Unionism was traumatized by the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Molyneaux had until the last believed that nothing would come from the ongoing Anglo-Irish negotiations.1 He had been over-impressed by Thatcher's rejection of the three main proposals of the New Ireland Forum and perhaps relied too much on the views of Ian Gow, who had been Thatcher's Parliamentary Private Secretary but was excluded from the small group who negotiated the Agreement. But his miscalculation was buried in a wave of Protestant rage that manifested itself in the massive crowd of over 100,000 that gathered at a protest rally outside Belfast City Hall on 23 November. Tellingly, it was Molyneaux who warned the crowd that the campaign against the Agreement would be a protracted one.2 The campaign in its various manifestations – from a mass resignation of Unionist MPs to council boycotts and a one-day general strike and ‘Day of Action’ in March 1986 – had little effect. The institutions of the Agreement had been specifically designed to be impervious to a loyalist reaction à la 1974. The UUP was soon divided over the wisdom of a council boycott, which would in some cases leave its political opponents in control and in others lead to legal action. The Day of Action ended in violence, and in the by-elections caused by the resignations the Unionists lost Newry and Armagh to the SDLP.3 The Agreement's fundamental unpopularity with Protestants was to remain one of the core facts of Northern Ireland's political life, but this was to co-exist with a growing awareness that the institutions of the Agreement, like the hated Anglo-Irish Secretariat at Maryfield on the outskirts of East Belfast, were becoming more or less permanent features of the governance of the province.
Another notable feature of the post-Agreement landscape was the weakening of the DUP; the party's intransigence could be credibly presented as part of the reason for the imposition of the accord itself. It continued to dabble in the militant fringes of loyalist politics. In 1986, when a group of grass-roots loyalists formed the paramiitary-tinged group Ulster Resistance, Paisley and Peter Robinson were seen parading in the organization's red berets. Robinson got himself arrested in the Republic after leading a farcical loyalist ‘invasion’ of the County Monaghan village of Clontibret in August 1986.4 The DUP's practice of resistance to relatively marginal concessions to the Catholic community was in any case rendered futile when such a substantial concession as the Agreement was already in place. The party entered hesitantly into a pact with the UUP from which it emerged in a weakened state, shorn of some of its best-known leaders. In the 1992 general election it achieved a mere 13.7 per cent of the poll, although its decline stabilized somewhat at 17.2 per cent in the May 1993 local government elections.5 The DUP's difficulties went hand in hand with a steady rise in Protestant paramilitarism: loyalist paramilitaries killed only two people in 1984, but by 1991–2 they were more active agents of death than the IRA.
While the Agreement led to an increase in support for integrationist ideas amongst the Protestant middle class, Molyneaux advocated a strategic minimalism based on twin perceptions of the need to maintain UUP unity and of increasing Conservative disenchantment with the Agreement. While deeply averse to the more traditional NIO objective of power-sharing devolution, Molyneaux was nevertheless determined that mainstream unionism would not be imprisoned within a public posture of inflexibility. If the British government were to raise the possibility of a new and more broadly based agreement, Molyneaux would not adopt a rejectionist stance.6
Meanwhile, constitutional nationalism was profoundly divided, and not entirely because the UUP leadership still found it unpalatable to speak of power-sharing devolution. The SDLP had, by 1988, shown signs of moving decisively beyond the demands of Sunningdale. This was, in part, the result of the failure of the Agreement to marginalize Sinn Féin. Although that party's support had peaked before the Agreement, it had consolidated at around 11 per cent of the electorate. While the Agreement had accelerated those tendencies that made direct rule the ‘best possible shell’ for an expanding Catholic middle class, it had delivered neither the final decisive defeat for unionism nor the concrete economic benefits for the impoverished urban Catholic ghettos that might have reduced republican support in a more substantive way. It was also a reflection of the failure of Hume's own belief during the early phase of the Agreement – from November 1985 to mid 1987 – that since Thatcher had ‘lanced the Protestant boil’ by imposing the Agreement on the majority community, the unionists would have no alternative but to negotiate with him. He had predicted in an Observer interview that this would occur by the end of 1986.7 The failure of the prediction and the lack of a Sinn Féin meltdown impelled Hume towards a political engagement with the republican movement. The ‘pan-nationalist front’ was beginning to emerge.
The first sign of this was the seven-month-long dialogue between the SDLP and Sinn Féin in 1988. This was faciliated by Sinn Féin's desire to avoid the political isolation and marginalization that were the objective of the Agreement. Gerry Adams recognized that as long as the Sinn Féin vote was contained at around 30 to 40 per cent of the Catholic electorate – as seemed likely – the impetus of the 1982 electoral surge might well dissipate. Adams was also concerned that Sinn Féin's attempt to build up an electoral base in the Republic had so far proved fruitless. The breakthrough of their bitter enemies, the Officials – now known as Sinn Féin–The Workers’ Party – into Dáil politics was noted with some envy by Adams and his comrades, particularly after the three SFWP deputies had forced Haughey to cut a deal with them in order to form a government in 1982.8 Convinced that the party's maintenance of the traditional policy of refusing to take their seats in the Dáil was a major obstacle to political advance in the Republic, Adams and his allies had waged a campaign against abstentionism, which culminated in the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis voting in 1986 to remove the ban on attendance at the Dáil from the party's constitution.
The removal of the ban had provoked a final break with the traditionalists led by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill, who resigned from the party and created Republican Sinn Féin. Adams's critics claimed that, despite his continued public support for the ‘armed struggle’, the logic of increasing political involvement would eventually lead the Provisionals down the same road as the Officials and Fianna Fáil towards incorporation in the ‘partitionist system’. In 1981, when Adams was starting the process of building up the political side of the movement, Danny Morrison had brilliantly anticipated the complaints of the more militarist elements in a speech to the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis in which he asked: ‘Who here really believes that we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’9 Although tremendously effective as rhetoric, the ‘Armalite and ballot box’ strategy put a severe limit on Sinn Féin's capacity to grow electorally in both states. Adams was soon criticizing IRA ‘mistakes’ that killed ordinary people and deterred northern Catholics from voting for his party. In the first general election in the Republic after the decision to abandon abstentionism, support for Sinn Féin was a mere 1.9 per cent.10 The connection with northern violence was a formidable obstacle to Adams's aim of Sinn Féin acquiring a pivotal role in the Dáil.
It also made impossible the creation of a broad ‘anti-imperialist alliance’ proposed by Adams and including the SDLP and Fianna Fáil. The aims of such an alliance were to pressurize the British government to declare in favour of a united Ireland and use its influence to move the unionists in that direction. For, although the Anglo-Irish Agreement had been denounced by Sinn Féin as an attempt to build up the SDLP and marginalize republicans, there was a recognition that the British state had made a substantial concession to constitutional nationalism and undermined the unionist position in Northern Ireland.11 Using his friend Alec Reid, a Redemptorist priest from the Clonard Monastery in West Belfast, as intermediary, Adams informed Haughey that he would support an IRA ceasefire if the Irish government would pursue the issue of Irish unification.12 During 1988 Adams was involved in secret discussions with Martin Mansergh, Charles Haughey's adviser on Northern Ireland. The price for pan-nationalist negotiations was an IRA ceasefire, and this was, publicly at least, said to be out of the question by Adams, who declared that ‘the British will leave only when they are forced to leave.’13 However, behind this public reiteration of the continued centrality of ‘armed struggle’ an intense debate on future strategy had opened up amongst the republican leadership.
By the mid 1980s the conflict between the IRA and the British state was stalemated. The reorganized, slimmed-down and militarily proficient terrorist organization – the product of the ‘Long War’ strategy promoted by Adams and his supporters from 1977 - was far from being defeated by the security forces. Yet its campaign was obviously containable. Its main victims had long ceased to be British troops: as a result of the policy of ‘Ulsterization’, it was local Protestants in the police and the Ulster Defence Regiment who bore the brunt of Provisional attacks. In the year of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, of the sixty-four deaths from the conflict only two were of British soldiers, whereas twenty-seven were members of either the RUC or the UDR.14 Adams has subsequently described the situation in which republicans found themselves after the Agreement: ‘There was a political and military stalemate. While republicans could prevent a settlement on British government terms, we lacked the political strength to bring the struggle to a decisive conclusion. Military solutions were not an option for either side.’15 There were, however, still those in the leadership of the IRA who believed that the ‘war’ could be won.16 A serious attempt was made to break the stalemate with the help of three shipments of arms and explosives from the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in 1985–6. These included two tons of the powerful plastic-explosive Semtex, surface-to-air missiles, heavy machine-guns, and rocket launchers. The more militaristic of the IRA's leadership, including its Chief of Staff, saw in the Libyan material the possibility of a major shift in the balance of forces that would lead to an end to British rule.17 In July 1986 the list of IRA ‘legitimate targets’ was widened to include civil servants, building contractors, caterers and British Telecom employees who did work for the security forces. Republicans had killed forty-two people in 1985, while in 1987 they killed sixty-nine and in 1988, sixty-two.18 But if the intensification of ‘armed struggle’ gained it some gruesome headlines, with the murder of a leading Northern Irish judge and his wife in a car-bomb attack in April 1987 and a landmine at Ballygawley, County Tyrone, in August 1988 that killed eight off-duty soldiers, it also had high military and political costs.
The ‘Long War’ strategy, by reducing the number of IRA activists, had made it easier for the security forces to concentrate their resources against known activists. The Special Air Services (SAS) was first publicly committed to action in Northern Ireland in 1976 to combat the IRA in south Armagh, an area with a centuries-old tradition of anti-state activities and a republican stronghold that the security forces could only enter in strength and with helicopter backup. Now its activities were expanded to Fermanagh and Tyrone, where the IRA was attempting to create another ‘free zone’ like south Armagh. In May 1987 it wiped out an eight-man IRA unit that was in the process of attacking the RUC station at Loughgall. This was the IRA's largest loss of ‘volunteers’ in a single incident since the Civil War and a major blow to its East Tyrone brigade, one of its most effective units. The same brigade was further weakened in August 1988 when the three men responsible for the Ballgawley landmine were killed in an SAS ambush as they attempted to kill a lorry driver who was a part-time member of the UDR. In March 1988 three of the IRA's most experienced operatives had been shot dead in Gibraltar while unarmed. It was alleged that they were preparing a bomb attack on a British Army band.19
Controversy over the use of the SAS and their tactics, particularly over whether it was necessary to kill those whom they had ambushed, was inevitable. However, Sinn Féin's ability to exploit it was limited by the IRA's spiralling list of ‘mistakes’ in which it had to admit that it had killed the wrong people. Most politically damaging was the detonation of a bomb at the Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen on 8 November 1987, which killed eleven people. The IRA admitted that this had dealt a ‘body blow’ to hopes of a ‘broad-based front against imperialism’.20 The eight-month dialogue with the SDLP in 1988, so important for Adams in his quest for pan-nationalist unity, was called off by John Hume when the IRA accidentally killed two of his constituents.21 By the end of the decade hopes of military victory had been relinquished, although the republican movement was far from discarding the application of violence or the threat of it as a tool for political bargaining.
The intensification of republican violence after 1986 showed the limitations of the attempt to combine the armed campaign with the search for more electoral support. Sinn Féin lost sixteen seats in the 1989 local government elections and some of its councillors began to point out publicly the irony of its criticisms of direct rule's failure to deal with unemployment levels in West Belfast while the IRA's bombing campaign continued to put people out of work and scare off new investors.22 The impasse of the ‘Armalite and ballot box’ strategy and the knowledge of internal republican debate gained by intelligence services led to a two-track approach on the part of the British, by which hints of flexibility in the event of a ceasefire were combined with the threat of inter-party talks aimed at a centrist settlement that would isolate and marginalize republicans.
As early as the end of March 1987, Thatcher felt that the security returns following the Agreement were inadequate: ‘I told Tom King [Northern Ireland Secretary] there must be a paper brought forth setting out all the options. I was determined that nothing should be ruled out.’23 The election of the Haughey government served to cool the atmosphere even further, as did the announcement in January 1988 by the Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, that there would be no prosecutions arising out of an inquiry into an alleged ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of the RUC that led to the deaths of six unarmed men in County Armagh in 1982. John Stalker, Assistant Chief Constable of Manchester, who had been brought in to conduct the inquiry, complained of resistance and sabotage by some in the RUC and was taken off the inquiry in suspicious circumstances.24 Although he did find that there was no official policy of ‘shoot-to-kill, the controversy surrounding his replacement and the Mayhew decision led to the resurgence of the megaphone diplomacy between London and Dublin that the Agreement was supposed to have consigned to the history books.
