by Peter Taylor
With the Official IRA’s cease-fire in place, which lasted indefinitely as they re-embarked on the political path they had pursued through the sixties before the split, the ‘Brits’ now only had one IRA to fight. The spotlight was now on the Provisionals, who, besides feeling community pressure, were also anxious to test the water and see if the ‘Brits’ were willing to talk. They believed they were winning and wished to take advantage of what they regarded as their position of strength. The young Martin McGuinness, who had become commander of the IRA’s Derry Brigade after ‘Bloody Sunday’, went to Dublin with the veteran Derry republican, Sean Keenan, to see the IRA’s Chief of Staff, Seán MacStiofáin. Whilst the IRA’s Derry Brigade was carrying out a devastating commercial bombing campaign in the city centre that cost millions of pounds but no lives, McGuinness thought it worth sounding out the ‘Brits’. MacStiofáin agreed there was nothing to lose and, heavily disguised with a wig and false moustache, travelled to Derry to give an audacious press conference on 13 June 1972. He was flanked by Martin McGuinness, the Army Council’s David O’Connell and the hardline commander of the Belfast Brigade, Seamus Twomey.
MacStiofáin announced that the IRA was prepared to declare a truce and invited Mr Whitelaw to come to ‘Free Derry’ or ‘elsewhere’ to meet the Provisional leadership and talk peace. He assured the Secretary of State that he would be guaranteed ‘safe conduct’. To the Provisionals, ‘peace’ meant withdrawing troops from nationalist areas, ending internment, giving amnesty to its prisoners and men ‘on the run’ and granting the Irish people, North and South, the right to decide their own future without British interference, known as ‘self-determination’. If Mr Whitelaw accepted the offer within forty-eight hours, MacStiofáin said, the IRA would call a cease-fire for seven days, on condition that the British army ended arrests, raids and ‘harassment’ of the civilian population.
Not surprisingly, Mr Whitelaw declined the invitation and said he could not respond to ‘an ultimatum from terrorists’.2 But his officials, in particular Frank Steele, were not so dismissive. They were interested in the prospect of meeting the IRA and testing them out. The ‘Brits’ however had far more to lose than the IRA. Unionists were still incensed at the loss of their Stormont parliament, and the loyalist paramilitaries were still seething at the continued existence of the IRA’s ‘no-go’ areas and the apparent impunity within which its gunmen and bombers seemed to operate. The UDA had even set up ‘no-go’ areas of its own, challenging the army to take them down, which the army did. The UDA then argued that if the army could take down loyalist barricades, why could it not take down the IRA’s? The Government hardly needed reminding that if word leaked out that there were secret talks with the IRA, the impact on unionists and the loyalist paramilitaries might well be catastrophic. But Steele thought the risk was worth taking and felt no compunction at talking to the ‘men of violence’. To the ‘Brits’, who had engaged in dialogue with the former ‘terrorist’ leader Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya – and others elsewhere – such an activity was nothing new.
The day of the Provisionals’ press conference in Derry, there was a growing crisis in Belfast’s Crumlin Road gaol where the IRA’s former Belfast commander, Billy McKee, was on hunger strike with other republican prisoners and now rumoured to be dead. Buses and lorries were hi-jacked and burned in nationalist areas of the city. McKee had been arrested on 15 April 1971 along with Frank Card, one of the Provisionals ‘named and shamed’ by Farrar-Hockley the year before. He had begun refusing food in the hope of forcing the Government to grant IRA prisoners ‘political status’ in recognition that they were not common criminals but ‘prisoners of war’. A week after the Provisionals’ press conference, the hunger strike was resolved after thirty days, almost certainly as part of the ‘confidence-building’ measures prior to HMG secretly pursuing MacStiofáin’s offer of talks. According to McKee, the settlement was negotiated by David O’Connell. ‘We thought it was part of the peace process that was going on at that time,’ he told me. In effect, the Government capitulated, giving McKee and all prisoners, both republican and loyalists, what amounted to political status in everything but name. Prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes, which to them was always the most symbolic and important issue, and to have extra visits and parcels. The Government called it ‘special category status’ but McKee was not bothered about the name. ‘It was exactly our demands they gave us. Every one of them,’ he said. ‘They didn’t say it was political status, but we weren’t worrying.’ The decision to grant ‘special category status’ was to have momentous consequences for the ‘Brits’ in the years ahead. To the IRA, Whitelaw had shown good faith by resolving the issue that could have destroyed the tentative moves now being made towards some kind of dialogue.
