The Northern Ireland state created by the Anglo-Irish war of 1919– 21 and the subsequent settlement agreed by the British prime minister, Lloyd George, and Irish republican leaders was not much more than a quarter of a century old when, on October 6, 1948, Annie Adams gave birth to her first son and christened him Gerry after her husband. The centuries-old struggle for Irish independence had burst into violent guerrilla warfare between the IRA and the British just as the First World War ended, and although the rebellion was widespread and popular in a way unmatched in Irish history, it was only partially successful. When the two sides, exhausted by their bloody efforts, finally agreed to sit down and negotiate a settlement, the deal that emerged, the Treaty, as it would forever be known, eventually gave most of Ireland—twenty-six of its thirty-two counties—political freedom from Britain. But six counties, Northern Ireland, stayed British at the insistence of their large Protestant and unionist majority. By October 1948 Northern Ireland was enjoying peace, albeit an uneasy one. But trapped inside the state into which Gerry Adams was born was a significant Catholic and nationalist minority, a third of Northern Ireland’s one and a half million people, whose oppressive treatment at the hands of the unionists ensured that there would always be a role for the IRA and an audience for its seditious gospel.
To say, however, that violent republicanism was the predominant sentiment among Northern Ireland’s Catholics would be wrong. By far the bulk of them supported constitutionalist politicians, principally the conservative and strongly pro–Catholic Church Nationalist Party. Support for the IRA was a minority activity; membership was even more so. Nevertheless there was a republican tradition in Northern Ireland, and by the standards of early postwar Belfast the Adams family were in its blue-blood line. It was this political lineage that would ordain what the newborn Gerry Adams would do in life. As the infant Gerry grew up, he was surrounded by relatives who had fought, been jailed, and, in the case of his father, even shot for the cause of Irish freedom. The IRA—its traditions, history, and values—was imbibed with his mother’s milk.
His paternal grandfather, also called Gerry, had been in the highly secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the forerunner of the IRA commanded by the legendary guerrilla leader Michael Collins, during the Anglo-Irish war. His father, Gerry Adams Sr., joined the IRA as a sixteen-year-old and in 1942 was sentenced to an eight-year jail term after an IRA ambush of members of the predominantly Protestant police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), went badly wrong and he was felled by three bullets. Two paternal uncles, Dominic and Patrick, had been interned without trial because of their IRA sympathies, one by the government in Dublin, the other by its Unionist counterpart in Belfast. For a short period prior to the Second World War, Dominic Adams had held the highest rank in the IRA, that of chief of staff, a position his nephew was later to occupy, also briefly but with much more effect.
His mother’s family, the Hannaways, had a similar history. His maternal great-grandfather, Michael Hannaway, had been a member of the Fenian movement, which bombed England in the 1860s and 1870s. His grandfather, Billy Hannaway, was Eamon de Valera’s election agent when the hero of the 1916 Easter Rising ran for election in West Belfast in 1918. Later he broke with him when de Valera became a constitutional politician.
Adams’s mother was a member of the women’s branch of the IRA, the Cumann na mBan;1 she was a “staunch republican,” her son was to write many years later.2 Three of her brothers—Tommy, Liam, and Alfie—were IRA stalwarts in the city. Uncle Liam Hannaway was to play a crucial part in steering the young Gerry Adams toward the Provisional IRA, while Uncle Alfie, a leading light all his life in the IRA’s boy scouts movement, the na Fianna Eireann, was a daily communicant at Clonard Monastery, in the heart of West Belfast, helping to establish a relationship between the Adams family and Clonard’s Redemptorist priests which proved pivotal many years later when the Irish peace process began.
The Adams and Hannaway families may have been seen as republican aristocrats, but that was only among their own small rebellious circle. In the wider world they were members of a beleaguered minority that had more often tasted isolation and defeat for their dedication to Ireland’s cause. In the Northern Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s very few Catholics were in the IRA or indeed knew much about it. Many were deterred from having anything to do with it by the knowledge that any display of IRA sympathies would be sure to invite the hostile attention of the fledgling unionist government’s security agencies, in particular the RUC Special Branch, a detective force that specialized in monitoring political opponents of the Protestant-dominated state.
A draconian law, called the Special Powers Act (SPA), gave the authorities exceptional powers to arrest, detain without trial, and suppress political dissent. So severe were its penalties, which included the death penalty for some firearms offenses, flogging, and the confiscation and destruction of property, that a South African prime minister during the apartheid era once famously remarked that he would swap all his emergency laws for one clause of the SPA.3 On top of conventional forces, the first unionist government had created an armed paramilitary force, known as the B Specials, manned by thousands of pro-British Protestant supporters, which could be mobilized in emergencies to put down armed revolt. In peacetimes they kept a wary eye on their Catholic neighbors.
Unionism was an ideology that thrived on a sense of siege. Even the creation of a state whose gerrymandered border guaranteed unionists virtually permanent majority rule could not overcome a deep political psychosis. Fear of retribution from their downtrodden and disenfranchised Irish Catholic neighbors was possibly the most potent single factor in their political makeup. It had haunted the Protestants since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when English monarchs like Elizabeth I, anxious to create a loyal buffer in rebellious Catholic Ireland, confiscated native-held land in the northeastern part of the island nearest to Britain, in the province of Ulster, and gave it to trustworthy, loyal Protestant planters imported from Scotland and England. Deep inside, many of the planters were terrified at the thought that one day the native Irish would take their revenge and their land back, a communal dread that has survived the centuries.
The idea behind the plantation of Ulster was to make invasion of Protestant England by Catholic France or Spain via Ireland that much more difficult. It was the first expression by England that the occupation and colonization of Ireland served to advance its wider strategic and military interests. But serving England’s interests created a poisonous mix of sectarian and political division that was to shape and deform Irish politics for centuries.
Even in the 1940s and 1950s, when Gerry Adams was growing up, many unionists still looked upon their Catholic fellow countrymen in much the same way as white settlers in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American West had viewed the Sioux or Apache or the South African Boer his Bantu servants—that is, with a mixture of fear, guilt, ignorance, and hatred.
The actual threat that the IRA posed to the new state in Northern Ireland was more debatable, especially when the appetite for militant policies south of the Border waned and with it sympathy for the Northern nationalists’ plight. Once the 1921 partition settlement had taken root, and especially as Catholic Church influence on the infant Irish Free State tightened, the commitment of Southern republicans to dismantling the Border and freeing Ireland became increasingly rhetorical. As the years passed and they developed their own set of economic and social priorities, the two states in Ireland gradually drifted apart and there was a consequent decline in Southern enthusiasm for the IRA’s aims.
A key event in this journey was de Valera’s decision in 1926, just five years after the Treaty had been signed, to end the IRA’s armed struggle and embrace parliamentary politics. De Valera’s supporters had opposed the Treaty and fought a bitter civil war against Michael Collins’s forces but had been soundly beaten. Eventually de Valera persuaded most of the IRA to abandon violence—as Gerry Adams was later to do in his day—brought them into his new Fianna Fail party, and eventually entered government. A die-hard rump, from which the modern IRA sprang, refused to compromise and, accusing de Valera of betraying the freedom struggle, vowed to continue the fight. In the North, nationalists and republicans increasingly felt abandoned.
Although Fianna Fail discarded objectionable aspects of the 1921 Treaty settlement, such as the oath of allegiance to the British monarch, de Valera eventually took as tough a line against the recalcitrant IRA as any of his predecessors. The IRA was often divided and at times spectacularly incompetent, but Northern unionists liked to imagine that the IRA was a much more potent threat, that it was an organization swollen with thousands of members, armed to the teeth, just waiting for the word to attack. The truth was much more prosaic. At the time of the arrest of Gerry Adams’s father, for instance, the IRA in Belfast could barely muster three hundred members and was poorly armed.4 Even so, the unionist government did not hesitate to use its formidable powers at any sign or hint of a threat. Sometimes, such as during the “Hungry Thirties,” when unemployment rates soared as high as 25 percent, the unionist government found the IRA specter a successful way of scaring its supporters away from cross-community, left-wing politics. Either way, life was made uncomfortable for those Catholics tempted to dabble in the IRA. Republican suspects were regularly arrested and occasionally interned, and detailed records kept of likely sympathizers. Parades, marches, and other expressions of support for the IRA were often banned and the organizers pursued.
Gerry Adams’s father became a victim of this system in 1942 after a ban was slapped on the republican parade to Milltown cemetery in West Belfast, an annual event to remember the IRA dead of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. An effort by the IRA to divert police away from the cemetery so that a brief procession could take place failed, and there was a short, sharp exchange of gunfire between the IRA men and the RUC during which one policeman was killed. The six-man IRA unit was captured and sentenced to death, but after pleas and protests, including an intervention from Pope Pius XII, only one of their number, Tom Williams, the officer commanding the unit, was hanged. When the IRA decided to protest against Williams’s execution in September that year with further attacks, Gerry Adams Sr. was shot and arrested.
Those who joined the IRA faced other pressures. If they were caught and convicted, a record of their imprisonment would be stamped on their employment records, with the result that republicans often found it difficult to get work even after they had severed all links with the organization. Gerry Adams Sr. was denied entry to Australia with his family because of his prison record. Others discovered they had been declared “politically suspect” even though they had done nothing wrong.5 Many were forced to emigrate to England or the United States or to move south to Dublin in search of a living.
Not surprisingly, involvement in the IRA was confined to a few. Nationalists in Northern Ireland may have secretly supported the aims for which the IRA fought even if they had qualms about its methods, but very few would go so far as to join. The risks and potential burdens were too great.
