By the start of the 1980s, Adams’s struggle to oust the O Conaill–O Bradaigh leadership had been virtually won. The IRA Army Council was at this stage completely under his control and had rejected Eire Nua, and it would just be a matter of time before the last vestiges of the old leadership had been swept out of Sinn Fein. The blueprint drawn up and refined in Cage 11 of Long Kesh had been almost fully implemented, thanks in no small measure to the patience, skill, and determination of its architect.
The IRA was, however, no nearer its goal of expelling the British from Northern Ireland than it had been in 1969 when its war had begun. While it was true to say that the Adams plan had rescued the organization from virtually certain defeat, and an ignominious one at that, the IRA still lacked the strength and resources, both political and military, to make the British change their Northern Ireland policy in any significant way. The IRA’s violence had fallen off dramatically from the heady days of the early 1970s when victory over the British did truly seem possible, dropping from an average of some 160 killings a year to fewer than 80, a decline of exactly half. Military stalemate reigned, with nothing on the horizon to suggest that major change was possible. The IRA could not be beaten, that seemed certain, but neither could the British.
It was in these circumstances that Gerry Adams led the republican movement into one of the most extraordinary and complete political volte-face in its long history in a bid to break this stalemate, executing a move that involved adopting some of the very same tactics and ideas whose espousal by the O Conaill–O Bradaigh leadership had made them such objects of hatred and scorn. The shift took many forms, but none was as dramatic or unequivocal as the decision to give the fighting of elections the same priority as the waging of war against Britain.
Those who knew Adams well during these years say that the episode not only demonstrated the utter pragmatism that governed his approach to politics but revealed a determination that neither he nor his generation of republicans would suffer the same sad fate as his father and his contemporaries. When their IRA project ended, in the case of Adams’s father in the late 1940s, they had retreated to their hearths demoralized and directionless, bereft of community support, to dream of what might have been and sustained only by the hope that a new generation would one day rise up, take on the torch, and succeed where they had failed. Old comrades would meet on Friday nights to drink and sing stirring ballads of war and sacrifice, of battles fought and lost—but rarely won. His father helped found the Felons Club, a social and drinking club on the Falls Road where membership was open only to those who had been imprisoned for the cause. There, old IRA comrades could gather and reminisce and help each other out when sickness, bad luck, or death struck. In some ways it almost seemed as if defeat suited them better than victory, for there was a sense in which Irish republicanism thrived on oppression and the isolated exclusivity that came with it. This had been the story of one generation of IRA men and women after another, and it was the atmsphere within which Adams was born and reared. Unlike his father and his generation, however, Adams would not settle for such paltry spoils.
One Cage 11 veteran remembered Adams once putting all this into words. “There was no way he was going to fade back into the obscurity of Ballymurphy. He hammered it home to all of us that something had to come out of all of this during our lifetimes, that no matter about previous campaigns this struggle was not going to be for nothing.”1
For this to be possible, ideas and policies once regarded as sacrosant could and would be discarded when necessary. The “move to the left,” which Adams had launched to isolate the old guard in Sinn Fein, was eventually reversed, as were other policies that characterized and even defined the Provisionals under his leadership in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. The opposition to federalism, once thought of as a core Adams value, faded and was forgotten, and so too was the opposition to electoral politics, to the idea that Sinn Fein should run in elections and thereby give establishment politics even that small level of recognition. The Adams camp had fiercely resisted electoral politics when its feud with O Bradaigh and O Conaill was raging, but once they had been vanquished, that too was abandoned and reversed.
Running in elections was a tactic on which republicans had historically taken a pragmatic stand and past IRA leadership often justified the practice as a way of advancing the struggle against Britain when military methods were no longer viable. Frequently, electoral success was used to vindicate later violence. As long ago as the 1870s, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) had authorized its leaders to run in elections and take seats in the Westminster parliament in London as part of a strategy to obstruct the business of government in Britain. In December 1918 Sinn Fein’s victory in the general election in Ireland paved the way for the IRA’s war of independence. After partition and the split with de Valera, anti–Fianna Fail republicans regularly contested elections in both jurisdictions, although always on an abstentionist basis. Mostly they were beaten, but on two celebrated occasions they scored remarkable victories. In 1955 Sinn Fein ran for several Northern seats in the Westminster general election and won in two, MidUlster and Fermanagh–South Tyrone, while in 1957, a year after the IRA had launched its Border Campaign, the party contested the Republic’s general election and ran in nineteen constituencies. They were successful in four: Fergal O’Hanlon won in Monaghan, J. J. Rice in South Kerry, John Joe McGirl in Sligo-Leitrim, and Ruairi O Bradaigh in Longford-Westmeath. There was nothing in republican ideology that forbade the organization from fighting elections. The only iron rule was that successful candidates could never take their seats in what were regarded as illegal and corrupt parliaments. In practice, as well, republicans ran only occasionally, when there was a particular advantage to be gained. Otherwise, as a matter of doctrine, priority was given to the strategy of armed struggle.
That pragmatic stand changed at the time of the 1970 split with Goulding. Those who left to form the Provisionals had a long list of grievances with the Goulding leadership, but high on that list was suspicion about its parliamentary intentions. Goulding’s move to leftist, agitational politics and his gradual erosion of the abstentionist principle were seen as parallel tracks leading in the same direction, toward participation in elections and the recognition of the partition parliaments in Dublin and Belfast. “Elections” became a dirty word.
