10

Endgame

The Picador Approach

An IRA ceasefire duly followed on 31 August 1994, reciprocated weeks later by the loyalist paramilitaries. A document circulated to IRA Volunteers on TUAS – ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ – set out the rationale for a truce: ‘Republicans at this time and on their own do not have the strength to achieve the end goal.’ The priority now was to ‘construct an Irish nationalist consensus with international support’. The paper suggested that such a consensus could be based on a number of principles – ‘partition has failed’, ‘structures must be changed’, ‘no internal settlement’, etc. – but acknowledged that there were ‘differences of opinion’ on how those principles should be applied, such as ‘an interpretation of what veto and consent mean’. Basic questions about the meaning of consent and self-determination, which had been fundamental to the conflict for the past quarter-century, thus became matters of secondary importance. It may well have been, as the document suggested, ‘the first time in twenty-five years that all the major Irish nationalist parties are rowing in roughly the same direction’.¹ But it was the Provos who had turned their boat around.

Gerry Adams spelled out the shift in perspective the following year. According to Adams, the British government’s current position would not prevent ‘constitutional change or political advances which fall short of dismantling the union from going ahead without the consent of a majority in the North’.2 By implication, political advances which did go beyond that point were off the agenda. The Sinn Féin leader was now aiming for a settlement with strong cross-border institutions that could be presented as a first step towards Irish unity.

In the meantime, reforms should be carried out to ensure ‘equality of treatment’ for nationalists in Northern Ireland. Adams claimed that such measures would ‘erode the very reason for the existence of that statelet’.³ Republican critics of Adams had repeatedly compared him to Cathal Goulding over the previous decade – a suggestion that he found deeply wounding, as those who made it intended.⁴ In this case it could be said, without polemical distortion, that the movement’s leadership had reverted to the civil rights strategy of the late 60s. Then as now, republicans argued that a successful reform programme would leave Northern Ireland with no long-term future.

The main question was whether Adams and his allies could hold the movement together on the basis of this revisionist agenda. Observing the reaction to the ceasefire in Provisional strongholds, Eamonn McCann detected ‘a sense of relief, or more accurately of release, from a burden which people had found harder to bear than they’d been able to acknowledge’, with no desire for the war to go on: ‘There are some who have doubts about what’s on offer in return, but no powerful faction has emerged to argue that continuation of armed action is the best way to win more.’⁵

In the long run, IRA Volunteers would find it very difficult to swim against the current of nationalist opinion, but there was no guarantee they would heed it in the timeframe that Sinn Féin’s peace strategy required. However much it reflected wider political realities, the ceasefire had clearly been leadership-driven, with the decision made by the seven-man Army Council.⁶ The TUAS document acknowledged that ‘communication up and down the organization has been patchy’ and promised to do better from now on.⁷

John Major’s government insisted on the decommissioning of IRA weapons as a precondition for Sinn Féin’s entry into talks. British officials who had been involved in contacts with the republican movement saw this as a reckless gambit. Quentin Thomas of the NIO believed that Major’s demand ‘kept inviting the Sinn Féin leadership to confront those within their movement who they did not want to confront for perfectly normal political reasons’, while the MI6 veteran Michael Oatley tartly described it as the ‘picador approach’ to peace negotiations: ‘No doubt, if sufficient barbs are thrust into its flanks, the animal will eventually, with reluctance, charge. The picadors can then claim that the beast was always a ravening monster.’8 In contrast, Albert Reynolds moved quickly to bring Sinn Féin inside the tent, hosting a meeting with Adams and John Hume within weeks of the ceasefire.

As ever, the IRA’s inner life could only be glimpsed through a glass darkly. One well-informed reporter, Suzanne Breen, saw ‘immense trust’ in the Adams leadership when the ceasefire began, provided it kept peace overtures within certain limits. An IRA Volunteer in Belfast told Breen that ‘intelligence-gathering, fund-raising and other activities’ would carry on as before: ‘If it was a question of us handing over arms, we’d oppose it. But that’s not on the agenda.’⁹ Twelve months later, she still found the ceasefire to be ‘rock-solid’, with ‘no immediate threat of an internal split’, but widespread dissatisfaction in the lower ranks of the movement.¹⁰ By the start of 1996, Breen was warning that trouble might lie ahead: ‘The IRA’s opponents are paying a small price for the ceasefire. They can afford to be more magnanimous in victory.’¹¹

The decommissioning stand-off was the main issue for republicans, but there had been other developments to put the ceasefire under strain. When the Reynolds government collapsed in December 1994, a new coalition headed by Fine Gael’s John Bruton took its place. Bruton made no bones about his hostility to ‘pan-nationalism’; worse still from a republican perspective, his government included Proinsias De Rossa’s new vehicle Democratic Left, which had ditched the Marxist ideology of the Workers’ Party but retained all of its animosity towards the Provos.

