by Ed Moloney
The reality was that the Christin ni Elias affair had struck fear into Adams’s critics. The Ard Comhairle was told that the three members of the Sinn Fein court of inquiry into the allegations had unanimously found against her, but one of the tribunal, Kevin Agnew, a solicitor from Maghera, County Derry, wrote privately to a party official, saying that this was not true; he had voted for her, and as a lawyer he was horrified at what had happened. But he beseeched the official to burn the letter after it had been read in case it fell into the hands of the Adams camp. Her friends were appalled at what had happened, but no one wanted to stand up and publicly make an issue of it; they were too frightened. When the author, then Northern editor of the Irish Times, revealed in September 1982 that ni Elias had been dismissed from Sinn Fein on security grounds, there was a rush to deny it. The Ard Comhairle, which still included some of her closest political friends, called the article “a piece of scurrilous journalism.” Those who had been dismayed at the way the IRA had behaved chose to stay silent.51 A few months later Christin ni Elias left quietly with her ailing mother for Toronto, where she has lived ever since. Aside from a few Christmas cards and letters she has had little or no contact with her friends in Ireland since the trauma of 1982. “She was our Dreyfus,” confessed one of them.52
SIX
A Long, Hot Summer
By the start of the 1980s, Adams’s struggle to oust the O Conaill–O Bradaigh leadership had been virtually won. The IRA Army Council was at this stage completely under his control and had rejected Eire Nua, and it would just be a matter of time before the last vestiges of the old leadership had been swept out of Sinn Fein. The blueprint drawn up and refined in Cage 11 of Long Kesh had been almost fully implemented, thanks in no small measure to the patience, skill, and determination of its architect.
The IRA was, however, no nearer its goal of expelling the British from Northern Ireland than it had been in 1969 when its war had begun. While it was true to say that the Adams plan had rescued the organization from virtually certain defeat, and an ignominious one at that, the IRA still lacked the strength and resources, both political and military, to make the British change their Northern Ireland policy in any significant way. The IRA’s violence had fallen off dramatically from the heady days of the early 1970s when victory over the British did truly seem possible, dropping from an average of some 160 killings a year to fewer than 80, a decline of exactly half. Military stalemate reigned, with nothing on the horizon to suggest that major change was possible. The IRA could not be beaten, that seemed certain, but neither could the British.
It was in these circumstances that Gerry Adams led the republican movement into one of the most extraordinary and complete political volte-face in its long history in a bid to break this stalemate, executing a move that involved adopting some of the very same tactics and ideas whose espousal by the O Conaill–O Bradaigh leadership had made them such objects of hatred and scorn. The shift took many forms, but none was as dramatic or unequivocal as the decision to give the fighting of elections the same priority as the waging of war against Britain.
Those who knew Adams well during these years say that the episode not only demonstrated the utter pragmatism that governed his approach to politics but revealed a determination that neither he nor his generation of republicans would suffer the same sad fate as his father and his contemporaries. When their IRA project ended, in the case of Adams’s father in the late 1940s, they had retreated to their hearths demoralized and directionless, bereft of community support, to dream of what might have been and sustained only by the hope that a new generation would one day rise up, take on the torch, and succeed where they had failed. Old comrades would meet on Friday nights to drink and sing stirring ballads of war and sacrifice, of battles fought and lost—but rarely won. His father helped found the Felons Club, a social and drinking club on the Falls Road where membership was open only to those who had been imprisoned for the cause. There, old IRA comrades could gather and reminisce and help each other out when sickness, bad luck, or death struck. In some ways it almost seemed as if defeat suited them better than victory, for there was a sense in which Irish republicanism thrived on oppression and the isolated exclusivity that came with it. This had been the story of one generation of IRA men and women after another, and it was the atmsphere within which Adams was born and reared. Unlike his father and his generation, however, Adams would not settle for such paltry spoils.
One Cage 11 veteran remembered Adams once putting all this into words. “There was no way he was going to fade back into the obscurity of Ballymurphy. He hammered it home to all of us that something had to come out of all of this during our lifetimes, that no matter about previous campaigns this struggle was not going to be for nothing.”1
For this to be possible, ideas and policies once regarded as sacrosant could and would be discarded when necessary. The “move to the left,” which Adams had launched to isolate the old guard in Sinn Fein, was eventually reversed, as were other policies that characterized and even defined the Provisionals under his leadership in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. The opposition to federalism, once thought of as a core Adams value, faded and was forgotten, and so too was the opposition to electoral politics, to the idea that Sinn Fein should run in elections and thereby give establishment politics even that small level of recognition. The Adams camp had fiercely resisted electoral politics when its feud with O Bradaigh and O Conaill was raging, but once they had been vanquished, that too was abandoned and reversed.
