One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  Behind the scenes, they were preparing to move further still. The private discussions Adams had been conducting with John Hume and the Fianna Fáil leader Charles Haughey from the late 1980s were intended to forge a pan-nationalist consensus that would inevitably require Sinn Féin to move closer to the perspective of its would-be allies. When the talks began, Adams did have some grounds for hoping that Fianna Fáil might be induced to meet the Provos halfway in the event of a ceasefire. Haughey had cultivated a hard-line, nationalist image from the opposition benches in the 1980s, opposing the Anglo-Irish Agreement.47 Fianna Fáil’s team were closer to Sinn Féin in their analysis of British policy than the SDLP had been at the 1988 talks.48 But Haughey softened his line on the agreement after returning to office in 1987, and his administration stayed close to John Hume. In October 1991, Hume worked with Irish officials to draw up the text of a declaration for the two governments to endorse that would, he hoped, give the IRA enough room to halt its campaign.49

  Sinn Féin’s first alternative draft in February 1992 tried to water down Hume’s emphasis on unionist consent, merely acknowledging that ‘the exercise of the democratic right to self-determination by the people of Ireland as a whole would best be achieved with the agreement and consent of the people of Northern Ireland’, and committing the British government to bring about Irish unity ‘within a period to be agreed’.50 This was still compatible with republican orthodoxy, albeit expressed in unfamiliar language.

  But four months later, Sinn Féin endorsed a fresh draft – known as the ‘Irish Peace Initiative’ or simply ‘Hume–Adams’ – that took the movement right out of its comfort zone: ‘The British Government accepts the principle that the Irish people have the right collectively to self-determination, and that the exercise of this right could take the form of agreed independent structures for the island as a whole.’51 This was to be balanced by a symmetrical commitment from Dublin, with the Taoiseach accepting, in the light of Northern Irish experience, that ‘stability and well-being will not be found under any political system which is refused allegiance or rejected on grounds of identity by a significant minority.’ Self-determination by the Irish people ‘as a whole’ would have to be ‘exercised with the agreement and consent of the people of Northern Ireland’.52

  Although there was still a certain ambiguity in the wording, the most plausible reading of Hume–Adams was that it maintained the guarantee for unionists, but transferred its location from London to Dublin. The Irish government would grant the North’s unionist majority the right to block constitutional change, and republicans would find that easier to swallow than the existing veto upheld by Britain.53 There was no commitment to British withdrawal: the exercise of self-determination ‘could take the form of agreed independent structures’, but then again it might not.

  According to Gerry Adams, the IRA leadership approved this document as the basis for a possible ceasefire.54 If so, the members of the Army Council had either shifted away from established orthodoxies, or did not fully grasp the import of what they were endorsing. Combined with the public signs of flexibility in Gibney’s Bodenstown speech and ‘Towards a Lasting Peace’, the Provos had taken the first major step that would lead towards an IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

  The Final Phase

  The military stalemate facing the IRA in the early 90s was an obvious spur towards such ideological revisionism. In September 1988, an IRA spokesman assured Eamonn Mallie that its struggle was now entering the ‘final phase’: ‘The next eighteen months to two years will be critical because the IRA has the resources and will then know if it has the capacity to end it.’55 This turned out to be a shrewd analysis, if not in the way intended. After the spike of 1988–89, losses inflicted by the IRA dropped sharply again. From 1991 to 1994, forty-two members of the security forces were killed in total, fewer than in 1988 alone.56 In January 1992, Colonel Derek Wilford, the commander of 1 Para on Bloody Sunday, made a surprising reappearance on the massacre’s twentieth anniversary, comparing Northern Ireland to Aden and calling for the withdrawal of British troops: ‘It would be a victory for common sense.’57 But such exhortations were increasingly rare.