The result was that republican involvement tended to be an inherited rather than an acquired activity. Gerry Adams’s background was a classic of its type. His parents, like those of many other republicans of this time, would pass on to their children their political views as well as a special, exclusive sense of shared suffering. The IRA in places like West Belfast, where the Adamses and Hannaways came from, grew heavily dependent on a small, often interrelated network of extended families.
West Belfast republicanism was dominated by three families: the Adamses, the Hannaways, and the Burnses. They were all intermarried, the consequence of the imprisonment of their male members. When figures like Gerry Adams Sr. emerged after having served their jail terms, they found girls of a marriageable age either already spoken for or reluctant to marry into the IRA. Inevitably they drifted into relationships with the sisters of their IRA comrades.
The family was always an iconic and powerful image for the Provisional IRA. Years later when the IRA’s war with Britain raged, the organization’s leaders would routinely refer to their supporters and members as “the Republican family.” Later during the peace process, when Sinn Fein organized gatherings to brief supporters on the latest developments, these were called “family meetings.” The image that was evoked, one of benevolent parents nurturing loving, obedient, but united children, was deliberate. And like children, the IRA’s supporters were not expected to ask too many awkward questions or disobey their elders; the leadership treated those who did in much the same way as a wayward son or daughter who had offended his or her parents.
One characteristic that the young Gerry Adams did share with his non-republican Catholic contemporaries was poverty, deprivation, and the consequences of state-sponsored anti-Catholic bigotry. In the one-party state that was Northern Ireland, Catholics routinely found themselves the victims of economic and social discrimination.
Anti-Catholicism was built into the state ideology and promoted by its leaders. On occasions unionist government ministers would urge their supporters to employ, wherever possible, only “good Protestant lads and lassies.”6 One prime minister, James Craig, famously described the parliament at Stormont, an extravagant neoclassical pile set on a hillside in East Belfast, from where he ruled Northern Ireland, as “a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant state.”7 There was little or no room in the new Northern Ireland state for Catholics.
The message was reinforced by occasional sectarian violence. Riots, burning, shootings, and bombings—carried out mostly by Protestant mobs—had been a regular feature of political life in the north of Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century, when Irish nationalists first began to agitate for Home Rule and a degree of separation from Britain.
In 1912 the unionists rebelled against the British when a Liberal government at Westminster threatened to grant Ireland Home Rule. Protestant leaders recruited and, with the support of British Conservative leaders in London, organized a private army that they called the Ulster Volunteer Force and threatened to resist Home Rule by armed force facilitated by thousands of rifles smuggled into the Ulster port of Larne from Germany. The first Irish paramilitary group, the first effort to import weaponry from Britain’s enemies, came not from Irish republicans but from people who loudly proclaimed their loyalty to Britain.
The Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21 brought fresh communal violence, as did the Treaty settlement when unionists faced the problem of stabilizing their new state. Previous manifestations of nationalist rebellion, such as the bids for Irish Home Rule in the 1880s, had been met with often terrible violence, and now that Northern Ireland’s political leaders were presented with the problem of constructing a political order that was opposed by up to a third of its citizens, they and their supporters in organizations such as the Orange Order turned to old, reliable methods. The early 1920s saw scores killed in riots, gun battles, and burnings; in the early 1930s violence erupted again. Catholics made up a disproportionate number of the fatalities.
Faced on the one hand by official state forces that regarded them as hostile and on the other by irregular Protestant mobs that often went on the rampage while the RUC and B Specials turned a collective blind eye, Catholics inevitably came to look on the IRA as a defensive force first and foremost.
The Northern Ireland that Gerry Adams was born into was a society in which most Catholics were at the bottom of the heap, at best tolerated, at worst regarded as a fifth column intent on undermining the state. The best-paid and most skilled jobs, such as those in the Belfast shipyards where the Titanic was built or in engineering factories like Shorts, went mostly to Protestants.
Years later, in the 1970s and 1980s, when official statistics were first recorded, this pattern of discrimination was confirmed. Catholics were found to be at least three times more likely to be unemployed than Protestants and disproportionately represented in the poorest-paid, least-skilled, and most insecure jobs.
To buttress their economic domination, Protestants banded together in a semisecret society known as the Orange Order. Founded in the eighteenth century by the Anglo-Irish middle classes, the Orange Order saw its primary role as resisting Catholic and radical Protestant demands for independence that were modeled on the French and American revolutions.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward industrialization transformed the north of Ireland and politics on the island as a whole. The desire to retain access to British markets fueled Protestant resistance to Irish independence, while the flood of rural Catholics into Belfast attracted by the new work opportunities brought competition with Protestants, and sectarian tensions rose.
As unionism developed into a coherent political ideology, the Orange Order, whose ranks were open only to those who had been born Protestant, acted as an umbrella under whose generous frame factory boss and factory worker could both find shelter. The order’s ranks swelled. Orangeism became an instrument of sectarian division and privilege. By the end of the 1940s, when Gerry Adams was taking his first, faltering steps, no unionist politician could aspire to elected office if he or she was not a member. The prime minister and all his cabinet were usually Orangemen. Huge parades of Orangemen were held annually on the Twelfth of July. These would see tens of thousands of men wearing bowler hats and orange sashes marching in formation in Belfast and elsewhere behind military-style bands to celebrate the victory at the Battle of the Boyne by the Protestant King William over the Catholic King James in 1690. The Williamite triumph was a major event in British and European history, but by the middle of the twentieth century these annual celebrations had become archaic and incomprehensible to the outside world. They were, though, demonstrations of Protestant domination, designed to remind Catholics of their subordinate place in the political, social, and economic order.
Gerry Adams’s parents were not untypical of many Catholics of the day. His mother, Annie, was a doffer, replacing spools of thread in one of the dozens of linen mills that dotted West Belfast, while his father, when he was not unemployed, was an unskilled building laborer. Although the Catholic working class was large, for the first thirty to forty years of partition the Catholic middle class was inconsequential, confined to a few thousand schoolteachers, bar owners, and lawyers who serviced mostly their own communities.
The Catholic clergy held a disproportionate sway over their flock. Once the unionist government handed over control of non-state schools to the Irish hierarchy, the Catholic Church’s interest in the status quo became almost as strong as that of the unionist cabinet. Most Catholics, including the young Gerry Adams and most of his contemporaries, had little chance of rising much above their appointed place in life.
What prospect Gerry Adams did have of upward economic mobility came courtesy not of the Northern Ireland government or the Catholic Church but was due to huge political changes across the Irish Sea in postwar Britain. At the end of the war with Nazi Germany, Britain’s voters turned against Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party with such determination and numbers that what happened approached a social revolution.
The Labour Party was swept into power on a platform of social equality that included the nationalization of railways, utilities, heavy industry, and coal and the provision of a free national health service. Arguably the most radical social measure was in the field of education, where college education was thrown open to working-class children. Those who were bright enough and could pass an intelligence test when they were eleven years old were streamed into an academic education. For the first time ability dictated how far children could go.
No other factor was more responsible for causing the Troubles. The Eleven Plus, as the exam became known, opened the door to the middle classes and introduced a significant element of social mobility into British society. This was also the case in Northern Ireland, but the state’s Catholic population encountered an extra obstacle, the built-in systems of discrimination that had been constructed to preserve unionist privilege. As more Catholics obtained a college education, their economic, their social, and ultimately their political expectations soared. It was unionism’s refusal and inability to satisfy these expectations that finally unplugged the Northern Ireland volcano.
Gerry Adams’s early life, like that of his peers, was a tough one. After a brief period living with his maternal grandmother in the Falls Road in West Belfast, the family moved to the northern outskirts of the city, to Greencastle on the picturesque shores of Belfast Lough, where they rented a one-room flat. The family grew, each year bringing a new addition and added strain on living space and financial resources.
The family, which eventually numbered five boys and five girls, hankered to be back in West Belfast, where the rest of the extended Adams and Hannaway clans lived, and so in the early 1950s, and largely thanks to his mother’s efforts, Gerry Adams made a move that was to have significant consequences for Irish history.
At the end of the Second World War, Belfast had a huge homeless problem. German bombers had twice raided the city but missed their economic and military targets and devastated inner-city housing estates instead. The unionist government was forced to build public housing projects, and it was into one of these, a sprawling estate known as Ballymurphy on the slopes of the hills overlooking West Belfast, that the Adams family moved.
Home at 11 Divismore Park, Ballymurphy, gave the growing Gerry Adams much-needed social stability, comfort, and welcome contact with family as well as a new circle of friends. But it was also to provide him less than two decades later with a base that he would use first to dominate the IRA in West Belfast, next the city, and then the entire organization. If Annie Adams had not insisted on making the move to Ballymurphy, the IRA might never have been led by Gerry Adams, and Irish history would now look very different.
His parents were conscious of the opportunities offered by the Eleven Plus, and they encouraged their eldest son to sit for the exam. At the second attempt he passed and was granted a place at the boys-only St. Mary’s Christian Brothers Grammar School, situated on what was then the more affluent fringe of West Belfast. Most St. Mary’s boys were expected to stay at school until the age of eighteen and would be encouraged to go on to college or enter a profession. The Adams family’s hopes for Gerry Jr. were naturally high. Family photographs of the day show a gangly, if not awkward, teenager whose thick spectacle frames reinforced a bookish image.
But the family’s hopes were to be dashed. By 1964 he was flirting with republican politics and had helped campaign for the Sinn Fein candidate during an election in West Belfast, the highlight of which was two days of stone-throwing between RUC riot squads and local nationalists and republicans, including the adolescent Gerry Adams.
Adams’s studies suffered, and by Easter 1964 he was at the bottom of the class.8 With many contemporaries in Ballymurphy already working and a growing number of mouths to feed at home, he left St. Mary’s in early 1965 and took a job as a bartender, first in a Catholic-owned pub on the Loyalist Shankill Road and then in one of Belfast’s most famous hostelries, the Duke of York, home at the time to what passed for the city’s artistic and left-wing intelligentsia.
