A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  In order to describe the 1994 cease-fire in terms that would set grassroots’ minds at rest, the think tank had come up with an Irish word designed to convey the temporary and probationary nature of the cease-fire. The word was sos, which translates into English as a pause, a cessation, an interval, and a rest. The word, which in everyday IRA usage became simply “the suss,” succeeded in suggesting the IRA leadership’s determination not to be sucked into a long and fruitless cease-fire. Other reassuring signals were sent to the base. The first IRA “War News” column in An Phoblacht – Republican News published immediately after the August 31 announcement, for example, repeatedly called the cease-fire a “suspension.”1 The message that the cessation would be temporary, if necessary, was reinforced by senior republican figures at private republican “family” meetings attended by IRA and Sinn Fein supporters in the days and weeks after the declaration.2 By the end of September 1994, more comforting messages to the republican base were dispatched, Adams saying in Boston that if the causes of the conflict were not removed, no one could say that another IRA leadership would not come along, while McGuinness insisted that there was no such word as “permanent” in the republican dictionary. Both were fairly broad hints that the IRA would, if needed, resume its violence.

  The truth was that a permanent cease-fire was just not in Adams’s gift, at least in such explicit terms. The IRA simply would not have tolerated it, and the Army Council would have resisted it. If the cessation was to become enduring, it would have to evolve and develop naturally as political circumstances allowed. The sort of cease-fire demanded by Reynolds and others was not what Adams had been able to persuade the Army Council to back.

  Far from being permanent, the cease-fire the Army Council voted for in August 1994 had to be reviewed after just four months, a time frame chosen by chance. In theory the Army Council had endorsed the short, speculative cessation that had been predicted in the media, but it was cleverly disguised. The weeks leading up to August 31, 1994 had seen numerous conjectural reports about a three-month cease-fire, much of it encouraged by think tank briefings to the media, the author included. Other reports said the cease-fire would last for six months. By choosing a four-month cease-fire, Sinn Fein leaders could honestly and credibly deny media speculation about a three-or six-month-long cessation and this served to reassure the British, Irish, and Americans that it was indeed meant to be permanent.

  There were echoes of the ambiguity inherent in the TUAS strategy document in all this, another compelling clue that the Sinn Fein peace strategy derived its dynamic from the ability of the party’s leadership to send out differing messages to different constituencies. It also spoke to the readiness of recipients, especially Sinn Fein’s own supporters, to believe them. Otherwise the peace process could never have moved forward.

  These conflicting messages plagued the cease-fire in its early months and contributed in no small way to British skepticism about the bona fides of the Sinn Fein leadership. Part of the problem derived from the fact that the bulk of agents run by British intelligence inside the IRA knew nothing of this subtle dissembling. While the Sinn Fein leaders might say one thing to the British and Irish governments in public or even private, the intelligence briefings from MI5, the military, and particularly the RUC Special Branch reflected the quite different story being told to the IRA grassroots.

  There were also pieces of hard evidence that could not be ignored by the British. The IRA had broken the secret agreement not to recruit or train its members during the cease-fire. It had also engaged in some targeting and continued to produce explosives. Much to the discomfort of the Adams faction, the Army Council “soldiers” had interpreted literally an obligation in the IRA constitution to keep the IRA “as efficient as possible” and insisted that it be honored, despite the secret undertakings given to the British and Irish governments.3 In response, the British resumed surveillance of IRA leaders. The British could not be sure whether all this meant that the Army Council wanted to keep the IRA in fighting trim so that it could slip back into war or whether it was merely trying to reassure the rank and file. In this state of uncertainty, they opted for a cautious, slow-moving, and often suspicious approach to the cease-fire, and it was this that proved its undoing.

