Gerry Adams’s release from Long Kesh was eagerly anticipated by the IRA in Belfast and in the rest of Ireland. It was clear to even the most junior Volunteer that the organization had lost its sense of direction by the spring of 1977, that it had come out of the cease-fire in a battered and damaged state, and that its leadership was largely directionless and bereft of new ideas. Defeat stared the IRA bleakly in the face, and it was to Gerry Adams and the group around him that republicans now looked for salvation. The grassroots were aware of the divisions inside the jail, knew of the critique Adams had made of the Army Council’s policies, but they also knew that he had a reputation for strategic innovation, and although only a few were privy to the detail of his plans, most expected Adams to come out of jail with some sort of blueprint for regeneration.
He was supposed to go on a vacation south of the Border with his family immediately after his release from Cage 11, but within hours of being reunited with Colette, Gearoid, and the wider Adams clan in Ballymurphy, he changed his plans. Seamus Twomey, the IRA chief of staff, who was still in hiding in Dublin after his dramatic escape from Mountjoy jail, had sent a message summoning him to an urgent meeting. Adams had been able to communicate with Twomey and the Army Council from Long Kesh but only within limits. Written messages as well as the occasional typewritten document were smuggled out by visitors, and these had included a lengthy critique of the cease-fire and the state of the IRA that Adams had composed. His trip to Dublin after his release gave Twomey and Adams the first chance to discuss fully all the momentous events of the preceding four years and to bring Adams up to date on the implementation of the IRA reorganization plans hatched with Ivor Bell inside Long Kesh, not least the creation of Northern Command.
By the end of 1977, less than a year after his release from Long Kesh, Adams had become chief of staff in succession to Twomey, but not before another spell as Belfast commander. Debilitated by the 1975 cease-fire and a series of security successes by the British, the Belfast Brigade had corroded badly under McKee’s stewardship. Both the quality and quantity of IRA operations in the city had seriously deteriorated and when McKee was finally ousted, Gerry Adams was drafted in to reorganize and revive the organization.
Recapturing the Belfast Brigade from Billy McKee was an important milestone in Adams’s quest to dominate and mould the IRA nationally. In the late 1970s, as at the outset of the Troubles, Belfast was the engine for the IRA nationally. If the IRA in Belfast prospered so did the entire organization; if it faltered in the city, it faltered everywhere. And whoever dominated the IRA in Belfast, especially when it was doing well, inevitably carried huge clout in the national leadership.
Following his release from jail, Adams was armed with a powerful critique of the McKee leadership and had crafted a far-reaching plan to revive the IRA. But he also encountered stiff resistance to his agenda, even from those who had been part of his circle before his arrest. The explanation was very simple. The McKee leadership had taken pains to ensure that their supporters were in key positions throughout the Belfast Brigade and elsewhere in the IRA. No matter how convincing Adams’s case was against the cease-fire leadership, it made little impact on men who owed their positions and status to that leadership. Adams had to move with guile and caution to advance his agenda.
Assuming command of the Belfast Brigade brought Adams the breakthrough he needed. McKee’s allies in Belfast were removed and replaced with figures sympathetic to Adams and his reorganization plan. He also had the support of Seamus Twomey, the IRA’s chief of staff, who managed to get Adams on to the Army Council later in 1977. These developments paved the way for a decisive shift in the IRA’s direction that was cemented when Adams succeeded Twomey as the IRA’s military commander.
By 1977 two important allies from the North had joined the Council, and they would greatly assist the project. One was Martin McGuinness, the Derry IRA commander, whose IRA career had been launched when he was talent-spotted by Daithi O Conaill in 1971, and Brian Keenan, who by 1977 was IRA quartermaster-general, in charge of acquiring, hiding and distributing the IRA’s weapons.
McGuinness had spent much of the 1975 cease-fire either on the run across the Border or in Portlaoise prison, where he had been jailed after a conviction for IRA membership. Unlike Gerry Adams, he was not yet a national figure in the IRA but was known in Derry as a fearless and talented commander. Whereas Adams had a family history of association with the IRA, McGuinness’s parents were strong supporters of the old Nationalist Party and were typical of the vast majority of Catholics in a city never known for its adherence to the republican cause. Street violence, first involving the RUC and then the British army, had driven McGuinness into the IRA, initially the Goulding Officials, who had the greater support in the Derry of 1969–70. Unhappy at the Officials’ military timidity, McGuinness switched to the Provisionals just before internment removed the bulk of its activists. He suddenly found himself a general in a tiny army, but one that quickly mushroomed in numbers as conflict with the British intensified.
McGuinness had managed to stay out of the controversy caused by Cage 11’s campaign against the truce but had strongly supported Adams’s reorganization scheme and was rewarded with a place on the staff of the new Northern Command, first as operations officer (“double O,” in IRA parlance) and then as northern commander. Adams’s release and elevation to the Army Council meanwhile encouraged Keenan to abandon a long-standing reluctance to involve himself in the IRA leadership. Senior colleagues had often complained about Keenan’s repeated refusal to throw in his lot with them by joining either the Council or the IRA Executive, the twelve-person body whose main function was to select the Council’s members. But with Adams now on the Council, Keenan’s reservations dissolved. The effect of this crucial move was to strengthen Adams’s hand significantly.
The rest of the Army Council was a different matter. All the key figures were either obstacles to Adams’s ascent or ideological foes. Two in particular, Daithi O Conaill and Ruairi O Bradaigh, were major roadblocks. In 1977 the pair were still powers in the republican movement despite widespread criticism of their handling of the truce. Both men had enthusiastically backed the cessation and had played leading roles in bringing it about and nurturing it, and when it failed Cage 11 blamed them. O Conaill had acted as spokesman for the Army Council when senior Irish and English Protestant clerics had met the IRA leaders in an isolated hotel in Feakle, County Clare, in December 1974 to broker the cease-fire terms. His importance to the cease-fire was recognized by the British, who chose to send messages down the clerical pipeline to the IRA via O Conaill rather than anyone else. O Bradaigh was a member of a three-man Army Council delegation that met secretly with British officials in Derry throughout the cessation. His commitment to a successful resolution of the IRA’s campaign was more personal. When asked by the Feakle clergymen why he wanted a settlement, O Bradaigh had replied that the war could consume a second generation if it wasn’t brought to a halt.1 There was no doubting the disappointment of both men when the cease-fire failed to secure the deal they had hoped for.
Notwithstanding that failure, O Conaill and O Bradaigh had an IRA record that ensured they had considerable support at grassroots level, particularly in the South, where they were well known and respected. If they had a weakness, it was that they were largely unknown quantities north of the Border, where the attentions of the British security forces meant it was too risky to circulate frequently among the rank and file. To most of those IRA activists who had joined since the early 1970s, they were distant figures, a weakness Adams would later exploit to his great advantage.
Soon Adams would have two close allies by his side in the Army Council. One was his old Second Battalion and Belfast Brigade comrade Ivor Bell; the other was Danny Morrison, the republican movement’s able public relations guru and editor of Republican News, who first handled publicity relations for Northern Command and then became the IRA’s overall director of publicity. According to one account of this period, Adams, McGuinness, and Bell tightened their control of the Army Council by taking advantage of a clause in the IRA constitution that allowed the Council to co-opt people to fill vacancies in its ranks as long as the Executive ratified the appointment later. But in practice, knowledgeable sources say, no ratification was ever sought, a snub to the Executive that exacerbated internal divisions.
As Adams and his allies consolidated their hold on the IRA leadership, Billy McKee emerged as the first target. McKee had become president of their Army Council during the 1975 cease-fire, a post separate from that of chief of staff, whose occupant normally fulfilled a plenipotentiary role on behalf of the leadership. Along with Ruairi O Bradaigh, he had led the secret Derry negotiations with British officials on behalf of the Army Council, and like O Bradaigh and O Conaill, he desperately wanted the cease-fire to work. A confirmed bachelor who lived with his elderly mother and later his sisters, McKee was a deeply religious man who attended Mass daily. A quiet talker, he was described by one of the Feakle clerics as looking “like a Baptist pastor or a Sunday school teacher.” The reason McKee gave the Protestant clergymen for wanting the cease-fire to succeed revealed much about his politics. “He was fed up with the fight because it was doing more harm to the Catholic Church than enough,” recalled one. “When [the war] started at first all the boys went to Mass, but now they weren’t going. He said, ‘I’m not fighting to destroy my church.’”2
Adams’s attack on McKee centered on his direction of the IRA during the cease-fire, in particular alleging that he had encouraged the IRA to fight a sectarian war and to feud with other republican groups. McKee, the Adams camp said, had fallen into a double British trap. The sectarian killings allowed Britain to say that the Troubles were a communal conflict, not an anticolonial war, while the shooting wars with the Officials just spread demoralization in the nationalist community, something the British welcomed. It was the latter that provided the reason for Billy McKee’s fall.
