A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Donaldson drove other long-time Noraid activists to the margins of the group, people who were hard-line republicans and potential obstacles to the Adams peace process strategy. Important projects were sabotaged, like a proposed hunger strike movie starring Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. Whenever complaints were sent to Belfast, Ted Howell would invariably leap to his defence, saying, “Denis has tremendous Army credentials,… he was impeccable.”86 The clues that Donaldson was not what he seemed to be are evident in hindsight. He was never harassed by the FBI, was allowed to travel freely back and forth to Ireland and spoke openly about IRA matters on the telephone. He also took long trips to Cincinnati, allegedly to visit relatives but possibly to meet his handlers—but no one checked. His successor, Hugh Feeney, one of the 1973 London bombers, was by contrast arrested not long after his arrival in the United States and deported.

  Megahey opposed the Adams strategy but later moved back into the leadership camp when the U.S. government threatened to deport him because of a prison term he had served for attempting to buy a surface-to-air missile from an FBI agent. Galvin quit his Noraid positions in 1994 after the first IRA cease-fire and following his departure Noraid was gradually run down and replaced by Friends of Sinn Fein (FoSF), a business-friendly, distinctly IRA-free support and fund-raising group. While Noraid had led street protests against British policy, raised money for IRA causes and sheltered IRA fugitives from Ireland, FoSF lobbied corporate Irish-America and politicians in Congress. Sinn Fein moved out of the backrooms of bars in the Bronx into the boardrooms of Park Avenue and Donaldson helped do the groundwork. Had his handlers really been out to undermine the peace process then it is more likely they would have instructed him to bolster Megahey, Galvin and other hard-liners in Noraid rather than undermine them.

  BY THE TIME Denis Donaldson was revealed as a British spy, the IRA was powerless to take action against him, at least officially. To have done so, in the post-Northern Bank/Robert McCartney atmosphere, would have been such a serious breach of the cease-fire that it could have sunk Sinn Fein entirely. Although this example of IRA impotence against the work of British intelligence was a persuasive index of the changed times, the Provisionals had long employed double standards when it came to dealing with informers. While someone like Freddie Scappaticci, who had done more damage to the IRA than a dozen spies put together, had been allowed to live in order to spare the Adams leadership any embarrassment, others, like twenty-four-year-old Seamus Morgan from Dungannon, County Tyrone, were not so fortunate. Morgan’s crime against the IRA was to betray an empty arms dump and he paid for it with his life. He was shot dead and his body thrown by a roadside near Forkhill, County Armagh, in March 1982, his hands tied behind his back and white tape wrapped tightly over his eyes. His captors fed him whisky and vodka while he cried over photos of his children before his life was abruptly ended.87 The human rights group British Irish Rights Watch lists Seamus Morgan as one of Scap’s many victims.88

  Donaldson appears to have believed that the days of the IRA killing traitors had gone forever. There seems to be no other explanation for his decision not just to stay in Ireland but to move to the Glenties, in County Donegal, to an area frequented by republicans and not far from a part of the county—one of Ireland’s most beautiful and remote areas—that had been dubbed “Costa del Provo” by the media. In fact the abundance of holiday homes owned by IRA and Sinn Fein leaders included a four-bedroom, £150,000 summer retreat in Gortahork built by Gerry Adams.89

  Donaldson settled in a cottage some eight kilometers from Glenties on a remote bog road and it was there in mid-March 2006 that he was tracked down by a reporter from the Northern tabloid newspaper the Sunday World, who briefly interviewed him. Still denying there had been a Stormont spy ring, Donaldson opined: “All conflicts end in political solutions—it’s the only way.” Asked about his future, he replied, gesturing around him: “This is it.”90 The last person to see Denis Donaldson alive was sheep farmer Pat Bonner, who saw him driving his car in the midmorning of April 3, 2006. On the afternoon of the next day, Donaldson was found dead, lying near the front door of his cottage. A shotgun blast from close range had taken part of his right arm off and two spent cartridges were lying on the floor.

  The IRA quickly issued a statement denying any part in his death. The authorities on both sides of the Border now believe that IRA members did kill him but that the operation was probably not authorized by the leadership. Gerry Adams issued a statement dissociating “Sinn Fein and indeed all those republicans who support the peace process” from the killing.

