by Ed Moloney
GERRY ADAMS and his colleagues in the leaderships of the IRA and Sinn Fein did not achieve these electoral goals unaided. Elections in Britain and the south of Ireland in the summer of 1997, a year or so before the Good Friday Agreement, had brought new governments to both countries and with them significantly positive consequences for Sinn Fein’s peace process strategy, not least in the way the republican leadership was thereafter able to handle decommissioning.
In the Irish Republic, the Fianna Fail party, whose roots lay in the anti-treaty IRA of 1921, combined with the Progressive Democrats to replace the so-called Rainbow Coalition of Fine Gael, Labour, and Democratic Left. The Fine Gael party, whose leader John Bruton was taoiseach, was historically ill disposed to physical-force republicanism and both Bruton and the leaders of Democratic Left, who could trace the lineage of their party back to the Official IRA and the often violent and bloody split with the Provisionals in 1969–70, viewed Sinn Fein’s leaders with a baleful eye and their conversion to peaceful politics with barely disguised skepticism. Under the controlling hand of the Rainbow Coalition, the peace process, from Sinn Fein’s point of view, had experienced near-fatal turbulence. The new Fianna Fail-dominated government led by Bertie Ahern was, however, a horse of an entirely different color. Fianna Fail was ideally positioned to assist the Provisional leadership to lead their people out of warfare. Not only was Ahern’s party on the same ideological waveband as Sinn Fein but some seventy years earlier Fianna Fail had made a very similar journey away from violence. Ahern and his colleagues could recognize something of themselves—or at least their predecessors—in Adams and his supporters. But there was another compelling reason to indulge the Provisional leaders. The peace process was hugely popular in the Irish Republic and Gerry Adams was its charismatic architect. As Adams’s approval ratings in the Republic soared, electoral support for Sinn Fein began to swell dramatically and Fianna Fail would increasingly find itself in competition with Sinn Fein for the same constitutional and populist republican vote. While some foresaw the day when the two parties would merge, for the time being they were both rivals and putative coalition government partners. Ahern would need to tread carefully in his dealings with Sinn Fein, especially over decommissioning, for fear of alienating their common electoral base to the Provos’ advantage.
But the more significant political change was in London, where Tony Blair had led New Labour to a stunning landslide victory over John Major’s Conservatives. Whereas the Major government’s instinctive distaste for dealing with the Provisionals was reinforced by its slim parliamentary majority and consequent dependence on the support of unionist MPs, Blair had a huge 180-seat majority in the House of Commons and the freedom to act as he wished. It soon became clear that, despite maternal roots in the planter, Protestant community of County Donegal and his embrace of the “Irish unity only with consent” principle, Blair’s sympathies lay more with Irish nationalists, as did many of his generation in Britain who had grown up with the “Troubles” and watched events across the Irish Sea with a mixture of guilt and horror. A speech he gave in Belfast at a critical moment in the peace process offered a revealing insight into his mindset: “For years”, he told his audience, “nationalist [Northern] Ireland felt treated as second-class citizens. Let me cross out the word “felt”. They were treated as second-class citizens.”2 Later he would compare Muslim terrorists who had bombed London in July 2005 not to the IRA bombers who had twice devastated the City of London and slaughtered innocent revellers in bars in Birmingham and Guildford but to “the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland”.3 No other British prime minister had pinned colors to the mast in such a way, but then no other prime minister spent as much of his tenure in Downing Street dealing with Northern Ireland as Blair would.