A year later, when he reached eighteen, Adams’s career in the IRA began. He was sworn in to D Company (D Coy) of the Belfast Brigade, the unit his father had belonged to and whose members came from the Falls Road and West Belfast.9 Within six years D Coy was to be known as one of the most ferocious and active units in the emerging Provisional IRA, earning its members the nickname “the Dogs,” after “the dogs of war.”
Adams had chosen a period of tumult within the Republican movement to join the IRA. Always prone to ideological, military, and personality disputes, the IRA was again on the verge of a bitter and bloody split when the Belfast officer commanding took Gerry Adams through the IRA oath and welcomed him into D Coy.
The history of the IRA both before and after it tasted defeat in the 1921– 23 Irish civil war is essentially the story of military failure followed by retreat and introspection. After each reverse the remnants of the IRA would divide into two camps, those who retreated to their firesides and dreamed of better days to come and a second chance to take up the gun and bomb, and those who advocated a new and radical change of direction. Invariably that would involve advocating heresies, usually that the IRA should ditch its almost mystical distaste for parliamentary politics, and an internal row, possibly a split, would follow.
Virtually every twentieth-century republican leader had trodden this path. Michael Collins walked down it, and Eamon de Valera did as well. So too would Gerry Adams, although in circumstances that were to make the efforts of Collins and de Valera appear amateurish and clumsy.
After the 1921 Treaty the IRA divided into those who stayed loyal to Michael Collins and those who supported Eamon de Valera, and a bitter civil war followed. The split was not caused by the partition of Ireland. The Treaty had set up the Boundary Commission to draw the borders of the new Northern Ireland state, and even anti-Treatyites firmly believed that when nationalist areas were removed from the six partitioned counties, as the British had implied during the Treaty negotiations, the truncated remnant would not be viable and the new state would collapse into their hands.
The Treaty had imposed on members of the new Irish parliament and the “Free State” government an obligation to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown, and it was this that divided the IRA. Collins’s men argued that the oath did not matter. Ireland had secured the freedom to achieve freedom, bit by bit, county by county, and that was all that mattered. Predictably his supporters became known as stepping-stoners. De Valera eventually agreed to sign the oath but claimed this was not the same as swearing it, an elasticity of attitude to such matters that Gerry Adams was to imitate and incorporate wholesale into his own peace process strategy.
The resulting Irish civil war was an unequal battle. Armed by Britain and facing an opposition that hesitated to strike the first decisive blow, Collins’s “Staters” put the IRA on the defensive almost from the beginning. The war was over by 1923. The IRA leadership, on de Valera’s urging, ordered its members to dump arms.
Three years later “Dev” abandoned military methods. He resigned from Sinn Fein and announced the setting up of a constitutional republican party known as Fianna Fail, or Soldiers of Destiny, a name that was chosen to appeal to the militarist tradition from which the party sprang.
The vast bulk of the IRA followed de Valera, and IRA units were transformed almost overnight into Fianna Fail branches, or cumainn. Those who rejected Fianna Fail did not like what they saw but were confused about what to do. Some were content to wait and see whether or not de Valera did deliver on the republican rhetoric, especially after election victories brought the party to power. Others, like Peadar O’Donnell, argued that republicans should eschew establishment politics, move to the left, and take up radical social and economic policies. Many IRA men who thought as O’Donnell did later went to Spain to fight against Franco.
At first de Valera welcomed IRA support, not least because the civil war had left deep divisions in Irish society. Trust was hard to find, old civil war enmities simmered just beneath the surface, and Fianna Fail needed friends wherever it could get them. But the alliance was to be short-lived. In 1932 de Valera won enough seats to form a coalition government, and within four years he moved against the IRA and declared it an illegal organization.
By this stage the IRA was once again turning its attention to the older enemy. The British had reneged on promises made in 1921 when the Boundary Commission was set up. In a majority report the commission brushed aside nationalist concerns and recommended that all six partitioned counties be incorporated in the new Northern Ireland state, and the fledgling administration in Dublin had little option but to acquiesce. The decision made the new entity a viable one but at the cost of sowing the seeds of future conflict. Nearly half a million Catholics and nationalists, a third of the population, had been forced against their will into a state with which they did not identify and whose leaders were openly hostile to them.
Nationalist Ireland was unsure about what tactics to adopt. De Valera’s answer was to turn up the rhetorical heat. He drafted a new constitution in 1937 which set the goal of reuniting Ireland in legal stone. Physical-force republicans advocated a more traditional approach and urged renewed war against the British but not against de Valera. The IRA ended its conflict with the Southern state. It was a seminal development because it started a process that eventually led to the IRA’s formally recognizing the Southern state and then participating in its institutions. From then on, the main goal of the IRA was to get the British out of the North rather than to eject the impostors in Dublin.
By 1939 the IRA felt confident enough to declare war against Britain, and under the leadership of Sean Russell, a veteran of the 1916 Rising and an opponent of O’Donnell’s socialism, a bombing campaign was launched. As republicans had done before the 1916 Rising, lines were opened with Germany, whose Nazi leaders were themselves at war with Britain. Although the IRA hoped for all sorts of assistance, little came of the relationship.
The Forties Campaign, as the IRA’s war came to be called, forced its own split. Sean MacBride, son of the legendary Maude Gonne MacBride and himself a former chief of staff, broke with Russell. When the Second World War ended, the future Nobel laureate quit the IRA and formed his own political party, Clann na Poblachta, which enjoyed considerable, but brief, electoral and political success.
The IRA was the author of its own defeat in the Forties Campaign. In the sort of botched operation that would play such a crucial role in the modern peace process, a bombing in Coventry in the English Midlands at the start of the campaign went badly wrong, and five civilians were killed and another sixty wounded. At around the same time the IRA in Dublin raided the Irish army’s weapons reserves and, much to its own surprise, netted a dozen truckloads of guns and one million rounds of ammunition, most of which the IRA promptly lost when the police discovered their hiding place.
The Coventry debacle roused the English police, which used harsh methods against IRA suspects, while the Dublin arms raid permitted de Valera the political space to seek emergency powers, which he used to intern IRA leaders. De Valera was concerned that the IRA’s attacks on Britain and its overtures to Hitler’s Nazis could give the British the excuse to force him to take Britain’s side in the “Emergency,” as the Irish government termed the Second World War. Chief of Staff Russell had journeyed to Germany in a bid to get arms and other assistance from the Nazis, while the Germans hoped to use the IRA network to facilitate espionage operations against the British. It was just the sort of activity that gave de Valera nightmares, but luckily for him the Germans had grossly overestimated the IRA’s capabilities and virtually all the spies they sent to Ireland were exposed and arrested. Russell meanwhile died during a journey on board a German submarine not long after the Coventry bombing, and the IRA campaign soon petered out. By 1945 the IRA had effectively ceased to exist. Its structures and leadership had evaporated. Not even a membership list had survived the defeat. For a short while it seemed as if the long history of violent Irish republicanism had come to an end.
But the movement was not quite extinguished. By 1947, after a slow, painful reconstruction effort, the IRA was showing signs of revival. Structures were rebuilt and a leadership of veterans, headed by the new chief of staff, Tony Magan, put in place. Recruitment was under way, as was training in the hills outside Dublin, and a monthly newspaper was being published. A year later, in 1948, the year of Gerry Adams’s birth, the IRA was large enough to hold a Convention, the gathering of IRA representatives that the organization’s constitution decrees exerts supreme authority over its policies, ideas, and military direction.
The Convention decided that Oglaigh na hEireann, as its own members called the IRA, was to make plans for a new military campaign to end the British occupation of Northern Ireland. There would be no repeat of the mistakes of the Forties Campaign, its leaders determined; this time the campaign would be in the North itself, not in Britain.
It was at this point that the IRA leadership took another small but significant step toward accepting the existence and legitimacy of the southern Irish state, whose creation it had once declared illegal. It forbade units from making any attacks on the Irish police, the Garda Siochana, or any other military forces of the state, for fear that Dublin government reprisals would undermine the offensive against Northern Ireland. The IRA’s ruling body, the seven-man Army Council, issued General Army Order no. 8, forbidding such military action. From then on the South was to be the IRA’s logistical base, while the North would be the war zone.
Preparations for the campaign began with a series of arms raids in Northern Ireland and Britain. In 1955 came a sign that Northern nationalists might be receptive to an IRA campaign when, in the midst of agitation over the arrest of suspected IRA activists, two republicans, one of them an IRA man imprisoned for his part in an unsuccessful arms raid, were elected to the Westminster parliament. The Nationalist Party had stood aside to give Sinn Fein a free run, and overall the republicans won 152,000 votes, an unprecedented level of support, which the politicized Adams movement took twenty years of political work and a major ideological U-turn to better.
Thus boosted, the IRA campaign, code-named Operation Harvest but known popularly ever since as the Border Campaign, began in earnest. In December 1956 a series of cross-Border raids on security and government installations signaled the start. The campaign was strictly limited to areas outside Belfast. The IRA leadership feared that the city’s Catholic population was vulnerable to Protestant attack and might be held hostage by the unionist government for the IRA’s good behavior elsewhere. In practice IRA actions were confined to the Border counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Armagh.
The Northern authorities introduced internment within days of the first acts of violence, while the Gardai harassed the IRA leadership unmercifully. By mid-1957 de Valera was back in power, and when an RUC officer was killed in an IRA booby trap bomb in Tyrone, he introduced internment and later set up military tribunals that handed out draconian sentences. More seriously for the IRA, the public support evident in 1955 failed to materialize on the ground. The bulk of Northern Ireland Catholics simply ignored the IRA’s call to arms.
