by Peter Taylor
Decommissioning was different. The issue that had held up Sinn Fein’s participation in all-party talks and led to the Docklands bomb was not resolved by the Agreement, although the British thought and hoped that it was. Whereas the clauses concerning prisoner-releases were specific, those concerning decommissioning were aspirational. At no stage did any paramilitary group, be it the IRA, the UDA/UFF or UVF, give any specific guarantee, either directly or via its political representatives, that it would hand over its weapons. The issue was fudged. Had it not been so, there would have been no Agreement. Certainly, as far as the British were concerned, there was a clear obligation on the part of the paramilitaries to decommission since their political representatives – Sinn Fein, the UDP and PUP – had signed up to all the Agreement, including the clauses on decommissioning. The key clause said:
All participants accordingly reaffirm their commitment to the total disarmament of all paramilitary organizations. They also affirm their intention to work constructively and in good faith with the Independent Commission [on Decommissioning], and to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years following endorsement in referendums North and South of the agreement and in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement.18 [Author’s emphasis]
This critical clause subsequently became the focus of much splitting of hairs. Sinn Fein argued that it was not the IRA and could not speak for it, and although it would use ‘any influence’ it might have, it could not force the IRA to decommission. The loyalist paramilitaries, through their political representatives, made it clear that they would only start to decommission once the IRA had begun the process. Unionists accused Sinn Fein of being disingenuous and simply hiding behind excuses. Further clauses in connection with the formation of the Executive stipulated that all Ministers must pledge a ‘commitment to non-violence and exclusively peaceful and democratic means and their opposition to any use or threat of force by others for any political purpose … those who do not should be excluded or removed from office’.19 Sinn Fein argued that it had signed up to the ‘Mitchell Principles’ and that it was committed to non-violence as a democratic political party. Again it claimed it could not speak for the IRA. Decommissioning, or the lack of it, was to dominate political developments in Northern Ireland for the next two years and beyond. It was the rock on which peace would be built or founder.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The Hand of History
May 1998–March 2001
For the time being, the contentious issue of decommissioning was put to one side as parties geared up for the referenda and elections to the Assembly that were the bedrocks of the Good Friday Agreement. The dual referenda, to be held North and South on 22 May 1998, were designed to give the Irish people on both sides of the border the opportunity to ratify what had been agreed on Good Friday. This was seen by the British and Irish Governments as the expression of the collective will of the Irish people in whose name the IRA had claimed the legitimacy of its ‘war’. If the vast majority voted for peace, London and Dublin calculated the IRA would be stripped of any such ‘moral’ authority for its campaign.
To the alarm of the British Government, the ‘no’ camp, led by a re-invigorated Ian Paisley, made most of the running, seizing on the release of IRA prisoners and the absence of any decommissioning guarantee as well as the more traditional cry of the ‘sell-out’ of the Union. Trimble campaigned for the ‘yes’ vote as if his heart was never really in it and only took the stage with John Hume – introduced by the rock superstar Bono of U2 – at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall in the dying days of the campaign. Worried that the Agreement might be killed off before it had time to breathe, Tony Blair flew over to pump energy into the ‘yes’ camp’s flagging campaign and to give personal reassurances to unionists’ deep concerns, in particular on prisoner-releases and decommissioning. In the glare of the cameras, he put his signature to five personal pledges, including ‘Those who use or threaten violence excluded from the Government of Northern Ireland’ and ‘Prisoners kept in unless violence is given up for good’.1 There was no reference to decommissioning. On the morning of the referenda, the Irish News and the News Letter, the main newspapers of the nationalist and unionist communities, respectively, carried an article by the Prime Minister in which he wrote:
Representatives of parties intimately linked to paramilitary groups can only be in a future Northern Ireland government if it is clear that there will be no more violence and the threat of violence has gone. That doesn’t just mean decommissioning but all bombing, killings, beatings, and an end to targeting, recruiting and all the structures of terrorism.2
There was still nothing more specific on decommissioning.
