by Ed Moloney
The trip to Washington by the McCartney sisters signaled the most serious and sustained assault by the Irish-American political establishment on the Provos since the start of the peace process. It began when Sinn Fein’s most valuable friend in Irish America, Senator Ted Kennedy, abruptly cancelled a planned meeting with Gerry Adams, an unmistakable snub which was underlined when Kennedy later squired the McCartney sisters and Bridgeen Hagans around the Capitol building. The presence of the McCartney sisters, Kennedy said, sent “a very powerful signal that it’s time for the IRA to fully decommission, end all criminal activity and cease to exist as a paramilitary organisation.”30
As a huge media pack struggled in the corridor, the McCartneys met Kennedy, Senators John McCain, Christopher Dodd and Hillary Clinton, the last two long-time allies of Adams, in a congressional office to tell them about their brother’s murder and the Provos’ inadequate response. Dodd and Clinton joined the chorus calling for the IRA to end all its activities and later sponsored a Senate resolution that condemned IRA violence and criminality, supported the McCartney family and described as “outrageous” the IRA offer to shoot the killers of Robert McCartney. Another long-time IRA supporter, Congressman Peter King of Long Island, who had backed the Provos since the hunger strikes when it was not fashionable to do so, called on the organization to disband. New York Representative Jim Walsh, head of the Friends of Ireland group in Congress, openly criticized Sinn Fein’s handling of the McCartney murder: “I get the sense that the IRA has lost its discipline… They [Sinn Fein] have not handled it well. I do think they have handled it very poorly… They should have been far more aggressive about getting to the bottom of this murder.”31
In New York, Richard Haass, Bush’s first Irish peace process envoy and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, hosted a breakfast speaking event for Gerry Adams and delivered a blunt lecture to the Sinn Fein president: “The risk is that over time they [the Sinn Fein leaders] will suffer the fate of people such as Yasser Arafat of being ostracized. Gerry Adams does not want to become someone who’s unwilling to choose [as] in Mr. Arafat’s case between the olive branch and the gun. Mr. Adams and, more broadly, the republican movement, has to make the choice 100% to play by democratic rules, to play a political game only.”32
On the eve of Saint Patrick’s Day, Senator John McCain addressed the American-Ireland Fund dinner and, with Adams sitting just a few yards away, launched a blistering attack on the Provos. To repeated bursts of applause from the mostly Irish-American audience, McCain said no one could now describe the IRA as “anything better than a criminal syndicate that steals and murders to serve members’ personal interests.”33 One U.S. official commented: “He just peeled the paint of the walls in that building that night.”34 Donna McCartney noted in her diary: “[I]… just watched Adams during the Senator’s speech. He stared ahead and looked really grim. I didn’t expect him to clap when there was criticism of Sinn Fein, but he didn’t even put his hands together when McCain praised our courage. That speaks volumes. I realize now how badly this is going for Adams.”35 The next day Bush greeted the McCartneys in the Oval office and the Provos’ misery was complete.
Later that day, Bertie Ahern told Irish media correspondents that Sinn Fein faced “total exclusion” in the United States unless the IRA disbanded and ended criminality. Every leading U.S. figure he had spoken to, he said, wanted to “see action now”; patience in Washington was wearing thin.36 Ahern was quick to spot that the U.S. action had shifted the advantage away from Sinn Fein but the irony here is that prior to all this both his government’s officials and the British had been criticizing Mitchell Reiss for the decision to bar Adams from the White House. This was not the first or last time they would clash with the Bush envoy over his more muscular approach to the Provos. Nor had either the Irish or the British offered sympathy or support to the McCartney girls and neither government had attempted to pressurize the Sinn Fein leadership to turn over his killers. Only the Americans had helped the family.
Unknown to the public, the Americans had actually been much tougher on Adams. The U.S. administration had told Sinn Fein that any fund-raising by Gerry Adams or other figures during the St. Patrick’s Day festivities would be unwelcome and that if Adams persisted in his application for a fund-raising visa to cover the trip it would be rejected, with consequent embarrassment that would be impossible to hide. The Provos got the message and Adams quietly abandoned the bid, settling instead just for a visitor’s visa. When the Sinn Fein leader addressed hundreds of supporters at a trade union hall in New York, the plastic buckets that would usually have been passed around the crowd and filled with $20 and $50 notes were nowhere to be seen. The Robert McCartney murder was now hurting Sinn Fein in its most sensitive spot, its wallet.
The Provos had gone through a bruising time in America and the irony was that it all could have been avoided had Adams and his colleagues taken Jim Walsh’s advice and been “more aggressive” about getting to the bottom of the McCartney murder. So why hadn’t they done this?
From her close vantage point, Catherine McCartney suspects that, along with the Northern Bank robbery, Sinn Fein’s disastrous handling of her brother’s murder provided the IRA leadership with a route out of the decommissioning cul de sac: “If you look at it in the broader picture of Gerry Adams, the Northern Bank and then Robert’s murder, the pressure he was being put under. He knew the only thing he could offer was decommissioning… I would say that Sinn Fein manipulated Robert’s murder as much as anyone did to get themselves to a point where they knew they had to go and decommission. They knew they were going to have to do it, but never on Paisley’s terms.”