The Border Campaign limped on for a further five years but was effectively over at that point. In February 1962 the IRA leadership finally acknowledged defeat, ordered its units to dump arms, and admitted the great part played by Northern nationalist indifference to the campaign in the decision to end hostilities.
Twelve people had been killed in the 1956–62 campaign; six were RUC members and six IRA men. Another thirty-eight people—civilians, IRA men, and Northern security personnel—were wounded.10 At the time unionists were alarmed at this level of IRA activity, but by the standards of the coming conflict it was a tame affair. In 1972, for instance, the worst single year of the Troubles, the entire casualty list for the five-year Border Campaign could be compressed into an average ten-day period.
Exhausted and demoralized, republicans retreated once more. Most quit and took up normal lives, but others returned to the fray determined to rescue something out of the wreckage of defeat. Among them was a forty-six-year-old Dublin painter and decorator called Cathal Goulding, who had several qualifications for leadership. He was one of the small number of IRA men who in 1945 had met in Dublin and agreed to start the slow process of rebuilding the IRA from the ashes of the Forties Campaign, and he was possibly the most enthusiastic of the group. A good friend of the playwright Brendan Behan, with whose widow he was later to father a child, he had a family background that was impeccable from a republican standpoint. His father had “been out” in the 1916 Rising, while his grandfather had been a Fenian revolutionary.
Goulding had also proved his mettle. In 1953 he led a high-profile raid on a British army base in Felsted, Essex, in southeast England, along with the Derry IRA man Manus Canning and a London-based ex-RAF member, Sean MacStiofain, who was later to become the first chief of staff of the Provisional IRA. The raid netted a huge haul of weaponry but so loaded down the men’s getaway van that a routine police patrol became suspicious and stopped them. They were later sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment each. Goulding was released in 1959 and returned to rejoin the IRA’s Army Council and become its quartermaster. But because he had been in an English jail in the early years of the Border Campaign when the most serious setbacks were suffered, he escaped blame for its dismal failure. As a neutral figure amid factions fighting in the ruins of a failed war, Goulding became, in 1962, the IRA’s new chief of staff.
The collapse of the Border Campaign provided a major punctuation mark in the history and development of the IRA. In the space of forty years the organization’s fortunes had ebbed and flowed. At its peak the IRA enjoyed the backing of a majority of the Irish people, and it had fought a long and bloody campaign, which had brought the British to the negotiating table. But that brief success was followed by division, civil war, and disillusionment while the numbers remaining true to the faith of Pearse and Connolly dwindled, as did public support for and even tolerance of the IRA’s activities. The two partitionist states continued to glower at each other across a heavily militarized border, but they also grew roots and developed their own legitimacy. As they did, the IRA was forced to slowly soften and even abandon its hostility to the Southern state and shift the emphasis of its conflict with the Treaty settlement to the existence of Northern Ireland. The Forties Campaign had failed miserably to shift Britain’s support for the unionist state, and then the Border Campaign had disintegrated in the face of Northern nationalist indifference. Smarting from failure and lacking any clear sense of future direction, the IRA in 1962 was at a crossroads.
REPUBLICAN ACTIVISTS surveying the scene at the dawn of the sixties would have seen little to be cheerful about. As the prisoners were released from the internment camp at the Curragh just west of Dublin and from Crumlin Road jail in Belfast, they returned to communities whose indifference to their fate was as pronounced as it ever had been. The internees and sentenced men had hoped for and some even expected popular demonstrations and protests when they were arrested, but there were none, just as there were no crowds to stage welcome-home celebrations upon their release. The depth of demoralization could be measured by the numbers who had agreed to “sign out” from prison as the Border Campaign petered out, men who had given their hated jailers written promises never to take up arms in the IRA’s cause again in return for their freedom. And of those who did not become “signees,” as they were termed, a similar number voted with their feet and refused to report back for duty. The hearths to which many of the IRA retreated after 1962 were cold and lonely places to dream of what yet might be. Few of the released IRA men, surely, could have imagined that in just seven years Ireland would be plunged into the most violent cataclysm in its history.
The 1960s were a period of change for Ireland as for the rest of the Western world. Although the Cold War still raged, other and older enmities were fading. In the United States, John F. Kennedy conquered what many feared was an overwhelming prejudice to become the first ever Catholic president. In Rome fundamental reform was under way. Under the radical leadership of Pope John XXIII the Catholic Church had opened a dialogue with the Church of England, and in 1961 the pontiff met its head, Queen Elizabeth II, whose ancestors had led the English Reformation. Religious ecumenism began to flourish.
In Ireland ancient enmities appeared to be softening too. In 1963 Lord Basil Brookeborough, the conservative, diehard defender of unionism, finally retired and was succeeded by a young Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Captain Terence O’Neill, who could trace his lineage back to sixteenth-century landowners. Despite this conventional, establishment background, modernizing reform was also on his agenda.
In both parts of Ireland the new postwar realities were beginning to make their impact. In the North old traditional industries like linen and shipbuilding were in decline, and their replacement was a matter of urgency. The Northern Ireland government was forced to turn to the outside world for new investment. The need for political stability and the requirement to present a less distasteful image to foreign investors—which in practice meant building bridges to the nationalist community—acquired a new if unfamiliar importance.
O’Neill was also aware that there was now a Labour government in London that was more likely to listen sympathetically to nationalist complaints of discrimination and human rights abuses. Slowly, gingerly, and with frequent glances over their shoulders at their own hard-line grassroots, some unionists began to reach out to Catholics.
O’Neill’s approach infuriated hard-line Protestants, but it was resented by some nationalists, who called it cosmetic, patronizing, and at times insulting. On one famous occasion he explained his approach in almost racist terms:
It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets. They will refuse to have eighteen children but if a Roman Catholic is jobless and lives in the most ghastly hovel he will rear eighteen children on national assistance…. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants, in spite of the authoritarian nature of the Church.11
Nevertheless many Catholics welcomed O’Neill’s conciliatory policies, and hope of real change was in the air. The Southern state was also in transformation. The era of de Valera ended in 1959 with his retirement as taoiseach, and he was succeeded by another, albeit younger, veteran of the 1916 Rising, Sean Lemass, who quickly discarded Dev’s protectionist economics in favor of attracting foreign investment. The era of the technocrat, North and South, had arrived.
The two governments in Ireland were on a similar course, and it made sense for them to examine ways of improving cooperation. In 1965 the political ice cracked when O’Neill invited Lemass to Stormont and a month later made a return trip to Dublin. The journeys continued when Jack Lynch succeeded Lemass as Irish prime minister.
Throughout the continent of Europe, a wave of liberalism brought new power to the Left in a way that had not been seen since the 1930s. In Britain a dozen years of uninterrupted Conservative rule were brought to an end when Labour’s Harold Wilson swept into power on a ticket of economic modernization. In Ireland the Left made gains in both jurisdictions. The Northern Ireland Labour Party was winning seats to Stormont, while in the South the Labour Party was shedding its conservative Catholic image and beginning to talk more openly of the merits of socialism.
In Europe, as a whole, moves were afoot to dismantle economic borders and to bury old hatreds. Inspired by the American civil rights movement and the excitement brought on by an era of unprecedented sexual liberation, among other factors, the movement toward the left grew increasingly strong.
And that is certainly what Cathal Goulding discerned. Under his leadership the IRA made the most radical and determined move to the left in its history, embracing a doctrinaire Marxist analysis of Northern and Southern Irish politics that would eventually split the organization and spark the most violent upheaval in modern Irish history. The manner in which Goulding failed to take a united republican movement down his chosen path was to provide Gerry Adams with one invaluable lesson when he made his own very similar journey some twenty years later. Preventing the sort of split that destroyed Goulding’s hopes became a strategic imperative for Adams.
The greatest obstacle blocking Goulding was the immense conservatism of the Republican movement. Overwhelmingly rural and lower middle class in their makeup, most IRA members were people of a traditional Catholic outlook. This was reflected in the rituals and the ways in which the IRA was organized, many of which had changed little in forty years.
Men and women, for instance, were still segregated into separate military units, as they had been in 1916 when Patrick Pearse sent out a female Irish Volunteer from the GPO in Dublin with a white flag of surrender to present to the British army. The IRA of the 1960s, like Irish society at large, was slow to accept gender equality. The IRA had always been an exclusively male organization, and its members were the soldiers who did the actual fighting when there was any to be done. The women were organized into the Cumann na mBan (Women’s Group), with their own distinct structures and leadership. Their role was the IRA equivalent of being stuck in the kitchen and the bedroom; they carried messages and smuggled weapons and explosives and they nursed wounded IRA Volunteers. They could be useful for gathering intelligence and carrying weapons, but they did very little, if any, actual fighting. Nor did they play any part in the formulation of IRA policy or strategy. That was a male preserve, the privilege of the seven-man Army Council, to which Cumann na mBan was subservient.
Catholic Church ritual permeated IRA ceremonials. It was commonplace for a decade of the rosary to be said, often in Irish, at the start of IRA ceremonies, such as the annual Easter commemorations of those who were killed in the Rising of 1916 and other phases of the struggle. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective way of confirming unionist prejudices about the IRA.
Most IRA members had a simplistic set of motives for joining. They believed that only armed force could remove the British from Ireland and that people who advocated parliamentary methods had sold out the struggle. As one commentator put it, “To go into the Dail [the Irish parliament], to seize power, was not only an invitation to corruption, a tainted tactic already proven sterile, but also, and most important, outrageous immorality.”12
Their history was full of examples of IRA leaders who had abandoned physical force for parliamentarism, yet had failed to force the British out of Ireland, North or South. They viewed with suspicion, therefore, the motives of any who advocated such a course. As one account put it, “They believed no one ever went into politics except a failed revolutionary.”13 Their opposition was not just practical but almost spiritual as well.
