A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The first document had been sent to the IRA by the British side on March 19, 1993. Known as the “Nine Pointer,” it set out the parameters of the British negotiating position, parameters that echoed the secret diplomacy facilitated by Father Reid. Like a fisherman casting for trout, the British had landed a large, enticing fly over the IRA’s nose to see if it would bring a rise.

  The kernel of the “Nine Pointer” was in paragraph 7. “[The British government] has no blueprint,” it read. “It wants an agreed accommodation, not an imposed settlement, arrived at through an inclusive process in which the parties are free agents…. The British Government cannot enter a talks process, or expect others to do so, with the purpose of achieving a predetermined outcome….” If talks went ahead on that basis and reached agreement, it continued, “the British Government would bring forward legislation to implement the will of the people.”14 Although framed in blunter language, paragraph 7 represented a repetition of the core sentiments contained in the secret British reply to Adams in 1987, in particular the key redefinition of British withdrawal. The British had secretly offered the deal to Adams in 1987, and now, it seemed, they wanted to see whether or not he was genuine.

  Unaware of the secret Reid-Adams diplomacy, the Army Council rejected the “Nine Pointer” out of hand, with the “soldiers” dismissing it as falling far short of the 1988 Council policy on British withdrawal. There was no indication in the document, for instance, that the British were prepared to commit to withdraw; there was certainly no timetable for withdrawal in the document nor any indication that the British would override the unionist veto. At this point the Army Council “soldiers” urged that the dialogue be halted; if the British were not prepared to budge on such fundamental issues, there seemed little point in continuing. But Adams argued otherwise: the British should be tested all the way. To walk away at this point would be to abandon the moral high ground to the enemy; the contact should not be broken off, he urged. He got his way. Not for the first time Adams succeeded in keeping the process on the rails and by so doing limited the Army Council’s ability to retrace its steps.

  Eventually on May 10, 1993, nearly two months later, the IRA sent a reply, an eleven-point document. It was delicately worded, testament to the lengthy wrangling that had gone on inside the Army Council. The IRA was, as the British hoped, ready to respond positively to an offer of talks in return for a short, two-week cease-fire and would also set up a secretariat headed by Martin McGuinness which could help organize the subsequent face-to-face contact. That was the good news for the British. The bad news was that the document repeated, in strong language, the Army Council’s 1988 bottom lines. The British would have to leave Ireland, said the document. The free exercise of national self-determination, it went on, required a process that “culminates… in the end of [British] jurisdiction.”15 The unionist veto was a major obstacle. If the British were not prepared to override the veto, as the “Nine Pointer” suggested, it meant that the British had predetermined the outcome of the process in favor of the unionists. The veto had to go.

  The republican document attempted to perform a balancing act between a yes and a no, between wishing to signal a willingness to keep the process going—as Adams clearly wanted—and a need to draw lines in the sand— as the Army Council “soldiers” insisted upon. But notwithstanding the IRA document’s use of subtle language, it had failed to disguise a fundamental reality; the Army Council’s position fell far short of what the British had been hearing in private about what figures such as Adams would accept. The talks went downhill afterward and that fall eventually deteriorated into bickering and mutual recrimination. If the British had set out to test the IRA waters, they had found them as chilly and inhospitable as ever. The peace process had once again fallen victim to the ambiguity that Adams had built into it.

  IF THERE WAS one ploy that Adams and his allies on the Army Council used with great effect to keep the peace process on the rails, until finally a cease-fire was within reach, it was the ability to persuade the “soldiers” not to walk away from the enterprise even when it seemed there was no point in doing otherwise. The gap between the secret peace process and the process the Army Council thought it had endorsed was at times so great that, with hindsight, it was Adams’s greatest achievement that he managed so skillfully to stop his more military-minded colleagues from pulling the plug. That he was able to do so created the time and space for the hidden agenda to finally triumph.

  There was no better example of this in practice than the talks between Adams and the SDLP leader, John Hume, which had continued in secret after 1988, even though to the public mind they had ended in sharp disagreement. Hume was acting as the de facto representative of the Irish government at the suggestion of Charles Haughey, and although the discussions had mired, they were revived when Albert Reynolds succeeded Haughey as Ireland’s prime minister in early 1992. By this point the aim of the exercise was to compose a joint British-Irish declaration outlining Britain’s attitude and intentions toward Northern Ireland. The Army Council had authorized the talks on the basis that somewhere in the declaration the British would indicate their desire to withdraw and, crucially, give a date by which this would be completed, even a date twenty years hence.

  On the face of it this was a daunting and even an impossible task. A huge ideological rift separated the Provisionals from Fianna Fail and the SDLP. The republicans officially rejected the consent principle, whereas for the constitutional nationalist parties, securing unionist assent to a united Ireland was a defining point of principle.

  Such was the magnitude of this gulf that in practice the only way in which an agreed position between republicans and nationalists could be reached was for one or the other to compromise fundamental beliefs. Neither the Irish government nor the SDLP was prepared to do that. Dublin in particular made it clear to the republican negotiators, as one authoritative account described it, that “any formula to do with Irish unity must involve consent of a majority within Northern Ireland.”16 To have done otherwise would have caused a rupture with Britain and serious internal political instability.

