A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Next in line came the operations department, which was responsible for overseeing IRA activity, in England and Europe in particular; two sub-departments handled operations in these two theaters, and their heads reported to the director of operations on GHQ. The six remaining departments were self-explanatory: intelligence, finance, training, political education, internal security, and publicity. Assisting the chief of staff was the adjutant general (AG), effectively his second in command, whose duties included ensuring that the chief of staff’s instructions were carried out, overseeing internal discipline, and making certain that the rank and file understood and implemented Army policy. The AG had more day-to-day contact with the rank and file than anyone else at leadership level and was often charged with assessing grassroots feelings, especially during the cease-fires.

  Underneath GHQ, the IRA in Ireland was divided into two operational areas. Northern Command included not just the six counties of Northern Ireland but the five Border counties of Leitrim, Cavan, Louth, Monaghan, and Donegal as well. Beneath them were the various brigade areas and active-service units (ASUs). Only South Armagh retained the old battalion structure, the First Battalion around the Forkhill and Jonesboro areas and the Second based in Crossmaglen. The remaining twenty-one counties of Ireland were grouped under Southern Command, with a similar but much smaller brigade and ASU substructure. The QM’s department and the engineering department made up the strongest elements of Southern Command, since it was here that the bulk of weapons dumps and arms and explosives factories were to be found.

  AT THE TOP of this structure sat the seven members of the Army Council, whose role and powers were strictly defined by the IRA’s constitution. The Council’s prime function was to “conclude peace or declare war,” and it could do so by a simple majority vote.1

  The Council’s other important task was to choose the chief of staff and to ratify his appointments to GHQ and other key posts. It also drew up the IRA’s general orders, which governed the rules of engagement, and formulated membership regulations, a disciplinary code, and the procedures and penalties for courts-martial. Crucially the Army Council, by dint of its ability to “conclude peace,” was charged with negotiating with the British government if the need arose, although as far as face-to-face contact with the British was concerned, this task was left to the chairman of the Army Council, one of the seven members whose other task was to preside over the monthly Council meeting. Throughout the peace process this was a role performed by Martin McGuinness, chairman since 1982. His mandate for negotiations, however, was determined by the full Army Council, to which he had to report back regularly.

  The Army Council was not, however, the supreme authority in the IRA. That was a status reserved for the General Army Convention (GAC), a delegate gathering of the IRA rank and file that was supposed to meet every two years. In practice it usually met only when the IRA was at peace or, if the IRA was at war, when the leadership so needed the endorsement of the rank and file for political changes that it was prepared to take the risk of assembling the IRA delegates. The 1986 convention, which endorsed the dropping of abstentionism, fell into this category. During those periods when the IRA was at war, and it was considered too dangerous to convene such a large meeting, the Army Council held all power in its hands. It was the Convention, theoretically representative of IRA structures and membership throughout Ireland, that alone and by the required two-thirds majority had the power to change the IRA’s constitution. But that was the least of its functions. By a complex but indirect process the GAC was also supposed to choose the Army Council, to which it technically lent its powers between Conventions. It did this by electing the twelve-member IRA Executive, whose first task was to choose, usually from its own number, the seven members of the Army Council. Once the Executive had voted for the Army Council, the seven vacated seats would then be taken by substitutes previously elected by the GAC. The selection of the Executive was thus the Convention’s most crucial act since the choice of Executive by the delegates would determine the leadership and therefore the direction of the IRA. It followed that the disposition of the delegates selected to attend the Convention was in turn vital to the process of shaping the political character of the IRA. This factor could and did determine whether the IRA opted for peace or for war, for abstentionism or against, for or against federalism, and so on. The selection of delegates and whether they actually managed to complete the often difficult and lengthy journey to the Convention were issues that assumed critical importance.

  These two structures—an Army Council of seven members, and an Executive with twelve—were balanced, sometimes uneasily, at the very top of the IRA. This elaborate and often difficult relationship was the result of the IRA’s early history when the Executive was the much more important of the two bodies. The Army Council in the early days of the IRA was a subcommittee of senior military staff answerable to the policy-making Executive, whose membership was largely drawn from Sinn Fein’s ranks, but by 1938, when governmental authority was bestowed upon it by the remnants of the Second Dail, power and influence became concentrated in the Army Council’s hands, not least because it was the body running the day-to-day IRA campaign. As far as the modern IRA is concerned, the relationship between the Executive, which regarded itself as the repository of the republican conscience, and the Army Council, which jealously guarded its power and authority, has traditionally been a fraught one, and the last three splits in the IRA all came about because of friction between them.

  The Army Council became even more powerful during the Provisionals’ campaign because it was often too dangerous to convene a Convention. The security risks attached to such an enterprise, which involved assembling between seventy and a hundred men and women, many of them “on the run” and wanted by the security forces North and South, meant that between 1969 and 1996 only four Conventions were held. Since elections to the Executive were few and far between, the Army Council became a self-replicating body. This in turn reinforced an antidemocratic and authoritarian tendency in the IRA leadership.

