by Ed Moloney
In a very real sense the Sinn Fein leadership was right to make the claim, for a straight line can be drawn between the events of 1981, the Good Friday Agreement and everything else that happened during the peace process. Bobby Sands’s chance election as the MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone in a Westminster by-election had enabled the Provisional leadership to fast-forward what before the hunger strikes had been modest and long-term plans for Sinn Fein to become an electoral party. At a later stage in the protest, two other prisoners were elected to Dail Eireann at an Irish general election, and after Bobby Sands’s death another by-election was held in Fermanagh–South Tyrone, which was won by Sands’s polling agent, former teacher and Sinn Fein activist Owen Carron. That winter, after the hunger strikes had ended, Gerry Adams was able to go to the annual Sinn Fein Ard Fheis and, with Owen Carron on the platform as living proof of the viability of the tactic, win party support for the strategy of fighting elections while waging a violent war of national liberation. The so-called ballot box and Armalite strategy was born. A year later, Sinn Fein won seats to a new Northern Assembly and, with a political alternative to violence now available, shortly afterwards Gerry Adams began his talks with Father Alec Reid and the peace process was underway. The rest, as they say, is history—but none of it could have happened without the hunger strikes.
The deaths inside the H Blocks of the Maze prison in 1981, as well as outside, were relentless. An immovable British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, faced an irresistible force of republican hunger strikers and after Sands died, one by one, they went to their graves. The hunger strike was organized in such a way that it became a drip-feed of death, each hunger striker beginning his protest a week or so after the one before him. After Sands, the Tyrone IRA legend Francis Hughes died, and then on May 21 the third and fourth hunger strikers, South Armagh IRA man Raymond McCreesh and Derry INLA man Patsy O’Hara, who began their protest at the same time, died. After the fourth death a large gap, potentially six weeks long, opened up before the next likely death, slated to be Belfast IRA man Joe McDonnell. During this time the prisoners’ public relations officer, Richard O’Rawe, drafted a statement moderating the rhetoric of the prisoners’ demands, in particular dropping language about “political status,” a neuralgic term as far as the Thatcher government was concerned, and it was published on July 4. As he later wrote in his 2005 book Blanketmen, the effect of the statement was immediately to encourage the British to open negotiations. It is his account of what he knows of those negotiations that has proved to be so explosive for the Adams leadership.
According to his account, the day after the statement was made public, July 5, the commander of the IRA prisoners, Brendan “Bik” McFarlane was called out for a visit with Danny Morrison, the former Sinn Fein and IRA publicity director and a long-time member of the Adams think tank. McFarlane came back and in a “comm”, a message written on a cigarette paper sent down to his cell, he told O’Rawe that the British had begun confidential contact with the IRA leadership and had made an offer to end the hunger strike. Four of the prisoners’ five demands, including the crucial insistence that IRA prisoners be allowed to wear their own clothes instead of a prison uniform, could be granted if the protest ended. O’Rawe wrote that Morrison had said that a British intermediary, code-named “Mountain Climber”, who was believed to be an officer in British intelligence, had passed on the offer. O’Rawe and McFarlane, conversing in Irish for security reasons, discussed the offer for several hours and, concluding that 80 percent of the protesters demands had been met, they wrote a “comm” out to the IRA leadership saying that the prison leadership wanted to accept the British offer.
The response was a “comm” sent back from an IRA leader, code-named “Brownie”, saying that the British offer was regarded as inadequate, that four hunger strikers had died for much more and not for this offer.57 The Mountain Climber offer shriveled on the vine and three days after O’Rawe had learned of the British approach, Joe McDonnell died. The offer was briefly revived later in August, just before, at the request of hunger striker relatives, Gerry Adams visited the protesters in the hospital wing of the Maze prison. Adams outlined the renewed offer but declined to say that it was good enough for the protest to end or, on behalf of the Army Council, to order the men to end it as some relatives had wanted, and he left it to the prisoners to decide. Weighed down by the deaths of their comrades and the fear that ending the protest in such circumstances would amount to betrayal, they decided to carry on. By this stage six prisoners had died—Joe McDonnell and Martin Hurson had succumbed since the first Mountain Climber initiative, and a further four would die before the protest finally ended in early October.