  On the other hand the secret diplomacy begun by Adams and Reid had already demonstrated the Sinn Fein leader’s readiness to make that fundamental compromise, although as far as the Army Council and most of their senior IRA and Sinn Fein colleagues were concerned, the rejection of the unionist veto, as the consent principle was termed by the IRA, remained a cornerstone of their beliefs and officially guided the talks between Adams and Hume.

  The Army Council brief for the Hume-Adams dialogue was based upon the 1988 policy change on British withdrawal. While it was prepared to be flexible about the time-scale for British disengagement and would even accept a secret rather than a public pledge from the British to leave Ireland, the Council’s view was that it would not compromise on the demand for a specific time line by which the process of disengagement had to be completed. Nor would the IRA leadership bend on the issue of the unionist veto. While it was prepared to give unionists the final say on the options to partition, they would not be allowed to prevent British withdrawal. That was the official Army Council line, and as such it threatened to throttle the Reid-Adams diplomacy. The task facing the Sinn Fein leader was to keep that from happening. The story of the Hume-Adams dialogue is the story of how that was done.

  WORK ON DRAFTING the joint British-Irish declaration began in late 1991, during the dying months of the Haughey administration, and when Albert Reynolds succeeded Haughey the pace of events quickened. So did the traffic of paper between Hume and Adams. The number of drafts of the joint declaration multiplied. In June 1992 the Adams think tank drafted, for Army Council approval, a version of the joint declaration that eventually became known as the Hume-Adams document. Cleverly and carefully enough worded to allow for ambiguity, one paragraph—number 4—encapsulated the IRA’s 1988 policy position. It reads as follows:

  The British Prime Minister reiterates, on behalf of the British Gove
rnment, that they have no selfish, strategic, political or economic interest in Northern Ireland, and that their sole interest is to see peace, stability and reconciliation established by agreement among the people who inhabit the island. The British Government accepts the principle that the Irish people have the right collectively to self-determination, and that the exercise of this right could take the form of agreed independent structures for the island as a whole. They affirm their readiness to introduce the measures to give legislative effect on their side to this right (within a specified period to be agreed) and allowing sufficient time for the building of consent and the beginning of a process of national reconciliation. The British Government will use all its influence and energy to win the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland for these measures. They acknowledge that it is the wish of the people of Britain to see the people of Ireland live together in unity and harmony, with respect for their diverse traditions, independent, but with full recognition of the special links and the unique relationship which exists between the peoples of Britain and Ireland.17

  That part of June 1992 Hume-Adams document echoed the 1988 Army Council policy almost exactly. All that needed to be done was to fill in the blank space after the commitment to withdraw to indicate how long it would be before the British left Northern Ireland. But the paragraph flagrantly offended the consent principle and flew in the face of established policy on Northern Ireland. The notion that the British or the Irish government or the SDLP could accept such a formulation was approaching fantasy.

  On the other hand the Army Council seemed to be unalterably committed to its view on British withdrawal, as a message sent to Reynolds in April 1993, and unearthed by the writers Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, revealed. While the leadership was ready to consider alternative ways in which the British could make this announcement—a private agreement underwritten by international figures and released some months after the joint declaration was one suggestion—the message unequivocally declared that the IRA preference “is for a joint declaration which embodies a clear and specified time” for achieving national self-determination.18 The gulf between the constitutional forces and the Provisionals seemed to be as wide and unbridgeable as ever.

  It was at this point, in April 1993, that the SDLP leader, John Hume, saved the process. He put his name to the June 1992 draft in all respects save one, the part of paragraph 4 that referred to the yet to be agreed time-scale for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. This was, of course, the defining section of the Hume-Adams document, and unless there was agreement on it the paper would remain largely an academic exercise. Nevertheless, Hume’s act allowed Adams to go to the Army Council and argue to keep the initiative alive, not least on the grounds that the Hume-Adams double act was irritating the unionists and annoying other anti-Provisional forces in the Republic, as was demonstrated by the barrage of criticism directed at Hume when his secret dialogue with Adams was revealed, also in April 1993. It intensified when Hume and Adams jointly called for “national self-determination” in Ireland, although the critics could not have known that the term had been fundamentally redefined by the Sinn Fein leader and his Redemptorist helper.

  Hume’s move strengthened Adams’s hand in another way, one that began to affect the IRA’s military strategy and push the organization toward a cease-fire. On the same day in April 1993 that Hume and Adams called for “national self-determination,” a ton of fertilizer-based explosives packed into a truck exploded right in the heart of the City of London, killing one man, injuring over thirty, and devastating Britain’s financial center. One estimate of the damage put the cost at $1.45 billion. It was a massively destructive blow, the latest in a series of blockbuster attacks in England masterminded by the South Armagh IRA.

