by Ed Moloney
Instead the IRA was allowed to strike back only at named, identified targets, and this meant that only those who could be shown to have been directly involved in the loyalist killings or who were known to be pulling their strings in the background were legitimate targets. Again Northern Command would vet each operation, and local brigades would have to justify the choice of targets. That was necessarily a drawn-out process that delayed the IRA response. “The time frame was crucial, otherwise the message was lost,” recalled a Tyrone republican. “Loyalists retaliated fast, while in the IRA they had to battle for permission to strike back. You virtually needed a jury trial.”27
Retaliation for the McNally and Davey killings came in the first week of March 1989 when East Tyrone IRA members sought out Leslie Dallas, a UVF member and a leading member of one of the four UVF families in the East Tyrone–South Derry area. He was gunned down in a garage in Coagh, not far from Ardboe, but the shooting was a disaster for the IRA. Two elderly Protestant men, Ernest Rankin and Austin Nelson, neither of whom had any association with the UVF, were caught in the gunfire and shot dead.
In Belfast, Gerry Adams distanced Sinn Fein from the killings. Referring to the deaths of Rankin and Nelson, he echoed the Army Council line. “Our position is clear,” he said. “Sinn Fein does not condone the deaths of people who are non-combatants. There can be no legitimate reason for any uncertainty about Sinn Fein’s attitude to such killings.”28 On the ground in East Tyrone, the Provisionals’ grassroots, by contrast, had demanded a much more drastic response. “The cry was a councillor for a councillor, for Willie McCrea or a bomb in the council chamber,” explained a Tyrone republican. “That was the gut feeling of the rank and file.”29 They didn’t get their way.
After the Coagh shootings, the UVF campaign in the East Tyrone, North Armagh, and South Derry areas intensified. Their targets included not just uninvolved Catholics but IRA and Sinn Fein members and their families, and its effect was to deeply undermine republican morale. “In Tyrone the SAS went for IRA members while the UVF went for the families,” was how one republican source described the tactics in these years.30 The UVF killed twice more in 1989, five times in 1990, and fifteen times in 1991, eight of the victims gunned down in the first three months of the year. Again the facts and figures speak for themselves. Between 1988 and August 1994 eighty-six people died violent deaths in the East Tyrone operational zone, and the UVF was responsible for forty of them, nearly half the slaughter. Davey’s death began an open season on Sinn Fein councillors and activists. Fourteen Sinn Fein members were killed in the four years that followed the killing of the Magherafelt councillor, over half of all the Sinn Fein personnel killed since 1970. The IRA was powerless or unwilling to stop it.
Relatives of Republican activists were also picked off, sometimes in exceptionally brutal circumstances, sometimes in circumstances suggesting that the loyalist killers had excellent intelligence. Roseanne Mallon, for instance, shot dead in Lisgallon in May 1994, was related to the most senior IRA figure in the county. In one of the worst examples of this kind of killing, a mother of five, Kathleen O’Hagan, was gunned to death in front of her children at her home near Cookstown in August 1994. Her husband had served eight years for possessing an IRA gun, and that made her a target, as it made by implication the spouses of other IRA personnel. Mrs O’Hagan was seven months pregnant at the time of her brutal death. There were other clues that the killers were well briefed. Patrick Shields, shot dead with his son Diarmuid in January 1993 in his grocer’s shop near Dungannon, had been in the IRA in the 1970s but had quit long before. He was, however, still a contact of Kevin Mallon’s, by this stage no longer a Provisional but a dissident sympathizer. Not many people would have known that. A month later his son’s girlfriend, Julie Statham, overwhelmed by grief, committed suicide.