  Even if the IRA Army Council had authorized Donaldson’s killing, Gerry Adams and his closest colleagues had contrived a way to avoid any suggestion they had been involved in the decision. Around the time of the July 2005 IRA statement that formally ended the armed campaign, Adams, McGuinness and Kerry Sinn Fein TD Martin Ferris had all quit the Army Council and three veteran activists, Bernard Fox, a former hunger striker from Belfast, Brian Arthurs from County Tyrone and Martin Lynch from Belfast, had replaced them. At the same time a seriously ill Brian Keenan was replaced by Sean “Spike” Murray, a Belfast activist who had succeeded Martin McGuinness as Northern commander in 1996. This move was designed to finally cleanse the Adams–McGuinness leadership of any IRA traces and to end damaging speculation about the Sinn Fein politicians’ part in future IRA actions—but it was a fiction. According to republican sources, Adams and McGuinness continued to control the Army Council, but from behind the throne. “Have you ever met [IRA chief of staff] Slab?” asked one former activist. “If you had you would know that he needs their advice and counsel, he’s that type. No IRA volunteer I know of has ever met Slab by himself. He always has someone with him to explain and guide him and it’s the same with the Army Council.”91 At least one of the three replacements, Bernard Fox, eventually realized the scale of the fraud and resigned in protest, but not before harsh words were exchanged with Martin McGuinness and Brian Keenan.92

  It had been an annus horribilis or two for Gerry Adams and his colleagues in the Provisional leadership, but it did not end with Donaldson’s killing. In a burst of exuberance after Sinn Fein’s electoral triumphs, the West Belfast-based Andersonstown News group, publishers of weekly community papers and an Irish-language paper, unveiled a new, all-Ireland daily paper in January 2005 that would aggressively promote an Irish republican view of the world. Daily Ireland was a barely disguised platform for Sinn Fein and its appearance invited comparisons with the now defunct Irish Press group which had been founded by Eamon de Valera and supported his Fianna Fail party. Although a formal association was denied, the fact that, for example, its managing director Mairtin O Muilleoir was a former Belfast Sinn Fein councillor strengthened the suspicion. Irish justice minister Michael McDowell openly linked the Provos with the paper and compared it to the Nazi party newspaper Volkischer Beobachter.

  If the founders of Daily Ireland imagined there was a market hungry for the Sinn Fein gospel, as there had been for de Valera’s Irish Press, they were to be sadly mistaken. The paper never managed to sell more than 10,000 copies a day, a miserable tally compared to other Irish newspapers: the Irish Independent’s circulation is around 160,000, the Irish Times has sales of 117,000 and the Irish News, which circulates only in Northern Ireland, sells 50,000 copies a day. Daily Ireland wasn’t even approaching a break-even point and in September 2006, after just 475 issues, the paper folded. Mairtin O Muilleoir blamed the British for refusing to allow Daily Ireland to tender for public service advertisements, thus starving the paper of revenue. The British responded by saying that the paper’s circulation was too low to be considered viable and pointed out that the Northern Ireland Office had given £556,000 in grants to the Andersontown News and £368,000 to the group’s Irish publication.93 The real reason Daily Ireland collapsed was because it failed to attract enough readers and that was a depressing message for Sinn Fein. It raised some troubling questions for the party’s leaders: was Sinn Fein’s
popularity based on its ability to guide the IRA into peace rather than its politics? And once the IRA had completed that journey, would people still vote for Sinn Fein?

  Three days after two shotgun barrels ended Denis Donaldson’s life, British premier Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern travelled to Armagh city to announce one more initiative. The suspended Assembly would be revived in mid-May and a deadline of November 24 set for agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP. If there was no deal by then, the Good Friday Agreement would be shelved. On May 22, Gerry Adams stood up in the Assembly chamber and nominated lan Paisley as first minister and Martin McGuinness as his deputy. Paisley’s response was curt. “Certainly not,” he replied. The circle had been closed. In 1964, riots over an Irish tricolour displayed in the window of a republican election office on the Falls Road, fomented by Ian Paisley, had persuaded a sixteen-year-old Gerry Adams to join the IRA’s junior wing. Forty-two years later they would once again be joined, but in a way neither could ever have imagined or foreseen.

