7

The Broad Front

‘A growing Marxist feeling’

At Bodenstown in 1977, Jimmy Drumm delivered a speech on behalf of the Provisional leadership that curtly dismissed the hopes animating their campaign for the past six years: ‘A successful war of liberation cannot be fought exclusively on the backs of the oppressed in the Six Counties, nor around the physical presence of the British Army. Hatred and resentment of the Army cannot sustain the war, and the isolation of socialist republicans around the armed struggle is dangerous.’ Drumm insisted on the need for ‘a positive tie-in with the mass of the Irish people who have little or no idea of the suffering in the North’ if British rule was to be ended: ‘The forging of strong links between the Republican movement and the workers of Ireland and radical trade unionists will create an irrepressible mass movement and will ensure mass support for the continuing armed struggle in the North.’¹

The ideas expressed in Drumm’s speech came from Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison, two of the central figures in a group of younger northern Provos poised to take control of the movement. Adams set out his stall from Long Kesh in a series of articles under the pen name ‘Brownie’, when the Provisionals were at their lowest ebb since the Troubles began.

The timing of the IRA’s return to war in 1976 could not have been worse, as the nationalist population had no real stomach for the resumption of armed struggle, even in republican strongholds. This war fatigue found an opportunity to express itself soon after the Provos resumed their campaign. British soldiers in Belfast opened fire on a car driven by an IRA member called Danny Lennon, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. Lennon was killed, along with three young children who were hit by the car. A spontaneous backlash against paramilitary violence mushroomed into the Peace People movement, whose demonstrations attracted crowds of up to 10,000.

IRA supporters attacked the Peace People as stooges of the British, and they certainly received support from long-standing republican adversaries in the media and the Catholic Church. But as People’s Democracy pointed out, the protests also attracted many working-class Catholics from what had been the movement’s core constituency: ‘For everyone who marched, there were more who couldn’t stomach the hymn-singing, anti-IRA histrionics but who sympathized with the peace campaign. And many of them were the civil rights or anti-internment marchers of other days.’2

It would be extremely difficult for the Provos to sustain a war in the face of such attitudes. Adams urged republicans to draw the right lessons from the demonstrations of 1976: ‘The peace campaign should remind us all that people are tired and that they desire peace. It is self-defeating, stupid and counter-productive to attack these people.’³ The armed struggle would have to continue, he insisted, but in a way that was ‘controlled and disciplined’: ‘Republicans must ensure that our cause and our methods remain within the bounds of our consciences.’⁴

Already tainted by feuds and sectarian killings, the IRA now came under intense pressure from the security forces after the breakdown of the truce. The RUC routinely took Provo suspects to its interrogation centre at Castlereagh and coerced them into signing confessions, which non-jury Diplock courts then accepted as sufficient grounds for conviction. Such methods eventually became a source of embarrassment for politicians in London, but in the short term they were highly effective, delivering the benefits of internment with none of the political costs.5

The British authorities demolished the ‘cages’ at Long Kesh to make way for a new prison, the Maze, whose inmates were to receive the same treatment as those convicted of violent offences in the rest of the UK. Laid out in H-shaped blocks and surrounded by a dense security cordon, this ultra-modern jail was designed to be escape-proof. To symbolize their loss of special-category status, newly convicted prisoners no longer had the right to civilian clothing. The first of those prisoners, Kieran Nugent, arrived in the H-Blocks in 1976 and refused to wear the uniform supplied. With no other garb available, Nugent wrapped himself in a blanket to keep warm. By the year’s end, there were more than forty ‘blanketmen’ in the Maze following his example.

The Northern Ireland Office privately acknowledged that many republican prisoners were ‘not regarded as “criminal” by the communities from which they come’, and warned that this might give rise to problems down the line:

Their organization and immediate friends and relatives are unlikely to become reconciled to society as long as there remains a substantial group whom they regard as ‘prisoners of war’. Any untoward event taking place in prison may therefore provoke limited violence outside the prison. Conversely the prisoners themselves, enjoying a measure of moral support from their own communities, are unlikely to settle down to serve their sentences quietly.⁶

But this was a challenge that the British government expected to handle with comparative ease. Meanwhile, the security regime pushed the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment into the front-line of the struggle against the IRA. From London’s perspective, ‘Ulsterization’ had two obvious benefits. By granting the local police force a leading role, it drove home the message that republican violence was the product of a criminal conspiracy by terrorist ‘godfathers’ with no popular support. It also reduced the number of British soldiers being killed or injured by IRA attacks.

