A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  The crowd in the Library of the Royal Dublin Society’s vast complex in that most Anglo-Irish section of the city, Ballsbridge, on Sunday, May 10, 1998, had little difficulty, however, in recognizing the men. Encouraged by the Sinn Fein leadership on the platform in front of them, they rose as one to give a rousing ovation as the four men struggled to make their way to the podium through the shoulder-slapping throng. The cheering, shouting, and clapping lasted for a full ten minutes. A wave of emotion swept the delegates to this special Sinn Fein Ard Fheis as the party’s leaders, led by Gerry Adams, queued to embrace the IRA men. The rest of the world may have regarded the Balcombe Street gang as ruthless killers who had claimed their victims indiscriminately, but to the Provisionals these men were their own, “our Nelson Mandelas,” said Adams later with no sense of impropriety or exaggeration.1

  When finally the noise subsided, Adams and his colleagues knew that their problems were over. The special Ard Fheis would vote as they wanted it to and endorse the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, for to do so meant that the prison ordeal suffered by these men would be ended at last. To reject it would be to send them back to jail, possibly for many more years. The reason for this was a clause in the Good Friday Agreement that allowed for the release of all paramilitary prisoners within two years, but only if the deal was endorsed. Less than two hours later the debate was all over. By an overwhelming 94.6 percent majority—331 out of the 350 delegates—the Ard Fheis ratified the agreement and changed Sinn Fein’s constitution to allow the party’s members to take seats in a Northern Ireland parliament. Abstentionism in the Republic had been abandoned in 1986, and now, twelve years later, it was gone in the North. The unthinkable had become reality.

  But appearances were deceptive. Adams had secured a majority, the scale of which would have done the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin proud, but the Good Friday Agreement, which Sinn Fein had helped negotiate and was now recommending to its membership, had caught the Provisionals’ grassroots by surprise, and hostility to it was deep and widespread. The cause of this anguish was the agreement’s centerpiece, a new Assembly at Stormont outside Belfast, which would have the task of governing Northern Ireland’s one and a half million divided people. The realization that their leaders had put their names to such a proposal confused and dismayed many in the IRA and Sinn Fein. These were, after all, organizations in which antagonism toward any parliament at Stormont was so deeply embedded that it was almost in the genes. The parliament in Belfast was the preeminent symbol of unionist bigotry in their eyes, and even though the Good Friday Agreement had stipulated that the new government would have to be a power-sharing one, in which Sinn Fein would have a place as of right, the idea still stuck in many republican throats. A similar power-sharing administration had been set up in 1974, yet the Provisionals had opposed that, arguing that it only reformed and put an acceptable face on partition, and here were some of the same leaders who had resisted that arrangement then, asking them now to back something very similar.

  Not for the first time in recent republican history, it was Sinn Fein, not the IRA, that threatened to cause the leadership the greatest problems. An IRA Convention, held a few days beforehand, had comfortably backed Adams’s strategy, but in the context of the convincing defeat of the dissidents at the previous fall’s convention, that was not surprising. The leadership’s control over the IRA was by now complete and dissent virtually nonexistent. Sinn Fein, though, was a different matter. It was supposed to be a democratic body in which debate, argument, and dissent were encouraged, and for some IRA members unwilling to challenge military authority, the party’s forums provided an opportunity to challenge orthodoxies more safely while wearing a different hat.