The only parliament to which they gave allegiance had by the 1960s long since disappeared. That was the Irish parliament of 1921, the so-called Second Dail, the last gathering of representatives chosen in a pre-Treaty, all-Ireland, thirty-two-county election. The Second Dail had a Sinn Fein majority elected on a platform of support for the 1916 Easter proclamation of independence, and republicans regarded the mandate as almost sacred. Although the Second Dail later voted narrowly for the Treaty, it became an article of faith among the recalcitrant IRA that no other parliament, no other government, could claim the legitimacy bestowed on that parliament. After the Treaty was endorsed, the Second Dail ceased to exist as far the IRA was concerned, and its partitionist successor, the Northern parliament at Stormont as well as the new parliament in Dublin, was regarded as illegal.
The rump of the Second Dail, those surviving TDs who had voted against the Treaty, were deemed to be the only legitimate government of Ireland, but they were dying off, year by year. In 1938 the dozen or so survivors passed on their authority to the IRA’s Army Council to safeguard until all the people of Ireland could again freely choose their own government. To the outside world it may have looked absurd, but it was on this basis that the IRA leadership framed its claim to be the sovereign government of Ireland.
Because of this, one of the most hallowed principles of traditional republicanism was the refusal to recognize or take seats in either Stormont or the Dail. It followed that any republican who betrayed this principle was implicitly recognizing the Treaty and by so doing betraying the Irish people and all those IRA men and women who had laid down their lives in the fight to free Ireland. The logic of all this was that republicans had to deny legitimacy to the other institutions of the state as well. Republicans refused, for example, to ask either police force in Ireland for permission to parade or raise funds. IRA standing orders forbade prisoners from entering a plea in criminal courts—that was the same as recognizing the state—although an exception was made when IRA men faced a capital charge. Abstentionism was the defining characteristic of Irish republicanism, and it was written in legal stone in the constitutions of both the IRA and Sinn Fein. Any IRA or Sinn Fein TD or MP who took his or her seat in a partitionist body or even suggested discussing the idea would be liable to automatic dismissal or expulsion.
These were the uncomfortable realities that faced Goulding and the small number of radical advisers and confidants he had gathered around him. And it was the left-wing background of this coterie that produced the first signs of internal unrest. With the IRA laid low after the Border Campaign, Goulding had turned to new men and new ideas for inspiration. There was already a sentiment in favor of moving leftward. IRA prisoners in the North’s largest jail, Crumlin Road in Belfast, had produced a journal called Saoirse (Freedom) under the editorship of a young County Cork militant called Daithi O Conaill, which had published an article, “Quo Vadis Hibernia?” (“Whither Ireland?”), advocating involvement in social and economic agitation.14 Not for the first or last time prison was a crucible in the development of IRA politics.
The move to the left accelerated in 1963 when two radical intellectuals put their stamp on the movement. One was a young computer scientist called Roy Johnston, who had returned to Dublin from England, where he had been prominent in the Communist Party of Great Britain–linked Connolly Association. The other was Anthony Coughlan, a young lecturer at that most Anglo-Irish of bastions, Trinity College, Dublin, who had been national organizer of the Connolly Association in Britain.
The Connolly Association members had been urging on the IRA what they called “a new departure” prior to the 1962 cease-fire. Long before Johnston and Coughlan were able to exercise direct influence over Goulding, their program had been spelled out. One chronicler of the period wrote, “[The IRA was] advised to work through a broad alliance for the displacement of the Unionist regime and for political democracy in the North and for social progress… in the South. They were also advised to end their abstentionism and seek to work through parliamentary institutions.”15
Johnston, who was quickly appointed to the IRA’s Army Council by Goulding as a sort of political adviser cum commissar, was the inspiration for the establishment of a debating society named after the eighteenth-century Protestant founder of modern Irish republicanism, Wolfe Tone. With branches in the main universities and in Belfast and Dublin, the Wolfe Tone clubs discussed and advanced the Connolly Association’s agenda. Left-wing veterans like Peadar O’Donnell and George Gilmore re-emerged from obscurity to contribute to the debate.
The political program developed by Johnston and Coughlan was borrowed directly from a former Soviet leader, none other than Joseph Stalin, who had died a decade before. Called the “stages theory,” it mapped out a rigid, dogmatic path to Irish socialism in which Ireland would pass through three distinct phases before reaching the goal of a workers republic.
The first would be the creation of a normal liberal, parliamentary democracy in the North, which would be achieved through agitation on civil rights issues. The employer class in the North would cooperate with this, since it was in its economic interests to do so, and, Johnston predicted, there would be growing working-class Protestant and Catholic cooperation and unity as workers realized how much their interests coincided. In the second phase, revolutionary links would stretch across the Border as radicalized and increasingly united Northern workers would make common cause with their Southern counterparts, who themselves were being radicalized by Sinn Fein agitation. The third phase would be revolution and final victory.
It followed that clinging to abstentionism was an absurdity. How could Sinn Fein hope to relate to the social and economic problems of the Irish working class, Johnston and his allies asked, as long as it refused to address those problems in the only forums available to Irish workers, their parliaments and governments? The people accepted the partitionist arrangements, and so should the IRA, they urged.
The “new departure” had implications for the IRA and the direction of its armed struggle. Gradually the emphasis of its activities shifted to economic and social agitation and away from the traditional goal of waging war against Britain. The IRA and Sinn Fein became involved in rural cooperatives, and in Dublin they set up a housing action committee that staged sit-ins to highlight poor living conditions and overcrowding.
A campaign was launched against foreign ownership of mining and fishing rights. The IRA organized illegal “fish-ins” on exclusive salmon runs in the west of Ireland and offered manpower to help striking workers. Foreign landowners, mostly Germans, were targeted and buildings torched. In Limerick the IRA burned a bus transporting strikebreakers to an American-owned company. In Kerry a foreign-owned lobster boat was sunk.
Some twenty years later Roy Johnston explained the reasoning behind the leftward shift: “The idea was that if links could be cultivated between the movement and the people, the roots would be firmly in the ground and a principled, political stand would be made, even in ‘illegal assemblies’ such as Leinster House [the Dail] without automatic corruption.”16
While all this naturally alarmed the Fianna Fail governments of Sean Lemass and his successor Jack Lynch, the implication was that the need to wage armed struggle against Britain had moved farther and farther down the IRA’s list of priorities. That meant downgrading the IRA itself, and when the split finally came there were bitter accusations from his critics that the Goulding leadership had deliberately run down the organization, dismantling command structures, discouraging or diverting promising recruits, scaling down training, and—worst of all—diminishing the IRA’s stores of weapons.
The logic of the “stages theory” was that if Northern Protestants were going to cooperate in the democratization of their own state, then the idea that Catholics needed arms to defend themselves against the Protestants was nonsense. Weapons acquisition, once a priority for the IRA, was virtually abandoned. Money that would have been earmarked for this was devoted instead to political activities.
The last defining characteristic of the Johnston-Goulding strategy was the notion that all this could best be achieved if the IRA and Sinn Fein cooperated and perhaps even merged with similarly minded, progressive political parties. It was the classic broad-front strategy so beloved of left-wing groups: Johnston and his associates called it the National Liberation Front (NLF), a term with echoes of the Vietnamese resistance then beginning to radicalize American youth. The other members of the NLF, at least those mentioned most often as candidates for partnership, were the Communist Party of Northern Ireland, its Southern counterpart, the Irish Workers Party, the Connolly Association, and the Connolly Youth Movement. It was this proposal which fixed the notion in conservative, dissident minds that the IRA was being slowly taken over by godless Marxists.
And there was resistance to the Johnston agenda. The IRA had always distrusted outsiders, especially those preaching foreign ideas. Most of its members were God-fearing, Mass-attending Catholics who had been reared in an Ireland thoroughly dominated by a deeply conservative Catholic Church. It was, though, the manner in which Goulding pursued the Johnston-Coughlan strategy that finally fractured the IRA as much as the ideology he and his supporters espoused. He made two fatal errors. First, he tried to push his ideas onto the IRA at too early a stage. Not only did he not have enough support before he moved; he had failed to isolate his opponents first. Gerry Adams would never make this basic error. Goulding moved too early, and when he met failure his frustration grew and propelled him into confrontation with his opponents. That was his second mistake— and Adams learned from that too.
Having decided upon a strategy of open confrontation, Goulding set the stage for a series of damaging rows within the IRA during the mid-1960s that were destined to end in a damaging and, as it turned out, bloody split. The battles were fought at IRA Conventions and at Sinn Fein’s annual conferences as Goulding and his allies attempted to push through the Johnston-Coughlan agenda, only to find their way blocked by traditionalists and conservatives. Rebellious branches, particularly in rural areas, were expelled, as at one stage was the entire branch of the women’s IRA, the Cumann na mBan. Frustrated at failure, Goulding turned to tactics that sometimes verged on the ludicrous. At one point he expanded the Army Council from seven to twenty members in a bid to secure a majority for his policy. The normally highly secretive body, which went to great lengths to hide its meetings from the authorities, was now so large that it almost had to hire a hall for its gatherings.
Of the Council’s usual seven members, Goulding could count on the support of only three. On his side were Sean Garland, a fellow Dublin republican and a hard-line Johnston supporter, and the quixotic County Wicklow republican Seamus Costello. Opposing him were Ruairi O Bradaigh (Rory O’Brady), a County Roscommon schoolteacher who had been chief of staff when the Border Campaign ended in 1962; Daithi O Conaill, who had been badly wounded in County Tyrone during the campaign; and Sean MacStiofain, Goulding’s IRA comrade on the ill-fated Felsted arms raid in 1953 and the IRA’s then director of intelligence. Between them, holding the balance of power and uncertain as to his sympathies, was Tomas MacGiolla, the lofty president of Sinn Fein who doubled as chairman of the Army Council. He did not finally throw in his lot with Goulding until the summer of 1969.
