A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The problem for the IRA was that there was a limit to the number of big bombs that could be gotten out of South Armagh, and by definition these attacks were bound to be infrequent. In order to sustain the impact of the campaign, GHQ was obliged to activate existing units in England, with consequences that only highlighted the IRA’s shortcomings. Ed O’Brien, a twenty-one-year-old IRA member from County Wexford who had been living quietly in London for some time awaiting orders from GHQ, was activated in February 1996, but his IRA career was destined to be short-lived. A bomb he was carrying on a London bus on February 18 exploded prematurely, killing him instantly. The circumstances of the explosion suggested that the device he was carrying might well have been tampered with, possibly by the British. Small bombs were set off outside restaurants during the next six weeks, and at the end of March two bombs placed underneath Hammersmith bridge exploded only partially, a classic sign of interference by the security forces. The most compelling evidence that the British had thoroughly penetrated the IRA’s operations in England came in July there, when eight men were arrested and a bomb factory discovered in West London. Two months later the IRA member Diarmuid O’Neill was shot dead, five others arrested, and ten tons of homemade explosives, Semtex, and weapons captured by police, again in London. There were occasional IRA successes. In mid-June the commercial and shopping center of Manchester was devastated by a huge van bomb that injured two hundred people; but the circumstances suggested hasty planning and the absence of the IRA’s usual caution in preparation. Overall the balance sheet painted a less than inspiring picture of success.

  NONE OF THIS made good news for Adams and his allies as they waited for the extraordinary Convention to finally meet. While the IRA’s failures in England strengthened the objective arguments for a cease-fire, there was every chance that the setbacks would instead be blamed on Adams and his supporters, who in an uncanny echo of the criticism leveled at the 1975 IRA leadership, would carry the can for leading the IRA down this path in the first place. As the preparations for the Convention intensified, so the need for a military success grew and, with that, so did the pressure to resume the IRA’s war on the streets of Northern Ireland.

  Just three weeks or so before the Convention, on October 7, two IRA car bombs exploded inside Thiepval barracks in Lisburn, the British army’s headquarters in Northern Ireland. It was the first attack in Northern Ireland since August 1994, twenty-six months before. The operation was a spectacular breach of British security, deeply embarrassing to security chiefs, and as a signal that the IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland had been resumed it could not have gone better for the Adams camp. The operation had been carried out by a special unit headed by the Northern Command’s intelligence officer, a West Belfast figure who had loyally policed the peace strategy in the Maze prison’s IRA wings on behalf of Adams until his release two years earlier. Northern Command had set up the unit to spearhead the resumption of violence in the North, and it had spent months infiltrating unionist areas to gather intelligence on RUC and security force targets. This was its prize operation.

  Although the bombs exploded deep inside the Thiepval complex, somehow major loss of life was avoided. Only thirty-two people were injured— a small toll for two large bombs—but one of them, Warrant Officer James Bradwell, a forty-three-year-old married man, died of his wounds four days later. According to the description given by his daughter, his death could only have come as a relief. “The man I saw in hospital,” she said, “was a shattered human being. He had tubes attached to him and there were machines all around. He had lost all of his hair. His face was swollen up because of his burns. I stood there crying. I just could not stop myself.”13 John Major blamed what he called “this cold-blooded killing” on Gerry Adams, but the irony of Bradwell’s awful death was that it had quite possibly saved both the peace process and Gerry Adams’s political skin. Just two weeks after his death, on the last weekend of October, the extraordinary IRA Convention met at a venue in the Irish midlands. Thanks in no small way to Warrant Officer Bradwell’s agonizing death, Gerry Adams would survive the experience.

  The Convention gathered in a much more optimistic mood than would have been the case had it convened the preceding February or March, when the meeting was originally scheduled. Gerry Adams came in for a dreadful hammering at the Convention, but there is little doubt that, except for the Thiepval bombing, the weekend meeting might well have spelled disaster for him and the peace process.

  It began, as Conventions always do, with a report from the chief of staff. Celebrating his twelfth year in the job, Kevin McKenna referred to the bombing in glowing terms right at the start of his address to the sixty or seventy delegates. It was a classic attack, he told them, according to an account provided to the author by one delegate, just the right type of operation to restart the war in the North. The sos, he assured the IRA, had been only tactical and now it was over; war was resumed. There would be more operations like Thiepval, he promised.

  ORGANIZING an IRA Convention is a massive and risky undertaking. It requires a considerable portion of the IRA’s manpower and resources to put together, and while great efforts are made to ensure that security is tight, the authorities North and South invariably get some inkling that it is about to happen. The most dangerous and difficult part of the exercise happens once a secure location has been chosen by the convenor and a date picked for the Convention. Around forty-eight hours beforehand a series of mini-Conventions must be held at the unit level and among battalion and brigade staffs so that delegates can be chosen and motions for debate framed.

  The delegates are chosen on a basis of one for every ten IRA members, and, once the turnout at the Convention is known, that makes it possible to figure out fairly accurately the strength of the IRA. Some sixty delegates were present at the 1996 Convention, while another ten or so missed their pickups, and that suggests that the operational strength of the IRA in 1996 was around six hundred or at most seven hundred men and women.

