The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Tom Kelly commissioned regular private polling in Northern Ireland. It showed the Unionist community becoming ‘more and more aggravated’.57 Kelly wrote a first draft of a tough speech which was then refined by Blair and Powell on a flight back from Moscow. ‘There was a good deal of agonising’ that the newly robust tone towards Republicans might drive them out of the process altogether. ‘Will they just walk away from it?’ Blair worried to his aides.58 Powell and Kelly ‘ganged up’ on the Prime Minister to convince him he had to deliver an ultimatum.59 The speech was made on 17 October 2002 at the Harbour Commissioner’s Office beside the Belfast docks. He declared that there now had to be a commitment to ‘exclusively peaceful means, real, total and permanent’. He went on: ‘The crunch is the crunch. There is no parallel track left. The fork in the road has finally come. We cannot carry on with the IRA half in, half out of this process. Not just because it isn’t right any more. It won’t work any more.’ There would be no more ‘inch by inch negotiation’. What was now required was ‘acts of completion’ to prove Republican commitment to democratic politics and a ‘complete end’ to paramilitarism, spying, punishment beatings and weapons-buying.60

  This new approach was occasionally called the ‘big bang’, an unfortunate label in the context of Northern Ireland. Blair was ‘very twitchy’ about the reaction.61 When a response came from Gerry Adams, it was extraordinary: the Sinn Féin leader asked Jonathan Powell to help him draft a reply. Eagerly taking up this unexpected invitation, Powell’s draft included the following:

  The IRA is never going to disband in response to ultimatums from the British Government or David Trimble. But I do believe the logic of the peace process puts all of us in a different place. So if you ask me do I envisage a future without the IRA? The answer is obvious. The answer is yes.

  To the amazement of Blair, Kelly and Powell – the only people who knew that Number 10 was drafting speeches for Sinn Féin – Adams delivered the crucial passages with barely a word altered. He included the vital line about the disappearance of the IRA.62 Soon afterwards, Martin McGuinness, who joined the IRA at nineteen, declared: ‘My war is over.’63

  That was progress, but far from enough to dissolve the impasse over ‘guns and government’. The IRA refused to move towards full decommissioning until the Assembly and Executive were restored; the Unionists required decommissioning before they would go back into government. Neither side wanted to jump first for fear that the other was not sincere about reciprocating. This was the obstacle time after time. Talks at Hillsborough Castle in March 2003 again snagged on the IRA’s refusal to unequivocally declare that its weapons would be destroyed and the Unionists’ unwillingness to share power without that pledge.

  Even the usually inexhaustible Powell was sometimes driven to despair ‘that perhaps Northern Ireland was insoluble after all … every time we made a breakthrough we faced a new crisis immediately, and maybe the only thing we could do was manage the problem, keep talking so that people didn’t go back to killing each other.’64 Through all the many sudden crises and dashed hopes, Blair demonstrated an astonishing persistence and a stubborn conviction that they would get there in the end. ‘Tony kept going when most of us were ready to give up.’65 Another of Blair’s officials marvelled at how much time and energy he would devote, even when it seemed utterly fruitless, to coaxing and cajoling the recalcitrant parties. ‘These people are very, very high maintenance. All ringing up constantly, all demanding meetings constantly, all slagging each other off.’66

  At the end of May 2003, Blair invited Adams and McGuinness to a secret lunch at Chequers. They were still maintaining that the IRA should be left to gradually ‘fade away’, an idea that would never satisfy Unionists. Blair proposed that he should meet the IRA leadership. Certain as ever of his powers of persuasion, he believed he only had to get in the same room as the IRA high command to convince them that a much bigger and more definitive act of disarmament was required. He made this remarkable offer ‘repeatedly’ over the years.67 The Sinn Féin leaders always fobbed him off by saying the time was not quite right. Some will suggest that they declined because a meeting with the high command of the IRA would have brought Blair face to face with the same Adams and McGuinness. Mandelson regarded it as ‘a fiction’ that they were not talking to the IRA when they negotiated with Sinn Féin. ‘Of course we knew,’ Powell later accepted.68 When they used to say they couldn’t agree to something without consulting the Army Council, Mo Mowlam would say to the Sinn Féin leaders: ‘Why don’t you go out and look in the mirror and come back again.’69 One senior British official comments: ‘If they didn’t represent the IRA in some way, what’s the point of talking to them because the whole process had to be an end to violence.’70

