by Ed Moloney
The motive for the Executive’s move was clear, a suspicion that the Sinn Fein figures on the Army Council would cut a deal on IRA weapons if they could. The suspicion was not entirely without foundation. There had been conflicting, not to say confusing, signals emanating from persons like Adams and McGuinness regarding IRA weapons. While they continued, privately and publicly, to pour scorn on any notion that the IRA would decommission its weapons, they had at the same time authorized Sinn Fein to make a submission to the Mitchell body, outlining how it envisaged that the disarming would happen. There had even been an attempt to send an Army Council member along to talk to Mitchell about it. In another sign of where Adams might lead the organization, he had announced that Sinn Fein would sign up unilaterally to the six Mitchell principles, one of which committed participants at the talks to some sort of decommissioning process.
On the face of it, McKevitt’s motion removed any room for flexibility on the issue. It was unambiguously worded: “The Army Authority shall retain, maintain and ensure the safety of all armaments, equipment and other resources of Oglaigh na hEireann until such time as the sovereignty and unity of the Republic of Ireland has been attained. Once a settlement has been agreed, leading to a united Ireland, all decisions relating to decommissioning of armaments, equipment and other resources must be ratified by an Army Convention.”17 The motion was passed unanimously. Adams, McGuinness, and the peace strategy supporters on the Army Council had no choice but to vote along with everyone else. To have done otherwise would have been to vindicate the criticism and suspicion directed at them.
Once the Convention had ended and the delegates dispersed to their home areas, the Adams camp tried to retrieve the situation. For months afterward Army Council meetings were riven by disputes between the dissidents and the Adams camp over whether or not the McKevitt motion was an addition to the constitution or an amendment. The Adams supporters argued that it was an addition and that the 1986 formulation that gave the Army Council ultimate power over IRA weapons—and therefore the authority to decommission—was still in place. It was yet another clue that, with time, decommissioning would happen.
The Adams camp suffered other setbacks at the Convention. The Army Executive was given a new role by delegates and became “the custodians of the [IRA] constitution” with the right to rule and arbitrate on policy matters that infringed the constitution, while rank-and-file Volunteers were given the right to petition the Executive on such matters.18 That meant that the Executive could take issue with moves made in the peace process by people like Adams and McGuinness. Another motion was passed ordering the Army Council to maintain “the organisational integrity and cohesion… the political and military strengths and capabilities” of the IRA until the organization’s objectives, as defined in the constitution, had been attained.19 There would be no running down of the IRA, in other words, by either the front or the back door.
Most significantly of all, the Army Council was deprived of the power to make decisions by a simple majority. From then on five Council members at least would have to approve critical matters such as cease-fires.20 That came as close to a vote of no confidence in Gerry Adams and his allies as it was possible to get.
AS THE CONVENTION neared its conclusion, it also reached its climax, the point when delegates elected the new Executive. The question of who secured a majority of the Executive was a vital one, for that section could, in effect, select and choose the members of the Army Council and thus gain control of the direction and strategy of the IRA itself. The dissidents had hatched a plan to take over the Army Council in such a way, but it was entirely dependent on winning a majority of the members of the new Executive. The Convention would have to support the dissident candidates. Once they had done that, they could choose an Army Council of their liking, and Adams would be defeated.
The dissidents hoped to place Adams in a terrible dilemma. Their plan was to have their majority vote him onto the Council but then to hobble him by stacking the rest of the Council with their supporters. That way the beleaguered and isolated Sinn Fein president would then have to decide whether to stay, and be constantly outvoted, or go. The decision would be entirely his, while the dissidents could not be blamed for forcing him to go, thus losing the Provisionals their most charismatic spokesperson and leader. Either way the peace process would be dead, and so would the Adams strategy.
