by Ed Moloney
Although these two clerics would be witnesses, the same confidentiality restriction that had bedevilled earlier phases of the decommissioning process applied to what they could say now and what the IICD could reveal. For much of the next week, the IICD members and the witnesses were ferried from one location to another in a blacked-out van. “I spent a lot of the time on the road asleep,” Father Reid said later. “We could not see where we were going. We did not know where we were going. And we didn’t want to know.”42 The Redemptorist priest would later reveal that decommissioning took place at nine locations altogether.43 As for the process itself, de Chastelain was guarded: “I can only tell you that we worked a number of days, and long hours. I am not looking for sympathy, but it was six in the morning, until late at night, with the three of us involved at each event. Brigadier Nieminen and I have handled every weapon that was put beyond use, to examine it, to identify it… counting, weighing.”44
According to the later account provided by Father Reid to the Irish Times, the process was at times even convivial: “We were very well looked after, I can tell you that… We had two or three picnics. We would be working away and one of the IRA people would shout, ‘Come on, we’ll get a few sandwiches’. They had sandwiches, flasks of hot water, coffee and all kinds of bits and pieces, cups of soup… we would chat.”45
But when it came to the sort of detail that could overcome deep unionist skepticism about the process, none of the salient facts were made public by de Chastelain or the two witnesses. Key questions such as where decommissioning took place, how many events there were during that week, what weaponry and how much of the IRA’s arsenal was put beyond use went unanswered. The most important aspect of all, how the weapons were decommissioned, has never been revealed and is still a matter of intense speculation. The IICD will only say that the decommissioning was done in a way consistent with its legal obligation to put weapons “permanently inaccessible or beyond use.” Two of the most obvious ways of destroying weapons, blowing them up or cutting them into pieces with heavy industrial saws, as happened to some of the Loyalist Volunteer Force’s weapons in December 1998, can presumably be eliminated, the first on the grounds that it would have been hard to keep such events from public notice, and the second because it would have been just too impractical. Nor is it likely that weapons were dumped at sea since the limited accounts suggest land-based activity.
Security sources suggest that guns, bullets, rocket-launchers and the like may have been plunged into fast-setting concrete while explosives like Semtex were boiled away in water.46 But this possibility raises as many questions as it answers. Where was the concrete, in holes in the ground or in containers, and if the latter, what happened to them, where are they now? Would it be possible to separate the weapons from the concrete after the IICD had departed? Did the IICD stay around to ensure the concrete had set solidly? Where are the sites and are they secure? And so on.
The same lack of clarity surrounds the amount of weaponry decommissioned and the question of whether or not the IRA had given up all its weaponry. The IICD’s remit said that records of what had been decommissioned could be publicly released only when the entire process had ended and since neither of the two largest loyalist groups have, at the time of writing, even started to give up their weapons it may be a very long time before that happens. De Chastelain maintained that the weapons put beyond use related to the inventories of IRA weaponry provided by security force intelligence on both sides of the Border. But these inventories described ranges of quantities, not precise quantities. Only in the case of the Libyan weaponry could the authorities be confident that they knew more or less exactly what was in the IRA’s arsenals. In the 1990s, the Libyan leader Colonel Qaddafi had handed over to the British Foreign Office manifests of weapons he had supplied to the IRA as part of his effort to rehabilitate himself with the West, and the authorities needed only to subtract from this the weaponry used up or captured to work out what was left. But how could it be known how much the IRA had in its dumps before this or what weapons were smuggled in afterwards?
It came down to accepting de Chastelain’s assurances that he believed the IRA had told him the truth. “We are talking about flame-throwers, surface-to-air missiles, we are talking about rocket-propelled grenades, both commercial and home-made; heavy machine guns, all of the things you have seen in the papers. Of course, we have no way of knowing for certain that the IRA hasn’t retained arms. But it is our understanding from discussing with them and our belief in what we had done that they were sincere when they said that. This time, when we said, ‘Is this everything?’, they said, ‘Yes, this is everything’. That certainly wasn’t the case two years ago.”47 Although skeptical unionists were unconvinced, there could be little doubt that an awful lot of weaponry had been put out of commission and with it the IRA’s ability to resume war.
