Discreet negotiations were opened up between them and a policing deal was struck in which, according to the IRA version, the Army agreed that the RUC would stay out of the area, and policing in the Second Battalion area would be left to the IRA. The British would also evacuate the area. Almost immediately the deal, if such it was, fell apart, and seven hundred troops invaded the estate and began searching for arms. Fierce rioting once more engulfed Ballymurphy. Then the Reverend Ian Paisley announced that he had found out about the secret talks, while an increasingly beleaguered Chichester-Clark extracted a pledge from the Tory home secretary, Reginald Maudling, that British troops could now take “the offensive” against the IRA.

On February 2, 1971, in response to pressure from unionists and ministers in London, British soldiers cordoned off the Clonard area of West Belfast, the scene of the burning of Bombay Street in August 1969, and began a punitive series of house searches. These sparked vicious riots, in which loyalist workers from a nearby engineering factory joined. Clonard was in the Second Battalion area and was supposed to be covered by the secret policing deal. IRA commanders saw this as evidence of British army bad faith and responded accordingly. The Clonard riots spread to other Catholic districts, and soon the IRA went into action. British troops came under gun and bomb attacks in North Belfast, and then on the night of February 6 an IRA unit under the command of Billy Reid from the New Lodge Road area ambushed a British patrol, killing one soldier, Gunner Robert Curtis, and wounding four of his colleagues. He was the first of 503 British military personnel to die in the Troubles.³

By the end of 1970 support for the Provisionals in Belfast was increasing in direct proportion to the weight of the British military presence in nationalist areas. The unionist government’s answer to every downward twist in the cycle of violence was to ask Britain to send more troops to police nationalist districts. Invariably the British refused the more outrageous demands, but unionists still got a good deal of what they wanted. Chichester-Clark was in a strong position. Without him the British would have been forced to intervene directly in Northern Ireland’s affairs and might well have had to abolish the local parliament and government and rule directly from London, a leap in the dark that no British leader yet wanted to take. That might have had to happen at some stage, but in the meantime, the British calculated, the only viable policy was to give the unionist leader what he needed to stay in office.

Sending more troops into nationalist areas was, however, a bit like throwing gasoline on a fire. The troops were trained battle soldiers, not policemen; their instinct was to hit every problem on the head with a club, and, with some exceptions, few of their officers showed much understanding of the political cauldron in which they had landed. Some, like the Parachute regiments and the Marines, were particularly ill suited to the delicate task of keeping peace and quickly developed a name for casual, horrific brutality. For some incomprehensible reason the British insisted on sending into some of the worst troublespots, like Ballymurphy, Scottish regiments, many of whose recruits came from Orange backgrounds in Glasgow and elsewhere and were every bit as staunch as their Belfast brethren. If the riots in Ballymurphy were particularly bitter and bloody, it was due in no small measure to this ingredient.

The troops were also operating in a political environment that became more and more warlike, not least because the views of their commanders were hardening. During 1970 British commanders had given their troops permission to open fire and shoot dead any gasoline bombers who ignored warnings, and after the death of Gunner Curtis, Chichester-Clark declared that his government was at war with the Provisional IRA. As the rhetoric grew more bellicose, the troops on the ground became more aggressive, and increasingly the operational distinction between ordinary Catholics and IRA activists became blurred. Belfast Catholics repaid the soldiers’ hostility and anger with interest, and a self-perpetuating, self-nourishing cycle began that no one seemed able to break. It was all a boon to the fledgling IRA, as MacStiofain recognized: “The fact was that… the British soldiers caused friction, resentment and problems that had not been there before.”4

By 1971 there were unmistakable signs that the Provisional IRA was getting bigger and more dangerous than Goulding’s Officials. In June 1970 some five thousand people had attended the Provisionals’ Bodenstown ceremonies; within twelve months the crowd had nearly tripled, to fourteen thousand. This was reflected in growing IRA recruitment figures. The IRA Convention of September 1970, which regularized the makeup of the Army Council and Executive, was, in MacStiofain’s opinion, the largest he had ever attended, as was the following month’s Sinn Fein Ard Fheis.⁵ In Belfast the Provisionals had scored two moral victories over their rivals in the Officials, both in Adams’s Second Battalion area, and these resulted in a shift of support to them in a key district of the city.

It was Adams’s old colleagues in D Coy in the Lower Falls Road area who swung matters the Provisionals’ way. The members of D Coy had performed well against the British army, better than the Officials, some believed, during the Falls curfew, even though the fighting had taken place in an Official IRA stronghold. Then, in March 1971, D Coy’s commander, Charlie Hughes, was killed by the Officials in circumstances that strongly suggested duplicitous dealing by the Goulding supporters. A feud had broken out between the two groups, and each side had kidnapped hostages. Negotiators intervened and patched together a settlement, but just as rival leaders endorsed it, Hughes was shot dead. Hughes was widely respected in the area; he had fought off a loyalist mob with a Thompson machine gun during the August 1969 riots, and it looked as if the Officials had killed him out of resentment at his local standing. The Officials claimed that the responsible gunman had not been told of the mediation in time, but few in the Lower Falls believed them and local sentiment shifted to the Provisionals.

With the political and military circumstances shifting in their favor the Provisional leaders decided to intensify the campaign, to move from defensive mode into retaliation and attack. The way the IRA signaled the change was also a harbinger of the depths to which the violence could and would descend in the years to come. On the evening of March 8 three young members of the Royal Highland Fusiliers, two of them brothers aged seventeen and eighteen from the Scottish town of Ayr, were lured from a bar in central Belfast and taken to a lonely mountain road overlooking the northern suburbs of the city; there they were each shot in the head, apparently as they were relieving themselves after the night’s hard drinking. The extreme youth of the victims, the fact that the killers would likely have known that two were brothers, and the supposition that girls may have played a part in enticing them to their deaths made it an operation that the IRA was not keen to boast about. The IRA issued a statement actually denying responsibility, and the episode was written out of the organization’s annals. The killings, for instance, did not feature in MacStiofain’s own account of this period or in the IRA’s official history of its early years,6 but the truth was that the operation had been authorized by the Belfast Brigade and was carried out by personnel from the city’s Third Battalion.⁷

Such ruthlessness paid off. The loyalist reaction was instant and widespread, fueled in no small way by the cultural and ethnic links many Protestants had with the part of Scotland the soldiers hailed from. Thousands of Protestants marched to the center of Belfast, where the Reverend Ian Paisley led them in an impromptu memorial service; angry Protestant workers in the shipyard laid down tools and joined them. Teenage loyalist bands calling themselves Tartan Gangs in tribute to the dead soldiers appeared on the streets, adding a violent and unpredictable element to the growing unionist unease. Within days the beleaguered Chichester-Clark resigned. The shipyard workers and other loyalists had demanded that IRA leaders be immediately interned, and the Ulster Unionist Party’s choice for their new leader was evidence that this measure was now on the agenda. Brian Faulkner, an ambitious member of both O’Neill’s and Chichester-Clark’s cabinets, had been minister of home affairs during the IRA’s 1956–62 campaign when the use of internment on both sides of the Border had helped end the IRA’s violence. Convinced that internment could and would work again, he promised his hard-line supporters that his would be a law-and-order administration.

The prospect of internment also alarmed the IRA leadership, especially in Belfast, where the killing of the three Scottish soldiers and Faulkner’s elevation combined to produce leadership changes that would have profound and lasting effects on the course of the Troubles. In April, days after the killings, the Belfast commander Billy McKee and his adjutant, Proinsias MacAirt, or Frank Card, as the British insisted on calling him, fell foul of a new get-tough approach. They were stopped by a military patrol in West Belfast, and their car was searched both by the soldiers and by Scotland Yard detectives, who were on secondment to the military because of the RUC’s inability to operate in nationalist districts. One of the detectives triumphantly brought out an automatic pistol. McKee and MacAirt were arrested and charged. The IRA alleged that the men had been framed. Both men had participated in the secret talks about policing Ballymurphy, and the British knew exactly how important they were. They were also under constant surveillance. A powerful British army searchlight nightly illuminated the front of MacAirt’s house in the Lower Falls, where early brigade staff and other IRA meetings had been held. The pair knew how foolish it would be to drive around the city carrying arms. Their defense, however, was rejected and each was sentenced to five years in jail.

McKee’s removal created gaps in the Belfast leadership’s battle order. The Second Battalion commander, Joe Cahill, took charge of the Belfast Brigade while Seamus Twomey replaced MacAirt as second in command and was made brigade adjutant. Cahill took McKee’s position on the Army Council, thereby preserving the precedent set at the September 1970 IRA Convention that the Belfast Brigade leadership would be heavily represented at leadership level. Twomey, a veteran of the 1940s’ IRA campaign, had been in charge of building up the Auxiliaries, but now he was set on a course for national prominence. Known as Thumper because of his habit of slamming the table with his fist when angered, Twomey would later leave an indelible imprint on the history of the Troubles.

McKee’s departure opened opportunities for Gerry Adams. McKee disliked Adams and distrusted his motives for joining the Provisionals, believing that he was secretly sympathetic to the Goulding faction. The April 1970 riots in Ballymurphy had soured relations between them even further; Adams’s defiance had angered McKee, and it was clear that as long as McKee was in charge of Belfast, Adams’s chances of promotion would be slim. “He always thought of him as a Stick,” *recalled a contemporary.⁸

Temperamentally the two were at opposite poles. McKee was first and foremost an operator and believed that the best way to lead was by example. When the Short Strand was under attack in June 1970, he immediately drove over from West Belfast to take his place beside the East Belfast IRA, crouching behind crumbling headstones to return the fire of loyalist snipers. The wounds he received that night left him with a permanent illness. Adams on the other hand led more from behind, earning a name not for his physical courage or operational valor but for his organizing abilities and tactical canniness.

