8

War by Other Means

A New Front

Sinn Féin’s 1981 conference gave the leadership approval to contest every subsequent election, north and south. The first opportunity to test their dual strategy came in October 1982, just as the broad front against ‘criminalization’ was put out to pasture. Thatcher’s Northern Ireland secretary, Jim Prior, had scheduled elections for a local assembly as part of a political initiative that he called ‘rolling devolution’. Many nationalists feared that the British government was trying to restore Stormont by the back door, and the SDLP pledged to boycott Prior’s assembly after the poll. This ill-fated scheme gave the newly energized Sinn Féin an ideal platform: the party won 10 per cent of the vote and five of its candidates were successful, including Gerry Adams, Danny Morrison and Martin McGuinness. The results were a sensational blow to British policy and gave Sinn Féin real substance as a political force.

In its analysis of the election, the Northern Ireland Office admitted that ‘the existence of so considerable a Republican protest vote is disturbing’. Sinn Féin had absorbed the base of groups like People’s Democracy and the Irish Independence Party, but also ‘brought out a new element of hard-line nationalists who have previously boycotted elections’ and ‘maximized their support among young voters frustrated by economic and social conditions and angered by the constant harassment, as they see it, of the security forces’.1 Government officials tried to find a silver lining in the party’s success – ‘involvement in politics may occupy people who might otherwise be busy with violence and could lead to divisions in the PIRA/Sinn Féin leadership’ – but concluded that such divisions were unlikely to materialize. There was no precedent for a party of this kind performing so well in the United Kingdom: ‘Open support for violence distinguishes Sinn Féin from all but the most extreme political groups.’² The Provos always rejected the claim that ‘open support for violence’ set them apart from the other political parties in the UK. But they would have been delighted to accept the characterization of Sinn Féin as a force like no other. With the sole exception of the abertzale movement in the Basque Country, no party with explicit ties to an armed insurgency has ever achieved such a degree of implantation in a liberal-democratic state.

For a time, it looked as if the Provisionals might sweep everything before them. The SDLP was their primary electoral target and seemed to be there for the taking. John Hume’s party had never fully transcended its origins as the vehicle for a disparate group of politicians with their own constituency teams but no real activist base. In a preview of the 1983 Westminster election, Michael Farrell set out the factors that distinguished the two parties in Belfast and Derry. Sinn Féin’s activists were ‘young, unemployed, ex-prisoners’ who ‘live in the working-class ghettoes’ and ‘speak the people’s language’, in contrast to their nationalist rivals: ‘The SDLP candidates are all middle-class. Three of the four candidates in Belfast are doctors.’³ In private, the NIO’s civil servants made similar observations: Sinn Féin was simply ‘more astute and enthusiastic’ than the SDLP in its approach to community politics, making its adversary look ‘middle-class, middle-aged and out of touch’.⁴ Farrell described the tireless constituency work of Sinn Féin advice centres, which far surpassed anything the SDLP could manage: ‘Instead of waiting for complaints to come in, they have gone round the doors with a checklist of possible repairs or benefits – like beds, blankets or rent rebates – to which the people might be entitled.’⁵

There may have been a certain incongruity in the IRA’s political wing making such carefully itemized claims upon the British state, but the results were plain for all to see on polling day in June 1983. Sinn Féin surpassed expectations, winning over 100,000 votes: one-third higher than its total the previous year. Most importantly, the party’s share of the nationalist vote had increased from 35 to 43 per cent. Gerry Adams beat off competition from the SDLP’s Joe Hendron and the incumbent Gerry Fitt to win in West Belfast, while Danny Morrison came within a hundred votes of victory in the Mid-Ulster constituency. Owen Carron lost his seat in Fermanagh–South Tyrone – the SDLP ran a candidate this time, dividing the nationalist vote – but overall, the result was a triumph for Sinn Féin, and its leaders were in exultant form.

When Adams sat down with Michael Farrell to discuss Sinn Féin’s prospects after the election, the world seemed bright and full of promise. He was careful to insist that the IRA had no need for electoral validation, and rejected the idea that Sinn Féin’s recent successes undermined the case for armed struggle against British rule: ‘A movement that wants them out will either have to use force or the threat of force.’6 However, there was no question that recent events had dramatically boosted republican self-confidence. Two IRA spokesmen also spoke to Farrell and explained that their perspective of a ‘long war’ lasting twenty years or more was now open to revision: ‘If the Republican movement can capitalize on all the social discontent in the 26 Counties and continue the electoral successes it could be a lot shorter.’⁷

In November 1983, Adams formalized his control over the movement by replacing Ruairí Ó Brádaigh as Sinn Féin president at the party’s Ard Fheis. Ó Brádaigh kept the private rancour of his tussle with the Adams faction under wraps, although he couldn’t resist a parting shot across the bows, noting that his tenure as president had not witnessed any splits: ‘Long may it remain so, as it will, provided we stick to basic principles.’⁸

