by Daniel Finn
Within a fortnight, an attempt by republicans to wipe out the UDA leadership had gone disastrously wrong, raising the spectre of all-out civil war. The IRA’s Belfast Brigade planted a bomb in a fish shop on the Shankill Road below an office that the UDA had been using as a meeting place: the device went off prematurely, killing nine Protestant civilians and injuring dozens more. In revenge for the bombing, loyalist gunmen killed fourteen people, including eight victims of a ‘spray job’ in a crowded bar. The two governments embarked on a frantic round of political manoeuvres to dispel the sense that Northern Ireland was on the brink of catastrophe.
Events moved at a dizzying pace, with politicians and diplomats shuttling back and forth in a process that ultimately led to the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993.93 The Sinn Féin leadership, having done so much to get the ball rolling, now found themselves watching from the sidelines. The Shankill bombing was the immediate cause of their political isolation, but even without that calamity, it was always likely that the final drafts of a ‘joint declaration’ would emerge in such a fashion. As soon as the Provos decided to rely upon John Hume and Albert Reynolds to strengthen their negotiating position, they accepted the risk of being presented with a fait accompli.
The text of the Declaration drew upon the Hume–Adams document, but whittled down some of its key elements.94 In particular, it ditched the idea of a positive commitment to Irish unity, with the British government no longer promising to ‘use all its influence and energy to win the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland’ for steps in that direction.95 The constitutional guarantee that Hume–Adams had transferred to Dublin remained in its present location: ‘The British Government agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between their two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.’96
Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick described that ‘serpentine paragraph’ as ‘a masterpiece of diplomatic ambiguity’ that ‘reconciled the irreconcilable’.97 But the reconciliation was achieved at a discursive level, not a substantive one. The NIO minister Michael Ancram had good reason to depict it as ‘a pretty Orange document in Green language’.98 In the terms used by Walter Bagehot to analyse the British constitution, the dignified parts of the Declaration were Green, while its efficient parts were Orange.
It would be harder for Gerry Adams to sell the Declaration to the IRA as the basis for a ceasefire, but the alternative was to break with Sinn Féin’s negotiating partners, and the republican leadership had gone too far down the pan-nationalist road to contemplate that. Instead of rejecting the Declaration outright, Adams played for time by asking the British government for ‘clarification’. His claim to have found a discrepancy between statements by John Major and Albert Reynolds was disingenuous. In truth, the two leaders had been spinning the text of the Declaration for the benefit of their respective audiences, using very different language to describe the same essential point: there could be no change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status without the consent of a majority.99 While Sinn Féin delayed its response to the Declaration, Adams set off on a trip to the United States whose main purpose was to demonstrate the political benefits that would accrue from a ceasefire.
Unlike most guerrilla movements of the late twentieth century, the Provisionals had always looked west rather than east for support: before the Libyan arms shipments of the 1980s, by far the greater part of the IRA’s arsenal came from Irish-American sympathizers. The collapse of the Soviet Union thus had no immediate relevance to the Provos.100 The broader crisis of the international left, affecting movements that had been a real source of inspiration for republicans, was a different matter. In 1989, when Jim Gibney warned his comrades that they were facing the spectre of defeat, he described ‘creative Marxism’ as the ‘liberating philosophy’ that was ‘capable of bringing people out of the apathy which they are sunk under’.101 However, in the cramped political environment of the early 1990s, there was little chance of Gibney’s movement embracing Marxism of any variety.
Danny Morrison’s rejected article for An Phoblacht two years earlier had taken the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as its starting point. Morrison saw that setback as a triumph for brute American force.102 But the tendency for movements like the Sandinistas and the PLO to seek an accommodation with the sole remaining superpower found a strong echo in the new republican peace strategy. Adams reached out to Irish-American politicians and businessmen like Bill Flynn with close ties to the US foreign policy establishment.103 These new contacts gave the republican leadership another reason to put hard-left rhetoric in cold storage. Questioned about his burgeoning relationship with the Clinton Administration, Gerry Adams gave a phlegmatic response: ‘You can have right-on, politically correct opinions, but, if I may say so, the correct left position must be to bring an end to British rule in Ireland.’104
On his return from Washington, Adams played down talk of a ceasefire in public while putting the last pieces together behind the scenes. In July 1994, he listed ‘issues of immediate concern’ that a peace process would need to address, from which the demand for British withdrawal was conspicuously absent.105 Later that month, a Sinn Féin delegate conference in Donegal formally rejected the Downing Street Declaration, but the party’s leader insisted that the peace process was ‘very much alive’.106 In a letter to Adams, the lawyer Paddy McGrory, who had represented several prominent republicans, cut to the heart of the matter: ‘The most important decision is not acceptance or rejection of the Declaration, but a decision as to whether more is likely to be gained for the republican cause by armed struggle than might be won by political means.’ McGrory argued that an IRA ceasefire would ‘garner a rich harvest of support for the republican movement, such as it has not known for decades’, while carrying on with the war would bring only isolation: ‘The tide is at the flood, and is beginning to ebb. This is the hour.’107 Adams and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ clearly agreed.
