Dublin’s Mansion House has witnessed many dramatic and historic moments in its nearly three hundred years of life. Built as a town house in 1710 in the middle of Georgian Dublin by a wealthy County Derry property developer, Joshua Dawson, it has been the official residence of the city’s lord mayors since 1715. Its famous Round Room, added to mark the visit of King George IV in 1821, has been the venue for some of Ireland’s most momentous political gatherings. In January 1919 the First Dail, dominated by the revolutionary Sinn Fein party, met there to ratify the 1916 proclamation and adopt Ireland’s Declaration of Independence. Only twenty-six of the sixty-nine successful Sinn Fein candidates were at liberty to attend the session, and although the British authorities permitted the rebel parliament to meet, the proceedings were closely monitored from a building across the road, by the inspector general of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Sir James Byrne, and his Dublin counterpart, Colonel Wedge-worth Johnston. The Second Dail also convened in the Mansion House more than two years later but was dissolved after only a year as civil war gathered Ireland in its terrible grip. And it was in the Mansion House that Eamon de Valera had presaged the civil war when he told delegates to the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis of October 1921 that “Ireland’s representatives will never call upon the people to swear allegiance to the English King.” When a few weeks later Collins and the Treaty delegates brought home from Downing Street an agreement requiring just that, Irish republicanism was convulsed by violent division.
More than sixty years later, on November 2, 1986, as once again the forces of law and order watched events from a safe distance, the Mansion House was witness to another great Irish political rupture when Provisional Sinn Fein delegates, after nearly five hours of tense and at times emotional debate, elected to drop the party’s long-standing opposition to taking seats in the Irish parliament. To some in the hall this formal act of recognizing the hated partitionist settlement was a case of déjà vu. The same issue had split the movement in 1969 and 1970, with the IRA and Sinn Fein taking separate but equally divisive stands on the issue. The resulting quarrel had torn the movement apart, and the consequences were violent and long-lasting, leading not just to the formation of the Provisional IRA but also to the creation of a feud culture within republicanism in which ideological differences were often settled by the shedding of blood.
There were, however, key differences this time that would make this split less divisive and provide evidence that Gerry Adams had learned important lessons from the mistaken way Cathal Goulding and his allies had handled the issue in their day. In 1970 Goulding had advocated entering all three partitionist parliaments at the same time—the Dail in Dublin, or Leinster House, as republicans preferred to call it; Stormont in Belfast; and the House of Commons at Westminster.
In 1986 Adams made a much less ambitious proposal to the republican movement. He wanted Sinn Fein to enter only the Irish part of the 1921 settlement, Dail Eireann; the British parts, Stormont and Westminster, would still be off limits. There was no ideological reason for this, since once the principle of abstention was ditched for one assembly it applied to all three. But by advocating entry first into the Dail, a far-off place about which Northern republicans knew little and cared less, Adams minimized likely opposition from Northern IRA units.
Goulding’s move also came at a time when his internal critics were complaining that he was running down the IRA’s military capacity and had failed to ensure that Catholic districts of Belfast were adequately protected against loyalist attack. No one could level that charge against the Adams-led IRA. The debate on dropping abstentionism came just as the IRA was receiving huge shipments of weaponry from Colonel Qaddafi. Far from running the IRA down, Adams and his colleagues were promising an escalation in both the quality and the quantity of IRA operations, and on such a scale that they could possibly tilt the military and political balance in the IRA’s favor. In 1969 the IRA had split after a general Army Convention had voted in favor of the policy switch, but at a similar Convention, held in County Donegal in September 1986, delegates were able to reconcile their differences without a rupture. Reassured by the leadership’s promise of an intensified war, most of the delegates who voted against the motion stayed in the IRA’s ranks. In 1970 they had walked out.
In 1986 some of those attending the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis did walk out in protest, but they never presented the threat posed by the dissidents of 1969. Led by Ruairi O Bradaigh and other veteran activists, they went on to form Republican Sinn Fein (RSF). Despite the purity of their beliefs, the O Bradaigh wing failed to persuade enough Provisionals to join them. The split was small and contained, confined largely to older republicans, many of whom were based south of the Border miles away from the war zone, where the Provisional IRA still carried the greater appeal for grassroots militants. Although RSF supporters did set up a military wing, such was the fear of reprisals from the Provisionals that it was years before the Continuity IRA revealed its existence. That in itself was a comment on the new group’s frailty.