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL eight months into the cessation that the British secretary of state, Sir Patrick Mayhew, began to think that the Provisionals probably were genuine, and by that time it was very likely too late.4 The British were used to thinking the worst about the Provos, and for good reason, but evidence that has emerged from inside the republican world suggests they were wrong. From accounts given by key IRA personnel, it appears that not only was the cease-fire called in defiance of the wishes of most rank-and-file IRA members but that it had been structured in such a way that, surreptitously, the cessation could be extended again and again no matter what the grassroots thought.

  IRA activists had strongly registered their opposition to a cease-fire not long after the Downing Street Declaration had been published. In February 1994, six months before the cessation was called, a mini-Convention was held in Donegal and came out strongly against stopping the campaign. The meeting brought together the Army Council, GHQ, Northern Command staff, brigade commanders, and operations officers, a total of nearly forty of the IRA’s most senior and important personnel. Three-quarters of them, according to one estimate, rejected the cease-fire option.5 Voicing their opposition did not halt the process, but the Donegal meeting did give the leadership a good idea of who was for and who was against their strategy.

  The movement toward the cease-fire was kept a closely guarded secret, its detail known only to the Army Council and the Adams think tank. IRA activists were given private assurances that the media speculation— which by the summer of 1994 was intense—was groundless, and this continued right up to the eve of the cease-fire announcement. Even Gerry Adams joined in. Ten days before the declaration, just a day or two before he would formally propose the cease-fire motion at the Army Council meeting in County Donegal, he issued a public statement describing the media speculation as “news to me.”6

  The IRA rank and file was not consulted or briefed about the decision, and preparation for military operations continued until a few days beforehand, as one activist recalled. “A week before there was no word of a cease-fire,” he said. “I had just delivered a van to——for a big bomb they were planning. I was being pushed to get jobs done, targets were being readied, and then four days before we heard what was coming. It hit me like a thunderbolt.”7 IRA prisoners likewise were kept in the dark. The Northern IRA was given some notice, but the IRA in Southern Command got none at all. Most IRA members in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Kerry, and Galway first heard of the cease-fire on the day it was declared, and they heard it first on television or radio news broadcasts, not from their leaders. Even in the North not all areas were briefed about the cease-fire; Tyrone, where support for the Adams strategy was at its most lukewarm, was kept in the dark almost to the end.

  The non-IRA republican base, people who would vote for Sinn Fein and work for the party during elections, knew even less about the impending events and were stunned when the cease-fire came, as one vivid account of a republican meeting in Derry held just after the declaration became public, described: “It was an extraordinary meeting because it soon became clear that a significant number of those present were in open disagreement with the decision of the IRA leadership to call the ceasefire. As for those who did support the cease-fire it was not so much because they knew why. Indeed they seemed to be as surprised by the totality of the decision as everyone else.”8 In West Belfast, Sinn Fein stage-managed a celebratory cavalcade of cars that toured the area, its occupants waving large Irish flags and honking horns. At a rally in Andersonstown, Gerry Adams was presented with a bouquet of flowers and surrounded by smiling Sinn Fein politicians. The crowd, however, was largely subdued and puzzled.

  In the face of such anxiety, the Army Council used two arguments to c
alm its supporters. One was to urge the rank and file to keep faith and trust in the leadership, and here the record—and thus trustworthiness—of a leadership that had smuggled tons of weapons from Libya was constantly and relentlessly invoked. The other argument, possibly the most powerful of all during these days, said that only the British stood to gain by division and discord within the IRA. Those who stirred dissent and criticism were, in effect, doing the British a huge favor, and they should therefore keep silent or risk being accused of helping the enemy, IRA leaders said. This appeal for unity by and large worked, but it was not an inexhaustible argument.

  The decision to review the cease-fire after four months may have enabled Sinn Fein leaders to field awkward questions from the media, but its effect was to position the review at times that made it more difficult to argue for going back to war. The first four-month review, for instance, was scheduled to take place in the month of December. That meant that if the cease-fire was ended, it would happen around the festive period, a bad time in public relations terms to go back to bombing and shooting. Although the cease-fire was going badly for the leadership at this time and would continue to worsen, the Army Council, predictably, decided against a resumption and put the decision off for another four months.

