A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The Mitchell principles became the last battleground between the Executive and the Army Council. The Executive took a hard line on the principles and argued that they represented a direct infringement of the IRA’s constitution. A commissioned study concluded that one consequence of acceptance would be a de facto recognition of the unionist veto, and that struck at the very heart of the reason for the IRA’s existence. Accepting the Mitchell principles, the study argued, would be tantamount to abandoning the struggle to rid Ireland of the British presence.

  Another joint meeting between the Army Council and the Executive was arranged, this time on the latter’s initiative. It took place on August 27, 1997, and once again was a heated, fractious affair. The Executive insisted that the Mitchell principles were aimed at getting republicans to legitimize the Northern Ireland state, while the challenge they made to the IRA’s right to use force and hold arms, it said, would bring about the demise of the Army. If the IRA accepted the Mitchell principles, there could be no going back, and if the Army Council subsequently did claim that it had been duped into signing up, no one would believe it. Its reputation would be in tatters.

  There could be no doubt about the seriousness of the charges made by the Executive. The Army Council was being accused of dishonoring and betraying the IRA’s core principles, and this battle could produce only victory and defeat; a compromise was out of the question. There might be more serious consequences. The recent history of republicanism had demonstrated how easy it was for such disputes to deteriorate into a shooting war. The conflict between the Executive and the Army Council was heading inexorably toward a split, and when splits happened and rival groups rushed to control and take over arms dumps, IRA history showed, anything could happen.

  With the Belfast Brigade commander, the quartermaster general, and the director of engineering combined against them, Adams and his allies were facing the most serious challenge of their IRA careers. At the joint Army Council–Executive meeting in July, Martin McGuinness had physically tensed when he was told that signing the Mitchell principles would breach the constitution. He knew instinctively that matters were getting deadly serious.

  When the dispute had first surfaced, in July, the Army Council argued that the Mitchell principles infringed no part of the constitution, but by the end of August it had reluctantly come around to accept that they did. However, at the August meeting Adams claimed that there were precedents that allowed the Council to give special dispensation to permit Sinn Fein members of the IRA to sign the principles and remain IRA members. If this dispensation was exercised again, then the Army Council could safely send delegates to the coming Stormont talks, he argued. There were two precedents for this, he said. One, in the 1980s, had allowed IRA members to recognize the Northern and the Southern courts so that they could present a defense against criminal charges; the second had allowed Sinn Fein councillors who doubled as IRA members to sign the British government’s mandatory antiviolence oath. One Adams ally, Danny Morrison, signaled his contempt for the British move at the time, saying he would sign the oath with his tongue sticking so firmly in his cheek that it would come through the roof of his mouth.

  Adams’s argument went to the heart of his “tactical” approach to politics, in which promises would be made and pledges solemnly signed but not necessarily meant—or at least supporters told they were not meant. The Mitchell principles, Adams had said, were the same; they were just a piece of paper. In riposte McKevitt and his supporters claimed that the anti-violence oath could not be compared to the Mitchell principles. While the Mitchell principles intimately touched upon matters in the IRA’s constitution, the antiviolence oath had not. And so the argument went on, back and forth.

  The two sides were deadlocked. A halfhearted attempt was made by the Executive to suggest a compromise. Sinn Fein should attend the Stormont talks on September 15, but only as Sinn Fein. Before signing the Mitchell principles, Army Council and other IRA delegates would formally resign from the IRA, which would then issue a public statement explaining why it repudiated Mitchell. The Army Council would acknowledge the efforts of Sinn Fein but emphasize that until Britain gave a formal promise to quit Ireland, the IRA would reserve the right to use armed struggle. This was a nonstarter and everyone knew it. Neither the British nor the Irish government was likely to accept such a dubious arrangement, and the unionists certainly would not— after all, the whole purpose of the exercise was to corral the IRA’s hard men inside a peace settlement, and the move would stymie that. Adams and the Army Council recognized the proposal for what it was—a way of unseating them or destroying their strategy—and they turned it down flat.

  With debate exhausted, the Executive formally informed the Army Council that it had by a vote of ten in favor, one against—Gerry Kelly, the only firm Army Council supporter on the Executive—made a ruling that the Mitchell principles offended the IRA constitution and that if any Volunteer signed them, this would be a breach of the IRA’s most sacred rules. That having been done, there was really only one thing left. An extraordinary General Army Convention had to be called to decide who was in the right, the Executive or the Council. The Army Council readily agreed.

  THE TASK of organizing the Convention was again given to Pat Doherty, but this time the County Donegal man had no problems discovering a secure venue, and he did so with commendable speed. The meeting was scheduled for mid-October in the Gweedore area, one of the most picturesque parts of County Donegal, only six or seven weeks after the decision to hold the Convention had been made. The fact that Doherty got the job gave the Adams camp an enormous advantage. Those who controlled the Convention controlled its timing, location, and all the logistical aspects of setting up the meeting. That advantage had lain with the dissident camp in 1996, but now it was with their enemies.

