by Ed Moloney
THE IRA held one of the keys to winning the issue, or rather Colonel Qaddafi did. By October 1986, a month before the Ard Fheis and just after the IRA Convention, the IRA had smuggled some 130 tons of Libyan weaponry into Ireland in four separate shipments and had successfully hidden these in secret dumps in some of the most isolated parts of Ireland. As the Army Convention and the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis neared, the number of key IRA activists who knew that substantial amounts of arms had been successfully landed slowly grew. “People were told there was big gear come in,” remembered one IRA member, even if only a select few knew the details.3 The origin of the arms, the fact that they were a gift from Qaddafi, was still a secret to all but the Army Council. With tons of weaponry stored away and many middle-ranking IRA activists aware that a big offensive was in the pipeline, the notion that Adams was about to sell out just seemed absurd. Colonel Qaddafi had helped make the outcome of the abstention debate a foregone conclusion.
Before going to the Sinn Fein conference with the proposal, Adams first had to win over the IRA. Once that was done, Sinn Fein would be easier to handle. In early 1986 the Army Council set up a special subcommittee to examine the possibility of holding an IRA Convention. When the decision to go ahead was made, it moved very fast. “It was done very hurriedly, in less than two weeks, when normally it would take a month to organize,” remembered one delegate.4 Before the Convention met, the ever-reliable Brian Keenan, by then into his seventh year in various English jails, made his support for Adams known publicly. In a letter to An Phoblacht–Republican News, co-signed by three other IRA prisoners held in Britain, Keenan wrote, “It is time for a change to enable elected representatives to carry out revolutionary work in the corridors of power. We do not believe any republican principle is involved in this issue.”5 A secret letter went to the Army Council saying the same thing.
At the Convention, the Adams camp, including Adams himself, argued that a yes vote would assist the armed struggle by broadening the base and producing more safe houses for the IRA. Martin McGuinness predicted that Sinn Fein would win up to five or six seats, and if that happened no government in Dublin would dare move against the IRA. The IRA could launch attacks in the North safe in the knowledge that its rear was secure against assault. Danny Morrison claimed that the dead hunger strikers, especially Bobby Sands, would have voted yes, and Seamus Twomey declared his support for the change. Opposition was strongest from around the Border in South Armagh, Louth, and South Down. But the message from the outgoing IRA Army Council was that the war was going on regardless of how the vote on abstention went, and this swayed the meeting. “The way Adams did it was to say to the IRA men, ‘This is politics. You get on with your thing—the war—and it won’t be affected,’” remembered another delegate.6 The Convention was held in a room that sloped downward from the back rather like a cinema; somewhat disconcertingly for the delegates, the leadership sat in the rear seats, watching and noting the speeches and who voted which way.
The vote went three to one in favor, comfortably exceeding the required two-thirds majority. There were two bonuses. The Convention once again upheld General Army Order no. 8, which had prohibited IRA actions against the security forces in the Republic for some forty years. The effect of this would be to reinforce Father Reid’s conciliatory message to Haughey. Adams also got a restructured Executive, the first to be elected since 1970 and one much more sympathetic to his politics, at least initially. A small minority eventually left the IRA after the vote, but there was no walkout from the Convention, as there had been in 1969.
ADAMS’S PROBLEM was not with the IRA but with Sinn Fein. The IRA had been under the sway of the Belfast leadership ever since the establishment of Northern Command, and since it was larger in the North the units there would always have a greater say at a Convention. But Sinn Fein was as numerous on the ground in the South as in the North, and feelings in the South were stronger against change. Many of the Southern members of Sinn Fein came from families and backgrounds shaped by the bitter divisions of the civil war in 1922 and they literally hated the system of government in Dublin. The Southerners had stymied Adams at the 1985 Ard Fheis when a move to declare abstentionism a tactic rather than a principle failed to get a two-thirds majority. Having foiled Adams once, they could do it again. The difficulty that Adams and his allies faced was the possibility that they would end up with the same result that Goulding had got in 1969 when the IRA had voted for the change, but Sinn Fein was against. If sufficient numbers split from Sinn Fein, they could act as a magnet for military dissidents, and the division could worsen. With Father Reid’s approach to Haughey building up speed, Adams’s need to avoid a big public split in Sinn Fein assumed greater significance.