Republicans were ill-equipped to mount a political challenge to Britain’s new offensive. People’s Democracy contrasted the mood of the Catholic ghettoes at the beginning of 1976 with the heyday of civil resistance: ‘The bulk of the minority population are apathetic if not hostile. Let any organization, including Sinn Féin, call a demonstration now around some political demands and how many will turn up? Hardly any except their own members and a handful of dedicated activists.’7

Adams and his comrades understood this all too well, and Drumm’s speech at Bodenstown was their attempt at a response. PD welcomed it as ‘a major development in Provisional thinking, which opens the way for intense and fruitful discussion within the anti-imperialist movement’. They had observed with keen interest a ‘complex and at times confused debate going on within the Provisionals’, which now emerged into public view: ‘A section of the movement, particularly in Belfast, has gradually but definitely moved away from militarism and from exclusive concentration on the Northern question.’⁸

A new leadership team took shape around Adams that included young ex-prisoners such as Danny Morrison and Jim Gibney, with the northern Provo newspaper Republican News as its platform. In December 1977, the Irish police captured an IRA ‘staff report’ drafted by Adams and his associates which elaborated on their plans: ‘Sinn Féin should be radicalized (under Army direction) and should agitate about social and economic issues which attack the welfare of the people. SF should be directed to infiltrate other organizations to win support for, and sympathy to, the movement.’⁹ At Bodenstown in 1978, Sinn Féin’s Johnny Johnson took another step down the path opened up by Jimmy Drumm the previous year: ‘We promise the economically deprived, the poor and the oppressed our wholehearted support. We are not in this to exchange one set of capitalist rulers for another.’¹⁰ An observer from the British embassy noted a ‘growing Marxist feeling’ among the delegates at Sinn Féin’s 1978 Ard Fheis – ‘some of them even addressed each other as comrade!’ – and a palpable desire to strengthen the movement’s political interventions.¹¹

At the beginning of 1979, the Dublin-based An Phoblacht and Republican News merged with Morrison as editor, symbolizing a shift in the movement’s centre of gravity. Morrison recruited several contributors from the left-wing scene, including PD’s John McGuffin and the cartoonist Brian Moore (‘Cormac’), and turned the paper into a lively mouthpiece for the Provos with a highly effective distribution system that by-passed commercial newsagents.12

Later that year, it was the turn of Gerry Adams to deliver another left-republican homily at Wolfe Tone’s graveside. He pledged to oppose ‘all forms and all manifestations of imperialism and capitalism’, and urged his audience to build ‘an economic resistance movement, linking up Republicans with other sections of the working class’.¹³

For some Provisionals, this language was all too reminiscent of their hated rivals, the Officials. The role of a British Trotskyist called Phil Shimeld, who contributed articles to Republican News under the pen name ‘Peter Dowling’, particularly angered the old guard. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and his allies compared Shimeld to Cathal Goulding’s adviser Roy Johnston and noted where that experiment had led.¹⁴ In a bid to pre-empt such criticism, an early edition of Morrison’s new paper insisted that coverage of working-class struggles ‘doesn’t mean we are going “sticky”’.¹⁵ (The Officials had become known as ‘Stickies’ or ‘Sticks’ in the early 70s, after selling adhesive Easter lilies to mark the 1916 Rising.)

But there was another strand of Irish Marxism that Adams and his comrades found much more attractive. Jim Gibney in particular paid close attention to the arguments made by People’s Democracy about the limits of republican militarism and the need for class politics.¹⁶ Michael Farrell was already a well-respected figure in republican circles, and his book The Orange State became a touchstone for opponents of British rule when it appeared in 1976. Based on extensive historical research, Farrell’s work set out the case for British withdrawal with a polemical force that no republican pamphleteer could match. The Provos hailed it as a vindication of their cause: when a second edition came out in 1980, Sinn Féin’s Richard McAuley described it as ‘a book not to be missed’.¹⁷

Eamonn McCann had always been more sceptical of republicanism than Farrell. However, when McCann published a new version of his book War and an Irish Town in 1980, he dedicated the text to republican prisoners and rounded it off with an emphatic declaration of solidarity: ‘There is no such thing as an anti-imperialist who does not support the Provos and no such thing as a socialist who is not anti-imperialist.’18 The transformation of the Provisionals had enthused McCann, and he quoted the speech delivered by Gerry Adams at Bodenstown approvingly, but added a note of caution about the new platform: ‘Given the structure and traditions of the Republican movement it would be damnably difficult to put into effect. It would mean making a fundamental break from the politics of the founding father – at whose graveside he was speaking.’¹⁹ Danny Morrison’s An Phoblacht gave the book a friendly review, describing it as a ‘welcome and stimulating’ contribution to the debate: ‘McCann’s criticism aims to be honest, comradely and constructive, rather than smug or divisive.’²⁰

The Long War

Another intervention from Eamonn McCann was much less welcome to the new Provo leadership. Towards the end of 1979, Gerry Adams drafted a new programme to replace Éire Nua that was Marxist in everything but name. The document called for private farms to be nationalized, however small the holding might be. Many rural republicans who made a vital contribution to the movement, allowing it to use their land for arms dumps, safe houses and training camps, were horrified by the idea of replacing family plots with ‘custodial ownership’. Opponents of the new line seized the opportunity to push back. On the eve of a special conference in October 1979, McCann published a story in a Dublin tabloid based on information from a well-placed source, predicting a dramatic shift to the left. A furious backlash confronted Adams, who had no choice but to deny the reports.²¹

In an attempt to defuse the row, Adams gave an interview to the magazine Hibernia that An Phoblacht reprinted, seeking to reassure the movement’s conservative supporters: ‘I know of no-one in Sinn Féin who is a Marxist or who would be influenced by Marxism.’22 The same edition of the paper carried statements from both wings of the movement denying that it had embraced Marxist ideology.

