A Secret History of the IRA
Page 38
This was the kernel of the Reid-Adams initiative: the creation of a pan-nationalist axis whose political clout would be greater than the IRA’s and sufficiently strong to persuade the hard men of the organization to lay down their weapons. For this reason Haughey was being approached in his capacity as Fianna Fail leader, Reid explained, not just because he was taoiseach. The dialogue, if it ever happened, would initially be between Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail, with the church acting as a neutral host and facilitator. Even the start of such a dialogue, Reid suggested, would be sufficient to influence the course of the armed struggle, and once it was under way, he believed, the IRA would respond and cooperate positively.
Sinn Fein, he said, had consistently told him that republicans would fully cooperate with the church in the search for what became known as “the alternative method” to armed struggle. They, or rather Gerry Adams, had also given a number of pledges, should the dialogue start. Adams would not insist on any preconditions either officially or unofficially and promised that all their dealings would be treated in the strictest confidence; there would be no question of Sinn Fein’s leaking embarrassing details for political advantage. The peace initiative would be given the highest priority by the Sinn Fein leader, the necessary resources and energy would be devoted to it, and Sinn Fein promised to “engage constructively”11 with anyone the church decided should be involved in the dialogue.
Reid went on to tell the Fianna Fail leader that Sinn Fein would accept any settlement that came out of a properly structured process, even if it fell short of its stated aim of achieving a socialist Ireland. The goal of the IRA’s armed struggle, he had been told, was not the creation of a thirty-two-county socialist republic; rather, it was to establish the right of all the Irish people to decide their own political future in free negotiations, the so-called right of national self-determination. The goal of socialism was a political one that Sinn Fein would pursue by political methods only.
This was an important and revealing concession. The move to the left during the 1970s had been constructed by Adams and his allies in Cage 11 as part of a strategy to capture the movement. By 1987, however, the need to make an alliance with Fianna Fail dictated a compensating move in the other direction—socialism would be discarded in the interests of advancing this new Adams strategy. The underlying message to Haughey and others involved in the process was that pragmatism would determine the flow of events, not dogged adherence to political ideology.
Adams did have certain bottom lines in negotiation, however, Reid explained. The most crucial was that nationalists and unionists should be able to negotiate their political and constitutional future free of dictation from the British, and as long as this principle was honored, Sinn Fein would be content with whatever shape the agreed settlement took.
It was at this point that the Reid-Adams enterprise dovetailed with the secret British correspondence with the Sinn Fein leader. The British had told Adams that while physical withdrawal from Northern Ireland was out of the question, they would promise not to interfere or dictate the terms of any settlement reached by unionists and nationalists; they would withdraw politically, in other words. It was all very Jesuitical, but by the late spring of 1987 Adams was approaching Haughey with the very same idea and sought his cooperation in making this a public and formally acknowledged policy of the British government.
Adams wanted the British to implement this promise, Reid said, in a practical fashion by declaring in some convincing way their willingness to set aside section 75 of the Government of Ireland Act (1920), the legislation that formalized the partition settlement. This section gave the British parliament supreme authority over Northern Ireland, in effect saying that Britain could veto the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland even if their representatives reached political agreement. As long as a majority favored staying in the union, this was not an issue, but theoretically it could be used to thwart a vote in favor of Irish unity.
This was to be the revised and reinterpreted version of British withdrawal, the centerpiece of the Reid-Adams initiative: a declaration of constitutional disinterest and a promise not to dictate or influence the outcome of the all-party talks. If the British withdrew the legal claim of veto over the people of Northern Ireland, in other words, then Sinn Fein would be content to view this as the culmination and realization of the IRA’s goals, for which, by that time, it had waged some seventeen years of killing, shooting, and bombing.
In practice, Reid said, Sinn Fein would accept a promise from the British to repeal the offending section of the 1920 act after agreement had been reached in negotiations between unionists and nationalists, not before. The traditional republican model for British withdrawal foresaw the all-party conference happening once the British had at least declared their intention of leaving Northern Ireland. In Adams’s new version, the conference would happen first, and then the British would make good their declaration.
The Sinn Fein leader had added an important qualification to all this, Reid told Haughey. The British did not have to withdraw immediately or even in the foreseeable future. In fact Sinn Fein wanted the British to remain, and would insist that they did, in order to oversee the practical details of implementing any agreed settlement.
Then came the central message from Reid to Haughey: if the British agreed to do this, the IRA would declare a cease-fire. The IRA’s long war would come to an end, and in a much more definitive fashion than any of the short-lived and doomed cease-fires of the 1970s.
Once representatives of nationalist and unionist opinion were able to meet freely without a British veto hanging over their heads, then, as far as Sinn Fein was concerned, all options for a settlement of the national question would be on the table. Sinn Fein would at that point abide by negotiating arrangements that would guarantee unionists their heritage and culture in accordance with their right of consent and the right of consent of the Irish people as a whole. This was Gerry Adams’s way of recognizing the integrity of the Northern Ireland state and of opening the way to Sinn Fein eventually helping to govern it.