It was also, she believes, about policing and the fact that Sinn Fein knew that republicans would sometime soon have to sign up to the PSNI. “I think the thinkers in the party who could see the vacuum that they had left, squabbling over the police, that they couldn’t ride two horses for ever and couldn’t leave the Nationalist community in the hands of what essentially would be gangs. At the end of the day they could have had Robert’s murder solved within weeks had they wanted to and it wasn’t because of their love for ‘Jock’ Davison and that other crowd that they didn’t. It was for some other reason.”37
This was not the first time in the long and tortuous evolution of the peace process that the Adams leadership had used the IRA’s own excesses against itself, to curb the IRA and then manoeuvre, cajole and even compel the organization to take political paths that otherwise might never have been contemplated. Sometimes, as in the case of the Colombian adventure and the September 11 attacks which forced the beginning of decommissioning, the opportunity fell into their laps. At other times the matter appears more contrived. The endorsement of the IRA’s “human bomb” tactic in the autumn of 1990 by both Northern Command and the Army Council was an example of this. It was sanctioned at a time when Adams and other republicans were openly criticizing the IRA for military operations that alienated nationalist public opinion by killing civilians, yet despite all this the go-ahead was given. Predictably the tactic backfired badly. The first human bomb attack in Derry involved strapping a local Catholic in the driving seat of a bomb-laden van and exploding it at a checkpoint before he could escape. The operation carried appalling PR consequences for the IRA but these validated Adams’s criticisms of the conduct of the IRA’s war and profoundly undermined the Provos’ militarists to the advantage of those urging an alternative political course.
The murder of Robert McCartney arguably fell into the same category as Colombia and September 11, an unforeseeable event whose subsequent handling nonetheless assisted the move towards final decommissioning and the ending of all IRA activity. But was the Northern Bank raid the equivalent of the “human bomb” tactic of 1990, an operation approved by the IRA’s political leadership in the knowledge that its consequences would force the organization to contemplate far-reaching measures? Alongside the identity and motives of the traitor who betrayed the Eksund,
this is one of the more intriguing, unsolved mysteries of the Irish peace process.
BY THE TIME Gerry Adams left New York and Washington after the Saint Patrick’s Day holiday he had come very close to admitting that the IRA had indeed carried out the Northern Bank robbery and that it had been a bad mistake. As he told the Council on Foreign Relations meeting during a question-and-answer session following his speech: “The Northern Bank robbery was totally and absolutely wrong, it should not have happened, and any other actions that one could conceive of, and all, all because there is now an alternative. There’s now a way to move forward through entirely peaceable and democratic means.”38 Why, if the IRA had not robbed the bank, did Adams make reference to the existence of a peaceable and democratic alternative, presumably that offered by the peace process? These were words that only made sense in the context of IRA culpability for the raid.
He also used language about the Robert McCartney murder of a condemnatory quality and passion that, to say the least, was in sharp contrast to Sinn Fein and the IRA’s ducking and evasion back in Belfast: “And let me tell you about the killing of Robert McCartney. Sinn Fein did not kill Robert McCartney, and neither did the IRA. And the people, apart from Robert McCartney’s immediate family, who have been most angry and frustrated over this man’s death are people like myself, because I have given, as have many others, our entire lives—whatever people think about us, we’ve given our entire lives to this struggle. And for republicans—and there are rogue republicans; there are a very, very small number—to behave like thugs, to take this man’s life, to sully what we feel is our good name—and I have travelled extensively. I’ve been speaking from Cork to Tyrone, through Dublin, Wexford, and I can tell you the hundreds and thousands of Irish republicans feel exactly the same as I do. And the only way that the family will get justice is on their own terms: through a court, through people being held accountable for their actions… And what I have said very, very publicly—and I’ll put my reputation on the line—is that those people who did this should be man enough—should be man enough—if I had got myself, by some freak, caught up in this situation and I had been responsible for killing Robert McCartney and I had woken up the next day, I would have walked straight into whatever I thought was the appropriate body and admitted what I had done. That’s what I would do. I think that those who did this are behaving in a most cowardly way and are motivated entirely by self-preservation.”39
The message sent by Irish America and the Bush White House had hit home. “One, Sinn Fein does want to bring about an end to the IRA,” he went on to tell the Council on Foreign Relations. “Two, Sinn Fein, I think with others, will be successful in achieving that; and then, three, for Irish republicans, the alternative to the IRA has to be Sinn Fein.” Perhaps unwittingly, he went on to suggest that persuading the IRA rank and file would not be that difficult: “I found when we were on the cusp of last December that there was a huge, an emotional backlash against what we were trying to do, and not so much from what you would call IRA people—who seemed to be fairly, I suppose, philosophical that they, their leadership was going to move into this new phase and that they would go with it—but others who in some way maybe felt that the IRA represented them against the British, against British aggression, against the British army occupation and so on.”40