For their part, sceptics pointed to evidence of ongoing IRA activity, in particular a botched robbery that claimed the life of a post office worker in November 1994. The IRA leadership admitted that its members were responsible for the killing, but insisted that the Army Council had not sanctioned the operation.12 IRA units also shot dead several alleged drug dealers in Belfast during the ceasefire, using the cover name ‘Direct Action Against Drugs’.

In the summer of 1995, rioting broke out in nationalist areas after two controversial events: John Major’s decision to release a British soldier who had been convicted of murder, and the RUC’s decision to push an Orange march through the predominantly Catholic Garvaghy Road in Portadown. The Ulster Unionist MP David Trimble joined hands with Ian Paisley as they completed the parade, insisting there had been no deal with the Garvaghy Road residents.¹³ Trimble’s role in the controversy helped him ascend to the UUP leadership in September 1995.

After years in which he was known primarily as an IRA leader, Martin McGuinness had begun to emerge as a politician with a profile to rival that of Gerry Adams. His reputation as an uncompromising militarist might have led one to expect a strained relationship between the two men, but there was little sign of that in public. Indeed, that hard-line image proved to be a vital asset for Adams, making it easier to sell the compromises that his strategy was bound to entail. When push came to shove, the contrast between the two Sinn Féin leaders appeared to be largely a matter of style and personality, masking the deeper political convergence between them.

On the first anniversary of the truce, McGuinness reproached the British government for its ‘begrudging and negative response’.¹⁴ The controversy over IRA weapons overshadowed further evidence of the change in Sinn Féin’s position. Not for the last time, a republican leader tried to snatch a semblance of victory from the jaws of retreat by redefining basic political concepts.¹⁵ McGuinness railed against ‘London’s acceptance of the unionist veto over talks’, insisting that ‘no group can be allowed a veto on change’.¹⁶ This minimalist recasting of the ‘unionist veto’ would allow Sinn Féin to claim victory when it secured entry to all-party talks, even if that veto as republicans traditionally understood it was a foundation stone of the entire process. ‘Change’ was every bit as malleable a term, since British governments had already accepted that Unionist politicians could not veto reforms that fell short of ending partition.

The balance of forces inside the IRA eventually tipped in favour of the sceptics, after more foot-dragging from John Major, and a massive bomb in London’s Canary Wharf shattered the ceasefire in February 1996.17 The subsequent campaign now looks like a strange parenthesis in the history of the movement, prosecuted by a leadership that had no desire to abandon the peace process altogether, with little activity inside Northern Ireland, and successful operations like Canary Wharf and the bombing of Thiepval barracks punctuated by major setbacks.

The IRA’s Easter statement in April 1996 simply called for all-party talks that would ‘allow for the core issues at the heart of this conflict to be addressed’.¹⁸ But the militarist tendency would have been happy to go back to basics, as Brendan O’Brien observed: ‘There were those who argued for a single-minded Brits Out offensive, with a view to extracting what they had previously failed to extract, namely a British commitment to withdraw. The advocates of this course were prepared to jettison the community-based support, built up over twenty years, even jettison the Sinn Féin connection.’¹⁹ If this faction had taken control of the movement, all bets would have been off.

The Adams leadership kept its strategy alive by seeing off the dissident challenge at an Army Convention in November 1996.²⁰ Fortified by this victory, they faced a special party conference in Athboy later that month. Although the conference was held behind closed doors, a transcript of the speech given by Gerry Adams soon leaked out. Adams made his distrust of Sinn Féin’s erstwhile ‘pan-nationalist’ allies clear: ‘It would be far better if we were bigger than them. We could ignore them.’ He also hinted at the possibility of a breach between Sinn Féin and the IRA: ‘Whatever the Army does is the Army’s business and people can have whatever views they want about that. But let us not use the Army in whatever it does as an excuse for us not to make peace.’²¹ However, the Convention’s outcome had made the prospect of a split much less likely.

The most controversial part of his speech concerned the issue of Orange marches. The second confrontation on the Garvaghy Road in July 1996 was far more dramatic than the previous year’s stand-off, with loyalists setting up roadblocks throughout Northern Ireland and a huge crowd massing at Drumcree to force the parade through. When the RUC’s Chief Constable Hugh Annesley reversed the decision to impose a ban, the relish of his officers in clearing nationalist protesters off the streets was all too evident.22 Adams credited the entire affair, which had made the RUC and the Unionist parties appear in the worst possible light, to ‘three years of work’ by republican activists: ‘Fair play to the people who put that work in. And they are the type of scene changes that we have to focus in on and develop and exploit.’²³ Unionist politicians seized on these remarks as proof that Sinn Féin had confected the opposition to Orange parades for its own benefit.

