by Ed Moloney
Between them these events pointed to the existence of agents or leaks at leadership, Northern Command, European department, Tyrone Brigade, Belfast Brigade, and security department levels. It was difficult to see how the IRA could have been more thoroughly compromised.
NOT EVERYTHING the IRA touched turned to dust. The European department resumed its campaign on the European mainland and enjoyed immediate success, killing three RAF personnel in one weekend in May 1988, but inevitably, it seemed, there were botched operations leading to civilian deaths, seven in all over the next two years, including that of a six-month-old baby girl and the German wife of a British serviceman. Ten members of the European department were arrested, again suggesting more leaks or treachery. The IRA’s England department enjoyed better luck. Between August 1988 and July 1990 its members killed fourteen British servicemen, eleven in a single bomb attack on the Royal Marine School of Music in Deal, Kent. The IRA also assassinated Ian Gow, Margaret Thatcher’s close friend and a political ally of Northern Ireland’s unionists. In two bombings it came close to causing multiple British army deaths. Later MI5 would make serious inroads into the IRA’s English department, so many that the IRA was forced to virtually abandon the use of “sleeper” units, groups sent in to merge with the local population and then activated, but the first two years of the campaign in Britain had shown no obvious sign of agent penetration.
In Northern Ireland, Adams’s strategy of encouraging pan-Irish nationalist unity was by this stage formal and public republican policy, although the details of his discussions with Haughey and the contents of the “stepping stones” document remained a closely guarded secret even from the Army Council. Instead Adams argued that pan-nationalism could politically isolate the British and the unionists, and increasingly he urged that the IRA’s military strategy be tailored accordingly.
So it was that the Army Council ordered its units to concentrate their energies on attacking British military personnel, to seek out and kill British soldiers in preference to locally recruited and mostly Protestant RUC and UDR members, a change in strategy strongly supported by Adams and his allies.
“Adams’s argument was that we needed to build a nationalist consensus and had to tailor the armed struggle accordingly,” recalled an IRA source familiar with the debate. “We needed fewer car bombs, more attacks on the Brits, more use of mortars against bases, and so on, but the IRA couldn’t deliver.”13 It was this thinking that had shaped the European and English departments’ campaigns, and the same would be attempted in Northern Ireland.
Once again there were public clues to the private shift which became evident during the spring and summer of 1988. In June Adams told the Observer’s veteran Ireland correspondent, Mary Holland, that it was “vastly preferable” for the IRA to target British soldiers rather than the RUC and UDR. “Callous as it may seem,” he told her, “when British soldiers die it removes the worst of the agony from Ireland…. It also diffuses the sectarian aspects of the conflict because Loyalists don’t see the killing of British soldiers by the IRA as an attack on their community.”14 A month later Adams overtly linked the military tactic with Sinn Fein’s quest for pan-nationalist unity. In an interview with the author he said,
It is a fact which the Dublin establishment might not like to admit, but there is… a broad acceptance in the 26 Counties which straddles elements of all the political parties that people don’t have any problems about operations against British Crown forces and particularly against what you would call British Army units which are not domestically recruited—no problem whatsoever. If you start off from the basic position that this is morally the right way to do it and add all these other considerations then not only is it the right thing to do but it’s also the clever thing to do—to pursue the armed struggle in such a way that it helps either to broaden the base or doesn’t obstruct the broader aims of the Movement.”15
Within the IRA the tactic was justified on the basis that the British would move to leave Ireland if enough soldiers were sent home in coffins. The appalled British reaction to the deaths of two British corporals in March 1988, in the wake of the Gibraltar funeral, was cited as an example. Mistaken for loyalist gunmen about to ambush the funeral of an IRA member, the two men were dragged from their car, beaten by a mob, stripped, and then shot dead by the IRA. Much of the incident was filmed by television crews and the scenes horrified British viewers. Mrs. Thatcher herself turned up at the airport when their bodies were returned to England, testimony to the traumatic impact of the deaths.
