by Ed Moloney
It took the PSNI eighteen days to confirm publicly what the dogs in the Belfast streets had already guessed, which was that only one organization had the manpower, discipline, track record and intelligence skills to carry out such an ambitious robbery and that was the Provisional IRA. Precisely why the PSNI chief constable, Hugh Orde, held back for so long is still unknown. Unionists blamed this slowness on policing reforms introduced as part of the process of weaning the Provos into democratic politics. In particular, they claimed, the Special Branch had been vitiated; well-placed informers had been discarded in a vetting procedure designed to weed out disreputable types, leaving the Branch blind and able to learn of IRA activity only too late. It seems, however, that the PSNI knew almost immediately who was responsible. Others speculated that the delay was not the fault of any weaknesses in police intelligence but was caused by political considerations and inspired by British and Irish governments at a loss what to do in the face of such brazen criminality, knowing that their Nelson’s eye approach to previous IRA activity had finally caught up with them and perhaps hoping something would happen to save them from having to confront the IRA’s political leadership.
IF POLITICAL FUNK by the two governments explains the delay in responding to the Northern Bank robbery, one obvious reason was that ten days before the robbery Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern had come within an ace of announcing a comprehensive agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP and they didn’t want to lose it entirely. The scale and ambition of the putative deal were astonishing given the glacial pace of events in the previous seven years and it would have been surprising had the two prime ministers not paused before reacting to the Northern Bank heist, given the potential that this would have to destroy a deal that was still, technically, on the table. The near settlement, after all, would effectively have brought the peace process to a conclusion by completing the Provos’ journey into constitutional politics. Its principal elements were:
• The completion of IRA decommissioning by the end of December 2004;
• A commitment by the IRA to permanently end all paramilitary activity;
• Verification of this by the new Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC);
• Policing and justice to be devolved to the power-sharing Executive;
• Sinn Fein commitment to win party approval for joining the North’s Policing Board and recognition of the PSNI;
• Agreement by the DUP and Sinn Fein to nominate candidates for first and deputy first minister posts;
• Restoration by March 2005 of the Assembly, Executive and North–South Ministerial Council and abolition of the British government’s power to suspend them.
Barely a year had passed since the decommissioning crisis that had fatally undermined David Trimble and paved the way for a new Assembly election. Suddenly all those internal difficulties and weaknesses which had allegedly prevented the Adams leadership from rapid and decisive action had melted away like snow off a ditch in springtime. There had been no dramatic changes in the IRA’s internal structures or mechanics in the meantime to explain this startling transformation; the same Army Council that had refused Trimble decommissioning transparency in October 2003 and declined to explicitly state that its war was over was by December 2004 suddenly willing to approve the completion of decommissioning and declare a permanent end to all IRA activity. The willingness of the IRA to make such a commitment was compelling evidence that the protestations in the years before about the great internal obstacles in the way of such moves were self-serving. Observers with long enough memories recalled how the 1981 hunger strikes had been handled with a similar sleight of hand. Throughout the protest figures like Gerry Adams had protested that the Army Council could not order it to end, but after Sinn Fein had extracted the maximum political profit, the Army Council brought it to a halt with the stroke of a pen.2
What had changed was that, thanks to the Assembly election, Sinn Fein was now the dominant nationalist party and their once powerful rivals, the SDLP, reduced to a shadow of what the party had once been. Those friendly to Sinn Fein would argue that having now proved that politics worked the Provo leadership had the self-confidence to move into acts of completion. A more cynical view held that the decommissioning issue had served its purpose and, having exploited it in order to attain nationalist electoral hegemony, it was time for the Provos to seize their political prizes, including a Sinn Fein deputy first ministry, and do a final deal. Whichever version is correct, one reality is undeniable: had the Adams leadership’s claim of internal resistance to decommissioning been correct—and on the scale asserted between 1998 and 2003—then the 2004 deal would never have been possible.