McKee’s approach to conflicts with Goulding’s Officials was simple, as an IRA activist of the day recalled: “His attitude was that ‘if any of my men are hit, I’ll hit back.’”3 The 1975 feud had claimed eleven lives, and scores more were injured. This and the killings of Protestants had enraged the Cage 11 dissidents. “When I first met Adams, he was very angry over what had been happening outside while he was in jail,” remembered the same IRA source. “He was pointing out that we started the ’75 feud. Yobos in the Provos would get drunk, start fights, and away you go, and we are supposed to be surprised when it started up. In that feud a score or more ‘Sticks’ shot in one and a half hours, then retaliations. Meanwhile 150 Catholics are killed by loyalists, more retaliations but no British being killed. It was a total waste.”4 The hostility toward McKee from the Cage 11 dissidents ran to such feverish levels that some even argued that they should arrange to get the Belfast commander shot dead.5
While Adams and those who thought like him undoubtedly saw McKee as a political and military liability, he was still a formidable opponent. When Adams was released from Long Kesh, McKee still had iconic status among the IRA grassroots, particularly in Belfast. McKee had two strikes in his favor. He had helped to defend St. Matthew’s Church in East Belfast against a loyalist mob, and his long hunger strike had, in IRA eyes at least, secured political status for IRA prisoners in the jails. As long as Billy McKee still held a leadership position in the IRA, Adams’s ambitions would be stalled.
The Revolutionary Council, the gathering of twenty to thirty IRA commanders and senior officers devised in Cage 11, was the instrument Adams used to purge McKee from the Army Council. McKee’s downfall began with yet another feud between the Officials and the Provisionals which broke out not long after Adams’s release from Cage 11.
AT THE EASTER commemorations in Belfast on April 10, 1977, a parcel bomb exploded just as the Official IRA parade was about to leave for the republican plot at Milltown cemetery from the assembly point at Beechmount Avenue in the mid–Falls Road area. A ten-year-old boy whose father was a member of the Officials’ political wing, the Republican Clubs, was killed, and several other Official IRA members and sympathizers were injured. The Officials assumed that the Provisionals had placed the bomb, and they set out to exact revenge. When the Officials’ parade eventually arrived at the gates of Milltown, the Provisionals were just leaving and the angry crowds clashed. Violent fistfights broke out, and shots were fired. Later that afternoon the dead boy’s uncle was shot dead by the Provisionals, and others were wounded. The feuding was stemmed when Catholic priests mediated a settlement, but the bad feelings simmered on for weeks even when it became clear that it had been loyalists, members of the UVF’s notorious Shankill Butchers gang, who had planted the Beechmount bomb, not the Provisionals. Nevertheless, at the end of July the Provisionals struck again, when gunmen killed a top-ranking Official IRA officer from North Belfast. Over the next four hours three more people were killed, two of them Provisionals and one a civilian mistaken for a member of the Officials. The last to die was Adams’s old friend Tommy “Toddler” Tolan, who along with Jim Bryson had helped make the Ballymurphy IRA unit such a formidable outfit back in the early 1970s.
His alleged failure to secure Army Council permission for striking against the Officials was the charge leveled against McKee at a Revolutionary Council meeting later that autumn. The accused IRA leader had no defense and appears to have been taken by surprise at the strength of the assault. According to one account McKee told the meeting that he could not remember the details of what had happened, and he was heavily criticized by one speaker after another, many of them members of the Adams camp. At a meeting of the Army Council held afterward, the censure continued, and he was out. Of the Council members present, only O Bradaigh spoke up for him. One version of what happened says that he resigned, another that he was asked to go.6
Whatever the truth, Billy McKee’s days as an IRA leader were over, and he was badly affected by the experience. “I saw him the next morning, and he was a shrunken man,” recalled a GHQ member who was at the Revolutionary Council meeting.7 Shortly afterward he was admitted to hospital first in Belfast and then in Drogheda over the Border, and his illness was the official reason given to fellow republicans for his departure from the leadership.
Adams had chosen the right issue on which to confront McKee. Had he criticized McKee for allowing the IRA to kill Protestants, the outcome might have been very different. While important IRA leaders, Twomey in particular, were ready to accept that feuding with the Officials played into British hands, striking back against the loyalists was a different matter. The truth was that many IRA leaders, particularly those from Belfast, found little wrong with McKee’s uncompromising attitude to the loyalist gangs and had raised no objection when the retaliations were at their worst in 1975 and 1976. “Twomey was all about protecting Belfast from the Prods,” explained one contemporary.8
Adams’s criticism of the 1974–75 cease-fire was accompanied by promises that if he and his supporters had their way there would never be another cessation unless and until the British had committed to withdrawal, and it was this dual approach that appealed most to the Revolutionary Council. There had been a great deal of resentment within the republican grassroots at the way the 1974–75 cease-fire had been handled, and the Adams camp expertly exploited the unease. The IRA leadership had never spelled out the terms of the cease-fire or made public any of the promises allegedly made, and broken, by the British. Even the way the cease-fire had ended was never satisfactorily explained. Above all there was a suspicion that the Army Council had been tricked and manipulated by the British, who had used the breathing space afforded by the cease-fire to reorganize and refocus their drive against the IRA. The overwhelming sentiment after the truce among activists at all levels in the IRA was that never again must a cease-fire be called unless the IRA had the British on the rack. It was against this strident background and distaste for cease-fires that Adams and his supporters made their pitch.
The message that they delivered was that as far as he and his supporters were concerned, there would be no more cease-fires, no repeat of the disaster of 1974–75. Presenting a hard-line, militant face was a strategy that Adams was to use again and again to take his leadership colleagues and the IRA rank and file down paths they otherwise would have shunned.
The anti-cease-fire message was repeated in public as well as privately. Using the Brownie pen name he had adopted in 1975, Adams had started sending it out as early as May 1976, using a Republican News critique of the leaders who had declared the 1921 Truce to make a thinly veiled denunciation of those behind the 1975 cessation. An admission of IRA membership in one Brownie column led Sinn Fein spin doctors during the later peace process years—when Adams was emphatically denying any association at all with the IRA, past or present—to claim that others in Cage 11 shared the Brownie by-line with Adams and that the offending article had actually been penned by Richard McAuley, Adams’s aide and constant companion during the peace process. Cage 11 veterans insist, however, that Brownie’s work was the product of only one hand, while the Republican movement as a whole regarded the Brownie articles as carrying Adams’s imprimatur. “The weakness of the IRA of that period,” wrote Brownie,
was that instead of pursuing the war to its bitter end come what may, they allowed unscrupulous politicians and so-called “Peacemakers” to gain the upper hand. The result was the betrayal of the Fight for Freedom followed by a vicious and brutal Civil War and of course partition. It is to be hoped that the lesson of that period will not be lost on today’s leaders. There is only one time to talk of peace and that is when the war has been won not while it is raging. The time to talk of peace is when the British have left Ireland, otherwise they will find some excuse to remain.9
Within two years the message had become much more explicit while public condemnation of the 1975 leadership was barely concealed. In an interview with Vincent Browne, the editor of Magill magazine, a GHQ spokesman was blunt. Asked what attitude the IRA now had to talks with Britain of the sort that had happened during the truce, the spokesman replied, “We now regard such talks as entirely futile and the only time we will talk to the British again is when they come to us and ask our help to secure their immediate departure from Ireland.” Pressed on whether or not any consideration had been given to another cease-fire, the spokesman did not mince his words: “None. There is absolutely no question of another ceasefire or truce. In my opinion the last one went on far too long and it would be almost impossible for anybody to persuade the Volunteers that another one would be in the interests of the Movement or its objectives. Our aim now is to win the struggle on this occasion and we are prepared to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to achieve this.”10 To drive the message home, Republican News reproduced the Magill interview in a special double-page center spread.
The American writer Kevin Kelley was given the same story in, if anything, stronger terms:
[T]he IRA today asserts that almost certainly it will not enter into a cease-fire agreement again, no matter what the bait might be. The Provos’ postmortem on the truce of 1975 is that, on balance, it proved to be seriously damaging to the movement, politically as well as militarily. As one volunteer observed…, “Even if the Brits reintroduced internment tomorrow and managed to pick up most of our guerrillas and all our weapons, we still wouldn’t ask for a cease-fire. The attitude would be, ‘Right, let’s get some new recruits and some more guns and keep fighting.’ Cease-fires are just not on.”11
It was hardly surprising that, presented with such uncompromising sentiments, the Revolutionary Council was so ready to give Adams his way and the Army Council so unwilling to oppose him.