Not all those who went with the Provisionals thought that in such simplistic terms. O Bradaigh had been an abstentionist member of the Irish parliament and knew the propaganda and political value of electoral success. He was also aware that, no matter how successful the IRA’s military campaign in the North was, the absence of elected representation was a serious weakness that the British would be foolish not to exploit. O Conaill likewise developed a more mature attitude to elections with the passage of time.
By the third or fourth year of the war in the North, around 1972–73, republican leaders knew that they could count their support in the tens of thousands and that if this could be properly harnessed, they could produce a respectable republican vote. The commonly held view at this time was that the IRA had at most the support of 1 or 2 percent of the North’s nationalist community, but republican leaders knew better. They knew, for instance, that they could not sustain the war effort at the levels it had reached in those years without considerable grassroots support. The days when republican gatherings could attract at most a few score hardy veterans were long gone. The war in the North had radicalized people by the thousand. Some had joined the IRA, but many more were ready to help in other ways. IRA leaders knew from annual events like the Bodenstown commemoration, for example, that if thousands of people could turn out to publicly show their support for the IRA, then there were probably many more who would vote for Sinn Fein in the privacy and safety of the polling booth. The republican movement was like an iceberg; the visible tip was the IRA’s violent campaign, but the rest was hidden beneath the surface.
But opposition to contesting elections was fierce in the Northern IRA. O Bradaigh and O Conaill wanted to fight two elections in the North during 1973, but Northern IRA leaders stopped them. The first was for local councils, and that opportunity arose when the British abolished the oath of allegiance that unionists had made mandatory for such contests. The pair argued that Sinn Fein should field candidates but not take seats. It would be a protest against internment, they said, that involved no loss of principle. Likewise when elections were announced for the new power-sharing Assembly, they urged that these should also be fought on an abstentionist basis so that the SDLP, Northern Ireland’s moderate nationalist party, would not have a clear run. But powerful forces on the Army Council, led by Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey, vetoed both proposals. An ally of O Bradaigh remembered the strength of Twomey’s opposition: “In early 1973 at a joint meeting of the Army and Sinn Fein, Sean O Bradaigh and Twomey had a serious row. Sean felt that we were allowing the SDLP to make all the running. Twomey’s response to that was: ‘Fuck you! You never fired a shot in anger all your life.’ The SDLP were allowed to get off the ground as a result of Twomey and after that we missed a beat in publicity terms. It was very noticeable that the traffic in journalists to Kevin Street [Sinn Fein’s Dublin office] diminished in the summer of 1973.”2 When polling for Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly took place on June 28, 1973, an IRA unit from Gerry Adams’s old Second Battalion fired an RPG-7 rocket at a polling station in the Lower Falls Road area. It was as if the IRA could not contain its contempt for electoral politics. From then on, ballot boxes had to be taken from polling stations by military guard so that the IRA could not destroy them.
The pro-election camp was again outvoted by the IRA leadership when the British announced elections in 1975 to a new body, a constitutional convention, which was to replace the power-sharing Assembly brought down by striking Loyalists the year before. Thereafter opposition to fighting elections became part of the general Cage 11 critique of those members of the 1975 Army Council highest on their target list, like O Bradaigh, O Conaill, and McKee. During the 1975 truce the British secretary of state, Merlyn Rees, had legalized Sinn Fein in the hope that it would encourage republicans to enter electoral politics. This failed because a majority on the Army Council suspected that the British were really trying to suck the movement into constitutionalism. But Adams and his allies seized on this and linked O Bradaigh and O Conaill’s flirtation with elections to the same alleged failing that had brought the IRA into a near-fatal cease-fire in the first place. Talk of fighting elections became the next worst thing to discussing surrender.
The next opportunity to fight an election came after Ireland’s accession to the European Economic Community. The first direct contest for the European parliament was due to occur in 1978 but was then postponed for a year. O Bradaigh and his allies had prepared the ground to fight the election on a quasiparticipatory basis. “We thought we would have won one seat,” recalled an O Bradaigh ally. “Neil Blaney [a former County Donegal – based Fianna Fail minister] had contacted us to offer to stand down in Connacht-Ulster if we had stood while O Bradaigh and O Conaill would have stood in Munster.”3 O Bradaigh spent two years persuading Sinn Fein and the IRA to agree to a proposal to take seats in Europe on what was called “a controlled basis,” that is, limited to using the offices and facilities in the Strasbourg parliament for propaganda purposes.
Adams led the opposition to this proposal, arguing that this was the thin end of the wedge. If Sinn Fein took seats in the European parliament, then the way would be opened, no matter what the proponents said, to taking seats in the Irish parliament or at Westminster, he said. A defining republican principle would be breached. He turned to the Revolutionary Council as a way if undermining O Bradaigh, and on the eve of the November 1978 Ard Fheis, IRA commanders by a single vote came out against contesting the Euro election. Even so, the first subsequent meeting of the Army Council backed the idea, but then the Adams camp once more intervened and a second meeting was called. “The Army Council was got at and the vote went four to three against,” recalled a prominent activist. “One person, Joe Cahill, was got at on the grounds that the move would open the way to constitutionalism, to taking seats in Leinster House and Stormont.”4 Adams also spoke against, and the motion was lost. “It was one of the turning points,” commented the same source. “We went back into the doldrums. It was like we had been knifed.”5
The Sinn Fein–IRA squabbling opened the way for the former student civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin to contest the Northern Ireland Euro constituency, and on an issue the Adams group considered the exclusive property of republicans. The motive for her decision was the deteriorating situation in the H Blocks of Long Kesh, where IRA prisoners were into their third year of a blanket and no-wash protest, heading inexorably, it seemed, toward a hunger strike. With the assistance of women activists from the Relatives Action Committees, a support network set up by families of the protesting prisoners, Bernadette, as she was simply known in republican circles, raised the issue of intervening in Europe in early 1978. Her intervention split the Provos. While the Sinn Fein leadership in Dublin backed her and even offered financial support, the Northerners, led by Adams, fiercely opposed her.