The British army had unwittingly cleared the way for Adams to rise through the ranks. Not only was McKee now out of the picture, but the elevation of Joe Cahill, a longtime IRA contemporary and friend of Gerry Adams Sr., meant that Adams had a friend at the top of the organization. As new Belfast commander, Cahill had the right to appoint his own commanders, and so in April 1971 he put Adams in charge of the Second Battalion. Adams had been Second Battalion adjutant when Cahill was battalion commander and according to one contemporary had managed to exercise “great influence” over his superior officer.⁹ Now Cahill’s old job was his, while Seamus Twomey became Cahill’s new deputy, the adjutant of Belfast Brigade. Twomey was another friend of the Adams family, and both he and Cahill looked to Adams as someone who knew the minds of young Volunteers who were now flocking to the IRA. Adams’s influence over Cahill and Twomey gave him a line right into the Army Council. Only fourteen months after the birth of the Provisional IRA, Gerry Adams’s voice would be heard, albeit indirectly, in its highest councils.

The appointment of Faulkner and events on the streets combined to put the Belfast Brigade, and in particular the Second Battalion, in combative mode. It was clear that Faulkner would press the British to introduce internment, and since the IRA itself, from bitter experience, knew how effective a weapon it could be, it was important that the threat was met correctly. Adams realized that the great weakness of the British was their lack of hard intelligence on the burgeoning IRA. The no-go areas in Belfast limited the ability to mount searches, screenings, and various other surveillance and information-gathering exercises while the IRA itself had changed radically, expanding way beyond the small, well-known family networks of the 1940s and 1950s to include people who had no republican background and were unknown to the RUC’s intelligence wing, the Special Branch.

Adams decided to force the pace, as a contemporary recalled:

[I]n the Second Battalion, the leadership, which was making much of the running at that time, were aware that internment was on the way in so we took a strategic decision to force the British hand on the matter. We mounted a concerted bombing campaign against the barracks in the battalion area. Some of them we bombed two or three times. We could not afford to allow them to bring in internment when they were ready. Had it been introduced a year later the British would very probably have had their intelligence act together and would have hit us badly. We knew at the time that their intelligence was bad so it was to our advantage to force internment much sooner than they would have liked.10

The official explanation given by the IRA for launching its bombing campaign in April 1971 was twofold—it would stretch the British army on the ground, and it would inflict economic damage, which the exchequer in London would have to pay for.¹¹ But the truth was that the IRA wanted to force Britain into premature and hasty action. The number of bombing operations, mostly in Belfast, steadily rose: 37 in April, 47 in May, 50 in June, and 91 in July. The targets were not just military and police bases but increasingly included government and commercial premises.

As the summer progressed, the pressure for internment and on Faulkner grew. In the early hours of the Twelfth of July, ten bombs exploded along the route in Belfast to be used by Orangemen later in the day. During the same week a brand-new printing plant built on the western edges of Belfast for the Irish edition of the popular British tabloid the Daily Mirror was destroyed in a daylight raid by a large IRA force. The bombing was a serious blow to Faulkner’s policy of attracting foreign investment to his ailing economy. By then the number of British troops on duty in Northern Ireland exceeded ten thousand, and the Tory home secretary, Reginald Maudling, declared that a state of “open war” now existed between the IRA and British forces. Faulkner calculated that if he did not get internment he was doomed, while the British still saw propping him up as preferable to dismantling unionist rule, a course they feared would cause more Protestant unrest.

On August 9, 1971, a day earlier than planned because of widespread rioting in Belfast, troops raided hundreds of homes in the hope of arresting and interning IRA leaders and activists. But the operation was every bit as disastrous and counterproductive for the British as Gerry Adams and his colleagues in the Second Battalion had hoped. As they had forecast, RUC Special Branch and British army intelligence on the IRA was either hopelessly out of date or inaccurate, and only a few handfuls of activists were rounded up in the initial swoop. Forced into premature action, the British army seized people who were in no significant way central to the IRA’s war effort. The IRA also had excellent intelligence and knew several days beforehand that the raid was about to happen. “Those capable of running an effective war machine escaped,” recalled one of Adams’s Second Battalion colleagues, “and went on to direct the war.”12 To rub salt in the British wounds, Joe Cahill held a press conference in the heart of Ballymurphy right under the noses of patrolling troops to declare that the IRA was intact. The press conference was organized by Gerry Adams, who had taken on the role of media adviser to the Belfast commander. It was evidence of Adams’s great media and PR skills, which he would put to good use throughout his career.

Internment was a triumph for the IRA in political terms as well, not least because it had been introduced in such a completely one-sided way that its effect was to enormously increase nationalist alienation on both sides of the Border. Although loyalist violence was also growing, the operation was directed solely against republicans, and even then political activists who were in no way associated with the IRA, student civil rights leaders, for instance, were included in the swoop. In Dublin the prime minister, Jack Lynch, had been toying with the notion of introducing the measure in tandem with Faulkner but the one-sided nature of the Northern operation meant he had little choice but to abandon the idea. As sympathy for their cause in the Republic exploded, IRA fugitives could now find sanctuary across the Border, safe in the knowledge that the Gardai would not throw them behind bars. Internment also pushed the levels of violence to record heights. Sectarian rioting flared across the city, driving up to seven thousand Catholics and two thousand Protestants from their homes, while for several days fierce gun battles raged, in many cases pitting loyalists and British soldiers together against the IRA. Once again the IRA could boast that it had answered the call to defend Catholic areas.

The figures spoke for themselves. In the whole seven months up to August 9, 34 people had been killed in conflict-related incidents, but in just three days following internment 22 people died violently. The death rate continued at a high level afterward; a further 118 were to die during the rest of the year, an average of nearly one a day. In Ballymurphy, British troops were involved in two days of savage gunfire and violence, which left a Catholic priest and 7 civilians dead, shot in circumstances that led to allegations the troops had killed with wanton abandon. There was little doubt that internment had exacerbated the violence.

The consequent alienation and anger in the Nationalist community took two catastrophic forms. Scores of young men and women, eager to strike back, flocked to the IRA, while older and more moderate nationalists registered their disgust by resigning from public positions. At Stormont, the nationalist opposition party, a pro-reform coalition called the Social Democratic and Labour Party, or SDLP, had already withdrawn in protest against British security policy, but now its leaders announced plans to establish a rival parliament. Internment had united Northern Catholics against the state in a way nothing else had done since 1921. It also soiled Britain’s name abroad and brought protests from respected human rights activists and intellectuals. Special interrogation methods used against twelve of those arrested landed Britain in the European Court of Human Rights, accused by the Republic of Ireland’s government of breaching the human rights charter and found guilty, the first of many occasions in which events in Northern Ireland would see an embarrassed British government carpeted at the international tribunal.

As the violence intensified and it became clear that internment had failed, unionists looked elsewhere for scapegoats and revived an old favorite—the IRA, they said, was still active because the Border with the Irish Republic was wide open. This simplistic conclusion flew in the face of the reality that most of the violence was taking place in Belfast, at least forty miles from the Irish Republic and rather too far for lightning cross-Border raids. Nonetheless in mid-October the British army obliged unionist anxieties and began to crater Border roads with explosives in an effort to make them unusable. In response, angry members of local farming communities who needed the road links to conduct day-to-day business promptly filled in the craters. The British army would arrive to stop them and there would be riots, often spread across fields.

The effect of all this was to antagonize a broad swath of rural Catholics and to energize the IRA outside Belfast, in Counties Tyrone, Armagh, and Fermanagh in particular, where new units, battalions, and brigades of Provisionals were formed or expanded. Existing units that were still unsure of their allegiance after the 1969 split now decided to plump for the Provisionals. Internment enlarged the IRA into a six-county-wide army and transformed it into a force that could now seriously challenge British rule in Northern Ireland.

Inasmuch as Gerry Adams’s Second Battalion had, by its bombing and his strategic foresight, helped to precipitate this disaster for British policy in Northern Ireland, the IRA had benefited from his strategic talents, and this enormously boosted his standing within the IRA. Cahill and Twomey became even more dependent upon his advice. Not the least of the effects of internment was that the IRA’s ranks were filled with new, angry, young recruits. The folklore of the IRA at this time is full of stories of young men and women rushing to join, some returning from as far away as North America and Britain. Numbers in the Second Battalion in particular soared, and soon its four companies were each able to field up to 100 volunteers. D Coy led the way with 120 members on active service at one point. By the end of 1971 the IRA in the whole of Belfast was more than 1,200 strong, a far cry from August 1969 when the entire organization was hard-pressed to mobilize more than 50.

With its ranks bloated, the IRA went on the offensive. All units, not just those in Belfast, were encouraged to take part in a commercial bombing campaign against businesses and offices. IRA operations multiplied. The number of bombings rose to nearly 200 in September 1971, the first full month after internment. In its official history the IRA claimed that all but a tiny number of the violent incidents, shootings as well as bombings, logged by the British after August 9 were its responsibility: 999 in September, 864 in October, 694 in November, and 765 in December.13 One weekend in November saw no fewer than 100 IRA attacks, 60 of them carried out on the first day.¹⁴ The death toll also soared. Killings by the IRA climbed to 86 in 1971, more than four times the number in the preceding two years, while those ascribed to the British army rose by more than sixfold, to 45. Forty-four soldiers were killed in 1971, more than two-thirds of them after August 9, while IRA casualties rose threefold, to 23, all but 4 of whom died after internment. Civilians made up the largest category of violent deaths, as they would throughout the Troubles; 92 died in 1971, compared with 16 since 1969.¹⁵

During all this time Gerry Adams led a highly furtive and clandestine existence. This was especially so after August 9, when British troops raided widely in West Belfast in the hope of catching those who had escaped the first swoops. Like other senior IRA figures, he moved from one safe house to another to sleep and eat—“billets,” in IRA language—and not always in the Second Battalion area. It was during this period that some IRA leaders realized that South Belfast, a mixed, mostly middle-class area with a large transient student population, was an ideal hiding ground, and they based themselves here. When it was necessary to talk to other members of his battalion staff or to pass on instructions, Adams used “call houses,” operational HQs in the houses of sympathizers in West Belfast, where it was considered safe to meet but not to stay overnight.