The IRA’s new, restrained retaliation policy had two effects. The IRA concentrated all its energies in the hunt for the head of the Mid-Ulster UVF, Billy Wright, who was based in Portadown and who was believed to have had a hand in most if not all the killings. The IRA made at least five attempts on Wright’s life, including a booby trap bomb placed underneath his car, but the UVF leader lived a charmed life and survived them all. He was later shot dead by the INLA under extraordinary circumstances, inside the Maze prison, but the IRA’s inability to deal with him or his associates discredited the organization. “They were always talking about a night of the long knives against the UVF, but it never did happen,” remembered one Tyrone IRA man.31 Another recalled approaching a prominent Sinn Fein politician in the county after learning of a UVF threat against his family: “His response was ‘I wonder if we could get in touch with the UVF and sort it out.’”32 A week later the UVF killed his brother.
The IRA’s failure to stem the loyalist killings struck at the core of its raison d’être. If it couldn’t protect its own, especially in Tyrone, wondered many republicans, how could the IRA expect to drive the British out of Ireland? “As the killings grew, the demand to do something grew as well,” recalled one activist. “People were scared because it seemed the loyalists had a free hand. People were afraid to be identified with Sinn Fein, not just the IRA. You could be shot for having the same name as someone in Sinn Fein like poor Tommy Molloy. Meanwhile the IRA was doing nothing to protect people.”33 Molloy was killed apparently because he shared a surname with Francie Molloy, the leading Sinn Fein figure in the area, who later became an Assembly member for Mid-Ulster. By the end of 1990, according to republican sources in the area, Sinn Fein was having great difficulty persuading people to run in council elections.34 The grassroots demoralization that flowed from all this nourished the psychology of ceasefire, making the peace process acceptable and even welcome, as one astute observer of Tyrone republicanism noted. “People are terrified of going back to war because of their memories of that UVF campaign,” he said.35
The IRA leadership’s new attitude toward loyalist killings sometimes meant that lies were told about the true allegiance of some victims. At least three Sinn Fein councillors killed by the UVF in the area were also key IRA activists, but this was never acknowledged even years later. When Liam Ryan was shot dead by the UVF at his Battery Bar near Ardboe along with a civilian, Michael Devlin, his IRA membership, never mind his role as brigade intelligence officer, was denied by Sinn Fein, although three weeks later an IRA firing party did fire a volley of automatic shots over his grave. The IRA’s worst loss at the hands of the Mid-Ulster UVF came in March 1991, when three young IRA members were shot dead as they drove into the car park of Boyle’s Bar in the strongly republican village of Cappagh, County Tyrone. Twenty-three-year-old John Quinn, seventeen-year-old Dwayne O’Donnell, and twenty-year-old Malcolm Nugent were cut down in a hail of bullets, and a Catholic noncombatant, fifty-two-year-old Thomas Armstrong, killed by a stray round as he used the toilets in the bar. The IRA did not acknowledge the three for a year, and they were depicted in Sinn Fein propaganda as innocent Catholic victims, the result of an order relayed to the Tyrone Brigade on behalf of Northern Command by Jim Gibney, a senior Belfast-based adviser of Gerry Adams.36 The deception fooled no republicans in Tyrone and very few in the rest of Northern Ireland, but was aimed at currying sympathy south of the Border, where people were much less likely to be aware of the truth.
“Adams’s attitude was always to encourage the view of nationalists as being the underdog, the ones at the receiving end of this sort of violence,” recalled a senior IRA source. “He would say we want to be seen as the oppressed, and that was why the Cappagh men were disowned.”37 Denying the Cappagh dead enraged many Tyrone republicans, but the IRA on the ground was assured that there were good reasons. “It was to do with making life easier in the South, particularly in relation to the safe houses and the like which we could get, especially from Fianna Fail people,” explained one former senior figure. “After disasters like Enniskillen, houses were shut to the IRA; after Cappagh when what happened [was] seen as security force collusion with loyal
ists to kill Catholics, the houses open again.”38 There was a political dimension to this as well. If Fianna Fail supporters could open their homes to the IRA, then perhaps the Fianna Fail leadership could do the same at a political level with Sinn Fein. This provided the real reason for the shift in Army Council policy on loyalist killings. The change dovetailed into Gerry Adams’s quest for pan-nationalist unity that in 1988 and 1989 was at the center of his secret diplomatic overtures to the Fianna Fail taoiseach, Charles Haughey.