Thatcher and Mayhew had little sympathy with an approach to policing that seemed to them to impose standards appropriate to a liberal democracy untroubled with a terrorist campaign on a society in which the IRA's main target was the RUC. Thus in the year that the ‘shoot-to-kill’ incidents took place, republicans had killed eight members of the RUC and four of the RUC Reserve. In the year that the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed twenty-three members of the RUC and RUC Reserve had been murdered, nine of them in one IRA mortar attack on the Newry RUC station. In the 1982–5 period republicans were responsible for 70 per cent of the deaths from political violence, while the security forces were responsible for 13 per cent.25 Even the most right-wing members of Thatcher's cabinet would have accepted that the state should not debase its standards to those of the terrorists, but there was none the less little inclination to see the issues raised by Stalker as more than blemishes on what was fundamentally a disciplined and lawful response to an organization that, as Hume pointed out, had killed twice as many Irish Catholics as the security forces in the first twenty years of the ‘Troubles’.26
Thatcher's annoyance with Dublin grew as Irish politicians condemned the decision of the Court of Appeal to reject the appeal of the six men convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. Convinced that she had signed the Agreement to facilitate more Irish cooperation against the IRA in such key areas as policing and extradition, she now complained that Haughey's government provided less cooperation in the security field than any other European country: ‘Our concessions had alienated the Unionists without gaining the level of security cooperation we had a right to expect.’27 This was the context in which she directed her new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, to begin the search for a new and more broadly based agreement.
As the republican movement both intensified its military campaign and gave public hints of a new-found flexibility over the next five years, British policy assumed an increasingly pro-Union public posture while at the same time giving substantive private signs of an interest in republican revisionism. Peter Brooke launched the search for a new agreement through inter-party talks in January 1990 and managed to achieve some progress by the eve of the 1992 general election. An offer to suspend temporarily the workings of the Anglo-Irish Agreement proved enough to ensure the participation not only of the Ulster Unionists but also of the DUP. After the election the talks continued in a more serious vein with a new Secretary of State, Sir Patrick Mayhew. The UUP approached the talks in a slightly more confident frame of mind: their proposals were certainly considerably more advanced and elaborate. Under John Major, who had succeeded Thatcher in late 1990, the government gave even more explicit signs that it wished to reduce the unionist sense of isolation and anxiety. The Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, told the 1991 Conservative Party Conference that the debate on partition was over. The Anglo-Irish inter-parliamentary tier was presented in early 1992 with a critical British analysis of the working of the Agreement. In the run-up to the election in April 1992, a Tory Prime Minister rediscovered the Union as a political theme. After the election there was the appointment of a team at the NIO that was just about as unionist in political sympathy as the current Conservative Party could produce.
However, the talks process foundered on the rock of the SDLP's refusal to depart from its original policy document, which argued for a form of joint authority with an added European dimension. It was clear during the talks that the NIO was impressed with the flexibility of the Ulster Unionists. Although they had originally insisted on an agreement in ‘strand one’, which dealt with the internal structures of the North's governance, before the start of ‘strand two’, dealing with North–South relations, they proved willing to make the crucial transition without agreement having been reached in ‘strand one’. The unprecedented willingness of the Ulster Unionists to go to Dublin to discuss North–South relations was made possible by a private letter from Mayhew to Molyneaux indicating the former's lack of enthusiasm for the SDLP document. Nevertheless, Dublin's apparent unpreparedness to respond to the Unionist flexibility, together with Hume's refusal to budge from the original document, led to the collapse of the talks.
Deeply ingrained distrust of unionist motivation and an acute awareness of the potential republican cries of ‘sell-out’ for anything smacking of an ‘internal solution’ forced the SDLP away from a historic compromise with unionism. The Anglo-Irish Agreement had created a context in which it became logical, almost compellingly so, for constitutional nationalists to argue for a form of joint authority. British dissatisfaction with the Agreement's domestic failures – nobody questioned its international success in fire-proofing British policy in Northern Ireland – produced the usual frenetic tactical ingenuity, but this simply served to obscure the fundamental shift in terrain that the Agreement had produced. Even if a Sunningdale-type agreement were now possible, it was too ‘internalist’, too dependent on unionist goodwill, to be attractive from the SDLP's point of view. Both constitutional and revolutionary nationalism were convinced that the Agreement was a clear indication that the tide of history was running their way.
Major's increasingly precarious position in the House of Commons – where he was dependent on the nine UUP votes – brought about an increasingly pro-unionist tone in government statements. Yet the failure of the talks also pushed the government back towards an Anglo-Irish approach and into the intensification of private communications with the republican movement that had been initiated in October 1990.28 Republican interest had been stimulated by hints of a new flexibility in speeches by Brooke. In an interview to mark his first 100 days as Secretary of State, Brooke had conceded that it was difficult to imagine the military defeat of the IRA. The following year he made a more direct appeal to republican strategists when he declared that the British government had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’.29 This produced a number of public indications of possible republican flexibility on some of their more fundamentalist postures – particularly that Britain should withdraw in the lifetime of one parliament. A ‘scenario for peace’ emerged in which an IRA ceasefire might be forthcoming in exchange for a British commitment to withdraw in a ‘generation’ while, in the interim, structures of joint authority would operate. Ultimately it appears that, despite the intensification of IRA activities in the North and Britain in 1991 and 1992, it was republican rather than unionist flexibility that was found most impressive.
Only the impact of serious intelligence work can explain British willingness to wager on these hints of a new republican flexibility at a time when IRA violence was intensifying. The IRA launched a renewed campaign in England in the early 1990s. At first aimed at ‘Establishment’ figures and institutions – Ian Gow, MP, a close friend of Thatcher and former adviser on Ireland, was murdered in a car-bomb attack in July 1990, and, in January 1991, 10 Downing Street was mortared while a cabinet meeting was taking place – the campaign developed into devastating bomb attacks on key financial and commercial centres. On 10 April 1992, the day after the British general election, two IRA bombs exploded at the Baltic Exchange in London, killng three people and causing £800 million of damage. More attacks followed over the next year. In March 1993 a bomb in a shopping centre in Warrington killed two young boys, and in April a massive explosion at the NatWest Tower in the City of London killed one person and caused over £1 billion in damage.30 There was also an upsurge of IRA attacks in Northern Ireland. In 1991 the IRA planted more incendiary devices in commercial premises than it had in the previous nine years, as well as launching some massive car-bomb attacks in Belfast. The year 1992 began with the slaughter of eight Protestant building workers whose van was destroyed by a bomb at Teebane Cross in County Tyrone as they returned from working at an army base. During the year that followed the centres of a number of predominantly Protestant towns were destroyed by IRA car-bombs.
The Provisional campaign was increasingly matched in murderous intensity by the main loyalist paramilitary organizations. The UDA had experienced a palace revolution in the late 1980s as a leadership considered too middle aged and corrupt had been pushed aside by a younger and more single-mindedly ruthless cadre. Working under the nom de guerre of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), it had responded to the Teebane Cross atrocity by an attack on a bookmaker's business on Belfast's Lower Ormeau Road in which five Catholics were murdered. In 1992 and 1993, for the first time since the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’, loyalists were responsible for more deaths than republicans.31 The campaigns of the UFF and UVF, although ordinary Catholics were still the main victims, were notable for their successful targeting of Sinn Féin activists as well as, for the first time, IRA members. Claims of security force ‘collusion’ soon became a major issue. However, the main result of the intensification of loyalist violence was a further weakening of electoral support for Sinn Féin. It lost ground to the SDLP in the 1992 general election, and Adams lost his West Belfast seat to Joe Hendron of the SDLP. Although the immediate cause of his defeat was the decision of a substantial section of the 3,000 unionists in the constituency to vote tactically for Hendron, there could be no disguising the fact that republican complicity in the violent sectarian atmosphere of the early 1990s had cost them votes. However, Adams's disappointment at his loss of West Belfast was mitigated by ongoing negotiations with Hume to construct a pan-nationalist alliance that would apply pressure to the British government for a radical shift in policy on Northern Ireland.
During the 1988 discussions between Sinn Féin and the SDLP the core difference between the parties, apart from the issue of violence, was the SDLP's interpretation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. In one of their papers for the talks, the SDLP argued that the Agreement showed that Britain was now neutral on the partition issue: ‘she has no military or economic interests and if the Irish people reached agreement among themselves on, for example Irish unity, Britain would facilitate’.32 Although even in 1988 the extent of the British financial subvention made it difficult for republicans to argue that Britain had an economic interest in maintaining partition, they claimed that a strategic interest did exist:
Strategic interests are now the most important consideration in Britain's interference in Ireland. Quite apart from the very real, if somewhat exaggerated fear, among the British establishment that an Ireland freed from British influence could become a European ‘Cuba’, even the prospect of a neutral Ireland is regarded as a threat to British and NATO's strategic interests.33
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ in Russia and Eastern Europe instituted a new world order within which only one hegemonic power, the US, existed. The end of the Cold War removed any lingering credibility from the notion that Britain remained in Northern Ireland for strategic reasons. It had a related effect noted by Michael Cox: ‘it was inevitable that as the global tide of radicalism began to retreat after 1989, this would feed into republican thinking.’ 34 With former ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘national liberation’ forces in Central America, the Middle East and South Africa opting for negotiations rather than for the continuation of armed struggle, the international context helped to foster hitherto heretical thoughts amongst leading republicans. Thus the republican propagandist Danny Morrison reflected on the fall of the Berlin Wall in a letter from prison:
If there is one thing last year in Eastern Europe should have taught us it was the bankruptcy of dogmatism… The lesson has certainly helped me rethink my politics and become more pragmatic and realistic in terms of our own struggle. If we all lower our demands and our expectations a peg or two we might find more agreement.35
But this new realism did not mean that republicans had come anywhere near accepting that there was a democratic basis for partition, nor even that they were prepared to countenance Hume's argument that the British state was neutral on the issue. During their discussions with republicans in 1993, the British had specifically rejected the republican demand that, in return for an IRA ceasefire, they should adopt the role of ‘persuading’ the North's majority population of the merits of a united Ireland.36 However, this notion would be central to what became known as the ‘Hume–Adams’ negotiations.
Hume had approached Adams in October 1991 with a proposal, the idea for which had come from the same Catholic cleric who had opened up contacts between republicans and Charles Haughey in 1987, for a joint declaration to be made by the British and Irish governments. This would set out the agreed principles that must underlie any final settlement and was aimed to be open enough to republican aspirations to allow for an IRA cessation of its campaign. Republicans were unhappy with Hume's reformulation of the principle of Irish self-determination, which made it dependent upon ‘the agreement and consent of the people of Northern Ireland’. This was flawed from a republican point of view, as it gave unionists, who were a majority in Northern Ireland, a ‘veto’ on the achievement of national unity.37 But the fact that Hume had obtained the support of Haughey for the draft of the joint declaration encouraged Adams's leadership group to envisage the construction of a pan-nationalist front that might be able to shift the British towards a more proactive position.