  When elections were held for the Assembly on 26 November 2003, the failure to make political progress polarised the voting and left the centre ground scorched. Ian Paisley’s DUP, which had said from the start that Republicans could not be trusted, greatly gained at the expense of Trimble’s UUP. The constitutional nationalists of the SDLP lost further ground to Sinn Féin, who seemed to have more power to lever concessions from London than their more moderate competitors for Catholic votes. That election marked the final eclipse of the moderates who had made brave compromises for peace and the ascendancy of the extremes who had so often wrecked it.

  It put an end to Blair’s original strategy to ‘build out from the centre’.71 Powell lamented: ‘All our hopes … were dashed.’72 They now faced what looked like an utterly impossible challenge: reconciling such implacable enemies as Sinn Féin and Ian Paisley. The DUP leader’s instant reaction to his victory was to declare: ‘I’m not talking to Sinn Féin. I think I’m entitled to ignore terrorists.’73 Blair initially responded to this blow by refusing to come to terms with it and clinging to the hope, shared by none of his officials, that Trimble might somehow make a comeback. ‘There was guilt’ about what had happened to Trimble. ‘He felt he’d let David down.’74 The triumph of Paisley appeared disastrous. Dr No had been the ranting voice of Protestant supremacy for decades. ‘No surrender’ and ‘Not an inch’ were his war cries. His forty-year career was founded on the politics of division and destruction during which he successfully set out to obliterate any moderate Unionist politician who attempted an accommodation and denounced compromise as a selling out of Ulster to ‘fiendish republican scum’.75

  Paisley was a bigot with an inflammatory history of vilifying the Catholic Church as ‘the Whore of Babylon, the mother of abominations’.76 He would not shake the hand of the Irish Prime Minister nor that of Cherie because she was a Catholic. His party had marched in protest against the Good Friday Agreement. ‘Tony didn’t trust Paisley and he didn’t like Paisley,’ says Tom Kelly.77 According to Jonathan Powell, ‘he was convinced that Paisley would never do a deal.’78 Blair lamented that it would be another ten years before there was a Unionist leadership ready to settle.79

  This gloom was pierced by a few shafts of hope. The people of Northern Ireland were enjoying the diminution of violence and the growing prosperity that accompanied the absence of terrorism. No party wanted to be blamed for wrecking that. Sinn Féin emitted signals that it could be open to a deal even with the Reverend. Paisley and his deputy, Peter Robinson, might have been unyielding in their public rhetoric. Yet they began to move into a slightly more flexible position once they were the dominant Unionist players. In February 2004, a DUP delegation came to Downing Street. They surprised Blair and his officials with their professionalism and sophistication when Robinson gave a PowerPoint presentation of their negotiating position in the state dining room.80 He declared that they would be prepared to share power if Republicans met what the DUP called the ‘Blair necessities’: the end of criminality and paramilitarism spelt out in the Belfast Harbour speech. In the summer of 2004, the Euro-elections confirmed the ascendancy of the DUP and Sinn Féin. In September, talks were convened at Leeds Castle, a picturesque Norman fortress in Kent. Proceedings be
gan with some amateur theatrics. Adams and McGuinness turned up brandishing a five-foot bugging device which they said had been uncovered at a Sinn Féin office in the Falls Road. They made a show of presenting the 1980s-vintage bug to Blair as ‘an offering to the mighty god of British intelligence’.81 Everyone knew it was a stunt. McGuinness was ‘smirking like a schoolboy’ while Adams was ‘desperately trying to keep a straight face’ and Powell could ‘barely control his giggles’.82 Once they had plonked the ancient bug in front of him and departed, Blair joked to his aides: ‘I thought we could do better than that!’83

