A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  At the next level there were regular meetings in Belfast between the IRA Executive members Jimmy Drumm and Proinsias MacAirt and British officials that were held at a British government house called Laneside, in the affluent County Down seaside town of Hollywood. The Laneside talks happened quite frequently, much more often than the highest level of talks that were held in Derry between Army Council delegates, O Bradaigh and McKee, and senior officials from the Northern Ireland Office (NIO). One authoritative account of the contacts depicts the British as quite open about their wish to withdraw but reluctant to spell out the details, even resorting to evasion in response to IRA questions.9 There were constant squabbles and complaints about breaches of the terms of the cease-fire by either side. The British could produce only one piece of evidence to support the notion that they wanted to be out of Northern Ireland, and that was the exclusion from British plans to nationalize the shipbuilding company of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic had been built some sixty-five years before. Nonetheless the Army Council perservered.

  The British failure to make good on the secret promises gave the Adams camp powerful ammunition. The allegation he and his allies leveled was simple: the Army Council had been fooled into taking part in bad-faith negotiations and tricked into calling a cease-fire that was designed to last so long that it seriously eroded the IRA’s fighting ability. The result was that the British were given a breathing space in which to devise ways of inflicting even more damage on the IRA. With IRA members relaxing visibly as the cease-fire dragged on, the British built up their intelligence on the organization in preparation for major changes in security policy, the central feature of which was that control of operations against the IRA passed from the British military to the Royal Ulster Constabulary and a new emphasis was put on legal methods to put IRA members behind bars. The use of internment was phased out, and instead more conventional judicial methods were employed, primarily the processing of IRA suspects through the courts, albeit courts that had no juries and in which verdicts and sentences, fashioned by a barrage of new antiterrorist laws, were handed down by a single judge. The change affected the prisons as well; special-category status, which had been granted to IRA prisoners as part of the 1972 cease-fire deal and which recognized a political motive for paramilitary activity, was scrapped, and instead IRA inmates were to be officially regarded and treated as common criminals.

  The British strategy was known variously as Ulsterization, normalization and criminalization, but whichever word was used the result was the same. The British had put in place a system that, from 1976 onward, saw IRA suspects trundled along a sort of conveyor belt that began with arrest and lengthy questioning in new RUC interrogation centers where confessions would be extracted, often amid claims of brutality. The next stage was in the courts, where, despite their often dubious integrity, the confessions were invariably accepted, and the last stage was in the Maze prison, the renamed and rebuilt Long Kesh camp but soon known to the world as the H Blocks, where IRA prisoners were to be treated in the same way as thieves and rapists. The new security policy cut swaths into the IRA, bringing it to the verge of defeat. The fault for this, the Adams camp was to insist, belonged to those who had negotiated the cease-fire.

  Terrifying and cold-blooded loyalist violence, most of it directed at ordinary Catholics, particularly in Belfast, was the second result of the 1974–75 cease-fire. Unnerved by the IRA’s contacts with the British, loyalist paramilitary groups began murdering Catholics in an often gruesome fashion and in a way that challenged the Provisionals’ claim to be the defenders of their community. As the loyalist killing increased, the pressure to hit back in like manner intensified.

  The loyalists’ logic was terrifyingly simple: the more Catholics they killed and the more horrible the manner of their deaths, the stronger the pressure would be on the IRA to stop its activities. The cease-fire was the trigger for the bloodshed. When the British and the IRA announced the terms of their truce, the loyalist groupings, especially the UVF, reacted with unusual violence. Within seven days they had killed five Catholics, and many more were to follow.