In fact, Adams had exaggerated his party’s influence: as events were to show, the Sinn Féin leadership was in no position to give orders to the Garvaghy Road Residents Group or its spokesman, Breandán MacCionnaith.²⁴ But there was a deeper irony to his comments that the critics appear to have missed. As the thirtieth anniversary of NICRA’s first venture from Coalisland to Dungannon approached, the question of street marches once again took centre stage in the politics of Northern Ireland. The movement Adams had joined after the republican split used NICRA’s protest campaign as the launchpad for a war that went on for much longer than anyone could have anticipated. Some IRA activists wanted to exploit ‘Drumcree 2’ in similar fashion to recharge their movement’s batteries for another generation.²⁵ In contrast, Adams cited the ‘community resistance’ of the Garvaghy Road as proof that, while the war might be over, the struggle would continue.

The Unwinnable War

Over the next few months, the pieces began falling into place for a second ceasefire. In May 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour Party trounced John Major’s Conservatives in the UK general election. Sinn Féin’s vote share in Northern Ireland rose from 10 to 16 per cent, with seats for Gerry Adams in West Belfast and Martin McGuinness in Mid-Ulster. A few weeks later, Fianna Fáil’s new leader, Bertie Ahern, returned his party to government in Dublin, while Sinn Féin won its first seat for a southern constituency since the Border Campaign. Blair and Ahern went on to provide continuity of leadership in the two states for the next decade. The new Taoiseach had criticized John Bruton during the election campaign for his handling of the peace process; Blair maintained a ‘bipartisan’ line in public while Major was still in power, but soon indicated that Sinn Féin could enter talks without decommissioning by the IRA.26

A second ceasefire came into effect in July, and Sinn Féin signed up to a set of principles drafted by the US mediator George Mitchell, committing the party to ‘exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues’ and ‘total disarmament of all paramilitary organizations’ in the framework of an eventual settlement.²⁷ Adams led a Sinn Féin delegation into talks soon afterwards. Paisley’s DUP withdrew in protest, but David Trimble kept his party in the mix, while refusing to engage directly with Sinn Féin.²⁸

Acceptance of the Mitchell Principles proved to be the final straw for Michael McKevitt, the IRA’s quarter-master general, who had spearheaded the challenge to Adams. After another Army Convention in October 1997 that strengthened the hand of the leadership, McKevitt and his supporters broke away to form a group known as the ‘Real IRA’.²⁹ McKevitt’s new organization soon acquired a political shadow, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, that accused Sinn Féin of betraying republican principles. But the effect of his departure was to splinter the internal opposition to Sinn Féin’s new approach.

Two small parties represented the loyalist paramilitaries at the talks: the UDA’s political mouthpiece, the Ulster Democratic Party, and the Progressive Unionist Party, aligned with the UVF. After the DUP’s exit, their presence alongside Trimble’s party satisfied the need for at least half of the Unionist electorate to be involved in the process. These groups proved to be more flexible than their bigger rivals on the terms of a peace settlement, so long as the Union remained in place. Infuriated by this accommodating stance, the UVF’s Mid-Ulster commander Billy Wright tried to lead his comrades back to war, setting up his own organization, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), after the UVF expelled him in 1996.30

Wright’s death inside the Maze prison in December 1997 sparked off a round of sectarian killings by the LVF and its UDA allies, but the loyalist ceasefire ultimately held. The shooting of Wright was the main intervention by a largely inactive INLA while the talks were in progress, although some INLA activists worked with McKevitt’s Real IRA to carry out bomb attacks.³¹

Tony Blair had scrapped Labour’s ‘unity by consent’ policy after becoming the party’s leader and removed its chief advocate, Kevin McNamara, from his position on the front bench. He used his first speech in Northern Ireland as prime minister to deliver a warm endorsement of the Union.³² Blair’s administration was no more willing to play the role of ‘persuader for unity’ than its predecessor had been. On the short-term question of decommissioning and Sinn Féin’s entry into talks, the new governments gave Gerry Adams exactly what he needed. However, the Heads of Agreement paper they published in January 1998 had a much weaker ‘all-Ireland’ element than the Framework Documents produced by Major and John Bruton in 1995.³³ The republican leadership had lowered its sights and was prepared to accept cross-border institutions with substantial powers in lieu of a united Ireland; now, even that objective looked to be slipping away as the final stage of negotiations began.

After a flurry of last-minute brinkmanship, the parties agreed on the text of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in April 1998.³⁴ The Downing Street Declaration had already laid down the broad parameters for a deal, leaving various secondary elements to be haggled over. In simple terms, the SDLP got most of what it wanted over power-sharing arrangements, David Trimble got most of what he wanted over cross-border structures, and Sinn Féin got most of what it wanted over decommissioning and prisoner releases. The republican negotiating team ditched its opposition to a new regional assembly, and watched Trimble secure the hollowing out of a paper on North–South institutions.35 But they kept the timetable for the release of prisoners down to two years, and made sure there was no requirement for decommissioning in advance of Sinn Féin’s entry into government.