To most delegates and nearly every media representative crammed into the Mansion House that day, there seemed little doubt that the underlying reason for that was the Adams leadership’s apparently unswerving support for armed struggle. It had been clear to all in 1969 that Goulding was intent on demilitarizing the republican movement. There was, apart from members of the O Bradaigh–O Conaill wing, no such suspicion by 1986. The debate about abstentionism seemed to be about what the leadership said it was about, an attempt to make Sinn Fein more relevant on the southern side of the Border by abandoning a policy stance that was unpopular with the bulk of voters there.
What only a few in the Mansion House could know was that the Adams leadership had already commenced a secret diplomacy with the leadership of Fianna Fail and that dropping abstentionism was a key part of the strategy. Changing Sinn Fein and IRA policy was in fact vital to the prospects of creating an alliance with Charles Haughey; after all, how could the Fianna Fail chief even contemplate a relationship with Adams as long as the Provisionals rejected the legitimacy of the state he led? The shift would undoubtedly help Sinn Fein win votes, but that would take many years to happen and require an IRA cessation. Primarily, the ending of abstentionism prepared the way for constructive dialogue with Haughey.
When Father Reid sent Haughey his lengthy message in 1987, he cited the outcome of the 1986 Ard Fheis as evidence of the strength of the Sinn Fein leadership and the freedom it had to initiate and organize its own policies. Adams, in other words, was the man with the skills and the trust of the rank and file needed to do the job. “Alec would say,” recalled one participant in the peace process, “that not even de Valera or Collins was able to accomplish such a huge shift in policy and get away with what was really an insignificant split and no upheaval worth the name.”1 What he meant, of course, was that while de Valera and Collins had both steered the IRA of their day into constitutional politics, it had been at the cost of serious and bloody splits. Adams was doing the same but largely kept the organization intact. That meant that he might even be able to deliver a fully intact IRA into the peace process.
To the outside world, dropping abstentionism seemed to be the logical conclusion of Adams’s efforts to politicize the Provisionals. He had started to move the organization in this direction during the Cage 11 days in the mid-1970s, when he had argued in favor not only of social and economic radicalism but of republican involvement in agitational politics in the South. Throughout the development of this strategy, Adams and his allies had justified it on military grounds. The argument was disarmingly simple; the more republicans identified with the lives and needs of the poorest sections of Southern society, the more support, tacit or otherwise, the IRA would get for the war of national liberation in the North. Adams would use the same argument to urge that abstentionism should be dropped.
In practice, however, it worked the other way around. When Sinn Fein tested the electoral waters in the Republic, the party discovered that the violence of the IRA’s campaign and Sinn Fein’s associations with the Northern conflict were liabilities. The early toleration of the IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland had virtually disappeared by the late 1970s and had been replaced by a fear that the conflict would spill over the Border, as it had in May 1974, for instance, when loyalist bombs killed thirty-three people in one day in Dublin and Monaghan. Many Southerners blamed the Northern republicans for this and strongly resisted voting for Sinn Fein. Although Sinn Fein attributed this to state censorship, particularly section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which banned the party from radio and television, the truth was that the IRA and its violent activities were the reason for the party’s electoral failure.
Adams’s push for involvement in Southern politics began in 1977, not long after his release from Long Kesh. It was there in Jimmy Drumm’s “long war” Bodenstown address in June that year and was made explicit in January the following year, by which time Adams had become IRA chief of staff.
As in the North, it was the hunger strikes of 1981 that strengthened Adams sufficiently to enable him to accelerate Sinn Fein’s electoral activity south of the Border. H Block candidates had done well in the Republic’s general election of June that year when nine of them won nearly 43,000 votes, some 2.5 percent of the electorate, and two won seats, both taken by Long Kesh prisoners. If nonprisoner candidates, pledged to take their seats, had run instead, they would have held the balance of power in the new Dail. Flushed with these victories and the separate successes in the North, delegates to the 1981 Ard Fheis had given the party leadership a free hand in deciding whether to contest future elections, North and South. The first opportunity to do that south of the Border came in February the following year when the FitzGerald government elected in the turbulent summer of 1981 suddenly collapsed.
