by Ed Moloney
The fight back came in October 1979 at a special Sinn Fein conference held in Athlone. That year’s Ard Fheis had been postponed and was not scheduled to meet until the following January, and so a stopgap weekend gathering involving two hundred or so of the faithful, mostly from the South, was held instead. Someone had decided to leak the story of the internal turmoil to the press, and a story was published in the Dublin tabloid the Sunday World under the byline of the left-wing journalist Eamonn McCann. The story claimed that federalism was to be ditched and that the Provisionals were about to move sharply to the left under the influence of Marxist sympathizers. The story, which was uncomfortably accurate, also talked about the waning influence of O Conaill and O Bradaigh. The reaction of many of the delegates, who included the party’s thirty councillors in the Republic, was an angry one. According to one report of the meeting, some would have staged a walkout had Adams not intervened during the Sunday morning session to deny the report.34 The identity of the deep throat was never established despite an inquiry ordered by the Ard Comhairle, although the Adams camp let it be known that it suspected the ousted An Phoblacht editor, Gerry O’Hare.
The Sunday World story put Adams on the defensive. Within ten days both the Army Council and the Sinn Fein leadership had been forced to issue statements denying the story, claiming that it was the result of British and Irish government efforts to raise a Red scare against them.
THE MARXIST ALLEGATION persuaded Adams to give an interview to the author, then a junior reporter with the Dublin weekly magazine Hibernia, to underline in person the IRA and Sinn Fein denial. It was the author’s first meeting with Adams and took place in a council house in the West Belfast housing estate of Andersonstown over a large tray of tea, sandwiches, and cake provided by an obviously adoring middle-aged hostess. Dressed in sports jacket and light trousers, sporting fashionably long hair and a somewhat unkempt beard, Adams still puffed on a pipe in those days. Anyone unaware of his real identity could easily have mistaken him for a visiting lecturer at a New England women’s college or a left-wing sociology professor at a red-brick English university. He was charming and impressively attentive and, displaying even then the consideration of the veteran political operator, stayed long enough to clear away the tray and wash the dishes when the interview concluded. Our matronly hostess beamed with pleasure and adoration when finally he left.
If he had his tongue stuck in his cheek during our conversation when he dismissed the left-wing allegations, it did not show. “First of all there’s one thing which should be said categorically,” he declared. “There is no Marxist influence within Sinn Fein; it simply isn’t a Marxist organisation. I know of no-one in Sinn Fein who is a Marxist or who would be influenced by Marxism.”35 The Hibernia interview was reproduced in full in An Phoblach–Republican News, and the following two issues carried more reassuring stories, one describing a pilgrimage Adams had made to the home of the decidedly non-Marxist hero of the 1916 Rising, Patrick Pearse, and another applauding the ultraconservative head of Irish Northern Aid in New York, seventy-two-year-old Michael Flannery.
Emboldened by all this, Adams’s opponents blocked the “gray document,” and in a compromise deal a special subcommittee was set up by the Ard Comhairle to marry the radical program with the original Eire Nua in time for the postponed 1979 Ard Fheis. While Adams had been forced to draw in his horns, the compromise document did contain concessions to his hard-line approach. For instance, while the original Eire Nua program envisaged that private enterprise would still have a role to play in the new Ireland, the compromise paper said it would have “no role to play” at all in key industries, and that small local businesses would be permitted only “provided no exploitation occurs.”36 Adams also got included a proposal to wage an “economic resistance campaign” that would commit Sinn Fein to work with radical trade unionists. Custodial ownership of land survived but became the clumsier and somewhat contradictory concept of “family or co-operative custodial ownership.” Even so, many of the delegates regarded the compromise program as an attack on small farmers, and the veteran and respected Leitrim republican John Joe McGirl had to intervene to assure the Ard Fheis that this was not the same agenda as that espoused by Goulding. “Ten years ago I parted ways with people whose policies I disagreed with,” he declared. “My politics have not changed and I support this document.”37 The document was jointly proposed by O Bradaigh and Adams and was passed, but by a margin that suggested serious divisions among the rank and file: 65 percent were for, 30 percent, against, and 5 percent undecided. “That was too close for comfort,” recalled O Bradaigh.38
The year 1980 ended on a positive note for the Adams camp. By November it shared control of the Sinn Fein ruling executive with the old guard, and the Northerners guerrilla tactics had forced one key opponent, Sean O Bradaigh, brother of Ruairi, to quit the leadership in protest against the radicalism of the compromise Eire Nua document. His shadow as SF publicity director, Danny Morrison, took over his job. Morrison became the confrontational, belligerent edge of the opposition. “Adams made the snowballs but Danny threw them,” commented one of his victims. The Adams grip on Sinn Fein had tightened immeasurably.
