by Ed Moloney
Unionism’s extremists, the loyalist paramilitary groups, had a history of turning to violence when they believed their constitutional position was threatened, and the September 1993 Hume-Adams statement was the trigger for a burst of bloody savagery that claimed the lives of three Catholics and injured dozens more. The loyalists mounted an average of one attack a day throughout the ensuing month, October 1993.
The loyalist onslaught directly challenged the IRA’s raison d’être, and the pressures on the organization in Belfast to respond were enormous. After all, the Provisionals had come into existence to defend the city’s vulnerable Catholic communities, and any failure to hit back at those behind the attacks could provoke uncontrollable freelance operations by IRA units. In a worst-case scenario these could even precipitate a split in the organization. The Ulster Defence Asociation, the largest loyalist grouping, was behind a majority of the attacks, in particular the so-called C Coy of the organization’s Second Battalion on the Shankill Road, a tough loyalist district of North Belfast. Led by a notorious, muscled gunman called Johnny Adair, the UDA was causing mayhem in the IRA’s strongest areas. In the face of all this the IRA decided to hit back. Plans were put forward by the IRA in Belfast to assassinate Adair and to wipe out the bulk of the UDA leadership.
The proposal to remove the UDA leadership was endorsed at the highest level in the IRA. The demands of the peace process meant that the Army Council had already moved to tighten its control over the organization when, in September 1993, it issued an order saying that in the future all IRA operations had to be approved by Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna. Northern Command had long had a veto on IRA operations, and now that power was extended to the Army Council. On the urging of Adams and his allies, the Council had taken this action for fear that a “bad” operation might endanger the fragile relationship with Hume. Accordingly the proposal to attack the UDA leadership was placed in front of the Council, and eventually one plan was given the go-ahead.
So it was that a car carrying three IRA men from the Ardoyne area of North Belfast drew up outside Frizzell’s fishmonger’s shop on the afternoon of Saturday, October 13, 1993, and set in motion one of the worst atrocities in the history of the Irish Troubles. Situated halfway along the Shankill Road, in the middle of the city’s toughest loyalist district, Frizzell’s was packed with shoppers that Saturday afternoon when two of the IRA men, both sporting white coats of the sort worn by delivery men, carried a bomb inside the shop. As one held up the customers and staff with a handgun, the other, a twenty-three-year-old single man, Thomas Begley, suspended the device from the ceiling and lit the fuse with a cigarette lighter. Above the shop was the local headquarters of the UDA, and usually on Saturdays the group’s commanders, including Adair, gathered there for a meeting. That particular Saturday, however, the UDA leaders had left early, and the IRA operation went disastrously wrong. The fuse lit by Begley had been cropped short to give the customers in the shop just enough time to get out but not enough for the UDA men to escape downstairs. But the fuse had been cut too short and the bomb exploded almost instantly, killing Begley and causing the ancient, Victorian brick building to collapse on top of the early afternoon shoppers. Nine other people died in the explosion, four of them women shoppers and two schoolgirls, one seven years old, the other thirteen. All the victims aside from Begley were Protestants. At Begley’s funeral a few days later Gerry Adams helped carry the coffin, a decision that brought expressions of outrage and condemnation from mainstream politicians and the media. What none of them knew was that as a member of the Army Council, which had approved the bombing, Adams had little choice.
The Shankill bomb ushered in a period of unprecedented terror in Northern Ireland. Following the Shankill disaster the UDA issued an ominous statement. “John Hume, Gerry Adams and the nationalist electorate,” it warned, “will pay a heavy, heavy price for today’s atrocity.”24 Over the next six weeks loyalists killed sixteen people, all but one of them Catholics. The UDA was responsible for thirteen of the deaths. The worst single incident was in the small County Derry village of Greysteel, where two UDA gunmen opened fire indiscriminately on a crowd of two hundred people celebrating the Halloween holiday in the Rising Sun restaurant and lounge bar. Eight people died in the hail of bullets, and nineteen were wounded. One of the gunmen shouted “Trick or Treat?” before pulling the trigger.