  Once the mini-Conventions have taken place, the chosen delegates are not allowed to return home but must immediately start to make their way to the larger meeting, a journey that can take over a day. Most delegates arrive exhausted and must then sit through a meeting that usually begins at midnight and may go on for five or six hours until dawn. A small number of people attend by right and do not have to have delegate authority to be there. The chief of staff, the adjutant general, the quartermaster general, and the seven members of the Army Council fall into that category, while the Executive and the GHQ are empowered to send two delegates each. Invariably the leaders arrive in a less weary state than do the rank and file, and that gives them a special advantage.

  Between drivers, internal IRA security staff, and people looking after food and drink, nearly as many people were involved in setting up the 1996 Convention as took part in it. The delegates were taken to the 1996 location via four separate stops. At each one they had to change cars and were thoroughly searched and debugged using state-of-the-art electronic detectors. The location itself was under guard by members of the IRA’s security unit equipped with walkie-talkie radios and scanners. Before and during the meeting the local Garda station was kept under surveillance, and contingency escape plans had been made in case the meeting was raided. The delegates were under strict orders not to bring mobile phones or any other electronic apparatus with them, for fear that these could be detected by surveillance equipment and the meeting compromised. The rule was strictly enforced for every delegate bar one. The security searchers did not have the nerve to stop Gerry Adams from bringing in a Walkman, which he occasionally plugged into his ears, presumably to drown out speeches he would rather not hear.

  Conventions go through a certain routine. First, a chairman has to be elected to lead the proceedings. At the 1996 meeting the election proved to be the opening salvo at the Adams leadership. A Sinn Fein loyalist, Pat Treanor, a councillor from Clones, County Monaghan, won but only narrowly. His opponent was a fo
rmidable adversary, none other than Brian Keenan, who had been finally released from English imprisonment in June 1993 and who had, since the 1994 cease-fire, widely advertised his criticism of the Adams strategy. A once faithful and loyal disciple of the Sinn Fein president, Keenan was now declaring himself to be a dissident. He was so strongly opposed to the TUAS strategy—or so it seemed—that he had made common cause with the rebels on the Executive, Brian Gillen, Frank McGuinness, and Micky McKevitt. Keenan lost by just two votes. The first round had gone to Adams.

  After McKenna’s report Gerry Adams rose to address the Convention. One delegate remembers that he looked like someone under pressure. “He was very nervous, not confident, hesitant and very mindful of saying the wrong thing. He was very nice to everybody.”14 Adams had every reason to be nervous. Under Convention rules he and his supporters did not get to see the motions presented by IRA delegates until the night before, when the Council held a special meeting. When they did, they must have blanched. Adams had had little time to digest the motions and almost no time to construct a counterstrategy when he rose to speak. It was, by all accounts, a disappointing and defensive speech. An assurance that the cease-fire was tactical, echoing Kevin McKenna, was accompanied by a plaintive plea for unity. Not all members of the Army Council had voted for his strategy, but once the vote had been taken they had supported it, he said, and he urged the delegates to act in the same spirit.

  If the Sinn Fein leader ran into difficulties at the Convention, it was because some of his most determined opponents were veterans of the 1986 Convention who had learned an important lesson from that experience about how to win the argument at such events. The key to success was to make sure that the effective motions were ones that required changes to the IRA’s constitution, and this is what happened at the 1996 Convention. Doing this was the only way to bind the hands of the IRA leadership. In 1986 numerous hard-line motions had been passed that their supporters believed had committed the Army Council to certain courses of action and policy positions, but because they did not alter the IRA’s constitution, they had been ignored afterward.

  OVER 130 MOTIONS were submitted by the IRA’s rank and file to the 1996 convention, nearly 60 of which dealt with the peace strategy. All but a handful were critical of the Adams strategy either explicitly or implicitly, and it soon became clear that the dissidents had done their homework well. By far the bulk of the critical motions sought to change the IRA’s constitution. Those that did not, such as one motion submitted by the East Tyrone Brigade, were blunt and to the point. The peace process, said the East Tyrone delegation, had severely damaged the IRA and the struggle against British rule. The IRA in East Tyrone, it continued, had lost all confidence in the leadership. In the interests of unity the motion was withdrawn, but the point had nevertheless been forcefully made.

  Gerry Adams won the second round when a motion on IRA membership submitted by the quartermaster’s department was debated. This would have barred IRA volunteers from joining any political party that recognized any of the partitionist institutions of government in Ireland or from swearing allegiance or giving recognition to them. It also forbade IRA members to make any pledge to refrain from the use of armed struggle to rid Ireland of the British presence.

  The motion was a thinly veiled but full-frontal assault on Adams and the Sinn Fein members of the Army Council. It was aimed not only at stopping Sinn Fein from entering any Assembly established at Stormont as a result of talks flowing from the peace process but at preventing it from even joining negotiations with the other parties. The reason for this was that the Mitchell report had set preconditions for the entry of political parties to the talks process, one of which included a declared commitment to totally peaceful methods.

