A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Notwithstanding that failure, O Conaill and O Bradaigh had an IRA record that ensured they had considerable support at grassroots level, particularly in the South, where they were well known and respected. If they had a weakness, it was that they were largely unknown quantities north of the Border, where the attentions of the British security forces meant it was too risky to circulate frequently among the rank and file. To most of those IRA activists who had joined since the early 1970s, they were distant figures, a weakness Adams would later exploit to his great advantage.

  Soon Adams would have two close allies by his side in the Army Council. One was his old Second Battalion and Belfast Brigade comrade Ivor Bell; the other was Danny Morrison, the republican movement’s able public relations guru and editor of Republican News, who first handled publicity relations for Northern Command and then became the IRA’s overall director of publicity. According to one account of this period, Adams, McGuinness, and Bell tightened their control of the Army Council by taking advantage of a clause in the IRA constitution that allowed the Council to co-opt people to fill vacancies in its ranks as long as the Executive ratified the appointment later. But in practice, knowledgeable sources say, no ratification was ever sought, a snub to the Executive that exacerbated internal divisions.

  As Adams and his allies consolidated their hold on the IRA leadership, Billy McKee emerged as the first target. McKee had become president of their Army Council during the 1975 cease-fire, a post separate from that of chief of staff, whose occupant normally fulfilled a plenipotentiary role on behalf of the leadership. Along with Ruairi O Bradaigh, he had led the secret Derry negotiations with British officials on behalf of the Army Council, and like O Bradaigh and O Conaill, he desperately wanted the cease-fire to work. A confirmed bachelor who lived with his elderly mother and later his sisters, McKee was a deeply religious man who attended Mass daily. A quiet talker, he was described by one of the Feakle clerics as looking “like a Baptist pastor or a Sunday school teacher.” The reason McKee gave the Protestant clergymen for wanting the cease-fire to succeed revealed much about his politics. “He was fed up with the fight because it was doing more harm to the Catholic Church than enough,” recalled one. “When [the war] started at first all the boys went to Mass, but now they weren’t going. He said, ‘I’m not fighting to destroy my church.’”2

  Adams’s attack on McKee centered on his direction of the IRA during the cease-fire, in particular alleging that he had encouraged the IRA to fight a sectarian war and to feud with other republican groups. McKee, the Adams camp said, had fallen into a double British trap. The sectarian killings allowed Britain to say that the Troubles were a communal conflict, not an anticolonial war, while the shooting wars with the Officials just spread demoralization in the nationalist community, something the British welcomed. It was the latter that provided the reason for Billy McKee’s fall.

  McKee’s approach to conflicts with Goulding’s Officials was simple, as an IRA activist of the day recalled: “His attitude was that ‘if any of my men are hit, I’ll hit back.’”3 The 1975 feud had claimed eleven lives, and scores more were injured. This and the killings of Protestants had enraged the Cage 11 dissidents. “When I first met Adams, he was very angry over what had been happening outside while he was in jail,” remembered the same IRA source. “He was pointing out that we started the ’75 feud. Yobos in the Provos would get drunk, start fights, and away you go, and we are supposed to be surprised when it started up. In that feud a score or more ‘Sticks’ shot in one and a half hours, then retaliations. Meanwhile 150 Catholics are killed by loyalists, more retaliations but no British being killed. It was a total waste.”4 The hostility toward McKee from the Cage 11 dissidents ran to such feverish levels that some even argued that they should arrange to get the Belfast commander shot dead.5

  While Adams and those who thought like him undoubtedly saw McKee as a political and military liability, he was still a formidable opponent. When Adams was released from Long Kesh, McKee still had iconic status among the IRA grassroots, particularly in Belfast. McKee had two strikes in his favor. He had helped to defend St. Matthew’s Church in East Belfast against a loyalist mob, and his long hunger strike had, in IRA eyes at least, secured political status for IRA prisoners in the jails. As long as Billy McKee still held a leadership position in the IRA, Adams’s ambitions would be stalled.

