A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  HAUGHEY’S OFFICIALS had prepared a lengthy list of speaking points, sixteen in all, to present to Major in an effort to win the British premier over to a fundamental reappraisal of Northern Ireland policy. These dwelt on the financial, human, political, and social costs of a conflict that seemed to be unending and that ultimately was in the interests of both governments to resolve and stabilize. Although each politician knew more about the secret peace process than he was prepared to admit, there was only one veiled reference to the clandestine diplomacy that had been going on in the background for over five years. “There are factors working for progress,” said one account of the exchange. “There is a strong tide of public opinion in favour of peace in both communities in Northern Ireland and in Ireland as a whole. The futility and horror of violence must surely become more evident even to its proponents with every passing year and we know that at least some of these elements are reflecting on this.”30 Haughey’s arguments succeeded, and Major agreed to initiate a comprehensive internal review that the two leaders would consider in the early part of 1992.

  The meeting between them never took place. An old scandal concerning the tapping of politicians’ and journalists’ telephones resurfaced, and in early February 1992 Haughey was forced to resign. Albert Reynolds was chosen by the Fianna Fail parliamentary party to succeed him, and a day later the group of British and Irish civil servants charged with considering the new initiative met at the Cabinet Office in London. Butler, Chilcot, and Thomas told their Irish counterparts there could be no further movement on the initiative until after that year’s British general election. Various problems were raised by the British, not least their unwillingness to talk directly to the Provisionals and the difficulties of selling the language contained in “Draft 2” to the unionists.

  Those on the British side were less than forthright with the Irish officials about their own lengthy dialogue with Gerry Adams, and made no mention of their complete familiarity with the concepts and language that permeated “Draft 2.” The British said they wanted an assurance of an end to violence before committing any more resources to the project. But there was a way ahead, they said. It lay in a British declaration of neutrality and an assurance by the Irish concerning the principle of consent in Northern Ireland. The meeting ended with agreement on those points and on a strategy to deal with any leaks to the media of John Hume’s role as an intermediary. But it was a doubtful, uncertain meeting; no one quite knew what the political landscape would look like in a few weeks’ time.

  As it turned out, Albert Reynolds embraced the peace process with enthusiasm and John Major survived the British general election. Haughey had fully briefed the new taoiseach on the state of play, and Reynolds had immediately agreed to keep Martin Mansergh on his staff. Alec Reid’s visit to Government Buildings in Dublin increased, as did the number of meetings between Hume and Adams. In December 1993, after months of exhausting, often frustrating negotiations with the Major administration, the Downing Street Declaration was finally unveiled by the two leaders to a curiously mixed reception in Northern Ireland.31 While unionists were relaxed about its contents, rank-and-file Provisional supporters were bewildered. Some feared that their leaders had been drawn into a deadly trap from which there could be no escape; none suspected that the declaration had emerged from the secret initiative launched by their own leader.

  The reason for their confusion was contained in the declaration’s paragraph 4, which incorporated Alec Reid’s consent principle, although none of the IRA’s supporters who read it could have been aware of that. “The British Government,” it said, “agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.”32

  The declaration was an astonishing document and one of the seminal pieces of Anglo-Irish diplomacy. The fact that it elevated the principle of consent and dictated that this had to be a cornerstone of any Northern Ireland settlement was secondary. The two governments had long agreed on that. What made the Downing Street document exceptional was that it was modeled on ideas and concepts evolved, initiated, and developed in a secret dialogue whose instigator was the head of the political organization pledged to overthrow the principle by gun and bomb.

  In June 2006, after a lengthy illness, Haughey finally succumbed to the rigors of prostate cancer and died at his home in Kinsealy where some twenty years earlier he and Father Reid had met to begin the peace process. Haughey’s supportive role in the peace process at its most vulnerable and crucial period—at its birth—had rarely been acknowledged in Irish public life, perhaps because it conflicted so starkly with the dark image that his political enemies and many in the Irish media preferred to project. But at his graveside Haughey’s protégé and successor as Fianna Fail leader and taoiseach, Bertie Ahern—once famously described by Haughey as “the most clever, the most cunning, the most devious of them all”—paid an overdue tribute to the role Haughey had played in ending the Troubles in the North: “His courageous decision to open a secret channel of communication with the Provisional leadership paved the way to the banishing of the bomb and bullet, North and South, in our time.”33

  TEN

  “No Idle Boast”

  Dublin’s Mansion House has witnessed many dramatic and historic moments in its nearly three hundred years of life. Built as a town house in 1710 in the middle of Georgian Dublin by a wealthy County Derry property developer, Joshua Dawson, it has been the official residence of the city’s lord mayors since 1715. Its famous Round Room, added to mark the visit of King George IV in 1821, has been the venue for some of Ireland’s most momentous political gatherings. In January 1919 the First Dail, dominated by the revolutionary Sinn Fein party, met there to ratify the 1916 proclamation and adopt Ireland’s Declaration of Independence. Only twenty-six of the sixty-nine successful Sinn Fein candidates were at liberty to attend the session, and although the British authorities permitted the rebel parliament to meet, the proceedings were closely monitored from a building across the road, by the inspector general of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Sir James Byrne, and his Dublin counterpart, Colonel Wedge-worth Johnston. The Second Dail also convened in the Mansion House more than two years later but was dissolved after only a year as civil war gathered Ireland in its terrible grip. And it was in the Mansion House that Eamon de Valera had presaged the civil war when he told delegates to the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis of October 1921 that “Ireland’s representatives will never call upon the people to swear allegiance to the English King.” When a few weeks later Collins and the Treaty delegates brought home from Downing Street an agreement requiring just that, Irish republicanism was convulsed by violent division.