Running in elections was a tactic on which republicans had historically taken a pragmatic stand and past IRA leadership often justified the practice as a way of advancing the struggle against Britain when military methods were no longer viable. Frequently, electoral success was used to vindicate later violence. As long ago as the 1870s, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) had authorized its leaders to run in elections and take seats in the Westminster parliament in London as part of a strategy to obstruct the business of government in Britain. In December 1918 Sinn Fein’s victory in the general election in Ireland paved the way for the IRA’s war of independence. After partition and the split with de Valera, anti–Fianna Fail republicans regularly contested elections in both jurisdictions, although always on an abstentionist basis. Mostly they were beaten, but on two celebrated occasions they scored remarkable victories. In 1955 Sinn Fein ran for several Northern seats in the Westminster general election and won in two, MidUlster and Fermanagh–South Tyrone, while in 1957, a year after the IRA had launched its Border Campaign, the party contested the Republic’s general election and ran in nineteen constituencies. They were successful in four: Fergal O’Hanlon won in Monaghan, J. J. Rice in South Kerry, John Joe McGirl in Sligo-Leitrim, and Ruairi O Bradaigh in Longford-Westmeath. There was nothing in republican ideology that forbade the organization from fighting elections. The only iron rule was that successful candidates could never take their seats in what were regarded as illegal and corrupt parliaments. In practice, as well, republicans ran only occasionally, when there was a particular advantage to be gained. Otherwise, as a matter of doctrine, priority was given to the strategy of armed struggle.
That pragmatic stand changed at the time of the 1970 split with Goulding. Those who left to form the Provisionals had a long list of grievances with the Goulding leadership, but high on that list was suspicion about its parliamentary intentions. Goulding’s move to leftist, agitational politics and his gradual erosion of the abstentionist principle were seen as parallel tracks leading in the same direction, toward participation in elections and the recognition of the partition parliaments in Dublin and Belfast. “Elections” became a dirty word.
Not all those who went with the Provisionals thought that in such simplistic terms. O Bradaigh had been an abstentionist member of the Irish parliament and knew the propaganda and political value of electoral success. He was also aware that, no matter how successful the IRA’s military campaign in the North was, the absence of elected repres
entation was a serious weakness that the British would be foolish not to exploit. O Conaill likewise developed a more mature attitude to elections with the passage of time.
By the third or fourth year of the war in the North, around 1972–73, republican leaders knew that they could count their support in the tens of thousands and that if this could be properly harnessed, they could produce a respectable republican vote. The commonly held view at this time was that the IRA had at most the support of 1 or 2 percent of the North’s nationalist community, but republican leaders knew better. They knew, for instance, that they could not sustain the war effort at the levels it had reached in those years without considerable grassroots support. The days when republican gatherings could attract at most a few score hardy veterans were long gone. The war in the North had radicalized people by the thousand. Some had joined the IRA, but many more were ready to help in other ways. IRA leaders knew from annual events like the Bodenstown commemoration, for example, that if thousands of people could turn out to publicly show their support for the IRA, then there were probably many more who would vote for Sinn Fein in the privacy and safety of the polling booth. The republican movement was like an iceberg; the visible tip was the IRA’s violent campaign, but the rest was hidden beneath the surface.
But opposition to contesting elections was fierce in the Northern IRA. O Bradaigh and O Conaill wanted to fight two elections in the North during 1973, but Northern IRA leaders stopped them. The first was for local councils, and that opportunity arose when the British abolished the oath of allegiance that unionists had made mandatory for such contests. The pair argued that Sinn Fein should field candidates but not take seats. It would be a protest against internment, they said, that involved no loss of principle. Likewise when elections were announced for the new power-sharing Assembly, they urged that these should also be fought on an abstentionist basis so that the SDLP, Northern Ireland’s moderate nationalist party, would not have a clear run. But powerful forces on the Army Council, led by Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey, vetoed both proposals. An ally of O Bradaigh remembered the strength of Twomey’s opposition: “In early 1973 at a joint meeting of the Army and Sinn Fein, Sean O Bradaigh and Twomey had a serious row. Sean felt that we were allowing the SDLP to make all the running. Twomey’s response to that was: ‘Fuck you! You never fired a shot in anger all your life.’ The SDLP were allowed to get off the ground as a result of Twomey and after that we missed a beat in publicity terms. It was very noticeable that the traffic in journalists to Kevin Street [Sinn Fein’s Dublin office] diminished in the summer of 1973.”2 When polling for Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly took place on June 28, 1973, an IRA unit from Gerry Adams’s old Second Battalion fired an RPG-7 rocket at a polling station in the Lower Falls Road area. It was as if the IRA could not contain its contempt for electoral politics. From then on, ballot boxes had to be taken from polling stations by military guard so that the IRA could not destroy them.
The pro-election camp was again outvoted by the IRA leadership when the British announced elections in 1975 to a new body, a constitutional convention, which was to replace the power-sharing Assembly brought down by striking Loyalists the year before. Thereafter opposition to fighting elections became part of the general Cage 11 critique of those members of the 1975 Army Council highest on their target list, like O Bradaigh, O Conaill, and McKee. During the 1975 truce the British secretary of state, Merlyn Rees, had legalized Sinn Fein in the hope that it would encourage republicans to enter electoral politics. This failed because a majority on the Army Council suspected that the British were really trying to suck the movement into constitutionalism. But Adams and his allies seized on this and linked O Bradaigh and O Conaill’s flirtation with elections to the same alleged failing that had brought the IRA into a near-fatal cease-fire in the first place. Talk of fighting elections became the next worst thing to discussing surrender.
