by Ed Moloney
By 1990–91 the British army was calling the PRG conduit “the Derry experiment,” and the most senior soldier in Northern Ireland then, the British GOC, Lieutenant General Sir John Wilsey, had personally endorsed the project. During a visit to Derry he assured the PRG that from then on every regimental commander posted to the city on the regular two-year tour would be told to continue the relationship. If they did not, the PRG was authorized to complain directly to British army headquarters in Lisburn.
It was not always clear whether the PRG conduit between the IRA and the British army produced results. Nothing was ever that direct or explicit; the results of the group’s mediation were often expressed indirectly or implicitly. A good example was an IRA decision not to deploy the coffee jar bomb in Derry. An invention of the IRA engineering department, the coffee jar bomb was designed to explode upon impact. Packed with Semtex explosives, nails, and pieces of metal, the devices were deadly. Once they appeared in the IRA arsenal, soldiers in the PRG seminars began to express the concern that they would not be able to distinguish between youngsters throwing bottles or glass jars and those tossing coffee jar bombs, and that an innocent teenage rioter could be shot dead, something that would intensify hostility between the military and the Catholic population.
The bombs were so dangerous that army patrols in Derry would have to resume wearing helmets, and that would be an inflammatory act, a reversal of the GRIT strategy. Lampen and a PRG colleague went to the IRA and were told that this situation could not arise; IRA Volunteers had to be eighteen before they would be allowed to throw any bombs, while IRA standing orders “forbade the use of members of the public as cover for operations.” They passed this reply back to the army, and that was the end of the exchange—or so it seemed. The devices continued to be used by the IRA in Belfast, but after that PRG-mediated conversation between the British army and the IRA, there were no more coffee jar bomb attacks in Derry.33 No formal agreements had been entered into, not even a hint of what would happen. But the results were there for all to see.
The Lampens had become friendly with two Derry republicans in particular: Martin McGuinness, the IRA’s Northern commander at this time, and Mitchel McLaughlin, the chairperson of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland and a member of Derry City Council. The Lampens had sometimes slept over in McGuinness’s Bogside home when visiting Derry prior to their permanent move to the city; and they occasionally took the McGuinness children away on PRG-sponsored cross-community trips. John Lampen met McLaughlin and McGuinness regularly, and in between there were informal contacts with either or both men. Later the two Provisional leaders tried to minimize the extent and significance of the arrangement, but the truth was that communication between them and the PRG was substantial, sustained, and significant.
The PRG was interested in making the GRIT strategy a vehicle for reducing IRA violence in Derry, something that could pave the way for more ambitious moves elsewhere. While it was easy to see what the IRA could do in terms of unilateral de-escalatory measures, it was more difficult to envisage the measures that the British army might contemplate. So in the autumn of 1990, in the weeks before the Coshquin “human bomb” attack, the PRG compiled a list of de-escalatory moves that the Provisional IRA and the British army and RUC could make in sequence. By this stage the PRG was in regular touch with the Northern Ireland Office, and the list was compiled after discussions with an NIO representative, the British army’s Western Brigade commander, the RUC divisional commander, and Sinn Fein. Built on contributions from all these sources, the list was submitted to the RUC, the British army, and, via a trusted intermediary, to the IRA Army Council, or so the PRG believed.
The list contained eleven moves that the British army or RUC could make and ten that the IRA could make. The measures would be confined to the Derry city area and could be introduced one or two at a time without publicity and further moves made dependent on the response from the other side. If the process succeeded in Derry, then the resulting trust could be used as a basis for a full-fledged IRA cease-fire. The fact that the British government, its security chiefs, and the IRA leadership were all involved in the initiative made it full of significance for the unfolding peace process.
The document suggested the following possible moves toward a more relaxed security situation in the Derry area:
Moves the Security Forces could make immediately:
1. Declare a moratorium on any decision about a [new] police station in Bishop Street;
2. Set up a Lay Visiting Scheme to police stations in Derry;
3. Improve response to complaints against police and army.
Moves if there was a reduction of IRA activity in Derry:
1. End blanket area searches;
2. Remove security barricades etc. from city wall—[to encourage] tourism;
3. Stop trying to recruit teenagers as informers.
Moves if there was an end to attacks etc:
1. Remove Strand Road/Spencer Road (RUC station) barriers;
2. Progressively withdraw Army from streets;
3. Reduce street patrols, road checks and personal searches;
4. Decide against Bishop Street police station;
5. Open a “walk-in” police office in the Richmond (shopping) centre— unarmed and possibly civilian staff—to provide a genuine service re insurance claims, lost property etc—not likely to be used by informers due to public location.