  It was much more important that Adams was declaring ‘we want to do business with Ian Paisley’ and the DUP leader didn’t reject the idea out of hand. Blair and Powell became encouraged by what seemed to be a personality change in Paisley, now in his seventy-eighth year. He came very near to death in August and looked emaciated when he arrived at Leeds Castle, having travelled there by ferry and car because he was still too ill to fly. His brush with mortality seemed to be altering how he saw the purpose of his life. Powell began to believe that ‘Paisley wanted to be remembered not as Dr No but as Dr Yes.’84 Kelly was also ‘convinced at Leeds Castle that the Doc was up for it. The question was whether he would survive for long enough to do it and could he bring his party with him.’85

  Nigel Dodds, a leading member of Paisley’s party, had been the target of an assassination attempt by the IRA on his way to visit his terminally ill son in hospital. His police bodyguard was shot. It was going to be hugely difficult to persuade a Unionist with that history to strike a bargain with Sinn Féin. Paisley still refused to sit down and negotiate with the Republicans face to face. After such a long wait for decommissioning, the DUP wanted tangible proof that IRA weapons were being destroyed, not least to convince their own supporters that they were not being played for dupes. At root, this was about symbolism. Even if they did completely disarm, the IRA could always re-equip. Decommissioning was not really a guarantee that they would never return to terrorism. But it was a symbolism that hugely mattered to both sides. Paisley demanded that a Protestant clergyman be allowed to observe decommissioning with the unrestricted ability to take video or photos: what became known as a ‘Kodak Moment’.

  Blair was visibly frustrated and tired when he held a closing news conference at Leeds Castle on Saturday lunchtime with Bertie Ahern. The two Prime Ministers had to admit that the three days of talks had not reached a resolution; the ‘moment of decision’ he had spoken of at the start had still not been achieved.86

  Shortly afterwards, the chances seemed to recede even further. Paisley came under pressure from fundamentalists in his party, to which he responded by telling a rally in his constituency: ‘The IRA needs to be humiliated. And they need to wear their sackcloth and ashes – openly.’87 That had a predictably inflammatory effect on the other side. The IRA definitively rejected the idea of a ‘Kodak Moment’.

  Four days before Christmas, Jonathan Powell landed at Belfast airport for another clandestine rendezvous with Adams and McGuinness at Clonard monastery. He was met by Jonathan Phillips, the Political Director and later Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office. The civil servant had a grim look on his face. Once their car had left the airport, Phillips asked the driver to pull over. On a grass verge on the side of the road, he told Powell that he had just received stunning news from the police. The headquarters of the Northern Bank had been raided and more than £26 million stolen from vaults which were full of Christmas takings from the city’s stores. ‘The dogs on the street know that the IRA carried out the crime,’ said Phillips.88

  Powell went ahead with his meeting with Adams and McGuinness, but he could not say that he knew about the robbery because it had not yet been officially announced. He returned to London feeling ‘completely conned’ and seized by fear that the raid, the largest ever bank robbery in the history of the United Kingdom, left ‘the whole process in deep shit’.89

  Tony Blair was aboard a Hercules flying across the Middle East when news of the robbery reached the Prime Minister. ‘It looks like a Provo job,’ reported Tom Kelly. A shocked and dejected Blair replied: ‘If it is, we’re not going to get the Unionists back.’90 The most positive gloss put on the robbery by security sources was that the IRA was trying to finance a ‘retirement fund’ in advance of winding up. Others reckoned they ‘just couldn’t help themselves’.91 Throughout the process, Blair and his team repeatedly asked themselves whether the Republicans were genuinely on the road to peace or playing games. ‘For all of us, there was a chill down the spine.’92

  The Prime Minister of Ireland also felt betrayed. ‘This was an IRA job,’ said Bertie Ahern in a fierce public denunciation of Sinn Féin, whom he accused of having prior knowledge of the bank heist. ‘This was a job that would have been known to the political leadership. What kind of idiots are people taking us for?’93 The Independent Monitoring Commission, the official assessors of terrorist activity, declared that the bank robbery was one of a ‘series of crimes’ by the IRA.94 Far from winding up, it looked like they were trying to establish themselves as the largest criminal organisation in Europe. Adams responded by attacking both the IMC and Ahern and challenging them to send the police to arrest him if they had any proof he knew about it.95 One typical commentary pronounced the Good Friday Agreement as good as dead. ‘We are back to square one in terms of building a peace deal.’96