The Belfast Sinn Fein leadership and the IRA’s Northern Command joined forces to disrupt Devlin’s campaign, using her reluctance to give “unequivocal support” for the IRA’s armed struggle as a stick to beat her. Even though she was running to publicize the cause of the IRA prisoners, the Adams leadership mobilized the H Block protesters against her. A statement issued in their name called on republicans to boycott her campaign and declared, “We know only too well that the only way to remove the H Blocks forever is to boot both them and the people who build H Blocks out of the country at the point of a gun…”6 Privately Devlin was accused of using the prisoners’ plight to advance her personal political ambitions, while on the ground leading figures campaigned against her. The IRA’s chief of staff, Martin McGuinness, followed her around Derry, urging people to boycott the election with the slogan “Back the prisoners, back the war!”
Despite the public and often vindictive opposition of Adams and his supporters, Bernadette, running under her married name, Devlin-McAliskey, won just shy of 34,000 votes in the June 1979 contest, a performance that far exceeded expectations and amounted to a serious rebuff for the Adams camp. The lesson was clear—if Bernadette Devlin could get that result in the face of republican antagonism, what could she have gotten had the IRA and Sinn Fein thrown their weight behind her? It was evident that there was untapped and not insubstantial electoral support for republican candidates. Her vote was dwarfed by the 140,000 votes won by the SDLP leader, John Hume, but her performance nevertheless indicated a far higher level of sympathy for republican-type issues than conventional wisdom had imagined possible.
Adams has never admitted that his opposition to Bernadette Devlin’s European campaign was mistaken or that it was the spur for his own turnaround on electoral politics. In his autobiography he claimed that it was “around 1978–79,” that is, before the Euro poll, that it was decided “simply and in principle that there would be a positive attitude towards an electoral strategy by Sinn Fein.”7 If a “positive attitude” toward elections had been taken at that time, there is scant evidence of it; in fact the evidence is that the Adams camp actually hardened its opposition to electoralism at this time. At Sinn Fein’s November 1980 Ard Fheis for instance, held only five days after the first hunger strike had started, Adams’s allies forced through a motion barring the party leadership from even considering running in the following May’s Northern local elections. Two of his close supporters, the IRA and Sinn Fein director of publicity Danny Morrison and IRA Executive member Jimmy Drumm delivered the telling speeches. The result was that when the election was held, two weeks after the death of Bobby Sands in May 1981, Sinn Fein could field no candidates and other, smaller groups like the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the Marxist People’s Democracy, and the Irish Independence Party, a greenish breakaway from the SDLP, cashed in on republican anger.
By the time of the next Ard Fheis, in November 1981, the situation had changed. The deaths of ten hunger strikers and the political turmoil that accompanied them had changed everything. Bobby Sands’s victory in the Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election in April 1981 and the success of H Block candidates in the Republic’s general election earlier that year cleared the way for Adams and his supporters to openly argue for electoral politics. The scale of their flip-flop was huge. While O Bradaigh and O Conaill had argued only for occasional electoral interventions, Adams and his allies pushed for a permanent strategy of fighting elections, a strategy that would coexist, albeit uncomfortably, with the IRA’s armed struggle.
Once again it was done by first giving assurances to the republican grassroots about the leadership’s total commitment to the tactic of IRA violence. Adams’s ally Danny Morrison told the assembled faithful that the lessons of history “show that the only effective campaign is that of armed struggle.” He went on, “[T]here is no one and no argument that can convince republicans that Britain, as she often asserts, cannot eventually be broken.”8 Having genuflected toward the altar of armed struggle, Morrison was delegated to lead the charge in the opposite direction and in favor of electoral politics a few months later at Sinn Fein’s annual Ard Fheis, this time arguing that military force on its own could not do the job of forcing Britain out of Ireland. It was as if the Bodenstown speech had never been given. “Who here,” he asked the delegates in what became one of Irish republicanism’s most famous speeches, “really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?”9
The so-called Armalite and ballot box strategy had been born, but the deep contradictions inherent in the approach, the built-in tendency for one to always inhibit and damage the other, would soon set Adams and others in his confidence on an expedition to seek a way out of armed struggle altogether. Adams was almost at that point in his political journey reached years before by Cathal Goulding and others who had led the republican movement in his youth, the point at which seeking votes and fighting a war would become mutually exclusive options.
The trek toward electoral politics had been a slow and cautious one, but with hindsight it appears to have been predetermined by the political program put together in the cages of Long Kesh. The key moment was when Adams won the argument in favor of the IRA’s involvement in political agitation. Once that was accepted and the IRA set out to capture and hold public support, the logical dynamic pushed republicans more and more toward contesting elections as the most effective way of measuring and demonstrating that support. And the more the IRA sought public approval, the more it had to examine how its military tactics and its violent actions contributed to or inhibited the task. The Cage 11 agenda was sold to the IRA on the basis of its republican purity and military ruthlessness, but the truth was that it imposed political restraints on the IRA which became tighter with the passage of time and with Sinn Fein’s deeper involvement in electoral politics. Eventually the contradictions would be too great to sustain.