  In the weeks that followed, the DUP and Sinn Fein jostled for advantage in the talks that everyone knew would take place in the autumn, notwithstanding Paisley’s abrupt rebuff of Adams. Speculation that the Provo leaders would sign up to the new policing arrangements intensified but there could be no doubt that, like the cease-fires, the Good Friday Agreement, the principle of consent and IRA decommissioning beforehand, grassroots reservations would be skilfully managed to ensure a result already decided by the leadership.

  In the late summer of 2006, republican circles in Northern Ireland were alive with stories of seasoned activists finally quitting the cause they had spent their adult lives serving. But no one expected them to flock to the dissidents or foment rebellion. It was far too late for any of that. As old comrades left, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness donned the mantle of international peacemakers, shrugged off the unresolved problems of Northern Ireland and strutted the global stage to offer their services— Adams in the Basque country to help broker a cease-fire between ETA and the Spanish government, and as a conduit between Israel and Hamas; while Martin McGuinness journeyed to Sri Lanka to urge the Tamil Tigers to learn the lessons of the Irish peace process and end its war.

  As for the IRA, one well-placed security source offered this judgement: “They are adhering to the bargain. Their civil administration is not giving out punishment beatings, there is no major criminality, recruitment has stopped, we assume they have a handful of guns for self-protection but weapons are no longer an issue. They see the future entirely as being political.94

  In this sense it really didn’t matter whether or not there was a deal between the DUP and Sinn Fein. After thirty-five bloody years and nearly 4,000 deaths, the war was finally and undeniably over.

  EPILOGUE

  “Turning the Titanic in a Bathtub”

  By the autumn of 2006 the Northern Ireland peace process had set a record for longevity which only the halting and often half-hearted attempts to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could come near to equalling in modern times. By the most conservative criterion, the process had lasted twelve years at this point—that is from the IRA cease-fire of 1994 onwards. But if the starting date is taken as late 1982 when Father Reid and Gerry Adams began talking then the process is much, much longer.

  By this calculation it had really lasted twenty-four years, which is longer than America’s involvement in Vietnam and means that almost two thirds of the thirty-six years that the Troubles in Northern Ireland had lasted were spent in an effort to bring them to an end. Even by the more orthodox metric of twelve years, it was an inordinately protracted process, three times longer than the First World War and twice that of the Second World War. There cannot have been many peace processes in history that took longer to consummate than some of the worst global conflicts.

  The two prime ministers centrally involved in the process, Britain’s Tony Blair and Ireland’s Bertie Ahern, spent their entire period in office, from the summer of 1997 onwards, attempting to push it over the finishing line. In Blair’s case he still could not be sure that the job would have been accomplished by the time he was scheduled to leave Downing Street in the summer of 2007.

  The sheer scale of the task and Gerry Adams’s finely honed instinct for caution and self-preservation explain the glacial pace of the process in the years up to the 1994 cease-fire and the Good Friday Agreement. The huge ideological compromises that would be involved, the decades of bloodletting, suffering and sacrifices that would have to be pushed to one side and the very real risks of a bloody split in those early years were testament to the magnitude of Adams’s achievement, even if dissembling and manipulation were among the tools he used. One Protestant friend of the Sinn Fein leader, a Presbyterian minister, put it well when he compared what Adams had done to “Turning the Titanic in a bathtub.”1

  The years after the Good Friday Agreement are a different matter. It is difficult to examine the evidence from those years and not conclude that the slow pace of events, especially regarding IRA decommissioning, were, on the part of the Sinn Fein and IRA hierarchy, deliberately contrived to destabilize moderate unionism and secure nationalist electoral dominance for Sinn Fein. But none of this would have been possible without the goodwill of the British and Irish governments whose indulgence of the Provo leadership in these years was the direct consequence of a flawed reading of the IRA’s internal politics.