Generally, as he related in his autobiography, he rarely ventured onto the streets during daylight hours. As a result Adams was something of a mystery figure to the British army. The Ballymurphy riots had made him a well-known IRA personality, but his precise rank and status in the organization remained a puzzle to the authorities. One former British intelligence officer recalled the poverty of intelligence on him. “We had a trace on Adams as Second Battalion staff, Lower Falls, St. James, the Rock, and Ballymurphy, but not much more than that. We had no trace of his involvement in any act of violence except what you would call B2 grade; in fact we didn’t have much intelligence on him at all. We certainly didn’t know where he was when he was ‘on the run.’”¹⁶

The British army was not even very sure what Gerry Adams looked like. Only one photograph of him existed; it showed a bespectacled, clean-shaven figure wearing an IRA beret at the funeral of the Provisional icon Jimmy Steele, whose coffin he had helped to carry. Now that he wore a beard his appearance was an even greater mystery. Adams’s own story seems to bear this out. In his autobiography he writes that British soldiers kidnapped his pet dog, which they took with them on patrol around Ballymurphy, apparently in the hope that the animal would identify him. Had they been sure what he looked like, that would not have been necessary. His account of his life in this period is littered with stories of near-escapes, of being stopped, questioned, and let go by British patrols who failed to recognize that one of the most senior figures in the Belfast IRA had just slipped through their fingers.

At rank-and-file level in the IRA it was a different story. Adams was beginning to acquire a celebrity status that he strengthened by placing a distance between himself and ordinary IRA Volunteers. He was never one to go for a drink with the lads or to hang around the many illegal drinking clubs that were sprouting up all over West Belfast. And he acquired a prestigious nickname to fit his image, as one IRA contemporary remembered: “Adams was talked about with great reverence. It was ‘The Big Lad says this and the Big Lad says that.’ Adams loved being called the Big Lad because it evoked images of Michael Collins, the Big Fella.”17

If the Second Battalion and the Ballymurphy IRA had acquired a fearsome name by mid-1971, it was due largely to the activities of a small group of “operators” Adams had recruited to A Coy in Ballymurphy. Jim Bryson, Tommy “Toddler” Tolan, and Paddy Mulvenna were Ballymurphy’s equivalent of Dan Breen and Sean Treacy, legendary gunmen of the 1919–21 Anglo-Irish war, and their often bloodcurdling exploits helped to construct the Adams myth. “They were the brawn, he was the brain,” remembered a contemporary.¹⁸

The most fearsome of the three was Bryson, who took command of A Coy when Adams was promoted to lead the Second Battalion. A terrifying and even reckless figure, Bryson would think nothing of patrolling the streets of Ballymurphy armed to the teeth on the off-chance of meeting a British patrol. Other members of A Coy lived in terror of being ordered to accompany him. “He was a controlled psychopath, someone with ice water in his blood. He would do things no sane man would ever consider,” concluded an IRA colleague.¹⁹ His favorite weapon was a vintage Lewis machine gun, known as Big Louie, with which he terrorized the British army. But he also earned a name as a deadly one-shot sniper. His relationship with Adams was complicated. Since Bryson’s death Adams has claimed him as “a dear friend of mine,”²⁰ but contemporaries say the friendship was not returned. “Bryson didn’t trust Adams, because he had never fired a shot,” remembered one. “He was such a hard bastard, and I think Adams was basically frightened of him.”²¹ When Adams needed to curb Bryson, to put him on a leash, he would send someone else, usually a fellow operator for whom Bryson had respect. He never did the job himself.

Bryson died in September 1973, a few days after being shot by an undercover British army unit in Ballymurphy. He was on the run at the time, as was Toddler Tolan, who survived him by a mere four years. The pair became IRA legends when in January 1972, along with five other IRA prisoners, they succeeded in escaping from the prison ship Maidstone, which had been berthed in Belfast docks first as military accommodation and then as an overflow to the city’s Crumlin Road prison, where there was just not enough room to hold the scores of IRA internees. Within hours their feat was being celebrated in song. Tolan was shot dead during a vicious Provisional IRA–Official IRA feud in 1977, while the third member of the group, Paddy Mulvenna, a brother-in-law of Gerry Adams, was killed by the same covert unit that fatally wounded Bryson. Following the escape Bryson had insisted he stay in Belfast to fight. He was recaptured in September 1972 but made another extraordinary escape, overpowering prison guards and fleeing in a stolen uniform. After a short spell across the Border, he came back to Ballymurphy and to his death. “He was born to be killed,” concluded an associate.22 Bryson was just twenty-six when he died, Mulvenna twenty-two, and Tolan thirty-one.

Adams’s leadership of the IRA during these early years received much of its shape and direction from his relationship with two influential comrades, both of whom were to leave lasting marks on IRA history. One was Ivor Bell, his adjutant in the Second Battalion, and the other, Brendan Hughes, an early commander of D Coy. Bell had been in the IRA during the 1956–62 campaign but disagreed with the decision to call a cease-fire and had quit. As much an anarchist as a republican, he rejoined in 1970 and became commander of B Coy in the Kashmir Road area. “Ivor and Gerry were a team. We looked to them for political direction, for strategy, and for interpretation,” recalled a colleague.²³ Hughes, from the Grosvenor Road, was an early recruit to the Provisionals and a disciple of the slain Charlie Hughes. Known as the Dark because of his swarthy features, Hughes was happier as a rank-and-file “operator” than as a leader and often teamed up with Bryson for operations. After Cahill’s elevation to the post of Belfast commander, he became Adams’s Battalion operations officer. Together, Adams, Bell, and Hughes were synonymous with the Belfast IRA of the early 1970s.

After internment the trio played an even more crucial role in the Belfast IRA. MacStiofain decided that leaving Joe Cahill in charge of Belfast was a public relations risk too high to take. Cahill had humiliated the British command with his Ballymurphy press conference a week after the failed internment swoop, but he was now a marked man and, as a result of the media coverage, well known too. It would only be a matter of time before he was arrested, and the British would be sure to make much of his capture. MacStiofain ordered Cahill down to Dublin, where he combined his Army Council position with the post of GHQ director of finance. Twomey was promoted to Belfast commander, and Adams became his adjutant, effectively his second in command. Bell became Brigade staff operations officer, while Hughes took over the Second Battalion. The trio had each moved up a step on the IRA’s ladder.

INTERNMENT USHERED IN a new phase in the IRA’s development, especially in Belfast. Its ranks were flush with new and angry members eager to strike back at the British, supplies of cash and weapons increased, particularly from Irish-American communities in the United States that had watched unfolding events with a mixture of astonishment and mounting atavistic fury, and soon IRA violence was at an unprecedented level.

The defining characteristic of the IRA in the weeks and months after internment was the utter spontaneity and unpredictability of its violence. There was virtually no central control from Dublin or even the Belfast Brigade. Aside from special operations that required coordination and planning, IRA companies were encouraged to go their own way. “There was an incredible amount of activity at this time,” remembered one activist. “We would mount five or six operations every day—a bank would be robbed, a bomb downtown, a booby trap for the Brits, snipes, a float.”24 A float was a particularly hazardous operation in which three or four heavily armed IRA members would drive randomly around their streets in the hope of encountering a British army patrol to fire upon.

At the start the British army was naïve and suffered badly in the unfamiliar warren of tiny streets that made up much of West Belfast. The first armored cars, Saracens, which were nicknamed Pigs by military and IRA alike, came onto the Falls Road with pictures of the Virgin Mary or Christ pinned to their radiators, apparently in the belief that the IRA would then not dare shoot at them. Their knowledge of where they were or whom they were dealing with was fashioned by ignorance and bigotry. Early on, the IRA discovered that they could easily trick soldiers into firing at their own patrols: “Whenever the Brits came in they would come in big ‘duck patrols.’ They would patrol in parallel and we would snipe at one, and before you knew what was happening the Brits would be shooting at each other and we would withdraw and watch them.”²⁵ Such naïveté did not, however, last long.

Adams kept one or more steps ahead of the British army for months after August 1971, but eventually he made a mistake. In July 1971 he married Colette McArdle, an activist who came from a well-known republican family, whose mother, Maggie, was a republican veteran and a friend of Joe Cahill. Gerry Adams and Colette McArdle had met in 1970 at a point when republicans were mounting pickets outside British army bases where discos were being held and Ballymurphy girls were fraternizing with the troops. Adams had a progressive attitude toward female involvement in military matters, but he barred Colette from involvement in them, although he encouraged other women to join his Second Battalion on the same terms as men, much to the fury of Cumann na mBan leaders, as one female member recalled. “That was in the days when the Cumann na mBan came under the authority of the IRA; in fact even a Volunteer in the IRA could give orders to a ranking Cumann na mBan woman. The Cumann na mBan stopped taking orders from the IRA when he [Adams] allowed women to join it; they wouldn’t take orders from other women; they were very resentful of them and refused to work with them.” Adams was, by contrast, keen to ensure that Colette never got involved in activities that could put her in danger, which her association with him might well have done, as one contemporary remembered. “We were told that he had given a direction [to Cumann na mBan leaders] that Colette was not to go on any operations, not even to carry a weapon or papers, nothing.”26 The purpose may well have been to make it more difficult for the British to track him and other IRA leaders down, but the order unsettled some colleagues.