The British also gave in on the other issue that was a prerequisite of progress. The Provisionals had insisted that if there was to be a meeting with Whitelaw, they should be allowed to choose their own delegation. They demanded that one of its members be the young Gerry Adams. The problem was that Adams was in Long Kesh and would have to be released from internment. The Government agreed and Adams, to his surprise, was set free. He had just come off a fourteen-day hunger strike in solidarity with Billy McKee. Whitelaw was finally persuaded, not least by Paddy Devlin from Belfast and John Hume from Derry, that the ‘Provos’ were serious and the risk should be taken. It was now a question of arranging the logistics.
The still-dazed Adams, who had originally thought his release was a leg-pull, was met outside the gates of Long Kesh by Dolours and Marion Price, who were to become notorious on their own account as part of the team that bombed London the following year.3 He was told there were to be talks with the ‘Brits’ and he was to be involved. He was driven by Paddy Devlin to Derry on 20 June and then taken to a large country house near the Donegal border for a secret meeting to arrange the logistics for the IRA’s meeting with Whitelaw. (The British had provided Adams with a special pass to get through the army checkpoints.) There he joined David O’Connell who was to make up the IRA’s two-man mini-delegation. Their British opposite numbers were Frank Steele and Philip Woodfield. The only time on the journey that Steele became nervous was when Woodfield swore he had misread the map and they ended up across the border in Donegal, which, as Steele said, could have ‘put us at terrible risk’. They had considered arming themselves in advance of the meeting but decided it was not a good idea as the IRA’s intention was to have talks with Whitelaw not kidnap his emissaries.
The first ever meeting between the IRA and British Government officials (Wilson had met them as Leader of the Opposition) was polite and formal. Steele could not remember whether he shook hands but said he would have had no objection because ‘one’s shaken hands with some fairly unpleasant characters over the years’. Steele was amused by the formalities. ‘They wanted to represent themselves as an army and not a bunch of terrorists so we all had to have letters of authority. They had them and we had them signed by a Minister or “Willie”. I thought at the time it was simply ridiculous, I mean what else were the four of us doing there? We obviously hadn’t just wandered in off the street for a chat. We were obviously representing HMG and the IRA.’ Details of an IRA cease-fire were discussed and a telephone ‘hot-line’ was agreed between Steele in Belfast and O’Connell in Dublin. Steele also passed on the army’s message that the IRA should remember to ‘de-boob’ all its booby-traps in case one went off and inadvertently brought the cease-fire to an end. Steele and Woodfield agreed that IRA Volunteers would be allowed to walk about freely without being lifted, as long as they did not engage in criminal acts like burglary. If they did, they said, they would be arrested. As the meeting broke up, Steele was dying to ask Adams a question. He knew him to be ‘a senior member of the Belfast Brigade having been commander of his area, Ballymurphy’ but also regarded him as a person with ‘a terrific future ahead because of his qualities’.
I said, ‘You don’t want to spend the rest of your life on the ru
n from us British. What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I want to go to university and get a degree.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re not stopping you. All you’ve got to do is to renounce violence and you can go to university and get a degree.’ And he grinned and said, ‘No, I’ve got to get rid of you British first!’
On 22 June 1972, two days after the meeting, the IRA announced that it would suspend offensive operations from midnight on 26 June. But that did not mean that the IRA scaled down its campaign. In the intervening four days it killed five soldiers and one policeman.
At midnight on 26 June, the IRA’s guns fell silent as agreed. The cease-fire held, although it was a tense time. The ‘hot-line’ between Steele and O’Connell glowed to make sure there were no misunderstandings that could jeopardize the cessation and, therefore, the planned meeting with Whitelaw. Finally, after the agreed interval, the day finally dawned for the historic meeting between the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and what was tantamount to the IRA’s Army Council. Steele must have heaved a sigh of relief as Whitelaw, not surprisingly, had had wobbles about the meeting.
At 8 a.m. on the morning of Friday 7 July 1972, Steele made his way to the agreed rendezvous in open country to the north-west of Derry near the border with Donegal. He was in a mini-bus with brown paper taped over its windows, driven by an army Captain in civilian clothes. ‘He was very taciturn and obviously disapproved of the whole proceedings.’ This time there was no map-reading error. Steele arrived on time but there was no sign of the IRA delegation. He waited and waited, fearful that the whole enterprise was about to fall apart.