The other reason was that the new leadership was quite simply delivering the goods. Although the IRA was never able to reproduce violence on the level and scale reached in the early 1970s, the years immediately after Adams joined the Army Council nevertheless saw a significant recovery in its fortunes, one which even the British were obliged to concede.
In 1977 Roy Mason had boasted of squeezing the IRA like a toothpaste tube, but eighteen months later, after the changes introduced by Adams had begun to take effect, his successor, Margaret Thatcher’s nominee Humphrey Atkins, was forced to admit to the British House of Commons that the situation had changed radically. In July 1979 he told MPs, “The first six months of this year have shown a marked rise in the level of terrorism and have demonstrated that we are up against a more professional enemy, organised on a system of self-contained, close-knit cells which make it difficult to gather information. Their weapons are more powerful and their operations have a different emphasis.”12 Atkins was not saying that the IRA was able to present the sort of threat it had posed in the early 1970s, but his words were an acknowledgment that the defeat of the IRA was no longer within easy reach.
Toward the end of 1977 Adams’s grip on the IRA leadership strengthened. In November, Belgian customs officers, possibly acting on an intelligence tip-off from the police in Dublin, discovered six tons of Russian-and French-made automatic pistols, explosives, mortars, rockets, and rocket launchers and ammunition hidden in electrical transformers on board the MV Towerstream, which had docked at Antwerp after a voyage from Cyprus. The weapons had been smuggled from the Middle East and were being sent to a front company in Dublin established by a GHQ officer called Seamus McCollum. The Garda Special Branch put him under surveillance and on December 2 swooped on a house in Martello Terrace in the scenic Sandycove area of South Dublin, where McCollum was arrested. The operation was a singular success, but the detectives got two apparently unexpected bonuses. In the flat detectives found a draft of the cellular reorganization plan put together by Adams at the request of the Army Council, while outside they found Seamus Twomey sitting in a parked car. After a frantic car chase that ended outside Fianna Fail’s headquarters in central Dublin, Twomey was captured. Four years earlier he and other IRA men had made world headlines when a helicopter had swooped into the exercise yard of Mountjoy jail in Dublin and carried him off to freedom. It was one of the most dramatic jail breakouts in the IRA’s history. Now he was back behind bars.
The circumstances surrounding the capture of Twomey have long been a matter of conjecture and controversy within the IRA, not least because his departure paved the way for Adams to become chief of staff for the first and only time. Adams was the sixth chief of staff in the Provisional IRA’s history, and his tenure is distinguished by two features: his reign as military commander was the only one that can be precisely dated, and it was also the shortest. He took over immediately after Twomey’s arrest but lost the post seventy-eight days later, on February 18, 1978, when he was arrested by the RUC along with over twenty other republican suspects, as a wave of condemnation swept Ireland following one of the most horrific IRA incidents of the Troubles.
THE BOTCHED BOMBING of the La Mon House hotel on the southeastern outskirts of Belfast was one of the worst atrocities of the IRA’s campaign, its twelve uninvolved victims exceeding the death toll of Bloody Friday. The bombing was a political and public relations disaster for the IRA, tarnishing its attempts to present a new efficient military face to the world and once again marking the IRA with a sectarian stigma—all twelve of the dead were Protestants. The La Mon bombing also held up the implementation of the Adams military and political agenda by nearly a year, much to the dismay of his supporters and allies.
The dead, seven of them women, had been attending the annual dinner dance of the Irish Collie Club when a blast incendiary bomb hung on a window of the restaurant exploded, sending a huge fireball billowing through the room and incinerating everything and everyone in its path. The IRA later admitted that the warning it had phoned to the RUC was inadequate. The bombers could not find a public phone box nearby, and by the time they did, the bomb was just minutes away from detonation. There was simply not enough time to evacuate the building. The outrage caused by the size of the death toll and the horrible manner in which the victims met their end was intense and widespread, and orders were issued to arrest Adams. He was picked up by the RUC in West Belfast, questioned at Castlereagh holding center, and then held in Crumlin Road jail in Belfast on an IRA membership charge for the following seven months. But the case against him collapsed before it reached a full trial. It had been based on what proved to be flimsy evidence, principally clips from a BBC TV Panorama program featuring him making a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis speech in which he used words like “billet” and “war zone.” Much to the anger of the British, the North’s senior judge, Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Lowry, threw out the case.
Adams was once more free, but he would never again hold the post of chief of staff. The disaster at La Mon had happened on his watch as chief of staff, and while he was clearly not responsible for the bungled warnings that caused the deadly inferno, the use of La Mon-style incendiary bombs had been approved by an IRA leadership of which he was then a crucial part. As soon as he was arrested, his place had been taken by Martin McGuinness, who occupied the position for the next four years while Ivor Bell replaced McGuinness as Northern commander; on his release Adams became McGuinness’s deputy, the IRA’s adjutant-general. The takeover of the IRA begun inside the cages of Long Kesh was complete and the Adams—McGuinness era had begun.
The months after Adams’s arrest were quiet as the IRA attempted to recover the swaths of political and propaganda ground lost after La Mon. Operations diminished in both number and scale, and the use of the deadly blast incendiary bomb virtually ceased. But in November 1978, two months after Adams’s release from jail and his assumption of the Northern Command post, the IRA offensive resumed. On the night of November 30, sixteen towns were bombed in the space of a one-hour period; altogether that month more than fifty bombs exploded across Northern Ireland, injuring nearly forty people. At the same time the Army Council authorized a new bombing campaign in England, and that Christmas police leave in London was canceled in expectation of a bombing blitz. By coincidence or otherwise, Adams’s release from prison signaled an upsurge in IRA violence.
Humphrey Atkins’s view that the post-1977 IRA was becoming a greater menace received its most powerful endorsement from one of the British army generals charged with combating the organization. An assessment of the IRA threat written in November 1978 by Brigadier James Glover, an intelligence specialist who later became the British army’s commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, fell into the IRA’s hands and was released by the IRA’s publicity department in May 1979. If Gerry Adams had been asked to write Glover’s report, he could hardly have done a better job. The brigadier’s central conclusion was an alarming one for the British government but music to the IRA’s ears. The Provisional IRA, he wrote, “has the dedication and the sinews of war” to maintain the then current levels of violence for the foreseeable future. He went on, “The Provisionals cannot attract the large number of active terrorists they had in 1972–73. But they no longer need them. PIRA’s organisation is now such that a small number of activists can maintain a disproportionate level of violence… though PIRA may be hard hit by Security Force attrition from time to time, they will probably continue to have the manpower they need to sustain violence….” He also paid a compliment to Adams’s skills in revamping the IRA: “[B]y reorganising on cellular lines PIRA has become less dependent on public support than in the past and is less vulnerable to penetration by informers.”
For years the official British propaganda view of the typical IRA Volunteer painted a picture of thugs motivated by subhuman criminality, but Glover recognized not only that this was rubbish but that the IRA itself was a great deal more sophisticated than was ever publicly admitted. “Our evidence of the calibre of rank-and-file terrorists does not support the view that they are mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and the unemployable. PIRA now trains and uses its members with some care…. They are constantly learning from mistakes and developing their expertise… there has been a marked trend towards attacks against the Security Forces and away from action which, by alienating public opinion, both within the Catholic community and outside the province is politically damaging.” Glover’s final judgment underwrote the entire Adams project: “The [republican] Movement will retain popular support sufficient to maintain secure bases in the traditional republican areas,” he wrote.13
Meanwhile Adams was using his post as adjutant-general to consolidate his standing in the eyes of the rank and file. His brief included enforcing discipline and reviewing IRA unit strength all over the country. The circumstances of the late 1970s were very different from those of 1973, when Adams was last on active service. Internment had been phased out, and while the authorities would dearly have loved to put him back in jail, they lacked the evidence to convict him in court, as Roy Mason had learned to his cost. Adams was now able to move around freely, and as he did so his influence outside Belfast grew, as a contemporary recalled:
Unlike any of his predecessors he was by this stage not on the run. He could go anywhere and spend days at a time reviewing units. He would arrive at a house, for instance, where there had been a death in the family and sympathize, telling them that he and Colette had prayed at Clonard for whoever it was, you know, showing a charming, personal touch. He made contact at a human level in a way his predecessors couldn’t, and that helped him to disseminate his message and win support.14
LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN was arguably the best-known and possibly best-respected member of the British royal family. A naval hero, he had served with distinction during the Second World War, commanding a British destroyer, the HMS Kelly, which was torpedoed several times in an incident immortalized in Noel Coward’s 1942 film In Which We Serve. He went on to serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia between 1943 and 1946, after which he was named viceroy of India, in which capacity he oversaw the turbulent and violent handover of power to the Congress Party and the partition of India into separate Muslim and Hindu states. It was, however, his role as adviser and confidant of the British royal family that really marked him out as a significant figure. As cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and mentor to Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, Mountbatten was eagerly sought out for his advice and experience by a dynasty going through painful and unwelcome changes in the media-conscious, iconoclastic latter half of the twentieth century.