Several historians of republicanism have taken these statements as proof that the left turn initiated by Adams was a sham, or at most a weapon in his battle against the old guard.²³ But the political context in which they were made suggests a more complex picture. Adams was unquestionably bending the truth with his claim that Marxism had no influence in the movement. One of his main concerns was to guard against another ‘Red Scare’: ‘In the past this sort of ploy has succeeded and many very good Irish radicals and organizations have been swamped by a combination of government, grassroots and Church attacks.’²⁴

In another interview, Danny Morrison tried to sidestep Catholic anti-communism by drawing attention to the role of priests in Latin American guerrilla movements: ‘There’s no reason why the revolutionary aspects of Marxism should not be taken up by Catholics.’ The Provisionals stressed the indigenous roots of their socialism – ‘a radical native brand taken from Tone, Lalor, Connolly and Mellows’ – as a way of deflecting conservative attacks.²⁵

In several important respects, the Provos were right to deny the parallels with Cathal Goulding’s movement drawn by their critics. When Goulding wanted to strengthen the IRA’s political thinking in the 1960s, he recruited intellectuals such as Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan from outside its ranks and gave them responsibility for drawing up a new programme. After Johnston and Coughlan parted company with the Officials, a new intellectual cohort, clustered around Eoghan Harris and the Industrial Department, performed much the same role in subsequent years. In contrast, the new Provo leadership kept figures like Michael Farrell and Eamonn McCann at arm’s length, drawing upon their work but never adopting their ideas wholesale. In time, they went on to produce an entire layer of capable, articulate politicians from within the ranks of the IRA.

Another crucial divergence lay in their attitude towards the unionist population. Goulding’s supporters stressed the need to reach out to working-class Protestants, but the new Provisional leadership dismissed that out of hand and even saw their own movement’s Éire Nua programme as an unacceptable sop to loyalism. Journalist Ed Moloney suggested that the northern Provos led by Adams were ‘undeniably more sectarian than their southern counterparts’, and gave the following terse summary of their outlook: ‘The Northern state is irreformable and so are most northern Protestants.’26 One interview with a Provisional spokesman icily referred to ‘an element who call themselves Loyalists’, whose ‘traditional role’ had been to help perpetuate British rule: ‘These people play the role of a fifth column in Ireland. As such, they will be eliminated.’²⁷

A debate over armed struggle showed that the Provos were determined to keep their own counsel. People’s Democracy turned away from support for militarism after a split in the group’s ranks at the beginning of 1976: ‘Violent actions are largely irrelevant in the absence of a mass movement and detract from the building of such a movement. There was a tendency in our organization and in the left generally to avoid such criticism but elitist action without a mass movement is an act of despair and shows contempt for the masses.’²⁸ For PD, it was essential to resurrect the tactics of the early 70s if the setbacks of recent times were to be reversed. Republican News dismissed this argument as the brainchild of ‘a whole mish-mash of left-wing groups and tired radical intellectuals, many of whom were mentally defeated by the Brits five or more years ago’. It rejected the idea that armed struggle had displaced mass action: ‘In fact the development of guerrilla warfare with popular support was the development of the struggle onto a higher level which a group like PD failed to match up to.’ Another article referred scornfully to ‘attacks from the revolutionary left on the war strategy of the oppressed Irish people’.²⁹ If civil resistance was going to return to the political stage, it would have to find room alongside the IRA campaign.

In fact, the new leadership bitterly reproached Ó Brádaigh’s old guard for alleged softness on the question of armed struggle. They denounced the 1975 truce as a fiasco and rejected the idea of further talks with the British government unless there was an explicit commitment to withdrawal.30 In tandem with their public embrace of class struggle and ‘economic resistance’, Adams and his comrades steered through a reorganization of the IRA along cellular lines that was intended to blunt London’s security offensive.³¹ Adams became the IRA’s chief of staff after his release from prison and won the support of several important figures for the project, including Martin McGuinness, Ivor Bell and Brian Keenan.³²

