A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The most important and meaningful part of the restructuring scheme was also its most controversial. Adams proposed the division of the IRA into two separate geographical entities. A Northern Command would be set up, comprising the six counties of Northern Ireland and five Border counties in the Irish Republic (Louth, Cavan, Monaghan, Leitrim, and Donegal), an area that coincided with what was effectively the war zone where military operations were planned and carried out. A separate Southern Command was proposed in the remaining twenty-one counties that would specialize in providing the logistics necessary for conducting the campaign in the North. The Southern Command would supply three essential elements: most of the IRA’s arsenals would be hidden there, most of the “factories” churning out homemade explosives and the IRA’s often ingenious improvised weaponry would be based there, and so would the organization’s training camps, often situated in isolated mountainous countryside or in underground firing ranges painstakingly excavated in lonely farmland and forests.

  Important though these functions were, there is little doubt that the proposal for a Northern Command would herald a significant switch in the internal balance of power. The IRA’s principal business was to fight a war against British forces in Northern Ireland, and those who controlled how that war was conducted—and those who appointed them—would inevitably wield the greatest influence in the organization. The Northern Command would have its own staff, which would shadow that in GHQ, which promptly lost its responsibility for conducting operations in the North and was thus weakened. Thereafter GHQ’s direct military role was confined to the IRA’s international activities, principally in Britain and Europe. The construction of a Northern Command would make the position of Northern commander one of the most important positions in the organization. Not least of the Northern commander’s powers would be that of having a major say—in later years the final say— in deciding who became brigade commanders and who made up their staff.

  The idea of creating a Northern Command was always going to be a contentious proposal, and so it was, especially with older republicans who had bitter memories of the last time, aside from the brief period before and after the 1969 split, when the Northern and Southern parts of the IRA had gone their separate ways. A Northern Command, composed of the six Northern Ireland counties and County Donegal, was established in 1939 just after the outbreak of the Second World War when cross-Border communication difficulties made the change necessary. The IRA had begun a bombing campaign in England around the same time, but within two years arrests by the British police had brought it to a halt. The IRA in the South, meanwhile, was enfeebled by arrests and arms seizures. The police forces in Ireland and Britain clearly had good intelligence, which the Northern commander, Sean McCaughey, and his allies suspected was being supplied by a traitor in the Dublin leadership. They kidnapped the chief of staff, the Wexford man Stephen Hayes, and held him for several weeks, during which time he was tortured, starved, and repeatedly questioned about failed operations and alleged Garda successes. After a court-martial, which predictably convicted and sentenced him to death, Hayes was forced to write out a lengthy confession. He managed to drag this out until an opportunity arose to escape. Hayes turned himself in to the Gardai and survived the ordeal, but McCaughey was captured and later died on a hunger and thirst strike. The Hayes affair and its consequences deeply divided the IRA on North–South lines. Many activists of the day blamed the Northern Command experiment for the acrimony and vowed never to repeat it.

  The “Forties men” were the strongest opponents of Adams’s proposal, among them Joe Cahill, Proinsias MacAirt, and Billy McKee, who was probably the most bitterly against the idea. Their common fear was that a Northern Command would precipitate a split. But Seamus Twomey, the chief of staff and, in the words of one IRA militant, “Adams’s pet Rottweiler,”34 backed the proposal, and Brian Keenan did the rest. Most of Belfast supported the idea, as did Martin McGuinness in the Derry Brigade, while Keenan, still the IRA’s QMG, won over crucial middle leadership people in three other vital areas, South Derry, East Tyrone, and South Armagh. Keenan’s argument was simple: a Northern Command would be responsive to the needs of the men who were fighting the war. “He told us we wouldn’t have to wait to see someone from Kerry,” explained a Northern activist. “We asked would a Northern Command mean that we would get more gear, and Keenan would say bigger, better, longer guns and then it was okay.”35

  Another rural Northern IRA member takes up the story:

