by Peter Taylor
Having recognized that defeating the IRA was out of the question, the ‘Brits’ settled in for a war of attrition to wear down and contain it. By the end of the 1980s, a stalemate of sorts had been reached with both sides recognizing the stark choices before them: to carry on shedding more blood or talk. Talking seemed the better option. The problem for the ‘Brits’ was how to do it without triggering a loyalist explosion in Northern Ireland or a public outcry in England. From the British point of view, there was no blueprint or neatly plotted course on the road to peace. It was almost ‘suck it and see’. The objective, however, was clear: to persuade the IRA to abandon the Armalite altogether and embrace the Ballot Box in its entirety. Clearly such a policy would not bear fruit overnight, as the Whitehall mandarins, like republicans, had their own problems, not least with the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. She had set her face against making any concessions to the IRA and there were ten dead hunger strikers to prove it. In fact, the British made a major policy U-turn although it was never admitted as such and certainly never put to Mrs Thatcher in those terms, given that she had once memorably proclaimed that ‘the Lady is not for turning’. The U-turn was made on the political front in the context of Sinn Fein, while security policy remained the same: to hit the IRA as hard as possible whenever possible.
The strategic purpose of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement had been to marginalize Sinn Fein and boost their constitutionalist SDLP rivals in the hope that moderate, anti-IRA opinion would prevail. At the first test in the by-elections that took place two months after the Agreement was signed because fifteen unionist MPs had resigned their Westminster seats in protest, the Government’s strategy seemed to be working. The SDLP saw its own vote rise by 6 per cent and Sinn Fein’s fall by almost as much.4 But for Sinn Fein, the setback was short-lived. In the 1987 General Election, Gerry Adams held his seat in West Belfast (despite a determined campaign against him by the SDLP) with an increased majority and share of the vote. Although the overall nationalist beneficiary was the SDLP, increasing its share of the vote on the 1983 general election by 3.4 per cent, the high-profile success of Gerry Adams in holding his seat was what grabbed the headlines.5 For Sinn Fein, that was the critical test. Although overall its vote was down 2 per cent on 1983, it still polled 35 per cent of nationalist voters.6 Rumours of Sinn Fein’s demise were premature.
As far as the British were concerned, the policy U-turn came in 1987 or thereabouts when they saw that Adams’s success in 1983 was not just an aberration in the wake of the hunger strike. Ian Burns, who as a private secretary in 1969 had paved the way for Home Secretary James Callaghan’s famous visit to Derry, was now Deputy Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, charged with the job of seeing if some form of political rapprochement might be effected. He knew that on the security front, the policy of containment was working.
It was plain that after twenty years there was plenty of evidence that the terrorists could not win and each new incident tended to increase British resolve that they should not win. It was also clear that the British Government would never stoop to the sort of measures which the terrorists were using, and that even if they did so, they would be wrong in principle and they would not themselves actually produce a solution. So we had a security situation in which we could certainly contain terrorism. In individual incidents, we could defeat the terrorist; but we could not eradicate terrorism. The question then was, how you go forward from there.
The conclusion we came to, rather a trite one perhaps, in retrospect, was that terrorism would end when the terrorists decide to end it. That meant trying to show to the terrorists that their existing policy of the Armalite and the Ballot Box was mistaken, and that the Armalite should be put on one side. If the terrorists wanted to make progress, they could not do so through a terrorist campaign. But republicans could make progress through using the political process. That was the essence of the emerging strategy at the end of the eighties. Republicanism did not have a future through terrorism.