  Fury about the continuing criminality of the IRA intensified further after the brutal murder of Robert McCartney, a Catholic father of two, in a bar near the Belfast law courts on 30 January 2005. The leadership of the IRA did not order the murder, but did organise the cover-up. There were seventy-two witnesses to the killing but every one was intimidated into silence.97 The crime scene was wiped clean before the police arrived. The murdered man’s bereaved fiancée and five sisters were not prepared to let his death become another killing which was briefly mourned and then swiftly forgotten. The McCartneys – articulate, determined and charismatic – launched a hugely effective campaign demanding justice. It put a spotlight on the violence and intimidation of Catholic working-class communities by those who claimed to be their champions. Blair reached out to Nationalists by showing that the British state was prepared to acknowledge its past sins when he gave a comprehensive apology to the ‘Guildford Four’ and ‘Maguire Seven’ for their false convictions in the 1970s.98 The IRA then made an extraordinary offer to shoot the killers of Robert McCartney, a suggestion which only confirmed their gangsterism.

  The united condemnation of London, Dublin and Washington, combined with the huge public sympathy for the McCartney family’s campaign, put Adams and McGuinness in a corner. When the Sinn Féin leaders were smuggled into Number 10 for a clandestine meeting on 23 February, Adams looked ‘shell-shocked’ and ‘physically shrunken’.99 The IRA initially sounded belligerent. It made a statement with a whiff of Semtex when it declared that the IRA ‘would not remain quiescent’.100 The Governments were ‘unnerved’ by the fear that they had ‘lost the Provos’.101 But they didn’t buckle in the face of this shrill attempt to shiver everyone’s spines. The Republicans were, in truth, deeply rattled by the backlash from both international opinion and within their own community.

  The McCartneys hit Sinn Féin where it hurt when they embarked on a media-saturated tour of the United States in mid-March. George Bush welcomed the sisters to the White House on St Patrick’s Day. Gerry Adams, previously treated as a celebrity in Washington, had the door shut in his face for the first time in more than a decade. The President announced that he believed Sinn Féin was no longer ‘a reliable partner for peace’.102 Senator Edward Kennedy, a veteran friend of Irish Republicanism, cold-shouldered Adams.103 Pete King, a New York Congressman who was a personal friend of the Sinn Féin leader and his closest ally on Capitol Hill, declared: ‘The time has come for the IRA to disband.’104 In April, Adams attempted to recover ground by making an ‘appeal’ to the IRA to ‘fully embrace and accept’ d
emocratic means. In the May general election, reaction against IRA criminality worked to the benefit of the SDLP at the expense of Sinn Féin. Paisley further consolidated his grip on Unionism when Trimble lost his seat in the Commons and his party was defeated in every other seat but one.

  The McCartney murder and the Northern Bank robbery, two shocking events which initially seemed so bleak for the peace process, had the ultimate effect of jolting it forward. The 7/7 bombings in London added further pressure. Republicans finally had to make the choice, spelt out by Blair at Belfast Harbour three years before, between ballot box and bullet.

  On 25 July, Number 10 waited to receive the text of an IRA response to the ‘appeal’ to disarm for good. As always, there was a series of intricate and secretly choreographed moves to get to this point. An IRA declaration that the ‘armed struggle’ was over would be reciprocated with an amnesty for IRA men on the run and the dismantling of army watchtowers. Number 10 awaited delivery of the text with apprehension. The IRA was notorious for making statements which were so obfuscatory that they left room for multiple interpretations which did not build confidence in the other actors. The Sinn Féin leaders were warned that they had ‘only one chance at this, the language has to be clear.’ When the text arrived, Blair and Powell handed it to Tom Kelly, who had the best nose for Unionist opinion, and waited for him to react. He only needed to read it once. ‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘We’re in business.’105

  On the 28th, a DVD was released by the IRA declaring the end of the nine-decade-long struggle to create a united Ireland through force of arms. With an Irish flag in the background, the statement was delivered by Seana Walsh, a former Maze prisoner who was a cellmate of Bobby Sands. ‘The leadership of Óglaigh na hÉireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign,’ he said. That was the key phrase that so many had longed to hear from the IRA. The statement continued: ‘All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. All volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means. Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.’106