  That meant the next review would be around Easter 1995, a predictable time of the year for republicans to resume war, given the association with the Easter Rising of 1916. The British would surely be waiting for the IRA to do just that. So again the Council opted to preserve the cease-fire and told the volunteers that it would end after Easter and to get ready to return to active service then. But again another review was ordered. As the weeks ran into months and the cease-fire ran into more and more trouble, IRA activists were repeatedly told to prepare for a resumption of hostilities, which never quite happened. “They were told forty times they were going back,” remembered one commander.9 Adams’s approach to the cease-fire, the reassurance contained in TUAS in particular, may have persuaded the rank and file that the military option was still viable, but every month without violence made it more difficult for the IRA to launch a sustainable campaign of armed struggle. Not only was the IRA itself getting rusty with inactivity, but the longer the cease-fire lasted, the more popular it became, especially in the IRA’s strongest areas, where the communities had borne the brunt of nearly two decades of violence and were now tasting peace and relative serenity for the first time.

  THE CEASE-FIRE ran into trouble fairly quickly. The British response was slow and cautious, and not until mid-October 1994 did John Major make what he called “a working assumption” that the IRA cease-fire was permanent. Even so, talks between Sinn Fein and NIO officials, only talks about talks, would not commence until December 1994, when technically the IRA leadership was supposed to review the entire enterprise. There was no sign yet of Sinn Fein’s sitting down with British ministers, much less of a British readiness to discuss their withdrawal from Northern Ireland. By this stage full-blooded negotiations with the British should have begun. Not that there was no movement at all by the Major government. Blocked Border roads were gradually reopened in October 1994, the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fein that prevented Gerry Adams’s voice from being heard on the BBC had been lifted, and British soldiers were wearing soft hats instead of battle helmets as they patrolled the streets and fields, signaling the start of a military de-escalation. But the British ambassador to Ireland was still under instructions to boycott the opening session of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin Castle because of the presence of Sinn Fein delegates. By the end of November, Adams and Hume were obliged to issue a strongly worded statement calling for demilitarization to be speeded up. Talks should commence “without further delay,” they said.10

  The British instinct for caution was reinforced significantly when the IRA shot dead a postal worker in the course of a robbery in the Border town of Newry in mid-November. The victim, Frank Kerr, a fifty-three-year-old single Catholic from South Armagh, died when three armed raiders dressed as postal workers held up staff in the main sorting office and tied them up. Kerr resisted, struggled with the robbers, and was gunned down. The robbery had been carried out by the South Armagh IRA but it was very quickly disowned by the Army Council, which claimed that the operation, while the work of its members, had not been sanctioned by the leadership. Publicly Adams expressed shock at the killing, and Father Reid traveled to Dublin to assure officials that this was indeed the case. Reid had however been misinformed. According to IRA sources the robbery had been given a broad sanction by the Army Council, inasmuch as a general permission had been granted to continue “fund-raising” activity, cease-fire or no cease-fire. It was a necessary part of the job of keeping the IRA “as efficient as possible,” as the Army Council “soldiers” had insisted must happen, and anyway the IRA always needed money.

  The Kerr killing had an immediately negative impact on the cease-fire, in that the Major government stiffened the demand for IRA decommissioning as a precondition for Sinn Fein’s entry to the political talks. It brought to the top of the agenda an item that was to haunt the peace process for years to come. Decommissioning of IRA weaponry had been simmering away on the back burner for much of the period leading up to the cease-fire. The Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, had mentioned it as something that would have to happen eventually, as had the Irish deputy prime minister, Dick Spring—but it was not yet the dominating issue it would become. Major had merely said that IRA disarmament would have to figure in any overall deal, but by the end of the year, as a result of the Kerr killing, he was much more specific and demanding. A Sinn Fein promise on guns would not be enough, he said, and there would have to be “significant progress” on the matter before Sinn Fein could sit at the negotiating table. Mayhew was making the demand detailed by January 1995, saying that Semtex and heavy machine guns would have to be put out of commission. During a trip to the United States to coincide with the Saint Patrick’s Day festivities in March, Mayhew introduced the Washington Three test, a series of decommissioning hurdles the IRA would have to jump before Sinn Fein could join negotiations. First, said Mayhew, there must be a willingness in principle to disarm progressively; next, agreement on the method of decommissioning; and third, a start to the process. Otherwise Sinn Fein would stay outside the negotiating chamber.