Trimble seems to have expected Sinn Féin to leave before the talks were over, relieving him of the need to sell a package that would put republicans in a power-sharing administration.³⁶ If so, he underestimated the party’s determination to remain inside the tent, even at the price of major ideological concessions. In order to secure his flank against internal opposition, Trimble extracted a letter from Tony Blair at the last minute, promising measures to exclude Sinn Féin from the regional government if decommissioning did not begin ‘straight away’.³⁷ As the academic Padraig O’Malley pointed out, the text of the GFA itself did not impose any such obligation on Sinn Féin; that was what the party’s leadership had signed up to, not a bilateral commitment from Blair to the UUP.³⁸ Ian Paisley geared up to oppose the Agreement in any case, accusing Trimble of selling out to the Provos.

At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in May 1998, Gerry Adams was careful not to oversell the GFA, describing it as ‘another staging-post on the road to a peace settlement’ rather than a settlement in its own right: ‘British rule has not ended. Neither has partition. That is why our struggle continues.’³⁹ Adams strengthened his case for a ‘Yes’ vote by welcoming the ‘Balcombe Street Gang’ onto the stage to receive a ten-minute standing ovation. The men, who had spent the last two decades in British jails after carrying out a series of bomb attacks in the 1970s, were on day release after their recent transfer to Portlaoise prison. Their presence reminded delegates that the Agreement would bring the IRA’s prisoners home and helped secure an overwhelming vote to endorse it, clearing the way for Sinn Féin to take its seats in a new Northern Ireland Assembly.⁴⁰ Adams concluded his speech with a new tactical emphasis: ‘We go into this next phase of struggle armed only with whatever mandate we receive, armed only with our political ideas and our vision of the future.’⁴¹

Nationalist support for the GFA was sky-high: the overwhelming majority of Northern Irish nationalists voted in favour, and there was a 95 per cent ‘Yes’ vote in a simultaneous plebiscite south of the border. But just 57 per cent of unionists endorsed the deal.42 Most unionists reacted with horror to the performance staged by the Sinn Féin leadership in Dublin, which weakened David Trimble’s position in the referendum campaign. Hard as it might be for their opponents to accept, the republican movement needed something to sweeten the pill after signing up to a political framework it had rejected out of hand for decades. The federalism of Éire Nua and the abstentionist policy never mattered as much to the northern Provos grouped around Gerry Adams as they did to their estranged comrade Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. But a firm belief that the state in Northern Ireland could never be reformed was absolutely central to their ideology. Now they would be haggling over the extent of such reforms for an indefinite period.

In total, the IRA accounted for nearly half of those killed between 1966 and 2001: over 1,750 people. Just over one in two of the organization’s victims fitted its own definition of legitimate targets (soldiers, police and prison officers, or loyalist paramilitaries).⁴³ By the standards that the IRA set for itself, its war ended in failure.

That outcome was both predictable and predicted from an early stage. Northern Ireland was a small, densely populated area on the fringe of Western Europe, with no mountains or jungles for guerrillas to shelter in. But the challenges that the region’s physical geography posed were ultimately less important than its social geography. Guerrilla movements need popular support to overcome the military advantages enjoyed by their opponents, yet the IRA faced implacable opposition from the unionist majority throughout the conflict. If the whole of Northern Ireland had been like West Belfast or South Armagh, the Provisionals could easily have won. In that scenario, of course, partition would never have been viable in the first place. The surprising thing is not that the Provos eventually compromised on their demands, but that they managed to avoid outright defeat.

Internal critics of Gerry Adams had warned that his electoral strategy would undermine the IRA from the moment it got off the ground.44 But it could well be argued that Sinn Féin’s political growth in the 1980s extended the war beyond its natural lifespan, by giving the movement’s leadership reason to hope it could still win. After all, the dual campaign from 1981 to 1994 comfortably outlasted the ‘pure’ military struggle of the 1970s, and went on for much longer than any previous republican insurgency, from the ‘Tan War’ to Operation Harvest. Once Sinn Féin hit its electoral ceiling, it should have been clear that republicans would find victory elusive. From that point on, it was a question of securing the best deal they could achieve.

Facing charges of betrayal from republican splinter groups, Adams and his comrades had one trump card: a widespread belief that armed struggle was a political dead end, even if the fruits of Sinn Féin’s alternative strategy left much to be desired. Richard O’Rawe, an IRA veteran who fell out with the republican leadership in the most acrimonious way, still defended their change of course without hesitation: ‘Of course I support the peace process. Like or dislike Gerry Adams, he has to be given credit for ending the unwinnable war.’⁴⁵

Michael McKevitt’s Real IRA dealt a hammer-blow to republican militarism in August 1998 when it planted a bomb in Omagh that killed twenty-nine civilians: the worst individual atrocity of the entire conflict. Having threatened to build up a head of steam, the group had little choice but to call a ceasefire in the wake of the carnage, although its uncompromising perspective suggested that it would eventually return to war. As long as the ‘dissidents’ were bent on restarting an unpopular armed campaign that had no prospect of forcing Britain to withdraw, there was little chance they would pose an effective political challenge to the Provos.