As it turned out, the election was a disaster for the republicans. Sinn Fein ran in seven constituencies, two fewer than in 1981, and selected a decidedly military-leaning slate. Two of the best-known candidates were IRA prisoners. Joe O’Connell, the leader of the Balcombe Street IRA unit, which had bombed and shot its way around southern England and central London in the mid-1970s, ran in Clare, while Seamus McElwaine, an IRA leader from the Monaghan-Fermanagh Border, then on remand in Crumlin Road jail, Belfast, ran in Cavan-Monaghan. His agent was Caoimhghin O Caolain, a former bank clerk from Monaghan town, who had been talent-spotted by Adams during the hunger strike and subsequently groomed for the seat. He eventually became TD for the constituency in 1997. The overall result revealed a collapse in the H Block vote, from 43,000 votes, or 2.5 percent, to just under 17,000, or 1 percent. The message was clear: Southern voters might come out at an emotional moment and support dying hunger strikers, but otherwise they would spurn the IRA and its political wing. By way of contrast, republicans who had run on a platform of taking their seats did well. Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey tripled the H Block vote in Dublin North-Central, while Sinn Fein’s old rivals in the Goulding’s Officials, now calling themselves Sinn Fein–The Workers Party, won three seats.
Sinn Fein drew in its horns in 1982 after that poor first result. That Easter the Army Council reaffirmed the traditional disdain of constitutional methods: “Only through armed struggle will we be listened to…, ” it said.2 When another Dail election was called in November 1982, Sinn Fein decided not to contest it, conserving its resources for the election to Jim Prior’s “rolling” Assembly in Belfast, which was held the month before. Nevertheless, the move toward dropping abstentionism in the South continued apace as Adams and his allies chipped away at the opposition at one Ard Fheis after another. First Sinn Fein agreed to contest European elections—a proposal Adams had resisted when O Bradaigh had suggested it—and to take its seats in the unlikely event of winning. Then it agreed to register as a political party in Dublin, a move that de facto recognized the hated Southern state. At the next conference a motion declaring abstentionism to be a tactic, not a principle, was passed, although short of a large enough majority to change the party’s constitution. Slowly, incrementally, the party was moving to end its ban on taking seats in the Irish parliament and recognizing the state that the IRA’s predecessors had vowed to destroy.
THE IRA held one of the keys to winning the issue, or rather Colonel Qaddafi did. By October 1986, a month before the Ard Fheis and just after the IRA Convention, the IRA had smuggled some 130 tons of Libyan weaponry into Ireland in four separate shipments and had successfully hidden these in secret dumps in some of the most isolated parts of Ireland. As the Army Convention and the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis neared, the number of key IRA activists who knew that substantial amounts of arms had been successfully landed slowly grew. “People were told there was big gear come in,” remembered one IRA member, even if only a select few knew the details.3 The origin of the arms, the fact that they were a gift from Qaddafi, was still a secret to all but the Army Council. With tons of weaponry stored away and many middle-ranking IRA activists aware that a big offensive was in the pipeline, the notion that Adams was about to sell out just seemed absurd. Colonel Qaddafi had helped make the outcome of the abstention debate a foregone conclusion.
Before going to the Sinn Fein conference with the proposal, Adams first had to win over the IRA. Once that was done, Sinn Fein would be easier to handle. In early 1986 the Army Council set up a special subcommittee to examine the possibility of holding an IRA Convention. When the decision to go ahead was made, it moved very fast. “It was done very hurriedly, in less than two weeks, when normally it would take a month to organize,” remembered one delegate.4 Before the Convention met, the ever-reliable Brian Keenan, by then into his seventh year in various English jails, made his support for Adams known publicly. In a letter to An Phoblacht–Republican News, co-signed by three other IRA prisoners held in Britain, Keenan wrote, “It is time for a change to enable elected representatives to carry out revolutionary work in the corridors of power. We do not believe any republican principle is involved in this issue.”5 A secret letter went to the Army Council saying the same thing.