The new-model IRA was much smaller than its predecessor. One estimate put the movement’s core strength at 300 or so, with another 3,000 ‘active sympathizers’ providing assistance. By comparison, in 1972 there had been 300 Volunteers in Belfast’s First Battalion alone.³³ The Provos told their supporters to prepare for a ‘long war’ that might last for ten, fifteen or even twenty years. As an Army Council spokesman told Ed Moloney, the IRA’s objective was now to ‘wear down the will’ of its opponents: ‘Either the British government itself comes to the conclusion that it must leave, or that conclusion will be forced on them by British public opinion.’³⁴

The La Mon Hotel bombing in February 1978 threw the conflict between armed struggle and political action into sharp relief. IRA members had been planting incendiary devices as part of their bombing campaign against commercial targets. This time, the warning they supplied was totally inadequate and a fireball swept through the building, burning twelve civilians alive. The RUC distributed horrifying photographs of the corpses as part of a media campaign against the IRA.

Facing a popular backlash, republicans had little prospect of strengthening their base. Adams later said that he could feel ‘two years of work going down the drain’ on the night of the bombing.³⁵ But the Provos strongly defended the use of such methods: ‘The political effects of the bombing campaign have been productive. It has created insecurity and confusion among Unionists and helped break up the loyalist monolith, brought down Stormont, made and makes the Six Counties internally ungovernable, and has made government under British direct rule difficult and often impossible.’³⁶

Later that year, the ministry of defence prepared a confidential assessment of the IRA’s strengths, ‘Future Terrorist Trends’. To its great embarrassment, the Provos managed to obtain a copy, and it supplied them with a welcome propaganda boost. The document paid reluctant tribute to the IRA’s recruitment policy: ‘Our evidence of the calibre of rank-and-file terrorists does not support the view that they are merely mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and unemployable. PIRA now trains and uses its members with some care.’ The IRA was now farther removed from the communities in which it operated, but this need not prove fatal to its campaign: ‘There is seldom much support even for traditional protest marches. But by reorganizing on cellular lines PIRA has become less dependent on public support than in the past.’37

In August 1979, the Provos supplied lethal confirmation of their enduring strength when a meticulously planned bomb attack killed eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint on the same day an IRA unit assassinated Lord Mountbatten during a holiday in Sligo. As Margaret Thatcher’s new government ordered a review of security policy to determine what had gone wrong, the IRA was in bullish form. Its leaders saw no reason to contemplate another ceasefire until they were sure that Britain was getting out for good.

In April 1980, ‘Brownie’ returned to a familiar theme in the pages of An Phoblacht: ‘A British withdrawal can be secured more quickly and in more favourable conditions if it is achieved not only because of the IRA’s military thrust but also because resistance to British rule has been channelled into an alternative political movement.’³⁸ For all the time spent on Sinn Féin’s revamped programme, the party was still a pale shadow of the IRA, with no real political weight and no chance of putting its radical policies into effect. However, the movement now stood on the brink of a dramatic breakthrough that would transform the balance of forces in Northern Ireland.

The issue that supplied this opening had been staring them in the face all along. When republican inmates in the H-Blocks began refusing to wear prison uniform, they set in motion a prolonged and hard-fought struggle that culminated in the death of ten hunger strikers during the summer of 1981. That struggle revived the fortunes of the republican movement and provoked the greatest crisis for British rule in Northern Ireland since the fall of Stormont nine years earlier. By then, Jimmy Drumm’s call for mass resistance at Bodenstown in 1977 had been decisively answered. But we cannot draw a straight line between the new thinking of the Adams leadership and the dramatic events of the period that followed. At several crucial points, the Provos had to be coaxed reluctantly along the road that led them to their ultimate destination.

Strength in Unity

Soon after Drumm’s speech at Bodenstown, Jim Gibney composed a letter from Crumlin Road jail, where he was being held on remand. Gibney saw the prison protest as a golden opportunity for ‘rallying the people away from their inertia and apathy’, but complained that the prisoners were not receiving enough support from the movement outside: ‘Whilst not singling out any group in particular, I believe that unity on this issue is essential.’39 Tact may have prevented Gibney from ‘singling out’ his own comrades for criticism, but the Provos had certainly shown little interest in mobilizing support for the prisoners, leaving the burden of such work to the Relatives Action Committees (RACs). According to People’s Democracy, the RACs were ‘unable to mobilize much more than the relatives of political prisoners and the hard-core activists of Sinn Féin and the Marxist groups’.⁴⁰ That weakness prompted Bernadette McAliskey and her Tyrone associates to organize an ‘Anti-Repression Conference’ in Coalisland at the beginning of 1978, in hope of expanding the campaign.