THE WEEKS between all this slaughter and the publication of the Downing Street Declaration in December 1993 rank among the most tense and dreadful that veterans of the Troubles could remember. Belfast became a ghost town in the evenings as workplaces and shops closed early. Most pubs and restaurants were deserted or didn’t bother opening. Catholic areas braced themselves for further slaughter, while the nightly television news programs were dominated by emotional scenes of grieving relatives and friends as one funeral followed another.
It was in these circumstances that the IRA was presented with the Downing Street Declaration, a document which held out a fragile hope for peace but whose rejection by the IRA would surely have brought censure and denunciation raining down on its head. The effect of the terrible violence was profound. Most people, not least Catholics on the receiving end of the loyalist violence, yearned for an end to the killing and were prepared to give the Downing Street Declaration a chance. There were also hints of tough security reprisals if the IRA rejected the document. Albert Reynolds said the Irish public would expect “a strong security response” if violence resumed its past levels, while the British press reported accounts of cabinet briefings in London suggesting that there would be an all-out offensive against the IRA if the declaration was not accepted.
The Adams leadership had one option that, according to his advisers, was only briefly considered and then discarded. This was to publish the original Hume-Adams document of June 1992 and embarrass Reynolds and Hume by revealing that they had initially accepted the proposition that Britain should withdraw from Northern Ireland, a position very different from that promoted in the Downing Street Declaration.
Putting the June 1992 document into the public arena would certainly have disconcerted both Reynolds and Hume and would have gone a long way to reassure a republican grassroots increasingly unsettled by the concession contained in the Downing Street Declaration. But doing that would have had two irrevocable consequences. It would, in the words of one of the think tank advisers, “have destroyed the pan-nationalist alliance”25 and demolished the relationship between Adams and his putative partners, Albert Reynolds and John Hume. More important, publicizing the document would have set limits to his flexibility beyond which Adams could not have retreated without incurring criticism from his grassroots activists and showing weakness to his political opponents. The Army Council had walked, or been steered, into a cul-de-sac from which there was no prospect of retreat.
One other consideration would figure more and more in the calculations of Adams and the think tank as the peace process progressed. The process was beginning to bring to Sinn Fein benefits of a sort the party had not seen in years. A month or so after the disclosure of the Hume-Adams meeting in Derry, in May 1993, elections were held to the North’s local councils, and for the first time in a decade Sinn Fein’s share of the vote rose, and the number of seats secured by the party increased by 20 percent. In October there was an even more dramatic example of this electoral bonus when Sinn Fein won a council by-election in Derry, transforming a previous 60-to-40 vote for the rival SDLP into a 55-to-45 victory for the republican candidate. Nationalist voters, it seemed, were ready to reward Sinn Fein every time the party edged toward a cease-fire, and the lesson was not lost on Adams and his allies.
ELECTORAL CONSIDERATIONS, however, were not foremost in the mind of the Army Council, at least not as far as its “soldier” members were concerned. The Downing Street Declaration was simply unacceptable—it made no mention of British withdrawal and set the principle of unionist consent in textual stone. The Council voted in January 1994 to reject it, with
Slab Murphy, Kevin McKenna, and Micky McKevitt openly contemptuous of its contents.
No one spoke up for the declaration, but once again Adams was able to persuade the Council not to take precipitate action and he argued, successfully, that the Council should keep its rejection of the document secret from the outside world and pretend that it was still being considered. Play for time, Adams urged. History may well judge this to be one of the most crucial moves, if not the most crucial move, of the entire process, one that made an IRA cease-fire inevitable and merely a matter of time and management. Having refused to say no, openly and publicly, the IRA was really saying yes.
Once again the argument that won the day was the same—keeping the game with Reynolds and Hume alive was paramount. Two delaying mechanisms were set in place. One, a peace commission was established under Pat Doherty with the brief of traveling around Ireland to hold hearings. It was supposed to report by the end of January 1994, but did not conclude its deliberations until June when, not surprisingly, it revealed that half the submissions received had opted for an IRA cease-fire. What started off as a delaying ploy ended by mobilizing pressure to end the war. The other delaying tactic was a Sinn Fein demand for clarification of the declaration. An elaborate game was played in which senior republicans suggested that buried somewhere in the text of the document might be a hidden message that the British could be teased into revealing.