WHEN ADAMS and his allies moved into the leadership of Sinn Fein in the late 1970s, the party they found was by and large unsophisticated and conservative. Movement into political activity was blocked by people who were instinctively antipolitical in outlook and who were content to allow a secret and unaccountable IRA leadership, the seven-man Army Council, to decide their politics for them. If the Adams agenda was going to succeed, that had to change; new and young blood would have to be brought into the party, if only to dilute the influence of the old guard.
Recruitment to the Provisionals had come in two great waves in the 1970s. There were first of all the Belfast Sixty-niners, as they were called, those who had joined the IRA in the wake of the August 1969 burnings and riots. Another surge of support followed the internment operation of August 1971 and Bloody Sunday nearly six months later. The next wave would come with the 1981 hunger strikes, but this time with a difference. The previous surges had all been into the ranks of the IRA; this time Sinn Fein would be the major beneficiary.
Even before the prison deaths Adams had been throwing Sinn Fein open to activists whose roots lay not in the IRA or even in Defenderism but in radical, left-wing politics. The first manifestation of this was the decision to introduce Sinn Fein to feminist politics, a ploy that enjoyed the extra advantage of infuriating the O Bradaigh and O Conaill camps.
Until the late 1970s the IRA and Sinn Fein had what would now be termed a traditional attitude toward women. Although individual women, often on the coattails of their husbands, did rise to leadership positions—the assassinated Maire Drumm, wife of Jimmy Drumm and at one stage a vice-president of Sinn Fein, being a prominent example—the republican movement was male dominated. Adams had encouraged the recruitment of women into the mainstream IRA and in the late 1970s he encouraged them to join Sinn Fein. Not least of their qualities was that many of them detested the O Bradaigh–O Conaill leadership more than he did. Sinn Fein then adopted a women’s program and, much to the horror of the old guard, set up the women’s department, which approved the use of contraception and began to address, gingerly at first, the vexed and divisive issue of abortion, eventually putting the Provos closer to a pro-abortion stance than any other Irish political party.10
Bringing women’s issues into republican politics became part of the heave against the O Conaill–O Bradaigh leadership. It was intended to enrage the conservative old guard, and this it succeeded in doing, as one of their allies angrily recalled: “Radical feminism was married to republicanism, and for a long time I couldn’t work out whether we were a national liberation movement, a radical feminist group, or republican revolutionaries!”11 But the move also had the effect of broadening Sinn Fein’s appeal to a new layer of political activists who might otherwise have found the Provisionals’ single-issue program of armed struggle in the North suffocating. These were just the sort of people who would be most open to electoral politics.
Adams also introduced republicans to broad-front politics, the tactic of making alliances with other groups and individuals on single issues, the essence of which implied a willingness to compromise core beliefs. The principle behind the tactic was that different groups would come together on the basis that, even though they could not agree on everything, there would be one or two issues on which they could find common cause. The benefit was that it brought greater political strength; the downside was that each group was required to bury the issue dearest to it. In the IRA and Sinn Fein’s case this meant that their insistence that everyone else was obliged to sign up to the armed struggle had to go. It was another important stage in the dilution of the influence of IRA militarism, and ironically it was the prisoners’ struggle in the H Blocks of the Maze prison to be treated as politically motivated prisoners that became the principal vehicle for another key and defining political turnabout.
BY OCTOBER 1980 the IRA and INLA prisoners on protest in the H Blocks of the Maze prison had reached the end of their tether. They had been refusing to wear prison unforms for the best part of four years in protest against the British attempt to treat them like criminals, and for over two years, clad only in a thin blanket, the prisoners lived, ate, and slept in their own dirt and stench. From time to time they were transferred to clean parts of the jail and guards moved in with steam hoses to decontaminate their cells, but soon their new accommodation was as foul and putrid as the one they had just vacated. The moves were often accompanied by violence, meted out by prison staff acting as if they were under orders to break the men’s morale. There had been nothing to compare with it in Irish history, and participating in the protest required special qualities and conviction on the part of the prisoners. The protesting prisoners numbered some three hundred, only around a half of those serving sentences in the Maze for IRA offenses, and their numbers sometimes grew but more often shrank as the protest showed no signs of achieving success.
The IRA and Sinn Fein leadership had, with reluctance, been persuaded to mount a campaign of street marches and demonstrations to advertise their cause, but it was clear that key figures were afraid that the prisoners’ plight would not attract the public support needed. The prison protest had the potential to bring about a great defeat, and those around Adams knew it.
Senior Catholic Church figures, notably the Irish primate, Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, had intervened in a bid to persuade the British to relent, with no success. He dealt directly with Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, but had found her totally inflexible on the issue. Although human rights lawyers had taken a case to the European Commission on Human Rights, its outcome held out only the slimmest possibility of a settlement. The IRA had stepped up its campaign on behalf of the prisoners, singling out prison guards for assassination. But nothing, it seemed, would move the British.
As the prisoners’ leaders surveyed the situation in the early fall of 1980, they realized the time had come to embark on the ultimate protest, the hunger strike to death. Their commander, Brendan Hughes, the old Cage 11 ally of Gerry Adams who was still serving out his sentence for the Malone Road arms finds, asked each wing on the protesting IRA Blocks to send in lists of volunteers prepared to go on the protest. Scores of names came back, and from the list Hughes chose himself and six others, five from the IRA and one from the smaller INLA, to go on the fast. They began refusing food on October 27, 1980.
There is little doubt that the Adams leadership was opposed to that hunger strike. Popular support for the prisoners was still too low, and it was clear that Mrs. Thatcher would not only resist the prisoners’ demands, the key one of which was that they be allowed to wear their own clothes, but might relish the chance to do the IRA serious damage by allowing the protesters to die. Should the fast end in deaths but no concessions, Thatcher would have won a great victory.