Mrs Thatcher may have been persuaded with some difficulty, not least when, on 30 July 1990, the IRA killed another of her close friends and associates, Ian Gow MP, with a Semtex booby-trap bomb. A staunch supporter of the unionist cause, he had resigned his ministerial post at the Treasury in protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. According to his widow, his attitude had been ‘bugger the IRA’.7
On the other side of the battle lines, the Provisionals too were beginning to shift their ground. Adams, the Republican Movement’s most astute political thinker, knew that at some stage the process of talking to the British would have to begin again but this time the political balance would be different. During the secret talks with the British Government in 1972 and 1975, the IRA had no quantifiable political base. They had their supporters in the nationalist community and could not have operated without them but there was no political machine behind the IRA. The incident centres set up as part of the 1975 ‘truce’ gave Sinn Fein its first real toe-hold in the nationalist community and Adams and McGuinness and their politically minded colleagues spent the 1980s in the wake of the hunger strike building upon it. Adams never advocated laying the Armalite aside since to have done so would have been politically suicidal as Sinn Fein drew its strength and mandate from the IRA. He knew, however, that the IRA’s role increasingly had to be balanced by Sinn Fein. In a seminal text, The Politics of Irish Freedom, written in 1986, Adams put the Provisionals’ strategy in context.
The tactic of armed struggle is of primary importance because it provides a vital cutting edge. Without it, the issue of Ireland would not even be an issue … armed struggle has been an agent of bringing about change … At the same time there is a realization in republican circles that armed struggle on its own is inadequate and that non-armed forms of political struggle are at least as important …8
Adams recognized that, by the end of the second decade of the conflict, Sinn Fein was still, as its Gaelic name broadly means, ‘ourselves alone’. Although the party was making gains in its electoral support in the North, it had been almost wiped out in the Irish General Election of 19 February 1987, winning no seats and taking less than 2 per cent of the vote. Adams realized that if Sinn Fein was to progress, it would have to embrace others and make alliances with them, most notably the SDLP, the Dublin Government and Irish-America. Republicans would have to start making friends and influencing people instead of repelling them by its association with IRA violence. John Hume, who since his emergence as a leader of the civil rights campaign in the late 1960s had been a passionate opponent of violence, was thinking along similar lines. Father Alec Reid, who had administered the last rites to the two corporals shot dead by the IRA after their Passat ran into Caoimhin MacBrádaigh’s funeral cortège, was instrumental in bringing them together. The purpose of the exercise was to try to work out a common front – agreed by the representatives of the physical force and constitutional traditions in Irish nationalism – to put to the British Government.
Adams and Hume and their respective Sinn Fein and SDLP delegations met and talked together throughout 1988 against a backdrop of violence that gave a deadly immediacy to their deliberations. The names that year were a byword for blood on the hands of all sides, ‘Brits’, loyalists and the IRA: Gibraltar, Michael Stone, Corporals Wood and Howes, Ballygawley and Drumnakilly. Hume knew that if the conflict was to be resolved and peaceful progress made towards Irish unity, the IRA would have to be persuaded to give up the gun, and the Republican Movement would have to be realistic in the demands it made of the ‘Brits’. Declarations of intent to withdraw, which had haunted the secret talks in 1972 and 1975, were out. If there was to be a united Ireland, Hume argued, it would have to come about by peaceful means, which meant that the million Protestants in the North would have to be persuaded that it was in their best interests. This would never happen as long as the IRA continued killing. Furthermore, Hume argued, he believed that the British Government would remain neutral in any political process and simply
act as facilitator.
Adams may have agreed with some of Hume’s analysis, although he was highly sceptical about British ‘neutrality’, but he knew that to carry the IRA, the Army Council would have to be convinced that ending its campaign would lead to talks with the British and ultimately, in whatever way, to Irish unity. If Adams could not take the IRA with him, the project was doomed. Martin McGuinness, with his impeccable IRA credentials, was his key ally. The fact that the two men have stuck together, close personal friends as well as comrades-in-arms, apparently without jealousy or bitterness, is one of the crucial factors that cemented the Republican Movement to the peace process. Time and again, the word amongst IRA Volunteers and their families during a difficult and testing time for ‘active republicans’ was, ‘If it’s good enough for Martin, it’s good enough for us.’ Not that Gerry was held in any lesser esteem: he was just viewed in a different light.
