by Ed Moloney
Claims by Bertie Ahern that Sinn Fein leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness knew the raid was imminent as they negotiated the December 2004 peace deal with him are credible for two reasons. One is that, once again, the mastermind behind the raid was the IRA’s director of intelligence, Bobby Storey, the loyal disciple of the Adams leadership who had organized the Castlereagh and Stormontgate operations on behalf of the Army Council.12 Another compelling clue was provided by the Independent Monitoring Commission in a report of May 2005. This pointed out that in the draft peace agreement published by London and Dublin in early December 2004, a statement to be issued by the IRA was to have included a commitment “not to endanger anyone’s personal rights and safety.” Yet when the IRA issued its own version of this statement on December 9, eleven days before the robbery, these words had been excised from the text, which otherwise read exactly as anticipated by the two governments.13 Participants in the negotiations also say that during the talks, the Sinn Fein delegation fiercely resisted the wording about “personal rights and safety.” Since the Northern Bank robbery most assuredly did lead to the endangerment of “personal rights and safety,” the obvious explanation for Sinn Fein’s negotiating stance and the December 9 IRA statement was that they were well aware of the planned robbery and the abductions and hostage-taking that it would entail. It also suggests that the robbery might well have gone ahead even if there had been a deal with the DUP.
In the days and weeks that followed the robbery the damage caused to the Provisionals mounted. IRA criminality became an issue and was fueled when on a popular RTE television programme, Derry Sinn Fein leader Mitchel McLaughlin refused to describe Jean McConville’s murder and disappearance in 1972 (when Gerry Adams was Belfast Brigade commander) as “a crime.” The spotlight then turned on the IRA’s chief of staff, Slab Murphy, in South Armagh and to the IRA’s involvement in cross-Border smuggling, counterfeiting and other forms of criminality. Michael McDowell then named Gerry Adams as an IRA leader, the first time his claim to have no links to the IRA had been challenged in such a public and damaging way by the Irish government. Bertie Ahern then ended any possibility that the killers of a Garda Special Branch detective, Jerry McCabe, shot dead during a Post Office robbery in County Limerick in June 1996, would be released. Four members of the IRA unit responsible were convicted and sentenced to between eleven and fourteen years in jail, but the Irish government, ever sensitive to the feelings of Garda rank and file, refused to release them along with other IRA prisoners under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA Army Council and Sinn Fein had denied the robbery was an authorized operation, but a subsequent internal inquiry found that the robbery had been approved but that Garda McCabe had been accidentally shot by a member of the gang. They went on the run and were eventually arrested in circumstances that caused controversy inside the IRA following allegations that their apprehension had been contrived to end Sinn Fein’s embarrassment over the affair.15 Sinn Fein leaders then took up their case and their release was, until the Northern Bank robbery, a side deal to the final settlement agreed with Dublin. The days of indulging the Provisional leadership had come to an end, at least for now. As one Irish Times political reporter put it: “The [governments] new stance marks nothing less than a fundamental break with the tolerance of fudge and ambiguity, qualities deliberately deployed for 10 years to help the process along.”16
As the damage intensified, the language used by Sinn Fein’s leaders underwent subtle changes. Former IRA adjutant-general Gerry Kelly called the robbery “wrong.” Along with Adams and McGuinness, Kelly had held face-to-face talks with Bertie Ahern before the raid and was presumably one of those in the “political leadership” the taoiseach had classed as having foreknowledge. Martin McGuinness, who initially had strongly supported the IRA denials, modified his line, saying: “Whoever carried out the robbery are also hostile to the Sinn Fein agenda and the peace process, and under no circumstances should any of these people get their way in the ongoing discussions which will have to take place if we are to resolve our political difficulties.”17 A few days later he went further: “If the IRA had been involved… there would have been a defining moment in Sinn Fein’s leadership’s work with the IRA. It would have been totally and absolutely unacceptable to me.”18
It was clear that by robbing the Northern Bank, the IRA had shot itself badly in the foot and the organization’s political leaders needed to prepare their supporters for the radical corrective action that would be needed if lost ground was to be recaptured. The only credible way to do that would be if the IRA disposed finally of its remaining weapons. Whether or not figures like Adams and McGuinness had guessed that the robbery would cause huge political fallout or had endorsed it in the hope that it would, a resolution of the decommissioning impasse had nonetheless been opened up. But the story was only beginning.