Sinn Féin now had two clear objectives: to overtake the SDLP as the main voice of nationalist opinion in the North, and to carve out a political foothold in the South. Adams conceded that sympathy for northern nationalists would not be enough to win seats in the Dáil: ‘You can’t get support in Ballymun because of doors being kicked in by the Brits in Ballymurphy.’ His party needed to develop a platform that could appeal to those angered by corruption and ‘Thatcherite monetarist policies’. According to Adams, republicans also had to recognize that the majority of people in the South considered its institutions to be legitimate, whatever they might think themselves about the ‘bastard state’ that arose from the Treaty. His defence of Sinn Féin’s abstentionist policy was distinctly underwhelming: ‘While that remains the position I will support it.’9 The rise of Sinn Féin deeply troubled Garret FitzGerald’s government, which feared contagion across the border. FitzGerald responded by convening the New Ireland Forum, a gathering of constitutional nationalists intended to shore up the SDLP against its republican challenger.

There was another strand to the new Provo strategy that had the potential to carry its influence right into the heart of British politics. During the 1970s, organized support for British withdrawal had largely been confined to the extra-parliamentary left. The growth of Labour’s Bennite current now held out the promise of a much more effective challenge to the bipartisan consensus on Northern Ireland. Adams told Michael Farrell that Sinn Féin had been trying to develop contacts with prominent Labour politicians such as Ken Livingstone, who was now in charge of the Greater London Council (GLC), Europe’s biggest municipal authority.¹⁰

Livingstone himself saw a clear affinity between the two movements: ‘If I had been born in West Belfast, I would have ended up in Sinn Féin.’¹¹ In his capacity as GLC chief, Livingstone invited Adams and Danny Morrison to visit London after Sinn Féin’s triumph in the 1982 Assembly elections. The invitation provoked tabloid fury, and Margaret Thatcher’s government imposed an exclusion order on the two men, preventing them from setting foot on British soil. Livingstone responded by travelling to Belfast as a guest of Sinn Féin. He argued strongly for Labour to commit itself to pulling out of Northern Ireland at the earliest possible date: ‘We have to go into an election pledged to withdrawal within two years.’¹²

A few months before the Westminster poll of 1983, the NIO’s David Blatherwick weighed up the chances that Sinn Féin might supplant the SDLP as the dominant force in nationalist politics.13 Blatherwick found nationalist opinion to be characterized by ‘frustration and helplessness’: ‘Catholics see in London a government which they believe to be dominated by chauvinistic and anti-Irish attitudes.’ A growing number feared that any return to devolved rule would simply be a vehicle for unionist domination: ‘Many ordinary Catholics appear to have concluded that the unionist leopard will not change his spots, that British governments will not grasp the nettle of unionist intransigence, as they see it, and that no “internal” solution is therefore possible.’ This drift in nationalist thinking was ‘not so much a reasoned decision to opt for Irish unity – many see the problems and dangers of unity and question the social norms of the Republic – but a reflection of their frustration over their inability to get what they want inside Northern Ireland’.

This was all music to Provisional ears. But Blatherwick’s paper also found a potential crumb of comfort in the class divide among nationalists, which strongly influenced their political attitudes. In the Catholic ghettoes of Derry and Belfast, where rates of poverty and unemployment were still alarmingly high, ‘people find it easy to believe that they would be no worse off, and maybe even better, in a united Ireland. Certainly, they can have little reason to believe that a resumption of devolved government, even on a power-sharing basis, would lead to a dramatic improvement in their standard of living.’ This was no exaggeration: in 1981, the male unemployment rate for Northern Irish Catholics was higher than for any region or any other ethnic minority in the UK.¹⁴ Having experienced political violence as part of their everyday lives for more than a decade, working-class nationalists could now, as Blatherwick observed, ‘view with comparative equanimity the prospect that getting the “Brits” out of Ireland may mean more bloodshed, especially if it might solve the problem once and for all’.

The attitudes of their middle-class brethren were more complicated. Unemployment had not affected this social layer to the same extent: indeed, direct rule had ‘largely removed from them the stigma of second-class citizens’ and opened the door to public-sector employment for Catholic university graduates. Blatherwick still found middle-class Catholics to be ‘deeply suspicious’ of British and unionist attitudes, which made the idea of Irish unity more attractive from their perspective; however, ‘because of their greater stake in the community they are far more disturbed than their working-class counterparts about the implications of continued violence’. They could still be weaned away from opposition to British rule if their political representatives secured a role in the administration of Northern Ireland: ‘If not, the danger is that the Catholic community will lose interest in ordinary, constitutional politics; and even that the SDLP will lose heart and disintegrate.’