Just before the Ard Fheis, Adams moved to try and neutralize O Bradaigh, and he used the Libyan weapons to lure his opponent, hinting that a number of big arms shipments had been brought in and that the war effort would be intensified. “Ruairi was told there was good news in that regard,” said one source familiar with the meeting.7 But Adams’s efforts to win over O Bradaigh failed. On the day of the debate he again asked to see O Bradaigh and his supporters. They met backstage in the Mansion House at lunchtime, both accompanied by supporters, for what turned out to be a bad-tempered and fruitless encounter. Adams had brought Micky McKevitt along as evidence that even though the powerful quartermaster’s department had voted against the change at the Convention, it was nevertheless prepared to stick by the Adams leadership afterward, once more hinting at the arms shipments and the coming IRA offensive. Daithi O Conaill had been barred by the Adams camp from the meeting, and it ended with a threat to the dissidents: if they set up a rival Army, the Provisionals would take O Conaill out.8 One of O Bradaigh’s supporters, Des Long from Limerick, slammed a table with his walking cane in anger, and they stormed out.
THE ARD FHEIS DEBATE started just before 11:00 A.M. on the Sunday morning, but many believed the key contribution had been made the evening before, when Gerry Adams gave his presidential address. His speech set out the classic arguments for change. The IRA had met in Convention and approved the move without staging a walkout, he said. It followed that anyone who opposed a yes vote was actually opposing the IRA. Critics had gone to the establishment media with accusations that the leadership was going down the same road as Goulding’s “Stickies.” “To compare us with the ‘Stickies’ is an obscenity,” he protested. “For anyone who has eyes to see, it is clear that the Sticky leadership had abandoned armed struggle as a form of resistance to British rule as part of their historic departure into British and Free State constitutionality. For our part, this leadership has been actively involved in the longest phase ever of resistance to the British presence. Our record speaks for itself. We have led from the front and from within the occupied area.”9 And, he added, the armed struggle would continue until victory. “We all have a part to play in it and those of us who remain committed to it will ensure, regardless of the dangers it holds for us, that this struggle is going to continue until Irish independence is won. That is no idle boast.”10
Others echoed the military arguments. Another Adams ally, County Donegal man Pat Doherty, opened the Sunday debate on the abstention motion and argued that the major difference between Sinn Fein and other republicans who had entered parliament in the past was this leadership’s commitment to the IRA’s armed struggle. John Joe McGirl, a former chief of staff, repeated the message. He had gone to other veterans, J. B. O’Hagan, Joe Cahill, and Seamus Twomey among them, he told the delegates, and they all supported the change. “We have an army fighting 16 years which will continue to fight until British rule is defeated,” he declared.11 Joe Cahill said that the Goulding leadership “had sold out the military spirit,” but he was confident that by the time the election after next came, the deadline for progress set by Adams, “the freedom fighters of the IRA will have forced the Brits to the conference table.”12 Speaker after speaker who backed the move invoked the IRA and the leadership’s
commitment to the armed struggle.
It was left to Martin McGuinness to deliver the hardest and most uncompromising military message of the debate, establishing a precedent for the peace process in which McGuinness’s militancy would be regularly flourished to reassure the rank and file that there would be no sellout. A large enough number of the delegates would have known exactly who Martin McGuinness was—that he was the current Northern commander in charge of the day-to-day war against the British. That day the Derry man was the voice of the IRA.
He began his speech with a commitment on behalf of the leadership never to enter Stormont or Westminster and then turned to allegations that he and other Republican leaders had plans to abandon the armed struggle. “I reject any such suggestion and I reject the notion that entering Leinster House would mean an end to Sinn Fein’s unapologetic support for the right of Irish people to oppose in arms the British forces of occupation,” he said. “That, my friends, is a principle which a minority in this hall might doubt but which I believe all our opponents clearly understand. Our position is clear and will never change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.”13 The opposition to the change, he continued in a less than subtle reference to O Bradaigh and O Conaill, was not about abstentionism but about the 1975 cease-fire. “The reality is that the former leadership of this Movement has never been able to come to terms with this leadership’s criticism of the disgraceful attitude adopted by them during the disastrous 18 month ceasefire in the mid-1970’s.”14 In other words, the only people who were talking about the war’s being ended had themselves nearly brought the IRA to defeat through a foolish cease-fire. How could anyone think that this leadership, which had rescued the IRA then, could or would make the same mistake?