A crucial development that affected republican calculations was the election of Bill Clinton as the new President of the USA in 1992. The end of the Cold War had drained the ‘special relationship’ of much of its significance for Washington and made it easier for Clinton to intervene in what had up until then been regarded as London's business. During the presidential campaign Clinton had supported the granting of a visa to Adams and also the idea of sending an American ‘peace envoy’ to Northern Ireland. Central to this more interventionist approach was the emergence of a new elite Irish-American lobby that aimed to transcend the existing division between Noraid and other pro-IRA groups and the ‘Friends of Ireland’ (for instance Senator Edward Kennedy) who were closely allied with Hume.38 ‘Americans for a New Irish Agenda’ was a powerful group of well-funded, business-oriented Irish-Americans39 whose leaders included ex-Congressman Bruce Morrison, Niall O'Dowd, editor of the Irish Voice, and two millionaire businessmen, William Flynn and Charles Feeney. A native of Drogheda, O'Dowd believed that Irish-American leverage was weakened by its association with support for IRA violence. A leading member of ‘Irish-Americans for Clinton and Gore’, he travelled to Belfast early in 1992 to talk to the Sinn Féin leadership about the American scene.40
Republican enthusiasm for the injection of an American dimension into the situation was a reflection of the leadership's calculation that Clinton's support might make it easier to sell a compromise to the more fundamentalist elements of the IRA. The price of the creation of a pan-nationalist front with the blessing of the White House would be a ceasefire, and this was bound to remind the ‘republican base’ of the last nearly disastrous ceasefire of 1975. In 1986 Martin McGuinness had declared: ‘Our position is clear and it will never, never, never change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.’41 Yet by the early 1990s it was clear to Adams and his closest allies that, as Danny Morrison put it in a letter to Adams in 1991, ‘I think we can fight on forever and can't be defeated. But, of course that isn't the same as winning or showing something for all the sacrifices.’42 The purpose of the ‘Irish peace process’, as Sinn Féin described its deepening involvement with constitutional nationalist parties in both states, was to obtain a settlement amounting to joint sovereignty that could be presented as transitional to the final goal of a thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic. In return the IRA would deliver an open-ended cessation of violence. The devastating bombs in London in 1992 and 1993 were aimed at increasing republican leverage once all-party talks about a settlement got under way.
US involvement was important as a compensatory device that allowed the republican leadership to recover from its profound disappointment with the Downing Street Declaration produced by John Major and Albert Reynolds on 15 December 1993. When Reynolds had dispatched his amended version of the Hume–Adams document to Major in June 1993, it was still heavily republican in content, with references to Britain as a ‘persuader’ of unionists towards Irish unity and the demand for a specific time-frame within which unity was to be attained.43 However, this was little more than an opening gambit as Reynolds had accepted that the notion of ‘persuasion’ was incompatible with the principle of consent. Despite his frustration with Major's much more cautious approach to the possibility of an IRA cessation, Reynolds did not shift on this fundamental point, and he was also concerned, as was Major, that mainstream unionism in the person of figures such as James Molyneaux and the Church of Ireland Primate Robin Eames would not reject any joint declaration.
Republican violence made it all the more necessary for the two Prime Ministers to distance themselves from ‘Hume–Adams’. On 23 October an IRA attempt to kill the leadership of the UDA in a bomb attack on the Shankill Road resulted in the death of ten people, nine of them shoppers or passers-by who were killed when the Provisionals' bomb went off prematurely. The day before the carnage Hume had told the House of Commons that his talks with Adams provided ‘the most hopeful dialogue and the most hopeful chance of lasting peace that I have seen in twenty years’. He called on the two governments to ‘hurry up and deal with it’.44 Hume now seemed dangerously isolated in his partnership with the republican movement, and Adams further shredded the tattered moral credibility of ‘Hume–Adams’ by helping to carry the coffin of the IRA bomber killed in the attack. On 30 October the UDA, using its nom de guerre of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, wreaked its revenge for the Shankill bombing when two of its men machine-gunned customers in the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, County Londonderry, killing six Catholics and one Protestant.
On 27 October Dick Spring, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, had announced to the Dáil six democratic principles that should underpin any settlement. These included a rejection of talks with those who used, threatened or supported violence, and no change in the North's constitutional position without the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland.45 Two days later, after a meeting between Major and Reynolds at an EU summit in Brussels, the Prime Ministers developed the six principles as a seemingly explicit alternative to the Hume–Adams document. As Reynolds privately informed his press secretary, ‘Hume–Adams was being declared dead, in order to keep it alive, in the same way as Adams carried the bomber's coffin, because otherwise he couldn't deliver the IRA.’46 Despite further embarrassment when, in November, news of the ‘back-channel’ discussions with republicans leaked to the press, Major was still prepared to continue with discussions aimed at producing an IRA ceasefire.47 At the same time he intensified the process of consultation with Molyneaux and other unionist leaders to attempt to ensure that any joint declaration would at least have the acquiescence of the majority community.
The Joint Declaration was signed at a ceremony at 10 Downing Street on 15 December 1993. It was a relatively brief document of eleven paragraphs, but underneath a certain opaqueness of style there was considerable originality and sophistication. This was particularly so in the complex language of the Declaration's fourth paragraph, in which the British government agreed ‘that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish’.
After the Downing Street Declaration, the ‘Hume–Adams’ phraseology continued to dominate the political scene, but its content was dramatically altered. One of the most effective slogans of Irish nationalism had been given new, decidedly softer conceptual content, and this had been done by a Fianna Fáil-led government. The self-determination of the Irish people was conceded by Britain but only on the basis that the Irish government wished to operate that principle in favour of Irish unity with the support of a majority in the North. Superficially, the rhetoric of the ‘Hume–Adams’ process had been conceded, but the process had been stripped of its content in a quite dramatic way. The British were now ‘facilitators’, not for Irish unity but for an agreed Ireland, and an agreed Ireland, by definition, could not be a united Ireland until there was majority consent in the North.
Divisions amongst republicans over how to evaluate the Declaration were soon apparent. Mitchel McLaughlin, the prominent Sinn Féin leader from Derry, claimed that the general reaction of republicans was one of disappointment. At a meeting of around 400 republican activists, many of them ex-prisoners, at Loughmacrory in County Tyrone in December there was no support for the Declaration.48 Yet Adams insisted that the Declaration represented a significant shift by the British, who had for the first time, if in a heavily qualified manner, recognized the right of the Irish people as a whole to self-determination. He was even to claim that it ‘marked a stage in the slow and painful process of England's disengagement from her first and last colony’.49 Tensions within the republican movement were exacerbated by Major's talk of a ‘decontamination period’ for Sinn Féin before they could enter into dialogue with the governments and the other parties about the way ahead. It was also made clear by the British government that the IRA would have to decommission its weapons before Sinn Féin would be admitted to all-party talks.50 Dick Spring compounded the republican leadership's problems when he too announced that republican participation in talks would necessitate movement on the arms issue.51
Yet, if many rank-and-file republicans saw in the Declaration little more than the ‘Unionist veto’ disguised in more ‘green’ verbiage, Adams and his supporters in the leadership detected real possibilities of political advance for Sinn Féin, North and South. Reynolds did all he could to play on Adams's desire for a republican political breakthrough in the Republic. The ban on Sinn Féin from radio and television in the Republic was removed in January 1994, and Reynolds announced that a Forum for Peace and Reconciliation would be set up to allow all the parties in the Republic to consider ways in which ‘agreement and trust’ could be developed between the ‘two traditions on the island’. Republicans were being invited into the mainstream in the Republic; Reynolds also ensured that Adams would be elevated to the status of an international statesman, provided he gave clear evidence that he was committed to ‘conflict resolution’. Crucial here was Clinton's decision in January, against the wishes of Major and the US State Department and Department of Justice, to grant a visa to Adams to allow him to attend a high-profile one-day conference on Northern Ireland in New York, organized by leading figures in the corporate wing of Irish-America. Clinton's decidedly ‘green’ Irish ambassador, Jean Kennedy-Smith, was also important in making Adams and his colleagues understand that with sufficient tactical ingenuity they could look to powerful allies in Washington.
When the leadership of the republican movement prepared IRA volunteers for a ceasefire in the summer of 1994, they emphasized the importance of a powerful pan-nationalist alliance supported by the White House. In a key strategy document entitled ‘TUAS’ that was circulated at the time, the main factors they identified as favouring an initiative were:
Hume is the only SDLP person on the horizon strong enough to face the challenge.
Dublin's coalition is the strongest government in 25 years or more.
Reynolds has no historical baggage to hinder him and knows how popular such a consensus would be among the grassroots.
There is potentially a very powerful Irish-American lobby not in hock to any particular party in Ireland or Britain.
Clinton is perhaps the first US President in decades to be substantially influenced by such a lobby.
The activists were told that the initials stood for ‘tactical use of armed struggle’, which implied that, if the ceasefire tactic failed, the armed struggle would resume. The two governments and the Americans were given the more soothing message that TUAS stood for ‘totally unarmed strategy’.52
The involvement of Reynolds and Clinton was conditional on a radical shift in the IRA's position. Both reacted angrily when, in pursuit of the ‘tactical use of armed struggle’ in the forlorn hope that the British could still be coerced into acting as ‘persuaders’ for unity, the IRA mortared Heathrow Airport in March 1994.53 Back at the time of the spat with Major over Adams's visa, Reynolds had privately declared that ‘Sinn Féin will pay a price for going to Capitol Hill. A lot of powerful people went out on a limb for Adams. If he doesn't deliver, they'll have him back in the house with steel shutters [Sinn Féin headquarters on the Falls Road] so fast his feet won't touch the ground’.54 When the IRA declared a three-day ceasefire in March it was received with cold contempt by Adams's ‘allies’ in Dublin and Washington; and by the beginning of the August, after some more gruesome loyalist murders of Catholics and with rumours of an imminent IRA cessation that would be time-limited and reserve them the right to defend nationalist communities, Reynolds let Adams know that republicans could be as quickly consigned to the margins as they had been recently brought in from the cold:
I've told them that if they don't do this right, they can shag off… Otherwise I'll walk away. I'll go off down that three-strand talks/framework document road with John Major, and they can detour away for another 25 years of killing and being killed – for what?’55
The IRA declaration of a ‘complete cessation of military operations’ on 31 August 1994 was therefore in part the product of a carrot-and-stick strategy on the part of the Irish government aided by the White House. Fear of political isolation if London and Dublin proceeded with the inter-party talks process from which they were excluded was a factor. So was the realistic assessment that ‘republicans at this time and on their own do not have the strength to achieve the end goal’.56 At the core of the leadership's optimism about ‘the new stage of struggle’ was the information it had obtained from Reynolds about the ongoing discussions with the British on the Framework Document that the two governments were drafting as a basis for a new and decisive round of all-party talks. The document, laden with cross-border institutions, was given an all-Ireland ethos designed to be seductive to republicans. From this perspective a ‘transitional’ settlement combining strong North–South institutions and a process of radical reform of the northern state would create conditions for unity over a period of fifteen to twenty years. Central to this process was the further fragmentation and weakening of unionism. But could republicans continue to count on unionism remaining inertly divided between Paisleyite rejectionism and Molyneaux's crab-like adjustment to the strategic initiatives of others?
James Molyneaux had tried to counter the lurid doom-mongering of Paisley by stressing his ability to have the unionist position respected at the highest levels in Westminster and Whitehall. His ‘friends in high places’ approach came near to foundering in 1985, and only the disarray of the DUP in the aftermath of the Agreement saved him. The publication of the Framework Document seemed to many in the UUP to show that their leader had been fooled again because of a naive faith in the goodwill of a British Prime Minister. Molyneaux, who had been denounced by Paisley for going to Dublin during the 1992 talks process, had been confident that the collapse of the talks would consolidate a shift in British government attitudes away from sympathy with nationalism. Given the Major government's precarious position in the House of Commons, he expected that it would give sympathetic attention to unionist concerns, particularly the demand for a Northern Ireland Select Committee to end the situation whereby Northern Ireland legislation was dealt with through Orders in Council. Although he did get satisfaction on this issue, he had seriously underestimated the attractive power of republican revisionism to any British government. When the Framework Document was published, it contained provision for North–South institutions that to many unionists appeared to be alarmingly autonomous and powerful. As Graham Walker notes, ‘The Unionist Party now found it difficult retrospectively to justify its acquiescence in the Downing Street Declaration and was roundly condemned by Paisley, who identified this as a key development in encouraging the government to pursue a path inimical to Unionist interests.’57
The Framework Document dealt a fatal blow to Molyneaux's leadership. In March 1995 Lee Reynolds, an unknown 21-year-old student, obtained 15 per cent of the votes in an audacious leadership challenge to Molyneaux. In the summer, Molyneaux resigned after his party lost the North Down by-election, a prime UUP seat, to an arch Molyneaux critic, Robert McCartney, QC, leader of the small UK Unionist Party.