The next opportunity to fight an election came after Ireland’s accession to the European Economic Community. The first direct contest for the European parliament was due to occur in 1978 but was then postponed for a year. O Bradaigh and his allies had prepared the ground to fight the election on a quasiparticipatory basis. “We thought we would have won one seat,” recalled an O Bradaigh ally. “Neil Blaney [a former County Donegal – based Fianna Fail minister] had contacted us to offer to stand down in Connacht-Ulster if we had stood while O Bradaigh and O Conaill would have stood in Munster.”3 O Bradaigh spent two years persuading Sinn Fein and the IRA to agree to a proposal to take seats in Europe on what was called “a controlled basis,” that is, limited to using the offices and facilities in the Strasbourg parliament for propaganda purposes.
Adams led the opposition to this proposal, arguing that this was the thin end of the wedge. If Sinn Fein took seats in the European parliament, then the way would be opened, no matter what the proponents said, to taking seats in the Irish parliament or at Westminster, he said. A defining republican principle would be breached. He turned to the Revolutionary Council as a way if undermining O Bradaigh, and on the eve of the November 1978 Ard Fheis, IRA commanders by a single vote came out against contesting the Euro election. Even so, the first subsequent meeting of the Army Council backed the idea, but then the Adams camp once more intervened and a second meeting was called. “The Army Council was got at and the vote went four to three against,” recalled a prominent activist. “One person, Joe Cahill, was got at on the grounds that the move would open the way to constitutionalism, to taking seats in Leinster House and Stormont.”4 Adams also spoke against, and the motion was lost. “It was one of the turning points,” commented the same source. “We went back into the doldrums. It was like we had been knifed.”5
The Sinn Fein–IRA squabbling opened the way for the former student civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin to contest the Northern Ireland Euro constituency, and on an issue the Adams group considered the exclusive property of republicans. The motive for her decision was the deteriorating situation in the H Blocks of Long Kesh, where IRA prisoners were into their third year of a blanket and no-wash protest, heading inexorably, it seemed, toward a hunger strike. With the assistance of women activists from the Relatives Action Committees, a support network set up by families of the protesting prisoners, Bernadette, as she was simply known in republican circles, raised the issue of intervening in Europe in early 1978. Her intervention split the Provos. While the Sinn Fein leadership in Dublin backed her and even offered financial support, the Northerners, led by Adams, fiercely opposed her.
The Belfast Sinn Fein leadership and the IRA’s Northern Command joined forces to disrupt Devlin’s campaign, using her reluctance to give “unequivocal support” for the IRA’s armed struggle as a stick to beat her. Even though she was running to publicize the cause of the IRA prisoners, the Adams leadership mobilized the H Block protesters against her. A statement issued in their name called on republicans to boycott her campaign and declared, “We know only too well that the only way to remove the H Blocks forever is to boot both them and the people who build H Blocks out of the country at the point of a gun…”6 Privately Devlin was accused of using the prisoners’ plight to advance her personal political ambitions, while on the ground leading figures campaigned against her. The IRA’s chief of staff, Martin McGuinness, followed her around Derry, urging people to boycott the election with the slogan “Back the prisoners, back the war!”
Despite the public and often vindictive opposition of Adams and his supporters, Bernadette, running under her married name, Devlin-McAliskey, won just shy of 34,000 votes in the June 1979 contest, a performance that far exceeded expectations and amounted to a serious rebuff for the Adams camp. The lesson was clear—if Bernadette Devlin could get that result in the face of republican antagonism, what could she have gotten had the IRA and Sinn Fein thrown their weight behind her? It was evident that there was untapped and not insubstantial electoral support for republican candidates. Her vote was dwarfed by the 140,000 votes won by
the SDLP leader, John Hume, but her performance nevertheless indicated a far higher level of sympathy for republican-type issues than conventional wisdom had imagined possible.
Adams has never admitted that his opposition to Bernadette Devlin’s European campaign was mistaken or that it was the spur for his own turnaround on electoral politics. In his autobiography he claimed that it was “around 1978–79,” that is, before the Euro poll, that it was decided “simply and in principle that there would be a positive attitude towards an electoral strategy by Sinn Fein.”7 If a “positive attitude” toward elections had been taken at that time, there is scant evidence of it; in fact the evidence is that the Adams camp actually hardened its opposition to electoralism at this time. At Sinn Fein’s November 1980 Ard Fheis for instance, held only five days after the first hunger strike had started, Adams’s allies forced through a motion barring the party leadership from even considering running in the following May’s Northern local elections. Two of his close supporters, the IRA and Sinn Fein director of publicity Danny Morrison and IRA Executive member Jimmy Drumm delivered the telling speeches. The result was that when the election was held, two weeks after the death of Bobby Sands in May 1981, Sinn Fein could field no candidates and other, smaller groups like the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the Marxist People’s Democracy, and the Irish Independence Party, a greenish breakaway from the SDLP, cashed in on republican anger.