  The caution of the British meant that they moved very slowly toward the release of IRA prisoners, one of the goals of the Adams strategy. The cease-fire had been made possible in no small measure because of an Irish government promise to press London for prison reform, but it was not until August 1995, a year into the cessation, that the British moved, when Mayhew restored 50 percent remission for sentenced prisoners. This concession had first been given to the IRA in 1976, when special-category or political status was removed, but taken away by the Thatcher government in 1988 in punitive response to the post-Eksund offensive. In IRA eyes it was hardly a concession at all, merely a return to what had been.

  Events south of the Border intervened to complicate a rapidly deteriorating situation for the Adams leadership. In mid-November, Albert Reynolds was forced to resign as taoiseach after his party was embroiled in a sordid scandal centered on his government’s failure to prosecute a pedophile Catholic priest. Reynolds’s partners in government, Labour, refused to deal with his successor, Bertie Ahern, and joined instead with Fine Gael, whose leader, John Bruton, became the new taoiseach. It was a devastating blow for the Adams cease-fire strategy. TUAS derived its credibility from the creation of a pan-nationalist alliance, and while Fianna Fail was clearly a nationalist party, and a fit partner for Sinn Fein, Fine Gael certainly was not, at least in the eyes of Provo supporters.

  The political successors of Michael Collins, the man who had negotiated the hated Treaty of 1921, Fine Gael had a controversial history, and at one stage in the 1930s was linked to Ireland’s version of the fascist movement. The party took a traditionally tough attitude toward the IRA, and a Fine Gael–
Labour coalition government in the mid-1970s pursued the IRA relentlessly. Under the leadership of Garret FitzGerald, Fine Gael developed a name for being more friendly toward unionists than toward nationalists, although political self-interest drove the party into an alliance with the SDLP in the mid-1980s when Sinn Fein first started to win electoral support. FitzGerald himself bitterly opposed the notion of talking to the Provos and had quarreled with the British over the issue. His successor, John Bruton, would have been regarded by Adams’s followers as even more sympathetic to the unionist case, so much so that few would quarrel with the sobriquet “John Unionist” bestowed upon him by Albert Reynolds.

  To say the least, Bruton’s elevation made it difficult for Adams to convince anyone in the republican movement that the pan-nationalist alliance still had meaning. Bruton had no appetite for the strategy and signaled this in an unmistakable fashion in October 1995, when he pointedly refused to meet jointly with Adams and Hume in their capacity as leaders of Northern nationalism. It was a terrible blow to the TUAS strategy, and to Adams’s credibility.

  The change of government brought important changes in the personnel handling the peace process, and the dismay of the Provos grew. Out went the trusted Martin Mansergh, who had been the Southern link with Adams via Father Reid since 1987, and in came a new adviser to the taoiseach, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Sean Donlon, whose credentials were very different from Mansergh’s. Whereas Mansergh was a thinking republican, Donlon was seen, by the IRA at least, as someone who sympathized with FitzGerald’s tough antirepublicanism while he was minister for foreign affairs. To make matters worse for Adams, Bruton put together a coalition cabinet and included as ministers members of the Democratic Left, the latest manifestation of the Workers Party, the successors to the hated Goulding IRA. It was called the Rainbow Coalition, but it created a black nightmare for Adams.