by Peter Taylor
The following day, 20 March 1993, the IRA exploded two bombs concealed in litter bins in Warrington, near Liverpool, when the town centre was packed with busy Saturday shoppers. Warnings were given but they were inadequate. Two young boys died in the blasts. One of them, Jonathan Ball, was only three years old. He had been out shopping for a Mother’s Day present. Twelve-year-old Tim Parry had been going to buy a pair of football shorts. Jonathan died cradled in a nurse’s arms and Tim died in hospital five days later. He had been running away from the first bomb and was caught by the second. Public revulsion was almost on the scale of Enniskillen. Thousands of letters of sympathy poured in, consoling the parents in their grief. A Timothy Parry Trust Fund was established to promote greater understanding between Great Britain and Ireland, North and South, and Tim’s parents became tireless campaigners for peace.8 Jonathan’s parents said, ‘If these initiatives lead to peace in Ireland, we shall be better able to bear our pain. If not, Jonathan’s death is a meaningless blasphemy.’9 As ever in such circumstances, it was difficult to find words of condemnation that were strong enough. Sir Patrick Mayhew expressed ‘disappointment’ as well as revulsion. ‘Here again they appeared to believe that violence, however disgusting and however random, was going to advance their political thinking,’ he said. ‘Equally it was important not to be deflected from our political analysis by yet another manifestation of that mistake.’ The ‘Brits’ intended to press on.
Following the Government’s message of 19 March, a face-to-face meeting in Derry between the BGR and Martin McGuinness had been scheduled for 23 March, arranged through the auspices of the Contact. The Provisionals expected that the BGR’s boss, John Deverell, would also be there. To the IRA, such a meeting would be a breakthrough. It was agreed by the Contact, the BGR and the Provisionals that both sides should be represented by two delegates with McGuinness and Gerry Kelly on the republican side and the BGR and John Deverell on the British side. When the meeting was arranged, neither party had any idea that Warrington would intervene. Neither McGuinness nor Kelly knew the minutiae of the IRA’s plans in England.
The meeting almost did not happen. The BGR turned up in Derry at the appointed time and place but Deverell did not. A degree of confusion surrounds what happened. Either Deverell realized that such a meeting would be inappropriate three days after Warrington, given the Government’s insistence that dialogue could only follow ‘a halt to violent activity’, or he had never intended to go anyway, or he knew nothing about it. Such are the unanswered questions that hang over this critical meeting. John Deverell did not live to provide an answer as he was one of twenty-five British intelligence officers who died on 2 June 1994 when their helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre on the way to a counter-terrorism conference.
In the end the Derry meeting only took place at the insistence of the Contact who knew how important it was to maintain his own credibility and the credibility of the peace process. The Contact was present and minutes were taken on the Provisionals’ side. When Sinn Fein subsequently published them, they made extraordinary reading. According to Sinn Fein, the BGR said that Mayhew, having tried to ‘marginalize and defeat the IRA’, had now changed tack, as evidenced by his Coleraine speech, which was ‘a significant move’: Mayhew was prepared to involve Sinn Fein, not because he liked them, but because he realized that the process ‘cannot work without them’. This preamble was, according to the Republican Movement’s minutes, then followed by a series of astonishing sentences.
Any settlement not involving all of the people North and South won’t work. A North/South settlement that won’t frighten unionists. The final solution is union. It is going to happen anyway. The historical train – Europe – determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change. This island will be as one.10
On the face of it, it seemed to be the message that the IRA had waited for more than two decades to hear from the ‘Brits’: that ‘the final solution is union’ and ‘this island will be as one’. I understand that Sinn Fein’s account of the meeting is broadly accurate, although the BGR was perhaps not quite as blunt as its record suggests. The minutes concluded by saying that the opportunity for formal meetings between the two sides ‘must be grasped’ as soon as possible. According to Sinn Fein, the BGR ended by saying that HMG would agree to talks the minute the IRA agreed to an undeclared cessation of violence. This suspension of violence would last for two to three weeks, during which time talks would take place. The BGR had already assured the Provisionals that at these delegation meetings, the British would convince the IRA that ‘armed struggle is no longer necessary’.11
Sinn Fein assumed, quite naturally, that the BGR was acting on behalf of HMG and was authorized to say what he did. He was, after all, the ‘British Government Representative’. Sir Patrick Mayhew did not find out about the meeting until many months later in the autumn of 1993 and was furious when he did. He regarded the meeting as a clear breach of HMG’s condition that there would be no face-to-face dialogue until the IRA had agreed to a cessation of violence, albeit unannounced. The Secretary of State had been kept in the dark and was appalled when he found out not only that the BGR had met McGuinness and Kelly but that he was alleged to have said what he did.
If it was true, it would have been dangerously and damagingly outside the remit because of reasons which hardly need explaining. So that was very unfortunate. It may have been an expression of this man’s personal views. It was certainly not an expression of the views of the British Government or a fulfilment of anything he’d been authorized to do or say.