  The Revolutionary Council, the gathering of twenty to thirty IRA commanders and senior officers devised in Cage 11, was the instrument Adams used to purge McKee from the Army Council. McKee’s downfall began with yet another feud between the Officials and the Provisionals which broke out not long after Adams’s release from Cage 11.

  AT THE EASTER commemorations in Belfast on April 10, 1977, a parcel bomb exploded just as the Official IRA parade was about to leave for the republican plot at Milltown cemetery from the assembly point at Beechmount Avenue in the mid–Falls Road area. A ten-year-old boy whose father was a member of the Officials’ political wing, the Republican Clubs, was killed, and several other Official IRA members and sympathizers were injured. The Officials assumed that the Provisionals had placed the bomb, and they set out to exact revenge. When the Officials’ parade eventually arrived at the gates of Milltown, the Provisionals were just leaving and the angry crowds clashed. Violent fistfights broke out, and shots were fired. Later that afternoon the dead boy’s uncle was shot dead by the Provisionals, and others were wounded. The feuding was stemmed when Catholic priests mediated a settlement, but the bad feelings simmered on for weeks even when it became clear that it had been loyalists, members of the UVF’s notorious Shankill Butchers gang, who had planted the Beechmount bomb, not the Provisionals. Nevertheless, at the end of July the Provisionals struck again, when gunmen killed a top-ranking Official IRA officer from North Belfast. Over the next four hours three more people were killed, two of them Provisionals and one a civilian mistaken for a member of the Officials. The last to die was Adams’s old friend Tommy “Toddler” Tolan, who along with Jim Bryson had helped make the Ballymurphy IRA unit such a formidable outfit back in the early 1970s.

  His alleged failure to secure Army Council permission for striking against the Officials was the charge leveled against McKee at a Revolutionary Council meeting later that autumn. The accused IRA leader had no defense and appears to have been taken by surprise at the strength of the assault. According to one account McKee told the meeting that he could not remember the details of what had happened, and he was heavily criticized by one speaker after another, many of them members of the Adams camp. At a meeting of the Army Council held afterward, the censure continued, and he was out. Of the Council members present, only O Bradaigh spoke up for him. One version of what happened says that he resigned, another that he was asked to go.6

  Whatever the truth, Billy McKee’s days as an IRA leader were over, and he was badly affected by the experience. “I saw him the next morning, and he was a shrunken man,” recalled a GHQ member who was at the Revolutionary Council meeting.7 Shortly afterward he was admitted to hospital first in Belfast and then in Drogheda over the Border, and his illness was the official reason given to fellow republicans for his departure from the leadership.

  Adams had chosen the right issue on which to confront McKee. Had he criticized McKee for allowing the IRA to kill Protestants, the outcome might have been very different. While important IRA leaders, Twomey in particular, were ready to accept that feuding with the Officials played into British hands, striking back against the loyalists was a different matter. The truth was that many IRA leaders, particularly those from Belfast, found little wrong with McKee’s uncompromising attitude to the loyalist gangs and had raised no objection when the retaliations were at their worst in 1975 and 1976. “Twomey was all about protecting Belfast from the Prods,” explained one contemporary.8

  Adams’s criticism of the 1974–75 cease-fire was accompanied by promises that if he and his supporters had their way there would never be another cessation unless and u
ntil the British had committed to withdrawal, and it was this dual approach that appealed most to the Revolutionary Council. There had been a great deal of resentment within the republican grassroots at the way the 1974–75 cease-fire had been handled, and the Adams camp expertly exploited the unease. The IRA leadership had never spelled out the terms of the cease-fire or made public any of the promises allegedly made, and broken, by the British. Even the way the cease-fire had ended was never satisfactorily explained. Above all there was a suspicion that the Army Council had been tricked and manipulated by the British, who had used the breathing space afforded by the cease-fire to reorganize and refocus their drive against the IRA. The overwhelming sentiment after the truce among activists at all levels in the IRA was that never again must a cease-fire be called unless the IRA had the British on the rack. It was against this strident background and distaste for cease-fires that Adams and his supporters made their pitch.

