by Peter Taylor
Just over two months later, on 23 February 1985, three operators from North ‘Det’ shot dead three more IRA men, Charles Breslin (20), Michael Devine (22) and his brother, David Devine (16). Breslin and Michael Devine were regarded as ‘serious players’. The shootings took place near the Head of the Town district in Strabane, a small border town fifteen miles south of Derry. Special Branch had received intelligence that an IRA unit was going to attack a police vehicle with an improvised armourpiercing grenade launcher and then shoot any surviving RUC officers as they tried to escape. The IRA scheduled the attack for 4 a.m., the time when the police vehicle was expected to drive by, presumably on its routine patrol. But in the early hours of that morning, the vehicle did not come. Breslin and the Devine brothers and two other IRA men waited to launch the attack and, when there was a ‘no show’, they decided to call off the operation and return their weapons to the ‘hide’ in a nearby field. The ASU then split up with Breslin and the Devines heading back to the field.
What they did not know was that the ‘Det’ had the ‘hide’ under surveillance. One or more of the weapons may have been ‘jarked’. It appears the three IRA men almost stumbled upon the ‘Det’ when they were only a few yards away from their O.P. According to one of the soldiers who opened fire, he told his two colleagues to ‘watch out’, at which point ‘all three gunmen swung their rifles towards us’. ‘I knew then we were in a contact situation and that the lives of myself and my colleagues were in immediate danger,’ the soldier said.13
The three operators fired a total of 117 rounds from two HK 53 rifles and a Browning pistol at the IRA men, killing all three. The rifles Breslin and the Devines were carrying – two Belgian FNs and a mini-Ruger – were found at the scene. The three IRA men had not had a chance to fire them. Ballistic tests proved that they had been fired before in four separate attempted murders and one actual murder.14 At Breslin’s funeral, Gerry Adams said he had been shot by ‘a British terrorist SAS gang’. The action of the operators involved showed that they had learned the lesson from their former colleagues in North ‘Det’ during the exchange between ‘Jay’ and ‘John’ and Francis Hughes in 1978 in which ‘Jay’ had been killed after issuing a challenge.
In the first four years of the decade in which the gloves appeared to have been taken off, ‘Group’ activity accounted for twelve IRA men and one member of the INLA.15 More bodies were to follow.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Political Front
May 1980–November 1985
Through most of the 1980s, the ‘Brits’ had almost despaired of finding an internal political solution in Northern Ireland that might bring an end to the conflict which by the beginning of the decade had claimed well over 2,000 lives, almost 600 of them were soldiers and policemen.1 Given that there were precious few signs that unionists were prepared to reach a realistic political accommodation with the nationalist SDLP, the ‘Brits’ felt they were banging their heads against a brick wall. Nevertheless, they realized that politics could not be allowed to die, not least because they saw Sinn Fein making significant political gains in the wake of the hunger strike. Accordingly, British political strategy through most of the decade ran on twin tracks: to try to stem the rise of Sinn Fein, and to bring the Dublin Government into the political equation in order to boost the constitutional nationalists of the SDLP. The ‘Brits’ had no intention of giving in and capitulating to IRA violence. A new context had to be explored in which the political deadlock might gradually be broken. For most of the decade, this context certainly did not include Sinn Fein. They were to be marginalized not encouraged. On the threshold of the decade, the NIO’s Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Kenneth Stowe, who had been instrumental in ending the first hunger strike, wrestled with the problem and decided a new, more imaginative approach had to be tried.
In dealing with all these issues in Northern Ireland, one was in a perpetual state of exploration. Will this help, can we make some ground here, can we open up a subject in this way? Can we see a way of just inching our way forward? What was clear to me was that we could not address our concerns solely in a dialogue between London and Belfast. It was unreal to suppose that we could achieve a stable society in Northern Ireland and one with an economic future without the collaboration of the Republic. Therefore we wanted to create an axis between London and Dublin as well. The Irish Government also wished to create it, as it could not have been done only from one side. Whatever one attempted in Northern Ireland, sooner or later you would hit a veto somewhere. What we wanted to do was to broaden the ground of debate, to create a wider context, remembering always that we were now addressing another partner in Europe. It’s to do with looking at the overall relationship of two member states within it, each of whom has a profound interest in the stability of Northern Ireland.
Sir Kenneth set the political compass for the course that almost two decades later was to lead to the Good Friday Agreement. Certainly he did not foresee where it would lead at the time and simply plotted the direction with his fingers crossed, secure in the knowledge that it had to be an improvement on the political atrophy in the North. He knew that a start had to be made with the two Prime Ministers who had both come to power in 1979, Mrs Thatcher in London and Charles Haughey in Dublin. It was appropriate that Downing Street should play host for the inaugural meeting, held on 21 May 1980. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister was mindful that unionists might get the wrong idea when they discovered she had been dining with the Taoiseach who ten years earlier had been involved in the gun-running scandal that engulfed the Irish government.2 With this in mind, Mrs Thatcher told the House of Commons on the eve of the meeting that ‘the future of the constitutional affairs of Northern Ireland is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland, this government and this Parliament and no one else.’3 It seemed like Haughey was being given his marching orders before he even crossed the threshhold of Number Ten.