At the Convention, the Adams camp, including Adams himself, argued that a yes vote would assist the armed struggle by broadening the base and producing more safe houses for the IRA. Martin McGuinness predicted that Sinn Fein would win up to five or six seats, and if that happened no government in Dublin would dare move against the IRA. The IRA could launch attacks in the North safe in the knowledge that its rear was secure against assault. Danny Morrison claimed that the dead hunger strikers, especially Bobby Sands, would have voted yes, and Seamus Twomey declared his support for the change. Opposition was strongest from around the Border in South Armagh, Louth, and South Down. But the message from the outgoing IRA Army Council was that the war was going on regardless of how the vote on abstention went, and this swayed the meeting. “The way Adams did it was to say to the IRA men, ‘This is politics. You get on with your thing—the war—and it won’t be affected,’” remembered another delegate.6 The Convention was held in a room that sloped downward from the back rather like a cinema; somewhat disconcertingly for the delegates, the leadership sat in the rear seats, watching and noting the speeches and who voted which way.
The vote went three to one in favor, comfortably exceeding the required two-thirds majority. There were two bonuses. The Convention once again upheld General Army Order no. 8, which had prohibited IRA actions against the security forces in the Republic for some forty years. The effect of this would be to reinforce Father Reid’s conciliatory message to Haughey. Adams also got a restructured Executive, the first to be elected since 1970 and one much more sympathetic to his politics, at least initially. A small minority eventually left the IRA after the vote, but there was no walkout from the Convention, as there had been in 1969.
ADAMS’S PROBLEM was not with the IRA but with Sinn Fein. The IRA had been under the sway of the Belfast leadership ever since the establishment of Northern Command, and since it was larger in the North the units there would always have a greater say at a Convention. But Sinn Fein was as numerous on the ground in the South as in the North, and feelings in the South were stronger against change. Many of the Southern members of Sinn Fein came from families and backgrounds shaped by the bitter divisions of the civil war in 1922 and they literally hated the system of government in Dublin. The Southerners had stymied Adams at the 1985 Ard Fheis when a move to declare abstentionism a tactic rather than a principle failed to get a two-thirds majority. Having foiled Adams once, they could do it again. The difficulty that Adams and his allies faced was the possibility that they would end up with the same result that Goulding had got in 1969 when the IRA had voted for the change, but Sinn Fein was against. If sufficient numbers split from Sinn Fein, they could act as a magnet for military dissidents, and the division could worsen. With Father Reid’s approach to Haughey building up speed, Adams’s need to avoid a big public split in Sinn Fein assumed greater significance.
Just before the Ard Fheis, Adams moved to try and neutralize O Bradaigh, and he used the Libyan weapons to lure his opponent, hinting that a number of big arms shipments had been brought in and that the war effort would be intensified. “Ruairi was told there was good news in that regard,” said one source familiar with the meeting.7 But Adams’s efforts to win over O Bradaigh failed. On the day of the debate he again asked to see O Bradaigh and his supporters. They met backstage in the Mansion House at lunchtime, both accompanied by supporters, for what turned out to be a bad-tempered and fruitless encounter. Adams had brought Micky McKevitt along as evidence that even though the powerful quartermaster’s department had voted against the change at the Convention, it was nevertheless prepared to stick by the Adams leadership afterward, once more hinting at the arms shipments and the coming IRA offensive. Daithi O Conaill had been barred by the Adams camp from the meeting, and it ended with a threat to the dissidents: if they set up a rival Army, the Provisionals would take O Conaill out.8 One of O Bradaigh’s supporters, Des Long from Limerick, slammed a table with his walking cane in anger, and they stormed out.
THE ARD FHEIS DEBATE started just before 11:00 A.M. on the Sunday morning, but many believed the key contribution had been made the evening before, when Gerry Adams gave his presidential address. His speech set out the classic arguments for change. The IRA had met in Convention and approved the move without staging a walkout, he said. It followed that anyone who opposed a yes vote was actually opposing the IRA. Critics had gone to the establishment media with accusations that the leadership was going down the same road as Goulding’s “Stickies.” “To compare us with the ‘Stickies’ is an obscenity,” he protested. “For anyone who has eyes to see, it is clear that the Sticky leadership had abandoned armed struggle as a form of resistance to British rule as part of their historic departure into British and Free State constitutionality. For our part, this leadership has been actively involved in the longest phase ever of resistance to the British presence. Our record speaks for itself. We have led from the front and from within the occupied area.”9 And, he added, the armed struggle would continue until victory. “We all have a part to play in it and those of us who remain committed to it will ensure, regardless of the dangers it holds for us, that this struggle is going to continue until Irish independence is won. That is no idle boast.”10
Others echoed the military arguments. Another Adams ally, County Donegal man Pat Doherty, opened the Sunday debate on the abstention motion and argued that the major difference between Sinn Fein and other republicans who had entered parliament in the past was this leadership’s commitment to the IRA’s armed struggle. John Joe McGirl, a former chief of staff, repeated the message. He had gone to other veterans, J. B. O’Hagan, Joe Cahill, and Seamus Twomey among them, he told the delegates, and they all supported the change. “We have an army fighting 16 years which will continue to fight until British rule is defeated,” he declared.11 Joe Cahill said that the Goulding leadership “had sold out the military spirit,” but he was confident that by the time the election after next came, the deadline for progress set by Adams, “the freedom fighters of the IRA will have forced the Brits to the conference table.”12 Speaker after speaker who backed the move invoked the IRA and the leadership’s commitment to the armed struggle.