  The Adams camp had effectively had the best part of a year to prepare for the meeting. When the Convention got under way, it soon became clear that they had used the period well. Under IRA rules delegates to an extraordinary Convention must, if physically possible, be the same delegates who attended the last Convention. This was based on the reasoning that if it was necessary to call an extraordinary Convention, it was most likely because of a problem that had arisen from its original meeting. It made sense that the same delegates should attend, delegates who would already be familiar with the issues. But many of the delegates who turned up in Gweedore had not been at the 1996 Convention and knew little about its wranglings and the various constitutional changes that it had approved.

  Some delegates had been replaced, the result some said of promotions and demotions made since 1996. In one or two cases troublesome delegations had been replaced altogether. The Tyrone delegation, for instance, which in 1996 had declared a total lack of confidence in the Adams leadership, was completely new; the East Tyrone commander had been replaced as well. Another factor worked in favor of the peace camp. The argument between the Army Council and the Executive had been kept very secret. Most of the delegates were unaware even that there had been a dispute between them, never mind what the arguments were on either side.

  The Executive had also made a fatal mistake when, at the August joint meeting with the Army Council, it suggested that Sinn Fein members of the IRA resign and then sign the Mitchell principles. This enabled the Army Council to accuse Executive members of attempting to stage a coup, a powerful argument in an organization where loyalty to the leadership was paramount. The Executive’s suggestion that Sinn Fein representatives resign from the IRA was seized on by the Army Council as evidence that the dissidents, not satisfied with their victories at the 1996 Convention, were now trying to overthrow the IRA leadership. Their real aim, said the Army Council, was not to save the IRA’s soul, as was claimed, but to take power themselves. Adams protested bitterly to the delegates: “They want me— me!—to resign from the Army.”10 The Executive was put on the defensive.

  The advantage that derived from the decision to give the task of organizing the
arrangements for the 1997 Convention to the Adams camp was soon evident. A large number of “guests,” perhaps as many as a dozen, were given special permission to attend. This was the first Convention ever that allowed nondelegates to attend, and even though they could not vote, the fact that the guests were given speaking rights—and invariably they spoke in favor of the Adams strategy—added strongly to the impression that the Convention was heavily on the leadership’s side. Their number included relatives of dead IRA heroes and venerable veterans like Joe Cahill and Joe B. O’Hagan, both former IRA leaders who had spent years in jail for the cause. Emotional speeches were given, promises made that there would be no sellouts, commitments to resign if there were. Others spoke of their faith and trust in the Adams-McGuinness leadership.

  According to a detailed account of the 1997 Convention given to the author by two delegates, the Army Council had choreographed the transportation arrangements cleverly. The dissidents, some twenty or thirty in all, were all picked up together as one group, long after the rest of the delegates had arrived at the Convention. As the delegates already present awaited their arrival, they were quietly briefed to prepare themselves for a possible coup attempt by the Executive supporters. When the dissidents walked in, it was to a largely cold and unfriendly reception. With the dissidents isolated and the Convention full of leadership loyalists, McKevitt and his supporters faced certain defeat.

  Once more the Convention lasted the entire night. According to one delegate it was a meeting of two halves. The first half saw Adams and his allies on the defensive as McKevitt and other dissidents spoke. The outgoing chairman of the Executive, Seamus McGrane, gave a lengthy speech detailing the four reasons behind the Executive’s decision to call the Convention. These were the unconstitutionality of the Mitchell principles, the Army Council’s failure to ratify the July cease-fire, the poor morale of IRA Volunteers caused by conflicting assurances from Army Council members about going back to war, and the Army Council’s treatment of the Executive (see appendix 4).

  McGrane’s last complaint brought the Convention to angry verbal exchanges. McGrane accused the Army Council of deliberately withholding key documents from the Executive, not just peace process papers such as the Hume-Adams document but the minutes of the 1996 Convention, a document that would, he claimed, reveal the hostile mood of the delegates toward the idea of calling another cease-fire.

  Martin McGuinness, he went on, had given the Executive an assurance that there would be no second sos in May, but “[w]e had only to wait a few weeks to see this commitment flounder.” McGuinness rose to tell the delegates that McGrane had been wrong, that all the documents he referred to had been given to the Executive. In fact the Army Council, he claimed, had done all in its power to facilitate the dissidents. At this point McKevitt intervened to call McGuinness a liar. Tempers were up, lines were drawn.

  The second half of the Convention went in Adams’s favor. The Convention guests started to make their pro-leadership speeches, and other delegates joined in. Adams, who had dressed down for the Convention, forsaking his politician’s suit for jeans and a T-shirt, began to relax visibly, as did other leaders. A key development had swung the Convention out of the dissidents’ reach, and the Army Council knew it. The Belfast commander, Brian Gillen, had sat through the first half of the meeting in total silence. In 1996 he had been one of the most vocal critics of the leadership, accusing it of running down the IRA, but not this time. As the Convention reached its climax, the reason for his silence became clear. He had switched sides, abandoning the Executive dissidents and declaring his support for Adams and the cease-fire, in return for a secret promise of a seat on the new Army Council. At that point, with the influential Belfast commander on Adams’s side, the battle was effectively over.