THE FUNERALS of the Loughgall ASU were some of the biggest seen in Ireland since the hunger strikes. Jim Lynagh’s removal and burial became an occasion for the Provisional grassroots to demonstrate a disdain for the Republic and its institutions that had been sharpened by suspicions that the Irish police, the Gardai, may have played a part in laying the ambush, possibly by passing on intelligence to the British. Lynagh’s body was escorted back across the Border on the Monday after the killings by hundreds of IRA supporters. At Emyvale in County Monaghan the cortege stopped in the main street and was joined by an IRA color party. From a side entry stepped three masked IRA men armed with automatic rifles. They fired three single shots over the coffin and then a wild volley into the air that roused the crowd. As they turned to melt back into the sea of faces, they found their way blocked by a carload of the elite Garda antiterrorist unit, the Task Force armed with Uzi submachine guns. Seeing this, the crowd surged forward and manhandled the police car into an empty drain, upturning it with one of its plainclothes occupants still inside. Other policemen fired wildly in the air, and for a few moments it looked as if a serious confrontation might follow. Later that day a Sinn Fein picket gathered outside Fianna Fail’s headquarters in Lower Mount Street in central Dublin. Angered by Fianna Fail denunciations of the IRA in the wake of the ambush, the picketers strung a banner across the footpath which read, “Fianna Fail, ‘The Republican Party,’ Collaborators with SAS Murderers.”
Lynagh was buried two days later, on May 13, and Gerry Adams gave the oration at his graveside and lashed the Fianna Fail government and its leader, Charles Haughey. “A few short months ago,” he said,
the people of this State elected a Fianna Fail government of sorts. Their leader made many brave noises about a British withdrawal being a prerequisite for peace in this island. He described the Six-County State as a nonviable social and economic unit. He chose Bodenstown to denounce British policy, [Garret] FitzGerald’s collusion in that policy and the actions of the British Crown Forces. That was when he was looking for votes. I have some questions for all Fianna Fail supporters and for all nationalists. Did you elect a government to support Thatcher’s terrorism? The British government understands Charles J. Haughey… as it understood FitzGerald and Spring. It has always understood the shoneen clan—it bought them off with partition. It does not understand the Jim Lynaghs, the Padraig McKearneys or the Seamus McElwaines. It thinks it can defeat them. It never will.39
It would have been later the same day or not long afterward that Tim Pat Coogan was ushered into Charles Haughey’s presence to hand over the lengthy letter from Father Alec Reid that outlined Gerry Adams’s proposals for an alliance between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein and the extraordinary offer of an IRA cease-fire. The letter, fifteen pages and 7,000 words long, had been written two days before, when the gunfire over the coffin of Jim Lynagh was still echoing around the streets of Emyvale and the angry shouts of Sinn Fein picketers were ringing outside Fianna Fail’s offices.
TWELVE
“The War of the Twilight”
As the year 1988 dawned, there were two sharply contrasting moods in the IRA. At grassroots level, disappointment at the loss of the Eksund the previous November was more than compensated for by the subsquent disclosure that other shipments had gotten safely through from Libya, well over 120 tons according to reports in the British and Irish media, and at the realization that the IRA was now better armed than at any other time in its history. Ever since the first shots were fired at British troops in 1970, the Volunteers had dreamed that one day they would have plenty of modern weaponry with which to take on British forces, and now that day had arrived. Whatever doubts they had about the political direction the Adams leadership was taking, whatever questions had been raised by the movement’s recognition of the Irish parliament a few months before, now vanished like snow off a ditch in spring.