Moves the IRA could make immediately:
1. No street attacks—risk of civilian injuries;
2. No bombings likely to cause fear in Protestant area—especially the Fountain;
3. No attacks on police going to the assistance of the public;
4. Reduction of home takeovers.
Moves if there was a security force response:
1. No attacks on “off-duty” forces;
2. Attempt to avoid targetting Ulster Protestants even in security forces—i.e. a more positive move in the interests of Irish unity;
3. End of house takeovers.
Moves if army was taken off the streets and there was a strong [and] positive RUC response:
1. End attacks on security force installations;
2. Remove arms and explosives stores from the city;
3. Recognise public right to use the police provided the police provide only a genuine service [i.e. do not try to recruit informers].34
Officially the PRG heard nothing more from the IRA leadership about these proposals, although there were private indications that the organization was ready to respond positively to some of the measures, including ending house takeovers, ending bombings that intimidated Protestants, stopping attacks on RUC officers going to the assistance of the public, and removing IRA arms dumps from the city.
The mini–peace process in Derry remained a closely guarded secret, every bit as hidden and furtive as the Reid-Adams diplomacy, which it clearly complemented. But in 1993 the Opsahl report, the product of an independent investigation into the possibilities for political progress in Northern Ireland, was published and inadvertently revealed the PRG’s role as a conduit between the IRA in Derry and the British security authorities.
Not long after the Opsahl report made public the PRG’s role, the author traveled to Derry to interview Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin about the claim. In an upstairs room of Sinn Fein’s office in Cable Street in Derry, the two men angrily denied reports of secret mediation moves between the IRA and the British.
Of John Lampen’s role, McGuinness said, “There is just no basis for the claims made. He came to us once with the idea of making Derry a shining light, to make it a bomb-free zone. We told him to go away. There was no way the IRA would free British resources for use elsewhere. He’s either very flaky, has misinterpreted conversations with our people, or something more sinister has been going on.” The PRG, he went on, had been told that Lampen was “virtually persona non grata” with Derry Provisionals.35 In March of the following year family reasons obliged John and
Diana Lampen to leave Derry for good, their value as peace workers undermined by Martin McGuinness’s angry public response to the Opsahl revelations.
Despite McGuinness’s and Mitchel McLaughlin’s denials, there was little doubt that the IRA and the British authorities did engage in a mutual de-escalation process in the early 1990s and that the process had been facilitated in no small measure by the PRG and its proposed set of sequenced measures.
The record shows that many of the proposals on the list were implemented, some earlier than others. The planned RUC station in Bishop Street in the heart of the walled city, actually a small post, was never built, for example. Had it been, it would have brought the police presence to within yards of the Bogside, the closest of any RUC base, and have required substantial military protection in order to function, something that would have antagonized Derry’s nationalists. By not building it, the British sent an important signal to the IRA. Blanket army house searches also ended, and the military presence in Derry, in accordance with the PRG-inspired strategy, continued to soften. The British government also set up a lay visiting scheme to check that detainees in police cells, including IRA suspects, were being properly treated throughout Northern Ireland. In Derry the PRG members Margaret O’Donnell and Diana Lampen were appointed to the local team.
An analysis, by the author, of operations carried out by the Derry Brigade shows that the IRA also responded to the PRG paper. Figures supplied by the IRA itself in the weekly columns of An Phoblacht–Republican News, reveal a dramatic falloff in activity in the months and years after the PRG de-escalation proposals were submitted. Between 1986 and 1989 the Derry IRA accounted for an annual average of 13 percent of all IRA operations, whereas between 1990 and 1993, after the PRG initiative had been launched, the average fell to just under 5 percent, a reduction of more than 60 percent.36 British military sources also confirm that the process had gotten under way: “The upshot was that when we started discussing various de-escalatory measures [throughout Northern Ireland], it was possible to say that we have already done that in Derry,” recalled one senior officer.37
The PRG never heard back officially from the IRA leadership regarding the proposed de-escalation measures, but the group did eventually get confirmation that the GRIT strategy had been adopted by the republican leadership in the city. “A couple of years later,” remembered a source familiar with the episode, “maybe at the end of 1992 or the beginning of 1993, John Lampen asked Mitchel McLaughlin if there was a chance that this agenda could be implemented, and McLaughlin replied, ‘What do you think we have been doing for the last two years?’”38 The British army, McLaughlin added, had been responding in kind. Derry had become the principal laboratory for the peace process.