  The message that they delivered was that as far as he and his supporters were concerned, there would be no more cease-fires, no repeat of the disaster of 1974–75. Presenting a hard-line, militant face was a strategy that Adams was to use again and again to take his leadership colleagues and the IRA rank and file down paths they otherwise would have shunned.

  The anti-cease-fire message was repeated in public as well as privately. Using the Brownie pen name he had adopted in 1975, Adams had started sending it out as early as May 1976, using a Republican News critique of the leaders who had declared the 1921 Truce to make a thinly veiled denunciation of those behind the 1975 cessation. An admission of IRA membership in one Brownie column led Sinn Fein spin doctors during the later peace process years—when Adams was emphatically denying any association at all with the IRA, past or present—to claim that others in Cage 11 shared the Brownie by-line with Adams and that the offending article had actually been penned by Richard McAuley, Adams’s aide and constant companion during the peace process. Cage 11 veterans insist, however, that Brownie’s work was the product of only one hand, while the Republican movement as a whole regarded the Brownie articles as carrying Adams’s imprimatur. “The weakness of the IRA of that period,” wrote Brownie,

  was that instead of pursuing the war to its bitter end come what may, they allowed unscrupulous politicians and so-called “Peacemakers” to gain the upper hand. The result was the betrayal of the Fight for Freedom followed by a vicious and brutal Civil War and of course partition. It is to be hoped that the lesson of that period will not be lost on today’s leaders. There is only one time to talk of peace and that is when the war has been won not while it is raging. The time to talk of peace is when the British have left Ireland, otherwise they will find some excuse to remain.9

  Within two years the message had become much more explicit while public condemnation of the 1975 leadership was barely concealed. In an interview with Vincent Browne, the editor of Magill magazine, a GHQ spokesman was blunt. Asked what attitude the IRA now had to talks with Britain of the sort that had happened during the truce, the spokesman replied, “We now regard such talks as entirely futile and the only time we will talk to the British again is when they come to us and ask our help to secure their immediate departure from Ireland.” Pressed on whether or not any consideration had been given to another cease-fire, the spokesman did not mince his words: “None. There is absolutely no question of another ceasefire or truce. In my opinion the last one went on far too long and it would be almost impossible for anybody to persuade the Volunteers that another one would be in the interests of the Movement or its objectives. Our aim now is to win the struggle on this occasion and we are prepared to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to achieve this.”10 To drive the message home, Republican News reproduced the Magill interview in a special double-page center spread.

  The American writer Kevin Kelley was given the same story in, if anything, stronger terms:

  [T]he IRA today asserts that almost certainly it will not enter into a cease-fire agreement again, no matter what the bait might be. The Provos’ postmortem on the truce of 1975 is that, on balance, it proved to be seriously damaging to the movement, politically as well as militarily. As one volunteer observed…, “Even if the Brits reintroduced internment tomorrow and managed to pick up most of our guerrillas and all our weapons, we still wouldn’t ask for a cease-fire. The attitude would be, ‘Right, let’s get some new recruits and some more guns and keep fighting.’ Cease-fires are just not on.”11

  It was hardly surprising that, presented with such uncompromising sentiments, the Revolutionary Council was so ready to give Adams his way and the Army Council so unwilling to oppose him.

  The other reason was that the new leadership was quite simply delivering the goods. Although the IRA was never able to reproduce violence on the level and scale reached in the early 1970s, the years immediately after Adams joined the Army Council nevertheless saw a significant recovery in its fortunes, one which even the British were obliged to concede.