The last session of the Convention, in the early hours of the morning, saw the Adams loyalists on the outgoing Army Council make their pitch to delegates for election to the new Executive. Pat Doherty told delegates that the nine-month delay in holding the Convention was not his fault; it was entirely due to logistical problems. Joe Cahill assured them that he would not settle for anything less than a thirty-two-county socialist republic. He hadn’t mellowed with old age, he added. If anything, his views had hardened with the years. Kevin McKenna objected to suggestions that he or anyone else in the leadership would settle for anything less than the traditional goal of unity, while Gerry Kelly admitted that TUAS had not been properly defined or explained to the membership. Apologetic, meek, defiant, they all knew what was on the line.
But the turning point, according to one authoritative account, came when the outgoing chairman of the Army Council, Martin McGuinness, rose to speak.21 The old Army Council, he declared, had no intention of entering talks that would lead nowhere and had already decided there would not be a second cease-fire, and it would advise the incoming Council accordingly. It was as close as any leader came that night to declaring the death of the peace process, and it swung the meeting. Any question that either he and Adams would not be returned to the leadership vanished. But the dissidents were still on course for victory.
The elections were held, and Micky McKevitt topped the poll. The dissidents did well and secured a seven-to-five majority on the Executive. Joe Cahill was badly defeated and did not even make it as a substitute, one of those chosen to replace the Executive members elected onto the Army Council. Gerry Kelly was chosen as a substitute, but Adams got himself and four allies safely elected onto the Executive, including Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty, and Martin Ferris, who replaced Joe Cahill.
The dissidents, however, quickly ran into trouble, and so did the plot to destroy Adams. One of their successful candidates, the Dubliner Frank McGuinness, had missed his pickup and failed to make it to the Convention, although he was elected to the Executive in his absence. McGuinness was supposed to have been taken to the Convention by the IRA’s intelligence director, Martin “Duckser” Lynch, a West Belfast activist and Adams loyalist, but an extra leg was added to the Dubliner’s journey for some unexplained reason, and Lynch never linked up with him.
Frank McGuinness’s absence did not stop him from getting elected to the Executive, but it did prevent him from using his vote in the election of Army Council members. Even so it still looked as if the dissidents had the Army Council election in the bag; they had a six-to-five majority and could freely choose the new Army Council from among their own. But then Brian Keenan, who for long had played the part of a dissident, dropped a thunderbolt and announced that he was switching sides and would back Adams. With Frank McGuinness absent, a six-to-five majority for the dissidents suddenly became a one-vote advantage for Adams.
Sensing that events had turned dramatically in his favor, Adams moved for an immediate meeting of the Executive to elect the Army Council. The IRA constitution stipulated that such a gathering should take place within forty-eight hours of the Convention, but Adams was taking no chances. If Frank McGuinness was allowed to vote, then the Executive would almost certainly be deadlocked, with potentially disastrous results for the peace strategy. It was imperative from Adams’s viewpoint that the Executive meet immediately. The dissidents tried to delay the Executive meeting, but to no avail. Adams won the vote, and the Executive convened straightaway. The meeting took place as dawn was breaking and voted in an Army Council that, if anything, gave Adams and his allies an even stronger gri
p on the IRA than they had held before the Convention.
In addition to Adams, the Council now comprised Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty, Martin Ferris, Brian Keenan, who replaced the South Armagh– based Northern Command adjutant, Kevin McKenna, and Slab Murphy. The Army Council’s “soldiers” were now in an even smaller minority. The scope for continued internal conflict was still considerable, however. The Executive that was formed after the Army Council election was substantially unchanged from that which had called the Convention. Ten of its twelve members were opposed to the Adams strategy; one was against and one unsure. The three principal dissidents, Gillen, Frank McGuinness, and McKevitt, were still in place but were now painfully aware that their putsch had not succeeded. Adams had been battered and damaged by the Convention, but he had survived to wreak revenge on his dissident enemies. And as far as the peace process was concerned, that was all that mattered.