Then suddenly ‘up drove a car at a rate of knots, simply bulging with IRA’. Its occupants explained that they had started off in two cars but one had broken down. There were six of them, all IRA and not one Sinn Fein: Seán MacStiofáin and David O’Connell from Dublin; Gerry Adams, Seamus Twomey and his second-in-command, Ivor Bell, from Belfast; and Martin McGuinness from Derry. They all got into the mini-van to a ‘look of utter disgust on the army officer’s face’ and made off for the field where a helicopter was scheduled to pick them up and take them to Aldergrove airport.
At Aldergrove, Steele and the six IRA leaders boarded an RAF Andover, with an Air Force ‘meeter and greeter’ standing to attention and saluting the delegation ‘with his jaw hanging open’. They were flown to RAF Benson in Oxfordshire where they were met by a Special Branch driver and taken to London via Henley-on-Thames, where they stopped off so the IRA could telephone their Dublin-based legal adviser, Miles Shevlin, to give him the location of the meeting. They had demanded an independent witness and Shevlin was he. The talks were to be held in Chelsea at the exclusive Cheyne Walk residence of one of Whitelaw’s junior ministers, Paul Channon.
Realizing the delegation might be hungry, Steele went into a grocer’s shop in Henley to buy a bag of apples. He returned to the car and passed them to the IRA men sitting in the back but they were in no hurry to take a bite. ‘I thought, My God, they think they’re drugged! So I took one of them at random and took a great bite out of it and then handed the bag to the Special Branch driver so he could have one. I then handed it over to the back. I think they were satisfied. It was typical of their conspiracy theories. We wanted talks. We didn’t want to drug them.’
Not surprisingly, the meeting lacked warmth. Despite all his reservations, Whitelaw conducted himself as the gentleman he was. He had learned how to pronounce MacStiofáin’s name correctly, which impressed the Chief of Staff, and went round the six IRA men shaking each by the hand. Adams noted that Whitelaw’s was ‘quite sweaty’. Whitelaw obviously concealed his distaste for shaking the hands of the leaders of an organization responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 soldiers but did so knowing that British governments had talked to ‘terrorists’ before and would probably do so again. Drinks were offered but declined, perhaps out of fear that they, unlike the apples, might be ‘spiked’. After a few words of welcome that must have stuck in Whitelaw’s throat, the two sides got down to business. The British side consisted of Whitelaw, Channon, Woodfield and Steele. Steele was startled when MacStiofáin began by reading out the IRA’s demands: self-determination for all the people of Ireland; a British government declaration that it would withdraw all British forces from Irish soil by 1 January 1975; an end to internment; and an amnesty for all ‘political prisoners, internees, detainees and wanted persons’. Steele was appalled.
It was far worse than I thought it was going to be. I did at least think they’d say, ‘Well, we’re all in a very difficult situation. Fighting each other is getting us nowhere so let’s see what we can do by talking and if it doesn’t work OK we’ll go back to fighting.’ But there was nothing like that. MacStiofáin behaved like the representative of an army that had fought the British to a standstill, Montgomery at Lüneberg Heath telling the German Generals what they should and shouldn’t do if they wanted peace. He was in cloud-cuckoo-land.
Because the British did not want the cease-fire to end, Whitelaw made polite noises about having to refer matters to his Cabinet colleagues and the meeting was brought to a close. A cloud of depression descended on the British delegation as they realized that the IRA was making impossible demands that no British Government could accept. MacStiofáin and his colleagues were absolutists with no concept of the Government’s obligations to the Protestant majority in the North and the constitutional position of the province.
Gerry Adams, apparently, said very little at the meeting. Steele was convinced that the experience of that day made Adams realize that ‘armed struggle’ alone was not enough to achieve the republican goal and the IRA would have to have a political dimension to what it was doing. Adams was to spend the rest of the century developing it. Twenty-five years later, on 10 December 1997, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness walked into Downing Street to shake hands with the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. By then over 3,500 people had died in the continuing conflict. Sadly, Frank Steele never lived to see that historic day as he died from a terminal illness shortly before it happened. Nor did he see Martin McGuinness becoming Minister for Education. I remember visiting Frank shortly before he died. ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘when you next see Martin McGuinness, give him my congratulations on becoming a statesman.’ I passed on the message.