Boats and Boxes

Danny Morrison took on a distinctive role in the new Sinn Féin leadership team. His rhetorical style was blunt and provocative, in contrast to the measured, avuncular persona that Adams sought to cultivate. It was Morrison who coined the soundbite of the decade at the 1981 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, when he asked the assembled delegates: ‘Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’15 Soon after the 1983 election, he spoke at a rally in West Belfast to mark the anniversary of internment. Morrison gesticulated angrily at the helicopter that hovered over the crowd – ‘the skies won’t always be safe for the British pigs’ – and offered British soldiers two routes out of Ireland: ‘There is the boat and the box. We want them to take the boat. We are a peace-loving people and it is up to them.’¹⁶

Sinn Féin chose Morrison as its standard-bearer for the party’s next big test, the European election of 1984. If the Provos could win a seat at the expense of John Hume, the implications for Irish politics would be earth-shattering. Morrison launched his campaign with confident predictions of victory, promising to use the assembly in Strasbourg to ‘harangue the British government over plastic bullets, show trials and its illegal occupation of this part of our country’.17 Even Hume’s Unionist opponents were beginning to worry about his prospects. The UUP leader James Molyneaux had previously said there was no point trying to rescue the SDLP from ‘the results of their own mistaken policies’.¹⁸ But as the European election approached, Molyneaux gave the nod to a more diplomatic intervention by his party secretary Frank Millar, urging unionists to ‘refrain in coming weeks from rhetoric of the kind which easily inflames fear and suspicion in our community’, for this might simply help Sinn Féin leapfrog the SDLP – ‘the ultimate nightmare for all the people of Northern Ireland’.¹⁹

The political cataclysm feared by Millar did not materialize on polling day. Hume fought a skilful campaign, presenting himself as a statesman who could work wonders for Northern Ireland on the international stage. As Ed Moloney observed, the SDLP leader channelled much of his energy into winning over ‘that broad mass of Catholic voters often decried by Sinn Féin as “middle class” but who are in fact mostly employed, respectable, Church-going Catholics who are definitely working-class but who aspire to greater things for their sons and daughters’. Morrison’s image as a ‘Belfast street fighter’ limited his appeal to this constituency.²⁰

Sinn Féin’s vote share – just over 13 per cent – was the same as in the previous year’s Westminster election, albeit on a lower turnout. But Hume had increased the SDLP’s score by 4 per cent, so the Provos were losing ground in the battle for nationalist hegemony. Moloney found party members to be ‘openly despondent’ about Morrison’s performance at the count centre.²¹ The overall winner was Ian Paisley, who topped the poll with a third of all votes cast. The SDLP’s biggest concern was that Paisley’s triumph and Hume’s strong showing might discourage Thatcher from making any concessions to Irish nationalism when she responded to the New Ireland Forum’s report.

Gerry Adams denied that Sinn Féin had reached a ceiling in its electoral ascent, but suggested that Morrison’s vote reflected ‘varying degrees of tolerance within the nationalist electorate for aspects of the armed struggle’: those who voted for the SDLP, or didn’t vote at all, ‘may have had some misgivings about IRA operations’.22 Danny Morrison later expanded on those comments in an interview with Magill. Morrison cited several factors that might have contributed to Hume’s success, from tactical voting by Alliance Party supporters to the boons of incumbency. But he also put his finger on a deeper problem for Sinn Féin: ‘Perhaps it’s not entirely possible to totally harmonize the relationship between armed struggle and electoral politics.’²³

Morrison was careful to stress that there could be no winding down of the IRA campaign: ‘Electoral politics will not remove the British from Ireland. Only armed struggle will do that.’²⁴ His insistence that ‘all republicans’ were united on that point masked a bitter dispute that was unfolding behind closed doors, pitting Gerry Adams against his former ally Ivor Bell.

Bell, who had been part of the delegation that met William Whitelaw in 1972, supported Adams and his comrades as they took control of the movement after the 1975 truce, and played a central part in reorganizing the IRA along cellular lines.²⁵ Unlike Adams and Martin McGuinness, Bell had not taken on a public role to match his position in the IRA leadership. Now he was concerned that Adams was diverting resources from the movement’s coffers to fund election campaigns. Bell and his associates also wanted to loosen the restrictions on IRA activity that the leadership had imposed for the sake of Sinn Féin’s public image. Behind these arguments lurked a suspicion that republican political growth was bound to come at the expense of the armed struggle.