At around four-thirty that afternoon the debate ended, and the Mansion House, which had been packed with media and spectators, waited expectantly for the result of the vote. When it came, the sigh of relief from the Adams camp was almost audible. Fully 429 delegates had voted for the change, 161 against, and 38 abstained. A two-thirds majority was 418, and the Sinn Fein leadership had made it by the votes of just 11 delegates.
In the excitement of the moment no one noticed that the number of delegates attending the Ard Fheis had inexplicably doubled from its usual figure. At the 1985 conference, the year before, the motion seeking to define abstentionism as a tactic and not a principle had been lost by 181 votes to 161; a total of 341 delegates had cast their votes. Yet just a year later the number of delegates at the Ard Fheis soared to 628, almost double; the following year, in 1987, it reverted to its normal 350 or so delegates. That was also the number of SF delegates, more or less, who voted overwhelmingly to back the Good Friday Agreement when Sinn Fein held a special Ard Fheis in May 1998, twelve years later, to discuss the political deal. Each year after 1986 and before 1998 had seen more or less the same number of delegates at each Ard Fheis. The puzzle is why the number of delegates suddenly jumped to over 600 in that one crucial year.
The explanation, according to a number of republican sources, is that the 1986 Ard Fheis vote was really organized and manipulated by the IRA, with all the care and preparation normally reserved for a military operation. This exercise, which began as early as 1984, had been twofold in character. One well-placed Belfast Sinn Fein source active at the time described what happened:
They went about it in two ways. Over a two-year period beforehand released IRA prisoners loyal to Adams were ordered to join Sinn Fein cumainn [branches] and take them over by replacing hostile or unsympathetic officers. In one instance in Andersonstown that I remember, two of these people got themselves chosen as delegates to the 1985 Ard Fheis and just point-blank refused to propose a motion that was seen as critical of Adams.
The other way was that they just invented Sinn Fein cumainn. All you needed was five names, and you got two delegates to the Ard Fheis. They were set up all over the country and in Belfast. I personally saw faces at the ’86 Ard Fheis I had never seen before or since. There must have been a hundred or more of these cumainn but after ’86 they just petered out. It was done over a two-year period with a big push in 1986, slow at first, but then it became obvious.15
No one noticed the disparity in numbers, or if anyone did, they chose to remain silent. The reality was that afterward the reason for the sudden surge in membership hardly mattered. The Ard Fheis result had objectively changed republican politics in two ways: Sinn Fein, and by extension the IRA, had been edged significantly closer to constitutionalism, while the Redemptorists’ mission to Charles Haughey had been armed with a crucial piece of evidence about the bona fides and skills of the Adams leadership.
Within six months of the Ard Fheis and in great secrecy, Reid delivered the cease-fire offer to Haughey, and his trips to Kinsealy on behalf of the Sinn Fein leader increased. The peace process was accelerating, and the 1986 Ard Fheis and its historic political turnaround had played a crucial part in achieving that.
ALTHOUGH SINN FEIN was by now well on the way to an even more comprehensive political transformation, its leaders continued to assure the rank and file that the IRA’s armed struggle would remain sacrosant, no matter how unsettling the changes. Between 1987 and 1989 Adams, McGuinness, the IRA GHQ, the Army Council, An Phoblacht–Republican News, and other influential figures and bodies gave one promise after another that the IRA would carry the war to the British until they agreed to leave Ireland and that whatever the talks with the SDLP were about, they did not encompass an IRA cease-fire.