When the results of the referendum in the North were announced, the ‘yes’ camp just squeezed past the critical 70 per cent mark by 1.2 per cent, thus narrowly avoiding what would have been seen by the ‘no’ camp as a defeat. There was huge relief, not least in Downing Street. Perhaps the Prime Minister’s eleventh-hour intervention had made the difference. David Trimble was hardly jubilant, perhaps aware of the enormous problems that lay ahead, both from within his own increasingly divided party and from an IRA that was likely to remain adamant on no decommissioning. He said he now wanted to see ‘the squalid little terrorist campaign and the IRA dismantled’.3 In the light of the result, Gerry Adams was repeatedly asked if the ‘war’ was over. He refused to say that it was.
There was never any question of the result of the referendum in the Republic, despite the decision to erase the territorial claim to the North from its constitution, but the outcome exceeded all expectations, with 94 per cent of voters saying ‘yes’ (although on a turnout of only 56 per cent).
With barely time to catch breath, the political parties in the North then launched straight into the campaign to elect the Assembly, as the poll was scheduled for 25 June 1998, only four weeks after the referendum. You could see from the expression on the party leaders’ faces that all energies were practically spent. Despite the danger of voter overkill, 68.8 per cent of the electorate cast their ballots. (The turnout for the referendum had been a record 81 per cent, the highest since 1921.)4 There were even greater sighs of relief from Downing Street and the ‘yes’ camp when 75 per cent of the electorate voted for pro-Agreement candidates. Good Friday had survived its first two critical tests. The Ulster Unionists became the largest party in the Assembly with twenty-eight seats, therefore making its leader, David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister for more than a quarter of a century. Trimble became ‘First Minister’ designate. But his majority over his unionist opponents, led by Paisley’s DUP who collectively won twenty-seven seats, was slender. The party that made the greatest advance was Sinn Fein, receiving its highest ever percentage of the vote at 17.6 per cent and winning eighteen seats. Many of these were held by leading Provisionals who had played prominent roles in the ‘war’, including Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty, Gerry Kelly, Mitchel McLaughlin, Alex Maskey and John Kelly. The UVF’s political party, the PUP, also won two seats to be occupied by two of its former ‘soldiers’, David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson. The UDA/UFF’s political party, the UDP, won no seats and was thereby excluded from the political process, and dangerously so.
The next step was the selection of the new Executive, the ten departmental ministers who were to serve under the First Minister, David Trimble, and the Deputy First Minister, Seamus Mallon of the SDLP. The SDLP had become the second largest party with twenty-four seats and 22 per cent of the vote. Sinn Fein was entitled to two ministerial posts in proportion to its representation in the Assembly.
Inevitably, it was not long before the spectre of decommissioning returned to haunt political progress and the formation of the new Government of Northern Ireland. Trimble insisted on ‘guns before government’, demanding that the IRA must start decommissioning before Sinn Fein could enter the Cabinet. Sinn Fein’s position was the ex
act opposite, ‘government before guns’, suggesting that the IRA might be persuaded to make some move but only when Sinn Fein had taken up the Cabinet seats to which it was entitled. But even then, there was no guarantee. Hopes, however, were briefly raised when Padraig Wilson, the leader of the IRA prisoners in the Maze, said that ‘a voluntary decommissioning would be a natural development of the peace process’ although he ruled out any prospect of the IRA handing over its weapons to the ‘Brits’.5 For their part, the ‘Brits’ knew the latter would never happen because the IRA would see it as surrender. Other ways would have to be found to decommission. In the meantime, deadlock replaced hope. Northern Ireland had a new Assembly but no Government. That could only happen once the decommissioning issue had been resolved and power was devolved from Westminster. The euphoria of Good Friday soon began to fade as unionists and republicans returned to their entrenched positions and dug in to see who would cave in first.