Goulding and his allies resorted increasingly to the tactic of purging their enemies. Senior Northern IRA figures were forced out or left in disgust at the tactics being used against their friends. Among them were men who would play key roles in the formation of the rival Provisional IRA a few years later, characters like Jimmy Steele, who had spent twenty years in jail for IRA activity, and Sean Keenan from Derry, a republican stalwart for years. With other Belfast men who had left or were eased out during this period—people like Joe Cahill, Jimmy Drumm, Billy McKee, the Kellys of North Belfast, the Hannaways, and Seamus Twomey—they were to form the core of a bitter opposition just biding their time to strike back at Goulding. If Adams learned another lesson from all this, it was to divide and discredit opponents lest they unite against him.
It was into this maelstrom of conflicting political ideas and personalities that Gerry Adams plunged when he joined the Belfast IRA’s D Company, although for a while it did not impinge much on his life. As he was to say himself many years later, all this ferment was “going on, if you like, above my head.”17 He was only sixteen when he joined the republican movement, and the debate within it was taking place far away, at leadership level and mostly in Dublin, where the IRA policymakers were based. But within four or five years events were to force Adams to take sides in their quarrel, and that decision would have unforeseeable consequences for Anglo-Irish politics.
The failure of the Border Campaign had set the scene for the tragedy that has always befallen Irish republicanism in the aftermath of defeat, when the ambitions of those who were convinced that fresh directions had to be taken clashed with the stubborn belief of others that change and compromise were indistinguishable and that deviating from principle meant devaluing the sacrifices of dead comrades. And so it was as the 1960s unfolded; the IRA was on the verge of another rupture.
IDEOLOGICAL, generational, and personality differences had set the scene for internal republican division, but they were not the only factors at work. Beyond the control of the IRA’s leaders, beyond the control even of its unionist governors, social and economic change was remolding Northern Ireland and in the process creating the circumstances that would bring political instability. Two factors in particular destabilized Northern Ireland in the 1960s and helped plunge it into the most violent and sustained conflict in Irish history.
The first and most damaging development was the furious reaction within unionism to the moderate reformism of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill. This took three forms. Some within O’Neill’s Ulster Unionist Party saw his modernizing policies as a threat to the union with Britain and argued that softening hostility to nationalists was a fatal weakness, while others saw the turbulence as providing the opportunity to snatch the prime minister’s crown from his head.
The second group coalesced around the powerful, hectoring frame of the Reverend Ian Paisley, a young Protestant street preacher with political ambitions who combined a fundamentalist biblical view of the world and a hatred for the Roman Catholic Church with a fiery opposition to all things ecumenical, religious, and political. Paisley’s oratorical skills made him a formidable opponent. He could sway a mob with a few well-chosen words. He also represented a virulent strain within unionism that could trace its roots back over a hundred years, to Belfast street preachers who would regularly incite crowds to riot, burn, and kill their Catholic neighbors.
Paisley’s violent rhetoric had a similar effect in the Belfast of the 1960s. On the Shankill Road in North Belfast, one of the city’s toughest loyalist areas, a group of men led by a former British soldier called Gusty Spence met to form a paramilitary group they called the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), after the huge private Protestant army that early unionist leaders like Edward Carson had mobilized in 1912 to resist Home Rule. Convinced that the IRA was planning a new violent campaign to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, in 1966, and inspired by Paisley’s oratory, Spence’s UVF launched a pre-emptive strike.
They aimed to kill IRA leaders but, like their counterparts when the Troubles intensified, were content to accept any Catholic target. By the summer of 1966 they had killed three times. One victim was a seventy-seven-year-old Protestant widow who died when a gasoline bomb intended for a Catholic-owned pub engulfed her house instead. Another was a tipsy twenty-eight-year-old Catholic pedestrian shot dead on the street; like so many of the victims of the oncoming Troubles, he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The third was an eighteen-year-old Catholic barman, Peter Ward, who had the misfortune of choosing a Shankill Road bar frequented by Spence and his colleagues for an after-work drink with friends. The deaths were the peals of thunder that foretold the impending storm.
Unionist and Protestant reaction was mirrored by Catholic and nationalist assertiveness. By the early and mid-1960s that new mood, fueled by a growing educated and frustrated middle class, took two forms. On the one hand Catholics began to participate in a state that they had initially boycotted. The first sign of this came in 1965 when, in response to the O’Neill-Lemass meetings, the Northern Nationalist Party entered the Stormont parliament for the first time since 1930 and became the official opposition, a step that signified recognition to the Northern Ireland state.
The other sign of the new mood was an increasing willingness of Catholics to stand up and demand their rights. Although Catholic and nationalist politics had been characterized for many years by meekness in the face of unionist strength, some in that community were well aware that they were the victims of discrimination in jobs and public housing. In the 1960s they set about compiling the evidence. The Campaign for Social Justice was started by a County Tyrone doctor and his former teacher wife, Con and Patricia McCluskey. Their research showed that Catholics were hugely underrepresented in places like the central and local government civil service. Soon the idea was mooted of setting up a civil rights body based on the NAACP in the United States, which had fought for the rights of blacks.
In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was formally launched at a public meeting in Belfast and drew up a list of reforms. Its most important demand was for the scrapping of a rule that restricted to property owners the right to vote in elections to the local councils. The rules gave some businessmen, most of them unionists, up to six votes, while thousands of working-class Catholics, who did not own their homes, were disenfranchised. The councils exercised considerable power. Not only did they give employment, but they were responsible for building public housing projects. That meant they could decide who, Protestant or Catholic, got decent public housing.
NICRA also sought the scrapping of gerrymandered electoral wards that, in places like Derry, Northern Ireland’s second city, gave unionists control over the local council even though the Protestants who voted for them were in a minority. The disbanding of the B Specials and the removal of the Special Powers Act, the law that gave the unionist government unprecedented powers and a points list for public housing, completed the roll call of reforms demanded. Significantly none of NICRA’s demands touched directly on the existence of the Border. Composed of a mixture of liberal and radical opinion, NICRA’s leadership had a simple attitude: if Nationalists were obliged to be British citizens, then they should have British rights.
These stirrings soon showed themselves on the streets. In June 1968 republicans in Caledon, County Tyrone, organized a sit-in at a house allocated by the local council to the unmarried secretary of a local unionist politician, and they demanded that poorly housed Catholic families take precedence. The protest drew wider publicity when a Nationalist MP at Stormont, Austin Currie, joined the sit-in. Two months later NICRA helped organize a protest march from the nearby nationalist village of Coalisland to Dungannon, Tyrone’s largest town, where protesters found their way blocked by a flag-waving crowd of Paisley supporters.
Standing up to demand community rights also meant that nationalists were more and more ready to resort to physical force to defend themselves. The early part of the 1960s had seen two examples of this. In October 1964 the lower part of the Falls Road, the main Catholic artery leading into Belfast city center, was convulsed by a two-day battle when, after threats from Paisley, the RUC invaded the area to remove an Irish tricolor from the offices in Divis Street of the Sinn Fein candidate in the Westminster general election. The trouble resulted in fifty civilian and over twenty RUC injuries. Eighteen months later, in June 1966, a month after Spence’s UVF started to kill, Catholics again fought hand-to-hand battles with the police when Paisley brought a mob through the nationalist Markets area en route to a city center protest against ecumenical Protestants. The tinder was in place and was dry; it needed but a spark to set it ablaze.
The spark came on October 5, 1968, when a poorly attended civil rights march in Derry was batoned off the streets by a force of RUC officers who appeared to have lost all control of their emotions. Derry had been chosen for protest because it was in nationalist eyes the capital city of injustice. Not only were the majority Catholics prevented from taking control of their city, but years of unionist rule had condemned them to appalling housing conditions and disproportionately high unemployment.
The unionist government reacted with alarm to the proposed civil rights march. In the eyes of its hard-line supporters, the walled city had been the symbol of Protestant supremacy over nationalist Ireland ever since its inhabitants had withstood a terrible siege in 1688 and helped the Protestant King William of Orange defeat the Catholic usurper, King James II. Its official name was Londonderry, after the City of London companies that had financed its reconstruction as a planter city. In celebration of its heroic resistance during the siege, unionists christened Derry “the Maiden City,” and any violation of its walls had to be resisted. The civil rights marchers wanted to parade right into the walled center, and unionists saw that as a bid to ravage the maiden. After an obscure and unheard-of loyalist group threatened a counterprotest, the unionist home affairs minister, William Craig, promptly banned the march.
The marchers assembled and found themselves blocked on all sides by riot police who laid into the crowd with batons flying. Eighty-eight demonstrators were injured and thirty-six arrested. Two British Labour MPs had turned up as observers, guests of West Belfast’s Republican Labour MP, Gerry Fitt, who was himself batoned around the head. Later the police turned a water cannon on dispersing protesters, in a violent scene reminiscent of police brutality in Alabama just five years earlier. The whole scene was captured by a camera crew from RTE, whose film was also screened on British TV and around the world. So was an interview with a blood-bespattered Fitt. These scenes seemed more appropriate in South Africa, but Northern Ireland was British and such things were not supposed to happen in Britain. Derry on October 5 sent a shock wave through both Ireland and Britain at the realization that “John Bull’s Other Island,” a headline borrowed from Shaw by one London newspaper to describe Northern Ireland, was a political slum.