While the approach of the Major government to the Provos was characterized by caution, suspicion and grudgingly slow recognition of the IRA’s and Sinn Fein’s bona fides, Blair, aided by his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, took a different tack. If the Major government could be accused of overusing the stick in its dealings with the Provisionals, then Blair and Powell faced the charge of proffering the carrot too often and too easily. In particular Blair appeared to have accepted almost uncritically the view that the project crafted by Gerry Adams was a delicately balanced, vulnerable creation that could be thrown out of kilter in an instant if the IRA’s hard men wished. Integral to this approach was the belief that the IRA could sustain a return to war, notwithstanding all the radically altered circumstances on the ground. While other observers concluded that between them the ravages of time on IRA capabilities, the impact of the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, the complete control over the IRA exercised by the Adams leadership, the weakness of his opponents and the likelihood that renewed violence would exact punishment from the Catholic electorate suggested otherwise, the Blair government seemed to differ. One American participant in the peace process offered the view that Blair’s priority in dealing with the IRA was to eradicate even the smallest risk that the IRA might again devastate London with huge Canary Wharf-size bombs, especially when Britain also faced a threat from Islamic jihadists. Indulging Adams and sacrificing politicians like Unionist leader David Trimble, he added, was in Downing Street’s view a small price to pay for Blair’s peace of mind.4 Despite accumulating evidence that the IRA neither had the ability to deliver Canary Wharf-type bombs nor wished to resume armed struggle, Blair and Powell persevered in the view that if Adams’s leadership and the peace process were to be preserved, then movement could not be much faster than that judged prudent by the Provisionals’ own chiefs, and was best achieved through inducements and concessions, even by quos often given in the absence of any quids. Side deals with the Provisional leadership, extra sweeteners to seal agreement, became a permanent feature of all-party negotiations under Blair’s watch. In one sense the British prime minister’s approach recognized that Adams was selling the IRA short and that he needed cover to complete the task of ending its war, but in another way the Blair–Powell doctrine was tailor-made for the Provisionals’ post-September 11 strategy of manipulating decommissioning for political and electoral gain.
WITHOUT A doubt the peace process journey would have been much less problematic and arduous for the IRA, the risk of internal schism minimized dramatically, if all the other parties to the process had accepted that the best way of obtaining decommissioning was not to make it an issue but to regard it as something that would evolve naturally with the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and the passage of time. At one level the Provos had reason to hope—if not expect—that something like this might have been possible. In the long history of Ireland’s often violent quest for independence and self-determination, republicans had never been obliged to give up their weapons before being allowed to enjoy the fruits of peace. To the contrary, the precedents, especially recent ones, showed that governments in both parts of Ireland had either not made or pressed the demand or had tolerated the IRA merely burying or dumping its arms after a campaign had ended. In 1921 the British government of Lloyd George agreed the terms of a cease-fire and began settlement talks with republicans without decommissioning. This is also what had happened at the conclusion of the Irish civil war in May 1923 when the IRA’s Chief of Staff, Frank Aiken, had called a cease-fire and ordered volunteers to “dump arms.” Three years later de Valera broke with Sinn Fein and set up Fianna Fail, bringing the bulk of IRA units, along with their “dumped” weapons, with him, and when he took his new party into the Dail a year later the absence of decommissioning was no bar to their entry. Likewise, when the IRA campaign of 1956–62 ended, the organization’s weapons were dumped and within a short time the hard-line unionist government led by Lord Brookeborough agreed to release IRA internees and prisoners. The fact that the IRA held on to its weapons was no impediment to this. In practice the IRA’s opponents were happy to accept the organization’s defeat and declined to insist upon its humiliation.
It was the acrid whiff of surrender accompanying the concept of decommissioning that gave the Provisionals another reason to hope that the peace process parties, particularly the governments, would soft-pedal the issue. The word itself conjured up the image of defeated soldiers laying their guns at the feet of a gloating, victorious enemy before being marched off to a prison camp, and that was the last impression that the Sinn Fein leadership wished to promote. The governments shared the view that a disarming process that implied surrender could be fatal to the Adams project and it is one reason why they and the IRA preferred the phrase “putting arms beyond use” to describe the process. The success of Adams’s years of manoeuvering and edging his movement into the peace process was vitally dependent on his followers accepting the notion that what was happening was a tactical ploy consistent with the IRA’s traditional goals and not a strategic shift that meant accepting all that they had been pledged to destroy. Ideally, being allowed to keep their weapons and letting them rot away in dumps—“trust in rust” as the phrase had it—was the best way of ensuring the fealty of the IRA rank and file. Accusations that Adams and his allies had engineered a sell-out would be considerably strengthened if the IRA gave up its weapons.