  Those chickens came home to roost, as one day they would have to, in the second week of October 2006 in a five-star hotel in St. Andrews, Fife, on the east coast of Scotland. The venue was chosen for yet another all-party conference on the peace process on the grounds that agreement might be easier to achieve the farther away the participants were from Belfast.

  And against all the odds an agreement did emerge. The bulk of the talking was done—virtually all of it through intermediaries—between the DUP and Sinn Fein, and between them and the two governments. The result was a deal that would restore the power-sharing Executive by the end of March 2007, an event that would be preceded by another election. If, as expected, the DUP and Sinn Fein emerged as the largest two parties, then Ian Paisley would become the first minister and Martin McGuinness his deputy.

  The success of the deal, that is the DUP’s willingness to share power with Sinn Fein, hinged entirely upon the readiness of the Provos to accept the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), and written into the small print of the deal was a pledge of office which the first and deputy first minister would have to swear, “endorsing fully the PSNI and the criminal justice system.” Recognition of the partitioned state would then be complete but in order to do that, Sinn Fein would have to stage a special Ard Fheis to approve the move.

  This endgame was the logical outcome of the journey undertaken by Gerry Adams and those around him, but there were other compelling reasons to believe that the Provo leadership saw many advantages in signing up to the PSNI. There were plans to enlarge the part-time Reserve inherited from the RUC by up to 2,500 members and the rules stipulated that these should be recruited from areas where there were very few existing reservists.2 This meant that nationalist areas, especially those where the Provos were strongest, such as West Belfast, would provide the bulk of these new recruits. By design or default, many would be loyal to the Sinn Fein leadership and some even members of the IRA. The Provos were also heavily involved in a number of Community Restorative Justice schemes, low-level efforts to eradicate minor crime, and between this and the PSNI Reserve, Provo influence on policing at grassroots level, and especially in the communities they already controlled, would be considerable. The St. Andrews Agreement also foresaw the day when policing and justice would be devolved and that meant that Sinn Fein would have a chance of nominating the responsible minister—although crucially there was no agreement on a timetable for this to happen. Gerry Kelly, a former London bomber and one-time IRA adjutant-general, was often named as the party’s candidate. Accepting the PSNI could cement S
inn Fein’s long-term control of their communities.

  Either because of the deep, atavistic hatred the Provisional grassroots had always harbored against the police in Northern Ireland, or because accepting the PSNI would be part of a final deal which would also see Ian Paisley, of all people, at the top of the heap, or even because such an outcome would signal undeniably Sinn Fein’s acceptance of partition, the republican base resisted the policing issue with more vigour than any other concession made during the peace process. There were rumors of death threats against leadership figures and reports of defections and resignations and privately, according to leaks in the media, the Sinn Fein leadership worried about the margin of victory they would secure at the special Ard Fheis.

  In the North the Provisionals’ leverage had disappeared with the final acts of IRA decommissioning and in the DUP they faced unionists made of sterner stuff than David Trimble, who would walk away rather than accept Sinn Fein in government on lesser terms. In the South there were alarming signs for Sinn Fein that the party had settled at the bottom of a political trough and that the Green party was now capturing the voters’ imagination in the way Gerry Adams had done a few years earlier. Something had to be done to restore Sinn Fein’s support in the South and perhaps the North could provide a way. And, when all was said and done, getting into government on both sides of the Border remained the Provos’ primary strategic goal. Everything pointed in the same direction—it was time to cut a deal.

  If it had been left to the British government, Sinn Fein would probably have been let into government without having to formally sign up to the PSNI, and again a flawed reading of the IRA’s internal politics was the cause. In July 2006 Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain visited the United States to tell Irish-American leaders that what was needed, “as the way forward,” from Sinn Fein was greater cooperation with the PSNI of the sort witnessed during the recent Orange marching season. There was no mention of the requirement to support the PSNI, merely more face-to-face get-togethers between PSNI officers and Sinn Fein leaders. At one meeting, a Sinn Fein official said that, while the leadership knew what had to be done, they had to go carefully and slowly to avoid a split. It was the same argument that had been made so successfully again and again during the decommissioning saga—and it appeared to be working once more. According to an informed source Hain described the Sinn Fein official’s comments as being “full of common sense.”3