It rapidly became an unstable slum as well, as events took on their own momentum. The nationalist pressure intensified in November after a repeat march in Derry brought fifteen thousand onto the streets and the RUC, hopelessly outnumbered, allowed the protest through. That in turn fueled more unionist anger at Terence O’Neill, and the crowds attending Paisley’s rallies grew. As NICRA held more marches and mobilized protests throughout the North, the British Labour government applied pressure on O’Neill to move faster and further to satisfy nationalist demands for change. The government in London led by Harold Wilson had been horrified and alarmed by the events of October 5, and the British prime minister demanded action from the unionists. At the end of the month O’Neill relented and announced a package of reforms and followed this up with a televised appeal for a break in the civil rights agitation.
NICRA obliged, but a small left-wing, radical student group, the People’s Democracy (PD) based at Queen’s University in Belfast, responded to O’Neill’s package with scorn and announced plans for a seventy-five-mile trek between Belfast and Derry to start on New Year’s Day 1969 to protest about the inadequacy and slowness of change. The route would go through some tough unionist areas, and trouble was inevitable. On January 4, as the march reached the outskirts of Derry, Paisleyite supporters ambushed the marchers with stones and cudgels. In response fierce bloody rioting between nationalists and the RUC broke out in the Bogside, the main Catholic area of Derry, in reality a slum that nestled at the foot of Derry’s walls.
As unionist discontent grew, O’Neill’s cabinet colleagues deserted him one by one, and in February he called a sudden and unexpected election to the Stormont parliament, hoping it would strengthen his hand—but if anything the result strengthened his opponents while bringing more able nationalists into political life. In March bombs exploded at an electricity substation and punctured a pipeline that supplied Belfast with most of its water. The bombs were really the work of loyalists, but at the time most people assumed a resurgent IRA had planted them. The subterfuge worked, and O’Neill was undermined even further.
In April the radicalization of nationalists continued apace when the student civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin was elected to Westminster in a by-election in Mid-Ulster, overcoming Catholic divisions to capture the seat. Unlike the republicans, she had no qualms about taking her House of Commons seat to highlight her community’s grievances, although her appetite for parliamentary politics quickly waned. In the same month O’Neill’s cousin Major James Chichester-Clark, a fellow Anglo-Irish aristocrat, quit his cabinet in protest of the prime minister’s policies, and an exhausted O’Neill surrendered and resigned. Chichester-Clark, whose ancestors had planted Ulster in the seventeenth century, promptly succeeded him as prime minister.
The fire was well alight, and soon the explosion came. During July so-called loyalist vigilante groups appeared on the streets in Belfast. They claimed that their role was to defend Protestant areas, but in reality they were there to attack Catholic districts. One group in particular, the Shankill Defence Association, led by an ally of Paisley, was involved in vicious clashes with Catholics in North Belfast, as were RUC riot squads. Reports of Catholics being intimidated into leaving their homes began to circulate.
The focus switched back to Derry when the Apprentice Boys, an offshoot of the Orange Order, made it clear they would go ahead with that year’s annual march on August 12 despite predictions of disaster. The march duly went ahead and calamity came in its wake. After skirmishes on the edge of the Catholic Bogside, ferocious rioting broke out between nationalists and the RUC. The rioters repulsed wave after wave of baton-wielding policemen with rocks and gasoline bombs, but soon the RUC turned to CS gas and flooded the narrow streets of the Bogside with acrid clouds that choked indiscriminately. Chichester-Clark mobilized the B Specials while the Irish prime minister, Jack Lynch, warned that his government would not “stand by” and watch as nationalists were attacked. Northern Ireland was moving rapidly toward the edge of civil war, and it looked as if the conflict might engulf the whole island. By August 14 the police were exhausted, and the Stormont government was forced to request military assistance from Britain. That day the first contingents of British soldiers took to the streets of Derry. Thirty years would pass before they left.
As the riots raged in Derry, civil rights leaders tried to ease the pressure on the Bogsiders by appealing to nationalists elsewhere to stage protests and demonstrations so as to stretch RUC numbers and resources. The ploy succeeded but with consequences that few could have foreseen. In Armagh a thirty-year-old Catholic man was shot dead by a party of B Specials in riots that had followed a civil rights rally. But the worst trouble was in Belfast, where that night five people died in gun battles between the RUC, loyalists, and republicans.
There were two trouble spots. In Ardoyne, a small nationalist enclave in North Belfast, two Catholics were shot dead by the RUC in clashes that were to follow a classic pattern. First rival crowds gathered to exchange insults and the occasional stone. The RUC arrived and almost immediately clashed with nationalists. As the clashes worsened, Catholics built barricades and threw gasoline bombs and stones at police, who invariably replied with baton charges. Behind the police came mobs of loyalists, many armed with guns and gasoline bombs, setting fire to homes and public houses as they swept through. Soon gunfire was echoing through the small streets, and mobs fought hand-to-hand battles.
The worst trouble was where it had always been worst, in the jungle of side streets that linked the nationalist Falls Road with the fiercely loyalist Shankill Road, the setting for regular outbreaks of rioting that dated back a hundred years. The two roads, with their crowded streets of small two-story homes, converged in a V-shape near the city center, and it was here, where they were closest, that the worst violence took place. The trouble began outside a police station on the Falls Road when a republican crowd protested and continued with clashes between the RUC, B Specials, and loyalist crowds on one side and nationalists on the other in and around Divis Street where the V of the Falls and Shankill narrowed. A Protestant member of a crowd trying to break through onto Divis Street was shot dead by one of two IRA gunmen firing from the roof of a nearby school. The RUC returned fire, and a gun battle ensued that left three policemen wounded. The RUC reaction to this was dramatic. Senior officers deployed armored cars fitted with Browning heavy machine guns. The weapons could fire high-velocity bullets over a range of 2.5 miles and were completely inappropriate for use in a heavily populated urban area. The results were again grimly predictable. A nine-year-old Catholic boy was killed when a bullet tore through the walls of his bedroom in an apartment block in Divis Street and removed the back of his head.
The next day the situation deteriorated dramatically. A local-born British soldier home on leave was shot dead by the RUC near his home in the Divis Flats complex. Earlier in the day serious rioting had broken out in the mid-Falls area when a Protestant mob invaded the Clonard district, burning homes as they came. Their target was Clonard Monastery, home of the Redemptorist order, whose priests later played such a significant role in the peace process. There was fierce street fighting and a lot of gunfire. One teenage boy, Gerald McAuley, was shot dead. A member of the republican youth wing, the Fianna, he was the first IRA member killed in the Troubles. The loyalists were eventually repulsed, but not before they had burned down much of Bombay Street under the shadow of Clonard Monastery, forcing its terrified inhabitants to flee. Earlier six hundred soldiers from the Third Battalion of the Light Infantry had taken up positions in Catholic and Protestant districts between the Falls and Shankill Roads but were seemingly unable to stop the destruction. Belfast’s infamous peace line had been drawn; soon it would take a more solid form and a twenty-foot-high wall would eventually be erected, making the division permanent. The Troubles had begun.
After two days of rioting and disturbances across Northern Ireland, eight people lay dead—two Protestant, the rest Catholics. Much of West and North Belfast resembled a war zone. Barricades blocked dozens of streets in nationalist areas, erected to prevent loyalist incursions and to keep out the RUC; scores of houses had been torched, bars lay wrecked and looted, and public transport had ground to a halt. Some seven hundred people had been wounded or injured and nearly three hundred buildings destroyed or badly damaged. Belfast was no stranger to such sectarian conflict. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and again during the 1920s and 1930s, there had been fierce rioting, burnings, and gun battles, but the scale and intensity of the violence of 1969 was beyond living memory. Everywhere anxious Catholics organized street defense committees and began patrolling their areas. Less visible but more traumatic was the intimidation and forced evictions that had occurred throughout the city. The British government later set up a commission of inquiry into the events, headed by a senior judge, Lord Scarman, which concluded that 1.6 percent of all households in Belfast had been forced to move between July and September 1969 and that Catholics had suffered most. Over fifteen hundred Catholic families, Scarman said, had been forced from their homes, five times the number of Protestants. That summer hundreds of Catholic families sought refuge in the safety of ghettos like West Belfast, as the biggest forced population movement in Europe since the Second World War began.
These were the events that finally forced the festering divisions within the IRA into the open. The riots and gunfire, the threat to their neighborhoods and communities, had brought back into circulation republicans who had quit in disgust at the Goulding-Johnston leadership, and now they had a serious charge to lay at their opponents’ door. The move to the left, they angrily protested, and the leadership’s obsession with politics had led to a military rundown of the IRA, and this had left Catholic areas defenseless. The emphasis given to politics over military matters by Goulding and his henchmen, they argued, meant that the IRA had failed in its primary role in the North, to protect its own people. The anger within this relatively small group of disgruntled former IRA men would simmer throughout the autumn and early winter of 1969 before bursting to the surface in the most serious split in the ranks of physical-force republicanism since the awful Irish civil war.
Throughout the years leading up to the tumultuous events of August 1969, Gerry Adams suffered, as he wrote years later, divided loyalties within the warring IRA: “I was in a strange position, one of a small cadre with contacts in both factions.”18 His father, his uncle Liam Hannaway, and many family friends like the future Provisional IRA chief of staff Joe Cahill sided with the traditionalists. But Gerry Adams, a generation younger, clearly took with enthusiasm to some aspects of Goulding’s strategy, especially the emphasis on political activity, and was ambivalent about others like the dropping of abstentionism. Most important, he stayed in the Goulding-led IRA and refused to follow the example of his father’s friends, many of whom had quit the organization in protest against its policies.