The former civil rights MP gave a sober assessment of where things stood almost a decade after NICRA’s first march, reminding her audience that they represented a minority of the nationalist population.⁴¹ People’s Democracy called for a broad campaign in support of the prisoners that would not be restricted to supporters of the IRA, but Sinn Féin members greeted the proposal with suspicion.42 The IRSP, which had its own prisoners involved in the protest, was more sympathetic, having been schooled in the idea of a ‘broad front’ by Seamus Costello before his death. Gerry Adams later admitted that the conference became a ‘lost opportunity to build unity’ because his own movement was still ‘temperamentally and organizationally disinclined’ to cooperate with other groups.⁴³ There was no hint of self-criticism from the Provos at the time. Republican News hailed the conference as a ‘notable success’, but warned against ‘hasty thoughts of a “New Mass Resistance” comparable to that of the civil rights movement ten years ago. The clock cannot simply be turned back like that, much as People’s Democracy and Bernadette McAliskey might wish it to be.’⁴⁴

The work of building a campaign in support of the prisoners continued nonetheless. In August 1978, the RACs organized a march from Coalisland to Dungannon on the anniversary of NICRA’s demonstration along the same route, laying claim to the civil rights heritage. Estimates of the turnout ranged from 10,000 to 25,000: a marked improvement on the 1968 march, which attracted a little over 2,000 people. Several veterans of the civil rights movement spoke at the rally, including Bernadette McAliskey, Eamonn McCann and Michael Farrell.⁴⁵ Republican News insisted that the protest was not just an expression of solidarity with the prisoners: ‘It also confirms the continued massive support for the armed struggle being waged by the revolutionary Irish Republican Army.’⁴⁶ After the success of the first march, a coalition of left-wing groups called another demonstration, this time following the same path from Belfast to Derry that People’s Democracy had traced a decade earlier. But Sinn Féin boycotted the event and condemned its organizers for registering the route with the RUC.⁴⁷

Another row erupted in June 1979, when Bernadette McAliskey announced that she was contesting Northern Ireland’s first European election on a platform supporting the prisoners. The Provos vehemently opposed her campaign: Gerry Adams warned that it would ‘only confuse the nationalist people’, and Martin McGuinness even heckled McAliskey with the aid of a megaphone as she canvassed in the Bogside.⁴⁸ On the eve of polling day, An Phoblacht railed against ‘mosquito groups such as People’s Democracy’ who had rallied to McAliskey’s banner: ‘Perhaps they have opportunistically buried their principles in their eagerness to promote a candidate – Bernadette McAliskey – who they believe they can manipulate to give themselves a public voice independent of – and opposed to – the Republican Movement.’49 The IRSP also called for a boycott of the poll, a measure of the distance travelled by Costello’s party since 1975, when McAliskey had looked set to spearhead its electoral challenge in the North.

McAliskey’s eventual score, 6 per cent, was respectable, although the SDLP candidate John Hume polled four times as many votes. PD saw the election as the start of a challenge to the SDLP’s political hegemony among nationalists. Hume’s margin of victory showed there was still a long way to go after ‘years of anti-imperialist fragmentation, mistaken reliance on an armed campaign, and irresponsible sectarian behaviour’.⁵⁰ An Phoblacht was pleased to report that McAliskey had received fewer votes than her supporters were hoping for, thanks to a ‘vigorous Sinn Féin boycott campaign’.⁵¹ The paper accused PD of ‘crossing the anti-EEC picket line’ with its support for McAliskey – ‘a mischievous act, and one which casts doubt on PD’s sincerity when they call for unity among anti-imperialists’.⁵²

However, after three years of foot-dragging, the Provos were about to endorse the proposal for a united front in support of the prisoners. Pressure from inside the H-Blocks may have been decisive. The IRA leadership wanted to dissuade the blanketmen from launching a hunger strike, but had to offer them some tangible signs of progress if that desperate gamble was to be avoided.⁵³ In October 1979, An Phoblacht passed on the movement’s new line: ‘Conditions placed by the Republican Movement in the past, for political-status campaigners to also support the armed struggle, no longer apply.’⁵⁴

At a ‘Smash H-Block’ conference held in West Belfast that month, delegates elected a sixteen-person committee to organize a campaign of protest in support of the ‘five demands’ (civilian clothing, no prison work, free association with other prisoners, the right to organize leisure and educational facilities, and full remission of sentences). The committee naturally had a strong Provisional element, but also included representatives of People’s Democracy and the IRSP.55

Over the next year, the National H-Block Committee channelled all its energies into publicity work, petitioning trade unions for support and organizing tours in the United States for its spokesmen. The committee’s leading figures exposed themselves to real danger: in June 1980, loyalist paramilitaries killed two prominent activists, John Turnley of the Irish Independence Party and the IRSP’s Miriam Daly. However, their efforts to rally public support proved unavailing. With no sign of a shift in British policy, Brendan Hughes led a group of seven IRA and INLA prisoners onto a fast that began in October 1980.⁵⁶

The first protest in solidarity with the hunger strikers attracted 17,000 marchers onto the streets of Belfast: the kind of mobilization that had not been seen since the heyday of civil resistance in the early 1970s. In a report for the current affairs magazine Magill, Gerry Foley described the sight of Bernadette McAliskey overcome with emotion as she watched the crowds pass by: ‘It was as if the civil rights movement that she knew eleven years ago had resumed its march.’⁵⁷ McAliskey herself, the most high-profile figure associated with the campaign, was lucky to survive an assassination attempt in January 1981 when a UDA hit squad riddled her with bullets. The attack was a perverse tribute to the central role McAliskey played in mobilizing support for the prisoners.