At the same time this was happening, the Adams leadership gradually introduced some of the key elements of the still-secret “stepping stones” agenda into the republican vocabulary. But not all of them, by any means. Some concepts, like the redefinition of British withdrawal, were just too heretical to be allowed into the public domain. Nor were the rank and file, or for that matter the Army Council, told about the secret strategy that underlay the new concepts. To call what happened between this point and the declaration of the first IRA cease-fire in 1994 a “debate,” as more than one observer has, would be something of an exaggeration. Ideas were certainly put into circulation, but the ideas belonged mostly to a Sinn Fein leadership that preferred to talk at rather than to or with their base. Dissension was frowned upon. One internal theoretical magazine, Iris Bheag (Little Magazine), which had been thrown open to the rank and file, was quietly suppressed around 1990, after IRA prisoners had used it to criticize aspects of the Adams strategy. Iris Bheag was replaced by two glossy productions, The Captive Voice, for IRA prisoners, and The Starry Plough, which featured mostly articles written or approved by SF headquarters. If there was a debate, it was mainly on the leadership’s terms.
In April 1987, just before Tim Pat Coogan carried Alec Reid’s letter to Haughey, Sinn Fein issued an eight-page discussion paper entitled “A Scenario for Peace.” Couched in the traditional idiom of republicanism, the document repeated the conventional demand for British withdrawal, called for the disbanding of the RUC and UDR and the release of IRA prisoners, and demanded reparations for British misrule. It seemed to be a routine repetition of republican dogma and was ignored by the media and most political rivals. But “A Scenario for Peace” did two things. It scrapped the simplistic and rigid “Brits Out” slogan of the 1970s and replaced it with the much more subtle and flexible phrase “national self-determination” (NSD), a concept that was one of the cornerstones of the Reid-Adams strategy. NSD was a formulation within whose generous frame two utterly conflicting definitions could coexist quite happily, one the traditional republican one, which envisaged physical British expulsion, and the other Reid’s version, which said that any move by the British to leave Northern Ireland had to be with the consent of unionists, not just nationalists. One other “stepping stone” idea was contained in the paper, the proposal for a constitutional conference at which elected representatives from all the Irish traditions, nationalist and unionist, would hammer out a settlement. Again worded in repu
blican language, this idea nevertheless could happily sit alongside the Reid-Adams formulation. Adams’s efforts to move Sinn Fein away from its ban on taking seats in the Dail had been a slow, cautious, and incremental journey; it would be the same with the bid to make the Reid-Adams diplomacy republican policy. Slowly, the building blocks for a settlement based on the constitutional status quo, by and large, were being laid—and Sinn Fein would be part of that settlement.
Within two years another plank in the Reid-Adams strategy, pannationalism, fell into place when the notion of an alliance with constitutional nationalism became de facto Sinn Fein policy. The groundwork had been done in the months before. Against a background of regular assurances throughout the spring of 1988 from Martin McGuinness that talks with the SDLP had nothing to do with an IRA cease-fire, a troop of Adams’s supporters, Mitchel McLaughlin, Tom Hartley, and Danny Morrison among them, made public calls urging the adoption of a pan-nationalist strategy. It was all in preparation for a special internal conference of Northern Sinn Feiners at the end of June 1988 that would consider a special report prepared by the SF general secretary, Tom Hartley, arguing for an alliance with the SDLP.
This was unfamiliar and unfriendly territory as far as many Provisional activists were concerned. Most still shared the scathing view of their constitutional rivals that had been expressed by IRA prisoners at the end of the 1981 hunger strike, and six years of electoral rivalry between the parties had, if anything, deepened the hostility at grassroots level. The June 1988 conference also heard a critique of the IRA’s armed struggle from a Belfast councillor, Martin O Muillear, a post–hunger strike, non-IRA recruit to republicanism who told the delegates that there were contradictions between “the armed struggle and our political work,” not least in the area of job creation. As a councillor he wanted jobs for his constituents, but the IRA was pledged to deter inward investment with its bombing campaign. “[L]et’s have enough savvy to tell the difference between what is a position of political suicide,” he told the 150 delegates, “and what is an intelligent and pragmatic political position.”16 O Muillear’s message was clear: the IRA was becoming an electoral liability, while Hartley’s message, the need for an alliance with the SDLP, offered an alternative.