The timetable agreed by Hughes and his prison colleagues meant that at some point six of the hunger strikers would have to decide whether the seventh should die. It was highly unlikely that all seven would reach a crisis point at exactly the same time, and inevitably the weakest prisoner would die first. It soon became clear that the British had rejected the option of forcibly feeding the men, on the grounds that this tactic, redolent of British behavior during the 1919–21 conflict, would only anger opinion south of the Border. The men would either die or somehow be persuaded to relent. Just before Christmas 1980 the crisis point was reached when the Newryborn IRA man Sean McKenna started to slip in and out of a coma. It was certain that he had only hours to live. Just at this psychological crux, a British government document appeared, presented to Brendan Hughes via a Catholic Church intermediary. It offered what seemed to be a compromise on the prisoners’ five demands, and the protest was called off. But even on a superficial reading the document was full of imprecision. Hughes and his five semiconscious comrades knew that rejecting the document meant that Sean McKenna would die. There was really no choice.
The ambiguity in the document was apparent to all who read it, and most who did concluded that the protest had failed. Despite that, the Belfast Sinn Fein leaders attempted to present the document as a victory, but their efforts were less than convincing. A celebration march held in West Belfast attracted only a paltry crowd. Morale at grassroots level was low and confusion widespread, not helped by the refusal of Adams’s allies in Belfast to show the British document to party members, claiming that their one and only copy had been sent to Dublin.
The British document was the result of secret negotiations between the IRA in Belfast and Michael Oatley, an officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Code-named Mountain Climber, Oatley liaised with two figures, one the Derry-based businessman Brendan Duddy and the other a member of the Redemptorist Order, Father Meagher, who ferried his messages to and from the Belfast IRA men. With Adams and his allies opposed to the hunger strike and fearful that it would end calamitously, the circumstances behind the appearance of the British document raised dark questions elsewhere in the Provisionals, suggesting that the Belfast leaders would go to any length to end the protest.
“The deal was done behind the backs of the national leadership by Northern Command,” claimed a well-placed spectator of events in Dublin.
Just as Sean McKenna was approaching his end, I heard there had been a message from the Belfast people, and I hotfooted it round to Parnell Square [Sinn Fein’s headquarters], where Joe Cahill opened the door. Eventually I was ushered in, and there they all were, Christin ni Elias, Ruairi O Bradaigh, Dave O’Connell, and Piaras O Duill. They said they had received a message from Belfast which said the British had conceded four and a half demands and that the only thing missing was an acknowledgment of political status. This was the first they had heard of it. The deal had been done behind their backs and behind the backs of the National H Blocks Committee; they didn’t know a thing about it.
Bernadette McAliskey and Piaras O Duill were dispatched to Belfast to meet Adams to find out what was going on and specifically whether or not the British paper was as generous as had been claimed. They were kept waiting from 3 A.M. until 8 A.M. before Adams and Morrison agreed to meet them. “The message the pair from Dublin had for them was to get their ass across the Border. But Morrison’s reply was ‘come and get us.’ There were tears in the National H Blocks office that day. If we had won, why were we crying? It was a deception which fired the second hunger strike.”12
THE FAILURE of the first hunger strike meant that a second protest was not only inevitable but would this time end in either victory or death for the IRA prisoners. Once again the pressure for the fast came from the prisoners and specifically from Hughes’s successor as IRA jail commander, Bobby Sands, a twenty-seven-year-old coach builder who had been drawn into the IRA when he and his family were expelled from their home in North Belfast by loyalist mobs. Known by his IRA colleagues as Geronimo, more for his resemblance to the Apache chieftain than for his hot temper, Sands was serving a fourteen-year-term for possession of weapons when fate propelled him into the history books.
A self-educated poet and a songwriter of some distinction, Sands had been in Cage 11 with Gerry Adams and was, by all accounts, a keen disciple of the Adams gospel. He was bright and a brilliant publicist who excelled at writing letters soliciting support for the prisoners’ cause from prominent personalities. He was popular with his prison colleagues, trusted, and, as events were to prove, brave as well. The new IRA commander designed the second protest in such a way that death, his own in particular, was almost guaranteed. The protest would be staggered. Sands started by himself, a lone protester whose fate, the decision to live or die, lay in his own hands. He began refusing food on March 1, 1981, just two-and-a-half months after the first hunger strike had collapsed. After him other prisoners, usually in groups of two, joined at two-or three-week intervals. If any hunger striker died, the moral pressure on those who followed to continue through to the end was huge. The fast also guaranteed that if there were deaths, the North would be pitched into a crisis every fortnight or so until the end. As an instrument for destabilizing political life in Ireland, it was beyond historical comparison.
Ten hunger strikers died agonizing deaths in jail, and sixty-eight people were killed on the streets of the North, before it all ended eight turbulent months later. Sands’s death was probably the most traumatic. He slipped away in the early hours of May 5, and within minutes the darkened streets of nationalist Belfast were echoing to the crash and thump of exploding gasoline bombs tossed by rioters and the thud of plastic bullet guns being fired by police and troops. Sands’s funeral three days later was the largest political demonstration probably in living memory, as tens of thousands of nationalists poured in from all over Ireland to pay homage to the dead IRA man, by now rapidly assuming an iconic status. It was as if people had difficulty believing that Mrs. Thatcher could have allowed him to die.