North Down was referred to as the North's ‘gold coast’ because of its high concentration of prosperous Protestants. These were the so-called ‘contented classes’: those who had in material terms done very well under direct rule. A major factor in the well-being of this group was the growth of the public sector, which had been expanded as a fire damper against political violence. By the 1980s public sector employment accounted for 42 per cent of the total workforce, compared to 27 per cent a decade earlier.58 Even under Thatcher, government policy in Northern Ireland remained strongly interventionist and quietly Keynesian. The result was a massive expansion in the size of the subvention that was paid by the Treasury to the region and reflected the difference between what was raised locally in taxes and the amount of public expenditure injected into the region. While the subvention was tiny in the early 1970s, by the mid 1990s it had become huge, standing at about £3.7 billion annually.59
The economic dependence of the North on the British Exchequer raised a serious practical obstacle to Irish unity and also provided a strong prudential argument against the ‘little Ulster’ vision of the DUP. The material well-being of the Northern Protestant middle class was another factor that British policy-makers might have hoped would buttress moderate unionism. However, the problem with this economic underpinning of the Union was that it tended to encourage a largely privatized lifestyle that wanted to insulate itself as much as possible from politics. For many middle-class Protestants the lives of their working-class co-religionists in North and West Belfast were as much an unknown and alien territory as those of the inhabitants of the Falls Road and Ardoyne. The problem facing any attempt to develop a more politically rational and proactive unionism had its social roots here. As the Church of Ireland leader Robin Eames explained to the Opsahl Commission: ‘To many the political process in Northern Ireland is already irrelevant. The opting out of the middle class is a definite factor at play. For those whose work, recreation or social life is untouched by the community of fear, there is a reluctance to get involved.’60
The ‘community of fear’ reflected not simply ongoing violence but a broader perception of decline and retreat amongst Protestants. It was the obverse of rising nationalist and republican self-confidence and reflected demographic and electoral trends.The Catholic share of the North's population increased from a third to at least 40 per cent between 1971 and 1991 and there were unionist fears that the 2001 census might show the Catholic share as 46 per cent.61 Although demographers disagreed as to the likelihood of a future Catholic majority because of declining Catholic birth-rates since the 1980s, such qualifications did little to calm more atavistic interpretations of imminent victory or defeat in an ethnic breeding contest. A rising nationalist and republican share of the vote – from 31 per cent in the early 1980s to 43 per cent in 2001 – had a similar effect. Even those tendencies that might have been seen as providing sections of the Catholic community with a material stake in partition were read through Orange spectacles. Thus the strengthening of fair employment legislation in 1989, which by the mid 1990s was contributing to an increase in the Catholic share of employment in virtually every occupational grouping,62 was read as a Dublin government-inspired stratagem for discrimination against Protestants. Such fearful pessimism would remain a major influence in unionist politics throughout the 1990s.
In the leadership contest that followed Molyneaux's resignation, David Trimble was seen as the most articulate and dangerous candidate of the right. This in part reflected his role in the major confrontation between the security forces and the Portadown Orangemen who were blocked from marching from Drumcree Church down the Garvaghy Road in July 1995. The Garvaghy Road was one of a number of areas where Catholic residents claimed that changing demography required that ‘offensive’ parades be curtailed. Sinn Féin had played an important role in the establishment of such residents' committees, in part as an example of ‘unarmed struggle’.63 The increasing confrontation over marches also reflected unionist fears about the new interventionist role of the Irish state in the North through the institutions and rights agreed at Hillsborough in 1985.64 As tens of thousands of Orangemen came to give support and others blocked roads and the port of Larne, Trimble, in whose constituency the conflict was taking place, was intensively involved in attempts to resolve the issue. However, the undoubtedly positive role he played in bringing the stand-off to a peaceful conclusion was obliterated by his indulgence in a piece of street theatre with Ian Paisley, when the two clasped hands in what nationalists interpreted as a triumphalist gesture as they greeted the Orangemen after they had been allowed to march down the Garvaghy Road.
His role at Drumcree would certainly have appealed to the many Orangemen who were delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council that met to elect Molyneaux's successor. Yet those in the upper reaches of the NIO who were aghast at Trimble's election misread both the man and the circumstances of his victory. In a party as bereft of intellectual ballast as the Ulster Unionists, it was no great compliment to Trimble to point out that he was by far the most cerebral of the candidates for the leadership. He was the only mainstream unionist figure who had the intellectual and strategic capacity to enter into a serious contest with Hume and Adams.
Trimble had been in William Craig's Vanguard movement and had supported the idea of an emergency coalition with the SDLP in 1976. This willingness to share power with nationalists was one indication of Trimble's basic political realism: his acceptance of the fact that no British government would return devolved institutions to Northern Ireland except on the basis of power-sharing. At the same time he found Molyneaux's trust in Thatcher dangerously naive. A law lecturer at Queen's University until he won the Upper Bann seat in 1989, Trimble was also an omnivorous reader of books on Irish history and had published two serious works of amateur history.65 This historical perspective provided him with a useful corrective to the overly pessimistic view of the British state that gripped many in the unionist community in the early 1990s. For if unionists were mistaken to rely on Thatcher's supposed innate sympathy for their cause, it was equally mistaken, if more understandable because of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, to become consumed by fear of British betrayal. Trimble was convinced that only a proactive strategy on the part of unionists would prevent further British concessions to nationalists and republicans.
For Trimble the IRA ceasefire was an admission of the failure of armed struggle:
Even though the cease-fire may be merely a tactic, the fact that they have had to change their tactics is an admission that the previous tactic [armed struggle] has failed. Although there are elements in the republican movement that desire a return to violence, they will be returning to a tactic that was not working… So, in that sense the republican movement is being defeated slowly. It is a slow process but that is what is happening. From our point of view, what we have to ensure is that while their campaign is winding up it does not cause any political or constitutional change which is contrary to the interests of the people of Northern Ireland. And we also want to do everything possible to ensure that the Union is strengthened.66
This was a sophisticated analysis, too sophisticated for many unionists, who still preferred the Paisley–McCartney vision of a republican movement with almost demonic powers that was moulding Anglo-Irish policies to its will through the continuing threat of force. Such views were strengthened in February 1996 with the exploding of a massive bomb at Canary Wharf in London, marking the end of the IRA ceasefire.
In the autumn of 1995 Major and Bruton had agreed to establish an international body to find a way forward on the arms issue. Chaired by a close Clinton ally, Senator George Mitchell, its report in February 1996 suggested waiving the British government's precondition – the beginning of decommissioning before republicans got into talks – and instead put forward the notion of decommissioning progressing in conjunction with the talks. There had already been signs that the balance of forces within the republican movement had shifted against the ceasefire, as exaggerated hopes for rapid movement towards all-party talks and the creation of ‘transitional’ structures were disappointed. Despite a demand by President Clinton, on a visit to Belfast in November 1995, for an end to paramilitary ‘punishment’ beatings and shootings, by the end of the year the IRA, using the nom de guerre ‘Direct Action against Drugs’, had killed six alleged drug dealers. Major's lukewarm acceptance of the Mitchell Report and his emphasis on the way forward being through an election produced a bitter denunciation from Hume in the House of Commons – and, within days, the bomb at Canary Wharf.
Despite Canary Wharf, Trimble maintained that for unionists to retreat into a posture of resistance to dialogue would be disastrous. Neither London nor Dublin had given up on the republican movement and a simple denunciatory response from unionists would guarantee that they became the passive victims of political change. He could also point out that one of the main reasons for the republican relapse was anger at his success in persuading Major of the need for elections as an alternative way into dialogue with republicans.
In the elections for a Northern Ireland Forum held in May 1996, the UUP vote at 24.2 per cent had declined by 5 percentage points, compared to the local government elections of 1993, while support for the DUP at 18.8 per cent had increased by less than 2 points.67 The limited rise in the DUP vote reflected inroads made into its support base by the two parties linked to Protestant paramilitary organizations: the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), linked to the UVF, and the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), linked to the UDA. Both organizations had responded to the IRA's ceasefire with one of their own, declared on 13 October 1994. Then the ‘Combined Loyalist Military Command’ had declared that assurances had been sought from the British government that no secret deal had been done with the IRA and that ‘the Union is safe’. They also offered ‘abject and true remorse’ to the families of their many innocent victims.68 Although members of both, particularly the larger and more Balkanized UDA, would soon be involved in sectarian attacks on Catholics and, like the IRA, continue to use violence to defend their many profitable criminal activities from drugs to cross-border fuel smuggling, the ceasefire did enhance the credibility and political acceptability of the PUP and the UDP amongst the Protestant working class.
Concerned that politics could be seen to work for the loyalist paramilitaries, the Northern Ireland Office provided a mixed electoral system for the Forum, which allocated an extra twenty seats to be filled on a regional list system, giving two to each of the ten parties with the highest votes. The PUP with 3.5 per cent, the UDP with 2.2 per cent and the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition with a mere 1 per cent were all allocated seats. However, the Forum elections also gave a major boost to Sinn Féinn, which won its largest-ever share of the vote: 15.5 per cent. The narrowing of the gap with the SDLP and the party's strong performance in the Republic's general election made a second ceasefire very likely. At the same time republicans were waiting for a British general election to deliver a Labour government with a secure majority that would, they hoped, push forward with a settlement that could be portrayed as transitional to Irish unity.
Trimble was untroubled by the prospect of a substantial Labour victory. He had established good relations with elements of ‘new Labour’. Shortly before he became Prime Minister in 1997, Tony Blair had sacked Labour's Northern Ireland spokesman, Kevin McNamara, who was seen as being on the ‘green’ wing of the party, and replaced him with Dr Marjorie (‘Mo’) Mowlam, who was initially welcomed by unionists. Blair's first trip outside London as Prime Minister was to Northern Ireland, where, on 16 May at Balmoral, he declared that unionists had nothing to fear from his government: ‘A political settlement is not a slippery slope to a united Ireland. The government will not be persuaders for unity. The wagons do not need to be drawn up in a circle.’ He also declared that he valued the Union and that ‘none of you in this hall today, even the youngest, is likely to see Northern Ireland as anything but a part of the United Kingdom.’69 Such sentiments were profoundly distasteful to republicans, yet they were soon given a very practical compensation when the government declared that a renewed ceasefire would get Sinn Féin into talks within six weeks. The decommissioning precondition had gone.
From the earliest days of Blair's administration the attractive and repulsive aspects of the deal on offer to unionists were relatively clear. Central to any settlement was an acceptance of the consent principle. This was to be copper-fastened by full constitutional recognition of Northern Ireland by the Republic. There would be a return of devolution to the North, now in the context of Labour's commitment to constitutional change in the rest of the UK. This would spell the end of the Irish government's ‘interference’ in the governance of the North in the form of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The price to be paid for these political and constitutional gains was an Irish dimension embodied in a North–South Ministerial Council and the insistence of Dublin, London and John Hume that republicans must be integral to any settlement.
The IRA did not return to full-scale ‘armed struggle’ during the sixteen months between Canary Wharf and its declaration of a second ceasefire on 21 July 1997. This was little consolation for the families of Detective Garda Gerry McCabe, shot dead in June 1996 during an IRA robbery of a mail van in County Limerick, or Stephen Restorick, a British soldier shot dead by a sniper in south Armagh in February 1997. Most IRA activity occurred in Britain, with a series of bombs in London and the devastation of the centre of Manchester by a 3,500 pound lorry-bomb in June 1996. As the general election approached, the attacks focused on disrupting road and rail networks as well as the Grand National steeplechase. Such violence served a number of purposes. It reminded the British government that should a ceasefire be restored, republican demands had to be seriously addressed if the peace process were not to be put in crisis again. Adams's ‘peace strategy’ continued to have a coercive element. It maintained the unity of the republican movement by showing restive elements in the IRA that involvement in negotiations had not made them redundant. By keeping the level of violence low and mostly outside Northern Ireland, it did not damage the continuing electoral expansion of Sinn Féin. In the 1 May general election Adams won back West Belfast from the SDLP and Martin McGuinness won Mid Ulster from the DUP's William McCrea. Three weeks later in the local government elections Sinn Féin increased its vote to 17 per cent, cutting the margin between it and the SDLP from 75:25 of the nationalist vote in the 1993 local government elections to 55:45 in 1997.70
But if republican violence, or the threat of it, continued to perform important functions for Adams's strategy, it was difficult to see it as more than a means of increasing the ‘green’ façade of what was a partitionist settlement. Adams was now writing about ‘renegotiating the Union’ rather than ending it.71 The new Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, had already declared that ‘irredentism is dead’ and that it was not ‘feasible or desirable to attempt to incorporate Northern Ireland into a united Ireland against the will of a majority there, either by force or coercion’. He also rejected joint authority as a realistic option.72 It was possible for republican leaders to depict the North–South institutions as mechanisms for creeping integration, but there was no guarantee that their version of North–South links would be the accepted one.