  Ever conscious of the need to step onto firm rocks and not lily pads, Adams had arranged a first, special Ard Fheis some ten days or so after the agreement on April 10, Good Friday, had been finalized. It provided a valuable opportunity to test the waters. No decision was reached at the Ard Fheis about the agreement, no attempt made by the Sinn Fein leadership to force through an endorsement of the pact. The conference became a listening exercise. It was a wise move. At the suggestion of the author, the Sunday Tribune conducted a survey of opinion among the conference audience, and the result made dispiriting reading for the party’s chiefs for it showed that they were well short of the support needed to endorse the settlement. Some 140 of the 1,000 people attending the conference, delegates and sympathizers, agreed to answer questions, and a total of 56 percent of them were evenly divided between outright rejection of the Good Friday Agreement and an unwillingness to express an opinion. These don’t knows in all probability disguised many who were really opposed but who could not bring themselves to admit as much to the media and risk being identified. Only 44 percent backed the deal, a figure that was well short of the two-thirds majority Adams needed to enter the new Stormont Assembly. Some 58 percent objected to taking seats at Stormont or again would not reveal their views, while only 42 percent said they were prepared to enter the North’s new parliament. A similar proportion, 42 percent, said the agreement was not worth the IRA’s thirty years of armed struggle, and 20 percent refused to tell the newspaper’s pollsters what they thought about that issue.2 This cross-section of Sinn Fein opinion was, at best, unenthusiastic about the deal their leaders had brought home. Defeat, or at least a damaging split, was staring Adams and his colleagues in the face.

  So it was that when the special Ard Fheis reconvened three weeks later, on May 10, the British and Irish governments had arranged for the wholesale temporary release of IRA prisoners especially for the occasion. Twenty-seven prisoners were set free for the day, given special parole to attend the conference in a bid to buttress the Adams leadership. The Balcombe Street gang had been transferred from England to Portlaoise prison southwest of Dublin some months before, in a move designed to strengthen the Sinn Fein leadership, and were set free for that day by order of Bertie Ahern’s office. Tony Blair played his part as well. The IRA’s officer commanding in the Maze prison, Padraig Wilson, was let out, as was Martina Anderson, convicted of conspiring to bomb England and since sent to join women IRA prisoners in Maghaberry jail, on the outskirts of Belfast. Both spoke up strongly for the Adams strategy. So did others held in British jails, including activists who had been recently convicted of IRA attacks in England and sentenced to brutally long terms, some for as much as thirty-five or forty years. The presence of so many IRA felons at the Ard Fheis served to remind the delegates that if they failed to support the deal in sufficient numbers, as the Sunday Tribune poll indicated was a real possibility, they would effectively be sending their comrades back to jail. If they voted for it, people who had already given so much for the IRA’s cause would once again taste freedom. It was an exquisitely crafted piece of political management, and it worked wonderfully well.

  THE SCENE was one most observers of the Troubles in Northern Ireland thought they would never see. It was the late afternoon of April 10, 1998, a month before the historic Ard-Fheis gathering in Dublin, and the party delegations involved in the months of talks had gathered in the main chamber of the stuffy, overheated office block in Belfast known as Stormont Buildings, where the negotiations had been based, to hear the talks chairman, the former U.S. Senate leader George Mitchell, offer his congratulations. The core of what would soon be christened the Good Friday Agreement had been fashioned in the early hours of the morning, with Bill Clinton working the phone from Washington, urging everyone to go the final mile. But daytime had been punctuated by crises, mostly caused by unionists unhappy at the loose language on IRA decommissioning. A leading unionist had walked out, but an intervention from Tony Blair put the show back on the road. Now the party leaders and their delegations sat side by side, Adams and McGuinness a few feet away from the unionist leader, David Trimble, with John Hume and the SDLP delegation sandwiched between them. The idea that such people could share a room would once have been dismissed with a laugh; the thought that they could all agre
e on a settlement, not even deemed worthy of consideration.

  It took only six months, from the IRA Convention of October 1997 to April 10, 1998, to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. By the standards of Ireland’s long and troubled history, that was a remarkably short period in which to complete such a complex set of negotiations, and by the standards of the Northern Ireland Troubles, which by that time had claimed 3,588 lives,3 seen tens of thousands of people wounded and injured, and lasted longer than any other post–Second World War conflict except that in the Middle East, the achievement was nothing short of miraculous. The agreement was testimony both to the skill with which the Adams leadership had seen off opponents within the IRA and to the determination to finish the journey started so many years earlier by Adams and Father Reid. It quite simply could not have happened at all, never mind in such a short period of time, without the proactive cooperation of the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership.