The effect of the failure of the Mountain Climber initiative, both in early July and then in August, was that the hunger strike was still ongoing when on August 20, 1981, the second Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election was held. Sands had won the first by-election but on his death the seat became vacant. Since the Thatcher government had rushed through a law barring convicts from standing for parliament, Owen Carron, Sands’s Sinn Fein election agent, was put forward instead. The fact that the prison protest was still underway when election day dawned had enormous implications for the outcome. Sands and later Carron both contested the Fermanagh– South Tyrone seat on the basis of an informal understanding that as long as IRA men were on hunger strike, other nationalists, principally the SDLP, would agree to allow them a free run. In this way the seat was being “borrowed” by the H Block prisoners and once their protest was over normal politics in the constituency would resume. The fact that IRA men were starving to death and dying in defiance of Margaret Thatcher, a politician who was particularly disliked by all shades of Irish nationalist opinion, meant that there was a huge incentive on the part of the Catholic electorate of Fermanagh–South Tyrone to vote for Carron. The IRA leadership’s rejection of the Mountain Climber offer in July had ensured not just that the hunger strike would still be underway but that the by-election would be governed by the same local understanding that had applied during Sands’s election. On election day Owen Carron was not only the sole nationalist candidate standing, but the continuing threat of hunger-strike deaths brought thousands of nationalists out to vote for him. Had the hunger strike ended after nominations had closed, for instance when Adams had visited the prison hospital, the heat would have gone out of the situation and many nationalists, especially those in the constituency who usually voted for the SDLP, would not have felt the same pressure to support Carron. The result would almost certainly have been his defeat. But instead Carron was easily elected. One especially significant consequence of this was that Adams’s bid to win his party over to an electoral strategy was considerably strengthened. The import of O’Rawe’s assertion is that the hunger strikes were kept going longer than necessary, and six of the ten dead hunger strikers sacrificed so that Gerry Adams could lead Sinn Fein into electoral politics.
“Brownie”, the IRA leader who in O’Rawe’s account had advised the prisoners’ leaders not to accept the Mountain Climber proposal, was none other than Gerry Adams, using the same pen-name he had invented when imprisoned in the 1970s so that he could write pseudonymously articles for Republican News. At the time O’Rawe believed that Adams was writing to McFarlane on behalf of the Army Council but he now believes that Adams ran the protest on the Council’s behalf: “I have since learned that a subcommittee [of the Army Council] was designated to manage and monitor the hunger strike. Given that ‘comms’ were coming in two or three times a day it is simply not possible to believe that the Council could have been kept informed of all the developments. Could the Council even have met regularly during that turbulent period? Adams ran the whole show. He sent the ‘comms’ in. He read the ‘comms’ that came out. He talked to the ‘Mountain Climber’. He ran everything from A to Z. Nobody knows the hunger strike like he knows it.”58
In 1985, O’Rawe was asked by Adams, along with two other republicans, to sift through th
e IRA’s archive of “comms” from the 1981 hunger strikes and to remove any letter that made reference to the “Mountain Climber” and the role he had played. He was then to make the sanitized collection available to the Guardian reporter David Beresford, who was researching and writing what became his seminal book on the protest, Ten Men Dead. By mistake, one comm mentioning the secret British official was overlooked and in this way Beresford and the world learned of the Mountain Climber. Gerry Adams’s intention, according to O’Rawe, was to keep Mountain Climber’s role completely hidden. In the course of this task, O’Rawe also searched for the comm he and McFarlane had sent out accepting the British offer, only to find that it was not in the archive. Its absence, he wrote, “was surely significant.”59
The impact of O’Rawe’s book on the Provisionals was strengthened by the fact that he had street credibility with rank-and-file supporters. He was not one of the republican movement’s political enemies but a fellow former IRA man with a long family history of involvement in IRA politics. He had also been on the H Blocks’ “blanket” and “no wash” protests alongside those who had died and was sufficiently highly regarded to be appointed to the IRA’s prison staff. After his release from jail, he worked for a while in the Sinn Fein press office in Belfast and later supported the Adams peace process strategy. He decided, he said, to speak out about events that had weighed heavily with him for so long only when it had become clear that the IRA’s violence was over and no damage could be done to its war effort. At the time of the 1981 protest many republicans had been greatly troubled that the IRA leadership had allowed the hunger strike to last so long and that many prisoner deaths had been pointless. O’Rawe’s explanation of this period made a great deal of sense to them.
