A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The fusion was a logical move from a number of viewpoints. It made economic sense to produce and distribute one rather than two weeklies, and the existence of separate Southern and Northern papers flew in the face of the republican objective of destroying partition. All these points were made in a paper prepared for the leadership by Danny Morrison, who was slated to be the new paper’s first editor. But the real significance of the merger became clear only after it had happened. It was at first not so much a merging of the two papers as a takeover of An Phoblacht by the Belfast paper, to the extent that the new weekly even looked and read like Republican News. “Effectively the Republican News people came down from Belfast and took it over,” recalls one spectator.22 Even so the real control of the new paper would lie in the hands not of its editorial board, or even the Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle, or Executive, but with the IRA leadership, and as a result the paper would become a powerful vehicle in the effort to undermine the remaining influence of O Conaill, O Bradaigh, and their allies. Republican News had started life as the news sheet of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, and APRN would be the creature of the Adams-dominated Army Council. Having captured the IRA Army Council, Adams was now determined to remove O Conaill and O Bradaigh’s influence from the last forum where their voice was still strong, in the leadership of Sinn Fein. The takeover of AP-RN was a vital first step in that drive.

  THE FOUNDERS of the Provisional Republican movement had devised a policy program that they believed would satisfy the two unresolved issues from the 1921 Treaty settlement. Known as Eire Nua, or New Ireland, the program was designed to create political structures that, its architects believed, would calm Protestant fears that a united Ireland would mean their subjugation and eventual absorption by nationalist and Catholic Ireland, while its economic ideology was intended to correct the grave wrong wrought to those who had done most to give Ireland its freedom back in 1919–21. The great economic imbalance that gave the east coast, and especially Dublin, such a huge advantage over the rural west, southwest, and north-west, where much of the IRA’s 1919–21 campaign had been fought, had to be rectified, and the sacrifice made by lower middle classes, particularly the small farmers, who had provided the manpower for the independence struggle, would be recognized in the new order.

  No republican policy was more personally identified with O Conaill and O Bradaigh than Eire Nua. It had been adopted as IRA policy in June 1972 when the Army Council endorsed it. Sinn Fein followed suit, and at that year’s Ard Fheis the party’s constitution was changed to encompass the plan. Eire Nua outlined a decentralized federal scheme that would consist of a central government drawn from a federal parliament, half of whose members would be elected nationally via a system of proportional representation and half drawn from four provincial parliaments that would have strong powers over economic policy. The provincial parliaments would be based on the four ancient provinces of Ireland—Munster, Leinster, Connaught, and Ulster—and underneath them would be two further structures, a series of regional development councils and a system of district councils.

  The important layer was at the provincial level, and the keystone of the whole edifice was the Ulster parliament. Although based on the pre-1921 province of nine counties, and not on the six counties of Northern Ireland, the Ulster parliament, or Dail Uladh, was intended to safeguard Protestant rights in an independent Ireland and to sweeten the bitter pill of British withdrawal. “Dail Uladh would be representative of Catholic and Protestant, Orange and Green, Left and Right,” declared the Eire Nua document. “It would be an Ulster parliament for the Ulster people. The Unionist-oriented people of Ulster would have a working majority within the Province and would therefore have considerable control over their own affairs. That power would be the surest guarantee of their civil and religious liberties within a New Ireland.”23 At the same time the inclusion of Counties Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal, with their significant nationalist majorities, meant that the overall Protestant majority in Ulster would be a thin one and that compromise with Nationalists would be necessary to make the scheme workable.

  Eire Nua held other attractions for the republican movement of the early 1970s. By creating strong provincial governments, Eire Nua intended to adjust the economic and political imbalance that had developed in the Republic as a result of the overdevelopment of the east coast and in particular the spectacular growth of the greater Dublin area since the 1960s. One result of this was that the west of Ireland and the southern and northern edges of the Southern state, including the Border counties, felt excluded and discriminated against. Eire Nua promised to change that. It was no accident that the bulk of Provisional supporters in the South came not from the east coast or from Dublin but from these poorer and more isolated fringes of the country.