10
Endgame
The Picador Approach
An IRA ceasefire duly followed on 31 August 1994, reciprocated weeks later by the loyalist paramilitaries. A document circulated to IRA Volunteers on TUAS – ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ – set out the rationale for a truce: ‘Republicans at this time and on their own do not have the strength to achieve the end goal.’ The priority now was to ‘construct an Irish nationalist consensus with international support’. The paper suggested that such a consensus could be based on a number of principles – ‘partition has failed’, ‘structures must be changed’, ‘no internal settlement’, etc. – but acknowledged that there were ‘differences of opinion’ on how those principles should be applied, such as ‘an interpretation of what veto and consent mean’. Basic questions about the meaning of consent and self-determination, which had been fundamental to the conflict for the past quarter-century, thus became matters of secondary importance. It may well have been, as the document suggested, ‘the first time in twenty-five years that all the major Irish nationalist parties are rowing in roughly the same direction’.1 But it was the Provos who had turned their boat around.
Gerry Adams spelled out the shift in perspective the following year. According to Adams, the British government’s current position would not prevent ‘constitutional change or political advances which fall short of dismantling the union from going ahead without the consent of a majority in the North’.2 By implication, political advances which did go beyond that point were off the agenda. The Sinn Féin leader was now aiming for a settlement with strong cross-border institutions that could be presented as a first step towards Irish unity.
In the meantime, reforms should be carried out to ensure ‘equality of treatment’ for nationalists in Northern Ireland. Adams claimed that such measures would ‘erode the very reason for the existence of that statelet’.3 Republi
can critics of Adams had repeatedly compared him to Cathal Goulding over the previous decade – a suggestion that he found deeply wounding, as those who made it intended.4 In this case it could be said, without polemical distortion, that the movement’s leadership had reverted to the civil rights strategy of the late 60s. Then as now, republicans argued that a successful reform programme would leave Northern Ireland with no long-term future.
The main question was whether Adams and his allies could hold the movement together on the basis of this revisionist agenda. Observing the reaction to the ceasefire in Provisional strongholds, Eamonn McCann detected ‘a sense of relief, or more accurately of release, from a burden which people had found harder to bear than they’d been able to acknowledge’, with no desire for the war to go on: ‘There are some who have doubts about what’s on offer in return, but no powerful faction has emerged to argue that continuation of armed action is the best way to win more.’5
In the long run, IRA Volunteers would find it very difficult to swim against the current of nationalist opinion, but there was no guarantee they would heed it in the timeframe that Sinn Féin’s peace strategy required. However much it reflected wider political realities, the ceasefire had clearly been leadership-driven, with the decision made by the seven-man Army Council.6 The TUAS document acknowledged that ‘communication up and down the organization has been patchy’ and promised to do better from now on.7
John Major’s government insisted on the decommissioning of IRA weapons as a precondition for Sinn Féin’s entry into talks. British officials who had been involved in contacts with the republican movement saw this as a reckless gambit. Quentin Thomas of the NIO believed that Major’s demand ‘kept inviting the Sinn Féin leadership to confront those within their movement who they did not want to confront for perfectly normal political reasons’, while the MI6 veteran Michael Oatley tartly described it as the ‘picador approach’ to peace negotiations: ‘No doubt, if sufficient barbs are thrust into its flanks, the animal will eventually, with reluctance, charge. The picadors can then claim that the beast was always a ravening monster.’8 In contrast, Albert Reynolds moved quickly to bring Sinn Féin inside the tent, hosting a meeting with Adams and John Hume within weeks of the ceasefire.
As ever, the IRA’s inner life could only be glimpsed through a glass darkly. One well-informed reporter, Suzanne Breen, saw ‘immense trust’ in the Adams leadership when the ceasefire began, provided it kept peace overtures within certain limits. An IRA Volunteer in Belfast told Breen that ‘intelligence-gathering, fund-raising and other activities’ would carry on as before: ‘If it was a question of us handing over arms, we’d oppose it. But that’s not on the agenda.’9 Twelve months later, she still found the ceasefire to be ‘rock-solid’, with ‘no immediate threat of an internal split’, but widespread dissatisfaction in the lower ranks of the movement.10 By the start of 1996, Breen was warning that trouble might lie ahead: ‘The IRA’s opponents are paying a small price for the ceasefire. They can afford to be more magnanimous in victory.’11
The decommissioning stand-off was the main issue for republicans, but there had been other developments to put the ceasefire under strain. When the Reynolds government collapsed in December 1994, a new coalition headed by Fine Gael’s John Bruton took its place. Bruton made no bones about his hostility to ‘pan-nationalism’; worse still from a republican perspective, his government included Proinsias De Rossa’s new vehicle Democratic Left, which had ditched the Marxist ideology of the Workers’ Party but retained all of its animosity towards the Provos.
For their part, sceptics pointed to evidence of ongoing IRA activity, in particular a botched robbery that claimed the life of a post office worker in November 1994. The IRA leadership admitted that its members were responsible for the killing, but insisted that the Army Council had not sanctioned the operation.12 IRA units also shot dead several alleged drug dealers in Belfast during the ceasefire, using the cover name ‘Direct Action Against Drugs’.