IT WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY offer. The Reid-Adams principle married the separate and conflicting concepts of all-Ireland and Northern Ireland–based self-determination, and in practice that would mean accepting the outcome of separate referenda held in the two divided parts of Ireland, albeit on the same day, which is precisely what happened in the weeks following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, eleven years after the astonishing offer to Haughey was made. Traditional republican theology held that self-determination had to mean the Irish people voting as one unit; in the message from Father Reid, Adams was saying that he would accept two separate votes and, crucially, that they would have equal value. If the North voted differently from the South, then he would accept this. It was setting established republican dogma on its head, and substituting heresy for orthodoxy.
Although senior republicans like Gerry Adams continue to deny to this day that they have conceded the right of a majority in the North to maintain the link with Britain, in practice the unionist majority,12 the subtle, ambiguous formula devised by Father Reid and the Sinn Fein president meant that they had. Sinn Fein, under Adams, was a little like a team of soccer players who strongly object to the offside rule but agree, nevertheless, to play in the cup final.
There was an important sense in which the proposal was based on fantasy. It assumed that the British would want to frustrate the will of the people of Northern Ireland, even if they did vote themselves into a united and independent Ireland. It was clear from a variety of public statements over the years of the Troubles that they would do no such thing. They had said as much in 1973, before the Sunningdale agreement, and again in 1985 when the principle of consent, both for the union and against it, had been written into law when the Hillsborough Agreement had been signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald. But the great achievement of Adams and Reid was that they had fashioned a wording that enabled Sinn Fein to join the ranks
of constitutional nationalism while preserving the outward aspects of the party’s traditional uncompromising brand of republicanism. As an instrument for keeping the Pro visionals united and the rank and file unaware of the true implications of the peace process, it was almost perfect.
All this was a preamble to the core proposal that Reid had brought from Belfast. It was for what the rest of the world would soon call a pan-nationalist front, an alliance of Irish nationalist parties, North and South, that would try to agree a common policy on the North. What this meant, said Reid, was that the three principal parties—Fianna Fail, the SDLP, and Sinn Fein—must agree at a minimum to press the British to remove their right of veto from the Government of Ireland Act.
Reid outlined two ways in which the enterprise could be advanced. Either the church could host face-to-face talks between Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail, whose confidentiality the church would underwrite, or the church could mediate between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein in a bid to devise ways in which direct dialogue between them could begin.
There was one immediate problem with the Reid-Adams proposal. It was not entirely clear in what circumstances the IRA would declare a cease-fire. Reid seemed to outline two scenarios for an end to armed struggle—one when the British agreed to remove their veto from the Government of Ireland Act, the other when the pan-nationalist alliance was formed. It was clear that the chronology outlined by Reid-Adams envisaged the latter happening first, but just when would the IRA cease-fire start?13 It was a loose thread in an otherwise finely woven garment.
This, in its essentials, was the blueprint of the Irish peace process, and with variations and amendments, and not necessarily in the order originally envisaged, it was the plan that was eventually implemented.
It would be quite wrong to say that with this message from Alec Reid the peace process was full-fledged, but its shape had been sketched out, a road map of sorts indicated, and the parameters of the historic but still secret ideological compromise that Gerry Adams was prepared to make clearly identified. There was a great deal of distrust to overcome, much of it caused by the IRA’s post-Eksund campaign of violence. Like the British, the Haughey government noted the gulf between what Gerry Adams and Alec Reid preached and what the IRA practiced.
At the time, according to one informed source, it never occurred to Haughey or his advisers to ask Adams if he had the backing of the Army Council for the initiative. Like the British, they assumed Adams would never take such a dangerous course unless he had the informed support of his leadership colleagues. Had they known that the process was, at this stage, as much a secret from the IRA leadership as it was to everyone else, the Reid enterprise might well have suffered an early and precipitate ending. But as it was, the question was never asked.
The process was full of difficulties, not least the need to overcome Irish and British government doubts about the IRA’s real intentions. One great obstacle was Margaret Thatcher. Few of those involved believed that movement along the lines sketched by Reid-Adams would be possible as long as she was British prime minister, as one of Haughey’s key aides, Martin Mansergh, was to write later: “I was always fairly clear that there was little hope of an end to belligerence in Ireland while she remained British prime minister.”14 He and everyone else would have to wait until November 1990 before she left the political stage. But the important point about Father Reid’s overture to Haughey was that it contained an unmistakably strong signal that Adams knew where he wanted to go, and even if the how was still a little hazy, the ending of armed struggle by the IRA was clearly now on the agenda.