As the discussions between Hume and Adams and their party representatives ended on 5 September 1988, there was no communiqué of agreement but common ground had been established. The ground was ‘self-determination’, although there were different interpretations of it. At worst, as far as the ‘Brits’ were concerned, it was a more sophisticated way of saying ‘Brits Out’, with all the people on the island of Ireland, North and South, voting on their destiny at the same time. At best, it was allowing the Protestant majority in the North, but a minority on the whole island, to have its say and have its verdict respected. This was the foundation on which the peace process was established. Dublin was listening and kept informed, and the ‘Brits’ were listening too. The peace process was built on two twin pillars: Sinn Fein and the SDLP, and London and Dublin. The challenge was to involve the unionists in the architecture without bringing the whole structure down. It was to take many years.
Three weeks after Hume and Adams had ended their deliberations with an agreement to keep in touch, the Secretary of State, Tom King, made a speech at a lunch hosted by the province’s Institute of Directors. In it he planted a critical seed, no doubt at the encouragement of John Hume. He said that Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom ‘by the express desire of a significant majority of its people’ and that there was ‘no secret economic or strategic reason [author’s emphasis], but simply that Northern Ireland’s position is based entirely and clearly on the self-determination of the people of Northern Ireland’.9 This is what Hume had meant by ‘neutrality’. In other words, HMG was saying that, contrary to what had become a mantra of republican liturgy, the British presence in Northern Ireland was based on the wishes of the majority of its citizens and not because Britain had any imperialistic or self-interested designs on the province. Having planted the seed, Tom King was not around long to see it grow. When his successor, Peter Brooke, took over on 24 July 1989, the world was already beginning to change and there were signs of the first cracks in the Berlin Wall. ‘There was already movement in Eastern Europe, in South Africa and the Middle East and there were people who said that the IRA were beginning to become worried that they were going to be the last unsolved problem,’ he told me. To republicans, Brooke was simply another unreconstructed unionist like Tom King but they could not have been more wrong in their assessment. In media interviews he gave on 1 November 1989 to mark his first 100 days at Stormont Castle, the new Secretary of State stunned everybody, not least republicans, by an answer he gave to a question from Derek Henderson of the Press Association. Brooke was asked whether, in the context of a military stalemate, he could ever envisage himself talking to Sinn Fein. The standard answer, practised down the years by successive British Ministers, would have been ‘no’ on the grounds that democratic Governments do not ‘talk to terrorists’. Brooke broke with tradition and said what he genuinely believed.
… it is difficult to envisage a military defeat [of the IRA] … if, in fact, the terrorists were to decide that the moment had come when they wished to withdraw from their activities, then I think the Government would need to be imaginative in those circumstances as to how that process should be managed … Let me remind you of the move towards independence in Cyprus. A British Minister stood up in the House of Commons and used the word ‘never’. Within two years there had been a retreat from that word.10
Brooke’s off-the-cuff remarks caused a storm. Unionists were horrified. Barely a month earlier, the IRA had bombed the Royal Marines School of Music in Deal, killing ten young bandsmen and injuring twenty-two others. Even mentioning the possibility of talking to Sinn Fein, whom unionists did not distinguish from the IRA, was bad enough but to mention the words ‘Cyprus’ and ‘independence’ in the same breath was the stuff of which unionist nightmares were made. Brooke rode the storm. ‘I gave an honest answer to an honest question,’ he said. ‘I was arguing that if you reach this kind of impasse, it was sensible to explore other ways of resolving matters.’ As the months went by, Brooke was informed by the intelligence services that the debate within the Republican Movement was ongoing. ‘In a case like Northern Ireland, like in warfare, the preoccupation is to work out what is going on on the other side of the hill,’ he said. ‘I had to send a signal that, were that debate to reach a point where they wished to talk rather than engaging in terrorism, then there would be something to talk about from our side of the table.’ Brooke sent the signal on 9 November 1990 via the unlikely medium of the British Association of Canned Food Importers and Distributors at the Whitbread Restaurant in London. The assembled guests, whose knowledge of matters Irish was likely to be more agricultural than political, were treated to a seminal discourse on ‘The British Presence’. The ideas and language were a development of those first expressed by Tom King.