Facing a potential challenge from a dangerous adversary, Adams moved quickly to arrange Bell’s expulsion from the IRA. Bell’s former comrades warned him not to set up a breakaway faction or join the INLA.²⁶ The tightly guarded affair stood as a warning to Adams that he risked provoking a split if the IRA was not given room to breathe. As 1984 drew to a close, republican sources boasted that they had the manpower to return violence to the levels of the early 1970s: all they lacked was the necessary arsenal.²⁷

In the utmost secrecy, the IRA pressed ahead with a scheme to import weapons from Libya that Bell had helped to initiate. The Libyan connection gave fresh impetus to the IRA campaign just as Sinn Féin faced its first political setbacks. In the meantime, the Provos sent a defiant message to their opponents by planting a bomb at the Conservative Party conference in October 1984.

The Brighton attack claimed the lives of five people and came within a hair’s breadth of killing Margaret Thatcher. The IRA revelled in the shock it had provoked and issued a statement baiting Thatcher and her colleagues: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.’28 Whatever might be happening out of public sight, the message conveyed to the outside world by the IRA was one of uncompromising militancy. It would lay down its arms when Britain announced a date for withdrawal, and not a day before.

If there was no prospect of a ceasefire to clear the way for Sinn Féin’s electoral advance, the Provos could still hope that British intransigence might drive nationalists into their arms. In November 1984, Thatcher responded to the New Ireland Forum’s report by rejecting every option it had presented with undiplomatic candour. The SDLP’s deputy leader Seamus Mallon reacted with fury to Thatcher’s ‘insulting’, ‘offensive’ and ‘racist’ comments, while Gerry Adams claimed vindication for Sinn Féin: ‘It must be a bitter disappointment to the SDLP and others who had hoped for a meaningful response.’²⁹ In the wake of the Forum controversy, politicians and civil servants embarked on a new round of Anglo-Irish talks to try and break the deadlock.

Meanwhile, Sinn Féin prepared itself for another test in the 1985 local elections. Adams was careful not to repeat Danny Morrison’s mistake as the party launched its campaign, conceding that Sinn Féin had been ‘ambitious’ in its previous targets and suggesting that it might even lose votes this time.³⁰ His exercise in managing expectations proved to be a wise move. The SDLP’s vote share fell back to its 1983 level, suggesting that John Hume’s performance in the European election had been a personal achievement. But Sinn Féin also lost ground, so there was a 60:40 split between the two parties, below the level Sinn Féin had reached in 1983. The ceiling on Provo support was beginning to look like a permanent feature of Northern Irish politics.

When Adams addressed his party’s annual conference in November 1985, he dismissed the Anglo-Irish talks as an attempt to isolate republicans and prop up the SDLP.31 Within weeks, the two governments had announced the result of their deliberations, the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA). Claims that London and Dublin would now exercise joint sovereignty over Northern Ireland were based on a reckless misreading of the text.³² The disputed region was to remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority wished, but the Irish government now received a formal consultative role, with a permanent secretariat of civil servants to deal with issues like policing and discrimination.

Northern Ireland was no longer, in Thatcher’s redolent phrase, ‘as British as Finchley’. Unionist politicians responded angrily, resigning their Westminster seats to trigger a series of by-elections and calling for mass civil disobedience to overturn the agreement. John Hume was the only Northern Irish politician to have had any real influence on the talks, and the SDLP brandished the outcome as proof that its strategy could deliver.

Garret FitzGerald and his colleagues in the Irish government presented the AIA as a response to ‘nationalist alienation’. But there was no homogeneous community with the same experience of alienation. For working-class Catholics who bore the brunt of violence, poverty and everyday harassment by the security forces, the agreement had limited appeal. For their middle-class counterparts, with ample reason for discontent but still much to lose if British withdrawal resulted in chaos, Hume’s promise of incremental gains within the Anglo-Irish framework was likely to prove more attractive. The very fact of Unionist opposition, and Thatcher’s willingness to face it down, made the agreement look more attractive to many nationalists. The campaign of resistance took many different forms, from big demonstrations to minor acts of non-compliance: four years later, the UUP’s Ken Maginnis was still refusing to pay his television licence.³³ In spite of all these efforts, the hated agreement remained firmly in place.

Sinn Féin had to frame its response to the AIA carefully. Gerry Adams predicted that it would result in more loyalist violence against Catholics, and warned that there could be no peace without an end to partition. However, in describing the agreement as a ‘carrot and stick’ approach by Thatcher’s government, he was keen to argue that any concessions stemming from it would be a response to Sinn Féin’s political growth.34 In private, NIO officials cheerfully acknowledged that Sinn Féin’s breakthrough had been a vital stimulus: ‘Our interest in fostering the SDLP as the party of constitutional nationalism increased; and that, indeed, was one of the objectives of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.’³⁵ Danny Morrison put forward a similar line to Adams, describing Thatcher’s shift to a more conciliatory stance as a ‘delayed reaction’ to the Brighton bombing. Morrison insisted that Sinn Féin had never referred to the agreement as a ‘sell-out’, and accused the SDLP of wrongly attributing that view to his party so that it would have sole title to any nationalist gains.³⁶