The following day, the Taoiseach arrived bearing the gifts of a Georgian silver teapot, which was much appreciated by the British Prime Minister who was not averse to flattery and charm. They lunched in the small dining room at Number Ten and Sir Kenneth was well pleased with the result. ‘It was a significant step forward in a new relationship,’ he said. ‘The exchanges were courteous and formal. I think they were only too well aware of their own standing and what lay behind them, so they were very cautious.’ Unionists were behind Mrs Thatcher and republicans in his Fianna Fail party behind Charles Haughey. ‘There was no personal animosity, neither do I recall there being any personal warmth. This was very, very high-level political business and they were two very accomplished politicians at work. That seemed to me to be the essence of their relationship.’ The post-prandial communiqué referred to a ‘unique relationship’ between the two countries and promised closer political cooperation.4 There was self-interest on both sides. Thatcher wanted tougher security from Dublin and more speedy extradition of IRA suspects from the South whilst Haughey, true to the tradition of his party and family (his father had been commander of the IRA’s Northern division),5 wanted the ‘Brits’ out of the North, although not at the point of a gun.
Later that year, on 8 December 1980, in the shadow of the first hunger strike, Haughey reciprocated his new-found friend’s hospitality by entertaining the highest-powered British delegation ever to visit the Irish Republic in the splendour of Dublin Castle, once the seat of British power in Ireland. The meeting was officially part of the European bi-laterals between member governments. The delegation consisted of Mrs Thatcher, Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, Home Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, and Northern Ireland Secretary, Humphrey Atkins. The resultant communiqué became a political landmark: the British and Irish Governments agreed to set up special study groups to examine ‘the totality of relationships within these islands’.6
Despite the impression an over-eager Haughey tried to create, however, the constitutional position of Northern Ireland was not discussed. There were predictable roars of �
��betrayal’ from Ian Paisley and profound dismay amongst unionists. But Stowe was encouraged. ‘The points in that communiqué were significant and have remained significant, although they were not able to be exploited very quickly.’ At the time, Sir Kenneth could have had no idea of just how significant they were to be, given the way the politics were to unfold. ‘If you roll the clock on nearly twenty years, that is pretty well what the Good Friday agreement has achieved,’ he said. ‘But we had no expectation then that it would ever get that far. We could hope, but it was no more than a very, very early stage in identifying that the relationship between London and Dublin could be of crucial importance in resolving the problems of Northern Ireland and to mutual benefit.’
Even as the two Prime Ministers met, events were coming to a head in the Maze prison whose repercussions were in the long term to change the shape of Northern Ireland’s political landscape. The ending of the first hunger strike led to the impasse over prisoners wearing their own clothes which in turn led to the second hunger strike and the election of Bobby Sands to Westminster. It was proof to the Provisionals that politics worked. Nor was Sands’s election the aberration the sceptics portrayed it to be. When Sands died and the parliamentary seat became vacant again, Sinn Fein’s Owen Carron, who had been Sands’s election agent, contested the by-election as an ‘Anti-H Block Proxy Political Prisoner’ candidate and won, increasing Sands’s vote by 786 on an increased turnout of 88.6 per cent.7
Two months later during Sinn Fein’s Ard Fheis (annual conference) at the Mansion House in Dublin, Danny Morrison took the platform to assure the party faithful and the sceptics in the Republican Movement that politics did not mean that the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ was about to take second place. Morrison will go down in the history of the Republican Movement’s ‘struggle’ for many reasons but he will be best remembered for coining the phrase the ‘Armalite and Ballot Box’. Contrary to the belief that the concept and the wording of it had been carefully discussed beforehand with Adams and McGuinness and the leadership of the Republican Movement, it was a purely ‘off-the-cuff’ remark that Morrison thought up minutes before he rose to his feet. When the words were uttered, McGuinness, who was sitting beside Morrison on the platform, looked up and said, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Morrison seemed to be making up policy on the hoof. In fact, the phraseology was not as neat as history would have it. His actual words were, ‘Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’8 However, the actual words came out, they did encapsulate the policy that the Republican Movement was to follow for most of the next two decades until the IRA’s second cease-fire, following Tony Blair’s election in 1997. The notion that Provisionals could move towards their goal of a united Ireland by pursuing a twin strategy of violence and politics convinced most of the doubters who by this time had realized that, were the ‘Brits’ to leave Ireland, it wouldn’t be at the point of a gun. The ‘long war’ was now to be fought on two fronts.