At the level of Army Council, the mood was entirely different. Those who had spent the previous three years putting the Libyan smuggling venture together and who had been planning the “Tet offensive” knew just what a disaster the betrayal of the Eksund was. They knew it spelled military stalemate for the IRA, robbing the offensive of the one element that would have guaranteed a major impact—surprise. But that was not the only disheartening aspect of the Eksund’s loss for IRA leaders. On board had been military mortars that could have devastated British barracks and RUC bases throughout the North, enabling the IRA to launch damaging attacks from safe distances. Also gone were the powerful 106-millimeter canons that were to be used to sink the Royal Navy’s patrol boat that cruised Carlingford Lough. There had also been plans to sink boats in Belfast harbor with the weapons, blocking access to the city’s docks and disrupting trade. But these ambitious schemes too would now have to be scrapped.
Also lost with the Eksund was the ambitious political agenda that the Army Council expected would be advanced by the “Tet offensive.” The immediate objective of the plan was to force the British into reintroducing internment against the IRA, the weapon last used in 1971 but discredited then as both ineffective and iniquitous. Internment would, the IRA leadership calculated, bring a number of political benefits. The use of the weapon would likely anger and alienate nationalist opinion in both parts of Ireland as it had done in 1971, thereby fueling support for the IRA’s campaign, and would also demonstrate the bankruptcy of British policy in Ireland, discrediting Britain in the eyes of world opinion and perhaps provoking public opinion in Britain to search for a more radical and long-lasting solution to the Irish problem.
The Army Council may have miscalculated the IRA’s ability to use the Libyan weaponry to the best advantage. Not everyone in the IRA was convinced that the organization had the wherewithal to deliver such an ambitious enterprise, as one middle-ranking commander recalled. “The strategy was to mount a massive campaign, but I had been going around the units and I was not convinced it would work,” he said. “We weren’t capable of that. There hadn’t been enough organization, and our security and training weren’t good enough. We didn’t have enough intelligence work done either. If we had tried to mount it, I think it would have been a disaster. I believed we needed a lot more time, but people had got carried away with all the heavy gear.”1 In a sense that did not matter, for the purpose of the “Tet offensive” was, like that of its Vietnamese original, to show the world how deep and violent the opposition in Ireland was. After all, the Vietnamese had been given a bloody nose during their offensive, yet the violence had helped transform American public opinion.
The plan came so close to success that the Army Council at one point succumbed to bragging. After the Villa had landed 105 tons of arms in October 1986, the leadership’s spirits had soared, and at the following Easter’s republican commemorations it could not resist dropping a hint of what was in the pipeline. In tune with the military mood, the Council’s statement was distinctly dismissive of electoralism:
We agree with the building of a revolutionary, republican party in the course of the armed struggle and we refuse to be over-euphoric with electoral victories or disillusioned or deterred by electoral setbacks. The British will only be talked out of Ireland through the rattle of machine-guns and the roar of explosives…. It has been a long time since the Irish Republican Army has felt so confident, so sure of victory, so happy about the future even though for many of us the coming fight may mean imprisonment and death.2
The move to abandon abstentionism in the South became part of the plan. At the 1986
IRA Convention the leadership sold the notion to the rank and file that recognizing and taking seats in the Dail in Dublin would help neutralize the Republic’s government and isolate the British. If Sinn Fein won seats to the Dublin parliament, it was argued, then it would be much more difficult for the Republic’s government to join with the British in an assault against the IRA. Furthermore, if Sinn Fein TDs held the balance of power in the Dail, as could happen, then the party would hold the whip hand and the IRA would be free to bomb and shoot at will. “We knew there were going to be major casualties and draconian measures introduced like internment,” recalled one IRA source familiar with the “Tet” strategy. “That was the story at the ’86 Convention: ‘We’ll have a couple of TDs by then, and if [the Republic’s government] introduce[s] internment we’ll be able to block it.’”3
There would be other succulent fruits to pluck if all went according to plan. If the British responded by reintroducing internment, the deal agreed with Nasser Ashour of the Libyan Intelligence Service envisaged Qaddafi sending more consignments of weapons to Ireland and pumping more money into the IRA. And there were other, enticing possibilities. “By inflicting such big casualties, you’d get the support of radical governments elsewhere in the world,” recalled the same source.4