THERE THEN FOLLOWED one of those events that no one had anticipated or could have anticipated. For the previous four years republican prisoners had been staging a protest designed to preserve special-category or political status. Frustrated by the failure of the protest and angry at their treatment as common criminals, IRA and INLA prisoners in the Long Kesh jail, now renamed the Maze prison, finally decided to bring matters to a head. The protest had begun with inmates refusing to don prison uniform, insisting that they wear only their bed blanket instead, and then they had refused to slop out their cells every morning, instead smearing the cell walls with excreta and pouring urine under their doors. As Catholic Church intermediaries tried but failed to broker a settlement with the British and the violence of the prison staff against inmates intensified, the prisoners finally decided in the autumn of 1980 to embark on a hunger strike in a bid to win recognition that their imprisonment was politically motivated.
That protest, which ended in confusion and defeat a week before Christmas, and the second, fatal fast, which began three months later, had the effect of temporarily uniting the Provisionals and papering over the widening cracks. The anti-Adams camp called a halt to the undeclared warfare, as one of their number recalled: “Ruairi and Dave avoided stand-up rows with Adams in order to prevent a split, especially during and after the hunger strikes when what we had was a very united and very strong movement.”39 They could do nothing else.
The feud was on hold, but the way the hunger strikes were run actually served to strengthen the Adams leadership, not least because the profile of the Northerners was heightened considerably, while that of Southerners like O Bradaigh and O Conaill was reduced. The campaign in support of the hunger strikers was largely directed from the North. Adams and colleagues like Danny Morrison were regarded very much as spokesmen for the protesting prisoners, and when republicans began winning elections, first as H Block prison candidates and then as Sinn Fein members, they were seen as the architects of that success, not O Bradaigh and O Conaill.
There was another, possibly more potent factor. As IRA coffins started to come out of the jail, the argument that federalism was a sop to the forces ultimately seen as responsible for the prison conflict became more and more appealing to grassroots activists. The pressure mounted on O Conaill and O Bradaigh. By the time the 1981 Ard Fheis met in the autumn, the two veterans had lost all control of the Sinn Fein leadership. A motion proposed by the Ard Comhairle and by the party organizations in Belfast and Dublin called for the Sinn Fein constitution to be changed so that the party’s aim was no longer a “federal” state but a “democratic socialist republic” instead. The motion, a head-on tilt at Eire Nua, was passed but just failed to win the two-thirds majority necessary to change Sinn Fein policy. The following year, by which time Adams and Marti
n McGuinness had been elected as abstaining members of a new Northern Assembly, the motion got the backing needed to alter the constitution. The O Conaill–O Bradaigh camp had lost the war with Adams. O Conaill quit as vice-president of Sinn Fein, a post he had shared uncomfortably with Adams, and O Bradaigh would step down from the party’s leadership a year later, in November 1983, and be replaced by the West Belfast man.
The old guard had fought on in the hope that Adams and his colleagues would grow weary of the battle, but they badly underestimated their reserves of patience. Adams quite simply outlasted them, and each time they promised to bring matters to a head—for instance, by threatening to resign en masse, which happened more than once—Adams would temporarily retreat, only to regroup for another debilitating round a few weeks or months later. It was the old guard who tired first, not Adams. They also forgot just how ruthless he and the other Northerners could be.