The first hunger strike ended in December 1980 without a clear agreement to address the grievances of the prisoners, exposing two tactical errors made by the prison leadership: all of the men had begun to refuse food simultaneously, and Hughes kept responsibility for decision-making even though he was taking part in the strike. One of the prisoners, Seán McKenna, proved to be physically weaker than his comrades and slipped into a coma. An offer of some kind appeared to be on the table, and Hughes decided to call off the protest rather than allow McKenna to die. There was still a window of opportunity at the beginning of 1981 when it might have been possible to resolve the stand-off in a way that allowed both sides to save face. However, the prisoners became convinced that the administration was bent on humiliating them and broke off negotiations.58 They began preparing for a second hunger strike. This time, the prisoners would join the fast one by one, maximizing the impact of their sacrifice.

On the first day of March, Bobby Sands stood down as the IRA’s commander in the Maze and began refusing food. Sands, soon to become the most iconic Provisional martyr of them all, had joined the IRA as a teenager in the early 70s. Convicted for possession of arms, he served time in the celebrated Cage 11 at Long Kesh, where Gerry Adams had begun to establish himself as one of the movement’s leading strategists. After his release, Sands resumed his IRA career and before long was back in prison on another weapons charge, still in his early twenties.

Such experiences were typical of the blanketmen who now pitted themselves in a fight to the finish against the government of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s hostility to the republican cause had acquired a sharp personal edge when the INLA killed her friend Airey Neave two years earlier. It would require an unprecedented popular mobilization in support of the five demands to break her government’s will to resist.

In the first week of the strike, an opportunity arose when the Nationalist MP Frank Maguire died suddenly, leaving his Fermanagh–South Tyrone seat vacant. Bernadette McAliskey was still recovering from the wounds inflicted by loyalist paramilitaries in January. She declared her willingness to run as a candidate in support of the prisoners, but promised to stand aside if one of the hunger strikers came forward in her place: ‘I would work the shirt off my back for that prisoner and the other prisoners he is representing.’⁵⁹ On 9 April, the voters of Fermanagh–South Tyrone had a straight choice between Bobby Sands and the Unionist candidate Harry West. By a tight margin, they elected Sands to Westminster.

The Northern Ireland Office had been rather sanguine about the protests of the previous year, suggesting that popular indifference to their cause ‘must have contributed to a sense of futility among the strikers’.60 Shortly before the vote in Fermanagh–South Tyrone, civil servants reported that public interest in the strike ‘still seems to be at a satisfyingly low level’.⁶¹ The by-election put paid to that. It gave the Provos a tremendous political boost and shone a harsh, unflattering light upon the British government’s record in Ireland.

Many supporters of the campaign assumed that Thatcher would now have to cut a deal with the prisoners. But she remained intransigent and Sands passed away in the prison hospital on 5 May. News of his death provoked violent clashes between young nationalists and the RUC throughout Northern Ireland. A newspaper report described the funeral on 7 May as ‘the biggest demonstration of republican sympathy since the protest rally immediately after Bloody Sunday’.⁶² Most alarmingly for London, demonstrations of support for the hunger strikers also took place in cities around the world. Dockworkers in the US refused to unload British ships for twenty-four hours, and the Portuguese parliament held a minute’s silence in honour of Sands.⁶³

The IRSP hailed the Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election as ‘a victory for the united front approach – by means of which members of different political organizations, and of none, can unite around the beliefs that they hold in common’.⁶⁴ The same could be said for the campaign as a whole. If the IRA leadership had insisted on making support for armed struggle into a precondition, its appeal would have been greatly reduced, and the hunger strikers might have gone to their graves without leaving any mark on Irish history. According to the RUC, there were at least 1,200 protests in Northern Ireland during the second hunger strike, attended by over 350,000 people. F. Stuart Ross, who has written the most comprehensive account of this upsurge, suggests that the mobilization of 1980–81 ‘dwarfed that of 1968 and 1969’.⁶⁵ Those who had put the idea of a united front campaign on the agenda in the first place – People’s Democracy, Bernadette McAliskey, the IRSP – played a crucial role in making that happen.