EVER SINCE BRITISH paratroopers had gunned down fourteen men during a civil rights march and demonstration in Derry against the use of internment without trial in January 1972, the events of “Bloody Sunday” had assumed iconic importance in the Northern nationalist psyche. What the bulk of nationalists viewed as the outrageous cover-up of the day’s bloodshed was orchestrated by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Widgery, at the tribunal of inquiry named after him. The Widgery tribunal had, for many, become a metaphor for British misrule in Northern Ireland, and its conclusions, which were published just eleven weeks after the killings and essentially took the British army’s version of events at face value, saying that the shooting spree had been justified when soldiers had been fired upon. Lord Widgery’s strongest criticism of the paratroopers’ action was to say that their firing had at times “bordered on the reckless”. By the 1990s there was a consensus stretching way beyond Irish nationalism that the Widgery tribunal had been deeply flawed. As new evidence emerged about the events, a campaign to reopen the inquiry won the support of the Irish government and in January 1998, British premier Tony Blair announced that a new inquiry would be held. Headed by Lord Saville of Newdigate, assisted by Canadian judge William Hoyt and Australian judge John L. Toohey, the new tribunal was to last six years and cost a staggering £400 million,19 a boon to Northern Ireland’s already Troubles-enriched legal profession, but setting up the new inquiry was a move that the British doubtless regarded as a preparatory soothing balm for the Provisional movement as the Good Friday Agreement negotiations moved towards a conclusion.
Every year the deaths of Bloody Sunday were commemorated by the people of Derry in a march that traced the same route as on that fateful day and the nearest weekend to the anniversary would be taken up with talks, films and music organized by and for the community still affected by the tragedy and for republicans throughout Ireland. By January 2005 the Bloody Sunday commemoration ranked alongside June’s trip to Bodenstown, August’s West Belfast festival and the annual Sinn Fein Ard Fheis as occasions for pilgrimage when Provisional supporters from all over the country would gather to reaffirm their political faith, renew acquaintances and enjoy the craic.
On Sunday, January 31, 2005, Belfast republicans had as usual traveled to Derry to take part in the march and then returned to Belfast by bus. In Magennis’s Bar in central Belfast that evening a crowd of perhaps two dozen republicans, most of them Sinn Fein members or supporters but some who were senior figures in the Belfast IRA, gathered for a drinking session after the journey. Magennis’s Bar is situated in May Street, behind Belfast’s Law Courts and was a popular lunchtime haunt for barristers, solicitors and their clients. At night time and at the weekend, however, Magennis’s clientele was very different—much of the bar’s trade came from the adjacent Markets area and nearby Short Strand across the River Lagan, two small nationalist enclaves well known for their republican activism. Amongst the drinkers in the bar that night were two friends, Brendan Devine and Robert McCartney, a thirty-four-year-old father of two small boys from Short Strand who was engaged to be married later that year to his l
ong-time partner Bridgeen Hagans.