Two weeks later, at a public meeting in South Belfast jointly hosted by the Reverend Good, Father Alec Reid described one incident at the end of the week they had spent with the IRA and the IICD which did more than anything else said or written to convince the outside world that something of significance had indeed happened: “I was surprised, you know, we used to go to these sites and you have all this war material, if you like, guns and explosives and bullets and all this kind of thing, all very carefully prepared, most of it with tags, all numbered by the IRA people so that the three people, the three commissioners then were given an inventory of everything that was there with a number and all that.
“It was very, very well prepared. But one of the first things I saw was this man carrying a Kalashnikov and as far as I could see it was loaded and I was wondering, ‘In the name of God’, you know? I noticed that he was kind of the lookout as well, and he had this thing either over his shoulder or carrying it in his hand. And everywhere we went, there was a man out there with, this Kalashnikov was there and you could see it was loaded.
“So, I began to wonder, were they afraid the dissidents would come in and try and rob the guns? In the end, I picked up that they were defending the site but particularly defending the three commissioners. They were providing a bodyguard if you like. But then at the end of the, the very last act, this gun, the bullets were taken out of it and it was handed over to General de Chastelain by the senior IRA person, the person who was in charge of the whole operation of the decommissioning.
“And it was kind of a significant moment, that this was the last gun, and the man handing it over was quite emotional. He was aware, I think, that this was the last gun.”48
TO CLAIM THAT that the IRA’s July statement or the final decommissioning carried out in September 2005 were greeted with universal acclaim would be something of an exaggeration. Many unionists, for one, were still inclined to cast a deeply skeptical eye on anything and everything the Provos said or did. By this stage it was also apparent that the Northern Bank raid, the murder of Robert McCartney and its subsequent cover-up, added to all the IRA’s previous escapades, had had a cumulatively corrosive impact on a wider section of opinion, on both sides of the Border. While the IRA’s words were welcome and de Chastelain’s assurances widely accepted, experience had taught many the foolishness of immediately accepting that the IRA was for real. Not only that but the IRA’s and Sinn Fein’s lies over the bank robbery had been pretty transparent. While there were understandable doubts over the identity of the culprits behind Castlereagh and a possibility that “Stormontgate” may have been contrived or exaggerated by the British, robbing banks was something the IRA did. Sinn Fein and the IRA were also badly affected by their handling of the McCartney murder. The brutality and cold-blooded nature of the killers contrasted starkly with the dignity of the dead man’s sisters as they campaigned for justice in Ireland, America and Europe, winning plaudits for their courage and persistence. By not taking assertive action against McCartney’s killers, Gerry Adams and others in the Provo leadership were widely perceived to be shielding the worst sort of thugs. What that did was to r
aise up again an image of the republican movement that had been seemingly banished years before. If the Northern Bank and the McCartney murder had helped the Adams leadership throw the IRA monkey off their backs, the events were also the first in a long catalogue of woes for the republican movement that would stretch over the next two years and prick the image of invincibility.