The seventy-nine-year-old Mountbatten had a soft spot for Ireland. Since the early 1970s he had vacationed for part of each summer at Mullaghmore on the Bay of Donegal between Bundoran and Sligo on the northwest coast. It was a dangerous spot for such a high-profile member of the British establishment to spend his vacations. Bundoran was a popular resort with Derry folk, and inevitably the summer crowds enjoying a vacation break would include IRA members and sympathizers who would be bound to hear of Mountbatten’s presence and might be tempted to strike a spectacular blow against the British royal family. But Mountbatten ignored the security advice to think twice about spending time there and continued to enjoy his fishing and boating expeditions off a section of the Irish coastline that everyone agreed was spectacularly beautiful.
His stubbornness cost him his life. On August 27, 1979, he died instantly when a fifty-pound radio-controlled bomb exploded on his thirty-foot pleasure craft, reducing the vessel to matchwood. Mountbatten died alongside his fourteen-year-old grandson, his daughter’s mother-in-law, and a fifteen-year-old boat boy from Enniskillen. It was clear that the IRA had known all about Mountbatten’s vacations for some time but had deliberately chosen this moment to move against him. The new British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had just taken office. She was a hardline opponent of Irish republicanism who was known to sympathize with the unionists and whose close friend and adviser on Northern Ireland matters, Airey Neave, had been killed by a bomb planted by the violent splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), during the 1979 British general election campaign. Mountbatten’s killing, as the IRA must have known, could only drive the new prime minister to adopt tough security measures of the sort that in the past had sustained and nourished the IRA.
The British establishment and media were only beginning to digest the enormity of this disaster when, later the same day, news of another catastrophe came in. On the shores of Carlingford Lough, a picturesque stretch of sea that divides County Down in the North from County Louth in the Republic, a two-truck convoy of British paratroopers was making its way from the soldiers’ base in Ballykinler to Newry when a huge bomb, hidden beneath hay on a trailer parked by the roadside, was detonated by a radio signal. The explosion devastated the convoy. Six soldiers died instantly, and when their shocked and disoriented colleagues came under sniper fire from across the bay, they sought refuge in the ruins of a gate lodge at a spot called Narrow Water. The frantic survivors radioed for assistance, and within twenty-five minutes a large Wessex helicopter carrying soldiers from the Queen’s Own Highlanders arrived and cautiously landed in a nearby field. No sooner had the reinforcements disembarked than another huge bomb, hidden near the gate lodge, was detonated. Another twelve soldiers were killed and a score or more seriously injured. Among the dead was the CO of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, Lieutenant Colonel David Blair, who was so close to the explosion that his body was literally vaporized by the force of the blast. It was a classic guerrilla ambush that drew the grudging admiration of the British, but there was no concealing the scale of the calamity. The death toll was the highest of the Troubles for the British army and represented the worst casualties suffered by the Paras since the Battle of Arnhem in 1944. In the annals of Anglo-Irish conflict it equaled or surpassed the famous Kilmichael attack of November 1920 in which the West Cork IRA commanded by the legendary guerrilla leader Tom Barry had ambushed a convoy of auxiliary police and, depending upon the version of the incident, killed seventeen or eighteen of their number.15
Between them the combined slaughter at Narrow Water and the assassination of Earl Mountbatten threatened to pitch Northern Ireland into the sort of security crisis relished by the IRA. There were rows between the RUC and the British army over who should lead the security battle against the IRA, and Mrs. Thatcher was forced to referee. She appointed Sir Maurice Oldfield, a former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, as security coordinator in an effort to improve interservice intelligence operations. Despite the provocation, the incident did not, however, tempt Thatcher into the sort of precipitate response the IRA had hoped for. The IRA, under Adams as under any of its leaders, operated on the principle that the more Britain resorted to crude repression, the greater the degree of sympathy and support, passive and active, the organization could count on from nationalists. The classic example of that was the one-sided internment operation of 1971, which had boosted IRA ranks enormously. For years afterward the IRA lived in hope that the British would repeat that mistake. But Thatcher disappointed them.
THE REAL LONG-TERM significance of the events of August 27, 1979, was that they enormously fortified Adams’s status in the IRA and thus his control of and influence over the republican movement’s political direction. In its review of 1979, An Phoblacht – Republican News gave the credit for Mountbatten, Narrow Water, and other military successes to the changes pioneered by Adams: “Last year was one of resounding Republican success,” crowed the paper, “when the IRA’s cellular reorganisation was operationally vindicated, particularly through the devastating use of remote-control bombs.”16 The IRA had been delivered from the disaster of 1974–75.
It has become an accepted part of the mythology of this period in the IRA’s development that Adams’s reorganization plan rescued the organization from certain defeat and was responsible for a dramatic turnaround in its fortunes between 1977 and 1979. The truth may be more complex. To begin with, the cell system was largely a Belfast phenomenon. Some rural areas successfully fought to maintain their old structures and the operational spontaneity and local control that came with them. The South Armagh Brigade, whose members had planned and carried out the Narrow Water attack, was perhaps the best example of this. Even in Belfast the reorganizing was far from complete or universal, as one former battalion commander recalled: “The cells in Belfast were never really divorced from the old company structures, because they [the companies] were needed for logistics, safe houses, call houses, and so on.”17
Those involved in fighting the war believed that a much more important factor in reviving the IRA after the 1975 cease-fire was the fact that the British had ended internment, and as a consequence scores of released IRA prisoners returned to active service. Internment was brought to an end officially in December 1975 as part of the cease-fire deal, and after this IRA suspects began to be processed through the courts and treated like ordinary criminals. As far as the Cage 11 dissidents were concerned, the criminalization policy that followed internment represented a major political setback, but according to another IRA commander it brought an unanticipated bonus for the organization:
Myself and [Billy] McKee analysed the political situation at the time [late 1974]. Internment had decimated the ranks of the IRA and in Ardoyne we had only four active Volunteers. I was never consulted about the possibility of a ceasefire and I near blew a gasket when I heard in prison that the Feakle talks had taken place. But I can’t understand these people who say that the truce wrecked us. In my view it strengthened us. We had a lot of internees coming back in for active service. It was so unlike the situation in 1974 when we had four active Volunteers. By the start of 1976 we were bursting at the seams.18
Nevertheless Adams received most of the credit for the IRA’s resurgence, and as his position strengthened he set his sights on removing the last obstacles in his way to unchallenged control of the republican movement. With Billy McKee ousted, the two most formidable remaining opposition figures were Daithi O Conaill and Ruairi O Bradaigh. The Belfast leader had once confided to a colleague on the Army Council the tactical approach he favored when going about the destruction and removal of political enemies, and it was this line of attack that he adopted to remove the Southern veterans: “ ‘You don’t confront people,’ he would say. ‘You isolate and marginalize them and then get rid of them.’ I often heard him say that,” the figure recalled.19 It was to be a long, arduous, and at times painful campaign against O Conaill and O Bradaigh, but in the end it succeeded—the pair was isolated, marginalized, and then discarded.
Gerry Adams’s drive against O Conaill and O Bradaigh had actually started before the purge of McKee when, in July 1977, the Revolutionary Council was convened to expel a fellow West Belfast man, Gerry O’Hare, a former public relations man for the republican movement in Belfast who had risen to become editor in Dublin of An Phoblacht, the Provisionals’ Southern weekly paper. There were two reasons for the heave against O’Hare; one was his political friendship with O Conaill and O Bradaigh, and the other was the fact that as long as the editorship of An Phoblacht was in his hands, Adams would be unable to influence republicans south of the Border. The pretext for O’Hare’s removal was, however, a much less straightforward matter.
O’Hare’s wife, Rita, one of the first women to join the male-dominated IRA and a formidable activist in her own right, had been badly wounded during an ambush of British soldiers in Andersonstown in 1972 in which she had taken part. She was arrested and charged, but because of her severe injuries she was given bail. On the eve of her trial she absconded across the Border and took up residence in Dublin. Like many IRA relationships, the O’Hare marriage had been battered by the Troubles and weakened by separation and worry. Gerry had been interned in the North and jailed in the South while the authorities relentlessly pursued his wife in the Republic and attempted to have her extradited back to Belfast for trial. Under the stress and strain, the couple had begun to drift apart. In 1975 the marriage was dealt a devastating blow when Rita attempted to smuggle a stick of gelignite into Portlaoise prison during a visit to an IRA prisoner and was caught. The three-year jail term meted out by the Special Criminal Court in Dublin sounded the death knell for their relationship.
