by Ed Moloney
These negotiations were to set a pattern for dealing with IRA arms that could best be compared to a ritualistic, but very tedious slow waltz in which, every few months, Sinn Fein and the unionists would take to the floor to the same tune. While the dance would invariably begin full of hope and promise it would always conclude in the same unhappy way, usually with David Trimble tripping over Gerry Adams’s feet and landing on his face. No less than five British Secretaries of State tried their hand at leading the orchestra during these years—Mo Mowlam, Peter Mandelson, John Reid, Paul Murphy and Peter Hain—while the events’ virtuoso, Tony Blair, supported by Irish premier Bertie Ahern, chalked up thousands of man-hours, perhaps 40 percent of his time in Downing Street, according to some estimates, trying to get Adams and Trimble to complete the waltz in step and unmarred by tumbles.
After the debacle of July 1999, when the “seismic shift” in the IRA’s decommissioning policy detected by Blair turned out to be not much more than a slight tremor, George Mitchell was once again prevailed upon to return to Ireland in an effort to get Sinn Fein and the unionists to agree a way forward. The significance of the deal he put together in November 1999 was that it formally ditched decommissioning as a precondition for Sinn Fein’s entry to government. Devolution would happen on December 1, 1999, but while the IRA agreed to nominate Brian Keenan as its interlocutor to the IICD, it would not have to actually come up with the “product” i.e. weapons to be decommissioned, until the end of January 2000. Trimble got the deal approved by his party only by lodging a post-dated resignation letter, due to come into effect on February 1 if the IRA had failed to keep its side of the deal. Despite Sinn Fein signing up to the Mitchell deal, January 31 came and went without the IRA delivering any product—merely a promise from Keenan that the IRA would take the most minimal step forward and begin examining the modalities of decommissioning.
With the Good Friday Agreement slipping into irreversible meltdown, British Secretary of State Peter Mandelson stepped in to suspend the Assembly and the Executive and thereby preserve them for a better day. In retaliation, the IRA withdrew Brian Keenan from his dialogue, such as it was, with the decommissioning body. There it rested until Blair and Ahern returned to Belfast in May and another deal was struck in which the IRA agreed in principle to decommission an unspecified amount of arms and, until that happened, to allow two international luminaries, a former president of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, and the ANC trade unionist-turned-millionaire businessman, Cyril Ramaphosa, to inspect IRA weapons in arms dumps on a regular basis to ensure they had not been moved and therefore used. This so-called Confidence Building Measure (CBM) was sufficient to restore the power-sharing institutions but, crucially, Sinn Fein had got back into government without any indication that the IRA might actually start to physically disarm. In fact the arms inspectors visited IRA dumps three times on behalf of the IICD, the last occasion in May 2001, and not only was there no decommissioning during this time but there was not even a single meeting between the IRA and the decommissioning body from June 2000 until March 2001. It wasn’t until August 2001 that Brian Keenan and the IICD even agreed upon the method by which the IRA would put its weapons beyond use. In a matter of six years the terms for IRA decommissioning had slipped dramatically in favor of the republicans, from being a precondition to Sinn Fein’s participation in talks about a settlement to the point where Sinn Fein ministers had been in government for over a year without the IRA giving up a single gun or bullet.
Another tedious and especially convoluted waltz began in July 2001 when the parties were shipped off to a country house in Shropshire, England, for inconclusive talks which were followed, in the ensuing weeks, by a dizzy series of events. Trimble and his ministers in the Executive first resigned and the Assembly was then suspended twice (with foresight, the architects of the 1998 deal had anticipated a troubled journey and wrote a one-day, repeatable suspension power into the GFA legislation which could bestow six-week breathing spaces during a crisis indefinitely). Then the IRA agreed on the modalities of disarming, then it withdrew from the IICD, only to return to decommission for the first time when the combined impact of the Colombia arrests and the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington shamed and pushed it into action. It was noteworthy that when decommissioning did take place for the first time, it was due not to the diplomatic skills of Tony Blair or Bertie Ahern but because of hubris on the part of the IRA in the jungles of South America and bloodthirsty daring by Osama bin Laden and his jihadist warriors.
SO WHY did it take so long for the Provos to begin disarming? And why were the governments so reluctant to put pressure on the Provos to move more speedily and convincingly in the direction of decommissioning? After all, the peace process was essentially a covenant between the Provos and constitutional democrats in Britain and Ireland in which the latter agreed to bring Sinn Fein in from the cold and to treat them in the same way as other democrats as long as the IRA left all its violent ways behind, including its guns. One part of the bargain, power-sharing, had been implemented, or was at least irreversibly on the way to being so, yet despite an implied promise or understanding that decommissioning would take place within two years of the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA had still not agreed how or when it would destroy its arsenals three years after the deal had been struck. Not only that, but as incidents like Colombia illustrated, the IRA’s propensity to mount operations that threatened the integrity of the cease-fire was undiminished. The IRA’s part of the bargain was not being honored. The governments would have been entitled to respond accordingly but they always baulked.