The newlyweds had a difficult first few months, always on the run and constantly afraid that at any moment they could be parted by Adams’s arrest or worse. Colette suffered a miscarriage, and the pair were rarely able to spend more than a few hours or at most a day or two in each other’s company before Adams had to move on to a safer “billet.” Regularly changing habits, routes, and lifestyle was the key to survival for IRA leaders in 1971 and 1972. Despite the strain Colette appeared delighted to have married the IRA leader, as an associate recalled: “I remember once going to a call house where we had to meet Adams, and as we were sitting there in the midst of an Army meeting Colette came bursting in and sat down on Adams’s lap, and it all got kissy-kissy, stroking his hair and so on. We had to change the conversation to general things, and someone asked, ‘What would you do if your partner was unfaithful?’ And I remember Colette flourishing her hand and pointing to the wedding ring, saying this is all I care about, as long as I’ve got this, and Adams was giggling.”²⁷

In a bid to create some stability in the relationship, Adams arranged to rent a terraced house in Harrogate Street in the Clonard district, where at least Colette, now pregnant, but destined not to go the full-term, could be assured of a more settled life even if her husband could visit her only occasionally. They moved in, but they were “hardly there,” to use Adams’s words, when the house was raided at dawn on March 14, 1972, by British troops and he was taken away to Springfield Road RUC barracks. Adams suspected that an informer had betrayed the house, because the troops knew whom they had come to get, although they were not really sure he was the Gerry Adams on their list.28 He chose to play on this by claiming he was someone called Joe McGuigan. The soldiers believed him, but when they brought in a veteran RUC Special Branchman, Harry Taylor, who identified him, Adams was transferred to the main military interrogation center at Palace barracks in Holywood, on the eastern outskirts of Belfast. Palace barracks had a terrifying name among IRA members; it was where the special interrogation methods had been used in the first internment swoops and the victims, Adams’s cousin Kevin Hannaway included, suffered longterm psychological and physical damage.

Adams was given a rough time by his interrogators. He was beaten badly and subjected to mental terror; his captors pretended they were about to kill him, and an attempt was made to inject him with what he was told was a truth drug. Years later Adams would be credited with introducing the IRA to systematic anti-interrogation training, which had at its core the principle that if IRA Volunteers stayed silent and avoided creating any relationship with their interrogators, they would survive the experience. But during his own interrogation he chose the dangerous course of conversing with his questioners and persisted with the attempt to pass himself off as Joe McGuigan even though Harry Taylor had destroyed the ploy. In his autobiography he claimed the tactic helped him withstand the experience, but in the end he admitted who he was after the Special Branch told him that if he was interned under the name Joe McGuigan, he would not be able to get visits from Colette. Once the police and army were satisfied they had seized the right man, he was transferred to the Maidstone, where he found his maternal uncles Liam and Alfie Hannaway waiting. Later, when the Maidstone was closed down as a prison ship, he was moved to a World War II prisoner of war–style internment camp at Long Kesh, on the western outskirts of Belfast, where his father and brother Paddy were imprisoned. There was no shortage of Adams family members in jail.

SECURITY SUCCESSES like the arrest of Gerry Adams were slowly restricting the IRA, but the British military was still denied the sort of face-to-face confrontation that its generals were confident could deal a knockout blow to the republicans and give the politicians the time and space to construct a deal. Since the IRA was unlikely to make a gift of such an opportunity to the British, it was left to the British to create one or at least to take full advantage if even half a chance came along. On January 30, 1972, in Derry, an opportunity did present itself, but far from providing the British with an opening to give the IRA a bloody nose, the horrific events of that day were to be a watershed in Irish history, one that would propel the Provisional IRA measurably closer to the goal of forcing the British to withdraw entirely from Ireland.

The event on January 30 was a march organized by NICRA to protest against the continuing use of internment, a march that was bound to attract many thousands of demonstrators and lead to the sort of stone-throwing confrontation that might tempt the IRA to come out into the open. The British chose to send one of their crack outfits, the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, to police the march in the apparent expectation that its battle skills would be needed.

Later IRA leaders concluded that the British were hoping that the presence of the First Para would lure the IRA into a gun battle that the Provisionals would surely lose. If that was the plan, it was misconceived; the IRA had no intention of falling into such an obvious trap. Ten thousand people marched to the Bogside, and just after a small section broke off to throw stones, bricks, and iron bars at the troops, the Paras went into action. An hour later thirteen men lay dead and seventeen wounded, one of whom died a few weeks later. None were in the IRA, and eyewitness testimony said they had been killed in cold blood. The deaths on Bloody Sunday outraged nationalist Ireland. A wave of anger swept through the entire country. In Derry the local SDLP leader, John Hume, said that the mood in the Bogside was now for “a united Ireland or nothing,” while at Westminster the civil rights MP Bernadette Devlin physically attacked the British home secretary, Reginald Maudling, in the chamber of the House of Commons. In Dublin a crowd of twenty thousand besieged the British embassy before IRA members arrived to bomb and burn it down. Even ministers in Jack Lynch’s Fianna Fail government in Dublin were moved to unaccustomed militancy by the bloodshed. As he arrived in New York to speak at the United Nations, the Irish foreign affairs minister, Dr. Patrick Hillery, declared, “From now on my aim is to get Britain out of Ireland.”29 In the Bogside, meanwhile, young people were said to be queuing up by the hundreds to join the IRA.

The most significant outcome of Bloody Sunday is that it sounded the death knell for unionist rule at Stormont. Within weeks the British finally concluded that the cost of sustaining Faulkner in power was too high. On March 24, 1972, after a contrived dispute with Faulkner over control of the security forces, the British prime minister, Edward Heath, announced a yearlong suspension of the Stormont parliament pending an agreed political settlement. In the meantime Britain would take direct responsibility for governing Northern Ireland on a day-to-day basis. A cabinet minister would run the government until the suspension was lifted, but everyone knew that in practice the suspension would be much longer than a year.

The fall of Stormont was a major victory for the Provisionals, but it also marked a watershed in their campaign. Most nationalists were jubilant. Stormont symbolized unionist domination and Catholics’ second-class status. Its collapse was a reason to celebrate and also to suspend the violence. This dramatic change in the psychological climate coincided with a series of badly bungled republican military operations, the combined effect of which was to stimulate demands for a cease-fire.

The botched operations followed one upon the other. On February 22 the Official IRA bombed the Paras’ headquarters in Aldershot, England, in revenge for Bloody Sunday, but instead of killing soldiers, five cleaning women, a British army chaplain, and a gardener were blown to smithereens. On March 4 a bomb exploded without warning in the middle of a busy Saturday afternoon in the Abercorn restaurant in downtown Belfast, killing two women and injuring seventy people, mostly shoppers, some of them terribly. The IRA was blamed for the bombing, and while it strongly denied the charge, the allegation stuck. Sixteen days later the IRA loaded two cars with bombs and parked them in Belfast city center. A number of conflicting phone warnings were given, with the result that police moved fleeing crowds in the direction of one of the bombs in Lower Donegall Street; it exploded and killed seven people, five of them civilians. The Provos had engineered their own Aldershot. Then, on May 21, the Official IRA in Derry kidnapped and killed a local Catholic, William Best, a nineteen-year-old member of the locally recruited Royal Irish Rangers, a regiment of the British army barred from serving in Northern Ireland. Ranger Best was seized while he was on home leave from Germany, and there was a strong local reaction against the killing, which affected the Provisionals as much as the Officials. As small peace groups, many led by women, sprang up in nationalist neighborhoods, the Official IRA leadership declared a cease-fire, and this in turn added to the pressure on the Provisionals.

THE SUSPENSION of Stormont and the imposition of direct rule from Britain represented a major victory for the IRA. In its own account of the period, the IRA described the day when Heath suspended the Stormont parliament as “one of the most momentous… in Irish history.”30 The IRA had good reason to celebrate. The destruction of the Stormont parliament had been a declared Provisional IRA war aim from the outset, as Sinn Fein’s president, Ruairi O Bradaigh, made clear when he told a July 1971 rally in Derry, “We’re on the high road to freedom, and what we need to do now is to rock Stormont and to keep it rocking until Stormont comes down.”³¹ Most Catholics, moderate as well as militant, heartily agreed—but with an important qualification. Many Catholics believed that, having achieved this success, the IRA should then at least review its options. There was also war weariness in many Catholic districts of Belfast. The shootings and bombings had transformed many nationalist areas into terrifying war zones, where people ran a daily risk of running into gun battles or being caught up in nerve-jangling bomb explosions. The collapse of unionist rule brought the hope that this could all be near an end, as one commentator noted: “This major victory having been won, the feeling grew in the Catholic community—fostered by the SDLP, the clergy and the Dublin government—that the Provos ought now call a halt to their campaign. At the very least, thought many nationalists, we deserve a bit of a respite from the past six months of non-stop violence.”³²

While the moderate nationalist party, the SDLP, welcomed the arrival of the new British minister for Northern Ireland, the avuncular and genial gentleman farmer William Whitelaw, and showed an eagerness to re-enter political dialogue, the IRA greeted the fall of Stormont by stepping up its violence. With its ranks swollen by the anger at Bloody Sunday and other instances of state violence, the IRA carried out twelve hundred operations in May 1972, many of them in rural areas, and more the following month. While the IRA leadership hoped that this would drive the British to the negotiating table, the truth was that the fall of Stormont had opened up a fault line within nationalism that would never really close. Moderate nationalist opinion now sought a political deal and reform, while the IRA fought on for revolution and the elusive republic.