Ten Men Dead

The far-left fringe, often dismissed by the Provos as irrelevant minnows, made another key intervention during the hunger strike. Local elections were scheduled for May 1981, and the British government resisted pressure to cancel the poll, fearing it would be seen as a victory for the Provos.66 Sinn Féin had already decided to boycott the election, so People’s Democracy and the IRSP stepped in to fill the vacuum and won two seats each in Belfast. For PD, it was especially important to challenge the West Belfast MP Gerry Fitt, who had urged Thatcher not to make any concessions to the prisoners: ‘We cannot ignore quislings like Fitt nor can we render them irrelevant simply by mass mobilizations. They must be fought and defeated on their home ground.’⁶⁷ PD targeted Fitt and Paddy Devlin, another staunch opponent of the prisoners, knocking Fitt off the council altogether, while Devlin was lucky to survive with a much reduced vote. An Phoblacht took careful note of the ‘remarkable’ victories achieved by these shoestring campaigns: ‘Had Sinn Féin or republican prisoners entered the field then the SDLP would have taken a sound enough knocking to have made nationalist collaboration a diminishing trade.’⁶⁸

The Provos were steadily inching towards engagement with electoral politics, but they were still in no mind to question the armed struggle, and insisted that any campaign in support of the prisoners would require ‘two sharply differing, but mutually reinforcing aspects: one peaceful, the other involving physical force’. Mass demonstrations, industrial action and lobbying of Nationalist politicians should be combined with ‘popular street riots, the erection of barricades against the British forces, and other violent acts of civil disobedience building towards the establishment of no-go areas in the nationalist ghettoes; plus, of course, the armed action of IRA Volunteers.’⁶⁹ On the political front, their main goal was to force what republicans called ‘the three cornerstones of the Irish establishment’ – the Catholic bishops, the SDLP and the Dublin government – to come out in support of the prisoners.⁷⁰

Thatcher’s abrasive style made life a great deal harder for those who had been holding the line against the Provos since the conflict began. As the NIO’s David Blatherwick observed at the beginning of June, the prime minister’s speech on 28 May went down ‘like a lead balloon’. The Catholic hierarchy ‘ostentatiously avoided’ Thatcher during her visit to Northern Ireland, on a tour which only managed ‘further to alienate Catholics, and to cause even some moderate Protestants to wonder what we are at’. The prospects for containing nationalist anger grew dimmer by the day: ‘Unless the hunger strike ends soon, probably before the next hunger strikers die and certainly before the beginning of the marching season, the situation will begin to deteriorate rapidly.’71 When John Hume met with Humphrey Atkins, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, he bitterly reproached Thatcher’s government for ‘treating the SDLP with contempt’. Hume feared that Sinn Féin would make an electoral breakthrough on the back of the protests and urged Atkins to negotiate with the prisoners.⁷²

In his assessment of the strike, the British ambassador to Dublin, Leonard Figg, described it as ‘one of the most difficult periods in Anglo-Irish relations for many years’.⁷³ The embassy had to deal with two different governments during the crisis. Fianna Fáil’s Charles Haughey was in charge when Sands began his fast: Haughey privately assured Figg that he would do his best to help, but urged the British government to resolve the dispute as soon as possible by ‘seeming to make concessions without actually doing so’.⁷⁴

Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael then became Taoiseach after a general election on 11 June. The poll gave the National H-Block/Armagh Committee the chance to run a slate of prison candidates, winning two seats and over 40,000 votes. A stunning achievement for such a hastily improvised campaign, the result came as an unpleasant shock to FitzGerald and reinforced his desire to end the crisis. According to Figg, this was the point when tensions reached their peak. FitzGerald’s overriding concern was the threat to domestic stability: ‘The Irish Government’s pressure on us to end the strike grew in proportion to their fears that they might not be able to control events and that the institutions of the state might collapse.’75 That was precisely the dilemma with which the Provos had wanted to confront FitzGerald and his colleagues.

There was always a fundamental contradiction embedded in the H-Block campaign. Its activists wanted to end the phenomenon of ‘spectator politics’ for good, yet their campaign ultimately relied upon the mental fortitude and physical endurance of a tiny group of men in Long Kesh, whose willingness to risk death made it possible to organize the biggest protests Northern Ireland had seen since the early 70s. A self-sacrificing elite created the necessary conditions for the revival of mass action, before the collapse of their fast in September 1981 precipitated its decline. On 20 August the INLA’s Mickey Devine became the tenth and last hunger striker to die, just as Sinn Féin’s Owen Carron won the by-election triggered by the death of Bobby Sands.