With the couple now married in name only and Rita confined to Portlaoise prison, sixty miles south-west of Dublin, Gerry O’Hare struck up a relationship with Grainne Caffrey, Daithi O Conaill’s sister-in-law and a first cousin of Ruairi O Bradaigh, and it was this that Adams and his allies seized upon to undermine the An Phoblacht editor. Internment and imprisonment had badly weakened family life in republican areas in places like Belfast, and one of the most divisive problems faced by IRA leaders was the constant allegation that prisoners’ wives were sleeping around, often with IRA men still at liberty. At a Revolutionary Council meeting in July 1977, O’Hare was accused of setting a bad example to IRA Volunteers because of his relationship with Grainne Caffrey, and he was dismissed from the editorship of An Phoblacht. “O Bradaigh defended him saying that but for the absence of divorce legislation they [Gerry and Rita O’Hare] would have regularized their situation, but Adams and Co. were pitching their appeal to Twomey and McKee, who were both very conservative Catholics,” recalled one delegate.20
The merciless ousting of O’Hare was the first move in Adams’s push to take control of the Provisionals’ public relations arm. O’Hare was replaced as editor of An Phoblacht by the Dubliner Deasun Breathnach, a member of a distinguished republican clan, but in reality control fell into the hands of Adams and his allies. While Breathnach became editor, power was transferred to an Adams appointee, Mick Timothy, who became manager of the weekly, and soon there were loud and bitter complaints about its content from the O Bradaigh–O Conaill wing.
The takeover of An Phoblacht was interrupted by Adams’s arrest and imprisonment after La Mon, but following his release in September 1978 the campaign resumed with vigor, and the Army Council authorized what was officially termed a fusion of An Phoblacht and Republican News. The new weekly, An Phoblacht–Republican News (AP-RN), was unveiled on January 27, 1979, and its first lead story announced that the purpose of the fusion was to “improve reporting of the war in the North.” But there was a hint of another objective, one that would pitch the organization into ideological turmoil. “We also intend to provide an improved and widened forum for Republican debate on building a new Ireland,” it declared.21
The fusion was a logical move from a number of viewpoints. It made economic sense to produce and distribute one rather than two weeklies, and the existence of separate Southern and Northern papers flew in the face of the republican objective of destroying partition. All these points were made in a paper prepared for the leadership by Danny Morrison, who was slated to be the new paper’s first editor. But the real significance of the merger became clear only after it had happened. It was at first not so much a merging of the two papers as a takeover of An Phoblacht by the Belfast paper, to the extent that the new weekly even looked and read like Republican News. “Effectively the Republican News people came down from Belfast and took it over,” recalls one spectator.22 Even so the real control of the new paper would lie in the hands not of its editorial board, or even the Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle, or Executive, but with the IRA leadership, and as a result the paper would become a powerful vehicle in the effort to undermine the remaining influence of O Conaill, O Bradaigh, and their allies. Republican News had started life as the news sheet of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, and APRN would be the creature of the Adams-dominated Army Council. Having captured the IRA Army Council, Adams was now determined to remove O Conaill and O Bradaigh’s influence from the last forum where their voice was still strong, in the leadership of Sinn Fein. The takeover of AP-RN was a vital first step in that drive.
THE FOUNDERS of the Provisional Republican movement had devised a policy program that they believed would satisfy the two unresolved issues from the 1921 Treaty settlement. Known as Eire Nua, or New Ireland, the program was designed to create political structures that, its architects believed, would calm Protestant fears that a united Ireland would mean their subjugation and eventual absorption by nationalist and Catholic Ireland, while its economic ideology was intended to correct the grave wrong wrought to those who had done most to give Ireland its freedom back in 1919–21. The great economic imbalance that gave the east coast, and especially Dublin, such a huge advantage over the rural west, southwest, and north-west, where much of the IRA’s 1919–21 campaign had been fought, had to be rectified, and the sacrifice made by lower middle classes, particularly the small farmers, who had provided the manpower for the independence struggle, would be recognized in the new order.
No republican policy was more personally identified with O Conaill and O Bradaigh than Eire Nua. It had been adopted as IRA policy in June 1972 when the Army Council endorsed it. Sinn Fein followed suit, and at that year’s Ard Fheis the party’s constitution was changed to encompass the plan. Eire Nua outlined a decentralized federal scheme that would consist of a central government drawn from a federal parliament, half of whose members would be elected nationally via a system of proportional representation and half drawn from four provincial parliaments that would have strong powers over economic policy. The provincial parliaments would be based on the four ancient provinces of Ireland—Munster, Leinster, Connaught, and Ulster—and underneath them would be two further structures, a series of regional development councils and a system of district councils.
The important layer was at the provincial level, and the keystone of the whole edifice was the Ulster parliament. Although based on the pre-1921 province of nine counties, and not on the six counties of Northern Ireland, the Ulster parliament, or Dail Uladh, was intended to safeguard Protestant rights in an independent Ireland and to sweeten the bitter pill of British withdrawal. “Dail Uladh would be representative of Catholic and Protestant, Orange and Green, Left and Right,” declared the Eire Nua document. “It would be an Ulster parliament for the Ulster people. The Unionist-oriented people of Ulster would have a working majority within the Province and would therefore have considerable control over their own affairs. That power would be the surest guarantee of their civil and religious liberties within a New Ireland.”23 At the same time the inclusion of Counties Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal, with their significant nationalist majorities, meant that the overall Protestant majority in Ulster would be a thin one and that compromise with Nationalists would be necessary to make the scheme workable.
Eire Nua held other attractions for the republican movement of the early 1970s. By creating strong provincial governments, Eire Nua intended to adjust the economic and political imbalance that had developed in the Republic as a result of the overdevelopment of the east coast and in particular the spectacular growth of the greater Dublin area since the 1960s. One result of this was that the west of Ireland and the southern and northern edges of the Southern state, including the Border counties, felt excluded and discriminated against. Eire Nua promised to change that. It was no accident that the bulk of Provisional supporters in the South came not from the east coast or from Dublin but from these poorer and more isolated fringes of the country.
A profile of the typical rural Provisional supporter of that time would show him or her to be a member of the small landowning and small business class, what one of their number called “peasant proprietors”24 and an Adams supporter once scornfully dismissed as “Fianna Failers with guns.”25 These were the people who stored weapons and explosives for the IRA’s Northern war, raised money, gave shelter to fugitives, and allowed their land and farms to be used as training grounds, meeting places, and bomb factories. Family ties to the losing side in the civil war motivated many, and few had shared in the benefits of Irish independence; above all they were overwhelmingly Catholic and conservative in their outlook. Eire Nua’s social and economic program appealed to all these elements. Based on the ancient philosophy of Comhar na gComharsan, Eire Nua decreed that the main instrument of economic policy would be the cooperative. A firmly neutral Irish state would control the finance sector and major industries; large ranchers would be dispossessed and their land broken up, and even though private enterprise would still play a role, it would be subservient to the cooperative principle. Non-nationals would be barred from owning a controlling interest in any Irish industry, while the strengthening of the Irish language and culture would be a priority in the new order. All this was, as the Eire Nua document boasted, a compromise between individualistic Western capitalism and the Soviet socialist system, a spot on the political spectrum that ideally suited the Provisionals’ Southern support base.
Both O Conaill and O Bradaigh strongly supported the Eire Nua policy and firmly believed that it was the only scheme that stood a chance of winning Northern Protestants to the idea of Irish unity and independence. But, for Gerry Adams and his allies, hostility to Eire Nua became the route by which they would undermine the O Conaill–O Bradaigh leadership. The assault on Eire Nua that followed took place on two fronts, one within the IRA and the other inside Sinn Fein, and in each case the tactics were markedly different.
Winning over the IRA was the easy part. With the organization now dominated by Northern Command, support for the Eire Nua policy was sapped by appealing to the most sectarian of sentiments—namely that the federalist scheme would leave Northern nationalists in the same subservient situation vis-à-vis the unionists as had existed before British withdrawal. The very reason for waging armed struggle would be questioned in the minds of many Northern and Belfast IRA activists if Eire Nua was implemented. It was, its critics claimed, a sop to loyalism.