From all the available evidence it seems that the subsequent truce was entered into halfheartedly by both the British and the IRA and in an atmosphere of intense mutual suspicion and distrust. After weeks of maneuvering, the cease-fire began on June 26, 1972, and ended just thirteen days later, on July 9, only two days after Whitelaw and an IRA delegation had met in London. It appears that neither side was all that sorry when it ended. A squalid sectarian dispute over the housing of Catholics in a loyalist-controlled part of West Belfast was allowed by the British to get so serious that it broke the cessation. If the British were secretly glad to see the truce end, so was the IRA in Belfast. Fears that the longer the cease-fire lasted, the more damage it would cause the IRA were very strong. The halt in hostilities had tempted hitherto unknown IRA members to break cover; they were mixing in public with known IRA men, and this was all very visible to the British. Something similar had happened during the 1921 truce. The IRA then had greeted the Treaty negotiations as a victory and celebrated accordingly, emerging in public to receive the adulation of their communities. Collins’s negotiating hand had been badly weakened as a result. Nevertheless the 1972 cease-fire gave something to both sides. The British got an opportunity to take a close look at the key Army Council and military leaders, while the IRA could now say to nationalists that at least it had tried to negotiate terms with the British, and if it had failed it was no fault of theirs.

It was a measure of Adams’s status within the IRA even at that early point that part of the truce preconditions included a demand that he be released from Long Kesh to join the IRA leadership delegation and to assist Daithi O Conaill in making the detailed arrangements for the Whitelaw-IRA summit. According to one account the cease-fire would not have happened had Adams not been freed: “The leadership of the Belfast Brigade at this time was heavily made up of those who commanded the Second Battalion in the run-up to internment. When MacStiofain announced internally that we were going for a truce he was told by that element in the Belfast leadership that there would be no ceasefire in Belfast unless Gerry Adams was released from internment.”33

It was men from Adams’s Second Battalion who fired the shots that ended the truce, a fusillade directed at troops stopping homeless Catholics from occupying houses in the Lenadoon housing estate. One of them recalled it vividly: “I remember quite clearly, Jim Bryson, Tommy Tolan, and another figure were told by Twomey to go up to Lenadoon with a Lewis gun— Big Louie—and two Armalites. They were told to wait for a signal from Twomey, who was negotiating with the Brits. When he raised his arm they were to open fire, and the cease-fire would be over. He couldn’t, because of the crowd that was confronting the Brits, but eventually Twomey got them back, and they opened up followed by the Andytown men.”³⁴

MacStiofain, ever eager to keep on good terms with the Northerners, had packed his London team with hard-liners from Belfast and Derry. Adams was joined by Seamus Twomey, Ivor Bell, now Belfast adjutant, and Martin McGuinness, the young leader of the Derry IRA who had risen through the ranks since internment. MacStiofain and O Conaill were the sole Southern IRA leaders on the delegation. Conspicuously absent was the Sinn Fein president, Ruairi O Bradaigh.

Afterward only MacStiofain appeared positive about the encounter, a view with which Adams openly disagreed. Adams and the Belfast IRA men suspected that Britain was seeking to draw the IRA into a long cessation, as an associate recalled: “The reasoning of the Belfast leadership… was that the British wanted the truce to continue. One of the delegation saw previously unknown Volunteers sitting outside pubs drinking with known IRA people, and he was deeply concerned. [The IRA’s] guard was dropping, and he was determined to see the truce broken. As far as I recall, the Belfast delegation left the Whitelaw talks with the clear intention of breaking the truce.”35 Adams sided with the hawks, according to a contemporary. “Adams and Bell were very, very skeptical about the cease-fire, they warned us that things weren’t good, they didn’t trust the Brits and thought they were playing for time. They were fully in favor of breaking it. If Adams had been opposed, it wouldn’t have happened.”³⁶ The truce duly broke down amid violence that claimed twenty lives over the next three days.

The Belfast IRA had its own reasons for wanting to break the truce. There had been developments on the military front that gave the IRA in the city reason to believe that it could stretch the British further. The IRA, they calculated, was not yet at its strongest and, if things went well, could put more pressure on the British before returning to the negotiating table in a more powerful position. In both cases Adams’s contribution was crucial.

The first was the decision by the Belfast Brigade to import quantities of the American-made Armalite rifle, a powerful semiautomatic weapon that came to symbolize the IRA of the 1970s. The Belfast Brigade first heard of the gun when a Falls Road seaman showed a member of Second Battalion staff a U.S. magazine article about the weapon, known as the AR-15, in the autumn of 1971. Weighing only seven pounds and fitted with a collapsible butt, the Armalite was easy to hide and could even be dumped in water. It fired a high-velocity .223 round, which tumbled through the air with the same deadly effect as a dum-dum bullet, and it was highly accurate. When brigade staff heard about the weapon, the decision was instantaneous: the Armalite could make the IRA better armed than the British army. The conclusion was simple, as one source familiar with the episode recalled: “If we could lay our hands on these guns [maybe] we’d win the war.”³⁷

Adams ordered his operations officer, Brendan Hughes, to travel to New York to arrange for the purchase and shipment of the guns. The Americans involved in gunrunning for the IRA had old-fashioned ideas about what the best weapons were, and GHQ in Dublin agreed with them. They were the weapons of their age. GHQ instructions were to acquire standard World War II U.S. infantry weapons, principally MI Carbines, Garand rifles, and the ubiquitous Thompson submachine gun. When Hughes arrived in New York looking for a completely different sort of weapon, he met enormous opposition from the locals. It strengthened a growing view at the top of the Belfast IRA that many in the Dublin leadership, especially in GHQ, were out of touch with the needs of those fighting the war in the North. Adams’s orders, however, were that the Armalites had to be acquired even if that meant bypassing GHQ. By the spring of 1972 the Belfast Brigade had organized its own supply route, and the Armalite began to appear in the city, where it was tested in combat by D Coy in gun battles with the British. The weapon was judged a huge success, and arrangements were made to import larger quantities. In May and June 1972, when preparations for the truce were in progress, two hundred AR-15s arrived in Belfast, smuggled aboard the transatlantic liner QE2 and then transported to Belfast from Southampton in England.38 There were enough Armalites to equip every active-service unit in the city. As Adams and Bell flew out on board the RAF plane to meet Whitelaw, they knew that back in Belfast the IRA was better able than ever to take on British troops.

The second military advance was the development of the car bomb, another weapon synonymous with the IRA of that era. The car bomb was discovered entirely by accident, but its deployment by the Belfast IRA was not. The chain of events began in late December 1971 when the IRA’s quartermaster general, Jack McCabe, was fatally injured in an explosion caused when an experimental fertilizer-based homemade mix known as the “black stuff” exploded as he was blending it with a shovel in his garage on the northern outskirts of Dublin. GHQ warned that the mix was too dangerous to handle, but Belfast had already received a consignment, and someone had the idea of disposing of it by dumping it in a car with a fuse and a timer and leaving it somewhere in downtown Belfast. “It was a bomb in a car rather than a ‘car bomb,’” recalled a Belfast IRA source familiar with the episode. “A young Volunteer took it in [to the center of Belfast] and we could feel the rattle where we stood. Then we knew we were onto something, and it took off from there.”³⁹ The car bomb enabled the IRA to increase significantly the amount of explosives it could deliver in each individual operation while exposing fewer operatives to arrest or premature death.

The “black stuff” mix was perfected and made safer to handle within weeks of McCabe’s death, and this meant that the IRA now had unlimited supplies of homemade explosives. It no longer had to depend on gelignite, supplies of which were gradually being cut off by the British and Irish intelligence authorities. The car bomb was, however, a double-edged sword. The sheer size of the devices greatly increased the risk of civilian deaths in careless or bungled operations. The IRA bombs that killed seven people in Little Donegall Street, for example, were among the very first car bombs deployed, and no one could doubt that the episode was a public relations disaster for the Provisionals.

The new explosives mix could be used outside the city as well. It was an ideal explosive to use in rural land mines, which were usually hidden in culverts, or drainpipes, which ran under country roads at regular intervals to draw off rainwater. The land mine came into its own during the early summer of 1972, making military and police patrols in Tyrone and Fermanagh hazardous and eventually rendering South Armagh a no-go area for motorized British units. The truth was that among Armalites, car bombs, and land mines, the IRA felt it was on a string of successes when the 1972 cease-fire was called. Seen in that perspective, the chances that IRA leaders would enter talks with Whitelaw in a mood of compromise were virtually nonexistent.

WITHIN TWO WEEKS all had changed utterly. The IRA had forced the destruction of the Stormont parliament and fought the British to the negotiating table. Not since 1920 had the organization wielded such power or been so well placed to influence and shape events. But in a trice all that was to disappear. On Friday afternoon, July 21, the Belfast Brigade sent twenty of the new car bombs into the city and detonated them in just over an hour, killing 9 people and injuring 130, in one of the worst days of violence yet seen during the Troubles. At the height of the bombing the center of Belfast resembled a city under artillery fire; clouds of suffocating smoke enveloped buildings as one explosion followed another, almost drowning out the hysterical screams of panicked shoppers. Six people, two of them soldiers, were killed by a car bomb at a bus station, and three civilians, two women and a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, died when another device was detonated in North Belfast. Television pictures of firemen shoveling human remains into plastic bags compounded the horror.