It was left to Martin McGuinness to deliver the hardest and most uncompromising military message of the debate, establishing a precedent for the peace process in which McGuinness’s militancy would be regularly flourished to reassure the rank and file that there would be no sellout. A large enough number of the delegates would have known exactly who Martin McGuinness was—that he was the current Northern commander in charge of the day-to-day war against the British. That day the Derry man was the voice of the IRA.
He began his speech with a commitment on behalf of the leadership never to enter Stormont or Westminster and then turned to allegations that he and other Republican leaders had plans to abandon the armed struggle. “I reject any such suggestion and I reject the notion that entering Leinster House would mean an end to Sinn Fein’s unapologetic support for the right of Irish people to oppose in arms the British forces of occupation,” he said. “That, my friends, is a principle which a minority in this hall might doubt but which I believe all our opponents clearly understand. Our position is clear and will never change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.”13 The opposition to the change, he continued in a less than subtle reference to O Bradaigh and O Conaill, was not about abstentionism but about the 1975 cease-fire. “The reality is that the former leadership of this Movement has never been able to come to terms with this leadership’s criticism of the disgraceful attitude adopted by them during the disastrous 18 month ceasefire in the mid-1970’s.”14 In other words, the only people who were talking about the war’s being ended had themselves nearly brought the IRA to defeat through a foolish cease-fire. How could anyone think that this leadership, which had rescued the IRA then, could or would make the same mistake?
At around four-thirty that afternoon the debate ended, and the Mansion House, which had been packed with media and spectators, waited expectantly for the result of the vote. When it came, the sigh of relief from the Adams camp was almost audible. Fully 429 delegates had voted for the change, 161 against, and 38 abstained. A two-thirds majority was 418, and the Sinn Fein leadership had made it by the votes of just 11 delegates.
In the excitement of the moment no one noticed that the number of delegates attending the Ard Fheis had inexplicably doubled from its usual figure. At the 1985 conference, the year before, the motion seeking to define abstentionism as a tactic and not a principle had been lost by 181 votes to 161; a total of 341 delegates had cast their votes. Yet just a year later the number of delegates at the Ard Fheis soared to 628, almost double; the following year, in 1987, it reverted to its normal 350 or so delegates. That was also the number of SF delegates, more or less, who voted overwhelmingly to back the Good Friday Agreement when Sinn Fein held a special Ard Fheis in May 1998, twelve years later, to discuss the political deal. Each year after 1986 and before 1998 had seen more or less the same number of delegates at each Ard Fheis. The puzzle is why the number of delegates suddenly jumped to over 600 in that one crucial year.
The explanation, according to a number of republican sources, is that the 1986 Ard Fheis vote was really organized and manipulated by the IRA, with all the care and preparation normally reserved for a military operation. This exercise, which began as early as 1984, had been twofold in character. One well-placed Belfast Sinn Fein source active at the time described what happened:
They went about it in two ways. Over a two-year period beforehand released IRA prisoners loyal to Adams were ordered to join Sinn Fein cumainn [branches] and take them over by replacing hostile or unsympathetic officers. In one instance in Andersonstown that I remember, two of these people got themselves chosen as delegates to the 1985 Ard Fheis and just point-blank refused to propose a motion that was seen as critical of Adams.