  In 1977 Roy Mason had boasted of squeezing the IRA like a toothpaste tube, but eighteen months later, after the changes introduced by Adams had begun to take effect, his successor, Margaret Thatcher’s nominee Humphrey Atkins, was forced to admit to the British House of Commons that the situation had changed radically. In July 1979 he told MPs, “The first six months of this year have shown a marked rise in the level of terrorism and have demonstrated that we are up against a more professional enemy, organised on a system of self-contained, close-knit cells which make it difficult to gather information. Their weapons are more powerful and their operations have a different emphasis.”12 Atkins was not saying that the IRA was able to present the sort of threat it had posed in the early 1970s, but his words were an acknowledgment that the defeat of the IRA was no longer within easy reach.

  Toward the end of 1977 Adams’s grip on the IRA leadership strengthened. In November, Belgian customs officers, possibly acting on an intelligence tip-off from the police in Dublin, discovered six tons of Russian-and French-made automatic pistols, explosives, mortars, rockets, and rocket launchers and ammunition hidden in electrical transformers on board the MV Towerstream, which had docked at Antwerp after a voyage from Cyprus. The weapons had been smuggled from the Middle East and were being sent to a front company in Dublin established by a GHQ officer called Seamus McCollum. The Garda Special Branch put him under surveillance and on December 2 swooped on a house in Martello Terrace in the scenic Sandycove area of South Dublin, where McCollum was arrested. The operation was a singular success, but the detectives got two apparently unexpected bonuses. In the flat detectives found a draft of the cellular reorganization plan put together by Adams at the request of the Army Council, while outside they found Seamus Twomey sitting in a parked car. After a frantic car chase that ended outside Fianna Fail’s headquarters in central Dublin, Twomey was captured. Four years earlier he and other IRA men had made world headlines when a helicopter had swooped into the exercise yard of Mountjoy jail in Dublin and carried him off to freedom. It was one of the most dramatic jail breakouts in the IRA’s history. Now he was back behind bars.

  The circumstances surrounding the capture of Twomey have long been a matter of conjecture and controversy within the IRA, not least because his departure paved the way for Adams to become chief of staff for the first and only time. Adams was the sixth chief of staff in the Provisional IRA’s history, and his tenure is distinguished by two features: his reign as military commander was the only one that can be precisely dated, and it was also the shortest. He took over immediately after Twomey’s arrest but lost the post seventy-eight days later, on February 18, 1978, when he was arrested by the RUC along with over twenty other republican suspects, as a wave of condemnation swept Ireland following one of the most horrific IRA incidents of the Troubles.

  THE BOTCHED BOMBING of the La Mon House hotel on the southeastern outskirts of Belfast was one of the worst atrocities of the IRA’s campaign, its twelve uninvolved victims exceeding the death toll of Bloody Frida
y. The bombing was a political and public relations disaster for the IRA, tarnishing its attempts to present a new efficient military face to the world and once again marking the IRA with a sectarian stigma—all twelve of the dead were Protestants. The La Mon bombing also held up the implementation of the Adams military and political agenda by nearly a year, much to the dismay of his supporters and allies.

  The dead, seven of them women, had been attending the annual dinner dance of the Irish Collie Club when a blast incendiary bomb hung on a window of the restaurant exploded, sending a huge fireball billowing through the room and incinerating everything and everyone in its path. The IRA later admitted that the warning it had phoned to the RUC was inadequate. The bombers could not find a public phone box nearby, and by the time they did, the bomb was just minutes away from detonation. There was simply not enough time to evacuate the building. The outrage caused by the size of the death toll and the horrible manner in which the victims met their end was intense and widespread, and orders were issued to arrest Adams. He was picked up by the RUC in West Belfast, questioned at Castlereagh holding center, and then held in Crumlin Road jail in Belfast on an IRA membership charge for the following seven months. But the case against him collapsed before it reached a full trial. It had been based on what proved to be flimsy evidence, principally clips from a BBC TV Panorama program featuring him making a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis speech in which he used words like “billet” and “war zone.” Much to the anger of the British, the North’s senior judge, Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Lowry, threw out the case.