While the Sinn Fein leadership hoped that the governments would not press the disarmament issue too forcefully, decommissioning was fated to take center-stage by virtue of the less than straightforward way that the Adams leadership had brought their more hard-line IRA colleagues into the peace process. The hard-liners had been persuaded to call a cease-fire in 1994 and give the political process a chance on the foot of assurances that the move was merely tactical—the cease-fire would be time-limited, would be dependent on the British giving Sinn Fein a speedy entry into talks, and if it all failed then war would be resumed. Indeed, at this stage the demand for decommissioning was portrayed during IRA leadership discussions as a casus belli that would justify breaking the cease-fire and was once described in such terms by Adams’s closest ally, Martin McGuinness, during a high-level internal IRA meeting.5 So when the cease-fire was called, Adams and his allies on the Army Council were in no position to deny demands from others in the leadership that the IRA be kept in fighting trim through continuing recruitment, training, production of explosives, intelligence gathering and “fund-raising”, a euphemism for robberies.
The members of the South Armagh IRA unit that raided Newry post office in November 1994, less than three months into the cease-fire, were acting under this type of Army Council dispensation and had it not been for the fact that in the course of the robbery a postal worker, Frank Kerr, resisted the robbers and was shot dead, the event might not have had the reverberations it did. A huge political row followed the Kerr killing. While the Army Council denied that it had been an authorized operation, not many people believed them and the effect of the killing was to destroy any credibility attached to the Adams leadership’s already ambiguous assurances that the cease-fire was permanent. If it was not possible to put trust in the IRA’s words, the skeptics concluded, then actions would be needed instead and they turned to decommissioning as a more tangible way of establishing republican credentials. The Major government in London began by hardening its language on decommissioning and in March the following year outlined a new policy that became known as Washington Three, after the preconditions set for Sinn Fein’s entry into negotiations. Enunciated by then Secretary of State in Northern Ireland Sir Patrick Mayhew during the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in America, the conditions barred Sinn Fein from political talks until the IRA publicly agreed three things: its willingness to decommission, its agreement on the modalities of decommissioning, and finally to actually make a start to decommissioning its arms. Prior to the killing of Frank Kerr, decommissioning had largely been a side issue, as much an aspiration as anything else, but afterwards it was propelled to the top of the political agenda and stayed there.
Washington Three was the high mark in hard-line attitudes towards decommissioning, both on the part of the British government and, notwithstanding an image very much to the contrary in nationalist eyes, David Trimble, whose decade-long leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party and brief reign as Northern Ireland’s first minister ultimately came to an end because of his perceived weakness on the issue. In January 1996, ten months after the Washington Three conditions were announced and only a few weeks before the breakdown in the IRA cease-fire which Mayhew’s intervention had helped to precipitate, an international commission headed by former US Senate leader George Mitchell weakened Washington Three and thus set in motion a lengthy process of diluting the terms under which IRA disarmament would happen. Mitchell concluded that decommissioning prior to all-party talks was just not attainable and he recommended a number of adjustments in the way it should be approached thereafter. Rather than happening as a precondition to talks, it could take place during negotiations and should be governed by a number of guidelines: the process should suggest neither victory nor defeat; it should be overseen by an independent body; it should result in the complete destruction of armaments; paramilitary groups should be allowed to destroy their own weapons and the process should be verifiable. In other words, IRA decommissioning should not be cast as a precondition but instead be done voluntarily and on terms acceptable to the IRA leadership, albeit overseen and agreed by an outside body, the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), which was established in 1997. The Mitchell Report shifted the decommissioning debate decisively in the republicans’ direction and towards the view that it would be a mistake to hard-pedal the issue, a view that was reinforced by the breakdown of the cease-fire just days after it was published.
The Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998, agreed only eight months after the IRA had restored its cease-fire, balanced the Provisionals’ acceptance of the consent principle against a guaranteed place in government for Sinn Fein, the release of IRA prisoners, an equality agenda, cross-Border cooperation and reform of the RUC. But decommissioning was left hanging, largely unresolved. The parties to the agreement, Sinn Fein included, merely confirmed their intention “to work constructively and in good faith with the Independent Commission, and to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years” of planned referenda on both sides of the Border that would endorse the agreement—in other words by the end of May 2006.6 One extraordinary feature of the tortuous negotiations that had led to the agreement was the minimal degree to which IRA disarming had featured in them. According to Dean Godson’s seminal and hugely detailed account of David Trimble’s stewardship of the Ulster Unionists during the peace process, Trimble, who became first minister of the power-sharing Executive, the Northern Irish version of prime minister, claimed he had not made an issue of IRA arms because he, like many others, did not foresee that Sinn Fein would take its seats in the planned new power-sharing Executive.7 Whatever the truth of that, the loosely worded terms of the Good Friday Agreement gave the Provos huge latitude to dodge and weave around the issue.
Once Sinn Fein’s delegation agreed to recommend the deal to a wider party conference, it was clear that the republicans intended to take their place in government and decommissioning immediately resumed its prior centrality and importance. Trimble’s ally and fellow negotiator, Jeffrey Donaldson, had already signalled his uneasiness by walking out of the unionist delegation at the end of the negotiations in protest at the terms for decommissioning. Two of Donaldson’s cousins were RUC officers killed by the Provisional IRA and his stand reflected the feelings of many Northern Protestants. The prospect of Sinn Fein leaders becoming government ministers was a shock whose tremors were felt along the length of Ireland’s political spectrum, but the idea that this could happen while the same leaders ran a still well-armed private army was especially noxious to unionists.
In a bid to shore up Trimble and win unionist support in the upcoming referendum, Tony Blair gave Trimble a side letter within hours of the conclusion of the
Good Friday Agreement negotiations, confirming the British view that IRA decommissioning should start by June 1998, less than two months after the successful April negotiations. The letter had no legal status, and its terms could never be imposed, but the incident was revealing. Whereas Trimble and other unionists might be forgiven for not realizing that the peace process strategy crafted by Adams meant that Sinn Fein would participate in government, the British and Irish governments had no such excuse. Both governments had engaged in years of secret diplomacy with Adams and it would be extraordinary if they had not realized that being in government was the logical end of the path Adams had taken, in fact the raison d’être of his strategy. Decommissioning was thus always very likely to become an issue, at least for unionists, but the fact that neither government, especially the British, wanted to tie the IRA’s disarming to any of the concessions in the Good Friday Agreement—such as the release of prisoners—indicated their preference to soft-pedal the issue. In this context Blair’s side letter can be seen as a hastily contrived and even desperate effort to cover Trimble’s exposed flank, but it gave republican leaders cause to believe that in Tony Blair they had a British leader who would be reluctant to jeopardize the peace for the sake of destroying already silent IRA weapons.
Although it was not the only issue that figured in post-Good Friday Agreement negotiations to set up the power-sharing Executive and cross-Border bodies, IRA decommissioning dominated them in the same way they would dominate the politics of the peace process for the next six years. The first post-Good Friday Agreement talks on decommissioning began in March 1999 at the Saint Patrick Day’s celebrations in Washington, when David Trimble abandoned the demand that disarming should be a precondition to Sinn Fein entry to government, and at a meeting with Adams agreed the principle of “jumping together”, the sequencing approach implicitly endorsed by George Mitchell back in 1996. But after a conference at Hillsborough Castle failed to get the IRA to deliver, Trimble tacked again and let it be known that he would now accept decommissioning “days” after the Executive was formed. (Gatherings at Hillsborough Castle, the British monarch’s official residence in Northern Ireland during royal visits but used as a home by the serving British Secretary of State, became a permanent feature of political life after 1998, usually to deal with crises or to broker deals. Although their delegates were surrounded by the symbols and trappings of British royalty, including a Throne Room where the visiting monarch would receive VIPs and there was a strong possibility their conversations were being electronically monitored by British intelligence, Sinn Fein, interestingly, never objected to the venue.) In July 1999, Blair declared that he had detected a “seismic shift” in the IRA’s attitude to decommissioning and agreed with Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahern on an approach that implicitly killed off the idea of simultaneous decommissioning.8 The IRA would only have to indicate a willingness to decommission for devolution to be triggered. But a bad reaction from his party obliged Trimble to harden his position, notwithstanding any signals he may have given to the contrary, and the proposal stalled.