The Southern Strategy

The 1987 general election was the next major skirmish between the two nationalist parties, resulting in a clear triumph for the SDLP, which increased its vote share by 3 per cent, while Sinn Féin fell back again. Gerry Adams held onto his seat in West Belfast, but the SDLP outpolled Sinn Féin in all but two constituencies and won almost twice as many votes in total. The elections of 1984–85 had already suggested there would be a limit on Sinn Féin’s expansion for as long as the armed struggle continued. The latest results powerfully reinforced that message. However, there could be no question of an IRA ceasefire, as the Adams leadership needed to buy the support of IRA Volunteers for a long-awaited move to abandon Sinn Féin’s abstentionist policy. This was the very issue on which the Provos had broken with Cathal Goulding at the start of the conflict, so a great deal of care was needed in preparing for the shift.

Adams and his comrades learnt from Goulding’s experience in two respects. First of all, they promised that Sinn Féin would never take its seats at Westminster or any revived Stormont assembly: Dublin’s Leinster House was the only platform it would use. Secondly, they made sure to keep the debate over abstention boxed off from any question marks over the armed struggle. Not only would the war continue, the IRA would actually intensify its campaign, with the help of the Libyan arms shipments that had started to make their way into the country.37 These promises of improved weaponry and greater autonomy for local units helped win the vote to ditch abstention at an IRA Army Convention in 1986.³⁸ Announcing the policy shift, an IRA spokesman promised there would be no let-up in its struggle against British rule.³⁹

The IRA’s decision gave Adams a vital asset as he faced his opponents in Dublin at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis that November. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was the spearhead of a traditionalist faction that opposed any change. All of the barely suppressed animosity between the old guard and those who had displaced them came to the surface, with talk of a split already trailed in the national media. Martin McGuinness scornfully dismissed Ó Brádaigh and his associates as a ‘former leadership’ who had never come to terms with their eclipse. He urged Sinn Féin members to keep faith with the ‘true revolutionaries’ of the IRA: ‘If you walk out of this hall today the only place you are going is home. You will be walking away from the struggle.’⁴⁰ McGuinness was already settling into his role as the IRA’s conscience, a bluff, plain-speaking militarist to offset the ‘sleekedness’ of his party leader.⁴¹ The reputation he had earned by playing a hands-on role in IRA operations made him popular with the movement’s grassroots, and his support for Adams in the debate was invaluable.⁴²

Adams himself sought to rise above the polemical fray, acknowledging that many republicans had ‘deep and justifiably strong feelings about abstentionism’. But he accused the Ó Brádaigh camp of trying to ‘panic and intimidate’ Sinn Féin members with talk of a split, and set out the case against abstention in emphatic terms: ‘It is a massive mistake to presume that our republican attitude to Leinster House is shared by any more than a very small section of our people, especially the citizens of this state.’ By taking their seats in the Dáil, republicans could open up a new political front. For Adams, this was ‘the only feasible way to break out of our isolation, to make political gains, to win support for our policies, to develop our organization and our struggle’.43 He made full use of the Army Convention’s recent vote to sway any doubters. The IRA was ‘united in its determination to pursue the armed struggle’, and those who denounced its new policy would have to turn their backs on republican prisoners in British jails.⁴⁴ Adams and his comrades had been keen to avoid a generational split by keeping veterans like Joe Cahill and John Joe McGirl on board. McGirl gave his full backing to the new line from the platform, insisting there could be no parallel drawn between Adams and Cathal Goulding: ‘We have an army fighting sixteen years which will continue to fight until British rule is defeated.’⁴⁵

The result was a decisive victory for Adams, as his supporters won the two-thirds majority needed to change the party’s constitution. Ó Brádaigh and his comrades left the conference to set up a new organization, Republican Sinn Féin, which was still committed to the abstentionist policy. Their splinter group received the seal of approval from Tom Maguire, the only surviving member of the second Dáil elected in 1921. In private, the Provos warned Ó Brádaigh not to foment any split in the IRA’s ranks.⁴⁶ His new party and its highly secretive military wing, the Continuity Army Council, would remain on the sidelines until the peace process of the 1990s gave Ó Brádaigh an opportunity to challenge the Adams leadership once again.

It wasn’t long before Sinn Féin had the chance to put its new line into practice. In his conference speech, Adams suggested that the election after the next one would be the party’s first serious test. He put the ‘political pygmies of Leinster House’ on notice to expect a strong challenge: ‘For too long they have been allowed a monopoly upon what passes for politics in this part of Ireland and for too long a very sizeable section of Irish citizens have been denied the opportunity to shape and build a relevant, radical and principled alternative to partitionist rule.’47 But that ‘sizeable section of Irish citizens’ proved to be elusive in the timeframe Adams had specified. There were two Irish general elections in 1987 and 1989. In the first, Sinn Féin won 1.9 per cent of the vote and no seats; in the second, it could only manage 1.2 per cent. The ramshackle Anti-H-Block campaign had won twice as many votes in 1981 as Sinn Féin did eight years later.

