by Daniel Finn
It wasn’t long before Sinn Féin had the chance to put its new line into practice. In his conference speech, Adams suggested that the election after the next one would be the party’s first serious test. He put the ‘political pygmies of Leinster House’ on notice to expect a strong challenge: ‘For too long they have been allowed a monopoly upon what passes for politics in this part of Ireland and for too long a very sizeable section of Irish citizens have been denied the opportunity to shape and build a relevant, radical and principled alternative to partitionist rule.’47 But that ‘sizeable section of Irish citizens’ proved to be elusive in the timeframe Adams had specified. There were two Irish general elections in 1987 and 1989. In the first, Sinn Féin won 1.9 per cent of the vote and no seats; in the second, it could only manage 1.2 per cent. The ramshackle Anti-H-Block campaign had won twice as many votes in 1981 as Sinn Féin did eight years later.
To compound the blow, 1989 was the greatest moment of triumph for the rebranded Officials in the South, just as they faced political oblivion north of the border. The Workers’ Party had discarded most of its republican heritage during the 1980s in the hope of winning support from working-class Protestants. Having formerly denounced the RUC as ‘a body of uniformed torturers’, it now praised the force for its ‘undoubted willingness’ to enforce the law without communal bias.48 The party programme called for a return to devolved government without power-sharing or the cross-border ‘Irish dimension’ insisted on by the SDLP. Workers’ Party leaders blamed John Hume for the political log-jam, and suggested that the Anglo-Irish Agreement might be suspended so the Unionist parties would enter talks.49 Such arguments made little impression on the Protestant electorate, as two of the party’s leading intellectuals, Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, noted in a paper for their comrades: ‘In the medium term we cannot hope for more than the interested attention of sections of the Protestant working class.’50 But they were bound to raise hackles among the working-class nationalists who had supplied the Officials with a modest electoral base in the 1970s. In a survey conducted in 1985, 96 per cent of Protestants believed that the RUC carried out its duties ‘fairly’ or ‘very fairly’; just 47 per cent of Catholics agreed.51
In effect, Cathal Goulding’s movement had set out to build a working-class version of the bi-confessional, civic unionist Alliance Party, only to find that the realities of Northern Irish society militated against that project. The Alliance could base itself in a real if limited social constituency, to be found in prosperous suburban districts where middle-class Protestants and Catholics lived, worked and socialized together. Its vote share ranged from 5 to 15 per cent during the Troubles.52
There was no working-class equivalent of this social layer: communal polarization and segregation was at its most acute towards the bottom of the economic scale. The post-republican Workers’ Party left the nationalist field to be tended by Sinn Féin and the SDLP, without doing anything to weaken the grip of the Unionist parties over the Protestant electorate. Throughout the 1980s, its vote fluctuated between 1 and 3 per cent, a handful of council seats the only reward for all the blood, sweat and tears invested by party activists. The NIO’s Political Affairs Division was cruel but accurate in its assessment of the Officials after the 1983 election: ‘They will continue their efforts to introduce class politics to the electorate but these will always be surrounded by a faint air of musical comedy.’53
For the Provos, there was nothing amusing about the apostasy of their former comrades, and they would have been happy to suppress the embattled sect altogether, if its members had not been able to call on their paramilitary shadow – known as ‘Group B’ – for protection.54 But the Officials carved out a political niche south of the border, where the lack of republican baggage was an asset, not a liability. In 1989, the Workers’ Party won 5 per cent of the national vote and seven seats in the Dáil. The European election that was held simultaneously saw the party’s leader Proinsias De Rossa top the poll in Dublin. The personal vote for De Rossa, a veteran of the Border Campaign, was twice as large as the entire Provisional electorate. With Goulding’s followers now occupying the ground Sinn Féin wanted to conquer in the South, just as the party found itself treading water in its northern heartlands, no amount of invective could dispel the sense of political stagnation as a new decade came into view.