  Adams was still in jail at this time, so Keenan was really the John the Baptist to Adams’s Christ. Into our midst during our perennial quest for gear would come Brian Keenan. Unlike other leaders he was an activist. He would arrive in jeans and denim jacket and would sleep in the ditches along with the Volunteers. He was good fun, clever, likable and would always arrive with a bit of gear wrapped up in plastic, fifty or a hundred rounds for some weapon. Brian could always turn up stuff for esoteric weapons. I remember we had a Chinese version of the AK-47 called the SKS, which used short 7.62 mm ammo as opposed to the British-NATO standard long round, and he got some for us. He would sit and talk things over with us; we’d go and get a carryout to eat; he charmed us and won us over.36

  Keenan and Adams were knocking at an open door, and the establishment of the Northern Command became a foregone conclusion. In late 1976 a meeting of the Revolutionary Council passed a resolution recommending to the Army Council that the change be made; faced with the united voice of the fighting units in the North, the Army Council had little choice but to agree. Martin McGuinness was appointed the first Northern commander but on Billy McKee’s insistence the powerful Belfast Brigade was excluded from the new arrangement. McKee was still OC of Belfast Brigade, albeit hanging on by his fingertips, and correctly saw Northern Command as an effort by the Adams camp to extend their power base. Only when Ivor Bell took over from McGuinness, when he was appointed chief of staff in early 1978 in succession to Gerry Adams, was Belfast integrated into Northern Command.

  The creation of the Northern Command had important and long-lasting consequences for the IRA. Not only did it facilitate coordinated Northern Ireland-wide attacks and make rapid alterations in military tactics more feasible, it established and refined central control over the IRA’s cutting edge. This was especially the case outside Belfast in militant areas like East Tyrone and South Armagh where the local IRAs were really under the control of clan chieftains—Kevin Mallon in Tyrone and later Tom “Slab” Murphy in South Armagh were examples—rather than part of a structured, centrally directed organization. “The leadership would never try to give them orders,” recalled a rural activist. “There was virtually no control from the center. They mounted operations against the British, and the job of leadership was to provide resources, training guns, explosives, etc. You just could not guarantee that they would vote at a Convention for the leadership’s political strategy. That independence all but disappeared with the Northern Command.”37 Creation of the Northern Command marked a vital staging post on the road to Adams’s establishing control not just of the IRA’s military tactics but of its political direction as well.

  The new structure also standardized the IRA in another important way. Prior to the Northern Command each area in the North had organized its own training camps and procedures. Separate camps had existed for Belfast, Tyrone, Derry, and Armagh IRA units, but after the change training was centralized and procedures regularized and, inevitably, improved. This development had its negative side. If a training camp was stumbled upon or betrayed to the Garda, Special Branch surveillance would now reveal much more about the IRA than before.

  There were other adverse consequences from the creation of the new body. The IRA lost a great deal of the spontaneity and unpredictability that had made it such a difficult quarry to corner in the early 1970s. After Northern Command was set up, Adams sent emissaries throughout the countryside to propound the new gospel, with the result in some instances that well-protected safe houses were
revealed and local command structures disclosed to outsiders. Some areas were forced to share hitherto jealously guarded technology. The IRA in South Armagh, for instance, had developed radio-controlled bombs but had refused to allow other areas to use them, for fear that the British would capture them and work out countermeasures. Once the Northern Command was set up and the technology shared, that is precisely what happened.

  IN FEBRUARY 1977, after the best part of four years spent in the Long Kesh prison camp, Gerry Adams was released into the loving arms of Colette and Gearoid, his three-and-a-half-year-old son, who had been born while he was in jail. Adams had seen his young son grow up but only in the visiting rooms of the jail and under the watchful and often intrusive eyes of the prison guards, the hated “screws.” Now for the first time they could be a proper family, inasmuch as an IRA leader ever had a proper family life. Despite the risks associated with the IRA lifestyle, at least they knew that the fear of arrest no longer hung over the head of the family. The phasing out of internment meant that if the British wanted to put Adams back in jail, they would have to assemble a case that would pass the scrutiny of a court, even if it was one where only a single judge also acted as the jury.