The reason, of course, was that both governments had bought heavily into the argument that Gerry Adams and his colleagues had limited freedom of movement and could not move much faster than their slowest and most recalcitrant colleagues. Given the IRA’s turbulent history between 1995 and 1997, this was a reasonable view but it was also one that was unique to its time and circumstances. As the years passed and the realities on the ground changed in their favor, the IRA leadership’s hand strengthened and so did its leeway on the issue of weapons. The question is not whether Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and their various advisers were wrong in 1998 to think there was a limit to how fast or far Gerry Adams could move his IRA colleagues, but whether they were naive, not to mention foolish, to believe or to behave as if this was still the case by late 2001 and during the next four long years.
In theory there were two areas in which an external threat existed to the Adams leadership that was sufficiently strong to limit their freedom to move. The first was the threat posed by its most recent home-grown dissident group, the Real IRA, and the second was the possibility that the Real IRA would link up with the other two dissident republican groups, the Continuity IRA, associated with Ruairi O Bradaigh’s republican Sinn Fein, which came into being after the 1986 split in the Provisionals, and the INLA, the left-wing, violent but feud-prone breakaway group from the Official IRA. Pledged to reverse the Adams sell-out, this coalition would be a formidable opponent and a natural magnet for disgruntled members of the Provisionals.
The fear of a split was one reason Gerry Adams moved so cautiously and slowly when he and Father Reid began developing the peace process after 1982. Adams had experienced at first hand the bitter and often bloody fracture between the Provisionals and the Officials in the 1970s and knew how physically dangerous and politically damaging such schisms could be. That split had been due in no small measure to Cathal Goulding’s confrontational style and because his political goals had been so transparent as to forewarn his enemies and rivals. Adams knew that if he was to deliver the Provisionals into the peace process intact and undivided, he had to avoid the most egregious of Goulding’s errors, as he told Irish government officials many years later.9 By moving slowly and carefully and keeping his cards close to his chest, Adams hoped to avoid the sort of split Goulding had created.
In fact a split turned out to be unavoidable and given that Adams’s ambitions for the Provi
sionals dwarfed Goulding’s agenda, this was to be expected. But Adams’s caution meant that when the break with Micky McKevitt and his supporters came it was probably too late for the dissidents to make a significant enough impact on the Adams strategy. It is arguable that the dissidents stayed their hand for too long, faltered at the prospect of unseating Adams and delayed delivering the fatal blow while they themselves turned out to be vulnerable to infiltration by Adams’s loyalists posing as fellow rebels. The very fact that the McKevitt group was ultimately obliged to leave the IRA was itself a convincing sign that they would never get off the back foot. They had failed to topple Adams at the 1996 Army Convention and had been trounced at the 1997 Convention. They could either stay in the Provisionals and face humiliation, marginalization and ultimately ejection, or they could leave. They chose the latter but by so doing they ensured that Adams and his allies remained in control of the bulk of IRA weapons and of most of its structures, and in possession of an undiminished claim to republican legitimacy.
McKevitt and his allies had chosen a piece of ideological high ground for the battleground with Adams. They fought their battle in opposition to the Mitchell Principles which committed the IRA to peaceful methods and to decommissioning. These were concessions that were like fingers dabbling in the IRA’s soul, but McKevitt’s critique had not cut much ice with the IRA rank and file in the place where it mattered—the Northern war zone. The failure of the McKevitt rebellion was testament to two defining features of the Provisional movement. The response of the Adams camp to McKevitt’s attack was to say, effectively, “We’ll accept the Mitchell principles but not mean it.” This was evidence of the extent to which Adams had successfully reduced every cherished republican belief to a tactic that could be bent and twisted to suit requirements. He was able to do so because he had a compliant membership who had been motivated to join and fight with the Provisionals not because they believed in the values of traditional Irish republicanism but by an atavistic need to confront and strike back at unionism and loyalism, in and out of uniform. So it was that the Adams leadership had much less difficulty jettisoning the IRA’s most defining beliefs, like opposition to the consent principle, than it did with decommissioning weapons, the instruments of defence and confrontation.
There were other factors. Adams and McGuinness were Northerners with a trusted track record, republican superstars in the eyes of the grassroots, who had rescued the IRA from near defeat in the 1970s and brought undreamed-of electoral success, whereas McKevitt and his supporters were Southerners with whom IRA and Sinn Fein activists in Belfast, Derry and elsewhere in the North had had little direct contact or knowledge. And so it was that, thanks to such factors, the bulk of the Provisionals’ Northern Command stayed loyal to the Adams leadership in the end, while the dissident group, called Oglaigh na hEireann (Army of Ireland) by its founders but soon to be dubbed the Real IRA by the media, got most of its support from the IRA in Southern Command, especially in McKevitt’s quartermaster’s department, in the engineering department led by Dubliner Frank McGuinness or along the Border. The split was a seminal moment in the evolution of the peace process because it revealed how shallow the Provisionals’ political ideology really was and how easily the movement could be led into greater and wider ideological compromise. From the moment the McKevitt rebellion failed to topple Adams, the IRA leadership could be confident that if disaffected members left, they would leave as individuals or in small groups and that the threat of an organized, coherent opposition had faded.