While these moves clearly kept open the possibility of a cease-fire, the Army Council chairman, Martin McGuinness, was dispatched in early January 1994 to give the Provisional grassroots a reassuring message, a role he would play again and again both publicly and privately before the cease-fire was declared. In a lengthy interview with the Sunday Business Post in Dublin, McGuinness warned that unless the British had a private position that was different from the one expressed publicly by John Major, then the Downing Street Declaration was “worthless,” adding that “anything short of a British government decision that they are leaving this country is unacceptable.”
Hinting at the 1988 Army Council decision, McGuinness went on to say that the timetable for British withdrawal was nevertheless negotiable and that the IRA might be prepared to negotiate terms that went beyond the lifetime of a British parliament, but on the issue of an IRA cease-fire he was unequivocally hard-line, as the IRA Volunteers expected their Northern commander to be. A cessation, he warned, would require an Army Convention, but as things stood republicans would regard even a three-month cease-fire as “particularly long.”26 But hidden behind this hard-line message was another signal, that the Army Council was not yet prepared to dismiss the Downing Street Declaration. Republicans needed clarification, McGuinness said, and in the meantime the leadership would continue to consult with its grassroots. Not for the first or last time tough language masked private flexibility.
THE PERIOD FOLLOWING the Downing Street Declaration was a bizarre, Alice-in-Wonderland time for rank-and-file republicans as they tried to work out why their leaders had not immediately rejected the declaration. In the ensuing weeks the Sinn Fein leadership hosted “family meetings” around Northern Ireland for republican activists which were addressed by leading members of the think tank, particularly Gibney and Hartley, whose unenviable task it was to act as lightning rods for grassroots confusion and anxiety. Hundreds of rank-and-file republicans would turn up at drinking clubs and community halls expecting or hoping to hear that Adams and McGuinness had a secret trick up their sleeves, only to be disappointed.
Instead they would be reassured not to worry and counseled to have faith and trust in a leadership they knew would never sell out; there would be no cease-fires, no dilution of the struggle. As soon as they went home, they would switch on the TV news to hear the same figures sending out completely opposite signals. One West Belfast republican described the internal turmoil in the opening weeks of 1994: “We go to meetings, and there seems to be a consensus that everyone agrees on, but every time you look at them on television or read something in the paper it seems to be taking a different direction…. There is confusion. I don’t know whether they know what the base thinks. I don’t think they’re out of touch; they’ve had so many meetings. And they’re getting the same message from the meetings. So what’s the name of the game?”27 Another rural activist put it more bluntly, although this judgment was made with the benefit of hindsight: “They told their people lies. I was at [our local] meeting… and their interpretation of it all was that they would run it to its natural conclusion; they would expose the Brits, the SDLP, and the Free State government, and then it would be back to the war. There would be no cease-fire and certainly no return to Stormont.”28
Eventually Sinn Fein submitted a series of inconsequential questions about the Downing Street Declaration to the British via Albert Reynolds in May 1994, and the British sent a formalistic reply. Those republicans who were expecting sensational admissions from the British were disappointed. A few days later Suzanne Breen, a reporter in the Belfast office of the Irish Times, filed a story quoting republican sources explaining why the IRA had refused to reject the declaration out of hand. The anonymous interview infuriated Adams’s press handlers, who denied it and privately blamed a leading Sinn Fein councillor for the leak. But the story had the touch of authenticity. “We don’t want to be written off as being negative,” the paper quoted the republican source as saying. “We don’t want to be portrayed as the people who have rejected peace. Our reply when it comes, will be a balancing act. Sure we’re playing games but what do you think the British are doing? They know damn well that we won’t accept what’s on offer. They would love us to be hot-headed but we’ve no intention of doing that.”29 It was back to playing word games.