  More than sixty years later, on November 2, 1986, as once again the forces of law and order watched events from a safe distance, the Mansion House was witness to another great Irish political rupture when Provisional Sinn Fein delegates, after nearly five hours of tense and at times emotional debate, elected to drop the party’s long-standing opposition to taking seats in the Irish parliament. To some in the hall this formal act of recognizing the hated partitionist settlement was a case of déjà vu. The same issue had split the movement in 1969 and 1970, with the IRA and Sinn Fein taking separate but equally divisive stands on the issue. The resulting quarrel had torn the movement apart, and the consequences were violent and long-lasting, leading not just to the formation of the Provisional IRA but also to the creation of a feud culture within republicanism in which ideological differences were often settled by the shedding of blood.

  There were, however, key differences this time that would make this split less divisive and provide evidence that Gerry Adams had learned important lessons from the mistaken way Cathal Goulding and his allies had handled the issue in their day. In 1970 Goulding had advocated entering all three partitionist parliaments at the same ti
me—the Dail in Dublin, or Leinster House, as republicans preferred to call it; Stormont in Belfast; and the House of Commons at Westminster.

  In 1986 Adams made a much less ambitious proposal to the republican movement. He wanted Sinn Fein to enter only the Irish part of the 1921 settlement, Dail Eireann; the British parts, Stormont and Westminster, would still be off limits. There was no ideological reason for this, since once the principle of abstention was ditched for one assembly it applied to all three. But by advocating entry first into the Dail, a far-off place about which Northern republicans knew little and cared less, Adams minimized likely opposition from Northern IRA units.

  Goulding’s move also came at a time when his internal critics were complaining that he was running down the IRA’s military capacity and had failed to ensure that Catholic districts of Belfast were adequately protected against loyalist attack. No one could level that charge against the Adams-led IRA. The debate on dropping abstentionism came just as the IRA was receiving huge shipments of weaponry from Colonel Qaddafi. Far from running the IRA down, Adams and his colleagues were promising an escalation in both the quality and the quantity of IRA operations, and on such a scale that they could possibly tilt the military and political balance in the IRA’s favor. In 1969 the IRA had split after a general Army Convention had voted in favor of the policy switch, but at a similar Convention, held in County Donegal in September 1986, delegates were able to reconcile their differences without a rupture. Reassured by the leadership’s promise of an intensified war, most of the delegates who voted against the motion stayed in the IRA’s ranks. In 1970 they had walked out.

  In 1986 some of those attending the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis did walk out in protest, but they never presented the threat posed by the dissidents of 1969. Led by Ruairi O Bradaigh and other veteran activists, they went on to form Republican Sinn Fein (RSF). Despite the purity of their beliefs, the O Bradaigh wing failed to persuade enough Provisionals to join them. The split was small and contained, confined largely to older republicans, many of whom were based south of the Border miles away from the war zone, where the Provisional IRA still carried the greater appeal for grassroots militants. Although RSF supporters did set up a military wing, such was the fear of reprisals from the Provisionals that it was years before the Continuity IRA revealed its existence. That in itself was a comment on the new group’s frailty.

  To most delegates and nearly every media representative crammed into the Mansion House that day, there seemed little doubt that the underlying reason for that was the Adams leadership’s apparently unswerving support for armed struggle. It had been clear to all in 1969 that Goulding was intent on demilitarizing the republican movement. There was, apart from members of the O Bradaigh–O Conaill wing, no such suspicion by 1986. The debate about abstentionism seemed to be about what the leadership said it was about, an attempt to make Sinn Fein more relevant on the southern side of the Border by abandoning a policy stance that was unpopular with the bulk of voters there.

  What only a few in the Mansion House could know was that the Adams leadership had already commenced a secret diplomacy with the leadership of Fianna Fail and that dropping abstentionism was a key part of the strategy. Changing Sinn Fein and IRA policy was in fact vital to the prospects of creating an alliance with Charles Haughey; after all, how could the Fianna Fail chief even contemplate a relationship with Adams as long as the Provisionals rejected the legitimacy of the state he led? The shift would undoubtedly help Sinn Fein win votes, but that would take many years to happen and require an IRA cessation. Primarily, the ending of abstentionism prepared the way for constructive dialogue with Haughey.