The other element that made the 2004 deal viable was that the DUP’s dislike of the Good Friday Agreement was not so deep or strongly held that its leadership would reject the opportunity of taking power, even if the cost was having to share it with loyalism’s mortal enemy. Although the DUP had boycotted the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, once the power-sharing Executive was up and running the party’s leaders decided that the ministerial posts on offer by virtue of the DUP’s electoral strength were too tempting to reject. And so the party’s deputy leader, Peter Robinson, and the North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds became ministers in the Executive. They declined to attend full Executive meetings or to take part in the North–South institutions but otherwise they enjoyed and exercised the full benefits and powers of office. While they did this, they sniped away at David Trimble from the sidelines over issues like decommissioning and continuing IRA activity. As Trimble lifted unionism’s heavy load, the DUP sat and waited for him to stumble and fall, which in the November 2003 Assembly election he finally did, allowing the DUP to do to the Ulster Unionists what Sinn Fein was doing to the SDLP. The DUP benefited electorally from the IRA’s stance on decommissioning every bit as much as Sinn Fein and if some observers could see in the DUP a mirror image of the Provos’ cynical opportunism, it was understandable.
The path to the deal had been reasonably smooth, at least by the standard of previous years. The IRA’s attempted abduction in February 2004 of a republican dissident, Bobby Tohill, from a Belfast city-center bar, which Gerry Adams attempted to characterize as “a bar room brawl”, briefly revived doubts about the IRA’s intentions. But by May, following contacts with Sinn Fein and the DUP during a review of the Good Friday Agreement, Blair and Ahern declared themselves confident that a deal could be finalized by the autumn. European elections in June confirmed the electoral dominance of Sinn Fein and the DUP. The seat held since 1979 by the former SDLP leader John Hume, who had quit politics entirely in February 2004, went to Bairbre de Brun as Sinn Fein outpolled the SDLP by a margin of five to three. Ian Paisley had also retired from Europe and his seat went to a DUP barrister, Jim Allister, who more comprehensively trounced the Ulster Unionist candidate, winning two votes for every one for the UUP. In September the Northern parties and the two governments decamped to Leeds Castle in Kent for talks which later resumed in Belfast. By the end of November all the elements of the deal had been agreed bar one.
Once again the process was being held up by the lack of transparency in the proposal for IRA decommissioning. Although the Army Council agreed that it would fully disarm within weeks and that two clerical figures, one Protestant and the other Catholic, could witness the event, it was refusing to accept the DUP’s nominee. Paisley wanted to nominate the Reverend David McGaughey, a former Presbyterian moderator and a strong opponent of ecumenism. He had once called the Catholic Church’s teachings “unbiblical” and often excoriated the IRA; he was, in DUP eyes, a figure likely to be more credible to Protestants than the IRA’s choice.3 Nor was the IRA prepared to allow the clerical witnesses freedom to describe in detail what they had seen. One exchange between the DUP and Tony Blair over this issue gave a revealing insight into the British prime minister’s elasticity in such negotiations. The DUP pointed out that the decommissioning act barred such witnesses from speaking out unless they had bee
n given permission to do so and since the IRA was refusing to relax this rule, the IICD could not budge either. The witnesses would have to stay silent and their contribution would thus be greatly devalued, unless a way could be found around the problem. “Blair’s answer to that was ‘Well, the moment these people come back they can resign [from the IICD] and speak,’ recalled one DUP participant. “We pointed out that the legislation says they must stay silent ‘during or after they leave the service’ and Blair said ‘It’s up to them’. We said back, ‘We’re talking about Christian ministers here, they’re not going to come back and break their word on these issues!’”4
A bigger problem was posed by a proposal that the decommissioning event be photographed and the pictures published so as to convince unionists. The republicans rejected this idea outright. Publicly and in the privacy of negotiations they maintained this was because to do so would be to allow the IRA to be to humiliated. But another effect of photographs appearing would be to remove any doubt whatsoever that when IRA and Sinn Fein leaders assured their grassroots that de Chastelain “had been conned” and no guns had been destroyed, they had been lying.