  The IRA had mixed results when it tried to broaden the scope of its war. A policy that branded civilians who worked on Army and RUC bases as ‘legitimate targets’ reached its nadir in January 1992, when an IRA bomb killed eight Protestant construction workers. Facing charges of sectarianism, the Provos might retort that they had also targeted Catholics who worked for the security forces, but this would simply remind their critics of the infamous ‘human bomb’ attack launched by the Derry IRA in October 1990, when they forced a local man who worked for a military canteen to drive a van packed with explosives into an Army checkpoint.58

  A renewed campaign in Britain did more to boost the IRA’s morale. Its Volunteers revelled in the technical proficiency of a mortar attack that came close to wiping out John Major’s cabinet in January 1991, and a new tactic of planting ‘blockbuster’ devices in the heart of London’s financial centre inflicted more economic damage than two decades of bombing in Northern Ireland. An Irish Times round-up of the IRA’s activity in 1992 noted the paradox: security-force casualties were at an all-time low, but its bombing campaign had been more effective than at any time since the Troubles began.59 In April 1993, a one-tonne bomb devastated Bishopsgate, causing more than a billion pounds in damage and forcing the City of London to impose a new security cordon in the hope of preventing further attacks. With the City now bidding to overtake New York as the world’s financial capital, the IRA had found a new weakness to exploit in the defences of its adversary.

  However, the ‘blockbusters’ had their own inherent limitations, as the margin between success and failure was very fine. Every time the Provos phoned in a warning, they took the risk of mass casualties if the police were unable to clear the area in time. In March 1993, journalist Mary Holland suggested that it was ‘beginning to look almost inevitable that one day soon the IRA, by accident or design, is going to cause a major disaster in a British city’. She warned that the bombings would not have the desired effect on public opinion in Britain, which was ‘too fragmented’ to rally behind a demand for withdrawal from Northern Ireland: ‘To effect such a dramatic change the IRA would need, quite deliberately, to sanction acts of terrorism against innocent civilians on a scale which its own supporters would not stomach.’60

  Within weeks, a Provisional bomb had killed two children at a shopping centre in Warrington: perhaps not as bad an outcome as Holland had feared, but bad enough to provoke an angry backlash in Ireland and Britain alike, with protests against the IRA on the streets of Dublin. The main political impact of the 90s bombing campaign may have been on the IRA itself. It made it easier for the Provos to claim that they were moving towards a ceasefire from a position of strength as an ‘undefeated army’, not suing for peace from their enemies.

  Republican pride was a source of great irritation to the IRA’s opponents, but there could be no doubting its importance in the approaching endgame. Danny Morrison’s prison journal offers a useful window into the leadership’s thinking at the time.61 In September 1990, he suggested that republicans were now determined to achieve ‘something substantial’ instead of ‘glorifying past defeats’, which would only be possible if ‘everybody agrees to come down a few rungs’.62 A letter to the journalist David McKittrick from September 1991 urged him to empathize with IRA Volunteers as ‘human beings who are in trenches, whose rationale may often appear elusive or inexplicable but who feel they have no other choice’, and who would ‘have to feel that a settlement was just and that their opponents were making compromises also’.63 In another message to McKittrick the following January, Morrison denied that he was ‘so stupid as to believe that republicans can win at the negotiating table what they haven’t won on the battlefield’.64 In tone as much as content, it was a far cry from the bombastic triumphalism of a decade earlier.

  W
riting to Gerry Adams in October 1991, Morrison suggested that the IRA could ‘fight on forever’ without facing outright defeat: ‘Of course, that isn’t the same as winning or showing something for all the sacrifices.’65 He drew his thoughts together in an article for An Phoblacht after the UK general election of 1992, when Adams lost his West Belfast seat to the SDLP. Morrison feared there would now be ‘a big temptation, because of frustration and alienation, for many republicans to abandon even their limited faith in politics and place all their trust in armed struggle’. That ‘emotional reaction’ would be a huge mistake: ‘The whole purpose of opening up a political front in the first place was because of the acknowledgement that the purely military struggle was being isolated and marginalized and could not on its own win.’66