The IRA delegation arrived back from their historic away-day to London on Friday evening, 7 July. It was clear from the meeting that the ‘Brits’ were not ready to give and it was only a matter of time before the cease-fire ended. It did so two days later on Sunday 9 July in Andersonstown’s Lenadoon Avenue in a confrontation between the army and a republican crowd, with Seamus Twomey at its head. I was there at the time and had little doubt the ending of the cease-fire was orchestrated by the IRA who were on standby at the top end of Lenadoon Avenue with guns at the ready. The issue revolved around the re-housing of Catholic families intimidated out of loyalist areas at the height of the marching season.
MacStiofáin had decided to ‘intensify’ the IRA’s campaign. The result was ‘Bloody Friday’, 21 July, the day the IRA planted twenty-two bombs in Belfast, killing nine people – five Protestants, two Catholics and two soldiers. Seven were killed at the crowded Oxford Street bus station in the city centre. Warnings were given but they were inadequate and imprecise. The carnage was horrendous, with television pictures showing young policemen sweeping body parts like black jelly into plastic bags. Like the photographs of the dead on ‘Bloody Sunday’, the images were never forgotten.
Joan Young caught one of the last buses out of Oxford Street bus station before the bomb went off. She was in the Secretary of State’s office in Stormont Castle when she heard the explosions tearing Belfast apart.
I think it was three or four a.m. the following morning before we got out of the office. There were high-level discussions going on. Lord Carrington had flown in. There were lots of people around. The GOC was in the office with the Secretary of State. There were endless meetings. I was manning the telephones with other colleag
ues and we were getting telephone calls from mothers whose children hadn’t come home. The man who ran the morgue in Belfast rang and, crying down the phone, demanded that ‘Willie’ Whitelaw come down to the morgue and see the bodies. It was a very, very emotional time to be working in Stormont, to be Northern Irish and to feel all the pain. It was difficult. This was my community. This was where I lived.
‘Bloody Friday’ was the IRA’s nadir, at least for a good many years. It was an operation that went hopelessly and tragically wrong for which the IRA paid the price, although it still retained a hard-core of support that was sufficient to maintain its operations. To many nationalists, ‘Bloody Friday’ cancelled out ‘Bloody Sunday’ although the IRA was at pains to differentiate between the two, alleging that the former was a mistake and the latter was not. But ‘Bloody Friday’ gave the army the chance it had been waiting for to implement its plan to end the IRA’s no-go areas. The plan had been in existence for some time and was not just dreamed up in the wake of ‘Bloody Friday’. The question always had been when to implement it and, with ‘Bloody Sunday’ in mind, how to do so with the minimum risk. ‘Bloody Friday’ offered the perfect opportunity. It was thought that few beyond the IRA’s most dedicated supporters would complain if the army went in and destroyed the protected nests that were harbouring members of the organization responsible for such carnage. No doubt this was one of the options being discussed in the Secretary of State’s office whilst Joan and her colleagues were manning the phones next door.
The plan was code-named ‘Motorman’ by Gavin, the army planning officer who had picked out Long Kesh as the internment camp the previous year. ‘It had a ring about it and did give some impression of the army in control, of the army “motoring”, doing something positive rather than reacting,’ he said. ‘“Bloody Friday” was a grievous and sad high point in that it probably stiffened resolve to sort things out. There was no question that this could go on in the manner that it was.’ The plan went to Whitelaw and, ten days after ‘Bloody Friday’, on 31 July 1972, 12,000 soldiers with bulldozers and tanks smashed their way into the ‘no-go’ areas of Belfast and Derry in the biggest military operation since Suez. At last the ‘Brits’ felt they were taking the initiative and were getting on top. The IRA offered no resistance, not wishing to have a shoot-out with hundreds of soldiers. In Derry, after ‘Bloody Sunday’ the most sensitive area of all, they piled their arms into vehicles and simply melted across the border. In Belfast, they simply left the area. With great convoys of trucks, bulldozers and soldiers rumbling across Northern Ireland, there was no chance of the army creeping up on the IRA. The whole operation was orchestrated by both sides through intermediaries as neither side wanted a showdown with ‘Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Bloody Friday’ still fresh in their minds.