SIX MONTHS OR SO before the changes at the top of Sinn Fein (some date it at around April or May 1983), a tall, willowy, dark-haired woman in her midthirties boarded a flight at Dublin airport bound for Toronto, in the Canadian province of Ontario, and said farewell to Ireland forever. It would have been surprising had any of her fellow passengers recognized her or been aware of the part she had played in the drama unfolding inside Sinn Fein. Christin Elias was not a figure who had been much in the public eye despite her prominence in republican politics, but the extraordinary circumstances of her exile and Gerry Adams’s rise to the summit of Sinn Fein were inextricably linked, if well hidden and only rarely discussed, events.
Christin Elias was by common admission an enigmatic figure who appeared on the Provisionals’ stage in the mid-1970s without any obvious tie to Ireland or its political ferment. About the only thing that fellow Republicans knew about her was that she hailed from somewhere in Eastern Europe; some believed that she was Hungarian, others that she was Russian or Ukrainian. Another version was that her mother was Irish and her father a Lithuanian who had been a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In fact she was born in Canada of a Canadian-Irish mother of Methodist stock and a Bulgarian father. She had been educated in Sofia and spoke Bulgarian fluently, a skill she learned from her émigré father. She and her mother traveled a lot and had ended up more or less by chance in Dublin in 1974, where, attracted by the conflict then raging in the North, she offered her home in Churchtown in South Dublin to the IRA as a “safe house” where meetings were held and fugitives took refuge. She worked in an engineering plant by day, but at night was an enthusiastic Sinn Fein worker; both she and her mother joined the party’s Cumann in Churchtown. She soon adopted the Irish version of her name—Christin ni Elias meant Christin, daughter of Elias—and moved gradually toward the leadership of Sinn Fein.
An enthusiastic supporter of Eire Nua’s federalist program, she befriended O Bradaigh, O Conaill, and other members of the Ard Comhairle and generally made herself indispensable. “She was a very clever, efficient lady, who ate work and was totally committed to Eire Nua,” remembered one of them. “She had studied behind the Iron Curtain and was the one who kept on pointing out the left-wing stuff of Adams’s people, predicting what would happen next.”40 By 1978 she had risen to membership of the Ard Comhairle and was Sinn Fein’s national education officer, charged with, among other things, promoting Eire Nua among the rank and file. When the hunger strikes started in 1980, she almost single-handedly ran the national committee formed to publicize the prisoners’ cause. One activist remembers that she often met the bills for printing hunger strike posters and leaflets out of her own pocket.41
It was perhaps inevitable that such a strong-willed woman would clash with Gerry Adams, but when she did the violence of the collision startled everyone. One witness vividly recalled the occasion:
In the months after the [July 1979] Army Council message dismissing Eire Nua, every Ard Comhairle meeting was getting more and more painful, the divisions were intense. We wanted to know that if the policy wasn’t to be Eire Nua what was it to be? So at this particular Ard Comhairle meeting Adams pulled a document out of his jacket pocket, but it was only two pages long, typed on each side. Behal laughed, everybody tittered as he started to read from it. When he finished, we thought it was just an introduction, it was so short. O Conaill said,“Are you sure that’s all?” and O Bradaigh asked when we would see the documents behind it all.