Once again the Revolutionary Council was employed to win the argument for Adams. Now dominated by his allies, it rejected Eire Nua at a meeting in Donegal in July 1979 and shortly afterward the Army Council endorsed the decision. Eire Nua was no longer IRA policy, although it was still Sinn Fein’s program. The extraordinary situation now existed where the military and political wings of republicanism held diametrically opposed views on what shape Ireland should take after the British had been forced out of Northern Ireland. Within weeks the Army Council attempted to exert its authority over the Sinn Fein leadership on the issue, and that is when the trouble began, as a participant recalled:
One fine day we were sitting in an Ard Comhairle meeting when a certain gent appeared and announced he had a statement to read, that we had to listen and it was of vital importance that it shouldn’t go outside the room. There was to be no discussion, and after he had read what he came to read we were to move on to the next business. He had been asked to deliver a message saying that the Army Council no longer supported Eire Nua, and all documents and leaflets, stocked and on shelves [dealing with Eire Nua], were to be taken away and boxed.26
A fissure had opened up in the Provisionals that was unseen by the outside world but starkly visible to those at the top of the movement. While Sinn Fein continued to support the idea of Irish federalism, the IRA leadership and increasingly the organization’s weekly paper An Phoblacht – Republican News opposed it. Furthermore, O Conaill and O Bradaigh showed every sign of fighting to hold the precious ground of Eire Nua, playing on what they perceived to be Adams’s fear of a public and damaging split that could cost Northern Command much of its logistical support in the South. At the 1979 Ard Fheis, Sinn Fein delegates overwhelmingly passed a motion proposed by the County Kerry republican Richard Behal and seconded by Daithi O Conaill urging that Eire Nua be “retained, promoted and publicised.” The 1980 Ard Fheis the following November endorsed a similar motion. The two resolutions were as near to an open defiance of the IRA leadership as it was possible to get. That Easter the Army Council replied with a declaration that deliberately omitted any mention of federalism, saying instead that only a unitary state—“a 32 County Democratic Socialist Republic”—could bring unity and peace between Catholics and Protestants.27 The two sides were at war, and occasionally, as at that Easter time, their skirmishes became publicly visible.
The warfare was fought on a number of fronts, political and organizational, but at one Sinn Fein Ard Fheis after another O Bradaigh and O Conaill were slowly but firmly sidelined. The determination of the Adams camp to destroy its enemy was absolute. To establish their militant credentials the Adams camp first persuaded Sinn Fein to back a policy of demanding “immediate” British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and the simultaneous disbandment and disarming of the mostly Protestant RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment. This was pie-in-the-sky stuff of course—there was little chance of republicans ever being able to enforce it—but that was not the purpose. The intention was to contrast Adams’s militancy and determination with the vacillation of O Bradaigh and O Conaill, whose own preference was for a phased and gradual British withdrawal so as to lessen the chances of a violent Protestant reaction, causing a civil war to break out. Meanwhile on the organizational level Adams and his allies pushed through measures that allowed for the co-option of their allies to Sinn Fein’s ruling executive. He also secured approval for the appointment of deputies to the party’s officers, a measure that soon brought charges that Adams’s allies were being placed strategically in places that would allow them to undermine the old guard.
The effect of all this was to gradually strengthen Adams’s grip on the Sinn Fein leadership. In 1977 he could count on the support of at most three other members of the party executive, but five years later he and his supporters had a total of ten out of the sixteen Ard Comhairle members elected by the Ard Fheis on his side and perhaps half or more of the twenty-one co-options.
It was, however, the turn to the left, charted and pioneered by Adams and his supporters, that sharpened the divisions almost to the breaking point. The Adams camp was picking at an ancient scab with this move. It was the extreme socialism of the Goulding leadership that had motivated many of the Southern republicans to side with the Provisionals in 1969 and 1970, and their views had not changed much in the intervening years. The reintroduction of socialist ideas by the Adams faction in the late 1970s deeply unsettled O Conaill, O Bradaigh, and their allies, but it also created a dilemma for them. Goulding’s leftward movement was accompanied by a scaling down of the IRA and military methods and was thus easier to denounce, whereas Adams presented his socialism as part of a revolutionary agenda of which an enhanced armed struggle was a vital and integral part. Opposing Adams’s socialism in these circumstances made O Conaill and O Bradaigh appear as if they were against the IRA at a time when many of those doing the fighting in the North identified fully with other revolutionary movements elsewhere in the world and saw the IRA’s struggle as fully consistent with them. As one of their number recalled, “[We were]… delighted to see the Khmer Rouge take over Phnom Penh, reveled in the liberation of Saigon, thought it fantastic when the Cubans chased the South Africans out of Angola, and identified with the Left in Europe, the ANC, and the Zimbabwe liberation struggle.”29
THE MOVE TO THE LEFT was first signaled not by Sinn Fein but by the IRA in bloody and dramatic fashion on the evening of February 2, 1977, when fifty-nine-year-old Jeffrey Agate, the English-born managing director of the giant multinational chemical company Du Pont, arrived home after a day’s work to find IRA gunmen waiting for him. He died instantly in a hail of bullets. Agate was the first businessman shot dead in the IRA’s new campaign of assassination aimed against the employer class. He died just before Adams’s release from Long Kesh. A month later, after Adams had joined the Army Council, the IRA killed its second businessman victim when forty-five-year-old English-born publicity consultant James Nicholson was shot dead as he made his way to Belfast airport following a one-day business trip to a struggling hi-fi factory on the edge of nationalist West Belfast. The killing of Agate and Nicholson and possibly as many as eight other locally based business figures in subsequent weeks and months 29 was justified by Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey. Employing the unfamiliar left-wing rhetoric of Cage 11, Twomey told a French TV interviewer, “All British industrialists are targets. They are exploiting the Irish working class… everyone directly connected with British imperialism are definite targets.”30
The move to the left was announced at same time as the “long war” doctrine was spelled out, at the 1977 Bodenstown commemoration. Declaring “We need to make a stand on economic issues and on the everyday struggles of people,” the Army Council spokesman Jimmy Drumm called for “the forging of strong links between the Republican Movement and the workers of Ireland and radical trade unionists.” The alliance, he predicted, “will ensure mass support for the continuing armed struggle in the North.”31 Two years later it was Gerry Adams’s turn to give the Bodenstown address, and he amplified the message, this time not as a Belfast troublemaker fresh from the Long Kesh prison camp but with the authority of a former chief of staff and current Northern commander.
The move to the left became the backdoor way of attacking the Eire Nua policy. The target became not the federalism of Eire Nua itself but the economic and social program attached to it. To transform Eire Nua’s mild radicalism into a left-wing revolutionary program, Adams relied heavily on advice from outside the republican movement and in particular from a figure who quickly became, in the eyes of the O Conaill–O Bradaigh camp, the new version of Roy Johnston, Goulding’s éminence grise. Phil Shimeld was an English writer on the Trotskyist weekly Red Mole, the newspaper of the London-based International Marxist Group (IMG). He had made contact with IRA prisoners during the mid-1970s and they had invited him to Belfast and asked him to write for Republican News. Much to the irritation of the republican old guard, Shimeld supplied leftist-oriented articles, often under the nom de plume Peter Dowling, a tactic that enraged allies of O Conaill and O Bradaigh.32
The IMG was the British section of the Fourth Socialist International and traced its political roots to Leon Trotsky himself. Among the group’s leading lights was Tariq Ali, a left-wing celebrity of the 1970s who had hit the headlines when he helped organize mass demonstrations in London against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Although the IMG was hostile to the Soviet Union, as most Trotskyist movements were, the distinction was lost on the older republicans, who saw Shimeld as Adams’s version of Roy Johnston and Tony Coughlan. The allegedly baneful influence of Goulding’s pro-Communist aides had badly divided the IRA and Sinn Fein in the 1960s, and although they may have been unaware of these niceties of Marxist ideology, O Conaill and O Bradaigh suspected that history was about to repeat itself.
Following the IRA’s rejection of Eire Nua, Adams came under pressure from the old guard on the Ard Comhairle to come up with an alternative policy, which eventually he presented to his senior colleagues late in 1979. It became known as “the gray document” because a fault in a photocopy machine in Belfast had darkened the copies made for the rest of the Sinn Fein leadership. It was a slim document—at most two pages long—that still advocated the decentralization that characterized the Eire Nua document but strengthened central government at the expense of the provincial parliaments. Adams reserved his assault on Eire Nua for its economic and social program. The alternative he advocated was unequivocally socialist, and it appalled the conservatives in the Sinn Fein leadership.
Declaring that political control in a post-British Ireland would be worthless without control of the country’s wealth and economic resources, the Adams document continued:
Furthermore with James Connolly, we believe that the present system of society is based upon the robbery of the working class and that capitalist property cannot exist without the plundering of labour, we desire to see capitalism abolished and a democratic system of common or public ownership created in its stead. This democratic system, which is called socialism, will, we believe, come as a result of the continuous increase of power of the working class. Only by this means can we secure the abolition of destitution and all the misery, crime and immorality which flow from that unnecessary evil.33
This was strong meat for the rural Southerners, but worse was to come. The new program would also abolish the right to own land; under Adams’s plan the state would be the only entity allowed to possess the title to Irish land, and those who were working the country’s farms, no matter how small the holding, would enjoy only “custodial ownership.” That touched a nerve in rural Ireland, for among other things it meant that inheritance rights would be lost. If Adams had his way, the family farm, the mainstay of rural Ireland, would be no more. It was a formulation designed to strike fear and anger into the bulk of republicans outside Belfast and Derry, and it did.