Gerry Adams had timed his call to the IRA to step down a month before the May 2005 Westminster election and while he denied this was deliberately done with an eye to the polls, it was obvious that Sinn Fein hoped his speech would give the party a boost and even help it finish off the SDLP. The Provos were casting a hungry eye on two of the SDLP’s three House of Commons seats: Newry and Armagh, whose incumbent, the former SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon, had retired from politics, and Foyle, the seat held by John Hume for decades and now being defended by the new, less than charismatic SDLP leader Mark Durkan, against Sinn Fein’s Mitchel McLaughlin. Of the two seats it was Foyle that the Provos coveted most of all. The third SDLP seat, South Down, held by Eddie McGrady, was thought unwinnable this time round, but in four or five years’ time, when McGrady had retired and if Sinn Fein worked hard, it might fall into the party’s lap. If everything went well Sinn Fein could end up with six seats at Westminster to the SDLP’s one. But it didn’t work out like that at all. Newry and Armagh fell to Sinn Fein as expected, but in Foyle, Durkan easily beat McLaughlin, much to the consternation of the Provos, who managed to secure only two votes for every three cast for Durkan. In addition, the SDLP was a surprise victor in the usually safe Ulster Unionist seat of South Belfast, where Alastair McDonnell, the new SDLP deputy leader, was the beneficiary of a split unionist vote and some tactical voting against the Sinn Fein candidate, Alex Maskey, who had distanced the IRA from the McCartney killing by attempting to describe it as the result of knife culture as opposed to IRA thuggery. The election ended with Sinn Fein holding five seats at Westminster to the SDLP’s three, a result that consolidated Provo support but which was far from the romp their strategists had anticipated.
There was compelling evidence that the bank robbery and the McCartney killing had also tarnished some of the lustre on Sinn Fein in the South, where a general election was to be held in May 2007. Sinn Fein had targeted the Republic for significant electoral growth and if that worked out and the party polled as well as its leaders hoped, then Sinn Fein might even be in line for cabinet seats as part of a coalition government before the decade was out. In October 2004 an opinion poll carried out for the Irish Times by TNS MRBI showed Sinn Fein winning the support of 12 percent of the electorate, making it the fourth largest party in the state, and Gerry Adams scoring a 51-point leadership approval rating with voters, only 2 percent behind that of the prime minister, Bertie Ahern.49 At that point the party could be confident that it was well on target. Events in the North then intervened, but self-inflicted disaster in the South also hit the Provisionals. In early February, just as the McCartney scandal was building up steam, five Dublin men were convicted of IRA membership after they were found in a van used for Sinn Fein electioneering in possession of a sledgehammer, a stun gun, pickaxe handles and CS gas spray, along with election posters for Aengus O Snodaigh, the Sinn Fein TD for Dublin South, Central.50 The previous November, Niall Binead, also an election worker for O Snodaigh, was convicted of IRA membership and his trial was told he was running a spying operation targeted at government ministers and TDs.51
The impact of all this was soon evident in the opinion polls. By March 2005, Sinn Fein’s support had plummeted by a quarter down to 9 percent, while Adams had suffered a catastrophic fall in his approval rating to 30 points, the lowest since it was first measured.52 If the Provos were hoping that ending its war and then completing the decommissioning process, would help Sinn Fein retrieve all this lost ground, they were to be disappointed. By May 2006, nearly eighteen months after the Northern Bank robbery, Sinn Fein’s support was still at 9 percent, while Adams’s rating had risen only to 39 points.53 Towards the end of September, a Sunday Business Post poll put Sinn Fein at 8 percent, while an Irish Examiner survey conducted at around the same time showed an alarming drop in Sinn Fein’s support in Dublin, where the party would have to do well in order to grow to just 5 percent.
THE NORTHERN BANK raid and the McCartney killing had tarnished the Provos with a criminal image and their enemies in the South, in particular the combative justice minister, Michael McDowell, rarely missed a chance to remind voters of the Provos’ criminality and supposed links to cross-Border smuggling, money-laundering and counterfeiting. Nobody in the Provisional movement was more associated with the label of criminality than its chief of staff, South Armagh IRA veteran Tom “Slab” Murphy, whom the British and Irish authorities had long believed ran a fuel-smuggling empire from the family farm in Ballybinaby, which literally straddles the Border. In May 2004 the BBC named him as the UK’s richest smuggler, with a fortune estimated at between £35 and £40 million.54 Throughout the years of the IRA cease-fire the British and Irish governments had resisted pressure, especially from the Bush White House, to pursue “Slab” Murphy on the grounds that to do so would alienate a key figure on the Army Council and possibly set the IRA in South Armagh against the Adams peace project. In early October 2005, just days after the IRA had decommissioned the last of its weapons, officers from the British Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) raided businesses in Manchester while their Irish counterparts, the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), raided premises in Dundalk, just south of the Border. Briefings from CAB sources suggested that they suspected that “Slab” Murphy had built up a significant property portfolio in Britain to launder the proceeds of cross-Border smuggling and the raids were aimed at discovering evidence against him.55 In November 2006, nine Manchester properties worth £1.25 million owned by Slab Murphy’s brother, Francis, were frozen by a court order sought by the ARA.