A year after Morrison’s exhortation, the strategy passed its first test when, on 20 October 1982, Sinn Fein’s triumvirate of Adams, McGuinness and Morrison all won seats in the election to the Assembly set up by Secretary of State, James Prior, in which he held out the promise of ‘rolling devolution’. The theory was that the more responsible its elected members turned out to be, the more powers Westminster would devolve. But it never worked out that way and the Assembly was finally dissolved in 1986. The elections were the first that Sinn Fein had contested on a province-wide basis since the outbreak of the conflict in 1969. The party won five of the seventy-eight seats with 10.1 per cent of the vote. The SDLP, Sinn Fein’s rival for the nationalist vote, took 18.8 per cent.9 A week later, the IRA exploded the 1,000-lb bomb that killed the three policemen on the Kinnego embankment. Armalite and Ballot Box were marching hand in bloody hand. But Sinn Fein’s most spectacular electoral success came at the Westminster General Election on 9 June 1983 when Gerry Adams contested the safe nationalist West Belfast seat and won, beating the incumbent, Gerry Fitt (formerly SDLP but now running as an Independent candidate), and the SDLP’s Dr Joe Hendron. The nationalist vote was split, giving Adams a famous victory with a majority of 5,445 votes over Hendron who came second. The contest was bitterly fought with Adams’s nationalist rivals presenting the issue as a choice between violence and democracy. Province-wide, Sinn Fein won 13.4 per cent of the vote while the SDLP won 17.9 per cent.10 The writing was now on the walls of Belfast and Derry and James Prior did not like what he saw.
I think my reaction was almost one of despair that they were going to elect someone whom we considered to be a terrorist and who was not going to play any part at Westminster. I had no doubts at all that he belonged to the Provisional IRA. I think he encapsulated the Armalite and Ballot Box completely. What a waste the whole thing was.11
Five months later, on 13 November 1983, the new MP for West Belfast was elected as President of Sinn Fein, ousting Ruairi O’Bradaigh who had led the political wing of the Republican Movement since 1970. It was not only a clear indication that the Northerners were now in charge but an early sign of the split that was to come three years later when O’Bradaigh, David O’Connell and the dissidents who supported them walked out of the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis to form Republican Sinn Fein (RSF). The issue that tore the Movement apart was its new leadership’s determination to change Sinn Fein’s constitution so its members could take seats in Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament. This was anathema to the traditionalists and the ways were parted with a degree of bad blood. At least there was no real blood on the floor. Supporters of the dissidents subsequently set up the Continuity IRA (CIRA), claiming that it alone had the right to claim the IRA’s historic mantle since the Provisional IRA had sold out. In his first Presidential address, two months after thirty-eight IRA prisoners made their dramatic mass break-out from the Maze, Adams reassured delegates of the primacy of the IRA’s military campaign.
Armed struggle is a necessary and morally correct form of resistance in the Six Counties against a Government whose presence is rejected by the vast majority of the Irish people … There are those who tell us that the British Government will not be moved by armed struggle. As has been said before, the history of Ireland and of British colonial involvement throughout the world tells us that they will not be moved by anything else. I am glad therefore to pay tribute to the freedom fighters – the men and women Volunteers of the IRA.12
On 18 December 1983, the ‘freedom fighters’ took their campaign to London once again, killing three policemen (including a WPC) and three civilians in a car bomb attack outside Harrods when Knightsbridge was crowded with Christmas shoppers. The police had been called to the scene minutes before the blast. A hundred people were injured, including fourteen members of the Metropolitan Police. With three dead civilians and so many injured, the IRA said the attack had not been authorized by the Army Council.13 It was not what the new President of Sinn Fein had had in mind.
A year later, the IRA struck the most devastating blow in its history when it almost wiped out Mrs Thatcher and most of her Cabinet as they gathered at the Grand Hotel in Brighton for the Conservative Party’s annual conference. At 2.45 a.m. on 16 October 1984, a 20-lb bomb strategically placed behind a bath panel in Room 629 exploded, collapsing four floors in the centre of the building like a house of cards. The bomb had been triggered by a sophisticated electronic timing device, similar to those found in video recorders.14 It had been set about a month earlier and timed to explode when the Prime Minister and members of her Cabinet were asleep. Five members of the Conservative Party were killed, including Sir Anthony Berry MP (59) and Roberta Wakeham (54), the wife of John Wakeham, the Tory Chief Whip. More than thirty people were injured, many of them seriously, including Margaret Tebbit, the wife of the Industry Secretary, Norman Tebbit, who was himself dug out of the rubble after a four-hour rescue operation by fir
emen.15 Mrs Thatcher, whose bathroom was badly damaged by the explosion, miraculously survived. In defiance of the IRA and its works, the Prime Minister insisted it was business as usual and addressed the conference as planned. She received an eight-minute standing ovation.
Many months before the conference I had talked to a senior Provisional. He was surrounded by young lieutenants who showed respect for the man who was clearly regarded as their military leader. At some stage, Mrs Thatcher’s name inevitably came into the conversation. The person looked me straight in the eye and said she was going to pay. This was a time when memories of the hunger strike were fading – at least for the British – and I naïvely asked, ‘For what?’ ‘You’ll see,’ he said. Brighton was no doubt what he meant.