  A profile of the typical rural Provisional supporter of that time would show him or her to be a member of the small landowning and small business class, what one of their number called “peasant proprietors”24 and an Adams supporter once scornfully dismissed as “Fianna Failers with guns.”25 These were the people who stored weapons and explosives for the IRA’s Northern war, raised money, gave shelter to fugitives, and allowed their land and farms to be used as training grounds, meeting places, and bomb factories. Family ties to the losing side in the civil war motivated many, and few had shared in the benefits of Irish independence; above all they were overwhelmingly Catholic and conservative in their outlook. Eire Nua’s social and economic program appealed to all these elements. Based on the ancient philosophy of Comhar na gComharsan, Eire Nua decreed that the main instrument of economic policy would be the cooperative. A firmly neutral Irish state would control the finance sector and major industries; large ranchers would be dispossessed and their land broken up, and even though private enterprise would still play a role, it would be subservient to the cooperative principle. Non-nationals would be barred from owning a controlling interest in any Irish industry, while the strengthening of the Irish language and culture would be a priority in the new order. All this was, as the Eire Nua document boasted, a compromise between individualistic Western capitalism and the Soviet socialist system, a spot on the political spectrum that ideally suited the Provisionals’ Southern support base.

  Both O Conaill and O Bradaigh strongly supported the Eire Nua policy and firmly believed that it was the only scheme that stood a chance of winning Northern Protestants to the idea of Irish unity and independence. But, for Gerry Adams and his allies, hostility to Eire Nua became the route by which they would undermine the O Conaill–O Bradaigh leadership. The assault on Eire Nua that followed took place on two fronts, one within the IRA and the other inside Sinn Fein, and in each case the tactics were markedly different.

  Winning over the IRA was the easy part. With the organization now dominated by Northern Command, support for the Eire Nua policy was sapped by appealing to the most sectarian of sentiments—namely that the federalist scheme would leave Northern nationalists in the same subservient situation vis-à-vis the unionists as had existed before British withdrawal. The very reason for waging armed struggle would be questioned in the minds of many Northern and Belfast IRA activists if Eire Nua was implemented. It was, its critics claimed, a sop to loyalism.

  Once again the Revolutionary Council was employed to win the argument for Adams. Now dominated by his allies, it rejected Eire Nua at a meeting in Donegal in July 1979 and shortly afterward the Army Council endorsed the decision. Eire Nua was no longer IRA policy, although it was still Sinn Fein’s program. The extraordinary situation now existed where the military and political wings of republicanism held diametrically opposed views on what shape Ireland should take after the British had been forced out of Northern Ireland. Within weeks the Army Council attempted to exert its authority over the Sinn Fein leadership on the issue, and that is when the trouble began, as a participant recalled:

  One fine day we were sitting in an Ard Comhairle meeting when a certain gent appeared and announced he had a statement to read, that we h
ad to listen and it was of vital importance that it shouldn’t go outside the room. There was to be no discussion, and after he had read what he came to read we were to move on to the next business. He had been asked to deliver a message saying that the Army Council no longer supported Eire Nua, and all documents and leaflets, stocked and on shelves [dealing with Eire Nua], were to be taken away and boxed.26

  A fissure had opened up in the Provisionals that was unseen by the outside world but starkly visible to those at the top of the movement. While Sinn Fein continued to support the idea of Irish federalism, the IRA leadership and increasingly the organization’s weekly paper An Phoblacht – Republican News opposed it. Furthermore, O Conaill and O Bradaigh showed every sign of fighting to hold the precious ground of Eire Nua, playing on what they perceived to be Adams’s fear of a public and damaging split that could cost Northern Command much of its logistical support in the South. At the 1979 Ard Fheis, Sinn Fein delegates overwhelmingly passed a motion proposed by the County Kerry republican Richard Behal and seconded by Daithi O Conaill urging that Eire Nua be “retained, promoted and publicised.” The 1980 Ard Fheis the following November endorsed a similar motion. The two resolutions were as near to an open defiance of the IRA leadership as it was possible to get. That Easter the Army Council replied with a declaration that deliberately omitted any mention of federalism, saying instead that only a unitary state—“a 32 County Democratic Socialist Republic”—could bring unity and peace between Catholics and Protestants.27 The two sides were at war, and occasionally, as at that Easter time, their skirmishes became publicly visible.