To compound the blow, 1989 was the greatest moment of triumph for the rebranded Officials in the South, just as they faced political oblivion north of the border. The Workers’ Party had discarded most of its republican heritage during the 1980s in the hope of winning support from working-class Protestants. Having formerly denounced the RUC as ‘a body of uniformed torturers’, it now praised the force for its ‘undoubted willingness’ to enforce the law without communal bias.⁴⁸ The party programme called for a return to devolved government without power-sharing or the cross-border ‘Irish dimension’ insisted on by the SDLP. Workers’ Party leaders blamed John Hume for the political log-jam, and suggested that the Anglo-Irish Agreement might be suspended so the Unionist parties would enter talks.⁴⁹ Such arguments made little impression on the Protestant electorate, as two of the party’s leading intellectuals, Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, noted in a paper for their comrades: ‘In the medium term we cannot hope for more than the interested attention of sections of the Protestant working class.’⁵⁰ But they were bound to raise hackles among the working-class nationalists who had supplied the Officials with a modest electoral base in the 1970s. In a survey conducted in 1985, 96 per cent of Protestants believed that the RUC carried out its duties ‘fairly’ or ‘very fairly’; just 47 per cent of Catholics agreed.⁵¹

In effect, Cathal Goulding’s movement had set out to build a working-class version of the bi-confessional, civic unionist Alliance Party, only to find that the realities of Northern Irish society militated against that project. The Alliance could base itself in a real if limited social constituency, to be found in prosperous suburban districts where middle-class Protestants and Catholics lived, worked and socialized together. Its vote share ranged from 5 to 15 per cent during the Troubles.52

There was no working-class equivalent of this social layer: communal polarization and segregation was at its most acute towards the bottom of the economic scale. The post-republican Workers’ Party left the nationalist field to be tended by Sinn Féin and the SDLP, without doing anything to weaken the grip of the Unionist parties over the Protestant electorate. Throughout the 1980s, its vote fluctuated between 1 and 3 per cent, a handful of council seats the only reward for all the blood, sweat and tears invested by party activists. The NIO’s Political Affairs Division was cruel but accurate in its assessment of the Officials after the 1983 election: ‘They will continue their efforts to introduce class politics to the electorate but these will always be surrounded by a faint air of musical comedy.’⁵³

For the Provos, there was nothing amusing about the apostasy of their former comrades, and they would have been happy to suppress the embattled sect altogether, if its members had not been able to call on their paramilitary shadow – known as ‘Group B’ – for protection.⁵⁴ But the Officials carved out a political niche south of the border, where the lack of republican baggage was an asset, not a liability. In 1989, the Workers’ Party won 5 per cent of the national vote and seven seats in the Dáil. The European election that was held simultaneously saw the party’s leader Proinsias De Rossa top the poll in Dublin. The personal vote for De Rossa, a veteran of the Border Campaign, was twice as large as the entire Provisional electorate. With Goulding’s followers now occupying the ground Sinn Féin wanted to conquer in the South, just as the party found itself treading water in its northern heartlands, no amount of invective could dispel the sense of political stagnation as a new decade came into view.

‘An end in itself’

Gerry Adams had claimed in 1986 that abstention was the main barrier to winning support from people who ‘might otherwise be open to our policies on all other issues’.55 But it was the IRA campaign that really stood in Sinn Féin’s path. Whatever latent sympathy there might be for republican goals, public opinion in the South was overwhelmingly hostile to the armed struggle. A series of kidnappings and bank robberies in the mid 1980s, some of which resulted in the death of Irish soldiers and policemen at the hands of IRA Volunteers, greatly sharpened that mood. Sinn Féin leaders railed against what they saw as the hypocrisy of Dublin’s political class. Danny Morrison reminded Garret FitzGerald that his own father, the 1916 veteran Desmond FitzGerald, had fought for Irish independence ‘with a Thompson machine gun in one hand and a ballot paper in the other’.⁵⁶ Morrison followed up that remark with a blistering pamphlet, The Good Old IRA, itemizing the atrocities committed by republicans during the War of Independence, in order to ‘confront those hypocritical revisionists who winsomely refer to the “Old IRA” whilst deriding their more effective and, arguably, less bloody successors’.⁵⁷