  The main thrust of his argument pointed in the opposite direction: ‘If the IRA does not raise the quality of its campaign the struggle could go on forever, and if it cannot raise the quality of its campaign it should consider the alternative.’67 Republicans should ‘never allow the situation to decline to the extent that we face such a decision from the depths of an unpopular, unseemly, impossible-to-end armed struggle or from the point of brave exhaustion’.68 According to Morrison, the paper’s editor turned down his article, despite agreeing with much of its content, because ‘it would have been seized upon by our opponents’.69 He later suggested it was too early for such arguments to appear in the republican press: with Gibney’s Bodenstown speech already in the pipeline, IRA Volunteers would have seen it as a kite-flying exercise for the leadership.70

  Some opponents of the IRA have claimed there was another crucial factor behind its shift away from armed struggle. As the Provos began inching towards a ceasefire, the loyalist paramilitaries stepped up their campaign after a period of relative inactivity: between 1983 and 1987, loyalists killed fifty people; between 1988 and 1994, they killed 224. By 1992, the UVF and the UDA were killing more people than the IRA.71 Now that the republican movement had an identifiable public face, it was easier for the loyalist groups to target Sinn Féin activists, but, as before, the majority of their victims were randomly selected Catholic civilians. In 1993, a leading Unionist politician, John Taylor, suggested that the escalation of loyalist violence was establishing a ‘parity of fear’ between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, making a peace settlement more likely.72 After the IRA called its ceasefire, Taylor argued that the loyalists should be credited with having made ‘a significant contribution to the IRA finally accepting that they couldn’t win’.73 The paramilitaries themselves made similar assertions about the impact of their campaign.74

  Sinn Féin spokesmen insisted at the time that the loyalist groups were receiving generous assistance from the security forces.75 British government spokesmen dismissed talk of ‘collusion’ as republican propaganda, but the case of Brian Nelson made it harder to credit such blanket denials. Nelson, who worked for the Army’s secretive Force Research Unit (FRU), had become the UDA’s director of intelligence and played a central part in the assassination of Pat Finucane, a high-profile lawyer who defended IRA suspects.

  Nelson’s role as a government agent gradually came into public view as the investigation into Finucane’s killing progressed. Under pressure from John Major’s government, the prosecution struck a plea bargain with Nelson, ensuring he would not face cross-examination at his trial.76 Nelson’s commanding officer Gordon Kerr – identified as ‘Colonel J’ in media reports – took ‘personal moral responsibility’ for the actions of his subordinate, describing Nelson as a man who was ‘very loyal to the system’ and earning him a reduced sentence.77 It later became obvious that Kerr had misled the court about Nelson’s role in the UDA. With the full knowledge of his handlers, the FRU agent had reorganized the group’s intelligence files to improve its targeting and arranged for a massive arms shipment to be brought into Northern Ireland in 1988.78 Those weapons proved to be invaluable for the recharged loyalist campaign that followed.

  The Finucane case remains emblematic to this day because it illustrates so many aspects of collusion: the enabling role of agents from different arms of the state (FRU, RUC Special Branch); failure to act on knowledge, before and after the fact; and the part played by government ministers, both in jeopardizing Finucane’s life and in arranging the subsequent cover-up. Much of what we know about Brian Nelson, and about the wider picture of collusion, dates from the period after the IRA ceasefire, when a series of reports exposed the seamy side of Britain’s counter-insurgency.79 But knowledge of the basic facts had already percolated widely when the killings were at their peak. As Eamonn McCann observed in November 1993: ‘Stop anybody at random on the Falls or in the Bogside and ask about the “Nelson Affair”, and there’s a fair chance you will be told in detail about the UDA man Brian Nelson, “Colonel J”, the killing of Catholics, the South African arms and so forth.’80

  In nationalist communities, the perception that the security forces were giving loyalist paramilitaries a helping hand intensified the mood of fear that John Taylor believed to have such a salutary effect. Echoing Taylor, the historian Paul Bew has suggested that collusion and peace talks should be seen as two aspects of ‘one, mutually reinforcing process’.81 The problem with such arguments, quite apart from their moral implications, is that the initial reassessment of republican strategy preceded the high point of loyalist violence in the early 90s. So did the sense of political inertia on which that reassessment was based. If the republican leadership had possessed any good reason to believe that victory was close at hand, the threat posed by the UVF and the UDA might have appeared to them in a very different light, as an evil that would have to be endured.