Sands’s death divided Irish society. Constitutional nationalists in the North, like the SDLP, as well the main parties south of the Border feared the potential for instability posed by the hunger strike deaths, while the Catholic Church wrestled with the moral questions raised by a protest that some theologians insisted was a form of suicide. International interest in the hunger strikes was intense. Media from all over the world poured into Belfast that summer, and Sands’s photograph, a flattering portrait showing a good-looking, long-haired youth, became a symbol of revolution. In Teheran a street was named after him, as was one in New York. The Irish diaspora was radicalized. Demonstrations took place in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada and in many American cities. In New York, Noraid supporters mounted a picket outside the British consulate on Third Avenue that lasted for years.
The months from May to September that year were unusually balmy by Irish standards, but a sense of crisis and of impending doom permeated life as one coffin after another was carried out of the jail to funerals that, although they drew smaller crowds than had turned out for Sands, were as emotionally intense as ever. The impact of the hunger strike deaths was felt throughout the island. That summer the author regularly and repeatedly drove around Northern Ireland, in and around the Border counties and down to Dublin, in the Republic, covering the protest for the Irish Times, and there was scarcely a crossroads in a nationalist area in either jurisdiction that was not draped with mourning black flags or did not have rows of telephone poles adorned with protesting placards. During that long, hot summer of 1981 as nationalist Ireland, North and South, vented its anger at Mrs. Thatcher’s government in London, a new phrase entered the island’s political lexicon—“nationalist alienation.”
Again the evidence is that the Adams leadership, fearing a second defeat, which would be impossible to dress up in any but the thinnest of garments, also opposed the second hunger strike. But that was only at the beginning. As events unfolded, the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership realized that the political potential from the prison protest was immeasurable. It was a realization that would propel the organization into serious electoral politics and herald a phase in the Provisional’s department that would usher in the peace process.
To the surprise of many observers, the hunger strike deaths did not lead to the enormous upsurge in IRA violence that many observers had predicted. The widespread expectation was that the organization would cause mayhem when their imprisoned colleagues began to die, but although there was considerable street violence and some continuing IRA violence, including one devastating land mine attack by the South Armagh Brigade that killed five British soldiers, the organization resisted the temptation to throw everything into war. The relatively restrained response to the prison protest surprised even IRA activists. To those with long memories, however, the summer of 1981 carried echoes of the summer of 1970 in Ballymurphy when, at Adams’s urging, the IRA was held back while increasingly vicious but well-organized rioting between Catholic civilians and the British army alienated thousands of people, drove scores into the ranks of the IRA, and transformed this slice of West Belfast into the strongest republican redoubt in the city. Something similar happened throughout nationalist Ireland during the summer of 1981.
In October the hunger strikes came to an end as more and more of the prisoners’ families brought their sons off the protest, usually when they had slipped into comas and were unable to stop them. The end also came not long after the appointment of a new, more accommodating British secretary of state, Jim Prior, who announced concessions on prisoners’ clothes and other issues. As the prison settled, Sinn Fein began to prepare for elections. In an interview with the author shortly after the protest ended, Gerry Adams announced that he would recommend that Sinn Fein embrace electoral politics when the party met for its November Ard Fheis.13
Writing in An Phoblacht – Republican News in 1984, three years after Bobby Sands began his hunger strike, Adams revealed that the main effect the hunger strikes had was to fast-forward the move toward electoralism. It made it “easier to argue for an electoral strategy within Republican ranks,” he wrote, effectively admitting that this had been his ambition and goal for some time.14 Before the hunger strikes, one of Adams’s leading advisers had confided to the author that resistance from rank-and-file IRA activists meant that persuading people to fight elections would be a slow and lengthy business. Sinn Fein might be permitted by its conservative membership and by the IRA to fight elections at the council level, but the prospect of larger-scale contests, for seats at Westminster, was probably some years down the line.15 The election of Bobby Sands in the Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election of April 1981 transformed that scenario and made it possible, much sooner that anyone had imagined, for Sinn Fein to fully embrace electoral politics.
The idea of making some sort of electoral intervention on Sands’s behalf appears to have originated with Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey. If Sands was to stand for the Westminster parliament, there was only one seat that he could conceivably win, and that was Fermanagh–South Tyrone, which had been held by the independent nationalist Frank Maguire since 1974. There were other nationalist seats but both, West Belfast and Derry, were held by Gerry Fitt and John Hume, respectively, bitter political enemies of the IRA who would do the prisoners no favors. Maguire, on the other hand, was effectively a republican MP, although his official designation was Independent. A former IRA commander in Fermanagh, he had been interned during the 1956–62 Border Campaign and took a more or less abstentionist attitude to the Westminster parliament. He never got around to making his maiden speech, for example, and he rarely attended the House of Commons, although his vote did keep a minority Labour government in office at key moments.