The reality was that once the Army Council had refused to reject the Downing Street Declaration, the die was cast. It was only a matter of time, management, and negotiation before the IRA was obliged to call a ceasefire. Albert Reynolds’s congenial press secretary, Sean Duignan, later wrote that the taoiseach constantly used the analogy of a hooked trout to describe the Provos in the wake of the declaration.30 It was just a matter of keeping a tight line and reeling them in. In January 1994 the hook was driven deeper. A promise given by Reynolds to Adams during 1993 to scrap the eighteen-year-old ban on radio and television interviews with Sinn Fein in the Republic as soon as there was a cease-fire was fast-forwarded. With Sinn Fein measurably closer to being treated like a normal, respectable political party, outright rejection of the Downing Street Declaration became more and more difficult to envisage.
IT WAS TIME to play the American card or, to be more accurate, the Clinton card. The American president had been assiduously wooed by Adams’s allies in the United States and in April 1992, when Clinton was seeking the Democratic nomination for the upcoming presidential election, he promised that, if elected, he would grant Gerry Adams a visa to visit the United States. Clinton had astutely realized that there were votes, Irish-American votes, to be won, and at a relatively low cost. Once Clinton arrived in the White House, however, it was a different matter. Both the State Department and the British embassy lobbied heavily against giving Adams a visa. The Provisional leader had been barred from entering the United States for twenty years, and if they had their way, that was how it would stay.
For the best part of two years Clinton refused to defy the mandarins in Foggy Bottom, but a combination of Irish government diplomacy, lobbying by John Hume, and the secret blandishments of the think tank chairman, Ted Howell, paved the way in February 1994 for a dramatic initiative. Much to the public fury of the British, Adams was granted a forty-eight-hour visa to visit New York to attend a conference on Northern Ireland hosted by the deeply establishment National Committee on American Foreign Policy, whose members included such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, George Shultz, David Rockefeller, and, later, Margaret Thatcher. For years Sinn Fein had championed the cause of many of America’s ideological foes in countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cuba. No
w, in the interests of the peace process, the Sinn Fein leader was supping at their enemy’s table.
The visit was a public relations triumph for Adams. The time-limited nature of his visa and the whiff of gunsmoke that trailed after him ensured that his visit became a matter of intense media interest. He was a guest on CNN’s Larry King Live and appeared on other TV talk shows. The Irish writer Edna O’Brien was clearly bewitched by Adams’s charm and composed the sort of profile in the New York Times that publicists only dream of. “Given a different incarnation in a different century, one could imagine him as one of those monks transcribing the Gospels into Gaelic,” she wrote.31 The American media treated Adams like a cross between Emiliano Zapata and Michael Collins. An intoxicated Irish-America, made drunk by Britain’s anger at the Adams visa, responded as though the Easter Rising were being refought in front of their eyes. Wealthy supporters paid for Adams to stay in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria where de Valera had lived during his lengthy American exile during the Anglo-Irish war. Meanwhile back in Ireland, Adams’s colleagues in the IRA predicted ruefully that after tasting life on Park Avenue, Adams would find it difficult to return to the diet of cold ham sandwiches, lukewarm tea, and damp country beds that life on the Army Council offered.
The Adams trip to New York gave the Sinn Fein leader an opportunity to send some highly significant political messages. The invitation had come from a group of figures from corporate Irish-America, people like the billionaire businessman Charles “Chuck” Feeney and the insurance magnate Bill Flynn, recruited to Adams’s cause by allies of Ted Howell, such as the New York publisher Niall O’Dowd. They had invested heavily in the Sinn Fein leader and expected him to deliver peace. The same people had access to the wealthiest political benefactors in America, and, if the Provisionals played their cards right, Sinn Fein could expect access to considerable political funds. The IRA leadership had already declared one unofficial ceasefire for American mediators, during a visit by the Flynn-Feeney group, but they expected more. Adams hinted they would get it. At one function he promised not to disappoint those “who had stuck their neck out for him” and noted privately that he knew there was no such thing as a free lunch. As the Irish Times Washington correspondent Conor O’Clery later wrote, he was quite specific about his plans: “In the limousine on the way to JFK airport, according to George Schwab (president of The National Committee on American Foreign Policy), Adams said, ‘George, I promise you we’ll never return to the old ways.’”32