  The warfare was fought on a number of fronts, political and organizational, but at one Sinn Fein Ard Fheis after another O Bradaigh and O Conaill were slowly but firmly sidelined. The determination of the Adams camp to destroy its enemy was absolute. To establish their militant credentials the Adams camp first persuaded Sinn Fein to back a policy of demanding “immediate” British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and the simultaneous disbandment and disarming of the mostly Protestant RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment. This was pie-in-the-sky stuff of course—there was little chance of republicans ever being able to enforce it—but that was not the purpose. The intention was to contrast Adams’s militancy and determination with the vacillation of O Bradaigh and O Conaill, whose own preference was for a phased and gradual British withdrawal so as to lessen the chances of a violent Protestant reaction, causing a civil war to break out. Meanwhile on the organizational level Adams and his allies pushed through measures that allowed for the co-option of their allies to Sinn Fein’s ruling executive. He also secured approval for the appointment of deputies to the party’s officers, a measure that soon brought charges that Adams’s allies were being placed strategically in places that would allow them to undermine the old guard.

  The effect of all this was to gradually strengthen Adams’s grip on the Sinn Fein leadership. In 1977 he could count on the support of at most three other members of the party executive, but five years later he and his supporters had a total of ten out of the sixteen Ard Comhairle members elected by the Ard Fheis on his side and perhaps half or more of the twenty-one co-options.

  It was, however, the turn to the left, charted and pioneered by Adams and his supporters, that sharpened the divisions almost to the breaking point. The Adams camp was picking at an ancient scab with this move. It was the extreme socialism of the Goulding leadership that had motivated many of the Southern republicans to side with the Provisionals in 1969 and 1970, and their views had not changed much in the intervening years. The reintroduction of socialist ideas by the Adams faction in the late 1970s deeply unsettled O Conaill, O Bradaigh, and their allies, but it also created a dilemma for them. Goulding’s leftward movement was accompanied by a scaling down of the IRA and military methods and was thus easier to denounce, whereas Adams presented his socialism as part of a revolutionary agenda of which an enhanced armed struggle was a vital and integral part. Opposing Adams’s socialism in these circumstances made O Conaill and O Bradaigh appear as if they were against the IRA at a time when many of those doing the fighting in the North identified fully with other revolutionary movements elsewhere in the world and saw the IRA’s struggle as fully consistent with them. As one of their number recalled, “[We were]… delighted to see the Khmer Rouge take over Phnom Penh, reveled in the liberation of Saigon, thought it fantastic when the Cubans chased the South Africans out of Angola, and identified with the Left in Europe, the ANC, and the Zimbabwe liberation struggle.”29

  THE MOVE TO THE LEFT was first signaled not by Sinn Fein but by the IRA in bloody and dramatic fashion on the evening of February 2, 1977, when fifty-nine-year-old Jeffrey Agate, the English-born managing director of the giant multinational chemical company Du Pont, arrived home after a day’s work to find IRA gunmen waiting for him. He died instantly in a hail of bullets. Agate was the first businessman shot dead in the IRA’s new campaign of assassination aimed against the employer class. He died just before Adams’s release from Long Kesh. A month later, after Adams had joined the Army Council, the IRA killed its second businessman victim when forty-five-year-old English-born publicity consultant James Nicholson was shot dead as he made his way to Belfast airport following a one-day business trip to a struggling hi-fi factory on the edge of nationalist West Belfast. The killing of Agate and Nicholson and possibly as many as eight other locally based business figures in subsequent weeks and months 29 was justified by Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey. Employing the unfamiliar left-wing rhetoric of Cage 11, Twomey told a French TV interviewer, “All British industrialists are targets. They are exploiting the Irish working class… everyone directly connected with British imperialism are definite targets.”30