In many respects his track record as a young republican was a model of what Roy Johnston had in mind; indeed in one interview he recalled attending lectures given by Johnston to the Wolfe Tone Society in Belfast, saying he had found them “excellent.”19 Adams threw himself into the sort of agitational activity that the new leadership firmly believed would win them working-class support. He was to the fore in housing campaigns like that in 1966 which opposed the building of high-rise apartments in Divis Street in the Lower Falls Road section of Belfast. He advocated other forms of political work that traditional IRA members frowned upon, such as producing local news sheets to deliver door to door. This was not the sort of work of which soldiers approved. The young Adams also supported Goulding’s notion of the National Liberation Front, the left-wing alliance that his father’s generation suspected had opened the door to Communist influence. In 1967 Adams could be found attending the inaugural Belfast meeting of NICRA, whose activities gave substance and meaning to Goulding’s strategy.
On the defining question of dropping abstentionism, Adams adopted a position that in years to come would be the hallmark of his approach to such internal controversies. “Although I was opposed to dropping the traditional abstentionist policy, I had no objection in principle to developing a debate on electoral strategy or abstentionism….”20 The distinction between the two was sometimes difficult to discern, since urging “debate” about abstentionism could be regarded merely as a way of creating the space within which the “debate” could be won. It was a clue that he was much more pragmatic about the issue than many of those who helped him found the Provisionals.
Adams’s sole disagreement with the Goulding-Johnston approach was over their idea that Northern Ireland could be transformed into a normal democratic society, one in which left-wing issues could unite Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Nationalist, in common cause. His experience on the streets of Northern Ireland, he believed, flew in the face of this. That view was formed, according to his own account of events, early on in his political activity when along with other Sinn Feiners he had forged links with Protestants living on the New Barnsley housing estate, adjacent to his native Ballymurphy, in a campaign to demand a pedestrian crossing at a spot on the busy main road dividing the estates where a child had been killed by a car. The campaign was successful, but the Protestant-Catholic unity proved to be short-lived when a Paisleyite politician from the Shankill Road arrived to stir up fears of popery and republicanism among the Protestants of New Barnsley. Adams later commented acidly on the episode: “If the State would not allow Catholics and Protestants to get a pedestrian crossing built together, it would hardly sit back and watch them organising the revolution together.”21
As the civil rights campaign gathered pace and sectarian tensions were sharpened, Adams’s conviction that cross-community unity was a chimera hardened, as did his misgivings about the way the IRA leadership was handling the gathering crisis. “Riot situations were beginning to develop,” Adams wrote, “but neither the Belfast nor Dublin [IRA] leaderships were able to understand what was happening let alone to give proper direction.”22 As 1969 wore on and street conflict loomed, some republicans, North and South, began to agitate about the need to prepare for defense but found the Dublin leaders unsympathetic and wholly absorbed in their coming internal battles with the traditionalists. That summer IRA dissidents demanded to know from Goulding how much weaponry existed to defend the Northern nationalists. “When we asked what gear there was the reply was enough for one job, i.e., one rifle, one Thompson submachine gun, two short-arms [handguns], training stuff in other words,” recalled one.23
Goulding and his allies ignored dangerous signals from Belfast. In late August a group of former IRA men, people who had long disagreed with the leadership and had either left or been expelled, met in the New Lodge Road district of the city to decide what they should do about the Belfast leader ship of the IRA then in the control of a Goulding loyalist, Billy McMillen. They were angry about McMillen’s failure to organize the August defense and they blamed Goulding for the Catholic deaths. Among them were Jimmy Steele, Joe Cahill, Billy McKee, John and Billy Kelly, Jimmy Drumm, Seamus Twomey, and a Southern ally, Daithi O Conaill. Gerry Adams was the only serving Belfast IRA man invited.
The old guard resolved to oust McMillen, and in September its opportunity came when McMillen called a meeting of IRA commanders in the Lower Falls Road area. Armed men led by Billy McKee were sent to demand his resignation. McMillen refused, and after heated arguments a compromise was hammered out. The Belfast IRA would withdraw from Dublin control for three months, McMillen would add some of McKee’s men to his operational staff, and weapons would be sought. If Goulding had not abandoned his strategy by the three-month deadline, McMillen would be replaced and Belfast would be run by a separate Northern Command. Meanwhile the Belfast units would play no part in the coming debate about abstentionism, effectively opting out of it.
The old guard clearly believed that Adams would be on its side not least because his father and all their family friends were. Adams had been deeply angered by the events of August. He had toured the city on August 16 to view the destruction and been appalled by what had happened in and around Bombay Street. He met his cousin Kevin Hannaway and others who had been in the thick of the violence. “The fighting here had been at very close quarters,” he later wrote, “yet the poorly armed defenders had repelled a large, much better armed group of attackers. What particularly incensed us was that Bombay Street was burned despite the presence of British troops who had been deployed around the area sometime beforehand.”24
Even so, Adams still had a foot in both republican camps. He had a soft spot for McMillen, liked much of Goulding’s political approach but deplored his failure to defend Belfast’s Catholics. As the August riots subsided, it was the fear among republicans that their people were still vulnerable and needed proper defense that was really stirring opinion in their circles. For once republican fears were shared in the city’s working-class nationalist areas, and it was this harmony that fueled support for the Provisionals and eventually persuaded Adams to throw in his lot with them.
Despite the violence and trauma of that summer and the divisions all this brought, the Goulding leadership proceeded with the plan to drop abstentionism. Goulding had set up an internal IRA commission under Sean Garland to examine the movement’s attitude toward the issue, and predictably it recommended that republicans take their seats in all three parliaments. The enlarged Army Council endorsed this by a vote of twelve to four, with four absentees. Ruairi O Bradaigh, John Joe McGirl, a friend of Adams from County Leitrim, Sean MacStiofain, and one other Northern republican were the dissenters, all of whom were to be to the fore in the impending split. An IRA Convention was called for December, and Goulding prepared well for it, ensuring that this time a majority of the delegates would be in his camp. They were, by a majority of thirty-nine to twelve. The anti-Goulding faction walked out and, with MacStiofain as its leader and new chief of staff, elected a caretaker IRA Executive and Army Council that would be loyal to the traditional principles and doctrines of republicanism.
The new dissident IRA bodies were interim and temporary; the Executive and Army Council could be ratified only by a General IRA Convention, which was not scheduled to meet until September of the following year. But until then they would represent the new group. News of the split and the formation of the rival IRA was leaked to the press by Goulding’s people in late December 1969, and in a statement confirming the story the new group claimed that already a majority of IRA units had sworn allegiance to the Provisional Army Council and Executive of the IRA. The tag “Provisional” stuck not least because it was a handy way for the media to distinguish the new group from those who had remained loyal to Goulding. His faction became known, inevitably, as the Official IRA. The two groups would later feud violently and bloodily about whose members had the right to call themselves republican, but there was little doubt that the new IRA, the Provos, as most activists would soon call the group, had arrived.
Adams’s criticism of the leadership’s handling of this episode, written admittedly after he himself had successfully and painlessly accomplished in 1986 what Goulding had failed to achieve in 1969, suggests that his reservations had more to do with their clumsy tactics than with any qualms he might have had that Goulding was traveling in the wrong political direction. “At the very least,” he wrote, “the leadership should have recognised the need for new priorities and suspended its pursuance of the new departure in republican strategy until a more settled time.” He added, “For many of the dissidents the issue was not abstentionism itself but what it had come to represent: a leadership with a wrong set of priorities which had led the IRA into ignominy in August.”25
Having secured the IRA Convention, Goulding pressed Sinn Fein to follow suit at its conference, or Ard Fheis, in Dublin in January 1970. A motion to drop abstentionism was carried but narrowly failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to change the party’s constitution. A Goulding supporter then proposed a motion of confidence in the IRA leadership, a roundabout way of achieving the same thing. Realizing they were about to be defeated, the dissidents walked out. Later that evening they met to set up an Executive for their own version of Sinn Fein and elected Ruairi O Bradaigh the first Provisional Sinn Fein president.
Adams’s own account has him missing the crucial debate, barred from the venue, Dublin’s Intercontinental Hotel, by a Sinn Fein official because he didn’t have the proper accreditation. Instead he went off to join an anti-apartheid protest at a rugby match between Ireland and the South African Springboks. His version of events is controversial not least because the only witness, the official who allegedly barred him, is long since dead. At the very least Adams’s memory of events is hazy since the walkout took place on a Sunday and the Springboks match was played the day before. Jim Sullivan, McMillen’s adjutant and one of those who stayed loyal to the Goulding faction, has claimed not only that Adams was present during the Sunday session but that he was sitting beside him when the walkout happened.26 Adams, he asserts, stayed in his seat and remained loyal to the Goulding leadership. Adams has denied this, but if his version of events is accurate and he was among those who did walk out, then he should have been at the meeting that set up the caretaker Sinn Fein Executive. But according to Ruairi O Bradaigh only two Northerners were present when the Provisional Sinn Fein came into being: Mary McGuigan from Ardoyne in Belfast and Liam Slevin from Beleek, County Fermanagh.27 Adams, he says, was definitely not there.
Whatever the truth, Adams does concede that he did not immediately align himself with the Provisionals, and that admission is consistent with the Sullivan–O Bradaigh version of the 1970 Ard Fheis rather than his own. Before the December Convention, Ballymurphy republicans had asked for a meeting with Sullivan, which debated the IRA’s internal differences, and afterward Adams told Billy McKee, the leader of the Belfast dissidents, that the Ballymurphy unit had decided to sit on the sidelines “until we saw what way things were going to break.”28 This led to accusations at the time that Adams was waiting to see which side came out on top before joining it. It was not until four months later, in April 1970, that Adams officially brought the Ballymurphy IRA into the Provisionals, by which time the vast bulk of IRA companies in the Belfast Battalion, fifteen out of sixteen, according to one estimate, had deserted the Goulding leadership for the new organization.29 He had joined the winning team.