The Army Council’s endorsement of the Adams analysis was a highly significant move whose underlying message was not detected at the time. Leaving aside the IRA’s capability or lack of it, the notion that Thatcher’s government or any British government could be influenced by military deaths was a contentious one. The British army was a volunteer, professional outfit, and the precedent from other colonial-style conflicts, from Cyprus to Vietnam, showed that it was only when conscript armies suffer casualties that domestic pressure to withdraw could become a potent factor, as it was in the United States during the Vietnam War and in Britain during the Cyprus emergency. The decision to scale down attacks on the RUC and UDR, in practice unenforced and unenforceable, disguised a deeper political shift. For years the IRA had targeted local security forces, the UDR in particular, knowing that such attacks, in the words of one Tyrone republican, “stop the unionists doing a deal with the SDLP.”16 In other words, the IRA’s attacks on Protestant security force members kept Northern Ireland unstable. Even though the new military tactic was in this regard largely observed only in rhetorical terms, it indicated a subtle change in attitude toward a Stormont-based political settlement on the part of Republican leaders.
The security statistics tell the tale. The number of British soldiers killed by the IRA between 1988 and 1990 rose to fifty-six, as many as had been killed in the six previous years. The IRA’s efforts in Europe, Britain, and in Northern Ireland, where in 1988 seventeen soldiers were killed between mid-June and mid-August, meant that the killing rate against the British military doubled. But the IRA could not sustain the campaign. In 1988 military fatalities dropped by over a half, to twenty-two soldiers. The next year there was a slight rise to twenty-four, but then in 1990 the IRA accounted for only ten soldiers. In 1991 British fatalities fell to five, to more or less the level they had been at before the revised offensive was launched. The offensive had proved to be unsustainable and was now over.
The failure of the campaign demonstrated that the British were more or less on top of the IRA. Thatcher had responded to the offensive with a public package of measures, including tougher prison terms, a media ban on Sinn Fein, and a restriction on the right of silence normally enjoyed by suspects in police custody, but a secret package, a vast increase in the Irish budget of MI5 and other intelligence agencies, caused more damage. “Money was being pushed through letter boxes,” recalled one activist.17 Much of the extra finance was directed to recruiting spies in the IRA, but GHQ intelligence noted a sharp rise in efforts to recruit informers in Sinn Fein, so-called “agents of influence,” whose job would be to steer the party in certain political directions. There were even attempts to recruit Adams’s senior advisers, on one celebrated occasion while the target was on a trip to Barcelona.
The British were ahead of the IRA in technical terms as well. New flak jackets worn by patrolling soldiers could not be penetrated by any bullet in the IRA’s armory. Only one weapon could fire a powerful enough round, and that was the U.S.-manufactured Barrett Light 50, an anti-helicopter sniping rifle that fired a huge half-inch armor-piercing slug. Eventually the South Armagh Brigade managed to acquire three of the weapons from its own American contacts, and sent one up to Belfast, where it was promptly lost to the security forces by the Belfast Brigade. But by then it hardly mattered, as the IRA was well on the way to the 1994 cease-fire. The IRA had also lost the battle over radio- and remote-controlled bombs. The British had learned how to bl
ock the IRA’s radio signals, even though the IRA had learned to modulate its signals. Bombs triggered by landlines could be detected thanks to infrared sensors fitted to British helicopters that were able to detect heat given off by the detonating cables, while culvert bombs, which had once made rural areas a terror for military patrols, had also been mastered by the British. Stuffed into the drains that tunneled underneath rural roads all over Northern Ireland, these land mines had killed scores of soldiers in the 1970s and made South Armagh too dangerous for the security forces to travel in by road. But by the late 1980s every single culvert in Northern Ireland had been blocked with wire mesh, making it impossible for IRA engineers to booby-trap them.
One way or another IRA strategy was in a state of flux. The demands of pan-nationalism had radically changed IRA policy toward loyalist violence, with enervating results on the republican base in Tyrone. Now the objective of building an alliance between Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail had created a demand for military goals that the IRA had been unable to deliver. The IRA was fast running out of military options. The more Machiavellian members of the organization came to a bleak conclusion. “It was a way of running down the war without saying so,” deduced one former IRA commander.18
IF THE NEEDS of pan-nationalism were pushing the IRA in the direction of politics, then Sinn Fein’s electoral reverses were pushing it in the same direction from another. With its constitutional opponent, the SDLP, revitalized by the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement, Sinn Fein’s electoral march upward and onward had been halted. By 1988–89 the party’s share of the vote had settled at around the 11 percent mark, almost what it had been in 1982 when the electoral strategy was launched, while the SDLP enjoyed twice that level of support. At the level of council elections the SDLP made gains at Sinn Fein’s expense, and then in 1992 disaster struck when the SDLP showed it could repeat that sort of success even against the best that Sinn Fein could field. The jewel in the Sinn Fein electoral crown was snatched away when Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat to the SDLP’s Joe Hendron, an affable but politically lightweight local family doctor.