Although the IRA and loyalist cease-fires held, the promised new dawn was not violence-free. Once again, the annual stand-off at Drumcree in July triggered rioting across the province as the army erected a wall of steel to prevent the Portadown Orangemen from marching down the nationalist Garvaghy Road. Loyalists’ visceral opposition to the Good Friday Agreement, which they saw as capitulation to the IRA, made their anger and their protest all the more incendiary. Had David Trimble, whose previous support for the Portadown Orangemen had been a critical factor in his election as party leader, shown his face on the hill at Drumcree, he would probably have been lynched. Paisley was welcome. Trimble was not. The protest only came to an end following the deaths of the Catholic Quinn brothers – Richard (11), Mark (10) and Jason (9) – who died on 12 July when their home in Ballymoney was torched by a loyalist petrol bomb. Courageously, the Reverend William Bingham, chaplain of the County Armagh Orange Order, urged his Orange brethren to call off their protest at Drumcree saying ‘no road is worth a life’.6 Despite Tony Blair’s insistence on the morning of the referendum that no party with paramilitary connections (i.e. Sinn Fein) could take its place in Government as long as violence of any kind persisted, including so-called paramilitary punishments and beatings, there appeared to be no end to them, inflicted by both republicans and loyalists determined to maintain their grip on their respective communities. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Bureau, an organization committed to exposing and countering such community violence, calculated that between Good Friday 1998 and summer 1999, there were 61 IRA and 71 loyalist punishment shootings (invariably through the knee) and 152 IRA and 171 loyalist punishment beatings (invariably with baseball bats and iron bars).7 Despite the cease-fire, in the months that followed Good Friday, the IRA was believed to have been involved in five ‘non-political’ killings, although it claimed none of them. One was the result of a personal grudge, one was a former IRA ‘supergrass’,8 one was a suspected Special Branch informer and two were suspected drug dealers. One British official infelicitously referred to such killings as ‘internal housekeeping’. But this intermittent relatively low-level violence (compared, that is, to years gone by) was overshadowed on 15 August 1998 by the carnage of the ‘Real’ IRA’s Omagh bomb. Twenty-nine people were killed and over 300 injured in what became the worst atrocity in Northern Ireland of the conflict. Three hundred pounds of explosives had been placed in the centre of the busy County Tyrone market town on a Saturday afternoon during Omagh’s civic festival. Coded warnings were telephoned forty minutes before the bomb went off but the wrong location was given, with the result that the crowd was inadvertently directed towards the bomb rather than away from it. The scenes were horrific and defied description. In a statement the ‘Real’ IRA apologized and said the attack was directed against ‘a commercial target, part of an ongoing campaign against the ‘Brits”.9
Tony Blair was on holiday in France at the time. ‘I can barely express the sense of grief I feel for the victims of this appalling evil act of savagery,’ he said. ‘But our emotion has got to be not just outrage and determination to bring the perpetrators to justice, but an equal determination that these people will not succeed in returning Northern Ireland to the past. There is a future for Northern Ireland and even amongst the grief and sense of loss of the families, we have to carry on to give the people of Northern Ireland the future they deserve.’10 David Trimble, who was also on holiday, said the tragedy would never have happened had the IRA decommissioned its weapons. ‘Sinn Fein cannot escape responsibility in this bloody atrocity,’ he said. Trimble was wrong or misinformed. The Provisional IRA had nothing to do with it and Gerry Adams condemned the attack unreservedly. Just over three weeks later, the ‘Real’ IRA announced it was suspending all ‘military operations’. Despite a massive RUC and Garda investigation, there were great difficulties in assembling the crucial evidence that would bring the bombers to justice. The police said they knew who they were but did not have the evidence to charge them. It may be that, for obvious legal and security reasons, the police kept their counsel, but on 9 October 2000 BBC television’s Panorama programme controversially named four of the main suspects after a detailed investigation by reporter John Ware and his team.
Omagh strengthened the resolve of all parties involved in the Good Friday Agreement to see it through and make it work, whatever the difficulties. The immediate signs were auspicious. On 2 September Gerry Adams said that Sinn Fein was committed ‘to exclusively peaceful and democratic means… [and] the violence we have seen must be for all of us now a thing of the past, over and done with and gone’.11 It was the closest the Sinn Fein President had come to saying the ‘war’ was over. The same day, Sinn Fein announced that Martin McGuinness would be working with General John de Chastelain’s decommissioning body, the IICD. Suddenly things seemed to be moving in the right direction. Four days later, Adams and Trimble held their first ever one-to-one meeting at Stormont to try to resolve their differences. It was the first official encounter between a Unionist and Sinn Fein in over seventy-five years.