Six months later, in March 2006, some 300 police officers, backed by British and Irish troops, raided Slab Murphy’s farm in South Armagh. The IRA’s chief of staff was given a few minutes’ notice of the raid and slipped through the security cordon, leaving behind a half-eaten breakfast on the kitchen table. The police seized nearly £700,000 in cash and cheques, twelve vehicles, some 30,000 cigarettes and fuel from the farm. During the raid, a preliminary income tax assessment of £3.5 million, based on his estimated smuggling income over the years, was left beside Murphy’s breakfast plate.56 This would have to be paid unless Slab could prove that his income was less than the estimate and that would necessitate airing the smuggling allegations in court, possibly opening the way to criminal proceedings. Following the raid Gerry Adams publicly threw his weight behind the IRA’s chief of staff: “Tom Murphy is not a criminal. He’s a good republican… and very importantly he is a key supporter of Sinn Fein’s peace strategy and has been for a very long time.” Slab also denied the allegations, but as he fled his breakfast table that March morning it would be surprising if the thought had not crossed his mind that no one, least of all Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness, had told him that losing his fortune was part of the peace process script.
What the moves against Slab Murphy signified in unequivocal fashion was that when the IRA decommissioned the last of its weapons, the consideration and protection they had afforded its leaders had evaporated, along with the implied threat they represented of renewed armed struggle. Also gone, but only if the British and Irish governments had the necessary political will, was Sinn Fein’s excessively generous leverage in the political process. For years the republican party’s unionist and nationalist opponents had complained that when Sinn Fein came to the negotiating table there was a metaphorical gun hidden under their seats and stacks of real ones piled outside the door. Not any more.
MARCH 1, 2005, was the twenty-fourth anniversary of the day that Bobby Sands began his sixty-six-day-long hunger strike to the death, and the Sinn Fein leadership—as they did every year at this time—were making ready to remember his sacrifice and that
of his nine comrades in speeches, rallies and marches around Ireland that would last until August. They were also gearing up to make the next year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1981 hunger strikes, one of constant commemoration and celebration of the ten dead hunger strikers who had perished during that never-to-be-forgotten year. It was also the day of publication of a book, written by one of Bobby Sands’s prison colleagues, that would challenge the most cherished assumption of the hunger strikes and shake the Sinn Fein leadership, Gerry Adams in particular, to its core. Remembering the hunger strikers would never be the same again for many republicans who had lived through it.
The ten dead hunger strikers were the Provisional IRA’s icons, the equivalent for the modern-day IRA of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion executed by the British in the wake of their failed rising. Just as the martyrs of 1916 were venerated for having inspired the war of independence of 1919–21 that followed, so the hunger strikers were presented by the Sinn Fein leadership as the forerunners of the peace process strategy, their names and memories invoked in support of the Adams leadership at every occasion. The hunger strikers had been protesting at the British government’s determination to treat them as criminals and their campaign for political status—especially their willingness to starve themselves to death to achieve it—had helped validate the IRA in the eyes of its supporters and had reverberated around the world. The protest had five demands: the right to wear civilian clothes, the right not to do prison work, the right of free association, the right to receive weekly parcels and visits and unlimited letters and the return of remission lost during a five-year protest during which IRA prisoners would wear only a blanket and refused to slop out, instead smearing the walls of their cells with excreta. In 2005, as in every year since the 1994 cease-fire, the memory of the hunger strikers was employed to legitimize the IRA’s modern, non-military methods and strategy.