by Ed Moloney
To say, however, that violent republicanism was the predominant sentiment among Northern Ireland’s Catholics would be wrong. By far the bulk of them supported constitutionalist politicians, principally the conservative and strongly pro–Catholic Church Nationalist Party. Support for the IRA was a minority activity; membership was even more so. Nevertheless there was a republican tradition in Northern Ireland, and by the standards of early postwar Belfast the Adams family were in its blue-blood line. It was this political lineage that would ordain what the newborn Gerry Adams would do in life. As the infant Gerry grew up, he was surrounded by relatives who had fought, been jailed, and, in the case of his father, even shot for the cause of Irish freedom. The IRA—its traditions, history, and values—was imbibed with his mother’s milk.
His paternal grandfather, also called Gerry, had been in the highly secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the forerunner of the IRA commanded by the legendary guerrilla leader Michael Collins, during the Anglo-Irish war. His father, Gerry Adams Sr., joined the IRA as a sixteen-year-old and in 1942 was sentenced to an eight-year jail term after an IRA ambush of members of the predominantly Protestant police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), went badly wrong and he was felled by three bullets. Two paternal uncles, Dominic and Patrick, had been interned without trial because of their IRA sympathies, one by the government in Dublin, the other by its Unionist counterpart in Belfast. For a short period prior to the Second World War, Dominic Adams had held the highest rank in the IRA, that of chief of staff, a position his nephew was later to occupy, also briefly but with much more effect.
His mother’s family, the Hannaways, had a similar history. His maternal great-grandfather, Michael Hannaway, had been a member of the Fenian movement, which bombed England in the 1860s and 1870s. His grandfather, Billy Hannaway, was Eamon de Valera’s election agent when the hero of the 1916 Easter Rising ran for election in West Belfast in 1918. Later he broke with him when de Valera became a constitutional politician.
Adams’s mother was a member of the women’s branch of the IRA, the Cumann na mBan;1 she was a “staunch republican,” her son was to write many years later.2 Three of her brothers—Tommy, Liam, and Alfie—were IRA stalwarts in the city. Uncle Liam Hannaway was to play a crucial part in steering the young Gerry Adams toward the Provisional IRA, while Uncle Alfie, a leading light all his life in the IRA’s boy scouts movement, the na Fianna Eireann, was a daily communicant at Clonard Monastery, in the heart of West Belfast, helping to establish a relationship between the Adams family and Clonard’s Redemptorist priests which proved pivotal many years later when the Irish peace process began.
The Adams and Hannaway families may have been seen as republican aristocrats, but that was only among their own small rebellious circle. In the wider world they were members of a beleaguered minority that had more often tasted isolation and defeat for their dedication to Ireland’s cause. In the Northern Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s very few Catholics were in the IRA or indeed knew much about it. Many were deterred from having anything to do with it by the knowledge that any display of IRA sympathies would be sure to invite the hostile attention of the fledgling unionist government’s security agencies, in particular the RUC Special Branch, a detective force that specialized in monitoring political opponents of the Protestant-dominated state.
A draconian law, called the Special Powers Act (SPA), gave the authorities exceptional powers to arrest, detain without trial, and suppress political dissent. So severe were its penalties, which included the death penalty for some firearms offenses, flogging, and the confiscation and destruction of property, that a South African prime minister during the apartheid era once famously remarked that he would swap all his emergency laws for one clause of the SPA.3 On top of conventional forces, the first unionist government had created an armed paramilitary force, known as the B Specials, manned by thousands of pro-British Protestant supporters, which could be mobilized in emergencies to put down armed revolt. In peacetimes they kept a wary eye on their Catholic neighbors.
Unionism was an ideology that thrived on a sense of siege. Even the creation of a state whose gerrymandered border guaranteed unionists virtually permanent majority rule could not overcome a deep political psychosis. Fear of retribution from their downtrodden and disenfranchised Irish Catholic neighbors was possibly the most potent single factor in their political makeup. It had haunted the Protestants since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when English monarchs like Elizabeth I, anxious to create a loyal buffer in rebellious Catholic Ireland, confiscated native-held land in the northeastern part of the island nearest to Britain, in the province of Ulster, and gave it to trustworthy, loyal Protestant planters imported from Scotland and England. Deep inside, many of the planters were terrified at the thought that one day the native Irish would take their revenge and their land back, a communal dread that has survived the centuries.
The idea behind the plantation of Ulster was to make invasion of Protestant England by Catholic France or Spain via Ireland that much more difficult. It was the first expression by England that the occupation and colonization of Ireland served to advance its wider strategic and military interests. But serving England’s interests created a poisonous mix of sectarian and political division that was to shape and deform Irish politics for centuries.
Even in the 1940s and 1950s, when Gerry Adams was growing up, many unionists still looked upon their Catholic fellow countrymen in much the same way as white settlers in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American West had viewed the Sioux or Apache or the South African Boer his Bantu servants—that is, with a mixture of fear, guilt, ignorance, and hatred.