  Gatherings of the Army Council were of necessity not easy to arrange. The logistical and security problems involved in bringing together some of the most wanted and watched fugitives in Europe were formidable. Meetings often had to be held in the most remote and least accessible spots in Ireland. The intricate journeys imposed on Council members meant that they would invariably arrive late at night at some damp farmhouse in the middle of a mountainous or isolated countryside with only a plate of cold ham sandwiches and a pot of tea to refresh them as they plowed through reams of documents in preparation for the following day’s meeting. This was a feature of Council meetings that was to prove crucial during the peace process. Not least it meant that those members who arrived fresh and already familiar with the stacks of documents dealing with the complex turns and twists of the peace process had a huge advantage over their other, less au fait colleagues.

  Although Army Council membership was limited to seven, as many as ten people could sit around the table, all of whom could influence the Council’s decisions even if not all of them could vote. The chief of staff did not have to be a member of the Army Council, although the pre-1994 chief of staff was. IRA rules said that two other senior figures, the quartermaster general and the adjutant general, were entitled, if not already members of the Council, to sit in and contribute to its deliberations. That was the case before and after the 1994 cessation. An eleventh person, a secretary who minuted the meetings, would also be present. The record of Army Council meetings was possibly the most delicate and secret document in the IRA’s archive, and great care would be taken in storing and hiding it. The monthly meeting usually took up the best part of a day and would be dominated by two reports, one by the chief of staff who reported on military matters and another on political affairs given by the senior Sinn Fein figure, who during the peace process was usually Gerry Adams. Meetings were opened and closed by the Council chairman.

  WITH THE EXCEPTI
ON of the short period when he was held in jail after the La Mon bombing, Gerry Adams had been on the Army Council since 1977 and was one of its longest-serving members. Since his election first as an Assembly member for West Belfast in 1982 and then the following year as Westminster MP, Adams had held no military position in the IRA, making him the only Council member in this category. This decision was taken deliberately to ensure that he could never be put at risk of being jailed again. Of all the Army Council members, he was destined to be the most permanent.

  Another figure who by the mid-1980s was working exclusively for Sinn Fein was the party’s Southern organizer, Pat Doherty, a close ally of Adams and identified as a senior Army Council figure by the IRA informer Sean O’Callaghan, a key witness in a celebrated libel action taken unsuccessfully in 1998 against the Sunday Times by Slab Murphy. Doherty’s rise to the heights of the IRA is the most difficult to explain. A Scot born in Glasgow in 1945, whose family hailed from County Donegal, Doherty, known to IRA colleagues as “Smiler,” is not known to have had any operational background, although a brother, Hugh, was a key member of the notorious Balcombe Street gang, which bombed and shot its way through London and southern England in the mid-1970s. A close friend of Martin McGuinness, Doherty, who was a civil engineer by profession, was famed for his ability to locate safe meeting places for IRA commanders and isolated localities for training camps in the wilds of Donegal. He also had the task of occasionally finding discreet and secure vacation homes for Gerry Adams and other figures from Belfast. Such is his knowledge of the more remote spots of Donegal that in the latter years of the peace process he was on more than one occasion made GAC convenor, charged with finding the appropriate premises for the delegates to meet.

  After Ivor Bell’s fall, Doherty took on the task of building up Sinn Fein’s organization in the South, while the job of adjutant general was eventually filled in 1989, on Gerry Adams’s recommendation, by Gerry Kelly, a former London bomber and Ballymurphy associate of the Sinn Fein president from the days when Adams was Belfast IRA commander. Adams recommended Kelly largely because of his fearsome reputation in the IRA. Known as a ruthless and fearless IRA operative, Kelly had survived regular bouts of forced feeding in Brixton jail during a lengthy hunger strike. In 1983 he took part in a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze prison on the outskirts of Belfast. Those who made it to the Republic were given the traditional options: they could either return to active service or be smuggled out to the United States to a job and a new identity. Kelly unhesitatingly chose the former and went back on active service, although he was recaptured three years later in Holland, where he was involved in an elaborate plan to smuggle weapons and explosives to Ireland. Intensely loyal to Gerry Adams, few republicans could doubt his commitment to the struggle. When the cease-fire came, Kelly’s support for it was crucial in winning over the unsure and anxious.

  Doherty could be depended upon to support Adams—as could Kelly, although he had no vote at Army Council meetings—and so, by and large, could a third member of the pre-1994 Army Council. Joe Cahill, a former Belfast commander and chief of staff who could trace his republican career back to the 1940s, was easily the oldest figure on the Council. A Ballymurphy-based contemporary of Adams’s father, Gerry Sr., he had been close to Gerry Adams from not long after the Provisionals were founded. Credited with forging the links with Qaddafi’s Libya in the mid-1970s, Cahill had, by the time the peace process picked up speed, effectively ended his operational IRA career and was in charge of Sinn Fein’s often parlous finances. His value to Adams and his colleagues was the continuity he represented. A founding member of the Provisionals, Cahill had credentials going way back to the famous Easter 1942 Milltown diversionary ambush. He had been sentenced to hang along with Tom Williams for the murder of Constable Murphy during that abortive operation but had been reprieved. Cahill’s emotional “I stood at the foot of the gallows for Ireland” speeches, usually in support of Adams’s latest ideological shift, were a regular feature of Sinn Fein Ard Fheiseanna and IRA Conventions.