Publishing his account was certainly not cost-free. Some, including this writer, had advised him not to publish his book because of the personal vilification that he would suffer, but he persevered. And the vilification was intense, as he later described: “All of a sudden I was persona non grata, someone who was to be ostracized. The smears started. People who I had been friends with avoided me. One person who I shared a cell with on the blanket refused to speak to me. Friends I had all my life blanked me out and made it clear when I went in to a pub that I was not welcome in their company. The leadership apologists ‘cut the tripe out of me’ on television, radio, newspapers—anywhere they had the chance. They tried to attribute false motives to me. They said it was about money. All of this was bullshit.”60
Sinn Fein’s usually slick and well-coordinated publicity machine reacted clumsily to O’Rawe’s account. While Gerry Adams initially opted for silence, other aides contradicted and tripped over themselves. Bik McFarlane flatly denied there had been any offer from Mountain Climber or that the exchanges with O’Rawe described in Blanketmen had happened: “There was no concrete proposals whatsoever in relation to a deal,” he said.61 All that Morrison had told him, he maintained, was that the British had opened up a line of communication, but he, McFarlane, shouldn’t get his hopes up too high.
Morrison’s own account was very different. Mountain Climber had indeed made an offer, he said, which he had outlined to McFarlane, but the deal had stalled when a request from the prisoners that the British verify and confirm the offer was turned down.62 McFarlane insisted there was no deal, while Morrison said there was one but it was killed off by the British, not the Adams leadership. Later, on an RTE television documentary, Gerry Adams claimed, to general astonishment, that he hadn’t known or heard of Mountain Climber until after the hunger strikes.63 O’Rawe has since let it be known that he has independent verification of his exchange with McFarlane and will release it if necessary. As the battle between them continued, the hugely damaging accusation that the peace process strategy was constructed on a foundation consisting of the graves of six republican hunger strikers who needn’t and shouldn’t have died was fated to hang forever over Gerry Adams’s head.
AT MOMENTS OF crisis during the years of the peace process and especially when the IRA was singled out for blame, the Sinn Fein leadership was fond of shifting responsibility instead on to British “securocrats,” so-called bureaucratic elements in the security establishment who, supposedly because of self-interest and hatred of the Provisionals, had set out to sabotage the process. The term began to appear in the Provo lexicon in 1995, around the time that the Washington Three decommissioning conditions were promulgated by the then Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew. It was apparently borrowed from South Africa where the ANC, long-time allies and friends of the IRA, had coined the term to describe elements in the apartheid system who were resisting change.64 As the peace process continued and its problems multiplied so did the frequency of the word in Sinn Fein speeches and statements. The securocrats were blamed for the Castlereagh break-in and for Stormontgate in particular. Way back in 1997, Gerry Adams even blamed them for suggesting he was on the IRA’s Army Council. Asked who these securocrats were, he replied: “Whether it’s the London civil servant who coordinates security, or the head of the RUC or the British generals, or whether it’s the people in MI5 or MI6 who don’t have another pot to stir, there are people who want to stick with the old security agenda rather than move to a new political agenda.”65 Blaming “securocrats” served a double purpose for the IRA and Sinn Fein: it conveyed the impression that republicans were still in struggle with the British while suggesting that if the British security establishment wished to destroy the peace process, then the strategy had to be injurious to British interests.
