leonard Figg suggested that the clashes in Ballsbridge were ‘clearly a turning point in popular support for the campaign’.82 However, the mental gulf between northern nationalists and the southern population, far more evident in 1981 than it had been a decade earlier, was a much wider phenomenon than that, and proved to be an insuperable barrier for the movement.

  Thatcher’s government paid a heavy price for the victory it had secured. The IRA and INLA recruited a new generation of militants in the wake of the crisis, preserving their capacity to wage war for another decade. In his overview of the hunger strike for An Phoblacht, Peter Dowling insisted that British policy had given the IRA its greatest boost since internment, ‘organizationally in terms of recruits, funds, “safe houses” and an expanded support base, and politically in terms of credibility and support at home and abroad’. Dowling picked out Sinn Féin’s failu
re to run candidates in the local elections as the one true blunder of the campaign.83

  The party leadership was now determined to make up for that omission at the earliest opportunity. As the hunger strike spluttered to a halt, a spokesman for the IRA tried to calm fears that the movement was going down the same road as the Officials: ‘What was wrong with the “Sticks” was not just that they contested elections but that they had a totally incorrect analysis of the nature of British imperialism. They believed that the six-county state could be “democratized” from within.’ There was no question of imitating Goulding’s movement on the question that really mattered: ‘The military struggle will go on with all the energy at our disposal.’84

  Sinn Féin was ready to take advantage of a shift in nationalist opinion that David Blatherwick of the NIO gloomily described as ‘a radicalization of politics in the urban minority’: ‘The young in particular are disillusioned with traditional politics and tend to regard conventional politicians as offering wrong answers to irrelevant questions.’85 The Provos wanted to clear the decks for an electoral strategy and saw nothing to be gained by preserving an alliance with smaller groups that had their own ideas about the way ahead.

  A poorly attended conference in October 1982 formally wound down the National H-Block/Armagh Committee. As PD observed, the decision simply ratified what was already happening on the ground: ‘The underlying reality that faced these delegates was the collapse of the H-Block/Armagh campaign throughout the 32 Counties.’86 The end of the prison protest had deprived the movement of its central focus, and it would be very difficult to find another issue with the same broad appeal. In any case, the Provos had no interest in keeping the alliance going, and without their support, there could be no united front of any value. It was the end of the road, and everyone at the conference knew it.

  8

  War by Other Means

  A New Front

  Sinn Féin’s 1981 conference gave the leadership approval to contest every subsequent election, north and south. The first opportunity to test their dual strategy came in October 1982, just as the broad front against ‘criminalization’ was put out to pasture. Thatcher’s Northern Ireland secretary, Jim Prior, had scheduled elections for a local assembly as part of a political initiative that he called ‘rolling devolution’. Many nationalists feared that the British government was trying to restore Stormont by the back door, and the SDLP pledged to boycott Prior’s assembly after the poll. This ill-fated scheme gave the newly energized Sinn Féin an ideal platform: the party won 10 per cent of the vote and five of its candidates were successful, including Gerry Adams, Danny Morrison and Martin McGuinness. The results were a sensational blow to British policy and gave Sinn Féin real substance as a political force.

  In its analysis of the election, the Northern Ireland Office admitted that ‘the existence of so considerable a Republican protest vote is disturbing’. Sinn Féin had absorbed the base of groups like People’s Democracy and the Irish Independence Party, but also ‘brought out a new element of hard-line nationalists who have previously boycotted elections’ and ‘maximized their support among young voters frustrated by economic and social conditions and angered by the constant harassment, as they see it, of the security forces’.1 Government officials tried to find a silver lining in the party’s success – ‘involvement in politics may occupy people who might otherwise be busy with violence and could lead to divisions in the PIRA/Sinn Féin leadership’ – but concluded that such divisions were unlikely to materialize. There was no precedent for a party of this kind performing so well in the United Kingdom: ‘Open support for violence distinguishes Sinn Féin from all but the most extreme political groups.’2 The Provos always rejected the claim that ‘open support for violence’ set them apart from the other political parties in the UK. But they would have been delighted to accept the characterization of Sinn Féin as a force like no other. With the sole exception of the abertzale movement in the Basque Country, no party with explicit ties to an armed insurgency has ever achieved such a degree of implantation in a liberal-democratic state.