The Real IRA’s leaders were aware of their weaknesses and so contact was made with the Continuity IRA and the INLA and their political leaders in an effort to forge a common military and political strategy against the peace process and the Provos. On the military front, the three groups co-operated and pooled resources to launch a bombing campaign which began with a van bomb attack on the RUC station at Markethill, County Armagh, in September 1997 and continued throughout 1998 with a series of car bomb and mortar attacks, mostly in County Armagh. The attempt to write an agreed political manifesto proved to be much more problematic. The difficulty was that Ruairi O Bradaigh, the president of republican Sinn Fein, Continuity IRA’s political wing, and Micky McKevitt, whose 32-County Sovereignty Movement represented the Real IRA, had taken opposing positions during the bitter 1986 split over recognizing the Dail. O Bradaigh had walked out of the Provisional Sinn Fein Ard Fheis with his supporters when Adams won the abstention vote, whereas McKevitt had not only stayed within the fold but had stood alongside Adams during the angry lunchtime confrontation with O Bradaigh and his people on the Sunday the vote was taken. The Real IRA people still didn’t care about abstentionism and believed holding on to it would mean political isolation, while for O Bradaigh it remained a defining matter of political principle. Dividing them was both an ideological gulf and the memory of an angry confrontation that still rankled; the combination of political and personality differences meant achieving an agreed political programme was nigh impossible.10
Any remaining chance that the three dissident groups could make common cause was literally evaporated on August 15, 1998, when a car bomb exploded in the County Tyrone market town of Omagh, killing twenty-nine people. The death toll was the worst for any single incident of the Troubles, the result of an inaccurate telephone-warning which actually drove people into the path of the bomb rather than away from it. The bombing had been the work of all three dissident groups. Continuity IRA provided the target and the intelligence, the Real IRA the code word, materiel and manpower, while the INLA provided the car used to ferry the bomb. The fact that a Real IRA code word was used meant that it got the blame. Neither the INLA nor Continuity IRA volunteered their role in the blast, leaving the Real IRA to carry the can alone, an aspect of the incident that further soured relations between them. Within three weeks both the INLA and the Real IRA had called cease-fires, although in the latter’s case it was not to be a permanent cessation.
Dissident unity had been smashed within a year of the Real IRA’s break with the Provisionals and none of the three groups was thereafter able to mount any sort of serious challenge to the Provisionals, who took to terming them, contemptuously, “micro groups.” Further evidence that the Provos regarded the Real IRA as a minimal threat came in October 2000 when, in broad daylight and with little attempt to disguise their identity, Provo gunmen in Ballymurphy shot dead twenty-six-year-old Real IRA member Joe O’Connor, pumping seven shots into his head as he sat in a car outside his mother’s house. There had been a recent history of friction between the Real and Provisional IRA in the area and O’Connor’s death was meant to send a message to the dissident group’s leadership. Had the Provos believed that there was any chance the Real IRA would have retaliated or that the group posed a real threat to Provo hegemony, O’Connor’s killing would never have been sanctioned. In the same year the Real IRA abandoned its cease-fire and carried out a series of bomb attacks in England, including an anti-tank missile fired at MI6’s headquarters, but these were few in number and never even remotely approached the scale of the threat that had been presented by the Provisional IRA. If anything, the attacks underlined the group’s marginal influence on republican politics.
In March 2001, the Real IRA was dealt a huge blow when Micky McKevitt was arrested and subsequently tried, convicted and given a twenty-year prison term on the basis of evidence provided by a US sympathizer who had infiltrated the group’s inner sanctums at the behest of the FBI and MI5. The agent, David Rupert, a German-American and part Mohawk Indian with no direct links to Ireland, was a serial bankrupt, tax defaulter and failed businessman from upstate New York who had been expelled by Continuity IRA’s American support group and then, at the urging of the FBI and MI5, turned his attention to the Real IRA. The fact that such a disreputable character was able to get so close to the Real IRA leadership was hugely embarrassing but it also confirmed a widespread perception in the republican community that the dissident group had been widely infil
trated and that those who joined it were only risking imprisonment or worse. The revelations about Rupert were a deterrent to seasoned Provisionals tempted to jump ship and increasingly the group turned to inexperienced and poorly motivated teenagers for recruits. The Real IRA also succumbed to an affliction common to Irish revolutionaries when in October 2002 it split after one faction, based in Portlaoise prison, accused the leadership outside the jail of corruption. By the time the Provisionals decommissioned for the first time, the dissident threat had been reduced almost to the level of a minor nuisance.
WHATEVER JUDGMENT British and Irish intelligence made on the dissident threat, it is clear that Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern continued to view the Adams leadership as vulnerable to internal criticism. The conviction took hold that if the IRA was compelled to move too fast or too far, the Provisionals’ unity could be threatened and there would be unthinkable consequences for the peace process. This produced an extraordinarily conflicting mindset about the leaders of the IRA in government circles in Britain and Ireland.