An Irish Republicanism seen to have finally renounced violence would be able, like other parties, to seek a role in the peaceful political life of the community. In Northern Ireland, it is not the aspiration to a sovereign, united Ireland against which we set our face but its violent expression … The British Government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland [author’s emphasis: note also there is no comma between the words ‘selfish strategic’]: our role is to help, enable and encourage. Britain’s purpose … is not to occupy, oppress or exploit but to ensure democratic debate and free democratic choice.11
Brooke was confident that he was sending the right message, having tested the proposition with John Hume. ‘The era of NATO and the nuclear deterrent meant that the importance of Ireland in strategic terms to the United Kingdom, which would have been significant over a period of about five hundred years, no longer obtained,’ he said. ‘With regard to the economic return, the United Kingdom was putting far, far more money into Northern Ireland than into any other part of the Kingdom and there was, by definition, no economic return coming out.’
The IRA made a direct response to the Whitbread speech by declaring a three-day cease-fire over Christmas 1990. The last time it had done so was in the run-up to the secret talks in 1975 when the MI6 officer Michael Oatley had orchestrated the dialogue with the Provisionals via the Contact in Derry. A matter of days later, again at a critical moment in the province’s history, Oatley emerged from the shadows once more to play a vital role in re-establishing contact between HMG and the IRA that had been dormant for a decade since his intervention in the first hunger strike in 1980.
Although Oatley had become head of MI6 operations in Europe, he had kept in touch with the Contact, who knew that Oatley was there if ever it was felt his services were needed again. They were not. Mrs Thatcher was not interested in talking to the IRA. According to Oatley, the ‘pipe’ consequently ‘rusted up’ during the following decade. Nevertheless, it remained in place. Around the time of the IRA’s 1990 Christmas cease-fire, some of the ‘rust’ was brushed off and messages were exchanged down the pipe once again. The initiative came from Derry not London. Oatley received a message that, in the light of the comments made by Peter Brooke, Martin McGuinness might be interested in sounding out the ‘Brits’. A
ccordingly, Oatley arranged to pay a visit to Derry in January 1991.
By this time, there had been a seismic change on the British political scene when Mrs Thatcher was advised to step down by the Conservative Party in the leadership election and John Major became Prime Minister on 27 November 1990. The fact that he had not suffered the personal agonies of Mrs Thatcher (who had lived though the carnage of more than a decade, in which she had not only weathered the hunger strike and endured the Brighton bomb but lost her close friends Ian Gow and Airey Neave) meant that Major could make a fresh start, unclouded by any sense of personal loss, however keenly he felt the deaths of British soldiers, policemen and civilians. When he moved into Downing Street, one of the first things he did was to make a list of his priorities. Northern Ireland was at the top. He was determined not just to stand in the trenches and recite the familiar mantras ‘we never give in to violence’ and ‘the IRA will never win’ because he knew such attitudes would never produce a solution, and a solution was what John Major wanted. ‘If what had been happening in Northern Ireland had been happening in Surrey or Sussex or in my constituency, Huntingdon, it would not have been acceptable,’ he told me. ‘And it wasn’t acceptable to me in Northern Ireland.’ Major knew that one of the keys to finding a solution was to enlist the support of the Dublin Government in doing so, and the mechanisms were already in place through the Anglo-Irish Agreement. He did not know, however, about Oatley’s visit to Derry to meet McGuinness and only found out after it had happened.
Oatley was due to retire in February 1991 and was anxious to make one last effort to see if he could do anything to help resolve the conflict that had occupied him on and off since he first went to the province in 1973. ‘I developed a feeling that in my last year in government service I would like to make use of my connections one more time to see if I could have any influence on the situation before I retired,’ he told me. ‘It seemed to be a pity just to walk away and leave it all as something one simply remembered. So I had conversations about it. It did seem, during 1990 and the early part of 1991, that there might be a mood developing within the Provisional leadership, where a political strategy, as an alternative to violence, might be something that they would consider pursuing.’