The problem that figures like Martin McGuinness had with the revelations in the Opsahl report, the reason they had so angrily and brusquely disavowed the Lampens, was that the truth about the contacts between the IRA, the PRG, and the British and the proposals to run down the war in the city were kept a secret not just from the IRA rank and file, as would be expected, but from the Army Council as well. The Derry experiment was never sanctioned by the IRA leadership, nor was it ever told that it was happening.39
To the public and to their grassroots supporters, the message from the Provisional leaders at this time was a very different one from that communicated privately to the British from Derry. The war, they regularly assured their people, would continue until victory. At almost exactly the moment when the PRG was compiling its de-escalation proposals and preparing to submit them to the Northern Ireland Office and, so it thought, to the Provo leadership, an IRA spokesperson gave a lengthy interview to the Independent newspaper in London. Asked about cease-fire speculation, the spokes-person was blunt: “It’s a tired old subject and it’s one that comes up with predictable regularity. But the only debate within the IRA is on how best to prosecute the war against the British. We can state absolutely, on the record, that there will be no ceasefire, no truce, no cessation of violence short of a British withdrawal. That, as blunt as that, is our position.”40
PART FOUR
Ending the War
President Bill Clinton underlines his support for the peace process by greeting Gerry Adams on the Falls Road in West Belfast during his first visit to Northern Ireland, in November 1995. (Sygma-Corbis)
FOURTEEN
Seven Men in a Room
When Gerry Adams embarked upon the journey that eventually led to the end of the IRA’s violent armed struggle against Britain, he enjoyed one huge advantage. For all practical purposes supreme power over the IRA lay in the hands of one small body, the seven-man Army Council, which was perched at the top of the organization’s pyramidal structure. It was the one part of the IRA where Adams’s idea of permanent leadership found its clearest expression, and during the key decade of the peace process, from 1984 until 1994, the same men, with only one or two exceptions, sat around the IRA’s boardroom table and decided the direction and policy that the organization should take. Adams could count on the absolute loyalty of three of his six colleagues, and while that, combined with his own vote, gave him a simple numerical majority, practical politics dictated that to get vital and controversial decisions, such as calling a cease-fire safely through, he would need the support of at least one and preferably two more Army Council members. The story of how he did that can now be told.
The structure of the IRA’s government gave considerable leverage to those at its pinnacle, and the reason for that was not just that the IRA was a disciplined body whose members, although volunteer soldiers, readily obeyed orders. In their eyes the Army Council was not merely a military politburo that issued orders but the only rightful government of the stillborn Irish Republic, which, according to republican dogma, had been betrayed first by the followers of Michael Collins, who signed the Treaty in 1921, and then by Eamon de Valera, who abandoned the republican struggle in 1926 to enter constitutional politics. The Army Council may not have had the powers and control over society exercised by conventional governments, but its right came from a higher authority; it was spiritual, conferred by the blood sacrifice of those who had fought and died to attain the Irish Republic and by the will of the whole Irish people who had voted for it back in 1919. The status of government was bestowed upon the Army Council in 1938 when the handful of surviving anti-Treaty members of the Second Dail, the last all-Ireland and independent parliament, agreed to pass on their authority to its seven members for safeguarding, lest it disappear with their deaths. Thereafter when Volunteers of the IRA—known properly as Oglaigh na hEireann, or ONH in republican shorthand—swore their allegiance to the Army Council, it was really to this almost mystical administration that they pledged their loyalty. Under the guidance, pressure, and cajoling of Gerry Adams and his allies, it was this “government of Ireland” that would bring the IRA to peace. And it was because of the Army Council’s special, almost sacred status that so many of the IRA’s rank and file went along with a process that caused within many of them the greatest doubts and anxiety.
THERE WERE NO WOMEN on the Army Council, and there never had been. The Provisional’s Army Council had always been a decidedly male preserve, a not surprising feature of the IRA of the 1920s through to the 1960s, given the secondary role played by women in society at large in those days. But under the Adams leadership republicans had championed the concept of gender equality, and this was reflected in the IRA itself, where women were encouraged both to join the male organization and to regard themselves as being on a par with their male colleagues. At the 1986 Convention the IRA’s constitution had even been rewritten to excise sexist language. In the meantime women had become brigade commanders and had even made it to the staff of Northern Command but, curiously, never to the supreme decision-making body.
Although the Army Council determined IRA policy, operational control was in the hands of the chief of staff, who had at his disposal the service of a GHQ staff and a Northern Command whose task was
to conduct the day-to-day campaign of violence against the British. In the years before the 1994 cease-fire, GHQ consisted of nine departments, each headed by a director who reported to the chief of staff. Each department carried out specialized functions and had its own identity, traditions, and culture. When it came to gauging sentiment in the IRA about political matters, such as whether or not a cease-fire should be called, departmental loyalties and differences mattered as much as, if not more than, geographical ones. Whether an IRA member was in the engineering or the finance department influenced his or her views as much as whether he or she came from West Belfast or East Tyrone.
The largest department in GHQ, accounting for perhaps 20 percent of the IRA’s manpower, was the quartermaster’s department. This department was responsible for acquiring and smuggling weapons into Ireland and then for finding secure dumps in which to hide the organization’s stores of arms and munitions. It also had the job of building arms and explosives supply lines to the ASUs in the North and to units operating in England and Europe.
The engineering department was possibly the next most important. It was responsible for mixing and manufacturing the huge amounts of homemade explosives that the IRA used each year. In secret locations, mostly in the Republic, the engineering department also invented, manufactured, and adapted the organization’s impressive array of detonating devices and improvised weapons, including a formidable range of mortar bombs. Since most of the engineering department’s product would be handled by the QM’s department, it was inevitable that these two sections would come to share a common view of the world and that their respective heads, the quartermaster general (QMG) and the director of engineering, would form an alliance.