Republican optimism was encouraged by the way the new Labour government downplayed the decommissioning issue. There was also a commitment to ‘confidence-building measures’ in areas such as the reform of the RUC and the strengthening of fair employment legislation. Although the government had initially proposed to deal with the arms issue along the lines of the Mitchell Report – by decommissioning in conjunction with political negotiations – this was dropped after a flexing of IRA muscle. On 17 June two RUC men were shot dead by the IRA in Lurgan, County Armagh. Within days an Anglo-Irish paper on decommissioning implied that all Sinn Féin would have to do was agree to discuss the issue during the talks.73 This approach, while it permitted the successful completion of negotiations, could not prevent the issue returning to haunt the early life of the new devolved institutions.
Some on the Tory right had denounced the internationalization of the search for a settlement involved in British acceptance of Senator George Mitchell as chair of the talks process, claiming that American involvement would simply strengthen the nationalist cause.74 In fact, for Mitchell as well as his sponsor, Clinton, it was accepted that the talks could only be successful if, as well as bringing in republicans from the cold, they did not drive the majority of unionists into the rejectionist camp. At the centre of Adams's pan-nationalist strategy there had been the over-optimistic assumption that Clinton's involvement would follow an Irish-American agenda. While there was no doubting the deeper emotional sympathy of the Democratic administration with nationalist Ireland, Clinton's substantive political interest was the attainment of a deal that could be trumpeted as ‘historic’, and this necessitated keeping Trimble's party on board.
Paisley and Robert McCartney had led their parties out of the talks when Sinn Féin entered in September 1997, thus making the negotiation of an agreement possible.75 While the leadership of Sinn Féin claimed a victory over unionist ‘intransigence’ and British ‘prevarication’, some members of the IRA, at both leadership and rank-and-file levels, were increasingly apprehensive about the implications of the peace process for traditional republican objectives. To gain entry to the talks process, Sinn Féin had to sign up to the ‘Mitchell Principles’, which committed them, amongst other things, to ‘democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues and to the total disarmament of all paramilitary organizations’. They were also committed to urge an end to punishment killings and beatings – the main rest and recreation activity of IRA volunteers on ceasefire – and to take effective steps to prevent them taking place.76 Decommissioning was to be treated as an issue to be addressed during the talks, and although unionist sceptics predicted that it would be fudged, there were some in the republican movement who feared that the military integrity of the IRA would be sacrificed on the altar of Sinn Féin's electoral and governmental ambitions. To quieten such voices a senior IRA spokesman had told An Phoblacht that the IRA ‘would have problems with sections of the Mitchell Principles’ and that the IRA was not a participant in the talks.77 This was a fiction, as senior members of the political wing of the republican movement, including Adams and McGuinness, were also members of the Army Council of the IRA, but it did reflect real tensions in the movement created by the political leadership's increasing envelopment by the process of political bargaining.
Already the Continuity IRA, the military wing of Adams's former comrades who had seceded in 1986 to form Republican Sinn Féin, were attempting to attract disgruntled Provisionals by a series of car-bomb attacks on RUC stations. In November an attempt by Adams's supporters in the IRA to centralize control over the ultimate disposition of arms with the IRA Army Council resulted in a split when the IRA's Quartermaster-General and a number of other senior IRA figures in the border area resigned from the movement and went on to form the Real IRA.78 The dissidents established their own political wing, the 32-County Sovereignty Movement, which, although it initially had the support of only a few disillusioned members of Sinn Féin, made up for this in ‘movement’ credibility by having the support of a sister of Bobby Sands. Given the epochal resonance of the deaths of Sands and his comrades for the Provisional movement, it was acutely embarrassing for Adams to be condemned by Bernadette Sands-McKevitt for entering a talks process that could only result in a ‘modernized version of partition’. As she witheringly put it, her brother did not die for a cross-border tourism authority.79
If republicans were going to embrace a settlement that left the North inside the UK for at least the medium term and accept the principle of consent – the ‘unionist veto’ in the movement's traditional language then it was important that it should be presented to their supporters as ‘transitional’. Acceptance of new devolved structures of government at Stormont needed to be balanced by a set of strong, free-standing North-South institutions along the lines set out in the Framework Document. But in January 1998 even these consolatory structures were put in question by the British and Irish governments’ joint document, Heads of Agreement, which, in setting out their understanding of the likely parameters of any final deal, proposed North-South institutions that would be mandated by and accountable to the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Irish parliament. A Belfast-based journalist knowledgeable about republicanism described Heads of Agreement as a triumph for Trimble and a disaster for republicanism.80 But, as Trimble himself pointed out, the process of bargaining, which led to an agreement and subsequently to the formation of an ‘inclusive’ government for Northern Ireland, was a ‘white-knuckle ride’ in which an apparent victory for one side produced such a bitter response from the other that it was soon provided with a compensatory ‘victory’ of its own.
Republican displeasure was soon evident in another ‘tactical use of armed struggle’ when first an alleged drug dealer and then a prominent loyalist were shot dead. Although the violence resulted in Sinn Féin being temporarily excluded from the talks, it may have contributed to the determination of Bertie Ahern's government to press the British for a return to the bolder version of cross-borderism of the Framework Document. The result was a final frenetic four days of negotiation, kick-started by George Mitchell's presentation to the parties of a draft of the agreement on 7 April. This included a section on strand two (North–South institutions) that the governments had drafted, which reflected the strong cross-border dimension of the Framework Document. Mitchell himself recognized that this would be unacceptable to Trimble and, with the leader of the Alliance Party, John Alderdice, predicting disaster if the proposals were carried out, Blair and Ahern descended on Stormont for three days and nights of what James Molyneaux disparagingly referred to as ‘high-wire act’ negotiations.
The final Agreement allowed Trimble to claim that the Union was not only safe but actually stronger because of unionist negotiating successes in strand two and on constitutional recognition. Unionist focus on strand-two issues during the final days of the negotiations had got a result: the North–South ministerial council and its cut-down list of ‘implementation bodies’ in areas including animal and plant health and teacher qualifications were difficult for either republicans or unionist rejectionists to portray as ‘creeping reunification’. For the first time an Irish government had committed itself to the constitutional recognition of Northern Ireland through the amendment of Articles 2 and 3 of its constitution, and all signatories of the Agreement were committed to accepting the principle of consent.
But the strong belief of the two governments and the SDLP that republicans were essential to any final settlement inevitably meant that unionists would have to pay a price for these victories. On devolution itself there was little attempt to defend the original UUP position of administrative devolution, with committee chairs allocated by the d'Hondt rule a mathematical device usually used for the allocation of seats in legislatures under the additional-member system of proportional representation. The SDLP demand was for a power-sharing cabinet. Republicans still ideologically opposed to devolution had made no contribution to the negotiations in this area while of course demanding ‘inclusion’ in whatever structures eventuated. The result was described by Robin Wilson: ‘Rather like the camel that emerged from a committee designing a horse, a power-sharing executive with positions distributed by d'Hondt was the outcome.’81
The lacuna in the Agreement that was to cause Trimble and his party so much subsequent grief was the failure to make Sinn Féin's participation in the Executive dependent on prior action by the IRA in decommissioning its weapons. It was on this issue that Trimble faced a rebellion from members of the UUP's talks team on the final afternoon of the negotiations. Faced by Blair's insistence that the Agreement could not be altered and after a phone-call from Clinton, Trimble extracted a letter of reassurance from Blair. The letter expressed sympathy with the UUP's concerns and promised that if within six months the Agreement proved unsatisfactory in dealing with this issue, the British government would support changes to the Agreement.82 But, as Frank Millar notes, ‘Most people at the time thought, and still think, that the letter was no more than a last-minute attempt to cover Trimble's embarrassment and was otherwise of no value or significance.’83 It did prove sufficient to win over most of the doubters as the talks neared their conclusion, with the important exception of Jeffrey Donaldson, Molyneaux's successor as MP for Lagan Valley. Ambiguity on the issue of decommissioning was part of the price that unionists had to pay to allow republicanism a soft landing, given that, as one of their leading strategists admitted, the Agreement had legitimized the British state in Ireland.84 Another last-minute concession to republican unhappiness with the North–South and constitutional dimensions of the deal was the reduction of the period – from three years to two – before which prisoners belonging to paramilitary groups on ceasefire would be released. This, and what Sinn Féin referred to as the ‘Equality Agenda’ – involving human rights legislation and safeguards, commissions on policing and criminal justice, and a British commitment to demilitarization – were to act as consolation for what a considerable number of republicans considered an Agreement that enshrined the ‘unionist veto’.
These were the issues that dominated the intra-unionist debate on the Agreement in the period leading up to the two referenda on 20 May through which the northern and southern electorates were to express a judgement on what had been agreed on Good Friday. It soon became clear that while nationalists and republicans overwhelmingly supported the deal, unionists were split. At first roughly half were in favour, a quarter against and a quarter undecided. In the weeks leading up to the referendum in Northern Ireland attention focused not on the constitutional aspects of the deal and Trimble's success on domesticating the North–South institutions but on the more emotive issues of early prisoner releases, the presence of ‘terrorists’ in government, and the supposed threat to the future of the RUC. Unionist rejectionists benefited from the spectacle of the triumphal reception given at a special Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis to recently released IRA men who had been involved in bombings and kidnappings in London in the 1970s. The choreography of this event was staged to give the imprimatur of those who suffered two decades of imprisonment for the ‘struggle’ to a radically revisionist republican strategy. But it produced a wave of repulsion in the unionist community and threatened major damage to the pro-Agreement cause.
That just over a half of unionists did vote ‘yes’ in the referendum was in large part the product of frequent trips to the North during the last two weeks of the campaign by Blair, who gave numerous reassurances, particularly on the issue of decommissioning. He was backed up by a cavalcade of British political leaders and international figures, including Nelson Mandela. A strong sense of the ‘historic’ nature of the choice on offer was also encouraged by the unprecedented attention of the international media and by a heavily funded ‘yes’ campaign that could rely on the support of Saatchi & Saatchi and even teamed up the staid, besuited and middle-aged figures of Trimble and Hume with the Irish band U2 and the northern group Ash at a rock concert in Belfast in the final days of the campaign.
The result was the mobilization of the Protestant ‘comfortable classes’ in an unprecedented fashion. Turnout at 81 per cent (in the Republic it was a mere 56 per cent) was the highest ever in Northern Ireland: 160,000 more than had voted in the last Westminster election.85 This surge was disproportionately drawn from the majority unionist areas east of the Bann, where turnout was traditionally the lowest in the North. Thus, although the 71 per cent ‘yes’ vote gave the Agreement a strong boost, its basis in the unionist community was shaky. As a leading member of the DUP put it of those who had broken a habit of a lifetime: ‘They came out to vote for what they saw as peace and now they will return to political hibernation for another 30 years. But those who voted “No” are not so apathetic.’86
The DUP man's prediction appeared vindicated at the election for the new Northern Ireland Assembly on 25 June. Many of those unionists who had voted ‘yes’ in May now stayed at home, and Trimble's party turned in its worst-ever performance, taking 21.3 per cent of the first-preference vote to the DUP's 18 per cent. Although pro-Agreement parties won 73 per cent of the vote and eighty of the Assembly's 108 seats, there was no disguising the precarious nature of unionist support in the Assembly, where pro-Agreement unionists held thirty seats while the ‘antis’ had twenty-eight. Nationalist and republican concern with the supposed danger of a unionist majority abusing its position had led to mechanisms for cross-community validation on key decisions that required, at minimum, the support of 40 per cent of each communal bloc. This was now an ever-present threat to pro-Agreement unionism.