‘An end in itself’
Gerry Adams had claimed in 1986 that abstention was the main barrier to winning support from people who ‘might otherwise be open to our policies on all other issues’.55 But it was the IRA campaign that really stood in Sinn Féin’s path. Whatever latent sympathy there might be for republican goals, public opinion in the South was overwhelmingly hostile to the armed struggle. A series of kidnappings and bank robberies in the mid 1980s, some of which resulted in the death of Irish soldiers and policemen at the hands of IRA Volunteers, greatly sharpened that mood. Sinn Féin leaders railed against what they saw as the hypocrisy of Dublin’s political class. Danny Morrison reminded Garret FitzGerald that his own father, the 1916 veteran Desmond FitzGerald, had fought for Irish independence ‘with a Thompson machine gun in one hand and a ballot paper in the other’.56 Morrison followed up that remark with a blistering pamphlet, The Good Old IRA, itemizing the atrocities committed by republicans during the War of Independence, in order to ‘confront those hypocritical revisionists who winsomely refer to the “Old IRA” whilst deriding their more effective and, arguably, less bloody successors’.57
The Good Old IRA painted such a black picture of the ‘Tan War’ that some have described it as a pioneering exercise in revisionist historiography.58 Morrison’s goal was not, of course, to discredit the republicans of yesteryear, but to show his readers that ‘no struggle involves a clean fight’.59 But his central argument that Northern Irish nationalists ‘live under arguably worse conditions in terms of repression than did all of Ireland in the pre-1921 period’, and that the case for armed struggle was as valid today as it had ever been, made no impact on its intended audience.60 Historians might agree that there was no yawning gulf between the methods of the old IRA and those used by the Provos. The need for logical consistency troubled politicians in Dublin much less. The War of Independence had been fought long ago and given them a state of their own with all the trappings of sovereignty. The Provo campaign now posed a threat to the interests of that state, and they wanted it to end as soon as possible. There was no substantial body of opinion in the South that took a different view.
The IRA still had the means to keep on fighting for a long time to come. Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya had promised them a remarkable gift: 240 tons of sophisticated weaponry, including heavy machine guns, surface-to-air missiles and a huge stock of Semtex explosive.61 A special IRA team managed to bring about half of this material into the country by sea before French police captured the largest shipment off the Atlantic coast in October 1987. The big question now for the Provo leadership was whether they should use this windfall to dramatically escalate their campaign, in the hope of precipitating a terminal crisis for British rule in Ireland.
The IRA’s main objective throughout the conflict was to kill members of the British security forces. From that perspective, there had been a marked decline in its capacity for lethal violence. Five hundred and seventy-nine soldiers and policemen lost their lives in the 1970s, the vast majority at the hands of the IRA, but the number of deaths fell to 342 in the following decade. These bald figures concealed a more important shift as ‘Ulsterization’ took effect. Losses suffered by the British Army had fallen sharply, from 349 to 124, but there was hardly any drop for the locally recruited forces (230 deaths to 218). From 1975 to 1988, there were only two years when the Army took more casualties than the RUC and the UDR. For five consecutive years in the mid 1980s, Army deaths were in single figures.62
To a large extent, the Provos were fighting a war of attrition against the Protestant community in arms. They had to face charges of sectarian bigotry, especially when I
RA Volunteers killed off-duty members of the UDR at their homes or places of work. Even if they shrugged off such accusations, IRA leaders could hardly deny that ‘Ulsterization’ had placed a formidable buffer between their campaign and the British government. Politicians in London would not have to face their own Vietnam, with the families of dead soldiers urging them to withdraw from a country whose fate meant nothing to them. If anything, the loss of sons and fathers made Northern Irish Protestants more determined to support the war against the IRA.