Although a settlement that would see Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness share the top political jobs in Northern Ireland was within reach, the DUP was still refusing to have face-to-face talks with Sinn Fein and it had to rely on the British for information about the republican negotiating stance. The British kept the Provos’ refusal to allow photographs to be taken from the DUP and instead directed the negotiations towards the question of when photographs would appear. The DUP wanted immediate publication but agreed to delay this until the Executive was up and running, an event planned for the following March. This idea came from the new US envoy to the peace process, Mitchell Reiss. Then Ian Paisley publicly called on the IRA to express repentance for its past violence; the republicans should be made to wear “sackcloth and ashes,” he said. By the end of the first week of December the issue of photographs had stalled the negotiations but this didn’t mean they had failed. Gerry Adams said that Sinn Fein should accept everything in the British—Irish proposals except the decommissioning plan and when Blair and Ahern traveled to Belfast on December 8, they published the full text of the planned and sequenced agreement. In the past the Provos had always withdrawn their proposals if negotiations broke down but this time they stayed on the table for all to see, at least for a while. Only the practicalities of final decommissioning stood in the way of a settlement; the principle had been conceded. The problem Gerry Adams and his leadership colleagues then faced was how to revive the deal without having to address the DUP’s demand for photographic proof of decommissioning.
IT WAS against this background that news of the Northern Bank robbery broke and London and Dublin struggled to construct a response. The eighteen-day hiatus between the raid and the PSNI chief constable’s announcement of IRA culpability had at least given the governments time to ponder what this should be. When Hugh Orde finally pointed the finger at the IRA, both Blair and Ahern were quick to back him up. It was evident that the two leaders realized that the huge scale of the robbery meant that turning a Nelson’s eye to IRA activity was no longer sustainable. But what had brought this about? The governments knew that the IRA had put together a special robbery team and that it had been active throughout 2004. In May the IRA had staged a multimillion-pound theft of white goods, freezers, washing machines and the like, from a wholesale supermarket in Dunmurry, on the edge of West Belfast. In September, several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of produce were stolen from the Strabane, County Tyrone, branch of the supermarket chain Iceland. In October, cigarettes with a retail value of over £2 million were stolen from a bonded warehouse in Belfast docks. Both this robbery and the raid in Strabane involved abductions and hostage-taking and may have been practice runs for the much bigger Northern Bank heist.5 Yet neither London nor Dublin had protested to the republican leadership. What made the difference, clearly, was the scale of the Northern Bank robbery. That made a tough response obligatory.
The governments played the role of outraged and betrayed partners. While Tony Blair called on republicans to end all criminal activity and said unionists would be justified in spurning Sinn Fein as a government partner until that happened, Bertie Ahern took the offensive, presumably on the grounds that a fellow nationalist could get away with saying things to the Provos that a British leader could not. Immediately after Hugh Orde’s announcement, the taoiseach implicated the Sinn Fein leadership in the crime. The robbery, he said, was “obviously being planned at a stage when I was in negotiations with those that would know the leadership of the Provisional movement.” Ahern didn’t quite name Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness but everyone knew what he meant. A few days later he gave an RTE radio interview and went a step further. “This was an IRA job. This was a Provisional IRA job. This was a job that would have been known to the leadership. This was a job that would have been known to the political leadership. That is my understanding. I am upset, quite frankly, that in the period when we were in intensive talks trying to get a comprehensive agreement that my information is now that people in very senior positions would have known what was going on.”6 The following month the Republic’s justice minister, Michael McDowell, filled in the blank spaces, naming Adams, McGuinness and Martin Ferris as members of the Army Council and alleging that the Provisional movement was “engaged in massive criminality,” earning millions of pounds which was laundered through a network of solicitors and accountants.7 In the coming months McDowell, a leading member of the Progressive Democrats, would emerge as the Provisionals’ most acerbic critic, given free rein by government colleagues to vent his deep dislike of the IRA and Sinn Fein. As much as anything else, this was a reflection of the newly enhanced role the Northern Bank robbery had given to Garda intelligence and McDowell’s Department of Justice in formulating Irish policy on the peace process.