  Reconciling the Irreconcilable

  News of the Hume–Adams initiative leaked out in April 1993, in a story broken by Eamonn McCann. The two nationalist leaders kept the ‘Irish Peace Initiative’ under wraps, although their first public statement on the talks hinted heavily at its contents: ‘The exercise of self-determination is a matter for agreement between the people of Ireland. It is the search for that agreement and the means of achieving it on which we will be concentrating.’ Shortly afterwards, Adams urged the British government to support the end of partition ‘in the shortest possible time consistent with obtaining maximum consent’, having identified ‘the steps that would be needed to get Northern majority consent to Irish reunification’. Adams did not spell out any mechanism for establishing ‘Northern majority consent’, although Hume insisted that a peace settlement would have to be approved by dual referendums, north and south, ‘to reassure the unionist people that we mean what we say when we talk of agreement’.82

  Republican spokesmen sent out mixed messages about the movement’s bottom line over the following months. Tom Hartley, a member of the so-called ‘kitchen cabinet’ driving Sinn Féin’s peace strategy, dismissed a paper from the British Labour politician Kevin McNamara that envisaged joint sovereignty between London and Dublin as ‘tinkering at the edges’.83 When an interviewer asked Gerry Adams about the same idea three months later, the Sinn Féin president tested out a verbal formula that his party would deploy frequently as the peace process gathered momentum. Adams put his own position on the record – ‘I have ruled out joint sovereignty as a solution’ – but immediately pivoted towards a more flexible stance: ‘How could you rule out discussing it? That would be ridiculous.’84

  Ed Moloney later compared this rhetorical strategy to ‘a footballer who disapproves of the off-side rule but agrees to play all the same’.85 The journalist Geraldine Kennedy received a detailed briefing on the Hume–Adams document in October 1993 and had no trouble grasping its significance: ‘For the first time, Sinn Féin, with the full backing of the Army Council of the IRA, accepts the principle of unionist consent to any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.’86 According to Adams, a positive response to the document from the British government would be enough for an IRA ceasefire.87

  In the meantime, Hume
and the new Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, had been trying to redraft the June 1992 paper to make its language more acceptable to the Unionist parties and the British government.88 A separate negotiating channel between republicans and John Major’s government confirmed that London had no intention of announcing a timetable for withdrawal, even one that extended over the space of a generation. A message from the British side in March 1993 made the position clear:

  The British Government cannot enter a talks process, or expect others to do so, with the purpose of achieving a predetermined outcome, whether the ‘ending of partition’ or anything else. It has accepted that the eventual outcome of such a process could be a united Ireland, but this can only be on the basis of the consent of the people of Northern Ireland.89

  From a traditional republican perspective, this restatement of the ‘unionist veto’ ensured that any talks would indeed have a predetermined outcome: the continuation of British rule for an indefinite period. If Adams and his inner circle had still been committed to a straightforward ‘Brits Out’ agenda, this would have been the moment to pull the plug on the whole process, but instead they persisted.

  There were enough straws in the wind to indicate that a significant change in republican policy was in the offing, and talk of an IRA ceasefire gathered pace. Such optimism coexisted eerily with signs of worsening conflict. Loyalist paramilitaries denounced the Hume–Adams ‘pan-nationalist front’ and began targeting SDLP members in a bid to scupper the talks.90 The SDLP politician Joe Hendron, who had replaced Gerry Adams as West Belfast’s MP, told reporters that there was now pervasive fear in the Catholic ghettoes: ‘Hit squads can seemingly roam about the city murdering at random, as a consequence of limited or no security-force presence in the areas from which they launch their murderous attacks.’91 Just as speculation about a truce reached fever pitch, an IRA spokesman promised to ‘exact a price’ from the loyalists, but insisted that his organization would ‘under no circumstances play into British hands by going down the cul-de-sac of sectarian warfare’.92