The Good Old IRA painted such a black picture of the ‘Tan War’ that some have described it as a pioneering exercise in revisionist historiography.⁵⁸ Morrison’s goal was not, of course, to discredit the republicans of yesteryear, but to show his readers that ‘no struggle involves a clean fight’.⁵⁹ But his central argument that Northern Irish nationalists ‘live under arguably worse conditions in terms of repression than did all of Ireland in the pre-1921 period’, and that the case for armed struggle was as valid today as it had ever been, made no impact on its intended audience.⁶⁰ Historians might agree that there was no yawning gulf between the methods of the old IRA and those used by the Provos. The need for logical consistency troubled politicians in Dublin much less. The War of Independence had been fought long ago and given them a state of their own with all the trappings of sovereignty. The Provo campaign now posed a threat to the interests of that state, and they wanted it to end as soon as possible. There was no substantial body of opinion in the South that took a different view.

The IRA still had the means to keep on fighting for a long time to come. Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya had promised them a remarkable gift: 240 tons of sophisticated weaponry, including heavy machine guns, surface-to-air missiles and a huge stock of Semtex explosive.61 A special IRA team managed to bring about half of this material into the country by sea before French police captured the largest shipment off the Atlantic coast in October 1987. The big question now for the Provo leadership was whether they should use this windfall to dramatically escalate their campaign, in the hope of precipitating a terminal crisis for British rule in Ireland.

The IRA’s main objective throughout the conflict was to kill members of the British security forces. From that perspective, there had been a marked decline in its capacity for lethal violence. Five hundred and seventy-nine soldiers and policemen lost their lives in the 1970s, the vast majority at the hands of the IRA, but the number of deaths fell to 342 in the following decade. These bald figures concealed a more important shift as ‘Ulsterization’ took effect. Losses suffered by the British Army had fallen sharply, from 349 to 124, but there was hardly any drop for the locally recruited forces (230 deaths to 218). From 1975 to 1988, there were only two years when the Army took more casualties than the RUC and the UDR. For five consecutive years in the mid 1980s, Army deaths were in single figures.⁶²

To a large extent, the Provos were fighting a war of attrition against the Protestant community in arms. They had to face charges of sectarian bigotry, especially when IRA Volunteers killed off-duty members of the UDR at their homes or places of work. Even if they shrugged off such accusations, IRA leaders could hardly deny that ‘Ulsterization’ had placed a formidable buffer between their campaign and the British government. Politicians in London would not have to face their own Vietnam, with the families of dead soldiers urging them to withdraw from a country whose fate meant nothing to them. If anything, the loss of sons and fathers made Northern Irish Protestants more determined to support the war against the IRA.

One response to this impasse might be to suddenly change gear and catch the British Army on the hop. Republicans weighed up the merits of their own ‘Tet Offensive’, inspired by the seminal moment in the Vietnam War when NLF guerrillas abandoned their usual hit-and-run tactics and tried to hold territory from static positions. According to one IRA Volunteer, ‘the idea was to take and hold areas in Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh and to force the British either to use maximum force or to hold off.’63 Another republican source described a plan to ‘take on the Army at roads and at fortifications with fifty to sixty IRA members involved at a time’, using the anti-aircraft missiles obtained from Libya to shoot down helicopters.⁶⁴ By denying the British Army safe use of the skies, the Provos would force it to rely on ground transport to supply its bases, leaving it vulnerable to ambush with the new weapons in the IRA’s arsenal.⁶⁵

Ed Moloney’s account of this proposal, easily the most comprehensive, draws heavily upon off-the-record interviews with republican dissenters who accused Gerry Adams and his associates of sabotaging the IRA campaign to prepare the ground for a ceasefire. The Libyan weapons and the ‘Tet Offensive’ form the centrepiece of this latter-day Dolchstoßlegende: according to the dissidents, elements in the Provo leadership deliberately compromised the last arms shipment before it reached Irish shores, scuppering the plans for a ‘big bang’ by removing the crucial element of surprise.⁶⁶

This version of events glosses over a fundamental point: what would have happened if the IRA had actually gone ahead with the plan? According to Moloney, republicans were hoping to repeat the experience of the early 1970s by goading their opponents into a counter-productive response.⁶⁷ If that was the case, then the IRA was on the brink of repeating Brian Faulkner’s mistake in 1971 by ignoring the fact that circumstances had changed dramatically since the last round.

On a purely technical level, it would have been much easier for the British government to strike a blow against the IRA by interning its members without trial. Having kept the organization under close surveillance since the conflict began and penetrated its ranks with informers, they would have had a much better idea of who to arrest and where than in the early 70s. If the authorities in Dublin had decided to act simultaneously – and there was a much better chance of that happening than in 1971, given the thaw in Anglo-Irish relations – the IRA would have found itself under severe pressure. Pitched battles between IRA units and British troops were also bound to take a heavy toll. It would have been a stiff challenge to preserve the organizational skeleton needed to train and equip any new layer of recruits, even if that layer had been forthcoming.