One response to this impasse might be to suddenly change gear and catch the British Army on the hop. Republicans weighed up the merits of their own ‘Tet Offensive’, inspired by the seminal moment in the Vietnam War when NLF guerrillas abandoned their usual hit-and-run tactics and tried to hold territory from static positions. According to one IRA Volunteer, ‘the idea was to take and hold areas in Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh and to force the British either to use maximum force or to hold off.’63 Another republican source described a plan to ‘take on the Army at roads and at fortifications with fifty to sixty IRA members involved at a time’, using the anti-aircraft missiles obtained from Libya to shoot down helicopters.64 By denying the British Army safe use of the skies, the Provos would force it to rely on ground transport to supply its bases, leaving it vulnerable to ambush with the new weapons in the IRA’s arsenal.65
Ed Moloney’s account of this proposal, easily the most comprehensive, draws heavily upon off-the-record interviews with republican dissenters who accused Gerry Adams and his associates of sabotaging the IRA campaign to prepare the ground for a ceasefire. The Libyan weapons and the ‘Tet Offensive’ form the centrepiece of this latter-day Dolchstoßlegende: according to the dissidents, elements in the Provo leadership deliberately compromised the last arms shipment before it reached Irish shores, scuppering the plans for a ‘big bang’ by removing the crucial element of surprise.66
This version of events glosses over a fundamental point: what would have happened if the IRA had actually gone ahead with the plan? According to Moloney, republicans were hoping to repeat the experience of the early 1970s by goading their opponents into a counter-productive response.67 If that was the case, then the IRA was on the brink of repeating Brian Faulkner’s mistake in 1971 by ignoring the fact that circumstances had changed dramatically since the last round.
On a purely technical level, it would have been much easier for the British government to strike a blow against the IRA by interning its members without trial. Having kept the organization under close surveillance since the conflict began and penetrated its ranks with informers, they would have had a much better idea of who to arrest and where than in the early 70s. If the authorities in Dublin had decided to act simultaneously – and there was a much better chance of that happening than in 1971, given the thaw in Anglo-Irish relations – the IRA would have found itself under severe pressure. Pitched battles between IRA units and British troops were also bound to take a heavy toll. It would have been a stiff challenge to preserve the organizational skeleton needed to train and equip any new layer of recruits, even if that layer had been forthcoming.
More importantly, the broader political context had changed beyond recognition since 1971. When British soldiers took the first internees to Long Kesh, it was at the behest of a Unionist government propped up by military force that had faced countless demonstrations by nationalists over the past three years. Now, Stormont was long gone, and the British government had pushed through its most recent political initiative in spite of ferocious Unionist opposition. Popular mobilization by nationalists had subsided after the hunger strikes, and Sinn Féin’s electoral advance was grinding to a halt. Public opinion in the South was indifferent to the IRA’s cause, if not actively hostile.
There was no reason to think that republicans could reverse these unfavourable trends with an all-or-nothing gamble. One senior Provisional suggested that the outcome would have been ‘six months’ intense fighting, with heavy casualties on both sides’, but no prospect of victory at the end of the line.68 If the Adams leadership really did sabotage the ‘Tet Offensive’, they most likely saved the IRA from a messy defeat that would have been a poor return on two decades of struggle and sacrifice.
There was a more limited escalation of the IRA campaign in the late 1980s, making use of the Libyan weapons that had slipped through the net. Army losses increased to their highest levels since the 1970s, with twenty-three soldiers killed in 1988 and twenty-four the following year. But the British state also had the capacity to raise its game. The Army killed nineteen IRA members in the space of a year, including an eight-man unit wiped out by the SAS at Loughgall in May 1987.69 The ambush in Tyrone was damaging enough, but the IRA could at least hope to turn the disaster to good account by transforming its dead Volunteers into martyrs for the cause.
However, no silver lining could be found in the IRA’s worst setback of the time. In November 1987, a Provo bomb exploded during a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen, killing eleven civilians, all of them Protestant. There was a furious popular backlash, especially in the South, where Sinn Féin had been hoping to establish a foothold.