  AS 1975 UNFOLDED, Northern Ireland, and Belfast in particular, entered what is arguably the darkest period of the Troubles, nearly two years of slaughter in which the loyalists and the IRA vied with each other in an often indiscriminate sectarian killing game, the latter refusing to admit its activities or seeking refuge behind fictitious cover names, the former glorying openly and proudly in the carnage. These were the years that saw the rise of chilling loyalist gangs with names like the Shankill Butchers, a group of UVF killers who specialized in cutting their victims to death with surgically sharp knives and axes. The IRA responded with bombings of Protestant pubs that invariably killed uninvolved civilians. Increasingly the IRA imitated the loyalists by kidnapping and killing innocent Protestants. The violence spread to rural areas of Tyrone and Armagh, where IRA members using cover names such as the South Armagh Republican Action Force to disguise their bloody deeds enthusiastically joined the slaughter. By the end of 1976 loyalists had killed nearly 250 people, most of them innocent Catholics, while 150 Protestants, similarly unconnected to those who were directing the murder campaign, had also met violent deaths, a majority of them at the hands of the IRA, however disguised or renamed.10

  The upsurge in loyalist killing put the IRA in a quandary. To respond in kind threatened to drag republican values into the gutter, making a nonsense of IRA claims to be a nonsectarian movement in the tradition of the Protestant founder of republicanism, Wolfe Tone. Yet if the Provisionals stood aside, this would be to deny the atavistic forces that had brought them into being in the first place, the need to defend their streets and communities. Most Provisionals agreed, some with less enthusiasm than others, with the view of one IRA leader of the day: “Republicans had to hit back at the Loyalists. It was as simple as that. They were slaughtering the Nationalists. There was no other way round it.”11

  The Adams camp chose to see things in a more negative light and courtesy of the same conspiratorial prism through which they had viewed the arrests of Hughes and Bell and the treacherous activities of Eamon Molloy and Vincent Heatherington. The sectarian warfare, they claimed, was being sponsored by the British, whose aim was to pull the IRA into a brutal but diverting tribal conflict in which the British could depict themselves as “the piggy in the middle,” as neutral arbiters, whose only interest was to stop the irrational violence of mad Irishmen. For this state of affairs Billy McKee, the defender of St. Matthew’s and once again Belfast commander, was held to blame. His motives were regarded as beyond justification. “McKee just wanted to get into a war with the Orangies,” concluded one of the Adams camp at the time.12

  The third consequence of the cease-fire was an outbreak of vicious feuding between rival republican groups, a hangover from the split of 1969, but something the Adams camp also maintained to be in the British interest. Billy McKee was, in their mind, guilty of allowing the IRA to get involved in sectarian killings, and they blamed him for the feuding as well. The worst piece of internecine slaughter between Provisionals and Officials broke out in Belfast at the end of October 1975. It started with around a dozen attacks mounted by the Provisionals in the course of an evening during which one member of the Official IRA was killed and sixteen were wounded. Up to ninety Provisional IRA members were said to have been involved in the night’s violence. The feud ended a fortnight later with a total of eleven dead, including a six-year-old girl, fatally shot during an attack aimed at her father, a member of the Official IRA. Feuds between the Provisionals and the Officials were not unknown, but this was by far the most serious outbreak of such violence. McKee justified the attacks by arguing that the Officials were acting as an arm of the British in areas controlled by the Provisionals, passing on information about IRA activists, facilitating British community policies, and undermining Provo influence. But the feud, coming on top of the loyalist onslaughts, was deeply demoralizing insid
e nationalist areas, and Adams seized on this to criticize McKee, as he later recorded: “Republican feuding contributed significantly to feelings of alienation on the part of the Nationalist people, who had long provided the essential support for the IRA. It also coincided and dovetailed with a sustained British propaganda campaign to portray IRA members as ‘common criminals.’”13

  The long-standing hostility between Adams and McKee, which had its roots in the Ballymurphy riots of 1970, came bursting to the surface again but this time in surrogate form. Even so, the dispute can with hindsight be seen as the first shot fired by Adams in his campaign to oust McKee and to engineer his takeover of the republican movement.

  The target chosen by Adams was David Morley, the commander of IRA prisoners in Long Kesh. The former leader of the Provisional IRA in the County Down Border town of Newry, Morley took over the job of camp commandant from McKee just prior to McKee’s release in the autumn of 1974. The two men were on close terms, and when McKee assumed command of the Belfast Brigade and rejoined the Army Council, Morley became the principal point of contact between the leadership and the Long Kesh prisoners.