One of Mayhew’s officials who was involved in the ‘back channel’ told me that the BGR ‘severly damaged’ HMG policy by having the face-to-face meeting. ‘When news of the secret meeting broke, there was anger, confusion and a feeling that we had been let down,’ he said. ‘Our whole strategy was to be straight with them [the Provisionals] and build up trust. We were “banging on” about no face-to-face meeting before an IRA cease-fire and they couldn’t understand that because they’d already had one. It just made things more difficult.’ What really happened at that vital meeting and what was actually said remains one of the unresolved mysteries of the secret, backstage manoeuvres that finally led to the IRA’s ‘cessation’ eighteen months later and the subsequent talks between the Government and the Republican Movement.
In the weeks and months that followed the Derry meeting between the BGR, McGuinness and Kelly, the talks about talks ran into the sand. In the view of the ‘Brits’ they were driven there by the IRA’s actions. On 24 April, the IRA launched a devastating attack in the heart of the City of London. This time the target was the NatWest tower in Bishopsgate. The bomb, made up of 1,000 lbs of fertilizer explosives packed into the back of a van, caused even more damage than the IRA bomb at the Baltic Exchange the previous year. The insurance bill was estimated to be more than £1,000 million. Despite the fact that eighteen ‘mostly accurate’ warnings were given, a News of the World photographer, Edward Henty (34), was killed.12 John Major’s reaction was similar to Sir Patrick Mayhew’s after Warrington. He was dismayed but not surprised.
Frankly, we thought it was likely to bring the whole process to an end. And we told them repeatedly that that was the case. They assumed that if they bombed and put pressure on the British at Bishopsgate or with some outrage or other, it would affect our negotiating position to their advantage. In that judgment they were wholly wrong. Every time they did that, they made it harder not easier for any movement to be made towards a settlement. They hardened our attitude, whereas they believed that their actions would soften it. That is a fundamental mistake the IRA have made with successive British governments throughout the last quarter of a century.
The Bishopsgate bomb was followed by a series of huge bombs in the centre of Belfast (20 May), Portadown (22 May) and Magherafelt (23 May), causing millions of pounds’ worth of damage. Major decided that enough was enough and, on 17 July 1993, after even more bombs and kil
lings, sent a blunt message to the IRA. It said that a temporary halt to violence was not enough and that ‘dialogue leading to an inclusive political process’ could only begin ‘after we have received the necessary assurance that organized violence had been brought to an end’. Major described this as ‘a holding message’. ‘I thought it essential to show the Provisionals that these tactics would not wash … We were determined to make them realize that terrorism and talking were incompatible … [The message] repeated our insistence on a lasting end to violence. It began to seem we were in a blind alley.’13
By this time, Major was looking in other directions, too, because he realized that for a settlement to work it had to involve all parties. He recognized that the IRA were a critical component but by no means the only one. He also knew that if and when the Army Council declared ‘a lasting end to violence’, the Republican Movement would have to be realistic in what it thought it could achieve at the negotiating table with all the other parties and in particular with the unionists, assuming, of course, that they could be persuaded to sit in the same room and negotiate with the representatives of the IRA. The Prime Minister’s frustration with the IRA’s insistence on killing and talking at the same time was understandable. With this attitude ingrained in the republican psyche, there seemed little chance of making significant progress. No wonder Major thought he was in ‘a blind alley’. He firmly believed that the Provisionals were serious in seeking to end their campaign but felt that their actions were contradictory.
By the summer of 1993, several different dialogues were being conducted at different levels in different places with the common objective of trying to make the peace process work. The British were communicating indirectly with the IRA through the Contact. John Hume was talking to Gerry Adams. John Major was talking to the unionists and to Albert Reynolds in Dublin. And the loyalist paramilitaries, who also recognized that at some stage the killing would have to stop, were talking to the Belfast Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Roy Magee, and Archbishop Robin Eames, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.14 For the peace process to work, all strands would somehow have to be brought together. It was like juggling plates whilst wearing a blindfold. John Major, through whose fingers at some stage all the threads ran, did not underestimate the task. ‘Building a peace in Northern Ireland is like playing multi-dimensional chess,’ he said. ‘You need everything in place at the right time.’
Gerry Adams and John Hume had resumed in earnest the discussions they had begun in 1988, and on 24 April 1993 set out an agreed position on the elements for a settlement.
1 That an internal settlement [i.e. within Northern Ireland] is not a solution because it obviously does not deal with all the relationships at the heart of the problem.
2 That the Irish people as a whole have a right to national self-determination.
3 That the exercise of self-determination is a matter for agreement between the people of Ireland.
4 That an agreement is only achievable and viable if it can earn and enjoy the allegiance of the different traditions on this island.