The fight back came in October 1979 at a special Sinn Fein conference held in Athlone. That year’s Ard Fheis had been postponed and was not scheduled to meet until the following January, and so a stopgap weekend gathering involving two hundred or so of the faithful, mostly from the South, was held instead. Someone had decided to leak the story of the internal turmoil to the press, and a story was published in the Dublin tabloid the Sunday World under the byline of the left-wing journalist Eamonn McCann. The story claimed that federalism was to be ditched and that the Provisionals were about to move sharply to the left under the influence of Marxist sympathizers. The story, which was uncomfortably accurate, also talked about the waning influence of O Conaill and O Bradaigh. The reaction of many of the delegates, who included the party’s thirty councillors in the Republic, was an angry one. According to one report of the meeting, some would have staged a walkout had Adams not intervened during the Sunday morning session to deny the report.34 The identity of the deep throat was never established despite an inquiry ordered by the Ard Comhairle, although the Adams camp let it be known that it suspected the ousted An Phoblacht editor, Gerry O’Hare.
The Sunday World story put Adams on the defensive. Within ten days both the Army Council and the Sinn Fein leadership had been forced to issue statements denying the story, claiming that it was the result of British and Irish government efforts to raise a Red scare against them.
THE MARXIST ALLEGATION persuaded Adams to give an interview to the author, then a junior reporter with the Dublin weekly magazine Hibernia, to underline in person the IRA and Sinn Fein denial. It was the author’s first meeting with Adams and took place in a council house in the West Belfast housing estate of Andersonstown over a large tray of tea, sandwiches, and cake provided by an obviously adoring middle-aged hostess. Dressed in sports jacket and light trousers, sporting fashionably long hair and a somewhat unkempt beard, Adams still puffed on a pipe in those days. Anyone unaware of his real identity could easily have mistaken him for a visiting lecturer at a New England women’s college or a left-wing sociology professor at a red-brick English university. He was charming and impressively attentive and, displaying even then the consideration of the veteran political operator, stayed long enough to clear away the tray and wash the dishes when the interview concluded. Our matronly hostess beamed with pleasure and adoration when finally he left.
If he had his tongue stuck in his cheek during our conversation when he dismissed the left-wing allegations, it did not show. “First of all there’s one thing which should be said categorically,” he declared. “There is no Marxist influence within Sinn Fein; it simply isn’t a Marxist organisation. I know of no-one in Sinn Fein who is a Marxist or who would be influenced by Marxism.”35 The Hibernia interview was reproduced in full in An Phoblach–Republican News, and the following two issues carried more reassuring stories, one describing a pilgrimage Adams had made to the home of the decidedly non-Marxist hero of the 1916 Rising, Patrick Pearse, and another applauding the ultraconservative head of Irish Northern Aid in New York, seventy-two-year-old Michael Flannery.
Emboldened by all this, Adams’s opponents blocked the “gray document,” and in a compromise deal a special subcommittee was set up by the Ard Comhairle to marry the radical program with the original Eire Nua in time for the postponed 1979 Ard Fheis. While Adams had been forced to draw in his horns, the compromise document did contain concessions to his hard-line approach. For instance, while the original Eire Nua program envisaged that private enterprise would still have a role to play in the new Ireland, the compromise paper said it would have “no role to play” at all in key industries, and that small local businesses would be permitted only “provided no exploitation occurs.”36 Adams also got included a proposal to wage an “economic resistance campaign” that would commit Sinn Fein to work with radical trade unionists. Custodial ownership of land survived but became the clumsier and somewhat contradictory concept of “family or co-operative custodial ownership.” Even so, many of the delegates regarded the compromise program as an attack on small farmers, and the veteran and respected Leitrim republican John Joe McGirl had to intervene to assure the Ard Fheis that this was not the same agenda as that espoused by Goulding. “Ten years ago I parted ways with people whose policies I disagreed with,” he declared. “My politics have not changed and I support this document.”37 The document was jointly proposed by O Bradaigh and Adams and was passed, but by a margin that suggested serious divisions among the rank and file: 65 percent were for, 30 percent, against, and 5 percent undecided. “That was too close for comfort,” recalled O Bradaigh.38
The year 1980 ended on a positive note for the Adams camp. By November it shared control of the Sinn Fein ruling executive with the old guard, and the Northerners guerrilla tactics had forced one key opponent, Sean O Bradaigh, brother of Ruairi, to quit the leadership in protest against the radicalism of the compromise Eire Nua document. His shadow as SF publicity director, Danny Morrison, took over his job. Morrison became the confrontational, belligerent edge of the opposition. “Adams made the snowballs but Danny threw them,” commented one of his victims. The Adams grip on Sinn Fein had tightened immeasurably.
THERE THEN FOLLOWED one of those events that no one had anticipated or could have anticipated. For the previous four years republican prisoners had been staging a protest designed to preserve special-category or political status. Frustrated by the failure of the protest and angry at their treatment as common criminals, IRA and INLA prisoners in the Long Kesh jail, now renamed the Maze prison, finally decided to bring matters to a head. The protest had begun with inmates refusing to don prison uniform, insisting that they wear only their bed blanket instead, and then they had refused to slop out their cells every morning, instead smearing the cell walls with excreta and pouring urine under their doors. As Catholic Church intermediaries tried but failed to broker a settlement with the British and the violence of the prison staff against inmates intensified, the prisoners finally decided in the autumn of 1980 to embark on a hunger strike in a bid to win recognition that their imprisonment was politically motivated.
That protest, which ended in confusion and defeat a week before Christmas, and the second, fatal fast, which began three months later, had the effect of temporarily uniting the Provisionals and papering over the widening cracks. The anti-Adams camp called a halt to the undeclared warfare, as one of their number recalled: “Ruairi and Dave avoided stand-up rows with Adams in order to prevent a split, especially during and after the hunger strikes when what we had was a very united and very strong movement.”39 They could do nothing else.
The feud was on hold, but the way the hunger strikes were run actually served to strengthen the Adams leadership, not least because the profile of the Northerners was heightened considerably, while that of Southerners like O Bradaigh and O Conaill was reduced. The campaign in support of the hunger strikers was largely directed from the North. Adams and colleagues like Danny Morrison were regarded very much as spokesmen for the protesting prisoners, and when republicans began winning elections, first as H Block prison candidates and then as Sinn Fein members, they were seen as the architects of that success, not O Bradaigh and O Conaill.
There was another, possibly more potent factor. As IRA coffins started to come out of the jail, the argument that federalism was a sop to the forces ultimately seen as responsible for the prison conflict became more and more appealing to grassroots activists. The pressure mounted on O Conaill and O Bradaigh. By the time the 1981 Ard Fheis met in the autumn, the two veterans had lost all control of the Sinn Fein leadership. A motion proposed by the Ard Comhairle and by the party organizations in Belfast and Dublin called for the Sinn Fein constitution to be changed so that the party’s aim was no longer a “federal” state but a “democratic socialist republic” instead. The motion, a head-on tilt at Eire Nua, was passed but just failed to win the two-thirds majority necessary to change Sinn Fein policy. The following year, by which time Adams and Martin McGuinness had been elected as abstaining members of a new Northern Assembly, the motion got the backing needed to alter the constitution. The O Conaill–O Bradaigh camp had lost the war with Adams. O Conaill quit as vice-president of Sinn Fein, a post he had shared uncomfortably with Adams, and O Bradaigh would step down from the party’s leadership a year later, in November 1983, and be replaced by the West Belfast man.
The old guard had fought on in the hope that Adams and his colleagues would grow weary of the battle, but they badly underestimated their reserves of patience. Adams quite simply outlasted them, and each time they promised to bring matters to a head—for instance, by threatening to resign en masse, which happened more than once—Adams would temporarily retreat, only to regroup for another debilitating round a few weeks or months later. It was the old guard who tired first, not Adams. They also forgot just how ruthless he and the other Northerners could be.
SIX MONTHS OR SO before the changes at the top of Sinn Fein (some date it at around April or May 1983), a tall, willowy, dark-haired woman in her midthirties boarded a flight at Dublin airport bound for Toronto, in the Canadian province of Ontario, and said farewell to Ireland forever. It would have been surprising had any of her fellow passengers recognized her or been aware of the part she had played in the drama unfolding inside Sinn Fein. Christin Elias was not a figure who had been much in the public eye despite her prominence in republican politics, but the extraordinary circumstances of her exile and Gerry Adams’s rise to the summit of Sinn Fein were inextricably linked, if well hidden and only rarely discussed, events.