  The explosion of April 1993 was, however, the last big IRA bomb in London during this part of the peace process. On the urging of Adams and his allies, the Army Council was persuaded “to hold back” on the English bombing campaign, as one of Adams’s think tank advisers later told the author. “It was held back because it threatened to clash with the Hume-Adams process and because there were signs that Reynolds was beginning to move back into the British camp,” he explained. “The risk was that we would be marginalized.”19 The IRA had stumbled on what was possibly the most successful military tactic since the start of the Troubles, yet agreed to suspend it in order to preserve a political strategy whose ambiguity they were unaware of and whose effectiveness had not been tested.

  Albert Reynolds had handed over the June 1992 draft, the so-called Hume-Adams document, to John Major in June 1993, but, as he told Mallie and McKittrick, he believed there was no way he could sell it to the British prime minister, and he told the Provisionals so via the doughty Father Reid. “I said, ‘If you’re talking about a time frame, forget it. I can’t sell that…. There is no way we are going to adopt that role, and if you persist in that argument then forget that side of the discussion because we simply are not going to persuade the Unionists to do anything….’ My feeling was telling me that the British wouldn’t run with what was in the document.”20 Reynolds was right. The British were distinctly cool about the paper, objecting in particular to what the document had to say about consent and a time-scale for withdrawal. In October 1993 Major formally rejected the Hume-Adams document—his government would or could in no way impose Irish reunification on the unionists. After a series of often difficult meetings with Reynolds, the two leaders decided to start drafting their own declaration, which would incorporate the principle of consent, yet offer enough to the Provisionals to ensure that rejection of the declaration by them would attract opprobrium and blame. It would also contain all the essential elements of the Reid-Adams diplomacy—although only a very few would know that.

  THE RESULT of Reynolds’s and Major’s work was unveiled in mid-December 1993 at a press conference in Downing Street, London, and the event was staged in such a way as to emphasize its historic importance. The world’s press was invited to witness the signing ceremony, and the Irish government sent along a large political and diplomatic delegation headed by Reynolds and his tanaiste, or deputy, the Labour Party leader Dick Spring. The Irish group posed for the TV cameras and press photographers beside a large Christmas tree outside the doorway of number 10. The spectacle of the British and Irish governments making common cause on the seemingly intractable Northern Ireland problem was welcomed around the globe and added enormously to the pressure on the Provos to accept the shared analysis.

  The Downing Street Declaration (DSD), as the joint British-Irish statement was called, conceded the principle of self-determination but in such a way as to weave the principle of consent through it. The relevant section of the new paragraph 4 read:

  The British Government agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish. They reaffirm, as a binding obligation, that they will for their part, introduce the necessary legislation to give effect to this, or equally to any measure of agreement on future relationships in Ireland which the people of Ireland may themselves freely so determine without external impediment.21

  The Downing Street Declaration conflicted fundamentally with the Army Council’s 1988 policy position. There was no commitment by the British to withdraw, no time-scale for withdrawal, and no rejection by the British of the unionist veto. But the declaration was fully consistent with the secret Reid-Adams diplomacy and encapsulated perfectly the two men’s redefinition of British withdrawal.

  Unsurprisingly the formulation on national self-determination in the declaration had ruffled no unionist feathers; in fact many unionists were pleasantly surprised by what it said. The declaration’s acceptance of the consent principle, on the other hand, dismayed the Provo grassroots; there were mutterings against Reynolds and Hume. Three days bef
ore the DSD was published, Adams anticipated his supporters’ mood and echoed the official Army Council line. In an interview with the Sunday Tribune, he said, “The Six Counties cannot have a right to self-determination, that is a matter for the Irish people as a whole to be exercised without impediment. However the shape of a future Ireland is a matter to be determined by all groups in Ireland obviously including the Unionists.”22 One senior Belfast republican summed up the general mood of IRA despondency in the wake of the Downing Street summit: “What we’re talking about here is that if we accept this we accept that everything we stood for in the last 25 years is for nothing, that’s what we’re talking about.”23 Neither he nor most other IRA supporters knew that the principle had actually been conceded by their leadership years before.

  A KEY FACTOR in shaping events in the aftermath of the Downing Street Declaration was a growing public expectation that a peaceful settlement to the Troubles was now possible. Hopes for peace had risen following the disclosure of the secret Hume-Adams talks back in April, and they soared in September 1993 when Hume and Adams issued another statement claiming that they had forwarded a report on their deliberations to the Reynolds government in Dublin for consideration. No such report existed. The statement was merely a ploy to force movement from Reynolds, but it had the effect of raising nationalist hopes and unsettling the unionists.

  Northern Ireland’s one million Protestant and largely unionist population had been watching the developing Hume-Adams dialogue with growing alarm and anxiety. The sight of their two enemies—one supposedly committed to nonviolence, the other unashamedly a supporter of armed struggle—sitting down and finding common cause filled them with dismay. This turned to anger when the British began negotiating directly with Hume as, on the sidelines, the Irish government urged them on. Ever distrustful of the British, the unionists suspected the worst and concluded that a deal was being hatched to throw them out of the union with Britain.