The pair hadn’t been to Derry but they knew many of the republicans in the bar and had cause to be wary of them; there was a history of bad blood between some of the IRA men and Brendan Devine. A row began when one of the IRA men challenged them over rude gestures they were making to each other, which were seen as being directed at a woman in their company. The matter was quickly settled but one IRA man was not satisfied and began an argument with Devine. He was the senior IRA man present, Gerard “Jock” Davison, a former Belfast Brigade commander.20 Davison had once been associated with anti-Adams elements on the Brigade staff, and was even considered by them at one point as a potential new chief of staff if their conspiracy against the pro-peace strategy leadership had succeeded. But Davison had since defected to the peace process camp. The events in Magennis’s Bar that night were later painstakingly reconstructed by the family of Robert McCartney, the PSNI and the local media and, although elements were denied by Davison, no independent evidence has emerged to disprove their account. During the brawl, Davison was reported as having “glanced at some of his IRA associates and to have drawn his finger across his throat, a signal as to what he wanted done to Mr. McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine.21 The row between Davison, his IRA associates and Devine ended when Devine’s throat was slashed open and a bottle smashed over his head; blood spilled everywhere, mixing with shards of glass on the bar floor. There was a lull, significantly, between that violence and what followed a few minutes later. According to one informed source, a gun was sent for but, before it arrived, the IRA men had managed to obtain other weapons, including knives.22 As that was happening, Robert McCartney half-carried his friend Brendan Devine out of the bar but as they staggered into a nearby alleyway, the IRA gang, up to eight-strong according to eye-witness testimony given later to the PSNI, pursued them, kicking and punching them and fatally stabbing McCartney and leaving Devine badly injured.23 McCartney was left to lie bleeding profusely as the IRA gang returned to the bar where, led by Davison, they ordered customers not to talk about what had happened while an IRA team was dispatched to clean up the bar to destroy any forensic evidence of the fight and to remove CCTV security footage. No attempt was made to help McCartney nor even to send for an ambulance. A passing PSNI patrol discovered him and he was taken to hospital where he died the next day. It was later established that Robert McCartney’s murder was not the result of a bar brawl that had got out of hand but was premeditated and planned.
If it hadn’t been for Robert McCartney’s five sisters, Gemma, Paula, Claire, Catherine and Donna, and his partner Bridgeen Hagans, it is possible that his murder would have been quickly forgotten, filed away as just another manifestation of the knife culture then spreading throughout Belfast. The murder of Robert McCartney was not an authorized IRA operation but it had been carried out by IRA members and, his family insisted, was then covered up and witnesses silenced by the IRA. “Their cover-up and their clean-up operation afterwards was meticulous,” said Paula McCartney.24 The campaign the McCartney family launched to bring the killers of their brother to justice would have implications for the peace process that at the time no one could have anticipated.
The most puzzling aspect of the events that followed concerns the way the Provisional leadership, Sinn Fein and the IRA, handled calls for the killers of Robert McCartney to be dealt with. There was no nationalist sympathy at all for the IRA gang responsible and seasoned strategists like Gerry Adams would very quickly have known that. What had happened to Robert McCartney was in no way political and couldn’t remotely be associated with the IRA’s struggle or Sinn Fein’s political agenda. In fact the killers had abused and misused IRA resources by employing a forensic team to destroy evidence of an indisputably criminal act. A vigil in the Short Strand a few days afterwards demonstrated the depth of grassroots feeling in a district whose fierce loyalty to the Provisional IRA had been sealed thirty-five years earlier when Belfast IRA commander Billy McKee and two other men had fought off an armed loyalist assault on the area at the cost of one of their lives and severe bullet wounds to McKee. Some 1,500 people turned out, a significant proportion of the area’s population—most of them, like some in the McCartney clan, Sinn Fein supporters and voters. One account of the vigil posted on the internet described members of the crowd openly using terms like “scum of the earth” and “animals” to describe the killers.25 These were the Provisionals’ own grassroots excoriating members of the IRA.
The cost to the IRA leadership associated with bringing the affair to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion by obliging the killers to turn themselves in, as the IRA arguably could have done, or by assisting the collection of eyewitness evidence against them, was very low and the benefits potentially very high. The murder of Robert McCartney had after all happened in the wake of a bank robbery that had stained the IRA with the charge of gangsterism and criminality. Bringing the killers to justice or to distance the IRA from them convincingly would have gone a long way to repair the damage and the move would surely have been popular with nationalists. Just over a year later both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness would publicly urge the alleged abductors of Bobby Tohill to turn themselves in for trial after the men had absconded. Yet they and their associates would dodge and weave to avoid taking an equally resolute position against Robert McCartney’s murderers.