‘Crablike towards their goal’

The period since 1998 is still very hard to view in a long-term perspective. The making and remaking of the Good Friday Agreement has been in progress for almost as long as the IRA’s armed struggle, without completing the transition from current affairs to history. Due to the limited availability of sources, any judgement on the post-conflict years must be rather tentative. Even so, we can identify some crucial landmarks, and examine some of the underlying factors beneath the surface of events. As both supporters and opponents would agree, this was a time in which Sinn Féin and the IRA remained absolutely central to the politics of Northern Ireland, forcing the other players to respond to their initiatives whether they liked it or not.

In the afterglow of the 1998 referendum, many observers expected that David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists would go on to dominate the region’s political life in tandem with the SDLP. But Trimble’s insistence on prior decommissioning – ‘no guns, no government’ – blocked the speedy formation of a power-sharing executive. The impasse dragged on for several years, while reports of continued IRA activity, from Colombia to Castlereagh, began to accumulate. Trimble’s authority as the leader of Unionism steadily drained away, and he dismissed eventual moves by the IRA on decommissioning as inadequate for his political needs. In the meantime, republican and loyalist prisoners won their freedom, and a commission headed by the Conservative politician Chris Patten delivered a report on police reform that Unionists greeted with fury.

The political stalemate did Sinn Féin little harm at the ballot box, and the party overtook the SDLP for the first time in the UK general election of 2001. When Paisley’s DUP surpassed the Ulster Unionists in regional elections two years later, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern sought to broker a compromise between the new communal hegemons, at first to little avail. But in September 2005, after coming under intense pressure, the IRA announced the full decommissioning of its arsenal. Two years later, Sinn Féin concluded a deal with Ian Paisley to form a power-sharing government that became a lasting feature of the political scene.

Describing what happened is straightforward enough; accounting for why it happened is a much trickier business. In public and in private, the Sinn Féin leadership had a simple explanation for the slow pace of decommissioning after 1998: their overriding fear of a split. Critics dismissed that claim out of hand, and chided Blair for his alleged reluctance to call Sinn Féin’s bluff. In Britain, a cluster of journalists and academics associated with hawkish, right-wing think tanks took up these arguments, already commonplace among anti-agreement Unionists.46

But a writer with a very different political outlook, Ed Moloney, also became a forceful spokesman for the ‘appeasement’ thesis. According to Moloney, Adams and his comrades could have begun decommissioning ‘very soon after the Good Friday Agreement was ratified’, having secured their control over the IRA. Instead, they opted to stall in pursuit of electoral advantage, an approach that ‘divided and destabilized mainstream unionism, rendered their SDLP rivals almost irrelevant, and polarized Northern Ireland politics to the advantage of the extremes’.⁴⁷ The two governments were ‘naive, not to mention foolish’ in their stance towards the IRA: Blair in particular, Moloney suggested, ‘would concede virtually anything that was asked of him’.⁴⁸ Given the importance of decommissioning for the whole course of events after 1998, this argument deserves careful scrutiny.

It is useful to compare Moloney’s picture of Blair and Ahern as IRA dupes with the account of the peace process supplied by Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Powell sympathized with the need for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to ‘move crablike towards their goal, in cautious and gradual steps, never revealing in full to the movement their eventual destination’. There was, he believed, a convergence of interests between his government and the Provo leadership, since they were both determined to avoid an IRA split: ‘We did not want to have to make peace lots of times with republican splinter groups. We wanted to do it once.’⁴⁹

For Powell, determining where Sinn Féin’s bottom line actually lay was an art, not a science, and there was no particular virtue in testing them to the limit ‘just for the pleasure of feeling we had got the deal at the lowest possible price’.⁵⁰ Ed Moloney described the ultimate reward for such patience very well: ‘Since it was the IRA’s own leaders who were winding up the armed struggle, it was coming to an end with a certainty and finality that no amount of security successes could have guaranteed.’ Moreover, the political price being asked in return would have been considered ‘impossibly modest’ just a few years earlier.51

Although Powell did not say so explicitly, Blair’s attitude towards the IRA clearly owed something to his commitments elsewhere. The period bookended by the Good Friday Agreement and the decommissioning statement of 2005 saw British forces deployed in action on a scale unknown since the last days of empire. With an almost messianic zeal, Blair held up armed struggle as the path to liberation for oppressed peoples, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq. Powell does not appear to have noticed the irony: his memoir scolds Martin McGuinness for ‘cheekily’ criticizing the bombing of Afghanistan – ‘he should know a thing or two about bombing campaigns, we thought’ – but there is no hint of self-awareness when Powell recalls Blair nipping out of crisis talks to strong-arm the Chilean president before a crucial vote on Iraq.⁵² Those who accused Blair of pandering to the Provos were often keen supporters of his strategy in the Middle East.⁵³ They were reluctant to admit that the flip side of military boldness in Basra or Helmand was a more cautious approach in South Armagh.