The other way was that they just invented Sinn Fein cumainn. All you needed was five names, and you got two delegates to the Ard Fheis. They were set up all over the country and in Belfast. I personally saw faces at the ’86 Ard Fheis I had never seen before or since. There must have been a hundred or more of these cumainn but after ’86 they just petered out. It was done over a two-year period with a big push in 1986, slow at first, but then it became obvious.15
No one noticed the disparity in numbers, or if anyone did, they chose to remain silent. The reality was that afterward the reason for the sudden surge in membership hardly mattered. The Ard Fheis result had objectively changed republican politics in two ways: Sinn Fein, and by extension the IRA, had been edged significantly closer to constitutionalism, while the Redemptorists’ mission to Charles Haughey had been armed with a crucial piece of evidence about the bona fides and skills of the Adams leadership.
Within six months of the Ard Fheis and in great secrecy, Reid delivered the cease-fire offer to Haughey, and his trips to Kinsealy on behalf of the Sinn Fein leader increased. The peace process was accelerating, and the 1986 Ard Fheis and its historic political turnaround had played a crucial part in achieving that.
ALTHOUGH SINN FEIN was by now well on the way to an even more comprehensive political transformation, its leaders continued to assure the rank and file that the IRA’s armed struggle would remain sacrosant, no matter how unsettling the changes. Between 1987 and 1989 Adams, McGuinness, the IRA GHQ, the Army Council, An Phoblacht–Republican News, and other influential figures and bodies gave one promise after another that the IRA would carry the war to the British until they agreed to leave Ireland and that whatever the talks with the SDLP were about, they did not encompass an IRA cease-fire.
At the same time this was happening, the Adams leadership gradually introduced some of the key elements of the still-secret “stepping stones” agenda into the republican vocabulary. But not all of them, by any means. Some concepts, like the redefinition of British withdrawal, were just too heretical to be allowed into the public domain. Nor were the rank and file, or for that matter the Army Council, told about the secret strategy that underlay the new concepts. To call what happened between this point and the declaration of the first IRA cease-fire in 1994 a “debate,” as more than one observer has, would be something of an exaggeration. Ideas were certainly put into circulation, but the ideas belonged mostly to a Sinn Fein leadership that preferred to talk at rather than to or with their base. Dissension was frowned upon. One internal theoretical magazine, Iris Bheag (Little Magazine), which had been thrown open to the rank and file, was quietly suppressed around 1990, after IRA prisoners had used it to criticize aspects of the Adams strategy. Iris Bheag was replaced by two glossy productions, The Captive Voice, for IRA prisoners, and The Starry Plough, which featured mostly articles written or approved by SF headquarters. If there was a debate, it was mainly on the leadership’s terms.
In April 1987, just before Tim Pat Coogan carried Alec Reid’s letter to Haughey, Sinn Fein issued an eight-page discussion paper entitled “A Scenario for Peace.” Couched in the traditional idiom of republicanism, the document repeated the conventional demand for British withdrawal, called for the disbanding of the RUC and UDR and the release of IRA prisoners, and demanded reparations for British misrule. It seemed to be a routine repetition of republican dogma and was ignored by the media and most political rivals. But “A Scenario for Peace” did two things. It scrapped the simplistic and rigid “Brits Out” slogan of the 1970s and replaced it with the much more subtle and flexible phrase “national self-determination” (NSD), a concept that was one of the cornerstones of the Reid-Adams strategy. NSD was a formulation within whose generous frame two utterly conflicting definitions could coexist quite happily, one the traditional republican one, which envisaged physical British expulsion, and the other Reid’s version, which said that any move by the British to leave Northern Ireland had to be with the consent of unionists, not just nationalists. One other “stepping stone” idea was contained in the paper, the proposal for a constitutional conference at which elected representatives from all the Irish traditions, nationalist and unionist, would hammer out a settlement. Again worded in republican language, this idea nevertheless could happily sit alongside the Reid-Adams formulation. Adams’s efforts to move Sinn Fein away from its ban on taking seats in the Dail had been a slow, cautious, and incremental journey; it would be the same with the bid to make the Reid-Adams diplomacy republican policy. Slowly, the building blocks for a settlement based on the constitutional status quo, by and large, were being laid—and Sinn Fein would be part of that settlement.
Within two years another plank in the Reid-Adams strategy, pannationalism, fell into place when the notion of an alliance with constitutional nationalism became de facto Sinn Fein policy. The groundwork had been done in the months before. Against a background of regular assurances throughout the spring of 1988 from Martin McGuinness that talks with the SDLP had nothing to do with an IRA cease-fire, a troop of Adams’s supporters, Mitchel McLaughlin, Tom Hartley, and Danny Morrison among them, made public calls urging the adoption of a pan-nationalist strategy. It was all in preparation for a special internal conference of Northern Sinn Feiners at the end of June 1988 that would consider a special report prepared by the SF general secretary, Tom Hartley, arguing for an alliance with the SDLP.