  Adams could be well satisfied with the fruits of his work in jail. Given the agenda devised in Cage 11, the IRA had been set on a course that would have lasting consequences for Anglo-Irish politics and for Adams himself. Reorganized to revive its flagging military fortunes, the IRA now had a political program to guide it, one that would ultimately propel it into electoral politics. It also had a structure that would inexorably and increasingly concentrate control and power in the hands of Gerry Adams and those he chose to have around him.

  Adams did not emerge from Cage 11 and return to his IRA comrades empty-handed. As far as some Army Council members were concerned, the disastrous cease-fire of 1974–75 had been partly forced on the leadership by a weapons shortage in the Belfast Brigade area that was so severe that many doubted if the organization in the city could conduct anything approaching a sustained campaign. Within weeks of Adams’s release, however, a cache of sixty Armalite rifles, a batch smuggled by Irish-American sympathizers, was being distributed to grateful and astonished active-service units in the city. The sudden abundance of weaponry was credited to their released leader. To many activists, it seemed that Gerry Adams had not only the ideas to rescue the IRA from defeat but the means as well.

  What none of them could have known was that the Armalites had arrived in Belfast well before the weapons famine hit the IRA in the city, before the resulting cease-fire, and had been secreted in five sealed dumps under the supervision of Brian Keenan and hidden even from Eamon Molloy’s prying eyes. The weapons had been put aside in case of an upsurge in loyalist violence, but when Adams was arrested and imprisoned along with many of his brigade staff, and eventually replaced by Billy McKee and his allies, no one told the new Belfast leadership that the weapons existed. Had they known about the guns, it is almost certain that the pressure to call the cease-fire would have been considerably less than it was. And if there had been no cease-fire, Gerry Adams would have been deprived of the cause around which to build his bid for control of the IRA.38

  FIVE

  “Our Dreyfus”

  Gerry Adams’s release from Long Kesh was eagerly anticipated by the IRA in Belfast and in the rest of Ireland. It was clear to even the most junior Volunteer that the organization had lost its sense of direction by the spring of 1977, that it had come out of the cease-fire in a battered and damaged state, and that its leadership was largely directionless and bereft of new ideas. Defeat stared the IRA bleakly in the face, and it was to Gerry Adams and the group around him that republicans now looked for salvation. The grassroots were aware of the divisions inside the jail, knew of the critique Adams had made of the Army Council’s policies, but they also knew that he had a reputation for strategic innovation, and although only a few were privy to the detail of his plans, most expected Adams to come out of jail with some sort of blueprint for regeneration.

  He was supposed to go on a vacation south of the Border with his family immediately after his release from Cage 11, but within hours of being reunited with Colette, Gearoid, and the wider Adams clan in Ballymurphy, he changed his plans. Seamus Twomey, the IRA chief of staff, who was still in hiding in Dublin after his dramatic escape from Mountjoy jail, had sent a message summoning him to an urgent meeting. Adams had been able to communicate with Twomey and the Army Council from Long Kesh but only within limits. Written messages as well as the occasional typewritten document were smuggled out by visitors, and these had included a lengthy critique of the cease-fire and the state of the IRA that Adams had composed. His trip to Dublin after his release gave Twomey and Adams the first chance to discuss fully all the momentous events of the preceding four years and to bring Adams up to date on the implementation of the IRA reorganization plans hatched with Ivor Bell inside Long Kesh, not least the creation of Northern Command.

  By the end of 1977, less than a year after his release from Long Kesh, Adams had become chief of staff in succession to Twomey, but not before another spell as Belfast commander. Debilitated by the 1975 cease-fire and a series of security successes by the British, the Belfast Brigade had corroded badly under McKee’s stewardship. Both the quality and quantity of IRA operations in the city had seriously deteriorated and when McKee was finally ousted, Gerry Adams was drafted in to reorganize and revive the organization.

  Recapturing the Belfast Brigade from Billy McKee was an important milestone in Adams’s quest to dominate and mould the IRA nationally. In the late 1970s, as at the outset of the Troubles, Belfast was the engine for the IRA nationally. If the IRA in Belfast prospered so did the entire organization; if it faltered in the city, it faltered everywhere. And whoever dominated the IRA in Belfast, especially when it was doing well, inevitably carried huge clout in the national leadership.