Ed Moloney detected ‘an intriguing clue as to how the IRA leadership really regarded Blair’ in papers seized by police officers investigating an alleged republican spy ring: ‘One document referred to the British Prime Minister by his IRA code-name: “The Naïve Idiot”.’⁵⁴ If word of this got back to Downing Street, Blair might well have chuckled at such self-aggrandizing bravado. The pay-off for his ‘naivety’ was the freedom to dispatch troops to far-flung locations without having to worry about exposing the British state’s soft underbelly. By one estimate, at least one-third of the IRA membership still consisted of ‘internal dissidents’ after the Real IRA split.⁵⁵ From Blair’s perspective, keeping those sceptics under the thumb of Gerry Adams was a bargain-basement approach to counter-insurgency.

It is hard to imagine that a fresh republican campaign could have matched the Provisional war of the 1970s and 80s, much less that it could have succeeded where the Provos failed. But violence on a more limited scale would still have destabilized the region and obliged the British government to commit forces on the home front, just as the ‘war on terror’ was entering its most ambitious phase. Blair’s line on decommissioning looks more like a calculated trade-off between policy objectives than the product of gullibility.

If the supposed fear of large-scale defections had been no more than a cynical ploy used by Adams to strengthen his movement’s bargaining position, we might have expected word of this to reach the highest levels of government. After all, one Sinn Féin activist on the fringe of the party’s inner circle, Denis Donaldson, was subsequently revealed to be a British agent. Powell’s account suggests genuine uncertainty about the balance of opinion within the IRA.56 The future release of state papers may reveal that Powell’s colleagues knew more than he let on.

But the work of journalists with good republican sources tends to confirm the wisdom of a cautious attitude. In January 2000, Suzanne Breen identified decommissioning as one compromise that the IRA’s grassroots could not stomach: ‘It has touched a deep chord. The vast majority are firmly opposed to even a token hand-over.’ She predicted that any move in that direction by the movement’s leadership would supply a major boost to the Real IRA: ‘The mood in the general nationalist community is firmly against a return to conflict but the republican base remains more ambiguous.’⁵⁷

Two years later, Breen argued that it was still necessary for the Army Council to allow intelligence-gathering and weapons training to continue, even at the price of political embarrassment for Sinn Féin, ‘in order to keep their base occupied’.⁵⁸ At the beginning of 2003, as speculation mounted that the Provos were going to stand their units down for good, she found ‘caution, disbelief and some resignation’ among IRA Volunteers in Belfast. Her report suggested that the salami tactics used by Adams to marginalize his opponents had paid off.

One IRA member told Breen that the movement was now ‘too far down the road to turn back’, even though he was unhappy with the outcome of the peace process: ‘I thought we would be heading towards a united Ireland. I’d have called anyone a liar who had suggested we would sit in Stormont or disarm, let alone wind up.’ Another ‘disillusioned Provisional’ had no intention of linking up with the dissidents: ‘They are not seen as alternatives. The only place for people like me to go is home.’59 Breen still detected ‘considerable discontent within IRA grassroots, particularly in Tyrone and Fermanagh’ a few months later.⁶⁰ The Sinn Féin leadership may well have exaggerated the strength of internal opposition as a negotiating tactic, but they did not invent it altogether.

There is also an unacknowledged tension in Moloney’s own account of these years. The final catalyst for wholesale decommissioning in 2005 came from two events that were extremely damaging for Sinn Féin: the Northern Bank robbery in December 2004, for which the IRA was immediately held responsible, and the brutal killing of Robert McCartney after a row with IRA members in a Belfast pub. The circumstances of the bank heist suggested that it must have had prior approval from the Army Council, unlike McCartney’s murder.⁶¹

According to Moloney, McCartney’s death was ‘an unforeseeable event whose subsequent handling nonetheless assisted the move towards final decommissioning’. But the Northern Bank robbery was something more calculated, ‘an operation approved by the IRA’s political leadership in the knowledge that its consequences would force the organization to contemplate far-reaching measures’.⁶²

Whether or not this hypothesis is correct, it can hardly be reconciled with the rest of Moloney’s argument. If the republican leadership had had a free hand to decommission the IRA’s entire arsenal from 1999 onwards, there would have been no need for them to compromise Sinn Féin’s position by giving the IRA a rope with which to hang itself later on.