Movement on the arms issue by the IRA would have given a substantial boost to Trimble's position in his party and in the wider unionist community. Such movement seemed possible, as Sinn Féin's political successes were seen as giving Adams increased leverage with the IRA. The Assembly elections had been a major victory for Adams's pan-nationalist strategy. The SDLP topped the poll with 22 per cent, and the aggregate vote of the nationalist–republican bloc was at its highest ever, with a Sinn Féin vote of 17.7 per cent. The peace process had put Adams and Martin McGuinness at the centre of national and international attention. Received respectfully in Downing Street, Leinster House and the White House, they were listened to deferentially when they continued to complain of being marginalized. They had before them the heady vision of being the first transnational party in the European Union with seats in the Dáil, Stormont and Westminster and the possibility of being in government in both Belfast and Dublin.
If the massive political benefits of flexibility, compromise and realpolitik were obvious, the dire futility of a return to the armed struggle was made abysmally clear on 15 August in Omagh when twenty-eight people were murdered in a Real IRA car-bomb attack. This was the largest loss of life in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. In the words of one former IRA hunger striker, Omagh was ‘the end of an era for a certain school of republican thought. What little sympathy was remaining for the physical force element evaporated on that dreadful Saturday afternoon.’87 The Omagh atrocity offered the leadership of the republican movement the best possible conditions to address the arms issue. However, nothing was done for another year and a half, by which time Trimble's position was substantially weaker within his party and the electorate.
In part this reflected Adams's long-standing caution in edging the movement in a more flexible and political direction while doing his utmost to prevent a split. It was also the case that the substantively partitionist nature of the deal that republicans had accepted made action on arms more difficult: giving ground on political fundamentals made even a gesture on arms more difficult to sell within the IRA. There was also a major obstacle in the strong element of solipsistic self-righteousness so strongly developed in the republican mentality. Republican violence was from this perspective a legitimate response to state and loyalist violence. This was despite the fact that of the 3,633 violent deaths during the ‘Troubles’, republicans were responsible for 2,139, or 58.8 per cent of the total. In comparison the reviled RUC, the disbandment of which Sinn Féin put near the top of its post-Agreement demands, was responsible for fifty-two deaths.88 Only a tiny element of the most sophisticated in the leadership would even hint at the possibility that the armed struggle had made an independent and powerful contribution to making Northern Ireland in 1998 more polarized, more segregated and more embittered than it was thirty years before. From this perspective the ceasefire was the fundamental concession made by the IRA, and pressure for it to move on decommissioning was an attempt to ‘humiliate’ an ‘undefeated army’.
Adams had recognized that most unionists ‘quite rightly’ would not feel any gratitude towards the IRA. He gave his own version of unionist thinking on the issue: ‘We are not thanking these people for stopping what they should never have done in the first place.’ Yet he did expect an understanding from unionists that any action on weapons would wait until all the aspects of the Agreement had been implemented, particularly the provision for an international commission on policing. Until then the IRA would remain ‘on the sidelines’.89 It did not take a particularly negative cast of mind for many in the unionist community to interpret this as ‘the politics of threat’.
From June 1998 to December 1999 Trimble maintained a position of refusing to form an administration that included Sinn Féin until the weapons issue was seriously addressed. A tactically ingenious ‘sequencing’ proposition was put forward by the two governments at Hillsborough in April 1999, by which a ‘shadow executive’ would be formed, and within a month, during a ‘collective act of reconiliation’, some arms would ‘be put beyond use on a voluntary basis’ and powers devolved to the Executive. Martin McGuinness rejected the proposals as an ultimatum imposed by the British military establishment and Trimble.90 With repub-cans talking of the danger of a split, the UUP came under intense pressure to make a ‘leap of faith’ on the basis of 10 Downing Street's belief that there had been a ‘seismic shift’ in the republican position. Blair, buoyed up by his central role in the Kosovo conflict and keen to announce an Ulster deal to coincide with the inauguration of the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies, set a deadline of 30 June. If Trimble had felt any inclination to oblige a Prime Minister with whom he had an extremely good personal relationship, this was undermined by another bad election performance. In the European elections in June the Ulster Unionist candidate got 17.6 per cent of the vote, the party's lowest-ever share, and it narrowly avoided an ignominious fourth place behind Sinn Féin.91
Trimble's rejection of the two governments' new attempt at sequencing in July led to a reinvolvement of George Mitchell in a review of the Agreement that started in the autumn. Despite a recrudescence of IRA punishment beatings and killings during the summer, Mitchell achieved a breakthrough: an agreement by Trimble to recommend to his party that, in return for a commitment by republicans to address the decommissioning issue by the end of January 2000, an Executive could be formed. However, the souring of the atmosphere as a result of the publication of the Patten Report on policing in September made Trimble's offer conditional. The international commission headed by the ex-Tory politician and former Governor of Hong Kong produced a report that, while it did not recommend the disbanding of the force, as republicans demanded, put forward proposals for radical restructuring that most controversially proposed a change of name and insisted that the force's symbols should not reflect those of the British and Irish states. The report produced fierce denunciations from all shades of unionism.
Believing that he might not win a majority in the Ulster Unionist Council for his proposal to form a government that included Sinn Féin, Trimble promised to recall the Council in February to report on what progress there had been on weapons and deposited a post-dated letter of resignation as leader of the party with its President. Adams now claimed that Trimble had added a new precondition to what had been agreed in the talks chaired by George Mitchell. The result was that, while in January 2000 Northern Ireland had its first government since 1974, it lacked even the rudiments of a common understanding on what was a central issue – after all, under the Agreement the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons was supposed to be completed by May 2000. This experience of devolved government lasted less than two months. While unionists had to get used to republicans running the departments of Health and Education (one of them, Martin McGuinness, popularly believed to have been a member of the IRA's Army Council until very recently), republicans appeared to have calculated that once the institutions of government were functioning, unionists would be reluctant to bring them down.
However, with the support of a more unionist-friendly Secretary of State, Peter Mandelson, who had replaced Mowlam in October 1999, Trimble did not hesitate to use his threat of resignation to force Mandelson to suspend the institutions in February.This hard-nosed approach outraged nationalists, who claimed that Mandelson's assertion of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland violated the spirit of the Agreement. But it steadied nerves in his own party and forced republicans to move on arms. On 6 May an IRA statement committed it to putting its arms ‘completely and verifiably beyond use’ in a manner that would be acceptable to the International Commission on Decommissioning, headed by the Canadian General John de Chastelain. The return of devolution on 27 May 2000 took place after Trimble had got the support of 53 per cent of the 800 or so delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council, the party's ruling body. His margin of support in the Council had narrowed substantially from the 72 per cent who had voted in favour of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. However, neither nationalists nor republicans appeared to have much concern about this attenuation of pro-Agreement unionism. After two IRA arms dumps were independently inspected by a leading member of the ANC and a senior Finnish politician in June, there was little more of substance for General de Chastelain to report. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin and the SDLP criticized the British government for allegedly eviscerating the Patten Report, while Trimble used his powers as First Minister to ban Sinn Féin ministers from attending meetings of the North-South ministerial council and the implementation bodies.
With a senior republican claiming that Trimble's action and the failure of the British government to deliver on Patten and ‘demilitarization’ (the closing down of British Army installations in strategic border areas such as south Armagh was particularly emphasized) were threatening the peace process,92 2001 began gloomily for pro-Agreement Ulster Unionists. The IRA had formally disengaged from contacts with the international decommissioning body, and the UUP's continued involvement in government with Sinn Féin was a source of increasing intra-party conflict, as activists faced a general election with a high probability of losses to the DUP. Reacting to this pressure, Trimble lodged a letter with the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly on 23 May, resigning as First Minister with effect from 1 July 2001 if by then the IRA had not begun to decommission. Despite this action, the UUP lost three seats in the general election while the DUP gained two. Without it, it is possible that the UUP would have lost two more seats: Trimble's own in Upper Bann, where he was hard-pressed by a fairly unknown DUP candidate, and East Antrim. The overall result UUP, 26.8 per cent and six seats; DUP, 22.5 per cent and five seats; Sinn Féin, 21.7 per cent and four seats; SDLP, 21 per cent and three seats – was interpreted by many commentators as a triumph for the extremes.93
This was an oversimplification. Such a judgement was based on a comparison with the 1997 election, thus ignoring the radical effects of the Belfast Agreement on the political environment in Northern Ireland, particularly its destabilizing influence on unionism. A better comparison is with the 1998 Assembly elections, and here the picture for pro-Agreement unionism was not quite so bleak. The UUP vote increased from 21.3 to 26.8 per cent; the DUP's victories were also accompanied by a shift in its discourse towards a more subtle and less hysterical critique of the Agreement. This was most ably accomplished by its victor in North Belfast, Nigel Dodds, who focused not on the influence of Dublin or the Vatican but on the unbalanced nature of the workings of the Agreement, which, he alleged, was hollowing out the ‘Britishness’ of the North. This took up emotionally powerful issues such as the ‘destruction of the RUC’ and Sinn Féin ministers' refusal to allow the Union flag to fly over their buildings.
If decommissioning had begun it might have been easier to deal with these criticisms, particularly as the DUP was heavily involved in the institutions of the Agreement: sitting on Assembly committees with republicans and participating in the Executive, although refusing to sit around the cabinet table with ‘Sinn Féin–IRA’ ministers. The election result, which saw Sinn Féin out-poll the SDLP for the first time, demonstrated the gains from the ‘peace strategy’. Yet senior republican figures were still telling the rank and file that there would be no decommissioning.94 Attempts to justify republicans’ refusal to move on arms pointed to an ongoing campaign of pipe-bomb attacks on Catholic homes by elements of the UDA and the challenge of republican dissidents. These justifications were shown to be less than convincing when, in October 2001, the IRA began to decommission, regardless of the continuation of sectarian attacks and the scorn of fundamentalists who claimed the Provos had finally surrendered. That the weapons issue was at last addressed was a product of events in Colombia and New York that put irresistible pressure on the leadership of Sinn Féin.
Despite Irish fears that the new US President, George Bush, would adopt a more distant approach to Northern Ireland, US strategic concerns ensured an engagement that, for the first time since 1994, republicans would find unwelcome. The arrest of three Irish republicans in Bogotá on 6 August 2001 and the claim of the Colombian authorities that they had been training FARC guerrillas was acutely embarrassing for Adams, who was unable to give a satisfactory explanation to either the Bush administration or those wealthy Irish-Americans who had raised millions of dollars for the party in the 1990s. The events of 11 September put irresistible pressure on Adams to demonstrate, beyond contradiction, that republicans were not part of the ‘international terrorist network’. Irrespective of the instinctive anti-imperialism of many republicans, Adams moved quickly to accommodate the White House and corporate Irish-America and on 26 October the IRA announced that it had begun the process of decommissioning.95
The IRA's action enabled Trimble to contemplate returning to government with Sinn Féin. However, under the terms of the Agreement he needed to be re-elected First Minister with the support of at least 50 per cent of the members of the Assembly who had designated themselves unionist. He failed on the first attempt because of the defection of two UUP Assembly members. Four days later, in a manoeuvre he admitted was ‘tacky’, he returned to office – courtesy of three members of the Alliance Party and of one from the Women's Coalition who had redesignated themselves as ‘unionist’ for that purpose.96 Trimble might assert that ‘I'm not a Faulkner, lacking legitimacy’,97 but his loss of a unionist majority in the Assembly was an important symbolic blow, one that was accompanied by increasing evidence of political disaffection in the broader unionist community.
Protestant ‘alienation’ became a central theme in the speeches of NIO ministers and had a particularly ugly manifestation in the blockade of a Catholic primary school in North Belfast, which began in the autumn of 2001, where declining working-class Protestant communities in areas such as Ardoyne and Tiger Bay felt themselves losing out in a zero-sum territorial conflict with Catholics. A much broader section of the unionist community found it difficult to accept a republican presence in government, even with increasing signs that there was little chance of the Provos going back to war. This did not stem simply, as some commentators claimed, from an unwillingness to accept equality with Catholics. Rather, it rested on a perception that the new dispensation was based on the steady dilution of the North's Britishness as reflected in changes in the name and symbols of the RUC and disputes over the flying of the Union flag on public buildings.