Bertie Ahern’s and Michael McDowell’s logic was that if Adams and McGuinness had, as Army Council members, given the go-ahead for the Northern Bank raid, then it surely followed that they had foreknowledge of other major IRA operations, like the Colombian adventure, the Castlereagh raid and “Stormontgate”. The notion that the IRA organized operations behind their backs was therefore a fiction—and the governments knew this. And if this was the case, then it was possible also that the parallel presentation of Adams and McGuinness as moderates battling against hard-liners and obliged to move slowly and carefully was also a fabrication which the two governments had either fallen for or decided to indulge. The Northern Bank robbery did nothing less than raise large question marks against British and Irish policy towards the IRA in the post-Good Friday Agreement years.
The Provisionals’ response to all this was predictable. The Sinn Fein denial featured the now-familiar assertion of pot-stirring by British securocrats who had staged the robbery, as they had the Castlereagh break-in and the “Stormontgate” spy ring, in order to damage the peace process and blacken Sinn Fein. Only Sinn Fein’s most uncritical supporters in Irish America fell for this. The IRA also issued a terse, two-line statement denying responsibility and then in early February took the December 2004 proposals off the table. When that failed to impress the governments, the IRA warned London and Dublin not to “underestimate the seriousness of the situation,” an implied threat that the cease-fire could break down.8 If the statement was meant to spread alarm in London and Dublin, it signally failed; the days of pretending the IRA could go back to war had ended as comprehensively as had tolerance of its excesses.
So why had the IRA authorized the Northern Bank robbery? One obvious answer was the £26.5 million in proceeds, a sum that could be invested in lucrative, money-making ventures. In February, the Gardai recovered £60,000 in raids in Cork and Dublin that was subsequently traced to the Northern Bank cash center and arrested several people, including one man who was found trying to burn sterling banknotes in his back garden. Meanwhile the investigation of a County Co
rk-based finance company, Chesterton Finance, which had been tied to the discovery of £2.3 million in Northern Bank-linked cash, forced the resignation of Phil Flynn, a non-executive director of Chesterton, as chairman of the Irish branch of the Bank of Scotland. Flynn, an associate of Bertie Ahern, was a former vice-president of Sinn Fein and a leading trade unionist who had, in the public eye at least, dropped out of republican politics. Subsequent police inquiries led to Bulgaria where intermediaries for the IRA were said to have been interested in buying a £15 million apartment block, a hotel and a shopping centre as well as a small bank, which police suspected would be used to launder this [Bulgarian] and other investments.9 The Northern Bank raid had lifted a small corner on the IRA’s burgeoning financial empire. Always broke and casting around for money when the war was raging, in peace-time the IRA had little on which to spend its revenues and had amassed a small fortune. According to one authoritative claim, by 2006 it had built up an investment portfolio worth some £200 million in hotels, discos, bars and apartments in the Caribbean, Portugal, Turkey and of course both parts of Ireland.10
But the IRA’s political leaders, who were as astute a group of strategists as could be found in any political organization, must have known that the Northern Bank raid would be a robbery too far. The robbery took place just a week before Christmas, days before the peak of the seasonal shopping spree, when demand at outlying branches of the bank for notes would be at its height and stocks at the cash center consequently large. A Northern Bank spokesman confirmed that it would not have been unusual for the cash center to be holding as much as £26.5 million, given the time of the year,11 while other banking sources said there was perhaps twice as much cash in stock on the night of the raid, more than £50 million. Suggestions that the IRA was taken by surprise by the amount of cash available sit uneasily beside the evidently high level of inside information about the bank’s affairs and procedures in the IRA’s possession. The gang’s questioning of Chris Ward and Kevin McMullen alone pointed strongly in that direction, as did the timing of the robbery. It seems very likely that the IRA would have been fully aware beforehand that the haul would be very large and that the political consequences would therefore be profound and wide-ranging. If the IRA had taken £2.6 million they might have got away with it and the governments enabled to turn a blind eye once more. But knowingly stealing £26.5 million was an entirely different matter, something no one could ignore. If Adams and McGuinness had known about the robbery before it took place, as the Irish prime minister alleged, then they would surely have known this too.