Devlin-McAliskey conceived the idea of asking Maguire to temporarily relinquish the seat to allow an H Blocks candidate to run. Confident that he would respond positively, she made plans to visit him, and, if he agreed to go along with the proposal, Sinn Fein would be presented with a fait accompli. The idea of “borrowing” the seat was born. Just before her trip and only five days after Sands had begun his fast, Maguire suddenly died and the whole situation changed. The seat was now vacant, and a race began to fill it. Maguire’s family and the local Catholic church wanted his brother Noel to run in the by-election, and McAliskey let it be known that if that happened she would run against him on the H Block ticket. Some Sinn Fein leaders, Ruairi O Bradaigh in particular, were keen to run her in the seat, but O Conaill suggested running Sands instead, and Bernadette Devlin-McAlisky agreed to stand aside. Sinn Fein leaders, virtually the entire Ard Comhairle along with the Fermanagh republican Owen Carron, met in Clones, County Monaghan, to discuss the idea but initially rejected it. Locals feared that because Sands was an outsider in this most parochial of areas, nationalist voters would stay at home. The convention ended, but no one would leave. “People hung about talking, having little discussions and were clearly dissatisfied with the outcome,” remembered one delegate. “The outcome was a second convention, and the proposal went through. Adams had to be convinced. O Conaill was the main mover. He was convinced Sands could win. He had been IRA organizer there in the 1950s, he knew the area, knew the people, he’d even been shot there. He convinced everybody.”16
The drama was not quite over. The SDLP’s Austin Currie, a local man and a fierce opponent of the Provisionals, toyed with the notion of standing against Sands, but he relented after enormous pressure was applied by his SDLP colleagues to dissuade him. The SDLP feared that it would be blamed if Sands was beaten and then died, and no one in the SDLP, no matter how much he or she despised the Provos, wanted to carry that burden. Noel Maguire also flirted with the idea of running, but amid dark hints of threats against him he withdrew at the last moment. As the deadline for nominations neared, Adams hid in a nearby Catholic church ready to withdraw Sands if another nationalist candidate decided to run. It wasn’t necessary. Sands had a clear run against a local unionist farmer, Harry West. In the charged atmosphere of the time, nationalists swallowed whatever reservations they had about the IRA’s violence and elected Sands.
Caution was again the overriding consideration in Adams’s mind when the next opportunity arose to put hunger strikers before the electorate, this time in the Republic’s general election of June 1981, a month or so after Sands’s death. After much bickering between rival republicans, the decision was made to run nine prisoners in selected constituencies, four of them hunger strikers. The National H Blocks Committee had been divided over the issue. Some wanted to run nonprisoner candidates who would take their seats in the Irish parliament, where it was possible they could hold the balance of power and determine who made up the next government. But Adams vetoed the idea. No one on the committee could give him a guarantee that they would be able to hold the next Irish government to ransom. “He wouldn’t take the risk of any dissension within Sinn Fein about abstentionism,” recalled a member of the committee.17 It was a missed opportunity. Two prisoners won seats to the Dail, the hunger striker Kieran Doherty in Cavan-Monaghan and Paddy Agnew in Louth, who actually topped the poll. The result took Ireland’s media completely by surprise and threw Irish politics into turmoil. The broader election had produced a virtual dead heat between Fianna Fail and its opponents, Fine Gael and Irish Labour, who wanted to form a coalition government. The two seats won by IRA prisoners came at the expense of Fianna Fail; had Doherty and Agnew been able to take their Dail seats, or if nonprisoner candidates had run, the pro–hunger striker candidates would have held the balance of power and the history of the prison protest and much subsequent Anglo-Irish history might well have been very different.
While caution had dictated Adams’s attitude to the first two hunger strike elections, his demeanor changed after Sands’s death when a by-election to replace the dead prisoner loomed. His principal concern was to ensure that Sinn Fein held on to the prize of the Fermanagh–South Tyrone seat, but there were problems. Following Sands’s election the British had changed the electoral law to prevent serving prisoners from seeking election, so nominating another prisoner was out of the question. That was not all. Nationalist voters in Fermanagh–South Tyrone had been won over to support Sands with the promise that the hunger striker would merely “borrow” their votes in order to publicize the prisoners’ cause. Once the hunger strike was over, the seat could again be contested freely by mainstream nationalists. Under British parliamentary rules the writ for any by-election had to be moved by another serving MP, but no one at Westminster wanted to see another contest held while the prison fast was still under way. In June the Welsh nationalist MP Daffyd Ellis Thomas phoned the National H Block’s Committee to say that he would move the writ for the by-election whenever they wanted, but the committee demurred. Sinn Fein was not quite so backward. Behind the committee’s back, Thomas was contacted and he agreed to set the by-election machinery in motion. Sinn Fein then imposed Owen Carron as a “Proxy Political Prisoners” candidate, and in August he romped home, easily beating the local ex-UDR officer Ken Maginnis and actually increasing Sands’s majority.
Carron’s victory was the perfect springboard for Sinn Fein’s entry as a party into electoral politics, standing in its own name and not that of hunger-striking prisoners. Carron’s victory came, however, at a price. Throughout the hunger strikes the Army Council had refused to intervene and order the prisoners to quit, even when it became clear that, despite election victories and widespread international publicity for the prisoners’ cause, Thatcher would not bend and that any more deaths would be futile. The Army Council had that power and had used it in the past. The former chief of staff Sean MacStiofain had been ordered to end his fast in 1972, for example. As the hunger strikes intensified, so did the demand from some that the IRA leadership should intervene to end the deaths. In early August 1981, after the seventh hunger striker had been carried out of the jail in a coffin, Adams agreed to go into the jail to speak to the hunger strikers. He had come under enormous pressure to do this from prisoners’ families and their Catholic Church adviser, Father Denis Faul, and eventually he relented, or so it seemed.