  The fact that at the core of the Adams-Reid enterprise lay an acceptance by the republican leadership of the consent principle predetermined the nature and shape of the political settlement. When Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness signed the Mitchell principles and then led the Sinn Fein delegation into all-party negotiations in Belfast on September 9, 1997, their rhetoric reverberated with pledges “to smash the Union.”4 The reality was very different. The process begun by Gerry Adams and Father Reid meant recognizing the existence of the Northern Ireland state, and the Sinn Fein leadership knew that. The deep hostility of their supporters to this meant, however, that the leaders were obliged to carefully manage their base in regard to the talks in the same way that they had managed the process at other crucial points, not least in the matter of IRA cease-fires. They devised two positions—one for the consumption of the IRA and Sinn Fein base and one for the rest of the world. Once again, it would be the version prepared for those outside their ranks which would prevail.

  The British and Irish governments also knew what the parameters of any settlement would have to be, and so in January 1998, four months before the deadline for a deal, they published a “Heads of Agreement” document, outlining the necessary ingredients of the settlement and the principles that would underlie it.

  The principle of consent ran through the proposals like a golden thread. The principle was the cornerstone of the sixteen-year-long Reid-Adams diplomacy, and now it was given pride of place in the new proposed settlement. Other elements of that secret process were present. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act would be repealed in accordance with the secret British offer made to Reid and Adams which redefined British withdrawal. Instead of decamping from Northern Ireland physically, Britain would agree not to interfere or dictate the shape of any settlement. Scrapping the 1920 legislation, which had given the British parliament a veto over Northern Ireland’s affairs, gave practical effect to that pledge.

  The centerpiece of the proposal was a new Assembly at Stormont outside Belfast, the site of the old unionist-dominated parliament. Elected by proportional representation, the Assembly would choose a power-sharing government, its members drawn from the major parties, and there would be a new North-South ministerial council to foster cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The proposal seemed moderate and reasonable to the rest of the world, and indeed very similar ideas had formed the basis of the cease-fire agreement between the Adams camp and Bertie Ahern’s government in Dublin in the summer of 1997. It shocked grassroots republicans, forcing Sinn Fein leaders into hard-line rhetoric. The reason was simple. In the eyes of IRA and Sinn Fein supporters, the existence of a parliament in Belfast was anathema and symbolized British rule; the notion that their leaders in Sinn Fein could actually participate in such a body was simply too fantastic to be taken seriously. With their supporters thoroughly alarmed, Adams, McGuinness, and the Army Council all issued statements condemning the proposals, terming them a sop to unionists. Sinn Fein published its own counterproposal, which echoed traditional republican demands for an all-Ireland government. This was familiar and comforting to the grassroots but as unlikely a basis for a deal as could be imagined. The barrage of rhetorical opposition to the “Heads of Agreement” paper continued through February and March 1998, reaching such a pitch that many republicans, and a large section of the Irish media, were convinced that the interparty talks were doomed to fail.

  In reality Sinn Fein did negotiate on the basis of the “Heads of Agreement” document, as it was always going to, and when, on April 10, 1998— Good Friday—agreement was announced on the shape of the settlement, the only people genuinely surprised at the similarity between the Good Friday Agreement and the document so resolutely rejected by Sinn Fein in January were the republican grassroots. They had been presented with a fait accompli, in much the same way as they had been presented with two IRA cease-fires, and there was little they could do about it.

  Implementing the Good Friday settlement was a slow and tortuous business, punctuated by crises that never seemed to get so serious as to threaten the agreement itself but that happened with sufficient regularity that the demise of the deal was routinely predicted and often expected. That it never did collapse was, once again, due in no small measure to the determination of the Adams leadership in Sinn Fein that this should not happen. Bit by bit, the pieces of the agreement were assembled, each one haggled over and occasionally the cause of a brief outburst of violence or political instability that it seemed might topple the entire deal but never did. Eventually, by November 1999, eighteen months after the Good Friday Agreement had been reached, the power-sharing executive had been set up, the ministers selected, and the North–South ministerial council put in place.