  Largely because of McKee’s patronage, Morley had been elected camp commander by the rank and file in the jail, but his style was not universally popular. “Morley came from a British army background and ran the prison, much as McKee had done, on very militaristic lines,” remembered one former IRA prisoner who supported the Adams line. “There were roll calls, parades, tight discipline, and so on, all of which rankled with many people, especially young lads. Morley introduced a new IRA salute, two salutes to the head rather than one, so as to distinguish the IRA from the British army. Staff members wore Sam Browne belts and a holster with a wooden gun stuck in it.” Adams would describe it all as a cross between George Orwell and Spike Milligan.14

  To the astonishment of many in the camp, Morley told the prisoners that McKee wanted them to scrap existing escape plans and not to bother hatching any more. “The Army Council told us that we were all going to get out, internees and sentenced men,” recalled one former prisoner. “First there would be 50 percent remission, then two-thirds, then all out.”15 This was, the Morley-McKee critics complained, the ultimate in naïveté for at the same time this advice was being given, the IRA leadership was fully aware that the British were planning the construction of a brand-new prison, the H Blocks, to house IRA inmates. Morley had toured the first H Blocks, so named after the shape of the cell wings, and could see they were intended for something much more permanent. He was also allowed out of the jail on parole for talks with Jimmy Drumm and with British officials. “Mixing at this level with senior Brits went to his head,” suggested one critic.16

  Morley’s elevation coincided with changes to Adams’s own prison circumstances. He had initially been housed in the internee section of Long Kesh, in Cage 6, which he shared with some one hundred other inmates in three huts. But after two unsuccessful escape attempts, Adams was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and was moved to the sentenced-prisoner section of the camp, into Cage 11. Coincidentally, hostility to the leadership line had been growing over the cease-fire and the leadership style in jail; a large number of prisoners had been suspended from the IRA for disputing Morley’s authority. When Adams arrived in Cage 11, it was decided that a challenge should be made against the camp leadership, and Ivor Bell ran against Morley in the election for camp commander and fared surprisingly well. “The purpose of the exercise was to show there was unease with what was happening,” recalled an Adams supporter. Morley won but by a margin of just a handful of votes. Adams later stood in a separate poll and again ran Morley close, so close that the result badly scared the IRA leadership.17

  One outcome of the election was that the Army Council changed the rules governing the selection of prison OC. From then on the rank-and-file IRA inmates could nominate whomever they liked, but there would be no election. Instead the Army Council would choose the commander it wanted out of the list of candidates submitted by the prisoners. The idea was to prevent splits from coming out into the open, but it enormously strengthened the leadership’s hand in the jail; ironically, this was later to greatly benefit Adams when he assumed control of the IRA and wanted to be sure of the loyalties of the prison leadership. Although he had been a victim of the change, he made no alteration in the rule when he and his allies assumed control of the IRA.

  From early 1975 until Adams’s release in February 1977, two cages in Long Kesh were the focus for dissident criticism of the leadership in Dublin. One was Cage 11, where first Adams and then Brendan Hughes was OC, and Cage 9, commanded by Ivor Bell. But as the new British security strategy swung into action and the Castlereagh conveyor belt gathered speed, disgorging more and more IRA members into prison, Cages 11 and 9 also became think tanks devoted to planning new structures and policies designed to rescue the IRA from what every activist, inside and outside the jails, could see was imminent defeat.