  The move to the left was announced at same time as the “long war” doctrine was spelled out, at the 1977 Bodenstown commemoration. Declaring “We need to make a stand on economic issues and on the everyday struggles of people,” the Army Council spokesman Jimmy Drumm called for “the forging of strong links between the Republican Movement and the workers of Ireland and radical trade unionists.” The alliance, he predicted, “will ensure mass support for the continuing armed struggle in the North.”31 Two years later it was Gerry Adams’s turn to give the Bodenstown address, and he amplified the message, this time not as a Belfast troublemaker fresh from the Long Kesh prison camp but with the authority of a former chief of staff and current Northern commander.

  The move to the left became the backdoor way of attacking the Eire Nua policy. The target became not the federalism of Eire Nua itself but the economic and social program attached to it. To transform Eire Nua’s mild radicalism into a left-wing revolutionary program, Adams relied heavily on advice from outside the republican movement and in particular from a figure who quickly became, in the eyes of the O Conaill–O Bradaigh camp, the new version of Roy Johnston, Goulding’s éminence grise. Phil Shimeld was an English writer on the Trotskyist weekly Red Mole, the newspaper of the London-based International Marxist Group (IMG). He had made contact with IRA prisoners during the mid-1970s and they had invited him to Belfast and asked him to write for Republican News. Much to the irritation of the republican old guard, Shimeld supplied leftist-oriented articles, often under the nom de plume Peter Dowling, a tactic that enraged allies of O Conaill and O Bradaigh.32

  The IMG was the British section of the Fourth Socialist International and traced its political roots to Leon Trotsky himself. Among the group’s leading lights was Tariq Ali, a left-wing celebrity of the 1970s who had hit the headlines when he helped organize mass demonstrations in London against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Although the IMG was hostile to the Soviet Union, as most Trotskyist movements were, the distinction was lost on the older republicans, who saw Shimeld as Adams’s version of Roy Johnston and Tony Coughlan. The allegedly baneful influence of Goulding’s pro-Communist aides had badly divided the IRA and Sinn Fein in the 1960s, and although they may have been unaware of these niceties of Marxist ideolog
y, O Conaill and O Bradaigh suspected that history was about to repeat itself.

  Following the IRA’s rejection of Eire Nua, Adams came under pressure from the old guard on the Ard Comhairle to come up with an alternative policy, which eventually he presented to his senior colleagues late in 1979. It became known as “the gray document” because a fault in a photocopy machine in Belfast had darkened the copies made for the rest of the Sinn Fein leadership. It was a slim document—at most two pages long—that still advocated the decentralization that characterized the Eire Nua document but strengthened central government at the expense of the provincial parliaments. Adams reserved his assault on Eire Nua for its economic and social program. The alternative he advocated was unequivocally socialist, and it appalled the conservatives in the Sinn Fein leadership.

  Declaring that political control in a post-British Ireland would be worthless without control of the country’s wealth and economic resources, the Adams document continued:

  Furthermore with James Connolly, we believe that the present system of society is based upon the robbery of the working class and that capitalist property cannot exist without the plundering of labour, we desire to see capitalism abolished and a democratic system of common or public ownership created in its stead. This democratic system, which is called socialism, will, we believe, come as a result of the continuous increase of power of the working class. Only by this means can we secure the abolition of destitution and all the misery, crime and immorality which flow from that unnecessary evil.33

  This was strong meat for the rural Southerners, but worse was to come. The new program would also abolish the right to own land; under Adams’s plan the state would be the only entity allowed to possess the title to Irish land, and those who were working the country’s farms, no matter how small the holding, would enjoy only “custodial ownership.” That touched a nerve in rural Ireland, for among other things it meant that inheritance rights would be lost. If Adams had his way, the family farm, the mainstay of rural Ireland, would be no more. It was a formulation designed to strike fear and anger into the bulk of republicans outside Belfast and Derry, and it did.