The end of unionist hegemony within the northern state and the associated rise in nationalist and republican self-confidence both contributed to a prevalence of what Steve Bruce has called the ‘dismal vision’ in the Unionist community:98 a vision of inexorable decline in terms of demography and economic clout. Yet, looked at from the perspective of the period covered in this book, this seems an overly black picture. The massive economic and social changes that had transformed the Republic since the 1960s have consolidated a twenty-six-county-state patriotism that prioritizes stability over unity. The end of the IRA's armed struggle and the acceptance by Irish nationalists of the ‘consent’ principle contributed powerfully to the stabilization of the northern state.
However, the Good Friday Agreement was an elite-brokered settlement that balanced precariously on deep reserves of communal distrust and antagonism. This was particularly so in the Protestant community, where Trimble and pro-Agreement unionists found it increasingly difficult to counter a growing mood of sour cynicism about post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Trimble's upbeat portrayal of the constitutional and material gains since 1998 had a solid basis in reality. He had relied on the argument that the Agreement was a partitionist settlement in which the consent principle had been enshrined. Unionists did appear to be more confident about their constitutional future. According to the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, the percentage of Protestants who believed that there would be a united Ireland in the next twenty years had fallen from 42 per cent in 1998 to 32 per cent in 2003. This may have been influenced by the results of the 2001 Census, which, despite the increasingly triumphalist predictions of Sinn Féin, were distinctly anti-climactic. Although the Protestant share of the population had fallen from 58 per cent in 1991 to 53 per cent, the Catholic share had risen by only 2 per cent to just under 44 per cent. Trimble's main internal critic, Jeffrey Donaldson, commented that ‘A united Ireland is not even a remote possibility and it's time for republicans to accept that.’99 Similarly DUP propaganda increasingly focused not on creeping reunification but rather on the claim that the Agreement had institutionalized a nationalist agenda and on its supposed marginalization of Protestant and unionist values and culture.
That this message found a ready audience was also clear from the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, which showed a steep decline in the belief that the Agreement benefited unionists and nationalists equally: from 41 per cent of Protestants in 1998 to 19 per cent in 2002. At the same time the view amongst Protestants that nationalists benefited a lot more than unionists rose from 31 per cent in 1998 to 55 per cent in 2002.100 This growing alienation was in part a response to specific policies, particularly those to do with the early release of prisoners and policing. But it also related to the broader conception underlying the Agreement that institutions and public policies should reflect ‘parity of esteem’ for nationalist and unionist identities and allegiances. Decades of provincial self-government and thirty years of violence had accentuated a defensive ‘little Ulster’ mentality that found it extremely difficult to differentiate between the institutional recognition of Irish national identity and de facto joint authority. The problem was intensified because it was increasingly Sinn Féin that dominated the tone and idiom of northern nationalism. Many unionists were only too ready to take republicans at their word when they depicted their goal of participating in the governance of Northern Ireland as a mere stage in the inevitable transition to a united Ireland.
Trimble's ability to counteract popular unionist disaffection was weakened by the IRA's reluctance to move beyond its initial acts of decommissioning and the continuing evidence that, although it was no longer actively targeting the security forces, it was still a functioning paramilitary organization involved in punishment attacks, intelligence gathering and criminality. A raid on the headquarters of Special Branch in Castlereagh in March 2002 was suspected by the security forces to be an IRA operation. By June, Blair was privately wondering, ‘Are the Provisionals in transition or are they messing us about?’101 On 4 October of that year the Police Service of Northern Ireland carried out a very public raid on the offices of Sinn Féin at the Parliament Buildings, as part of an ongoing investigation into an alleged republican spy-ring at the heart of government. Sinn Féin's chief administrator at Stormont, Denis Donaldson, was arrested, and John Reid, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, had little choice but to suspend the devolved institutions.102
The depth of the crisis produced a major intervention by Blair in a speech given at the Harbour Commissioners' Offices in Belfast on 17 October 2002. He praised Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness: ‘I think they have taken huge risks in order to bury the past.’ However, at the core of his speech was the argument that the republican delay on complete decommissioning was, by far, the greatest threat to the Agreement:
But the crunch is the crunch. There is no parallel track left. The fork in the road has finally come… we cannot carry on with the IRA half in, half out of the process. Not just because it isn't right any more. It won't work any more.
The threat of violence, no matter how damped down, is no longer reinforcing the political, it is actually destroying it. In fact, the continuing existence of the IRA as an active paramilitary organisation is now the best card those whom republicans call ‘rejectionist’ unionists have in their hand. It totally justifies their refusal to share power.103
The speech demanded the explicit end of all paramilitary activity by the provisionals, a firm commitment and a date for complete decommissioning. But though the next twelve months would show that words and actions could be extracted from republicans, they were, as Paul Bew has said, ‘the typical product of the grinding, inch-by-inch approach that had worn away at the legitimacy of the Agreement in the eyes of many and which Mr Blair explicitly disavowed at the Harbour Commissioners’.104
For Blair there were limits to the pressures that could be placed on republicans. He did not share the common unionist view that the al-Qaida attacks of 11 September 2001 had transformed the international environment to such an extent that it would be impossible for the IRA to return to armed struggle and that there was therefore no reason to be patient with republicans. The full story of Blair's relationship with the republican movement must await the opening of the official archives, but a preliminary evaluation is possible. One factor in Blair's approach was the importance of the peace process and the Agreement to his own view of the major accomplishments of his premiership. He claimed, with justification, in the Harbour Commissioners' speech that he had spent more time on Northern Ireland than any prime minister since 1922. The end of the IRA and the restoration of an ‘inclusive’ government at Stormont would rank as substantial achievements. For Blair, Adams and McGuinness had proved themselves essential to accomplishing these goals.
The information that the British security services were able to provide about the balance of forces within the republican movement was a second crucial factor. The role of what republicans dubbed ‘securocrats’ is inevitably one where speculation, rumour and conspiracy theory are rife. It is clear, however, that state intelligence agencies penetrated the movement at various levels. In 2003 it was revealed that Freddie Scappaticci, a leading figure in the IRA's internal security department, was ‘Stakeknife’, a British agent since 1978. Even more embarrassing for the republican leadership was the revelation, three years after the PSNI raid on Stormont, that Denis Donaldson, a former comrade of Bobby Sands and a key Sinn Féin apparatchik, had been a British agent for two decades. The outing of Donaldson, whose murder in April 2006 the IRA denied, led republican critics of Adams and McGuinness to allege that the whole peace process had been corrupted by British involvement from the beginning.105
The reality is probably more subtle. The security services provided the intelligence that allowed the police and the military to bear down on the IRA's capacity to continue with any sort of effective campaign. In doing so, they reinforced the position of the more strategically minded in the republican leadership, who had themselves become convinced that the military campaign was stalemated and a major obstacle to the political advance of Sinn Féin. The continuing existence of the IRA, albeit in a relatively passive post-ceasefire mode, was useful as a form of leverage on Blair, who feared not a full-scale return to violence but rather some one-off ‘spectacular’ to register republican displeasure at setbacks in the process of change in Northern Ireland.
Blair was well aware of the difficulties facing Adams and McGuinness in managing the liquidation of the IRA. However, he was also conscious that the resultant protraction of the process was deeply damaging to Trimble's position within the unionist community. It was because of this that he postponed the Assembly elections, due in May 2003, first for a month and then indefinitely. The two governments published a Joint Declaration setting out the steps to be taken by them in anticipation of an acceptable IRA statement. Paragraph 13 stated: ‘We need to see an immediate, full and permanent cessation of all paramilitary activity, including military attacks, training, intelligence gathering, acquisition of arms, punishment beatings and attacks and involvement in riot.’106
While Trimble was prepared to work within the broad framework set out in the Declaration, critics like Jeffrey Donaldson and the MP for South Antrim, David Burnside, claimed that it delivered further concessions to republicans. Their opposition led to the twelfth meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council since the Agreement. Donaldson's resolution to reject the Joint Declaration was lost by 54 per cent to 46 per cent, and he, Burnside and the Reverend Martin Smyth resigned the UUP whip at Westminster.
Trimble's response to the persistence of deep division in the party was a final major attempt to negotiate a comprehensive deal with the republican leadership in the autumn of 2003. He had been encouraged by successful joint efforts by UUP and Sinn Féin representatives to prevent violent outbreaks during the summer's marching season. So impressed was he by republican efforts that he shook hands with Gerry Adams for the first time. The handshake took place in private in September 2003 at the start of unprecedentedly intense negotiations between Sinn Féin and the UUP,107 which aimed to reach agreement on a form of sequencing through which IRA actions on weapons and a statement on future intentions would be followed by commitments by the two governments and Trimble. These would involve a decision to hold the postponed Assembly elections, agreement to devolve policing and justice powers within six months, and a unionist commitment to work and maintain the devolved institutions. Although Trimble and his colleagues had made it plain to republicans that there was a need for transparency and visibility in the decommissioning process, the IRA refused to contemplate a ‘Spielberg’ whereby the acts of decommissioning would be filmed or photographed. Trimble therefore was reduced to relying on a clear declaration from republicans that the IRA was going out of business, plus a detailed statement from General John de Chastelain, the head of the Independent International Decommissioning body.
The two Prime Ministers had planned to come to Hillsborough to announce a deal on 21 October. But Blair rashly anticipated success by announcing that there would be Assembly elections in November, thus depriving himself of his main leverage on Adams. Adams's statement, which the IRA was supposed to endorse subsequently, was an advance on any previous republican formulation, as it implied that the implementation of the Agreement removed any justification for the continuance of the IRA. Blair had demanded that the statement be clear ‘in the way any ordinary member of the public can understand’, but Adams avoided any reference to the ending of the paramilitary activities of targeting, training and punishment beatings that had been mentioned in the Joint Declaration.108 Trimble's ability to deal with unionist scepticism was now dependent on General de Chastelain revealing that he had witnessed the destruction of a significant amount of IRA weaponry. The IRA, keen to avoid any hint of public humiliation, had insisted that the general's statement contain no inventory of weapons destroyed or any estimate of how much weaponry remained to be dealt with. To the consternation of Trimble, de Chastelain told reporters who asked for a timetable for the decommissioning process that he could not say when the process would finish.109
Despite the failure of the negotiations, the UUP performed creditably in the Assembly election held on 26 November. The DUP did emerge as the largest party, with 30 seats and 25.7 per cent of the vote: ten seats up on its performance of 1998. However, most of the DUP gains had been at the expense of the smaller anti-Agreement unionist parties, not the UUP, and Trimble could take some consolation from the fact that the UUP vote was slightly up on its performance in 1998: its vote share was 22.7 and it lost only one seat, coming back with twenty-seven.
Sinn Féin, which had overtaken the SDLP for the first time in the 2001 Westminster election, consolidated their lead, with twenty-four seats and 23.5 per cent of the vote to the SDLP's 17 per cent and eighteen seats.110 The election was the first that Mark Durkan, the Derry MLA and former assistant to John Hume, had fought as SDLP leader (Hume had retired as leader of the party in September 2001 and announced he would not stand for Westminster again). The party's strategy was incoherent, asking for moderate unionist votes to ‘Stop the DUP’ while at the same time trying to embellish its nationalist credentials by claiming it would seek a referendum on a United Ireland within the lifetime of the next Assembly. However, its most fundamental problem was the indispensable role that Adams and McGuinness were seen to play in the high politics of the peace process and that no SDLP politician could match.
The election, with its demotion of Trimble and the UUP and the elevation of the DUP, threatened to alter the dynamics of the peace process in unpredictable ways. Within weeks of the election the DUP's position was strengthened by the defection of Jeffrey Donaldson and two other UUP MLAs, which gave Paisley's party thirty-three Assembly seats to the UUP's twenty-three. The implications for the Agreement and the peace process of the DUP's leadership role in unionist politics were viewed with relative equanimity by senior mandarins in Belfast, London and Dublin. Trimble, it was argued, had been too handicapped by a divided party and harassed by the DUP to be able to deliver a sustainable agreement with republicans. When and if Paisley did a deal with Adams, he could not be attacked from the right. The DUP, it was argued, was a more pragmatic party than its more lurid populist Protestant rhetoric might suggest.