The actual threat that the IRA posed to the new state in Northern Ireland was more debatable, especially when the appetite for militant policies south of the Border waned and with it sympathy for the Northern nationalists’ plight. Once the 1921 partition settlement had taken root, and especially as Catholic Church influence on the infant Irish Free State tightened, the commitment of Southern republicans to dismantling the Border and freeing Ireland became increasingly rhetorical. As the years passed and they developed their own set of economic and social priorities, the two states in Ireland gradually drifted apart and there was a consequent decline in Southern enthusiasm for the IRA’s aims.
A key event in this journey was de Valera’s decision in 1926, just five years after the Treaty had been signed, to end the IRA’s armed struggle and embrace parliamentary politics. De Valera’s supporters had opposed the Treaty and fought a bitter civil war against Michael Collins’s forces but had been soundly beaten. Eventually de Valera persuaded most of the IRA to abandon violence—as Gerry Adams was later to do in his day—brought them into his new Fianna Fail party, and eventually entered government. A die-hard rump, from which the modern IRA sprang, refused to compromise and, accusing de Valera of betraying the freedom struggle, vowed to continue the fight. In the North, nationalists and republicans increasingly felt abandoned.
Although Fianna Fail discarded objectionable aspects of the 1921 Treaty settlement, such as the oath of allegiance to the British monarch, de Valera eventually took as tough a line against the recalcitrant IRA as any of his predecessors. The IRA was often divided and at times spectacularly incompetent, but Northern unionists liked to imagine that the IRA was a much more potent threat, that it was an organization swollen with thousands of members, armed to the teeth, just waiting for the word to attack. The truth was much more prosaic. At the time of the arrest of Gerry Adams’s father, for instance, the IRA in Belfast could barely muster three hundred members and was poorly armed.4 Even so, the unionist government did not hesitate to use its formidable powers at any sign or hint of a threat. Sometimes, such as during the “Hungry Thirties,” when unemployment rates soared as high as 25 percent, the unionist government found the IRA specter a successful way of scaring its supporters away from cross-community, left-wing politics. Either way, life was made uncomfortable for those Catholic
s tempted to dabble in the IRA. Republican suspects were regularly arrested and occasionally interned, and detailed records kept of likely sympathizers. Parades, marches, and other expressions of support for the IRA were often banned and the organizers pursued.
Gerry Adams’s father became a victim of this system in 1942 after a ban was slapped on the republican parade to Milltown cemetery in West Belfast, an annual event to remember the IRA dead of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. An effort by the IRA to divert police away from the cemetery so that a brief procession could take place failed, and there was a short, sharp exchange of gunfire between the IRA men and the RUC during which one policeman was killed. The six-man IRA unit was captured and sentenced to death, but after pleas and protests, including an intervention from Pope Pius XII, only one of their number, Tom Williams, the officer commanding the unit, was hanged. When the IRA decided to protest against Williams’s execution in September that year with further attacks, Gerry Adams Sr. was shot and arrested.
Those who joined the IRA faced other pressures. If they were caught and convicted, a record of their imprisonment would be stamped on their employment records, with the result that republicans often found it difficult to get work even after they had severed all links with the organization. Gerry Adams Sr. was denied entry to Australia with his family because of his prison record. Others discovered they had been declared “politically suspect” even though they had done nothing wrong.5 Many were forced to emigrate to England or the United States or to move south to Dublin in search of a living.
Not surprisingly, involvement in the IRA was confined to a few. Nationalists in Northern Ireland may have secretly supported the aims for which the IRA fought even if they had qualms about its methods, but very few would go so far as to join. The risks and potential burdens were too great.
The result was that republican involvement tended to be an inherited rather than an acquired activity. Gerry Adams’s background was a classic of its type. His parents, like those of many other republicans of this time, would pass on to their children their political views as well as a special, exclusive sense of shared suffering. The IRA in places like West Belfast, where the Adamses and Hannaways came from, grew heavily dependent on a small, often interrelated network of extended families.
West Belfast republicanism was dominated by three families: the Adamses, the Hannaways, and the Burnses. They were all intermarried, the consequence of the imprisonment of their male members. When figures like Gerry Adams Sr. emerged after having served their jail terms, they found girls of a marriageable age either already spoken for or reluctant to marry into the IRA. Inevitably they drifted into relationships with the sisters of their IRA comrades.
The family was always an iconic and powerful image for the Provisional IRA. Years later when the IRA’s war with Britain raged, the organization’s leaders would routinely refer to their supporters and members as “the Republican family.” Later during the peace process, when Sinn Fein organized gatherings to brief supporters on the latest developments, these were called “family meetings.” The image that was evoked, one of benevolent parents nurturing loving, obedient, but united children, was deliberate. And like children, the IRA’s supporters were not expected to ask too many awkward questions or disobey their elders; the leadership treated those who did in much the same way as a wayward son or daughter who had offended his or her parents.