  The choice of two of those ministers was a measurement of just how far the IRA and Sinn Fein had traveled since that fall day in 1982 when Father Alec Reid had visited Gerry Adams. The new minister of education, charged with ensuring the proper and efficient schooling of Northern Ireland’s young people, was Martin McGuinness, the chairman of the Army Council and, until a few months before, the IRA’s Northern commander. The minister of health was Bairbre de Brun, a Dublin-born activist who had joined Sinn Fein because of sympathy for the H Block protest. Once pledged to destroy the Northern Ireland state by violence, the two republicans now sat at the cabinet table, technically ministers of the British crown, an elbow’s length away from the leader of unionism and the new first minister, David Trimble. Within months plans for a new policing service, to be called the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), were unveiled. Sinn Fein had initially demanded the disbandment of the hated RUC but now called for the full implementation of the new policing scheme, effectively the old force in a new, reformed, and fairer guise. It was an intimation that the day might not be long off when republicans would join the new service and give more tangible expression to the meaning behind their participation in the institutions of Northern Ireland. The Provisionals’ long journey from war to peace, from revolution to constitutionalism, from odium to respectabilty, was almost complete. Only one issue was left to resolve.

  BY ONE ACCOUNT, 150 Colombian policemen and soldiers were waiting at the Bogotá airport for the three republicans to arrive and take connecting flights to Europe5 that day, August 12, 2001, and it was clear they were acting on excellent intelligence.6 When the men got off their flight from the southern lowland town of San Vicente del Caguan, their pale skins marked them out as foreigners and the police moved in quickly to arrest them. The eldest of the trio, James Monaghan, had just been named in the British parliament as a member of the IRA’s GHQ staff. Martin McAuley had been shot and wounded by the RUC in a 1982 undercover operation aimed at catching a bombing team in County Armagh. The third member of the group was Niall Connolly, a Dubliner with no direct links to the IRA but who was later named as Sinn Fein’s man in Havana, the party’s unofficial ambassador to the Fidel Castro regime.

  The arrests set off a flurry of speculation about the reasons for their presence in this part of Central America, and before
long they were being linked to the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebels of southern Colombia, an armed Marxist movement with ties, so its enemies alleged, to the lucrative cocaine trade. Soon stories appeared in the British and Irish media claiming the three had been on an expedition to trade IRA military know-how for Colombian cash. The IRA had never been shy of fostering relations with fellow revolutionary groups around the world. The long liaison with Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, culminating in the ill-fated Eksund expedition, was undoubtedly the most notorious of these foreign adventures, but over the years the IRA had forged links with various groups in Europe, notably the Basque separatists, Palestinians of one hue or another, the ANC in South Africa, and groups in South and Central America, particularly in El Salvador, whose own peace process the Provisionals had observed with interest. There was nothing unusual about having a relationship with FARC.

  The real reason for the expedition to FARC’s stronghold may never be known, but the effect on the peace process of the Colombian “caper,” as one American diplomat called the affair, was dramatic, compounded a month later by the rage against all forms of terrorism that swept the United States in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s onslaught against New York and Washington. Within weeks, pressure from the Bush White House and Adams’s powerful friends in corporate and congressional Irish-America were to succeed where the British and Irish had failed. Over three years had passed since Sinn Fein had agreed to “influence” the IRA in the direction of disarmament, but no weapons had been destroyed. The British and Irish governments had demanded decommissioning as a rite of passage into constitutional politics, and so had the unionists, increasingly angered that the release of republican prisoners and the renaming of their beloved RUC had brought no balancing concession from the IRA. Now, finally and ironically, it was the United States—once the key part of Adams’s pan-nationalist strategy—that forced the issue to a conclusion.