  The period was vividly symbolized by the British Labour government’s choice for Northern Ireland secretary in 1976, a blunt and diminutive former coal miner called Roy Mason, who saw his job in simple terms. He had come to Belfast not to indulge in dangerous political experiments like power-sharing but to crush the IRA. In one of his earliest public pronouncements he delighted unionists with a promise to roll up the IRA like “a tube of toothpaste.” And such was the initial success of the new police interrogation centers at Castlereagh, at Strand Road in Derry, and at Gough Barracks in Armagh in extracting confessions from IRA Volunteers that he felt strong enough to predict, “My view is that [the IRA’s] strength has waned to the point where they cannot sustain a campaign.”18 The security statistics appeared to support his boast. The death toll for 1977 went down to 116, about a third of what it had been the year before. Even though this reflected a lower level of loyalist activity, there was no doubt IRA operational capacity was being undermined. Shooting incidents in 1977 were down 45 percent from 1976 and bombings by more than half.19

  IRA MEN have always used their time in prison well. After the 1916 Rising in Dublin the defeated rebels were jailed in Britain, and one of their leaders, a young Michael Collins, used the time, leisure, and opportunity provided by his spell in the Frongoch internment camp in Wales to restructure the Irish Republican Brotherhood in preparation for the coming conflict with Britain. Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell, and Brendan Hughes spent their days in Long Kesh sixty years later doing something remarkably similar for the Provisional IRA. There was one major difference, however. The ideas produced in Cages 11 and 9, many of which Adams outlined in a lengthy report to the IRA leadership in 1976, were more than a rescue plan for the IRA; they were also a blueprint for his takeover of the movement. Their significance does not stop there. Within the plans can also be found the seeds of what, only a few years later, would become the Irish peace process, although it is doubtful if any of those responsible for drawing them up could see that at the time.

  The conceptual foundation stone of the takeover plan was the doctrine that the war against the British was going to be a long-drawn-out affair and that the heady days of 1972, when the IRA could realistically imagine forcing a speedy military defeat on the British, were gone forever. As with other controversial ideas, Adams employed junior allies to float the notion first, a ploy that allowed him to gauge grassroots reaction before declaring his own hand. In this instance his choice was Danny Morrison, a bright young West Belfast IRA member who had been interned but then released as part of the 1975 cease-fire deal. Morrison, who had initially backed the McKee leadership against Adams and then switched sides, eventually replaced Daithi O Conaill as the IRA’s director of publicity and went on to become a strong ally of Adams on the Army Council.

  One IRA activist of the mid-1970s can remember when Morrison first expounded Adams’s “long war” doctrine.

  He was the first I heard it from sometime in 1975. We had one or two mini- [IRA] Conventions, one in Clare and one in Donegal involving twe
nty-five or thirty of the top people, and Morrison was saying we have sold the people a false bill of goods with slogans like ‘Victory in 74!’ and so on. People were getting cynical, and we would have to say instead that it is a long war. It grated with a lot of us. None of us believed it would be a long war. We were of the opinion that we could win it, we could force the Brits to pull out. We were young and in our twenties, we had seen the fall of Stormont, burned down the British embassy in Dublin, ran the Brits ragged in the countryside. We were of a generation that had seen Saigon fall and the U.S. defeated in Southeast Asia.20

  The “long war” became IRA policy, but estimates of just how long the Long War would have to last varied enormously. Writing in the Belfast IRA paper under the pen name Brownie, Adams envisaged the conflict lasting for just seven more years, that is, until 1983.21 But privately he and his allies talked of a twenty-year conflict.

  Whatever the reservations, the “long war” doctrine was really just a statement of the obvious. Roy Mason had nearly defeated the IRA, and it was going to take years of careful rebuilding before it would again be in a position to challenge the British, if ever. The signal that this had been formally accepted by the Army Council as IRA policy came only four months after Adams’s release from Long Kesh, at the Bodenstown commemoration of June 1977, the highlight of the republican calendar. Adams’s choice of speaker to give the address sent its own signal. Jimmy Drumm, who had been one of the senior IRA figures involved in the secret Laneside dialogue, climbed the podium beside Wolfe Tone’s grave to declare that he and the other leaders associated with the 1974–75 cease-fire had all been wrong. In a script composed by Adams and Morrison, Drumm declared, “The British government is not withdrawing from the Six Counties. Indeed the British government is committed to stabilising [them] and is pouring in vast sums of money… to assure loyalists and to secure from loyalists, support for a long haul against the IRA.”22