  Following his release from jail, Adams was armed with a powerful critique of the McKee leadership and had crafted a far-reaching plan to revive the IRA. But he also encountered stiff resistance to his agenda, even from those who had been part of his circle before his arrest. The explanation was very simple. The McKee leadership had taken pains to ensure that their supporters were in key positions throughout the Belfast Brigade and elsewhere in the IRA. No matter how convincing Adams’s case was against the cease-fire leadership, it made little impact on men who owed their positions and status to that leadership. Adams had to move with guile and caution to advance his agenda.

  Assuming command of the Belfast Brigade brought Adams the breakthrough he needed. McKee’s allies in Belfast were removed and replaced with figures sympathetic to Adams and his reorganization plan. He also had the support of Seamus Twomey, the IRA’s chief of staff, who managed to get Adams on to the Army Council later in 1977. These developments paved the way for a decisive shift in the IRA’s direction that was cemented when Adams succeeded Twomey as the IRA’s military commander.

  By 1977 two important allies from the North had joined the Council, and they would greatly assist the project. One was Martin McGuinness, the Derry IRA commander, whose IRA career had been launched when he was talent-spotted by Daithi O Conaill in 1971, and Brian Keenan, who by 1977 was IRA quartermaster-general, in charge of acquiring, hiding and distributing the IRA’s weapons.

  McGuinness had spent much of the 1975 cease-fire either on the run across the Border or in Portlaoise prison, where he had been jailed after a conviction for IRA membership. Unlike Gerry Adams, he was not yet a national figure in the IRA but was known in Derry as a fearless and talented commander. Whereas Adams had a family history of association with the IRA, McGuinness’s parents were strong supporters of the old Nationalist Party and were typical of the vast majority of Catholics in a city never known for its adherence to the republican cause. Street violence, first involving the RUC and then the British army, had driven McGuinness into the IRA, initially the Goulding Officials, who had the gre
ater support in the Derry of 1969–70. Unhappy at the Officials’ military timidity, McGuinness switched to the Provisionals just before internment removed the bulk of its activists. He suddenly found himself a general in a tiny army, but one that quickly mushroomed in numbers as conflict with the British intensified.

  McGuinness had managed to stay out of the controversy caused by Cage 11’s campaign against the truce but had strongly supported Adams’s reorganization scheme and was rewarded with a place on the staff of the new Northern Command, first as operations officer (“double O,” in IRA parlance) and then as northern commander. Adams’s release and elevation to the Army Council meanwhile encouraged Keenan to abandon a long-standing reluctance to involve himself in the IRA leadership. Senior colleagues had often complained about Keenan’s repeated refusal to throw in his lot with them by joining either the Council or the IRA Executive, the twelve-person body whose main function was to select the Council’s members. But with Adams now on the Council, Keenan’s reservations dissolved. The effect of this crucial move was to strengthen Adams’s hand significantly.

  The rest of the Army Council was a different matter. All the key figures were either obstacles to Adams’s ascent or ideological foes. Two in particular, Daithi O Conaill and Ruairi O Bradaigh, were major roadblocks. In 1977 the pair were still powers in the republican movement despite widespread criticism of their handling of the truce. Both men had enthusiastically backed the cessation and had played leading roles in bringing it about and nurturing it, and when it failed Cage 11 blamed them. O Conaill had acted as spokesman for the Army Council when senior Irish and English Protestant clerics had met the IRA leaders in an isolated hotel in Feakle, County Clare, in December 1974 to broker the cease-fire terms. His importance to the cease-fire was recognized by the British, who chose to send messages down the clerical pipeline to the IRA via O Conaill rather than anyone else. O Bradaigh was a member of a three-man Army Council delegation that met secretly with British officials in Derry throughout the cessation. His commitment to a successful resolution of the IRA’s campaign was more personal. When asked by the Feakle clergymen why he wanted a settlement, O Bradaigh had replied that the war could consume a second generation if it wasn’t brought to a halt.1 There was no doubting the disappointment of both men when the cease-fire failed to secure the deal they had hoped for.