Christin Elias was by common admission an enigmatic figure who appeared on the Provisionals’ stage in the mid-1970s without any obvious tie to Ireland or its political ferment. About the only thing that fellow Republicans knew about her was that she hailed from somewhere in Eastern Europe; some believed that she was Hungarian, others that she was Russian or Ukrainian. Another version was that her mother was Irish and her father a Lithuanian who had been a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In fact she was born in Canada of a Canadian-Irish mother of Methodist stock and a Bulgarian father. She had been educated in Sofia and spoke Bulgarian fluently, a skill she learned from her émigré father. She and her mother traveled a lot and had ended up more or less by chance in Dublin in 1974, where, attracted by the conflict then raging in the North, she offered her home in Churchtown in South Dublin to the IRA as a “safe house” where meetings were held and fugitives took refuge. She worked in an engineering plant by day, but at night was an enthusiastic Sinn Fein worker; both she and her mother joined the party’s Cumann in Churchtown. She soon adopted the Irish version of her name—Christin ni Elias meant Christin, daughter of Elias—and moved gradually toward the leadership of Sinn Fein.
An enthusiastic supporter of Eire Nua’s federalist program, she befriended O Bradaigh, O Conaill, and other members of the Ard Comhairle and generally made herself indispensable. “She was a very clever, efficient lady, who ate work and was totally committed to Eire Nua,” remembered one of them. “She had studied behind the Iron Curtain and was the one who kept on pointing out the left-wing stuff of Adams’s people, predicting what would happen next.”40 By 1978 she had risen to membership of the Ard Comhairle and was Sinn Fein’s national education officer, charged with, among other things, promoting Eire Nua among the rank and file. When the hunger strikes started in 1980, she almost single-handedly ran the national committee formed to publicize the prisoners’ cause. One activist remembers that she often met the bills for printing hunger strike posters and leaflets out of her own pocket.41
It was perhaps inevitable that such a strong-willed woman would clash with Gerry Adams, but when she did the violence of the collision startled everyone. One witness vividly recalled the occasion:
In the months after the [July 1979] Army Council message dismissing Eire Nua, every Ard Comhairle meeting was getting more and more painful, the divisions were intense. We wanted to know that if the policy wasn’t to be Eire Nua what was it to be? So at this particular Ard Comhairle meeting Adams pulled a document out of his jacket pocket, but it was only two pages long, typed on each side. Behal laughed, everybody tittered as he started to read from it. When he finished, we thought it was just an introduction, it was so short. O Conaill said,“Are you sure that’s all?” and O Bradaigh asked when we would see the documents behind it all.
Christin sat back, drew on her cigarette and said, “Well, Gerry, isn’t this a rather slim document to produce after two years of turmoil? This is not even a foundation, we’d have a job to build on that. Surely this is a rather threadbare document?” Adams lost the rag. “What do you expect,” he exploded. “I had only twenty-four hours to produce the document!” We were all sitting there with our mouths open. Christin then replied, “In that case, Gerry, it was a very poor presentation.” Adams hit the table with rage, shouting that she was putting words in his mouth. From that day on her cards were marked.42
Other witnesses agree that Elias had made a dangerous enemy that day. “You could see the spark in Adams’s eyes; he had been hurt by her,” said one.43 “Boy was he mad, and all his lieutenants were mad! I pulled at her sleeve because I knew how vicious they could be,” remembered another.44
It was around the time of this famous confrontation that Christin ni Elias was approached by an official attached to the British embassy in Dublin who asked her out on a date. His interest was ostensibly romantic, and he asked if he could see her on a regular basis. It was an implausible story, and despite his assurances that he was not from MI5, she was suspicious and feared that he was an agent for one or other branch of British intelligence. She went straight to a senior member of the Sinn Fein leadership, who passed her on to the IRA. “They established an ongoing situation,” explained one source familiar with the story. “Belfast people in the GHQ Intelligence Department handled the operation, and they told her to meet the guy and they briefed her on what to say.”45 The relationship began in August 1979, and the pair would meet about once a month, usually for lunch at venues in Dublin or Belfast: “The IRA instructed her to report back on the meetings, and when she met them she gave them a written report, all typed out and in triplicate, which was typical of her.”46
Much to Christin ni Elias’s frustration there seemed to be no end to the affair. The IRA wanted her to continue meeting the official, but she was, as she told one Sinn Fein friend, “totally sick of the arrangement, it went on so long.” After more than two years, by the end of 1981 there was still no sign of the IRA operation coming to an end. “She was always hoping that she would be ‘interrupted’, that the IRA would abduct him,” recalled the friend.47
In early 1982 the IRA attitude to Christin ni Elias suddenly turned hostile, and it was not long before the reason was a subject of republican gossip. “The word got out that she was a British agent, a whispering campaign was started, and attempts were made to stop her being elected to the Ard Comhairle,” said one source.
Eventually in July that year, it was announced at the Ard Comhairle that there would have to be a court of inquiry into her, that she was suspect. It went ahead, but the truth was that it was a foregone conclusion, that the Army had already judged her and found her guilty.
The biggest charge against her was that she had sabotaged one of their operations. The background was that she had been told by the IRA to have lunch with the official in a certain Belfast hotel on December 22 or 23, 1981, and she agreed. But what Christin didn’t realize was that as it was Christmastime the hotel was full of office parties, so when they turned up there were no free tables and they had to go elsewhere. The IRA arrived to find no British official in the restaurant, and they immediately accused her of sabotaging their operation.
I told her she had been lucky, that they were probably going to kill both of them and accuse her of being a spy and meeting her handler. She paled. After that they came and searched her house. They held her blindfold for three days, all of them men, and they even accompanied her when she went to the bathroom. They questioned her all the time, and I believe they were looking for the blacks [copies] of the intelligence reports she had typed up for the IRA.48
Ruairi O Bradaigh arrived in the midst of the affair and was held at gunpoint until the IRA took ni Elias away, eventually abandoning her several miles from Dublin in the middle of the countryside.
ni Elias was expelled from Sinn Fein in November 1982, at almost exactly the same time as the party’s annual conference finally ditched her beloved Eire Nua policy. Those who were her political friends had little doubt that the timing of the purge against her was intimately connected to the internal battle being waged over federalism. It seemed the only explanation for the IRA’s dragging out the intelligence operation so long and then deciding to move when they did. “The incident really tore the curtain of trust,” commented a friend of ni Elias. “We felt they used the incident to get at her and to scare off everyone else. She was too articulate, too politically skilled, too astute to be allowed to survive.”49 Another commented, “The message was quite simple. If they could get at her, they could get at anyone. No one was immune.”
The atmosphere on the Ard Comhairle soured after the incident. Not long afterward the Ard Comhairle asked for a special meeting with the IRA to discuss Eire Nua, and the Army Council sent along two of its members, Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness and his deputy Ivor Bell. “The whole meeting was dominated by what had happened to Christin and their litany of complaints about the 1975 cease-fire,” recalled a participant. “The two Army men did all the talking. The meeting was full of bad vibes, the tenor was that if you criticized the opponents of Eire Nua and the O Bradaigh–O Conaill leadership you were anti-Army. Things started to get bad on a personal level after that. Before, everyone would go for a drink together in Conway’s pub after Ard Comhairle meetings, but after that they would go to Conway’s and we would go to Mooney’s up by Parnell Square.”50
The reality was that the Christin ni Elias affair had struck fear into Adams’s critics. The Ard Comhairle was told that the three members of the Sinn Fein court of inquiry into the allegations had unanimously found against her, but one of the tribunal, Kevin Agnew, a solicitor from Maghera, County Derry, wrote privately to a party official, saying that this was not true; he had voted for her, and as a lawyer he was horrified at what had happened. But he beseeched the official to burn the letter after it had been read in case it fell into the hands of the Adams camp. Her friends were appalled at what had happened, but no one wanted to stand up and publicly make an issue of it; they were too frightened. When the author, then Northern editor of the Irish Times, revealed in September 1982 that ni Elias had been dismissed from Sinn Fein on security grounds, there was a rush to deny it. The Ard Comhairle, which still included some of her closest political friends, called the article “a piece of scurrilous journalism.” Those who had been dismayed at the way the IRA had behaved chose to stay silent.51 A few months later Christin ni Elias left quietly with her ailing mother for Toronto, where she has lived ever since. Aside from a few Christmas cards and letters she has had little or no contact with her friends in Ireland since the trauma of 1982. “She was our Dreyfus,” confessed one of them.52