By the end of the month, forty-two loyalist and republican prisoners had been released but there was still no agreement on decommissioning. At the Labour Party conference, Trimble reminded the Prime Minister of his commitment to ensure it. ‘There has been no movement on the part of the paramilitaries,’ he said. ‘This is not a precondition. It is an obligation under the Agreement. It must happen if the Agreement is to work …Real peace can only be implemented if every part is implemented.’12 The following month, he re-affirmed his position at his own UUP conference by repeating that Sinn Fein could not take its seats in Government without IRA decommissioning. The ball, according to the First Minister, was in Sinn Fein’s court but the IRA had no intention of picking it up. By the end of 1998, the IRA had made it clear on three separate occasions – in April, September and December – that it would not be handing in any guns.13
On 18 December 1998, a week after David Trimble and John Hume had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, decommissioning finally began. However, it was not the IRA but the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), a splinter group of the UVF formed by the late Billy Wright, that handed in its guns to be cut up and destroyed before the television cameras. Even then, 9 guns, 350 bullets, 2 pipe-bombs and 6 detonators was hardly a terrorist arsenal.14 The exercise was supervised by General de Chastelain and the IICD. At least it showed that the ‘modalities’ were in place and the exercise could be done. But there was no sign of the IRA following suit. As the guns were being ground down, agreement was reached at Stormont on the specific responsibilities of the ten-department Executive and six cross-border bodies. But without some resolution of the decommissioning impasse, the Executive only existed on paper.
Sinn Fein’s Chairman, Mitchel McLaughlin – probably looking over his shoulder at the ‘Real’ and Continuity IRA – warned that even a token gesture on decommissioning could destabilize the IRA leadership, with unpredictable consequences. Above all, the Republican Movement feared that any move would trigger a more serious split in i
ts ranks and provide the republican dissidents with a windfall of recruits. That it could not afford. Martin McGuinness, not wishing to close every option, said that decommissioning should be dealt with ‘down the road’. He gave no indication how long that road would be. Tony Blair stood by his First Minister, demanding that the IRA should begin handing over its weapons if Sinn Fein was to join the Executive. ‘People have got to know if they are sitting down with people who have given up violence for good,’ he said.15 With the arrival of the first anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, prisoners continued to flow out of the Maze – by this time, 131 republican and 118 loyalists had been released – but there was still no sign of weapons flowing from their organizations’ stockpiles. The main loyalist paramilitaries of the UDA/UFF and UVF had indicated to General de Chastelain that they were prepared to decommission in principle but only in response to moves from the IRA. The feeling amongst unionists a year after the Agreement was that they had given everything and got nothing back in return, which gave David Trimble little room for political manoeuvre.
As the spring of 1999 arrived, the British and Irish Governments decided it was time for their personal intervention lest all that had been achieved on Good Friday was lost. They arrived at Hillsborough Castle, rolled up their sleeves again and settled in for another marathon session with the parties who had signed up to the Good Friday Agreement. What emerged became known as the Hillsborough Agreement. There was to be ‘a collective act of reconciliation’ which would see ‘some arms put beyond use on a voluntary basis’, to be verified by General John de Chastelain’s IICD. Then ‘around the time’ of this collective act, which would also involve ceremonies of remembrance for all victims of the conflict, the new Northern Ireland Government would be formed, with Sinn Fein taking up its two ministerial posts, and full powers devolved from Westminster. The Agreement would then be fully implemented.16 But, however fine the time-scale, this compromise still involved ‘guns before government’ and Sinn Fein rejected it out of hand, describing it as ‘a massive change’ and ‘an unacceptable departure from the commitments given on Good Friday 1998’.