Spinning Plates

The overall impression we get from Moloney’s narrative is that Sinn Féin approached the period after 1998 with a carefully thought-out strategic master plan. It appears much more likely that they improvised in response to events, knowing roughly where they wanted to end up but ducking and weaving along the way. An apt metaphor for the challenge facing them came from Moloney himself, who once compared the way Sinn Féin was handling the weapons issue to ‘that old circus act in which a juggler tries to keep an ever-growing number of plates spinning atop rows of bamboo poles’.63

Ironically, Gerry Adams used a very similar image when discussing the republican peace strategy: ‘As any juggler worth his balls knows, keeping more than two in the air at the same time requires a lot of focus and concentration.’⁶⁴ Adams and his comrades certainly wanted to extract the maximum political advantage from disposing of the IRA’s arms, but they also had real difficulties in bringing their supporters to that point. In much the same way, David Trimble exploited a genuine threat to his own leadership from within the UUP to lobby for concessions from Blair’s government.⁶⁵

In Moloney’s version of the juggling metaphor, it was only a matter of time before things went wrong for its subject: ‘Eventually he overreaches himself, tries to spin one plate too many and the rest begin to fall.’ That moment came in the early months of 2005, after Robert McCartney’s death and the Northern Bank robbery. If the Provisional leadership did possess the authority to order full decommissioning back in 2003, a move at that point would have left Sinn Féin with a stronger hand to play than after the September 2005 statement. Trimble’s waning political fortunes had encouraged republican hesitancy, as his advisor Steven King acknowledged: ‘Perhaps a card or two had to be kept back just in case they were in negotiations with the DUP in a few years’ time.’⁶⁶ But in the end, the Provos still had to surrender their most valuable bargaining chip before attempting to strike a deal with Paisley. Sinn Féin’s decisive entry into government came from a position of weakness and political isolation.

The long stalemate over decommissioning obscured the fact that Sinn Féin was becoming an increasingly conventional political party. The Provos had been the purest example of an anti-systemic movement in Western Europe: not only did they possess their own army, which doubled as a community police force, they also had their own media, entertainment industry and even transport system (the ‘black cabs’ of West Belfast). When Gerry Adams argued for Sinn Féin to scrap its abstentionist policy back in 1986, he referred in passing to the question of ‘electoralism as a means of revolutionary struggle’, which had ‘affected all struggles in areas where parliaments with universal suffrage exist’. Sinn Féin’s link to the IRA campaign was, he argued, the true guarantee of its revolutionary character.67 As the party finally severed that link, the full extent of its transformation since the 1980s should have been readily apparent.

One activist, Féilim Ó hAdhmaill, had expected a return to ‘the mass mobilizations of the civil rights period, producing a type of republican intifada’ after the IRA ceasefire.⁶⁸ But the only real example of that came from the community protests against Orange marches in the late 1990s. The mobilization of the Garvaghy Road residents in Portadown was a clear-cut success: in spite of heavy pressure from David Trimble, reinforced behind the scenes by Tony Blair, they secured the banning of the march in 1998, and all subsequent efforts to overturn that ban proved fruitless.⁶⁹ By 2004, as Jonathan Powell observed, the Drumcree march was a ‘dead letter’.⁷⁰ Away from flashpoints like Drumcree, however, there was little room for mass participation in Sinn Féin’s new struggle.

Northern Ireland probably had more elected representatives per capita than any region in Europe, and a remarkably high proportion of Sinn Féin’s activist base became involved in electoral work, whether directly as councillors and Assembly members or indirectly as research assistants, constituency workers, etc. A much smaller group managed the high politics of the peace process: very often it would be just Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, or even Adams alone, who took part directly in negotiations.⁷¹ The enervating, stop-start, ‘Groundhog Day’ character of the talks led to widespread apathy, as Suzanne Breen observed in 2003: ‘Most people have simply switched off. In pubs, taxi depots and cafés, in-depth analysis focuses on the race for the English Premiership, not that for the peace deal. The strategies of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger arouse much more interest than those of Gerry Adams and David Trimble.’72

Back in the 1970s, ‘Brownie’ and his comrades had proclaimed the need to eliminate ‘spectator politics’ and mobilize the republican base. Now the peace process had created a new form of spectator politics, and it was losing the battle for audience share.

If Sinn Féin had become a rather conventional vote-winning machine, it was at least a very efficient one. The party’s vote in regional elections rose from 16.7 per cent in 1998 to 23.5 per cent in 2003 and 26.2 per cent four years later, largely at the expense of the SDLP. By 2007, it had 63 per cent of the nationalist vote. Although there was some attrition in traditional strongholds, Sinn Féin remained completely hegemonic in West Belfast, taking five of the constituency’s six Assembly seats that year with 70 per cent of the total poll. The party had made deep inroads into the middle-class Catholic electorate without forfeiting its original base. Republicans were naturally delighted to overtake the SDLP, but that pleasure must have been tinged with a nagging recognition that they had stolen much of its political wardrobe. After vowing to overthrow the state for so many years, the Provos were now trying to manage and reform it as best they could on behalf of the nationalist minority, just as the SDLP had originally set out to do.