More importantly, the broader political context had changed beyond recognition since 1971. When British soldiers took the first internees to Long Kesh, it was at the behest of a Unionist government propped up by military force that had faced countless demonstrations by nationalists over the past three years. Now, Stormont was long gone, and the British government had pushed through its most recent political initiative in spite of ferocious Unionist opposition. Popular mobilization by nationalists had subsided after the hunger strikes, and Sinn Féin’s electoral advance was grinding to a halt. Public opinion in the South was indifferent to the IRA’s cause, if not actively hostile.

There was no reason to think that republicans could reverse these unfavourable trends with an all-or-nothing gamble. One senior Provisional suggested that the outcome would have been ‘six months’ intense fighting, with heavy casualties on both sides’, but no prospect of victory at the end of the line.68 If the Adams leadership really did sabotage the ‘Tet Offensive’, they most likely saved the IRA from a messy defeat that would have been a poor return on two decades of struggle and sacrifice.

There was a more limited escalation of the IRA campaign in the late 1980s, making use of the Libyan weapons that had slipped through the net. Army losses increased to their highest levels since the 1970s, with twenty-three soldiers killed in 1988 and twenty-four the following year. But the British state also had the capacity to raise its game. The Army killed nineteen IRA members in the space of a year, including an eight-man unit wiped out by the SAS at Loughgall in May 1987.⁶⁹ The ambush in Tyrone was damaging enough, but the IRA could at least hope to turn the disaster to good account by transforming its dead Volunteers into martyrs for the cause.

However, no silver lining could be found in the IRA’s worst setback of the time. In November 1987, a Provo bomb exploded during a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen, killing eleven civilians, all of them Protestant. There was a furious popular backlash, especially in the South, where Sinn Féin had been hoping to establish a foothold.

Soon after the bombing, the US journalist Kevin Kelley published a new edition of his highly sympathetic book about the Provos, with some words of commendation from Gerry Adams on the cover. Kelley added an epilogue on ‘the need for non-violence’, arguing that republicans were ‘bound to lose more than they will gain by continuing indefinitely on their present course’, and would do better to adopt new methods of struggle: ‘Sit-downs, “illegal” marches, refusal to pay rates, rents or fines, destruction of public records, and complete non-cooperation with all agencies and officials of the state – each of which would presumably result in mass arrests – might well stir international opinion and the British conscience in ways that bombs in London and bullets in Belfast demonstrably do not.’70 There were powerful echoes here of the case for civil resistance as a substitute for armed struggle that People’s Democracy had made a decade earlier, when the Provos brushed such arguments impatiently aside.

Another warning about the perils of republican militarism came from the fate of the INLA, which seemed to have entered its death throes. A new chief of staff, Dominic McGlinchey, held the organization together in rough-and-ready fashion for a few years in the 1980s, while the political wing of Seamus Costello’s movement continued to wither on the vine. McGlinchey had won a fearsome reputation as a Provisional commander in south Derry before the Provos expelled him for indiscipline. When the IRSP’s paper interviewed McGlinchey in 1983, while he was on the run from the Irish police, the INLA leader dutifully noted the party’s importance in giving ‘political leadership on the class struggle in Ireland’ and spoke of his interest in left-wing ideology, ‘from Fanon and Cabral to Guevara and Mandel’.⁷¹

But McGlinchey’s own practice was unmistakably that of a traditional republican militarist, and he masterminded a series of high-profile attacks. After the Irish authorities captured him in 1984, the INLA’s quarrelsome factions began preparing for all-out war.72 One splinter group broke away to form the Irish People’s Liberation Organization (IPLO) and ordered the rump INLA to disband. When their former comrades disregarded those instructions, a grisly vendetta ensued, claiming the lives of twelve people before it staggered to a halt.

The victims of the feud included Thomas ‘Ta’ Power, who had been trying to promote some fresh political thinking since his release from prison. A document written by Power gave a scathing description of the INLA’s ‘macho’ internal culture and asked whether the movement had backed itself into a corner: ‘We get no analysis, we get no strategy outside the basic [military] confrontation – it eventually becomes an end in itself simply due to the fact that they don’t know any other strategy.’⁷³

Repeating the arguments made by Bernadette McAliskey and her allies a decade earlier, Power urged his comrades to ‘put politics in command’ by establishing the supremacy of the IRSP over its military wing. Supporters of the IPLO faction gunned him down before he had any chance to put these ideas into effect. The INLA somehow survived the onslaught launched by its former comrades, but could not transcend the macho militarism that Power had castigated. One consequence of the feud was to incapacitate a potential rival for the Provos, just as they were putting out feelers for a new political initiative that might cause ructions inside the IRA.