Christin sat back, drew on her cigarette and said, “Well, Gerry, isn’t this a rather slim document to produce after two years of turmoil? This is not even a foundation, we’d have a job to build on that. Surely this is a rather threadbare document?” Adams lost the rag. “What do you expect,” he exploded. “I had only twenty-four hours to produce the document!” We were all sitting there with our mouths open. Christin then replied, “In that case, Gerry, it was a very poor presentation.” Adams hit the table with rage, shouting that she was putting words in his mouth. From that day on her cards were marked.42
Other witnesses agree that Elias had made a dangerous enemy that day. “You could see the spark in Adams’s eyes; he had been hurt by her,” said one.43 “Boy was he mad, and all his lieutenants were mad! I pulled at her sleeve because I knew how vicious they could be,” remembered another.44
It was around the time of this famous confrontation that Christin ni Elias was approached by an official attached to the British embassy in Dublin who asked her out on a date. His interest was ostensibly romantic, and he asked if he could see her on a regular basis. It was an implausible story, and despite his assurances that he was not from MI5, she was suspicious and feared that he was an agent for one or other branch of British intelligence. She went straight to a senior member of the Sinn Fein leadership, who passed her on to the IRA. “They established an ongoing situation,” explained one source familiar with the story. “Belfast people in the GHQ Intelligence Department handled the operation, and they told her to meet the guy and they briefed her on what to say.”45 The relationship began in August 1979, and the pair would meet about once a month, usually for lunch at venues in Dublin or Belfast: “The IRA instructed her to report back on the meetings, and when she met them she gave them a written report, all typed out and in triplicate, which was typical of her.”46
Much to Christin ni Elias’s frustration there seemed to be no end to the affair. The IRA wanted her to continue meeting the official, but she was, as she told one Sinn Fein friend, “totally sick of the arrangement, it went on so long.” After more than two years, by the end of 1981 there was still no sign of the IRA operation coming to an end. “She was always hoping that she would be ‘interrupted’, that the IRA would abduct him,” recalled the friend.47
In early 1982 the IRA attitude to Christin ni Elias suddenly turned hostile, and it was not long before the reason was a subject of republican gossip. “The word got out that she was a British agent, a whispering campaign was started, and attempts were made to stop her being elected to the Ard Comhairle,” said one source.
Eventually in July that year, it was announced at the Ard Comhairle that there would have to be a court of inquiry into her, that she was suspect. It went ahead, but the truth was that it was a foregone conclusion, that the Army had already judged her and found her guilty.
The biggest charge against her was that she had sabotaged one of their operations. The background was that she had been told by the IRA to have lunch with the official in a certain Belfast hotel on December 22 or 23, 1981, and she agreed. But what Christin didn’t realize was that as it was Christmastime the hotel was full of office parties, so when they turned up there were no free tables and they had to go elsewhere. The IRA arrived to find no British official in the restaurant, and they immediately accused her of sabotaging their operation.
I told her she had been lucky, that they were probably going to kill both of them and accuse her of being a spy and meeting her handler. She paled. After that they came and searched her house. They held her blindfold for three days, all of them
men, and they even accompanied her when she went to the bathroom. They questioned her all the time, and I believe they were looking for the blacks [copies] of the intelligence reports she had typed up for the IRA.48
Ruairi O Bradaigh arrived in the midst of the affair and was held at gunpoint until the IRA took ni Elias away, eventually abandoning her several miles from Dublin in the middle of the countryside.
ni Elias was expelled from Sinn Fein in November 1982, at almost exactly the same time as the party’s annual conference finally ditched her beloved Eire Nua policy. Those who were her political friends had little doubt that the timing of the purge against her was intimately connected to the internal battle being waged over federalism. It seemed the only explanation for the IRA’s dragging out the intelligence operation so long and then deciding to move when they did. “The incident really tore the curtain of trust,” commented a friend of ni Elias. “We felt they used the incident to get at her and to scare off everyone else. She was too articulate, too politically skilled, too astute to be allowed to survive.”49 Another commented, “The message was quite simple. If they could get at her, they could get at anyone. No one was immune.”
The atmosphere on the Ard Comhairle soured after the incident. Not long afterward the Ard Comhairle asked for a special meeting with the IRA to discuss Eire Nua, and the Army Council sent along two of its members, Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness and his deputy Ivor Bell. “The whole meeting was dominated by what had happened to Christin and their litany of complaints about the 1975 cease-fire,” recalled a participant. “The two Army men did all the talking. The meeting was full of bad vibes, the tenor was that if you criticized the opponents of Eire Nua and the O Bradaigh–O Conaill leadership you were anti-Army. Things started to get bad on a personal level after that. Before, everyone would go for a drink together in Conway’s pub after Ard Comhairle meetings, but after that they would go to Conway’s and we would go to Mooney’s up by Parnell Square.”50