‘Red Mickey’ had followed a winding path to Long Kesh, joining the first civil rights marches as a teenager in Derry and canvassing for Eamonn McCann in the Stormont election of 1969, before enlisting in the Official IRA with the rest of his young Labour comrades. He lined up with Seamus Costello when he launched the IRSP in 1975, along with the great majority of Derry Officials.⁷⁶ The IRSP put on a display of strength at Devine’s funeral, the last real opportunity it would have to do so. The party’s chairwoman Naomi Brennan described her martyred comrade as ‘a revolutionary, a soldier, but above all a socialist’, who ‘realized that to have national freedom, we must have socialism, and that, also, to have any chance of socialism, we must have national freedom’. Brennan stressed the importance of united action in support of the prisoners: ‘We have learnt by the mistakes of our revolutionary predecessors, and our campaign has been built on unity of all those who support the five demands. Such unity must not be taken lightly.’⁷⁷

Behind the scenes, the picture was much less edifying. There had been a dispute on the National H-Block/Armagh Committee over the recent by-election, as the IRSP wanted Bernadette McAliskey to go forward and take her seat at Westminster if elected. The Provisionals had no desire to give an unpredictable maverick such an important platform and insisted on running their own man instead.78 McAliskey’s remarkable talents as an agitator had been a huge asset for the campaign, but the time was fast approaching for the Provos to leave their allies behind. Reporting on Owen Carron’s victory, An Phoblacht announced that Sinn Féin would now be ‘stepping firmly into the electoral arena, taking on the SDLP (already badly shaken by the events of recent months), and establishing its undisputed leadership of the nationalist people’. The paper told supporters to prepare for a war on two fronts: ‘This new confidence within the Republican Movement, that now is the time – as never before – for its militant politics, is fully complemented by the IRA’s continued ability to take on the military might of the British presence.’⁷⁹ The SDLP’s Seamus Mallon lashed out at Thatcher after the result, suggesting that her government had ‘almost destroyed the democratic process in Northern Ireland’.⁸⁰

On 28 August, Carron held a meeting with Michael Alison, a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office, to discuss the prisoners’ fate. The minutes recorded a ‘calm and friendly’ discussion, at the end of which Alison ‘expressed the hope that a situation would arise when Mr Carron felt that he could attend the House of Commons’.⁸¹ But there was no sign of agreement. Fearing that the stand-off would continue indefinitely, the prison chaplain Denis Faul began urging family members to order medical assistance for their sons when they lost consciousness. This external intervention proved decisive in breaking the impasse. Over the weeks that followed, the hunger strike gradually collapsed, and Mickey Devine turned out to be the last fatality in Long Kesh.

The campaign’s inability to push the ‘three cornerstones’ of Irish nationalism into supporting the prisoners was a crucial factor behind its defeat. The threat to stability feared by Garret FitzGerald never really materialized in the South. The largest disturbances came in July, when police officers blocked the route of a march in Dublin to prevent it from reaching the British embassy. A full-scale riot broke out, with bricks and bottles thrown at the police, who dispersed the protesters with a baton charge. Leonard Figg suggested that the clashes in Ballsbridge were ‘clearly a turning point in popular support for the campaign’.⁸² However, the mental gulf between northern nationalists and the southern population, far more evident in 1981 than it had been a decade earlier, was a much wider phenomenon than that, and proved to be an insuperable barrier for the movement.

Thatcher’s government paid a heavy price for the victory it had secured. The IRA and INLA recruited a new generation of militants in the wake of the crisis, preserving their capacity to wage war for another decade. In his overview of the hunger strike for An Phoblacht, Peter Dowling insisted that British policy had given the IRA its greatest boost since internment, ‘organizationally in terms of recruits, funds, “safe houses” and an expanded support base, and politically in terms of credibility and support at home and abroad’. Dowling picked out Sinn Féin’s failure to run candidates in the local elections as the one true blunder of the campaign.83

The party leadership was now determined to make up for that omission at the earliest opportunity. As the hunger strike spluttered to a halt, a spokesman for the IRA tried to calm fears that the movement was going down the same road as the Officials: ‘What was wrong with the “Sticks” was not just that they contested elections but that they had a totally incorrect analysis of the nature of British imperialism. They believed that the six-county state could be “democratized” from within.’ There was no question of imitating Goulding’s movement on the question that really mattered: ‘The military struggle will go on with all the energy at our disposal.’⁸⁴

Sinn Féin was ready to take advantage of a shift in nationalist opinion that David Blatherwick of the NIO gloomily described as ‘a radicalization of politics in the urban minority’: ‘The young in particular are disillusioned with traditional politics and tend to regard conventional politicians as offering wrong answers to irrelevant questions.’⁸⁵ The Provos wanted to clear the decks for an electoral strategy and saw nothing to be gained by preserving an alliance with smaller groups that had their own ideas about the way ahead.

A poorly attended conference in October 1982 formally wound down the National H-Block/Armagh Committee. As PD observed, the decision simply ratified what was already happening on the ground: ‘The underlying reality that faced these delegates was the collapse of the H-Block/Armagh campaign throughout the 32 Counties.’86 The end of the prison protest had deprived the movement of its central focus, and it would be very difficult to find another issue with the same broad appeal. In any case, the Provos had no interest in keeping the alliance going, and without their support, there could be no united front of any value. It was the end of the road, and everyone at the conference knew it.