In the summer of 1995, rioting broke out in nationalist areas after two controversial events: John Major’s decision to release a British soldier who had been convicted of murder, and the RUC’s decision to push an Orange march through the predominantly Catholic Garvaghy Road in Portadown. The Ulster Unionist MP David Trimble joined hands with Ian Paisley as they completed the parade, insisting there had been no deal with the Garvaghy Road residents.13 Trimble’s role in the controversy helped him ascend to the UUP leadership in September 1995.
After years in which he was known primarily as an IRA leader, Martin McGuinness had begun to emerge as a politician with a profile to rival that of Gerry Adams. His reputation as an uncompromising militarist might have led one to expect a strained relationship between the two men, but there was little sign of that in public. Indeed, that hard-line image proved to be a vital asset for Adams, making it easier to sell the compromises that his strategy was bound to entail. When push came to shove, the contrast between the two Sinn Féin leaders appeared to be largely a matter of style and personality, masking the deeper political convergence between them.
On the first anniversary of the truce, McGuinness reproached the British government for its ‘begrudging and negative response’.14 The controversy over IRA weapons overshadowed further evidence of the change in Sinn Féin’s position. Not for the last time, a republican leader tried to snatch a semblance of victory from the jaws of retreat by redefining basic political concepts.15 McGuinness railed against ‘London’s acceptance of the unionist veto over talks’, insisting that ‘no group can be allowed a veto on change’.16 This minimalist recasting of the ‘unionist veto’ would allow Sinn Féin to claim victory when it secured entry to all-party talks, even if that veto as republicans traditionally understood it was a foundation stone of the entire process. ‘Change’ was every bit as malleable a term, since British governments had already accepted that Unionist politicians could not veto reforms that fell short of ending partition.
The balance of forces inside the IRA eventually tipped in favour of the sceptics, after more foot-dragging from John Major, and a massive bomb in London’s Canary Wharf shattered the ceasefire in February 1996.17 The subsequent campaign now looks like a strange parenthesis in the history of the movement, prosecuted by a leadership that had no desire to abandon the peace process altogether, with little activity inside Northern Ireland, and successful operations like Canary Wharf and the bombing of Thiepval barracks punctuated by major setbacks.
The IRA’s Easter statement in April 1996 simply called for all-party talks that would ‘allow for the core issues at the heart of this conflict to be addressed’.18 But the militarist tendency would have been happy to go back to basics, as Brendan O’Brien observed: ‘There were those who argued for a single-minded Brits Out offensive, with a view to extracting what they had previously failed to extract, namely a British commitment to withdraw. The advocates of this course were prepared to jettison the community-based support, built up over twenty years, even jettison the Sinn Féin connection.’19 If this faction had taken control of the movement, all bets would have been off.
The Adams leadership kept its strategy alive by seeing off the dissident challenge at an Army Convention in November 1996.20 Fortified by this victory, they faced a special party conference in Athboy later that month. Although the conference was held behind closed doors, a transcript of the speech given by Gerry Adams soon leaked out. Adams made his distrust of Sinn Féin’s erstwhile ‘pan-nationalist’ allies clear: ‘It would be far better if we were bigger than them. We could ignore them.’ He also hinted at the possibility of a breach between Sinn Féin and the IRA: ‘Whatever the Army does is the Army’s business and people can have whatever views they want about that. But let us not use the Army in whatever it does as an excuse for us not to make peace.’21 However, the Convention’s outcome had made the prospect of a split much less likely.
The most controversial part of his speech concerned the issue of Orange marches. The second
confrontation on the Garvaghy Road in July 1996 was far more dramatic than the previous year’s stand-off, with loyalists setting up roadblocks throughout Northern Ireland and a huge crowd massing at Drumcree to force the parade through. When the RUC’s Chief Constable Hugh Annesley reversed the decision to impose a ban, the relish of his officers in clearing nationalist protesters off the streets was all too evident.22 Adams credited the entire affair, which had made the RUC and the Unionist parties appear in the worst possible light, to ‘three years of work’ by republican activists: ‘Fair play to the people who put that work in. And they are the type of scene changes that we have to focus in on and develop and exploit.’23 Unionist politicians seized on these remarks as proof that Sinn Féin had confected the opposition to Orange parades for its own benefit.
In fact, Adams had exaggerated his party’s influence: as events were to show, the Sinn Féin leadership was in no position to give orders to the Garvaghy Road Residents Group or its spokesman, Breandán MacCionnaith.24 But there was a deeper irony to his comments that the critics appear to have missed. As the thirtieth anniversary of NICRA’s first venture from Coalisland to Dungannon approached, the question of street marches once again took centre stage in the politics of Northern Ireland. The movement Adams had joined after the republican split used NICRA’s protest campaign as the launchpad for a war that went on for much longer than anyone could have anticipated. Some IRA activists wanted to exploit ‘Drumcree 2’ in similar fashion to recharge their movement’s batteries for another generation.25 In contrast, Adams cited the ‘community resistance’ of the Garvaghy Road as proof that, while the war might be over, the struggle would continue.