  For a time, it looked as if the Provisionals might sweep everything before them. The SDLP was their primary electoral target and seemed to be there for the taking. John Hume’s party had never fully transcended its origins as the vehicle for a disparate group of politicians with their own constituency teams but no real activist base. In a preview of the 1983 Westminster election, Michael Farrell set out the factors that distinguished the two parties in Belfast and Derry. Sinn Féin’s activists were ‘young, unemployed, ex-prisoners’ who ‘live in the working-class ghettoes’ and ‘speak the people’s language’, in contrast to their nationalist rivals: ‘The SDLP candidates are all middle-class. Three of the four candidates in Belfast are doctors.’3 In private, the NIO’s civil servants made similar observations: Sinn Féin was simply ‘more astute and enthusiastic’ than the SDLP in its approach to community politics, making its adversary look ‘middle-class, middle-aged and out of touch’.4 Farrell described the tireless constituency work of Sinn Féin advice centres, which far surpassed anything the SDLP could manage: ‘Instead of waiting for complaints to come in, they have gone round the doors with a checklist of possible repairs or benefits – like beds, blankets or rent rebates – to which the people might be entitled.’5

  There may have been a certain incongruity in the IRA’s political wing making such carefully itemized claims upon the British state, but the results were plain for all to see on polling day in June 1983. Sinn Féin surpassed expectations, winning over 100,000 votes: one-third higher than its total the previous year. Most importantly, the party’s share of the nationalist vote had increased from 35 to 43 per cent. Gerry Adams beat off competition from the SDLP’s Joe Hendron and the incumbent Gerry Fitt to win in West Belfast, while Danny Morrison came within a hundred votes of victory in the Mid-Ulster constituency. Owen Carron lost his seat in Fermanagh–South Tyrone – the SDLP ran a candidate this time, dividing the nationalist vote – but overall, the result was a triumph for Sinn Féin, and its leaders were in exultant form.

  When Adams sat down with Michael Farrell to discuss Sinn Féin’s prospects after the election, the world seemed bright and full of promise. He was careful to insist that the IRA had no need for electoral validation, and rejected the idea that Sinn Féin’s recent successes undermined the case for armed struggle against British rule: ‘A movement that wants them out will either have to use force or the threat of force.’6 However, there was no question that recent events had dramatically boosted republican self-confidence. Two IRA spokesmen also spoke to Farrell and explained that their perspective of a ‘long war’ lasting twenty years or more was now open to revision: ‘If the Republican movement can capitalize on all the social discontent in the 26 Counties and continue the electoral successes it could be a lot shorter.’7

  In November 1983, Adams formalized his control over the movement by replacing Ruairí Ó Brádaigh as Sinn Féin president at the party’s Ard Fheis. Ó Brádaigh kept the private rancour of his tussle with the Adams faction under wraps, although he couldn’t resist a parting shot across the bows, noting that his tenure as president had not witnessed any splits: ‘Long may it remain so, as it will, provided we stick to basic principles.’8

  Sinn Féin now had two clear objectives: to overtake the SDLP as the main voice of nationalist opinion in the North, and to carve out a political foothold in the South. Adams conceded that sympathy for northern nationalists would not be enough to win seats in the Dáil: ‘You can’t get support in Ballymun because of doors being kicked in by the Brits in Ballymurphy.’ His party needed to develop a platform that could appeal to those angered by corruption and ‘Thatcherite monetarist policies’. According to Adams, republicans also had to recognize that the majority of people in the South considered its institutions to be legitimate, whatever they might think themselves about the ‘bastard state’ that arose from the Treaty. His defence of Sinn Féin’s abstentionist
policy was distinctly underwhelming: ‘While that remains the position I will support it.’9 The rise of Sinn Féin deeply troubled Garret FitzGerald’s government, which feared contagion across the border. FitzGerald responded by convening the New Ireland Forum, a gathering of constitutional nationalists intended to shore up the SDLP against its republican challenger.

  There was another strand to the new Provo strategy that had the potential to carry its influence right into the heart of British politics. During the 1970s, organized support for British withdrawal had largely been confined to the extra-parliamentary left. The growth of Labour’s Bennite current now held out the promise of a much more effective challenge to the bipartisan consensus on Northern Ireland. Adams told Michael Farrell that Sinn Féin had been trying to develop contacts with prominent Labour politicians such as Ken Livingstone, who was now in charge of the Greater London Council (GLC), Europe’s biggest municipal authority.10

  Livingstone himself saw a clear affinity between the two movements: ‘If I had been born in West Belfast, I would have ended up in Sinn Féin.’11 In his capacity as GLC chief, Livingstone invited Adams and Danny Morrison to visit London after Sinn Féin’s triumph in the 1982 Assembly elections. The invitation provoked tabloid fury, and Margaret Thatcher’s government imposed an exclusion order on the two men, preventing them from setting foot on British soil. Livingstone responded by travelling to Belfast as a guest of Sinn Féin. He argued strongly for Labour to commit itself to pulling out of Northern Ireland at the earliest possible date: ‘We have to go into an election pledged to withdrawal within two years.’12