Major knew that unionists would not accept this since to them ‘self-determination’ was a euphemism for ‘Brits Out’. Tempering this was one of the main purposes of Major’s dialogue with Reynolds. He had to persuade the Taoiseach that the critical factor in establishing a set of principles that would underpin any settlement was republican recognition that unionists must be allowed to give their consent to any agreement. In other words, they could not be coerced. The ‘consent’ principle was the key to any overall settlement. John Hume had long accepted the principle, and Albert Reynolds accepted it too.15 Gerry Adams, however, did not because the Republican Movement had always maintained that the unionists’ insistence on their right to say ‘no’ – the unionist ‘veto’ – had been the stumbling block to the resolution of the Irish problem.
John Major’s juggling was made even more difficult by the Westminster arithmetic. As his parliamentary majority became increasingly slender as a result of a string of lost by-elections, the votes of the nine Ulster Unionist MPs under their uncharismatic but politically astute leader, James Molyneaux, became increasingly critical to the Government’s survival. On 22 July 1993 Major only survived a critical vote on the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty (which was opposed by the powerful Euro-sceptic wing of his party) because of the support of the Ulster Unionists. Nevertheless, Major insisted that he never let the narrowness of his majority and the consequent importance of unionist votes in the House of Commons affect his decisions on Ireland. He bridles at any suggestion that he might have done. ‘That is a piece of propaganda that a proper light on history will show to be utterly false,’ he told me. ‘I can tell you categorically that at no time was there a deal with the unionist parties that put the survival of the Conservative Government before the peace process. At no time, in any way. I was not prepared to put at risk the process that I had started at the beginning of the 1990s for purely political ends. I was not prepared to do it and I did not.’
By autumn 1993, the situation had seldom looked bleaker as, once again, the province seemed on the brink of the abyss. On Saturday 23 October, two IRA men from Ardoyne, Thomas Begley and Sean Kelly, walked into Frizzell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road, carrying a bomb. They were dressed in white coats to give the impression they were making a delivery. Their target was an office of the UDA/UFF located directly above the shop. The IRA believed that Johnny Adair and the command staff of the UFF’s ‘C’ company were meeting there. The bomb had an eleven-second fuse, theoretically enough for the bombers to shout a warning and clear the shop before the explosion. The blast was designed to go directly upwards not outwards.16 The bomb went off prematurely, collapsing the building and killing Begley and nine Protestants. Fifty-seven people were injured. The room above was empty. The UFF had stopped meeting there when they suspected it was under security force surveillance.
Begley was buried with IRA honours, another martyr to add to the list. Had he wiped out Adair and the UFF leadership, his community would have seen him as a hero. Gerry Adams was one of those who carried his coffin, thus inviting nigh-universal condemnation for associating himself with such an atrocity. But, as the RUC Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, told me, ‘In a pragmatic way, I don’t think he had much option.’17 Not to have done so would have damaged Adams’s credibility in his own community and made it even more difficult to bring the Republican Movement along with him and accept the compromises that he knew might be necessary in the search for peace.
Sean Kelly, the other IRA bomber, who was seriously injured but survived, was given nine life sentences. Giving his verdict, the judge said, ‘This wanton slaughter of so many innocent people must rank as one of the most outrageous atrocities endured by the people of this province in the last quarter of a century.’18 Few would have disagreed. Kelly was among the last batch of prisoners to be released under the Good Friday Agreement in the summer of 2000. He said he accepted that he would be a target for the loyalist paramilitaries for the rest of his life. ‘Honestly, it was an accident and if I could do anything to change what happened, believe me, I would do it,’ he said. ‘While we did go out to kill the leadership of the UDA, we never intended for innocent people to die.’ He acknowledged he would have to live with what he had done for the rest of his life. ‘I am an ordinary guy who got caught up in the conflict.’19
The loyalist paramilitaries exacted dreadful revenge. During the week following the bombing of Frizzell’s fish shop, the UVF shot dead two Catholics and the UFF two more. But it was to be seven days before the nationalist community felt the full force of the loyalists’ terrible revenge. On 30 October 1993, Hallowe’en Eve, UFF gunmen walked into the Rising Sun bar in the village of Greysteel outside Derry, shouted ‘Trick or Treat?’ and opened fire on the horrified customers with an AK 47 and a Browning pistol. Six Catholics, one of them eighty-one years old, and one Protestant were mown down. The perpetrators were s
ubsequently released under the Good Friday Agreement.
Politicians were by now almost beyond despair. John Hume, who wept at the funeral of the victims, blamed the lack of political progress for creating the vacuum in which such unspeakable horrors flourished. In the House of Commons, two days after Greysteel, Hume attacked Major for not seizing the opportunity, as Hume saw it, of using his deliberations with Gerry Adams as a basis for peace. Stung by Hume’s words and the emotion with which they were expressed, Major retaliated with an equally emotional riposte, saying that if Hume was implying that the Government should sit down and talk with Gerry Adams, he would not do it. ‘The thought would turn my stomach,’ he said. ‘I will not talk to people who murder indiscriminately.’20