The existence of often compelling evidence to the contrary was never a deterrent to the claim being trotted out by Sinn Fein figures. For example, the “head of the RUC,” or at least the RUC‘s assistant chief constable at the time Gerry Adams offered his definition of a securocrat, was Sir Ronnie Flanagan who, in 1995, publicly expressed the very un-securocrat thought that the best possiblity of ensuring peace was if organizations like the IRA remained intact and under the control of their leaderships. When the issue of IRA decommissioning began to assume greater importance in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the staunchest critics of those insisting the IRA had to disarm before Sinn Fein could enter government was Michael Oatley, an MI6 officer who had had many dealings over the years with senior IRA figures as far back as the mid-1970s, and who was said to have used the “Mountain Climber” code-name at one point. He wrote of the decommissioning demand: “This tactic might be described as the picador approach to introducing a terrorist organization to the attractions of the political arena. No doubt, if sufficient barbs are thrust into its flanks, the animal will eventually, with reluctance, charge. The picadors can then claim the beast was always a ravening monster.”66 As for the other branch of British intelligence, MI5, its agents had worked with the FBI to persuade David Rupert to infiltrate the Real IRA and to bring Michael McKevitt to court on terrorist charges after the Good Friday Agreement was concluded. An MI5 committed to destroying the peace process would surely have left the Real IRA and McKevitt alone. Former RUC and PSNI Special Branch commander Chief Superintendent Bill Lowry also claimed that MI5 had pressured him to minimize the scale of the Stormontgate spying operation so as not to damage the Adams leadership, and he furthermore disclosed that in 1996, at the time of the crucial IRA Convention and Adams’s clash with Michael McKevitt, the Special Branch successfully stopped a number of anti-Adams delegates from getting to the meeting. As it was, Adams survived the Convention by the skin of his teeth but he might not have without the assistance of Bill Lowry and the Special Branch securocrats.67
Nor did it matter if, from time to time, the Sinn Fein accusations were so wide of the mark they embarrassed those making them. In the midst of the furore caused by the Northern Bank robbery, two of the Provisionals’ most senior figures, Martin McGuinness and Pat Doherty, launched an assault on the Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Joe Pilling, for remarks he had made during a trip to the United States. Doherty said: “
The NIO’s top securocrat, Joe Pilling stated, at what he thought was a private meeting in the US in October, that the worst case scenario would be that Sinn Fein would become the largest party in the North and that the priority was to stop this happening. The full frontal onslaught now being rolled out against Sinn Fein is therefore no coincidence.”68 McGuinness added: “This is the NIO line of the last 30 years. It is a position of failure and it is evidence of a British system that seeks the defeat of Irish republicanism.”69 Pilling was the NIO’s most senior official at the time of the Good Friday Agreement negotiations and it was largely at his urging that the issue of IRA decommissioning was decoupled from the release of IRA prisoners.70 Thanks to him, hundreds of IRA prisoners got out of jail without their leaders having to surrender as much as a single bullet. If Pilling truly was a securocrat and was seeking the defeat of the peace process strategy, would he have done this?
Without a doubt there were elements within the security forces, especially locally raised units, whose hostility to the Provisionals would have been sufficiently deep to tempt them into acts of sabotage against the Adams project. But it hardly makes sense to suggest that at an institutional or leadership level, MI5, MI6, military intelligence or the RUC/PSNI Special Branch would share this animosity. The IRA’s campaign of violence was, after all, being brought to an end on terms that in the past would have been dismissed as impossibly modest, and since it was the IRA’s own leaders who were winding up the armed struggle, it was coming to an end with a certainty and finality that no amount of security successes could have guaranteed. Far from obstructing this process, it was entirely in the interests of the British security establishment that they should lend a helping hand.