Sinn Féin’s claim to have changed its methods but not its goals rested on a few slender reeds. One was the argument that the GFA’s tightly ring-fenced cross-border institutions would somehow unleash a ‘transitional dynamic’ leading inexorably to Irish unity.⁷³ This belief had little objective basis, as Fianna Fáil’s chief ideologue Martin Mansergh pointed out: ‘There is no evidence, let alone inevitability, from international experience that limited cross-border cooperation necessarily leads to political reunification.’⁷⁴ In 2005, a careful analysis by Jonathan Tonge found the binational aspects of the Agreement to be ‘woefully thin’.⁷⁵ British sovereignty may not have been as intrusive as before, but when vital interests were at stake, its undiluted character became readily apparent.

Security reform was one such interest. In 2001, Blair’s government appointed the Canadian judge Peter Cory to investigate several killings where there were strong suspicions of state collusion, including the murder of Pat Finucane. Cory recommended a public inquiry into Finucane’s death, warning that it ‘could be seen as a cynical breach of faith’ if Blair demurred.76 While there was never any question of the British state dismantling its own security machine, an inquiry would have been a symbolic act of decommissioning, turning the page on a very ugly chapter in that machine’s history. However, the untrammelled investigation that Cory called for never took place. It was one thing to reconstitute the RUC as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), after watering down some of Chris Patten’s ideas for reform to keep the process within safe limits.⁷⁷ A wide-ranging inquiry that was bound to implicate ‘mainland’ institutions like the Army and MI5 was a very different matter. The British state settled down for a grinding war of attrition, doing its best to keep evidence of collusion out of the public domain.⁷⁸ That made it harder for Sinn Féin to support the PSNI, a precondition for its entry into government with the DUP, although the party leadership eventually got its way over the issue at the 2007 Ard Fheis.⁷⁹

The other source of consolation for the Provos was their political growth in the South, which appeared to lend substance to an all-Ireland vision. Having won its first seat in 1997, Sinn Féin took five in 2002, then surged past the Irish Labour Party with 11 per cent of the vote in the European election two years later. Sinn Féin’s southern representatives included men like Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin and Seán Crowe, who had been republican activists since the hunger strikes, and the IRA veteran Martin Ferris, reputedly a member of the Army Council when he claimed a seat for the party in Kerry.⁸⁰ But its successful candidate for Dublin’s Euro-constituency, Mary Lou McDonald, came from a new generation, a ‘peace process levy’ to supplement the ‘H-Block levy’ of the 1980s.

Southern politics provided the main outlet for Sinn Féin’s residual leftism, as the only electoral niche available lay on the Labour Party’s left flank. This was a much softer variety of left-wing politics than that of the 1980s, swapping Third World liberation movements for Nordic social democracy as a source of inspiration.⁸¹ It was still a distinctive message in a state dominated by centre-right parties, and Sinn Féin looked set to grow in the general election of 2007.

As polling day approached, the party announced that it was ‘ready for government, north and south’.82 The Dublin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh argued that a republican presence around the cabinet table in both Irish states would help create ‘a truly national government’.⁸³ This argument leaned heavily on one of the main cross-border institutions, the North/South Ministerial Council, which brought together ministers from both jurisdictions to discuss matters of common concern. While the presence of Sinn Féin representatives from either side of the border would certainly have had great symbolic value for republicans, strictly speaking it would make no difference to Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. Once again, the road to Irish unity was being paved with wishful thinking.

Sinn Féin’s only plausible route into government was as a junior coalition partner for one of the centre-right parties, most likely Fianna Fáil. The party leadership had seen off motions at the previous year’s Ard Fheis that sought to exclude that option.⁸⁴ Now they abruptly ditched a plan to raise corporation tax in order to ease their passage towards government office.⁸⁵ Having sacrificed principle for power, Sinn Féin found itself with neither. The party increased its vote share slightly but lost one of its five seats, and was in no position to drive a bargain of any sort with Fianna Fáil. A conservative newspaper columnist, Noel Whelan, expressed his satisfaction at the outcome: ‘Whereas in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin is now a catch-all party dominant on the nationalist side, in the Republic it has been, and it now appears will continue to be, a niche party on the far-left, ardent-republican end of the spectrum.’⁸⁶ Throughout the peace process, the republican leadership had relied upon an image of dynamism and forward thrust to keep its supporters motivated in the face of constant U-turns.⁸⁷ Now, with the IRA off the stage and Sinn Féin’s electoral growth becalmed, there was no mistaking the sense of historic closure.