The deaths were not deliberate but the result of careless planning by the Belfast Brigade leadership. Brigade commanders made the fatal error of assuming that the British army and RUC could deal with so many bomb alarms all happening more or less at the same time in different parts of the city. Bloody Friday, as the day was called, was the unionist equivalent of Bloody Sunday, and it was an unmitigated disaster for the IRA. The IRA later tried to blame the British for deliberately ignoring telephoned warnings, but that cut little ice with anyone except its most loyal supporters. Most people accused the IRA of using sheer terror tactics. Bloody Friday had a speedy political impact. Moderate nationalists put even more distance between themselves and the IRA and intensified efforts to seek negotiations with the British and Faulkner’s unionists.

It took years for the IRA to admit that Bloody Friday was its fault. “We put it down to the Brits allowing bombs to go off, but the real reason was it was too much for the Brits to cope with, the bombs went off too close together, the town was too small, people were being shepherded from one bomb to another,” conceded an IRA activist of the time.40 Bloody Friday had been planned by Twomey and his staff before the June 26 truce and was intended to pressure the British to come to the negotiating table.⁴¹ Adams was in jail at the time and played no role in its conception, but after the collapse of the truce he was back at the center of events, acting with Bell once again as adviser to Twomey.⁴² The plan was revived to demonstrate that the IRA was still in business, but it backfired badly; Adams did not initiate Bloody Friday, but he was involved in its organization. The British quickly realized that events had moved to their advantage. Ten days later, on July 31, in an operation code-named Motorman, hundreds of British troops invaded the no-go areas of Derry and Belfast, an action that would have been unthinkable before Bloody Friday. Within weeks military forts were constructed right on the IRA’s doorsteps, and the organization’s freedom of movement was severely curtailed. Now able to put the IRA under close surveillance in both cities and to screen thousands of civilians for IRA sympathies, British army intelligence on the IRA improved markedly. Within two years the British grip on areas like West Belfast was so tight that the Belfast Brigade was forced to move its operational headquarters to the southern outskirts of the city, to the affluent Malone area.

Bloody Friday was the one great black mark against Adams’s strategic record in the early 1970s. The man himself was incandescent with rage after the botched bombings, according to IRA sources. “Most of the bombs that day came from the Third Batt area, from Ardoyne and the Markets, and some from the Second Batt; it was a BB [Belfast Brigade] operation though. Afterwards the word was that: ‘the Big Lad’s doing his nut, about the warnings not being phoned in or being bungled.’ There was an undercurrent of blame being put on the Third Batt leadership.”43 In his autobiography Adams played down the implications of Motorman, saying that it merely required the IRA to readjust its tactics. But the reality was that Bloody Friday and its aftermath marked a watershed in the IRA’s fortunes. From then on the organization would be on the defensive both politically and militarily.

The first IRA casualty of Bloody Friday was the Belfast commander Seamus Twomey. Adams and Bell were convinced that Twomey was “too fiery” for the new circumstances, and they combined to persuade him to quit Belfast and to move to Dublin, where he would be better placed to look after the Northern IRA’s interests. In September, Twomey acquiesced. Adams replaced him and appointed Bell as his adjutant, and Hughes became his operations officer. In the view of some IRA members Adams was merely formalizing what already existed: “Twomey was commander in name only; Adams [always] really called the shots.”⁴⁴

Soon Adams would have an ally at the very top of the organization. In November 1972 Sean MacStiofain was arrested as part of the Dublin government’s accelerating crackdown on the IRA leadership. Sentenced to six months in jail on IRA membership charges brought on the basis of a radio interview he gave to the Irish broadcasting service, RTE, MacStiofain immediately embarked on that most traditional of IRA protests, a hunger strike, which ended fifty-seven days later, inconclusively and amid charges that the Provos’ chief of staff had cheated during the fast. Upon his arrest MacStiofain immediately lost his IRA rank, and thanks to the opprobrious circumstances of his fast’s conclusion, his republican career effectively ended. A tough and uncompromising leader, MacStiofain had overseen the birth and development of a formidable fighting machine, and for that Northern IRA leaders retained for him a degree of affection and respect that survived his ignominious departure. Joe Cahill took over as the Provisionals’ second chief of staff. Second Battalion veterans now occupied the two most important posts in the IRA, its national leadership and the command of Belfast, the cockpit of the IRA’s war against Britain.

GERRY ADAMS was to be Belfast commander for the next ten months, during which time his already established reputation as the IRA’s key strategic thinker was significantly enhanced. But he also earned a name for ruthlessness that would make many a potential rival pause for thought before considering any challenge to his authority.

One event marked out Adams’s period in command as special in the eyes of other IRA members, and that was a strike against British military intelligence that was reminiscent of the triumphs organized by IRA leaders during the Tan War. It looked like an astonishing counterintelligence coup, but in reality what happened was more a chance affair, which owed much to the alertness of an observant junior IRA member. But the operation that followed persuaded many that the new Belfast commander had penetrated the core of British intelligence.

The story of what became known as the affair of the Four Square Laundry began with an admission by a rank-and-file volunteer in the Second Battalion’s D Coy that he had been working as an informer for the military. The volunteer, Seamus Wright, from the Lower Falls Road area had come under suspicion because he was so often absent from Belfast, apparently spending much of his time in England. Under interrogation by Second Battalion staff, Wright admitted that all the time he had actually been in the company of a special military unit based at Palace barracks in Holywood, County Down, where IRA suspects were taken for routine interrogation before being interned. The unit was known by the initials MRF, which the IRA believed stood for Military Reconnaissance Force, a group subsequently alleged to have been involved in two drive-by shootings in the summer of 1972 that were blamed at the time on loyalist gangs. Wright admitted he had agreed to work for the MRF.

The MRF ran plainclothes military patrols in republican areas of the city, but it also had built up an agent-running capacity and had set aside a special section of Palace barracks to house informers where debriefings were conducted and operations planned. A favorite tactic was to drive these agents through nationalist districts in military vehicles to identify and photograph other IRA activists through the slits in armor plating. Wright named another D Coy volunteer as a fellow MRF agent. The IRA arrested Kevin McKee, and his questioning added significantly to the IRA’s knowledge of MRF operations.

McKee revealed that the MRF had constructed an intricate undercover intelligence network that included a massage parlor, ostensibly run by English prostitutes, an ice cream business, and the Four Square Laundry, which operated in West Belfast. The Four Square operation was simplicity itself: a van would tour housing estates offering cut-price laundry sevices so as to acquire clothing to be analyzed for traces of explosives and gunpowder and so to identify IRA houses. Within the roof space of the large van used to collect and return laundry lay two British operatives who would photograph suspects on the streets. By the standards of later British intelligence operations against the IRA, it was an amateurish operation but also an indication of how little the British knew about the IRA in those early days.

After McKee’s interrogation, the Belfast Brigade—Adams, in other words—took over the operation from Second Batt, and plans were made to ambush the various MRF teams. During the midmorning of October 2, 1972, gunmen ambushed the Four Square Laundry van as it made its rounds in Twinbrook, a sprawling housing estate on the edge of West Belfast. The driver was shot dead and the roof compartment sprayed with automatic fire. At the same time in North Belfast gunmen from the Third Battalion shot up the massage parlor. The third premises identified as an MRF front, city center offices, turned out to be vacant when the IRA arrived. At the end of the day the IRA claimed to have killed five undercover British soldiers, but the British would admit to only one dead, the van driver killed in Twinbrook. Despite this uncertainty the IRA regarded the day’s work as a major victory over British intelligence, and Adams compared the operation—and implicitly himself—to the counterintelligence exploits of Michael Collins, whose famous “squad” had wiped out the bulk of Britain’s secret agents in Dublin in one violent day, the first Bloody Sunday, fifty-two years earlier: “It was a devastating blow, on a par with Michael Collins’ actions against British Intelligence in November 1920…,” Adams later wrote.45

A devastating blow it certainly was, but the incident was no less serious for the IRA. Although badly hit by the Belfast Brigade, the episode had demonstrated that the MRF had clearly managed to infiltrate the IRA’s crack Second Battalion, and that this had only been discovered by chance. It was also apparent that, thanks to Wright and McKee, British intelligence now knew the names of all D Coy’s members and many of the Second Battalion’s secrets. The chances of there being other Second Battalion agents on the MRF’s payroll, recruited as a result of intelligence passed on by the pair, had to have been high. More than anything else the penetration demonstrated that the IRA had no systematic counterintelligence capability. After all, Wright and McKee had been caught by luck, not by any IRA system. While the task of pursuing traitors was part of the Coy intelligence officer’s job, it was only one part of a substantial job description—more time and energy went into identifying targets than into uncovering agents. The Four Square Laundry affair exposed major deficiencies in the way the IRA conducted its business and it raised embarrassing questions. Not least it exposed the damaging consequences that would result if the intelligence officer himself or herself had been turned by the British. Without a foolproof counterintelligence capacity, the IRA had no protection against that level of penetration. The Four Square Laundry operation was loudly praised, and Adams basked in the adulation, but the hard questions were just not asked. Instead, the accidental discovery of the MRF’s penetration and the weaknesses in IRA command and control which it had exposed were literally covered up.

The IRA sentenced the MRF agents Wright and McKee to death after courts-martial, but in an unprecedented twist the Belfast Brigade ordered that they be buried in secret after execution and their treachery kept hidden.46 This was contrary to one of the central principles of the IRA’s informer-hunting practice, which was that those found guilty of working for the British must be exposed publicly in order to discourage others from imitating them. In practice that meant that the bodies of dead informers must be left literally by the roadside and a public explanation given for the killing. The thinking behind this was that anyone tempted to follow suit would be persuaded to think again. That in this case, contrary to IRA rules, Wright and McKee were put in secret graves suggests another motive.