  When Father Reid sent Haughey his lengthy message in 1987, he cited the outcome of the 1986 Ard Fheis as evidence of the strength of the Sinn Fein leadership and the freedom it had to initiate and organize its own policies. Adams, in other words, was the man with the skills and the trust of the rank and file needed to do the job. “Alec would say,” recalled one participant in the peace process, “that not even de Valera or Collins was able to accomplish such a huge shift in policy and get away with what was really an insignificant split and no upheaval worth the name.”1 What he meant, of course, was that while de Valera and Collins had both steered the IRA of their day into constitutional politics, it had been at the cost of serious and bloody splits. Adams was doing the same but largely kept the organization intact. That meant that he might even be able to deliver a fully intact IRA into the peace process.

  To the outside world, dropping abstentionism seemed to be the logical conclusion of Adams’s efforts to politicize the Provisionals. He had started to move the organization in this direction during the Cage 11 days in the mid-1970s, when he had argued in favor not only of social and economic radicalism but of republican involvement in agitational politics in the South. Throughout the development of this strategy, Adams and his allies had justified it on military grounds. The argument was disarmingly simple; the more republicans identified with the lives and needs of the poorest sections of Southern society, the more support, tacit or otherwise, the IRA would get for the war of national liberation in the North. Adams would use the same argument to urge that abstentionism should be dropped.

  In practice, however, it worked the other way around. When Sinn Fein tested the electoral waters in the Republic, the party discovered that the violence of the IRA’s campaign and Sinn Fein’s associations with the Northern conflict were liabilities. The early toleration of the IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland had virtually disappeared by the late 1970s and had been replaced by a fear that the conflict would spill over the Border, as it had in May 1974, for instance, when loyalist bombs killed thirty-three people in one day in Dublin and Monaghan. Many Southerners blamed the Northern republicans for this and strongly resisted voting for Sinn Fein. Although Sinn Fein attributed this to state censorship, particularly section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which banned the party from radio and television, the truth was that the IRA and its violent activities were the reason for the party’s electoral failure.

  Adams’s push for involvement in Southern politics began in 1977, not long after his release from Long Kesh. It was there in Jimmy Drumm’s “long war” Bodenstown address in June that year and was made explicit in January the following year, by which time Adams had become IRA chief of staff.

  As in the North, it was the hunger strikes of 1981 that strengthened Adams sufficiently to enable him to accelerate Sinn Fein’s electoral activity south of the Border. H Block candidates had done well in the Republic’s general election of June that year when nine of them won nearly 43,000 votes, some 2.5 percent of the electorate, and two won seats, both taken by Long Kesh prisoners. If nonprisoner candidates, pledged to take their seats, had run instead, they would have held the balance of power in the new Dail. Flushed with these victories and the separate successes in the North, delegates to the 1981 Ard Fheis had given the party leadership a free hand in deciding whether to contest future elections, North and South. The first opportunity to do that south of the Border came in February the following year when the FitzGerald government elected in the turbulent summer of 1981 suddenly collapsed.

  As it turned out, the election was a disaster for the republicans. Sinn Fein ran in seven constituencies, two fewer than in 1981, and selected a decidedly military-leaning slate. Two of the best-known candidates were IRA prisoners. Joe O’Connell, the leader of the Balcombe Street IRA unit, which had bombed and shot its way around southern England and central London in the mid-1970s, ran in Clare, while Seamus McElwaine, an IRA leader from the Monaghan-Fermanagh Border, then on remand in Crumlin Road jail, Belfast, ran in Cavan-Monaghan. His agent was Caoimhghin O Caolain, a former bank clerk from Monaghan town, who had been talent-spotted by Adams during the hunger strike and subsequently groomed for the seat. He eventually became TD for the constituency in 1997. The overall result revealed a collapse in the H Block vote, from 43,000 votes, or 2.5 percent, to just under 17,000, or 1 percent. The message was cl
ear: Southern voters might come out at an emotional moment and support dying hunger strikers, but otherwise they would spurn the IRA and its political wing. By way of contrast, republicans who had run on a platform of taking their seats did well. Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey tripled the H Block vote in Dublin North-Central, while Sinn Fein’s old rivals in the Goulding’s Officials, now calling themselves Sinn Fein–The Workers Party, won three seats.

  Sinn Fein drew in its horns in 1982 after that poor first result. That Easter the Army Council reaffirmed the traditional disdain of constitutional methods: “Only through armed struggle will we be listened to…, ” it said.2 When another Dail election was called in November 1982, Sinn Fein decided not to contest it, conserving its resources for the election to Jim Prior’s “rolling” Assembly in Belfast, which was held the month before. Nevertheless, the move toward dropping abstentionism in the South continued apace as Adams and his allies chipped away at the opposition at one Ard Fheis after another. First Sinn Fein agreed to contest European elections—a proposal Adams had resisted when O Bradaigh had suggested it—and to take its seats in the unlikely event of winning. Then it agreed to register as a political party in Dublin, a move that de facto recognized the hated Southern state. At the next conference a motion declaring abstentionism to be a tactic, not a principle, was passed, although short of a large enough majority to change the party’s constitution. Slowly, incrementally, the party was moving to end its ban on taking seats in the Irish parliament and recognizing the state that the IRA’s predecessors had vowed to destroy.