  The Executive had formulated four motions based on the points contained in McGrane’s speech, and the debate on the Convention floor developed into a dispute over whether the motions should be treated separately, as the Executive wanted, or amalgamated, as the Army Council wished. The vote was taken, and the Army Council won. The four resolutions were then voted down in one go. A separate motion declaring that the Army Council had the authority to grant special dispensation to the delegates at the Stormont talks also went through, clearing the way for Adams, McGuinness, and other IRA members to attend the political talks as Sinn Fein delegates. In each case the Army Council secured a comfortable 60–70 percent majority. The Executive had been thoroughly outmaneuvered.

  It was almost over but not quite. Elections were held to the Executive and then to the Army Council. Brian Gillen’s volte-face had not gone down well with the delegates. He failed to get elected to the Executive, and when the decision came to fill the Army Council, Adams had to nominate him from outside the ranks of the Executive. The elections also saw the fall of Kevin McKenna. The chief of staff had been lucky to get reelected to the Executive in 1996. He had been given the distasteful task of assuring the IRA rank and file in 1994 that the cease-fire rumors were false, and then, when the sos was called, it was McKenna, among others, who constantly had to assure the grassroots that it would soon end. He was reelected at the 1996 Convention by only a few votes. By 1997 McKenna’s credibility with the rank and file had evaporated, and he made it back on the Executive only as a substitute. With Adams committed to promoting the apostate dissident, Brian Gillen, there was no room for McKenna on the Army Council. The Tyrone veteran had been a faithful and loyal servant of the Adams leadership, but once his usefulness was exhausted he was discarded. When rumors circulated afterward that he had been ousted because he disagreed with the cease-fire, Sinn Fein spin doctors spread the false story in the media that McKenna had quit because he had developed cancer. The story was concocted not so much for McKenna’s benefit but to scotch suggestions that such a senior figure might be opposed to the Adams strategy.

  Slab Murphy was elected the new chief of staff and took pity on his old friend. He made McKenna the new quartermaster general, a position from which he later resigned. At the time of writing, the Provisional IRA’s longest-serving chief of staff was still living quietly in County Monaghan in virtual retirement, unable to exercise influence at the IRA’s highest levels and shunned by former dissident colleagues. The post-1997 Army Council was even more to Adams’s liking. Apart from himself and Martin McGuinness, it included Slab Murphy, Brian Keenan, Martin Ferris, Pat Doherty, and the new member, Brian Gillen. Adams now enjoyed a comfortable six-to-one majority, seven-to-nil now that Slab was all by himself and unlikely to kick over the traces.

  As soon as the Army Council had been chosen, the substitutes joined the Executive. Once more there was an anti–Army Council majority on the body, although this had shrunk from a ten-to-two to a seven-to-five margin. The remaining dissident leaders—Seamus McGrane, Micky McKevitt, and Frank McGuinness—had been reelected, but it was obvious that they too would eventually follow McKenna into political oblivion. Two weeks after the Convention, on October 23, the new Executive met. McKevitt was the first to resign, citing the proposed acceptance of the Mitchell principles as his main reason. Five others followed, four of them, like McKevitt, members of GHQ staff and heads of department. The quartermaster’s department was next. The Belfast QM, all the Southern Command QMs, and a good number of those on the Border joined the rebellion. Much of the vital engineering department followed Frank McGuinness. A split was now a reality, and within days moves were under way to form a new IRA. Its founders would call it Oglaigh na hEireann, but the media would christen it, predictably, the Real IRA.

  An IRA split had been a virtual certainty from the moment that Adams embarked on the peace process, such was the scale of the departure from traditional IRA ideology that the enterprise implied. The only questions at issue were the timing, scale, and damage that the split would cause. The fact that it took so long to occur, that the fracture came after two cease-fires had been called, irreversible changes made to republican beliefs, and the scene set for a potentially defi
nitive settlement, not just of the Troubles in Northern Ireland but of the ancient and historic Anglo-Irish conflict, was testimony to the skill and determination of Gerry Adams and his allies. By the time the dissidents decided to move against Adams, it was already too late. And as the IRA delegates made their way home from the 1997 Convention, Adams had, after fifteen long years, finally taken the Provisionals beyond the point of no return.

  EIGHTEEN

  The End Begins

  The four men looked grayer and heavier than in their pictures, which was not surprising since the only photographs of the IRA’s notorious Balcombe Street gang had been taken twenty-three years before in a London police station shortly after their arrest, and by definition such photographs are never flattering and rarely faithful. The four, Harry Duggan, Hugh Doherty, Eddie Butler, and Joe O’Connell, then all in their twenties, had orchestrated a wave of terror in London and the southeast of England in the mid-1970s, shooting and bombing their way around the country in a campaign that claimed sixteen lives, many of them the lives of uninvolved civilians. They were eventually arrested in 1975, after a house siege in a central London street that gave the gang its name, and after their trial, which in the circumstances was a mere formality, had spent the bulk of the subsequent quarter of a century in some of England’s toughest and most impregnable prisons.