The justification for “disappearing” the men that was put forward at the highest levels of the Belfast Brigade—at the level of Adams, Bell, and Hughes—was disarming. Since Wright and McKee were both members of influential republican families, it was agreed, the IRA would be sparing their relatives considerable embarrassment if they were just quietly buried and news of their fate kept hidden.⁴⁷ Wright was related to the Hickey family, and a sister-in-law, Eileen Hickey, went on to become a senior figure in the Belfast Brigade and the commander of IRA prisoners at Armagh women’s prison. McKee was a nephew of Billy McKee, Adams’s old adversary. Secret executions and burial would spare their familes embarrassment, although anguish at their unexplained disappearance would surely outweigh that. But the secret manner of their deaths served another purpose; the extent of British intelligence penetration of Adams’s IRA units, particularly in his own Second Batt and D Coy, went to the grave with them and the luster of the Four Square Laundry operation left untarnished. The pair were ferried secretly down to South Armagh, where they were held for six weeks before the orders to kill them arrived. By that time their jailers had built up such a strong rapport with them that the South Armagh IRA requested that others do the deed. IRA men from Belfast, in fact from Adams’s old IRA unit in Ballymurphy, were sent down to carry out the killings.⁴⁸ The execution and burial of the two agents was kept a secret until March 1999 when the IRA, under pressure from relatives and the demands of the peace process, finally admitted part of the story of what had happened. Despite intensive efforts their graves have never been located. Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee carried to their secret graves the untold story of how British intelligence bested Gerry Adams. Their fate ensured that the story would never see the light of day.

THE CLANDESTINE BURIALS of Wright and McKee set a precedent that was repeated at least seven more times in subsequent years. The Belfast Brigade, under Adams’s leadership, had set a grisly precedent. From there on, if the IRA had an informer on its hands whose existence would embarrass the organization or its supporters, it would think little of disposing of the problem under the clay that covered a secret grave. The third secret interment during Adams’s reign as Belfast commander fell into that category, although the circumstances of the disappearance of Jean McConville were to leave a much more lasting and damaging stain.

The death and disappearance of Jean McConville was made possible by another important military innovation pioneered by Gerry Adams. With an eye on the special “squad” that Michael Collins had constructed in 1920 to subvert British intelligence operations in Dublin, Adams did the same thing in the Belfast of the early 1970s when he got Twomey’s go-ahead to set up two secret cells in the city to carry out special operations on behalf of the Belfast Brigade. These cells reported directly to Adams and received their instructions only from him, a chain of command that was formalized when Adams replaced Twomey as Belfast commander. They became known in IRA folklore as “the unknowns.” One unit was located in West Belfast and led by the brigade staff intelligence officer, a figure from the Turf Lodge area. The other was in the Third Battalion area in North Belfast and commanded by a renowned IRA leader, who was later shot dead at his home by loyalists. The cells were very small at the start, consisting of only three members each, later expanded to four. The idea was that “the unknowns” would be self-sustaining and independent of the rest of the Belfast IRA; they carried out their own intelligence work and acted on it themselves, although from time to time they borrowed personnel from other units for larger operations, especially D Coy in the Lower Falls.

Jean McConville was a thirty-seven-year-old East Belfast Protestant who had married a West Belfast Catholic and converted to Catholicism after their wedding. In 1972 she had been living for two years in the Divis Flats complex in the Lower Falls area with her ten children. Her husband, Arthur, a former soldier in the British army who had quit in 1964 to become a builder, had died a year before. Now widowed and poverty-stricken, Jean McConville was struggling to raise her family. In December 1972, suddenly and without any reason, she disappeared from the face of the earth. One widely accepted and repeatedly given explanation for her disappearance was that she had angered the IRA by comforting a seriously wounded British soldier who had been shot by a sniper outside her front door. In revenge, the story continues, the IRA abducted her and took her to a house in the Beechmount district of West Belfast, where she died during interrogation, allegedly suffocating when her questioners placed a plastic bag over her head in a bid to make her talk. Rather than admit what they had done, the IRA then decided to bury her quietly and afterward spread stories that she had deserted her children and run away to England with a British soldier.

The truth was much more complicated, as it tends in such stories to be, although there is no doubt the IRA lied about what happened to Jean McConville—and continued to lie for many years thereafter. The real story behind McConville’s death, the sad and squalid truth of her killing pieced together from sources in the IRA active at this time, is that she died because she was a small and not very important cog in the British army’s intelligence-gathering machine who had the misfortune to cross paths with two ruthless men. One was the British officer who ran her as an agent; the other was the senior IRA figure in Belfast who decided that her secret death would suit his purposes.

THE BACKGROUND to the tragedy of Jean McConville was set in Divis Flats, then a large sprawling complex of apartments and tower blocks whose stairways and corridors provided a perfect stage for snipers and bomb throwers. In the early 1970s the IRA operated virtually openly in Divis. “Everyone knew who the IRA in Divis Flats were; they walked around with guns and so on,” remembered one of their number.49 For the British army it soon became a priority to place a reliable spotter in the flats who could warn them of IRA activity and planned ambushes. Jean McConville agreed to be one of those spotters, but by all accounts she was not very good at her job and showed a too obvious interest in the IRA’s affairs. It was not long before the local unit tired of her unending questions and began to suspect her. Her apartment was raided, and sure enough the IRA found a radio transmitter that she had been using to communicate with the British army. “It was taken off her, and she was warned never to do that again; she was a woman and the mother of a large family, and so we let her off,” explained one IRA member familiar with the events.⁵⁰ But it was just that, a warning. Next time, she was told, there would be no warning.

Inexplicably McConville went back to spying on the IRA, this time with fateful consequences. Although by this stage the British army must have been aware that the IRA knew all about her activities and that she was now in terrible danger, her handlers carried on regardless and supplied her with a second transmitter. Her spying recommenced, and it did not take long before the IRA worked out that she was back in business, once more betraying IRA volunteers and operations. The Belfast Brigade decided that this time she had to die, but its senior members disagreed violently about what to do with her body. The question bitterly divided the Belfast Brigade staff. Some argued that her body should be dumped in the street so that her fate would act as a deterrent to other would-be informers in accordance with IRA custom and practice. But one figure disagreed, arguing that the publicity attached to her death, the fact that she was a widowed mother of ten, would work strongly against the IRA, and he urged that she be buried in secret and effectively disappeared.51

The job of “disappearing” Jean McConville was given to “the unknowns” in a move that guaranteed that the story of what had really happened to her would be confined to the smallest number of IRA activists. According to one well-informed source, the order to “disappear” McConville was given to the Turf Lodge-based commander of one of the “unknown” units by a senior member of the Belfast Brigade. Whether, as alleged by one well-informed source, or not the order was given by Adams himself, it is inconceivable that such an order would have been issued without his knowledge. Her court-martial had been held—although McConville was not present to defend herself—she had been found guilty and sentence pronounced. The task of the “unknown” was to fetch her and carry out the sentence.⁵² McConville was taken down to a beach near Carlingford just across the County Down–County Louth Border, where she was shot in the back of the head and her body buried in the sand.

Jean McConville’s death and disappearance came back to haunt Sinn Fein during the height of the peace process in the mid-1990s. A campaign to discover her fate was launched by her children, all of whom had been dispersed to foster homes after her abduction, and their efforts won the support of President Bill Clinton and the Irish government, two of Adams’s strongest allies in his new foray into constitutional politics. Adams met the chief campaigners, McConville’s daughter Helen McKendry and her husband, Seamus, but initially denied all knowledge of events. Only after Clinton’s intervention did he and the IRA admit that she had been “disappeared” by the organization. Even then strenuous efforts were made to distance Adams from the affair. Sinn Fein spin doctors suggested that he had been in Dublin at the time of the killing, implying that he had played no part in the decision to kill and secretly bury Jean McConville. Adams himself, according to her son-in-law Seamus McKendry, tried to claim that he could not have been involved, since he had been interned at the time: “He told Helen and I [sic]: ‘Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared.’ ”53 In fact Adams was very much at large at the time of Jean McConville’s disappearance and must have known all about the circumstances at the time. He was not arrested and imprisoned until July 1973, more than six months after her abduction and execution.

Public disquiet over the IRA’s treatment of the “disappeared,” especially Jean McConville, forced the Irish and British governments to set up a cross-Border commission to coordinate the search for missing remains. The IRA’s Army Council appointed its director of intelligence, Bobby Storey, a close ally of Gerry Adams, to revisit each case and to question the IRA members involved in an effort to discover where bodies had been hidden, while the police on both sides of the Border dug up bogs, beaches and basements. In the case of Jean McConville, extensive searches and excavation of beaches in the Carlingford area by Irish police in 1999 and the following year failed to find anything. But in August 2003 her remains were discovered, apparently by chance, by members of the public walking on a nearby beach that had not been searched. A postmortem examination revealed she had been shot once in the back of the head. While many in Sinn Fein were relieved to see this grisly and embarrassing case apparently closed, for others the killing and disappearance of Jean McConville had become an enduring metaphor for the Adams stewardship of the Belfast IRA. It also seems likely that McConville’s “disappearance” will haunt the Provos and Adams for some time. In July 2006, Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan said that an investigation by her office, launched at the request of the McConville family, had failed to find evidence Jean McConville had been an informer, a claim that forced the IRA to publicly repeat its assertion that the dead woman had been executed for spying on behalf of the British army. With the McConville case thus re-opened and an unwelcome spotlight directed at himself, Gerry Adams felt obliged to express concern at the IRA’s past behavior, although managing to avoid mentioning the word “disappeared” or his own possible knowledge of events: “Whatever about the circumstances surrounding Jean McConville’s killing, the burial of her remains was a great injustice to the family.” He also urged the Irish government to “act speedily” so that more excavations to find others who had been “disappeared” by the IRA could take place.