Adams and his Sinn Fein entourage departed the United States for Ireland on or around March 18, 2005. Just nineteen days later, on April 6, almost exactly a month before another Westminster election at which Sinn Fein hoped to complete the demolition of the SDLP, only thirteen weeks after the Northern Bank raid and just nine weeks after Robert McCartney’s killing, Adams began to do what he had promised at the Council on Foreign Relations conference. Flanked by elected and prospective Sinn Fein candidates gathered at Conway Mill in West Belfast and careful to use the word “we” when referring to Sinn Fein, and “you” when talking of the IRA, Adams urged the IRA leadership to fully embrace political methods. “The IRA”, he said, “is being used as the excuse [by rejectionists] not to engage properly in the process of building peace with justice in Ireland.”41
The Irish deputy prime minister, or tanaiste, Mary Harney, described the Conway Mill event as another example of Adams talking to himself, but nonetheless in due course, and to no one’s surprise, on July 28 the IRA announced an end to its campaign of armed struggle, ordered its volunteers to dump arms and to pursue republican goals by only peaceful means. It also disclosed that the decommissioning of IRA weapons would be completed quickly and verified by two clerical witnesses, one Catholic, the other Protestant. The Provisionals’ ever-slick publicity machine provided the electronic media with a DVD featuring long-time IRA prisoner Seanna Walsh reading the Army Council statement, an act that at an earlier time could conceivably have landed him in trouble with the police. Walsh was a former commander of IRA prisoners in the H Blocks who had shared a cell with Bobby Sands, the IRA icon, and taken part in the lengthy “blanket” and “no-wash” protests prior to the hunger strikes that claimed Sands’s life. Twice convicted of explosives offences, he had spent twenty-one of his forty-eight years on earth in prison and, finally released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, he had become a committed supporter of the Adams leadership.
In many ways Seanna Walsh was a prototypical Provisional IRA member, a fitting choice to declare an end to its armed struggle. He had joined the IRA after loyalists intimidated his family out of a mixed area of South Belfast, forcing them to flee to the safety of Catholic Short Strand. At around the same time a friend, Patrick McCrory, was shot dead by the loyalist paramilitary group the UDA. Like so many of his colleagues, especially in Belfast, Walsh’s motivation in becoming an IRA volunteer sprang as much from an obligation to protect his community and assert its rights as anything else. In its statement, the Army Council felt obliged to refer to the reason why the Provisional IRA had come into being in the first place and the fear that now there would be no one to perform that role: “The issue of the defence of nationalist and republican communities has been raised with us. There is a responsibility on society to ensure that there is no reccurrence of the pogroms of 1969 and the early 1970s.” In effect, the IRA was relinquishing its raison d’être and handing the job to others, not least the security forces under the control of the British government. In some respects these were the most meaningful words in its valedictory.
What was otherwise striking about the IRA announcement—the most far-reaching and significant since the birth of the Provisionals in 1970—was that the decision to end the war had not been taken at an Army Convention. For years the IRA’s political leaders had told all who would listen that only a Convention could declare an end to armed struggle, just as Martin McGuinness had assured republicans in early 1994 that a cease-fire would have to be ratified by a Convention. Not only was the cease-fire declared without such endorsement but the final act in the IRA’s life as an army of national liberation had been taken by seven men sitting in a room, after a consultation process amongst the IRA rank and file about whose outcome only the barest details were made known to them afterwards and which at all times was firmly under the control of those seven men or others acting for them. In its way, this is as good a metaphor as any for Gerry Adams’s leadership of the IRA and the way he and his colleagues brought them into war, and then out of it.
There only remained the matter of carrying out the decommissioning of the last of the IRA’s weapons. The weeks before and after the IRA’s statement were spent in scouring arms dumps throughout Ireland. General de Chastelain’s IICD issued certificates, valid on both sides of the Border, exempting anyone carrying IRA weapons from dumps from prosecution, should they be intercepted. The weaponry was deposited at central sites, warehouses, outbuildings and even houses where the IRA’s interlocutor with the IICD, Brian Keenan, oversaw the preparation of inventories to hand over to de Chastelain and his two colleagues for checking. Each IRA weapon, rocket-launcher, box of ammunition and packet of S
emtex explosives was numbered with a green tag.
On or around the weekend beginning September 17 the actual decommissioning process commenced and lasted for most of the following seven days. The two clerical witnesses, both approved by the IRA leadership, arrived to join de Chastelain and his two colleagues, the Finnish Brigadier Tauno Nieminen and the American diplomat Andrew Sens. One was the Revd Harold Good, a former Methodist president, a liberal and ecumenist who had long engaged the IRA in dialogue, and had persuaded its leadership to apologize for the bombings of “Bloody Friday”. Good was not the choice of most unionist politicians, who had argued that only a hard-line evangelist would be believed by their people. Nor would they have chosen the Catholic clerical witness. In some ways it was fitting that Father Alec Reid was there to witness what many regarded as the final act in the IRA’s life as an army since he had been there at the beginning of the peace process, back in 1982, when his dialogue with Gerry Adams began. Unionists would have great doubts about his part in the events, arguing that he was too credulous of the IRA. When a month later he said he still believed IRA denials of involvement in the Northern Bank robbery many of them felt their doubts had been well justified.