Optimistic calculations about the DUP took account of the fact that, while denouncing the Agreement, it had actively participated in all the Northern institutions created by it. Its Assembly members sat on committees with republicans, including committees chaired by members of Sinn Féin. It had taken up the positions in the Executive that it was owed under the d'Hondt rules. Its two ministers did not participate in the meetings of the Executive because of the presence of Sinn Féin ministers but continued to run their respective departments; meanwhile, the party depicted their ministers as ‘whistle-blowers – exposing each of Trimble's further concessions to Sinn Féin’.111 Commentators noted a further public mellowing when they dropped their policy of not sharing a television or radio studio with Sinn Féin members. The problem remained that the DUP had overtaken the UUP precisely by a relentlessly negative campaign, one that depicted the peace process and the Agreement as an exercise in ‘appeasement’ that was structurally biased against Protestants and the Union. For many DUP activists and supporters, ‘Sinn Féin–IRA’ was a slouching beast of ‘unreconstructed terrorists’. However pragmatic some members of the DUP political class might have become, they would face formidable problems in selling their participation in government with republicans to many of their supporters.
Despite this, Blair was intent on pushing both the DUP and republicans into serious negotiations, and in November the governments gave the parties their proposals for a comprehensive agreement. In the weeks leading up to the arrival of Blair and Ahern in Belfast for what was hoped to be the unveiling of an agreement on 8 December 2004, there were signs that the DUP was prepared to go some distance in accommodating republicans. DUP demands for radical changes in the Agreement were watered down to the provision that all ministers would be voted for as a slate – thereby avoiding the embarrassment for the DUP of its Assembly members having to cast specific votes for republican ministers, as the previous system would have required. For such a fig-leaf the party was prepared to accept the devolution of policing and justice powers within months, with the inevitability of republican control of at least one of these ministries. However, once again, the two Prime Ministers were to be disappointed. The failure of the negotiations was initially blamed by republicans on the DUP demand for photographs of the decommissioning process. Such claims were given some plausibility by a speech of Paisley's to DUP supporters in Ballymena in which he had proclaimed that republicans needed to be publicly humiliated and that the IRA should don ‘sackcloth and ashes’. In fact, the photographic documentation of decommissioning was agreed to by both governments with the proviso that the photographs would not be made publicly available until the formation of the Executive in March 2005.
On 20 December, shortly after the breakdown of negotiations, a gang of twenty armed men took over the houses of two officials of the Northern Bank and threatened to kill their families unless they cooperated in removing £26 million from the bank's vaults in the centre of Belfast. On 7 January 2005 the Chief Constable of the PSNI, Hugh Orde, declared that the IRA had been responsible for the biggest bank raid in the history of the UK and Ireland.112 Sinn Féin was faced with a united front of criticism from London and Dublin as Bertie Ahern contemptuously dismissed Martin McGuinness's attempt to blame the crisis on ‘securocrats’ in the Northern Ireland Office and Adams's claim that he believed the IRA when it denied involvement in the bank raid.113 Both Ahern and Michael McDowell, the Republic's Minister for Justice, accused the Sinn Féin leadership of actively misleading them in the December negotiations because of their supposed prior knowledge of the planned robbery. McDowell pointed to the recent hi-jacking of a truck carrying cigarettes worth £1.5 million and the multimillion-pound robbery of a wholesalers in West Belfast – both of which the Garda and the PSNI blamed on the IRA – in his labelling of the IRA as ‘a colossal crime machine’.114
Republican discomfiture was soon intensified after a dispute in a central Belfast pub on 30 January led to the death of a working-class Catholic from the Short Strand area of East Belfast. Robert McCartney was stabbed to death by a group that included senior members of the IRA in the Markets and Short Strand areas who were returning from the annual Bloody Sunday demonstration in Derry. The murder produced an avalanche of negative media comment on the continuing coercive role of the IRA in working-class Catholic communities. The victim's sisters and partner launched a high-profile campaign to bring his killers to justice in which they were highly critical of Sinn Féin. It was not easy for republicans to label the sisters as working to a ‘securocrat’ or ‘anti-peace process agenda’, as they were committed Sinn Féin voters. Internationally the campaign did major damage to the party, ensuring that Adams and McGuinness were excluded from the annual St Patrick's Day jamboree at the White House while the sisters were welcomed by Bush. Domestically, with Westminster and local elections due on 5 May, Adams's ambition to obliterate the SDLP once and for all, something that many commentators had thought likely until the end of 2004, looked increasingly problematic.
As with the first IRA act of decommissioning, which had been brought about by Trimble's success in having Blair agree to the suspension of the institutions, it was a serious threat to Sinn Féin's political ambitions that seemed to be most effective in producing movement from the IRA. On 6 April, as the election campaign opened, Adams made a public appeal to the IRA to abandon violence in favour of politics. In a predictable piece of peace-process theatre, the IRA responded to Adams by promising to give his appeal ‘due consideration’.115 The IRA's ‘internal consultation’ process would not produce any result before the election, and it was unclear whether it would do much to help Sinn Féin weather the storm created by the Northern Bank and McCartney murder.
Trimble went to the electorate with the less than compelling message that ‘Rebuilding a moderate coalition here and refocusing London on what should be done will not be easy.’ Paisley, turning his back on the previous December's attempt to do a deal with republicans, provided a traditional Manichaean blast: ‘the peace process is in reality a pit of perdition. To enter into government with the terrorists of IRA–Sinn Féin would be treason.’116 It was only too easy for the DUP to use the bank robbery and the McCartney murder to depict Trimble as the unwitting stooge of an unreconstructed republican movement. Trimble knew better: that they reflected the disreputable side of a movement in transition. He had little doubt that, like many other national liberation movements with which republicans liked to compare themselves, Sinn Féin would end up comfortably ensconced in power, albeit within a partitionist context. But it was the UUP who would pay the price for the protracted nature of the republican movement's move away from militarism. The UUP's vote slumped by 9 per cent to 17.7 per cent, and it lost all but one of its seats. At 33.7 per cent, the DUP's vote was almost double that of the UUP.
The SDLP's performance was the surprise of the election. Widely expected to be reduced to one seat, Eddie McGrady's in South Down, it won three. Although it lost Newry and South Armagh to Sinn Féin, Durkan easily retained Hume's seat in Foyle, while the party also won South Belfast because of a split in the unionist vote. The party had fought a tough campaign that focused on the recent graphic examples of republicans' continued linkages with criminality and violence. It was doubtful, however, that the ‘McCartney’ effect would sustain the party in the longer term. Sinn Féin's support – 24.3 per cent of the vote and five seats – had continued to grow. Nevertheless the result was a major disappointment for republicans who had confidently expected to win Foyle and reduce the SDLP to a sole MP at Westminster. This would have allowed them to claim with some foundation to be the party that represented the nationalst community in Northern Ireland.
The reverberations of the bank robbery and the McCartney murder were decisive in bringing some sort of closure to the long-drawn-out process of haggling over IRA arms. On 28 July the IRA issued a statement that its Army Council had ‘ordered an end to the armed campaign’. All IRA units had been commanded to dump arms and Volunteers instructed to ‘assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means’. The governments' concern about republicans' previous reluctance to fully embrace democracy was reflected in the instruction that ‘Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.’ There was also a commitment to put its arms ‘beyond use as quickly as possible’. Unionist sceptics would still be refused any photographic verification and would have to be satisfied with two clerical witnesses, one of them a Protestant.117 The process culminated in late September, when General de Chastelain and his staff, together with the two clergymen, witnessed the disposal of what the General referred to as ‘the totality of the arsenal of the IRA’.118
Despite its historic significance the announcement of the decommissioning of IRA weapons received a muted response. In part this reflected unionist suspicion of anything the IRA said or did. The DUP questioned the credentials of the witnesses: one was Father Alec Reid, a long-time confidant of Gerry Adams, and the other a liberal Methodist. Others, while accepting that the IRA had rid itself of much of its arsenal, argued that it was far from going out of business. Sceptics could point to the reports of the body set up by the two governments in 2004 to monitor the paramilitary ceasefires. The Fifth Report of the International Monitoring Commission in May 2005 claimed that the IRA was still recruiting and training new members. It was heavily engaged in organized crime, including the smuggling of fuel and tobacco and sophisticated money laundering. It concluded ‘the Provisional IRA remains a highly active organisation.’119 However, by the end of 2005, there were indications that the organization had become dormant. This reflected the governments’ insistence that, despite decommissioning being what Blair had described as a ‘step of unparalleled magnitude’,120 unionist confidence in republican intentions would need to be consolidated by further reports from the IMC.
Had the IRA, two years earlier, said and done what it did in July and September 2005, Northern Ireland may well have had a functioning and inclusive government by the end of 2003. In the intervening period Trimble's brand of unionism, which had demonstrated an ability to deal directly and flexibly with republicans, had been displaced by the DUP's more absolutist and populist variety. But it remained possible that, having displaced the moderates, the DUP would end up on very similar political territory to that formerly occupied by Trimble. For the party had moved far from a root-and-branch denunciation of the Agreement. Its demand now was not that it be scrapped but that it be operated in a more balanced manner. The party had been in negotiations with Sinn Féin, although indirectly. Even after the McCartney–Northern Bank storm, it was careful not to rule out entering government with republicans if Sinn Féin could demonstrate a complete break with paramilitarism. This was the pragmatic face that it put forward in negotiations with other parties and governments. The message to its supporters and the broader unionist community was more unreconstructed. It was that a vote for the DUP was a vote to end concessions, for an alternative to the ‘push-over unionism of David Trimble’. The DUP had depicted every significant development since 1998 as part of the piecemeal dismantling of the Union. The problem for the party was that, having blamed Trimble's leadership for acquiescing in this process and boasting, as Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the DUP, did, that ‘unionism is now under new management', there was little evidence that DUP dominance would produce any major rethink in British policy.
After the IRA's statement the British government announced a dramatic programme of ‘demilitarization’ that would see the number of British troops reduced to a maximum of 5,000 within two years, together with rapid movement on the closure of security installations along the border. The four ‘home’ battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment were also to be disbanded. The successor to the UDR, the RIR battalions were 4,000 strong, and the announcement produced a wave of street protests and Protestant paramilitary violence.121 In early September the rerouting of an Orange march on the Springfield Road led to the most intense period of loyalist violence for well over a decade. Fusillades of shots were fired at the police, roads throughout loyalist areas in Belfast were blocked with burning vehicles, and there was widespread antipolice rioting.
The violence led the new Secretary of State, Peter Hain, to declare that he took unionist concerns seriously.122 But there was no indication that the main lines of government policy would be more than tweaked at the edges. There was more unionist angst over proposed legislation to provide an amnesty for ‘on the runs’: IRA members who were outside the UK evading arrest. The government was also considering further police reform plus the official legitimation of restorative justice schemes that republicans had promoted as an alternative to the presence of the police in Catholic working-class areas. While the idea behind such initiatives was to make it possible for Sinn Féin to support the new policing structures, their short-term effect would be to make it unlikely that the DUP would risk going into government with republicans in 2006. Some elements of the DUP and many of those who voted for them preferred the continuation of direct rule to the return of devolution with Martin McGuinness in government. But such a disposition came up against the aversion of the British political class to the prospect of decades more of direct involvement in the running of the province. It also clashed with the strong ‘little Ulster’ mentality of many unionists, who resented local decisions being made by outsiders. Most fundamentally it ignored the fact that, although the Agreement helped to accommodate the republican movement to partition, it was also associated with the consolidation of a more confident and assertive northern nationalism. In the absence of devolution this would push direct rule towards shared decision-making between London and Dublin, further limiting unionists' involvement in the governance of Northern Ireland.
There are therefore strong negative incentives for the DUP's political class to deal with republicans, apart from the attractions of salaries, status and patronage that the return of devolved government would bring. The amount of agreement reached in December 2004 demonstrated a capacity for pragmatism at the top of the party. However, the powerful components of anti-Catholicism and demonization of republicans in the party's ideology will make the selling of such a deal to grass-roots members and supporters difficult. If it succeeds, the result will not be the ‘new Northern Ireland’ that Trimble looked forward to in the optimism of 1998.123 In many ways it will, as some progressive critics of the Agreement claim, institutionalize sectarianism. But underpinning it will be an implicit recognition by the two most obdurate forms of unionism and nationalism that the future of Northern Ireland cannot be settled on their own terms. In that at least the drafters of the Agreement might be able to claim a victory.