THE IRA’S FORTUNES had waxed and waned in the two years since the Ballymurphy riots ended in December 1970. By the end of 1972 the political and military balance was swinging in the British favor and the IRA was very much on the defensive. Not least of the factors now working against the IRA was that the British military’s intelligence was improving all the time, thanks to the recruitment of a growing number of informers. Since the IRA was increasingly restricted on its home patch, the idea grew among Belfast activists that it should try to break out of the straitjacket, to take the war directly to the enemy. The idea came not from Adams himself but from others in Belfast Brigade, although in IRA mythology it is credited as his and recorded as yet another example of his military and strategic skill.

“Towards the end of 1972 we started working on the plans,” recalled a well-placed IRA source.

The first priority was to recruit unknown Volunteers with no records. It was Adams who went to the three battalions to get them; he told them that the operation was a very big one, that it could be a hanging offense, as it was treason. There were rooms full of Volunteers, and when he said that and that anyone who didn’t want to go should leave, he was nearly knocked down in the rush. The result was that the team ended up with red lights, people like Gerry Kelly who was on the run for murder and others who had been interned.⁵⁴

Elaborate planning went into the bombs that would be placed in London. Although Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofain was told about the plan and approved it, GHQ’s involvement from Dublin was kept to a minimum, not least because the clannish Belfast IRA did not fully trust their Southern colleagues. The date of March 8 was chosen deliberately, for it was the day on which a British government-organized poll to decide whether the Border should be retained was to be held. With the result a foregone conclusion, thanks to Northern Ireland’s built-in Protestant majority, it was the IRA’s way of showing contempt for the idea that unionist consent should ever be a precondition of Irish unity.

The choice of bombing team was to prove controversial. Among the six IRA members who went to London were two young sisters, nineteen-year-old Marion Price and her twenty-two-year-old sister, Dolours, from a staunchly republican family in West Belfast. They had been among the first to volunteer for the mission. The Price sisters had been brought up in a family atmosphere in which sacrifice to the republican ideal had been sanctified. An aunt had been cruelly maimed in the cause, losing her sight and both hands in a bombing that had gone wrong in the 1956–62 campaign. MacStiofain objected, saying that they were too young and that both couldn’t go, because they were sisters. He relented only when one of them became visibly upset.55 The operations organizers in Belfast, by contrast, had expressed no such qualms, and they were sent on the mission.

The bombings duly went ahead. Car bombs were driven over on the Dublin–Liverpool ferry and taken down to London, where at 9:00 A.M. they were parked beside their targets. March 8, 1973, was not an abnormal day by the standards of the time in Northern Ireland. That morning a twenty-one-year-old British soldier was shot dead by an IRA sniper as he guarded a polling station in West Belfast; a thirty-one-year-old soldier shot earlier in the week in South Armagh died in hospital of his wounds; and the body of a forty-five-year-old married Catholic man was found in a Protestant district of North Belfast, shot in the head, apparently by loyalist gunmen. Six bombs exploded in Belfast that day and five in Derry, but it was the blasts in London that captured the world headlines. One car bomb detonated outside the Old Bailey courthouse and another exploded in Whitehall, at the epicenter of the British government. One man died of a heart attack and 180 people were injured. The IRA had bombed targets in England before, during the Forties Campaign, but never on this scale in London. Now, as a result of the efforts of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA’s war had come to Britain, and the extent of the subsequent media coverage taught the IRA a lesson its members would never forget: one bomb in London was worth a dozen in Belfast.

The bombing team had, however, made a simple error that caused its downfall. The group had fitted false British license plates to the cars ferrying the bombs before they arrived in Liverpool but had made them up randomly. What they had failed to realize was that British plates were year coded, and the age of the cars did not match the code on the plates. An alert police patrol noticed that a car parked outside Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London metropolitan police, had the wrong plates and raised the alarm. The second car bomb, parked in the West End, was discovered in the same way, and both devices were defused several hours before they were due to go off. The police headed straight for Heathrow Airport, where they found the bombing team queuing for the flight to Belfast. The plan had been that the bombers would all be safely back in West Belfast by the time the car bombs detonated, but it had all gone badly wrong.

It looked as if a simple oversight at the planning stage had landed the London bombers in jail, but there is evidence to suggest that the operation had been compromised somewhere in Ireland. The Belfast Brigade’s original plan had been to take ten bombs over to London, but that was scaled down to six, one for each member of the team. Two days before the bombs were set, a decision was made to reduce the number to four, after British customs officers had taken a close interest in one of the car bombs as it was driven off the Dublin–Liverpool ferry. A message was sent to the Belfast Brigade to leave the fifth and sixth car bombs in Ireland, just in case the customs interest was more sinister.56

It later became clear that the British knew all about this change of plan. At the bombing team’s trial, depositions from the prosecution side revealed that British police had sent out a bomb alert warning of four devices—not the six or ten in the IRA’s original plans—and had sealed ports and airports at 6:00 A.M. on the day of the bombings, long before the bombs had even been put in place. The intelligence was very specific and suggested the existence of an agent somewhere at the top of the organization. In addition, the police had distributed photographs of the Price sisters with instructions to stop them—it was clear that the police in Britain knew not only that a bombing was planned but who was involved. The evidence appeared to point to a serious leak somewhere in the Belfast Brigade, but attempts to hold an internal investigation into the affair were resisted.

THE NET HAD CLOSED over the London bombers, and in a wider sense it was also closing in on the Provisionals. On the political front the fracture within nationalism brought about by the fall of Stormont deepened. Whitelaw cajoled the SDLP into talks and won the party’s support with a promise that any deal negotiated would need to embrace “the Irish dimension” and that other nationalist concerns would have to be addressed. In March 1973 Whitelaw published a white paper that recommended a power-sharing form of government that would give the SDLP a guaranteed say in running Northern Ireland. There would also be a Council of Ireland to give meaning to the Irish dimension.

The principle of consent—the doctrine that Northern Ireland would stay British as long as a majority wanted—was reaffirmed, but there were other, balancing concessions for Catholics. Oaths of allegiance to the British crown, which were obligatory for civil servants, teachers, and local councillors and which Catholics considered discriminatory, were abolished. Most nationalists found Whitelaw’s proposals to their liking, and gradually the middle classes dropped their post-internment boycott of the state and returned to public life. There were other positive developments to encourage the Catholic middle class. In mid-1973 the first loyalist paramilitaries were interned, thus answering a long-standing nationalist complaint that the implementation of internment had been biased and one-sided.

The Provisionals meantime sought refuge in ideological purity and as a consequence became more isolated. In January 1973 Sinn Fein announced that it would boycott local council elections planned for later in the year. These went ahead, and the SDLP managed to establish itself as the North’s largest nationalist party. In June an SDLP councillor became mayor of Derry, once the capital city of unionist discrimination. When elections were held to Whitelaw’s power-sharing Assembly, the IRA urged nationalists either to boycott the poll or to spoil their votes. Another Stormont parliament would hinder the achievement of “a just and lasting peace,” it said.57 Most nationalists ignored the IRA and voted. The SDLP got a mandate, 22 percent of the votes and one-fifth of the seats. When the results came in, the SDLP leader in Derry, John Hume, declared, “The IRA have now heard the voice of the people and it is time they listened.”⁵⁸

Operation Motorman had meanwhile tightened the British army’s grip on the previously unchallenged no-go areas of republican Belfast and curtailed the IRA’s freedom of movement. The numbers of IRA suspects arrested and either interned or charged with criminal offenses increased steadily, according to official claims: one hundred by November 1972, a thousand by the following April. In June 1973 the Northern Ireland Office claimed that 500 IRA members had been convicted and sentenced since Motorman, eight of whom had been given life sentences, the rest an average of four years in jail apiece. Slowly the number interned fell—it stood at 450 in early 1973 but at 330 in June—as the British relied increasingly on the courts to put their adversaries out of action.

By this time Adams had found a safe billet in the University area in neutral South Belfast where he lived with Colette, by now expecting their first son, Gearoid. Like some sort of revolutionary commuter, Adams traveled daily from the safety of his middle-class hideout into the war zone of West Belfast to direct IRA operations. The fact that the IRA’s senior figure in Belfast was now unable to live among his own people was eloquent testimony to the extent to which events had put the IRA on the defensive.

On July 18, another signal that the IRA’s fortunes were slipping came when the Northern Ireland Constitution Bill, a product of Whitelaw’s political negotiations, became law and enshrined once again in section 1, part 1, the principle of consent, that Northern Ireland would remain part of Northern Ireland unless and until a majority of people voted otherwise in a poll. The passage of the bill symbolized the gravity of the political reverses suffered by the IRA since the suspension of the Stormont parliament in March 1972. The British move to strip unionism of power had succeeded in dividing nationalism and diluting opposition to the state, while the IRA’s stubborn support for violence alienated more and more Catholics.

The largest section of nationalism, represented by the SDLP, which was supported by the Catholic middle classes and church hierarchy, welcomed British direct rule and quickly entered into talks with the British and eventually the unionists about a deal that at its core would, inevitably, recognize the constitutional integrity of Northern Ireland. It was a decisive break with the Provisionals. The Catholic middle-class boycott of the institutions of Northern Ireland, which had begun in sympathy with and protest against the internment of IRA men in August 1971, slowly evaporated, and soon constitutional nationalist politicians and Catholic clerics would be condemning IRA violence with the gusto and vehemence they had once reserved for British excesses.