According to the accounts of those who were present, Adams met six of the hunger strikers in the prison hospital canteen and gave them a frank assessment of their situation. He told them that it was likely Mrs. Thatcher would let them die, and he went on to describe what was on offer from the Mountain Climber, Michael Oatley. But he left it up to the prisoners themselves to decide whether or not to end the protest. The IRA would support and understand them, he said, if they agreed to end the hunger strike either individually or collectively. But it was evident that neither he nor the IRA would order or even ask them to call a halt.18 With the weight of Bobby Sands’s sacrifice and the agonizing deaths of other comrades bearing down upon them, the prisoners unsurprisingly decided to continue their protest. Their decision meant that when the second Fermanagh–South Tyrone byelection was held two weeks later, prisoners were still dying in the H blocks, and with nationalist emotions running high, Owen Carron’s victory was assured. The SDLP once again stood down in his favor, and with a clear run against the sole unionist candidate he won by an even greater margin than Bobby Sands. When Adams addressed the next Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in the winter of 1981 to urge that they fight elections, he had in Carron a real live MP standing beside him as proof of the potency of fighting elections. Adams had spurned the opportunity to order an end to the prison fast, but by doing so created the most favorable circumstances for Sinn Fein’s change in political direction.
As the hunger strike headed toward its conclusion, Sinn Fein threw away any pretense that the National H Blocks Committee was an independent organization. At a conference in Dundalk in September, chaired by Adams’s Army Council colleague Ivor Bell, block voting removed all but two of its non–Sinn Fein members. By this stage of the protest the National H Blocks Committee had created a national structure of support groups throughout Ireland that rivaled and even exceeded Sinn Fein’s, and once the protest ended, a concerted effort was made to absorb these local committees into the party.
Then, with not even a whimper, the eight-month-long hunger strike ended. On the morning of Saturday, October 3, a brief statement announced that the most traumatic prison protest in IRA history was over. The end came as a relief. One hunger striker’s family after another had intervened to take their sons off the protest as unconsciousness overwhelmed them, and it was clear that further fasts were pointless and even counterproductive. The stage had been reached where the motives of Provisional leaders like Gerry Adams for not ending the protests were being openly questioned by clerics like Father Faul, once a sympathetic friend of the IRA prisoners but now a bitter opponent of the Sinn Fein leadership. Ten men had died awful deaths inside the jail, many more perished outside; nationalist politics had been radicalized in a way not seen since the 1916 Rising when the British had executed its leaders, while Mrs. Thatcher had become a hate figure beyond parallel in Irish history. The stage had also been set for Sinn Fein to emerge as an electoral force in Irish politics, at first in the North but eventually in the South too. Quietly, meekly, and with almost no notice taken by the media, the National H Blocks Committee voted itself out of existence, and scores of its supporters moved over to Sinn Fein. “The fact was that after the hunger strikes the republican movement was swamped by new young members,” explained one former Sinn Fein leader. “Some H Block committees just became SF branches overnight.”19 The decision by Sinn Fein to contest elections and to embrace this as a strategy was a formality.
THROUGHOUT the early part of the next year, 1982, the new British secretary of state, Jim Prior, spent his time constructing a new political initiative that he termed “rolling devolution.” Under Prior’s scheme the unionist and nationalist parties would be rewarded by a gradual and increasing return of powers to a local elected Assembly at Stormont if they could show they were able and willing to share power. Despite objections from both camps and lukewarm support from Margaret Thatcher, Prior pressed ahead with his scheme and announced elections for that October. In April, Sinn Fein declared that it would definitely field candidates on an abstentionist basis, and that rattled the SDLP, worried by the alienating impact on their supporters of the lengthy hunger strikes. After weeks and months of agonizing, the SDLP then decided that, while it would contest the election, it too would not take seats in Prior’s Assembly. The hunger strikes had made both nationalist parties in the North abstentionists.
Adams had great difficulty persuading the IRA to allow him to stand for election to the planned new Assembly. At an Army Council meeting in July 1982, he and McGuinness indicated their interest in running, Adams in West Belfast and the chief of staff in Derry. But the Army Council voted four to three against, on the grounds that neither man could be an elected representative and be able to carry out his IRA role at the same time. But Adams came back. At a second meeting in August, Joe Cahill, who had voted against, was absent on vacation, and Adams put the proposal once more. In the meantime Adams had won over one key figure, a County Donegal–based member of the Council, and the vote went in Adams’s favor, four to two. McGuinness and Adams were, however, forced to make a concession to the skeptics. Both men were allowed to run but on condition they give up their IRA roles, McGuinness as chief of staff and Adams as adjutant-general. McGuinness’s departure paved the way for Ivor Bell to become chief of staff.20 Adams’s ally Brian Keenan, by now a prisoner in England, wrote from his cell in Leicester jail that he “emphatically” supported the move and endorsed the Army Council’s decision. Keenan wrote, “It is not enough for Republicans to say, with reference to the Army, actions speak louder than words. We must never forsake action but the final war to win will be the savage war of peace. To those of us who have struggled for years in a purely military capacity, it must be obvious that if we do not provide honest, recognisable political leadership on the ground, we will lose that war for peace.”21 Not for the first or last time, Keenan sided with Adams at a critical juncture.
To again reassure the IRA, that November’s Sinn Fein Ard Fheis obliged election candidates to “be unambivalent in support for the armed struggle.” But in the run-up to Prior’s Assembly election there was a subtle shift in the rhetoric. Again An Phoblacht – Republican News was the first to reflect the change. In a front-page editorial the paper declared that, while “Irish freedom will only be achieved by armed struggle… it needs to be said loudly and unequivocally that freedom, unity and the creation of conditions by which we can proceed to the democratic, socialist republic will not be achieved by armed struggle alone and that armed struggle of a revolutionary nature cannot even be sustained without popular logistical back-up and support.”22 A few months earlier armed struggle alone had been the only way forward. Now that would not be enough. The contradictions between the Armalite and the ballot box were beginning to be acknowledged. The hunger strikes had wrought many deep changes in Irish society, but it would be some time before the effects of this would become visible.