  Tom Murphy from Ballybinaby in South Armagh was without doubt the wealthiest member of the Army Council. By some accounts a millionaire several times over, thanks to his business activities in the lucrative cross-Border pig and fuel trade, Slab, as he was known by everyone in the IRA, was not and never had been a member of Sinn Fein. Until 1984 Slab had been Northern commander, but with the Libyan shipments due to arrive and the “Tet offensive” to put together, he was made director of operations. He was one of a breed of republicans without whom the peace process would have been impossible, the activist who despised politics and took no interest in it. Slab personified one of the major fault lines in the Provisionals, one that divided those who saw the future in terms of Sinn Fein’s electoral strategy and those who saw themselves exclusively as IRA “soldiers.” The story of the peace process is as much about the triumph of the former group over the latter as it is about anything else.

  Martin McGuinness was the second-longest-serving member of the Council. He had taken over as Northern commander from Slab Murphy, and held the post along with the chairmanship of the Army Council. The move was actually a demotion for McGuinness since, after Ivor Bell’s removal as chief of staff, McGuinness had been made adjutant general. It was no secret in the IRA that he deeply resented having to give up the post of chief of staff when he ran for Sinn Fein in the 1982 Assembly elections, and promotion to adjutant general suggested he could be on the way back. To then be given the job of heading Northern Command looked to the untutored eye as if the Derry man was slipping down the IRA ladder. But the move made sense in terms of strengthening the forces in the leadership that were to shape the peace process. Control of Northern Command meant McGuinness decided which commanders got and which did not get supplies of the precious new Libyan weaponry, the IRA’s equivalent of pork barrel politics. As a way of rewarding allies and punishing opponents, it could hardly be bettered. Under his command, central control over the ASUs tightened. Before his appointment the local units were allowed to select their own commanders; under his direction, though, the ASUs could suggest candidates, but the final decision would be his. This brought predictable complaints, as one senior IRA source recalled: “From the late 1980s onward people were maneuvered into position who were loyal to Adams and McGuinness.”2 McGuinness’s appointment as Northern commander had another advantage. Since he was the man in charge of the day-to-day war against the British, his commitment to armed struggle seemed beyond doubt. So when McGuinness backed the peace process, many of the rank and file were prepared to follow.

  There was a belief that for a long time Adams and McGuinness disagreed sharply about the peace process and that it was not until later on that the Derry man backed the Adams strategy. But those who observed both men close up say that was never the case. “He nearly always agreed with Adams except on small things, on details,” remembered one.3 Another recalls a figure who as far back as the early 1980s had admired and looked up to the Belfast man. “I remember Martin once saying that Adams articulates what he couldn’t put into words himself,” he said.4

  McGuinness was respected by the rank and file and was popular in a way that Adams never could be. Not least there was the fact that McGuinness had an operational record, and his personal bravery had never come under question. Adams, by contrast, had no name at all as an “operator,” and while he was widely respected for his strategic and political prowess, nothing mattered more in the IRA than a person’s military record. Adams rarely socialized beyond a small group of confidants and was regarded widely as a somewhat distant and occasionally arrogant figure. His bad temper, which he could release on underlings without warning, was legendary.

  A story told by one IRA veteran illustrates why McGuinness struck a chord with the rank-and-file Volunteer and Adams did not.

  Dominic McGlinchey, Frank Hughes, and their gang were in Donegal hiding out for a while. They looked like mujahideen, longhaired, scruffy, heavily armed, dr
iving wrecks of cars. They were fed up staying in cow barns when they heard Adams and McGuinness were on holiday in the area. They found out where Adams was staying and turned up at his chalet, where they were sniffily shown the door. There was no way Gerry and Colette would let that crowd darken their door. So then they went to where McGuinness was staying. He was annoyed and cursed them up and down, but he let them in and allowed them to stay.5

  McGuinness’s second in command, the Northern adjutant, a well-known activist from South Armagh, was the sixth member of the Army Council. He had been promoted in January 1990 when the IRA’s director of publicity, Danny Morrison, was arrested in West Belfast while witnessing the interrogation of the IRA informer Sandy Lynch. Under IRA rules Morrison automatically lost his seat on the Army Council when he went to jail. The Northern adjutant’s presence on the Army Council meant that during much of the time that Gerry Adams and others like him were criticizing botched military operations and urging caution and prudence on the organization, two of the key figures on Northern Command in whose area of responsibility most of those “bad” operations took place regularly shared Army Council meetings with him. There was no need for Adams to make public speeches or give media interviews criticizing the IRA; all he had to do was to take McGuinness and the Northern adjutant aside and have a quiet but firm word with them.