SEVENTEEN
The Point of No Return
By one of those flukes of history, or perhaps owing to good intelligence about his enemies’ intentions, Adams had emerged from the October 1996 Convention not only intact, albeit badly mauled, but with a stronger majority on the Army Council than he had enjoyed before the meeting. Because of the way the IRA worked, the dissidents had only one chance to destroy him, and although they had come very close, their effort had failed. It was unlikely they would get a second chance. Encouraged and heartened by its achievement, the Adams camp prepared for the next and most crucial part of the journey from war to peace.
The old Army Council had agreed to end the 1994 cease-fire only when it became unavoidably clear that otherwise it would be defeated at the Convention demanded by the Executive. Going back to war in February 1996 was a matter of political survival for Adams and his supporters. But with their grip on the Army Council firmer after the October 1996 Convention, they could now resume the peace process with vigor and steer the IRA toward another cessation, this time better informed about their opponents and better prepared to meet their threat. Martin McGuinness had promised the delegates at the Convention that there would be no second cease-fire, but there would be.
Even before the Convention met, Adams had been in secret negotiations with the British prime minister, John Major, using the SDLP leader, John Hume, as a mediator, and afterward that diplomacy intensified. He had told the Convention that he did not believe the British were serious about hosting talks in which Sinn Fein members involved, but within weeks of the Convention he was engaged in what clearly were businesslike discussions with Downing Street whose goal was to remove the obstacles in the way of a new cease-fire and to open the road to talks in which Sinn Fein would play a central and definitive role.
Four issues dominated the Adams-Major negotiations. To begin with, there was uncertainty about whether Sinn Fein would be allowed to enter interparty talks at all or if they did about the conditions that would be attached to this. Even if Sinn Fein was allowed into the talks, it was not clear whether or not there would be a deadline for agreements. Adams again feared being drawn into an open-ended process whose only result would be to once again enervate the IRA and unsettle the rank and file. The unresolved issue of IRA decommissioning still hung over the peace process, as did the price Sinn Fein would exact from the British: “confidence-building measures,” as they were euphemistically called, in return for a new cease-fire. All these issues were on the table for discussion, and problematic though they were, the fact that Adams and his allies wanted to talk about them was a remarkable testament to their persistence.
Notwithstanding the outright hostility and doubt the IRA rank and file expressed about the peace process at the October 1996 Convention, Adams, McGuinness, and others in their camp made it abundantly clear in one public statement after another in the fall of 1996 and the early months of 1997 that a second cease-fire was not only attainable but desirable. At the end of November 1996, Martin McGuinness indicated that the IRA might be prepared to accept George Mitchell’s proposal that talks and decommissioning should happen in parallel. The Derry republican had once again been appointed Army Council chairman but by this stage was no longer Northern commander, that job having gone to a Belfast veteran instead. He was later quoted as saying, at the beginning of February 1997, that there was nowhere else for republicans to go but to the negotiating table. Writing in the Irish Times at the end of that month, Gerry Adams promised that any new cease-fire would be “genuinely unequivocal” as long as the preconditions governing Sinn Fein’s involvement were removed.1 These were men who were confident not only about where they wanted to go but in their ability to get there. The Army Convention was already a distant memory.
Other signals pointed unmistakably in the same direction. On February 12, 1997, the IRA in South Armagh shot dead a British soldier manning a roadblock at Bessbrook. The dead soldier, Stephen Restorick, had been killed by a sniper using a formidable Barrett Light 50, the only weapon in the IRA’s arsenal whose bullets could penetrate British flak jackets. This deadly weapon had killed some dozen soldiers and policemen in single-shot sniper attacks, most of them at the hands of the South Armagh men. There was an outcry at Restorick’s death, prompted in part by his grieving mother’s impressively moving interviews on television. A month later Gerry Adams wrote a letter of condolence to Mrs. Restorick, an unprecedented act for a member of the IRA Army Council ostensibly at war with the British. During the same month he told the Irish News in an interview that he could deliver an IRA cease-fire if the package was right. His Saint Patrick’s Day message, now accorded the same status in the media as those from mainstream Irish and Irish-American politicians, included a statement saying that the achievement of a permanent peaceful settlement through peaceful dialogue must be everyone’s goal.