Soon after the bombing, the US journalist Kevin Kelley published a new edition of his highly sympathetic book about the Provos, with some words of commendation from Gerry Adams on the cover. Kelley added an epilogue on ‘the need for non-violence’, arguing that republicans were ‘bound to lose more than they will gain by continuing indefinitely on their present course’, and would do better to adopt new methods of struggle: ‘Sit-downs, “illegal” marches, refusal to pay rates, rents or fines, destruction of public records, and complete non-cooperation with all agencies and officials of the state – each of which would presumably result in mass arrests – might well stir international opinion and the British conscience in ways that bombs in London and bullets in Belfast demonstrably do not.’70 There were powerful echoes here of the case for civil resistance as a substitute for armed struggle that People’s Democracy had made a decade earlier, when the Provos brushed such arguments impatiently aside.
Another warning about the perils of republican militarism came from the fate of the INLA, which seemed to have entered its death throes. A new chief of staff, Dominic McGlinchey, held the organization together in rough-and-ready fashion for a few years in the 1980s, while the political wing of Seamus Costello’s movement continued to wither on the vine. McGlinchey had won a fearsome reputation as a Provisional commander in south Derry before the Provos expelled him for indiscipline. When the IRSP’s paper interviewed McGlinchey in 1983, while he was on the run from the Irish police, the INLA leader dutifully noted the party’s importance in giving ‘political leadership on the class struggle in Ireland’ and spoke of his interest in left-wing ideology, ‘from Fanon and Cabral to Guevara and Mandel’.71
But McGlinchey’s own practice was unmistakably that of a traditional republican militarist, and he masterminded a series of high-profile attacks. After the Irish authorities captured him in 1984, the INLA’s quarrelsome factions began preparing for all-out war.72 One splinter group broke away to form the Irish People’s Liberation Organization (IPLO) and ordered the rump INLA to disband. When their former comrades disregarded those instructions, a grisly vendetta ensued, claiming the lives of twelve people before it staggered to a halt.
The victims of the feud included Thomas ‘Ta’ Power, who had been trying to promote some fresh political thinking since his release from prison. A document written by Power gave a scathing description of the INLA’s ‘macho’ internal culture and asked whether the movement had backed itself into a corner: ‘We get no analysis, we get no strategy outside the basic [military] confrontation – it eventually becomes an end in itself simply due to the fact that they don’t know any other strategy.’73
Repeating the arguments made by Bernadette McAliskey and her allies a decade earlier, Power urged his comrades to ‘put politics in command’ by establishing the supremacy of the IRSP over its mil
itary wing. Supporters of the IPLO faction gunned him down before he had any chance to put these ideas into effect. The INLA somehow survived the onslaught launched by its former comrades, but could not transcend the macho militarism that Power had castigated. One consequence of the feud was to incapacitate a potential rival for the Provos, just as they were putting out feelers for a new political initiative that might cause ructions inside the IRA.
9
Down a Few Rungs
‘The risk of being defeated’
In the summer of 1988, Sinn Féin sat down for talks with the SDLP to see whether a ‘national consensus on Irish unification’, as Gerry Adams put it, could be forged.1 The discussions began soon after a chaotic sequence of events that thrust Northern Ireland onto the global news agenda once again. In March, an SAS unit shot dead three IRA members preparing a bomb attack in Gibraltar whose leader, Mairéad Farrell, was already a hero for republicans. It soon became clear that Farrell and her comrades were unarmed when the soldiers opened fire, a revelation that generated intense controversy, coming after previous ‘shoot-to-kill’ incidents involving the SAS.
The Provos mounted a show of strength at the funeral service in Belfast ten days later. But the mourners came under attack from a loyalist paramilitary, Michael Stone, who tossed grenades and fired repeatedly at the crowd, killing three people before he was overpowered. At the funeral of one of Stone’s victims, two British soldiers dressed in plain clothes suddenly drove into the procession. The crowd assumed they were loyalists bent on another attack: the soldiers were dragged from their car, beaten and shot by the IRA before the security forces could intervene.