One characteristic that the young Gerry Adams did share with his non-republican Catholic contemporaries was poverty, deprivation, and the consequences of state-sponsored anti-Catholic bigotry. In the one-party state that was Northern Ireland, Catholics routinely found themselves the victims of economic and social discrimination.
Anti-Catholicism was built into the state ideology and promoted by its leaders. On occasions unionist government ministers would urge their supporters to employ, wherever possible, only “good Protestant lads and lassies.”6 One prime minister, James Craig, famously described the parliament at Stormont, an extravagant neoclassical pile set on a hillside in East Belfast, from where he ruled Northern Ireland, as “a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant state.”7 There was little or no room in the new Northern Ireland state for Catholics.
The message was reinforced by occasional sectarian violence. Riots, burning, shootings, and bombings—carried out mostly by Protestant mobs—had been a regular feature of political life in the north of Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century, when Irish nationalists first began to agitate for Home Rule and a degree of separation from Britain.
In 1912 the unionists rebelled against the British when a Liberal government at Westminster threatened to grant Ireland Home Rule. Protestant leaders recruited and, with the support of British Conservative leaders in London, organized a private army that they called the Ulster Volunteer Force and threatened to resist Home Rule by armed force facilitated by thousands of rifles smuggled into the Ulster port of Larne from Germany. The first Irish paramilitary group, the first effort to import weaponry from Britain’s enemies, came not from Irish republicans but from people who loudly proclaimed their loyalty to Britain.
The Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21 brought fresh communal violence, as did the Treaty settlement when unionists faced the problem of stabilizing their new state. Previous manifestations of nationalist rebellion, such as the bids for Irish Home Rule in the 1880s, had been met with often terrible violence, and now that Northern Ireland’s political leaders were presented with the problem of constructing a political order that was opposed by up to a third of its citizens, they and their supporters in organizations such as the Orange Order turned to old, reliable methods. The early 1920s saw scores killed in riots, gun battles, and burnings; in the early 1930s violence erupted again. Catholics made up a disproportionate number of the fatalities.
Faced on the one hand by official state forces that regarded them as hostile and on the other by irregular Protestant mobs that often went on the rampage while the RUC and B Specials turned a collective blind eye, Catholics inevitably came to look on the IRA as a defensive force first and foremost.
The Northern Ireland that Gerry Adams was born into was a society in which most Catholics were at the bottom of the heap, at best tolerated, at worst regarded as a fifth column intent on undermining the state. The best-paid and most skilled jobs, such as those in the Belfast shipyards where the Titanic was built or in engineering factories like Shorts, went mostly to Protestants.
Years later, in the 1970s and 1980s, when official statistics were first recorded, this pattern of discrimination was confirmed. Catholics were found to be at least three times more likely to be unemployed than Protestants and disproportionately represented in the poorest-paid, least-skilled, and most insecure jobs.
To buttress their economic domination, Protestants banded together in a semisecret society known as the Orange Order. Founded in the eighteenth century by the Anglo-Irish middle classes, the Orange Order saw its primary role as resisting Catholic and radical Protestant demands for independence that were modeled on the French and American revolutions.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward industrialization transformed the north of Ireland and politics on the island as a whole. The desire to retain access to British markets fueled Protestant resistance to Irish independence, while the flood of rural Catholics into Belfast attracted by the new work opportunities brought competition with Protestants, and sectarian tensions rose.
As unionism developed into a coherent political ideology, the Orange Order, whose ranks were open only to those who had been born Protestant, acted as an umbrella under whose generous frame factory boss and factory worker could both find shelter. The order’s ranks swelled. Orangeism became an instrument of sectarian division and privilege. By the end of the 1940s, when Gerry Adams was taking his first, faltering steps, no unionist politician could aspire to elected office if he or she was not a member. The prime minister and all his cabinet were usually Orangemen. Huge parades of Orangemen were held annually on the Twelfth of Ju
ly. These would see tens of thousands of men wearing bowler hats and orange sashes marching in formation in Belfast and elsewhere behind military-style bands to celebrate the victory at the Battle of the Boyne by the Protestant King William over the Catholic King James in 1690. The Williamite triumph was a major event in British and European history, but by the middle of the twentieth century these annual celebrations had become archaic and incomprehensible to the outside world. They were, though, demonstrations of Protestant domination, designed to remind Catholics of their subordinate place in the political, social, and economic order.
Gerry Adams’s parents were not untypical of many Catholics of the day. His mother, Annie, was a doffer, replacing spools of thread in one of the dozens of linen mills that dotted West Belfast, while his father, when he was not unemployed, was an unskilled building laborer. Although the Catholic working class was large, for the first thirty to forty years of partition the Catholic middle class was inconsequential, confined to a few thousand schoolteachers, bar owners, and lawyers who serviced mostly their own communities.
The Catholic clergy held a disproportionate sway over their flock. Once the unionist government handed over control of non-state schools to the Irish hierarchy, the Catholic Church’s interest in the status quo became almost as strong as that of the unionist cabinet. Most Catholics, including the young Gerry Adams and most of his contemporaries, had little chance of rising much above their appointed place in life.