  The second part of the motion, pledging IRA members to armed struggle, would have forced figures like Adams and McGuinness to choose between the IRA and Sinn Fein. Adams rose to oppose the motion in its entirety but focused on the second part. He was worried, he told the delegates, because if this motion was passed, the IRA would not be able to take back into its ranks prisoners who had been released from life sentences after signing a pledge of good behavior, something that was tantamount to recognizing the authority of British rule. Gerry Kelly asked what would happen if the IRA recruited members of the security forces or a prison guard. Would they be banned from IRA membership? Adams returned to add that if the Convention passed the motion, they could not insert any discretion. If the constitution banned some people from the IRA, no exceptions could be made. The motion was lost, largely because of objections to the bar on IRA membership, but the speed and force of the leadership’s response to the threat revealed its concern that the Convention could rob it of valuable negotiating flexibility when political talks eventually got under way.

  Adams’s skills were unable to prevent defeat in the third battle, when the Convention turned to consider motions that were aimed at limiting the Army Council’s ability and power to call a cease-fire. The constitution had historically given the Army Council sweeping powers over when and how to declare a cease-fire, bestowing upon it the authority “to conclude peace or declare war” by a simple majority. The leadership needed to refer to a Convention only when the “conclusion of peace”—that is, the settlement signaling the end of the war—had to be ratified.15 That condition had never been tested, and no one was quite sure what it meant.

  Whatever its real meaning, the mood of the Convention was clearly in favor of significantly restricting the Army Council’s powers to call future cease-fires and, by definition, it also sought to limit Gerry Adams’s ability to implement the peace process. This was a clear and unmistakable sign that the grassroots were deeply unhappy at the conduct of the sos. There were over twenty motions to this effect. All but a few either sought to time-limit any cease-fire called by the Council—three or six months appeared to be the favorite lengths—or they sought to force the Council to win approval elsewhere in the IRA if extensions were requested beyond the initial period. Delegates favored, in descending order, the involvement of the Executive, GHQ, or a commission of IRA commanders in this decision. The very presence of such motions on the Convention agenda amounted to an unprecedented censure of the Army Council and the Adams leadership, a sign that trust in them was no longer as firm or automatic as it had once been.

  Feelings on the issue ran strong. The Belfast Brigade, represented by Brian Gillen, said a time limit should have been set on the 1994 cease-fire, and he complained bitterly about the Army Council’s September 1993 order tightening its control over operations and banning certain types of operations, such as the use of car bombs. This had removed all power at the local level, he complained. Moves to limit the Army Council’s authority were about restoring democracy in the IRA, not about tying people’s hands.

  The delegate from Southern Command launched a full-frontal attack on Adams and his supporters. The sos, he complained, had been the work of a small, unrepresentative group of people and had succeeded only in causing widespread demoralization at the rank-and-file level. Southern Command’s motion would have given the Executive and GHQ staff a veto on any future move by the Army Council to declare a cease-fire. The Munster Brigade wanted all OCs to be involved in any future cease-fire decision. Only the Derry Brigade announced its support for the peace strategy, although it too was concerned that there was no contribution from the rank and file about how long a cease-fire should be allowed to last.

  An Army Executive motion was chosen as representative of these critical sentiments. It stipulated that after a cease-fire was called, a Convention had to be held within twelve months to review it and that if the Council wanted to extend the cease-fire beyond the first four months, the decision had to be ratified by the Executive and again every four months thereafter. This was not just an attempt to curb the Army Council but also a bid to shift the balance of internal power decisively in the direction of the Executive. It was a direct challenge to Adams’s authority.

  Th
ese assaults on his power base provoked desperate efforts by the Sinn Fein leader to deflect or dilute the challenge. Adams complained that if the British ever learned about the motion, it would give them an invaluable tactical advantage; once they knew that the cease-fire had to be reviewed after four months, they would delay and obstruct in an effort to create tension and foment a split within the IRA.

  Adams entreated the Convention not to make any move that diluted the leadership’s power, but he urged that if it was determined to do so, it should break up the motion and disguise it by spreading it around the IRA’s constitution. That way the British might not see what had happened if or when a copy of the new constitution fell into their hands. Although he did not say so, Adams must also have known that once the British learned of the changes, they would know they were now dealing with a much weakened figure.

  The Convention opted for Adams’s face-saving formula, ordered the Army Council to seek a four-month ratification from the Executive, but said the first post-cease-fire Convention should be held fifteen, not twelve, months after any new cease-fire. The motion was broken up and scattered around the constitution, as Adams had urged.

  Worse was to come for Adams. Under the terms of the 1986 constitution, the Army Council effectively had untrammeled control over the IRA’s weapons and stores of explosives. The relevant section of the constitution approved at that meeting read, “All personnel and all armaments, equipment and other resources of Oglaigh na hEireann shall be at the disposal of and subject to the Army Authority, to be employed and utilised as the Army Authority shall direct.”16 Although there was some doubt as to whether the Convention or the Army Council constituted the “Army Authority,” it was clear that on a day-to-day basis the Army Council was that “Authority” and thus held control of the IRA’s weapons. McKevitt’s quartermaster’s department had tabled a motion that would have replaced this section and deprived the Army Council of all negotiating flexibility on the decommissioning issue.