Towards the end of February the IRA announced that it had court-martialled and dismissed three of its volunteers involved in the events. One of these was “Jock” Davison. But within days the IRA sent a very different message about Davison’s status in the organization when he walked through the Short Strand area beside Bobby Storey, the IRA’s director of intelligence and one of Gerry Adams’s most fervent supporters. It was a brazenly defiant gesture, meant to signify that he was still in the fold and able to enjoy the protection of the IRA. A few weeks later Davison was seen canvassing for Sinn Fein candidates in local elections. The implied leniency towards Davison was later confirmed by the IRA which told the McCartneys that Davison was expelled because he had been involved in a bar brawl but would be allowed to reapply for IRA membership after six months. Davison had been charged by the IRA with a minor offence; he could have been court-martialled with the far graver crime of misusing IRA resources—employing IRA members to forensically cleanse a non-IRA operational scene. Other IRA members convicted of similar activity in the past had been shot dead by the organization.
Robert McCartney’s sisters had compiled a list of Sinn Fein members who were in the bar at the time of the attack, all of them potential eyewitnesses, which they passed on to Gerry Adams. The Sinn Fein president then announced that a number of party members had been suspended until the legal process was completed, adding that he had urged them to make statements to the police, either via a lawyer or to the police ombudsman, about what they had seen. But those suspended—allegedly some twelve party members—were, according to Sinn Fein, not on the list supplied by the McCartneys and the party refused to name them.26 Nothing happened to those named by the family. Catherine McCartney is in little doubt what this meant: “They’re telling lies, they didn’t suspend anyone. They didn’t name them for that reason.”27 The witness statements turned over to the police turned out to be useless. Some were unsigned, others maintained they had seen nothing, an unlikely claim given the violence of the affray, or that they had been in the toilet at the time of the incident, an assertion that led some to suggest wryly that Magennis’s Bar must have had the largest toilet of any pub in Ireland. When one witness did agree to be interviewed by PSNI detectives, the detectives’ questions were so lengthy and probing that afterwards no other Sinn Fein member would come forward.28 When two men were eventually charged in connection with the McCartney murder, they were housed in a remand wing of a local jail reserved for republicans, something that couldn’t happen without the say-so of the IRA Command structure.
At one point the McCartney family met with the IRA, which afterwards issued a stateme
nt saying that an offer had been made to shoot the men responsible. But according to Catherine McCartney this never happened: “One of them said these people [the killers] meant nothing to him and he would shoot them in the morning. That was just an expression. The only thing they offered was to make it impossible for them to abscond. Some said it was for the benefit of their grassroots, so that they could say, ‘We offered to shoot them but they refused. What more do they want?’ But I don’t know why they did it.”29 Whatever the reason, the incident put the IRA in an even worse light, especially across the Atlantic.
In March, the White House announced that President Bush had invited the McCartney sisters to the annual St. Patrick’s Day bash, an event that since Bill Clinton’s time had given Gerry Adams the opportunity to revel amid the powerful friends that the peace strategy had won Sinn Fein. But this year, on the advice of the new U.S. peace process ambassador Mitchell Reiss, no Northern politicians would be invited. This was the Bush administration’s way of signaling its displeasure over the Northern Bank robbery and Sinn Fein’s part in it. It was also a sign that the Americans were ready to take a tougher line with the Provos than either Tony Blair or Bertie Ahern would ever contemplate. Disinviting Sinn Fein alone would have allowed Gerry Adams to don the mantle of victimhood, and it might have prompted the SDLP to side with him, so it was decided to bar all politicians from the celebrations. While all the North’s political parties lost out, Sinn Fein would be hurt most of all. The prospect of the McCartney sisters supping inside the White House while Gerry Adams languished outside enraged Sinn Fein’s supporters and prompted Martin McGuinness to warn the McCartneys, just as they arrived in Washington, to “be careful” not to stray into party politics. The menace in McGuinness’s words again made things worse for the Provos with Irish America.