In the Republic it was an even sorrier story. There were no signs at all of the power-broking TDs promised by Martin McGuinness at the 1986 IRA Convention, while Gerry Adams’s assertion that the second election after the Ard Fheis would be the real test of the benefts of dropping abstentionism showed that Sinn Fein’s electoral appeal to Southern voters had collapsed. In the 1987 poll the party won 1.7 percent of the poll and no seats; two years later the Sinn Fein vote fell to a miserable 1.2 percent. In the June 1991 council elections Sinn Fein managed to win only 6 out of the 883 seats at stake and a derisory 0.7 percent share of the vote.
Virtually all the commentators agreed on the cause—a series of botched and bungled IRA operations that began in the autumn of 1987 and continued through to 1992. Each disastrous IRA operation highlighted the glaring contradictions between the IRA’s Armalite-based approach and Sinn Fein’s espousal of electoral, or ballot box, politics, as it was called. With every botched and bungled operation, with every uninvolved civilian killed, public anger grew and electoral support shrank. Gerry Adams’s press aide, Richard McAuley, put it most succinctly in 1992. Once a supporter of the anti-Adams camp led by Billy McKee and David Morley in Long Kesh in the mid-1970s, McAuley had long since joined the Adams camp and later became the Sinn Fein leader’s trusted press attaché. In September 1992 he wrote, “We’re not going to realise our full potential as long as the war is going in the North and as long as Sinn Fein is presented the way it is with regard to armed struggle and violence.”19
ON SUNDAY, November 8, 1987, just days after the discovery of the Eksund, local Protestants were mingling with members of the RUC and soldiers of the Ulster Defence Regiment at the cenotaph in Enniskillen, the county town of Fermanagh situated in one of the most picturesque spots in Ireland, where the two Erne lakes, the upper and lower loughs, meet. It was Remembrance Day, the annual occasion when the dead of two world wars and the conflict in Ireland were commemorated in a solemn ceremony that culminated in the laying of poppy wreaths at the base of the ornate war memorial. For Protestants it was a sacred day. Suddenly, and without warning, a bomb, hidden in a building overlooking the scene, exploded, sending tons of rubble and brick onto the heads of the crowd. When the dust settled, eleven people lay dead or dying, six of them woman, many of them elderly, and all of them Protestants. It was one of the worst IRA atrocities of the Troubles.
Condemnation was widespread, but it was particularly intense in the Republic. The reason for that was the impact made by Gordon Wilson, the father of the youngest victim, his daughter Marie, a local nurse. Father and daughter had been caught up in the blast, buried together under the rubble. He had survived, but Marie had been crushed to death His emotional, eloquent, but forgiving account of the ordeal, given in a Border brogue, caught the Southern imagination. In many ways Wilson was the South’s idealized Protestant—liberal, open-minded, and compassionate. He even read the Dublin-based daily, the Irish Times. The fact that the IRA had killed his daughter and had violated a commemoration of Protestant war dead deeply offended many Southerners. Gordon Wilson became an iconic figure in the Republic and was later appointed to the Irish Senate.
The political damage to the IRA was almost beyond calculation, and to compound the disaster the organization had been caught lying in its explanation for the slaughter, falsely claiming that the British had triggered the bomb with a radio sweep for bomb signals. Compelling evidence provided by the British army showed that the device had been set off by a mechanical timer that could have been set only by the hand of an IRA bomber.