AT THIS POINT events completely out of the control of Adams or anyone else in Ireland intruded—to the advantage of the peace process. A British general election was announced in mid-March, and the polls all showed a likely victory for Tony Blair’s New Labour Party and defeat for the Conservatives, whose approach to the peace process had been hamstrung by doubts over Adams’s bona fides and the party’s own historical links to unionism. The removal of John Major would set the scene for a radical reassessment of London’s policy toward Sinn Fein.
The British election also promised to strengthen the Adams camp in another very important way. The forum election of 1996, designed to jumpstart political talks, had resulted in a boost in support for Sinn Fein, and it seemed as if the 1997 election would do the same, at least as long as the IRA did not score any own goals. In the month before polling, the Army Council had secretly authorized what became known as “a tactical period of quiet” to help Sinn Fein’s chances while simultaneously the party’s leaders talked up the chances of peace. The party was unashamedly courting a pro-peace vote from the Catholic electorate. It was a clever tactic, not least because it created an expectation of a second cease-fire that Sinn Fein—and the IRA— could not ignore.
Blair’s New Labour signaled its readiness to cater to Sinn Fein’s needs in a way that had never happened when John Major led the British government. The party’s new Northern Ireland spokesperson was Mo Mowlam, a down-to-earth politician whose wheeler-dealer style and sometimes coarse approach unsettled unionists but appealed enormously to nationalists. At the end of March 1997 she announced that if the IRA called a cease-fire, Sinn Fein could be in talks by the start of June, just two months afterward. Adams and other Sinn Fein leaders welcomed her remarks, not least because she omitted any reference to the need for IRA decommissioning.
Tony Blair duly romped home in Britain in May 1997, with a huge parliamentary majority—enough to give him maximum flexibility on the peace process—while in Northern Ireland Sinn Fein made a significant electoral breakthrough, with Adams recapturing West Belfast from the SDLP and Martin McGuinness winning in Mid-Ulster, where the campaign was about which nationalist party, Sinn Fein or the SDLP, was best placed to defeat the DUP’s Reverend Willia
m McCrea, a Free Presbyterian minister and outspoken loyalist who was hated by local nationalists. Sinn Fein’s support across Northern Ireland rose to its highest-ever level, to 127,000 votes, or 16.1 percent of the total vote in Northern Ireland. A month later its vote rose even further, to 16.9 percent, in local council elections. The party was within striking distance of the SDLP, and it was clear beyond doubt that Sinn Fein’s future political growth was inextricably attached to progress in the peace process and to the declaration of another cease-fire. To the barely disguised delight of nationalists and the anger of unionists, Mo Mowlam was appointed the new Northern Ireland secretary.
Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place a month after the British general election, when in the Irish Republic the parties that had made up the Rainbow Coalition were ousted and a Fianna Fail–Progressive Democrats combination replaced them. The general election in the Republic meant that the Fianna Fail leader, Bertie Ahern, was the new taoiseach and in charge of Northern Ireland policy. Martin Mansergh was back in Government Buildings and soon once again serving cups of tea and plates of biscuits to Father Reid. Gerry Adams welcomed the development; his old pan-nationalist partners were back in place and stronger than ever. In mid-May, Blair traveled to Belfast to confirm that interparty talks would begin in June. If Sinn Fein wanted to join the peace train, he warned, then it had better make up its mind quickly, or the train would leave the station without it. To help it make up its mind, he offered exploratory talks between Sinn Fein and his officials, an offer the Provisional leadership accepted with alacrity. Soon Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly were meeting the NIO’s John Chilcot and Quentin Thomas. The stage had been set for the beginning of the final negotiations for the second IRA cease-fire.