Faced with two options by Father Reid—one of direct dialogue with Adams, the other indirect dialogue facilitated by the Redemptorist order— Haughey chose the safer and, as he had in 1981, chose to talk to Adams indirectly. With the history of the Arms Trial hanging over him, Haughey calculated that the risk of exposure was too great and that the slightest leak could destroy him. He kept the Reid approach secret from cabinet colleagues and particularly from his coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, who were led by his deadly enemy, Des O’Malley, a determined foe from the Arms Trial days.
Haughey’s decision caused the first crisis in the enterprise. Adams made a desperate plea to Haughey for face-to-face meetings, but to no avail, as one well-informed source told the author. “Adams was looking for [face-to-face talks] on the basis that if he was going to go to the IRA—and he said he would go to individual active-service units if necessary—he would have to be able to tell them that he had looked Haughey in the eye and that Haughey had assured him that this would be the policy of the Irish government.”15 Cardinal O Fiaich even offered a room at Maynooth College, Ireland’s principal seminary, where the two men could meet discreetly. But the proposal was too risky, and Haughey declined. The prospect of a speedy IRA cease-fire receded.
Known as An Sagairt, the Irish word for priest, in the code language worked out by Adams and the Redemptorist priest, Reid had come to see Haughey armed with a detailed, worked-out strategy, which he called “A Concrete Proposal for a Political Strategy for Justice and Peace.”16 Spread over three documents, “A Concrete Proposal” drew together all the various strands of the secret discussions between the Reid group, Sinn Fein, and the British, as well as the ideas developed by Haughey.
One paper set out the six fundamental principles that would underpin the strategy. Two of these crucially redefined the principle of Irish national self-determination to embrace the need for unionist consent. The idea behind Reid’s proposal was that if the project went ahead, then the three nationalist parties would agree to subscribe to the principle. The real significance of this is that it meant that Sinn Fein and the IRA would agree to abide by something that republicans had traditionally abjured and waged war to resist. Another key principle encapsulated the new definition of British withdrawal. By agreeing to this, republicans would formally abandon the IRA goal of ejecting Britain from Northern Ireland by force.
A second document suggested twelve “stepping stones,”17 as they were called, toward an agreement among Irish nationalists on a peace strategy.
These were as follows:
• An agreement in principle that there should be a joint Nationalist strategy
• An agreement in principle that peace can only come with the free, independent and democratic consent of the Irish people
• An agreement in principle that the aim of the strategy should be to design and create a New Ireland with a new Constitution
• An agreement in principle that the Irish people as a whole should design this new Constitution in unfettered dialogue amongst themselves
• An agreement that the Irish people consist of two traditions, Unionist and Nationalist
• An agreement in principle that consent must be two-fold in nature, requiring agreement from both Unionists and Nationalists
• An agreement in principle that this two-fold consent can only be achieved by political dialogue
• An agreement in principle that the framework for dialogue would be a Constitutional Conference that would sit on a semi-permanent basis until final agreement about Ireland’s future had been reached. Membership of the Conference would be through direct election and it was hoped that both Unionist and Nationalist parties would attend. The British, the Irish government, Sinn Fein, other Irish Nationalists and the Unionists would agree the arrangements for the Conference.
• An agreement in principle that the British would withdraw from the central decision-making process in Northern Ireland
• An agreement in principle amongst Sinn Fein and the other Nationalist parties that they would agree to try to persuade the British to make a declaration containing five points:
(i) That they will set aside the 1920 Government of Ireland Act when agreement is reached in the Constitutional Conference;
(ii) That they will say they have no selfish interest in remaining in Ireland
(iii) That they will facilitate the Constitutional Co
nference;
(iv) That they will not interfere in or dictate to the Conference;
(v) That if there is an agreement then the British will implement it in law.
• An agreement in principle that an advisory committee representing the leadership of the main Nationalist parties be set up to examine how best to implement and propagandise this strategy and win support for it in Ireland and abroad
• An agreement in principle, although couched in more discreet language, that Sinn Fein would try to win approval for the strategy from the IRA.18
All twelve “stepping stones” would in time be incorporated into the peace process, though with variations and modifications. The British declaration, for instance, became a British-Irish joint declaration after it grew clear that the British would make no promises about the fate of the Government of Ireland Act until the Irish agreed to amend articles 2 and 3 of Eamon de Valera’s 1937 constitution, which formally expressed the Republic’s territorial claim over Northern Ireland.
The leaders’ advisory committee would, in later documents, become first a nationalist “Convention,” which would advise on the steps necessary to achieve democratic self-determination, and then finally the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, set up in Dublin after the 1994 IRA cease-fire. An entirely nationalist body, the forum was designed to introduce Sinn Fein to the civilities of constitutional politics.
The problem of how Charles Haughey should proceed with the dialogue with Gerry Adams yet keep him at arm’s length was a difficult one, but the solution was eventually found in the structure of the strategy itself. Reid and Adams wanted to involve the main Northern nationalist party, the SDLP, and in particular its leader, John Hume, in the enterprise, and it was through Hume that Haughey’s difficulty was overcome.