It was the start of a catalog of disasters for the IRA. In March 1988 a twenty-one-year-old Protestant woman, Gillian Johnston, died in a machine-gun attack on her car near the Fermanagh village of Beleek that seriously wounded her boyfriend. Again the IRA lied in its account, claiming that the attack had been meant for her brother, a soldier in the UDR. In June the Fermanagh IRA set off a bomb in a school bus near Lisnaskea. The device was meant to kill the part-time UDR driver, but instead it injured children. In July a sixty-year-old Catholic mother and a twenty-four-year-old man, both West Belfast constituents of Adams, were killed in a booby trap bomb placed in the public swimming baths on the Falls Road. A soldier was also killed. Later the same month a land mine meant for a senior Catholic judge as he crossed the Border near Newry instead killed a family driving a similar car. Robert Hanna, a heating contractor, his wife, Maureen, and their seven-year-old son, David, were blown to pieces.
In the nine months since November 1987 the IRA had killed eighteen civilians, not an unusually high level for an organization that had, on the average, claimed the lives of twenty civilians during each year of the Troubles. As in every war, it seemed that civilian casualties were an unavoidable consequence of the Troubles. Two factors, however, made civilian deaths a new and urgent issue for the IRA in 1987 and 1988. The first was the fact that the British had learned from earlier mistakes and no longer killed as many civilians as they used to. In the 1970s and even the 1980s, IRA and British atrocities had more or less canceled each other out. But by this stage only the IRA was killing noncombatants, and there was a public relations and political price to pay for that. The political price was exacted at the polling stations, where bad IRA operations, as they were called internally, lost Sinn Fein support in the voting booths. In fact the damage, the seepage of support for the IRA in effect, could be calculated down to the last vote, and inevitably it had an impact on the organization’s politics.
Only a year before the Enniskillen deaths, figures like Adams and McGuinness had promised their grassroots that dropping abstentionism would not weaken or dilute the armed struggle. In one celebrated interview Adams had gone as far as saying that if Sinn Fein ever repudiated the armed struggle, the party would have to look for a new leader.20 Two years later, as he sought the go-ahead for talks with the SDLP and Haughey’s representatives, he had assured th
e Army Council that military policy would remain supreme. But now, as the armed struggle spawned electoral difficulties, Adams and, to a lesser extent, McGuinness began to criticize the IRA’s conduct of the war, criticism that implied the need to curtail and restrict operations.
Adams highlighted the negative consequences of Enniskillen days after the bombing, and he was to return to this theme repeatedly in the next two years. “What is clear is that our efforts to broaden our base have most certainly been upset in all the areas we have selected for expansion,” he said. “This is particularly true for the South and internationally. Our plans for expansion will have been dealt a body blow.”21 After the Lisnaskea school bus bomb, Adams said he was “unable to condone” the IRA action.22 Following the Falls Road swimming baths attack he called on the IRA to “get its house in order,”23 while the deaths of the Hanna family brought stronger words. He was “very shocked,” he told the BBC, and “considerably annoyed.”24 The language of his condemnations grew sharper with each atrocity.
Then, at the Sinn Fein conference in January 1989, Adams took the bull by the horns. “I want to speak directly to the active service volunteers of Oglaigh na hEireann,” he told delegates. “You have a massive responsibility. At times the fate of this struggle is in your hands. You have to be careful and careful again…. The morale of your comrades in jail, your own morale… in the field can be raised or dashed by your actions. You can advance or retard this struggle.”25 Adams’s criticism intensified as one botched IRA operation followed another until finally, in June 1990, it reached a sort of watershed. At the launch in West Belfast of a book he had written about his life as an IRA prisoner in Cage 11, his patience ran out. That morning the IRA had placed a booby trap bomb under the car of a retired policeman, sixty-five-year-old James Sefton, in North Belfast. The bomb, fixed by a magnet to the underside of the vehicle and known in the IRA as “up and under,” killed Sefton and his sixty-six-year-old wife, Eileen. Asked what he thought of the operation, a visibly angry Adams replied that he no longer believed that Sinn Fein had to explain, justify, or defend every IRA operation. “You can best describe Sinn Fein’s position as one of critical support for the IRA,” he said.26 The significance of the remark was that only seven years earlier Sinn Fein’s election candidates had been obliged to give unambivalent support to the IRA, lest anyone thought that fighting elections might inhibit the IRA’s armed struggle. Now Adams didn’t care what the IRA thought. Times had changed.