This was unfamiliar and unfriendly territory as far as many Provisional activists were concerned. Most still shared the scathing view of their constitutional rivals that had been expressed by IRA prisoners at the end of the 1981 hunger strike, and six years of electoral rivalry between the parties had, if anything, deepened the hostility at grassroots level. The June 1988 conference also heard a critique of the IRA’s armed struggle from a Belfast councillor, Martin O Muillear, a post–hunger strike, non-IRA recruit to republicanism who told the delegates that there were contradictions between “the armed struggle and our political work,” not least in the area of job creation. As a councillor he wanted jobs for his constituents, but the IRA was pledged to deter inward investment with its bombing campaign. “[L]et’s have enough savvy to tell the difference between what is a position of political suicide,” he told the 150 delegates, “and what is an intelligent and pragmatic political position.”16 O Muillear’s message was clear: the IRA was becoming an electoral liability, while Hartley’s message, the need for an alliance with the SDLP, offered an alternative.
Leadership figures were pushing the new ideas, but at the wider grassroots level reservations about dealing with the SDLP at such close quarters were deeply held and seemingly staunch. In the mostly pseudonymous columns of Iris Bheag, Tom Hartley’s discussion paper “Towards a Broader Base,” was given a dusty response by republican activists and IRA prisoners alike. Hartley’s principal contention that “Britain can only be moved on the National Question if the British state is confronted by the combined forces of Irish Nationalism”17 implied a compromise that went too far for many. In August 1988 one group of IRA prisoners identified the central danger of the approach, as they saw it. “We don’t believe that Britain can be moved ‘only by the combined forces of Irish Nationalism,’ mainly because we feel that no constitutional party will agree to ‘formal’ alliances with us unless we reject the use of armed struggle (and we don’t believe such is possible)…”18 The same prisoners also complained about the inconsistency in Hartley’s approach, recalling the long-held Provisional view that the SDLP’s role in Northern Ireland was to support British strategy. “We cannot simply tell our membership today ‘SDLP bad—Sinn Fein good’ and then tomorrow tell them ‘maybe SDLP not so bad, Sinn Fein good.’”19
IRA prisoners in H5 of the Maze prison were equally dismissive: “The central position of an alliance with the SDLP is impracticable,” they complained, “given the class position and interests of their leadership, and their stance on Hillsborough was a conscious reinforcement of imperialist rule. Neither the SDLP (nor the Dublin government for that matter) were pushed into this treaty, they jumped! Do we seriously believe we can force Hume or Haughey to adopt a more ‘Republican’ position?”20 Tony Doherty, SF education officer in Derry, put it more bluntly: “The Republican Movement is clearly identified as the arch-enemy of the SDLP. We [must] show them that we make a very formidable enemy.”21 Iris Bheag was closed down not long afterward.
Although Adams and his closest allies continued throughout 1988 to urge pan-nationalism on the republican base, the level of internal hostility toward it and the fact that in the autumn of that year Gerry Adams and John Hume took the Sinn Fein-SDLP talks into private and secret mode forced a more cautious and circuitous approach on the leadership. At the Ard Fheis of January 1989 talk of pan-nationalism had disappeared, replaced by a slogan calling for the setting up of a left-wing “anti-imperialist” mass movement that would bring together “nationalists, patriots, socialists, republicans and democrats” to press for national and economic self-determination.22 The Adams leadership—Tom Hartley, Martin McGuinness, Jim Gibney, Mitchel McLaughlin, and Adams himself—lined up to recommend the new slogan to the delegates, and it was easily approved. Although one agitational group, the Irish National Caucus, did emerge, little resulted in terms of longterm practical initiatives. As a strategy it disappeared from the leadership’s lexicon not long thereafter, replaced once again by pan-nationalism, albeit rechristened “the Nationalist consensus.” Not for the first or last time, Adams used the appeal of radical politics to bring his supporters to the desired goal.
The 1989 “anti-imperialist front” proposal got the rank and file accustomed to the notion of Sinn Fein’s working with other parties in broad fronts, an essential prerequisite for an alliance with the SDLP. The motion, Adams told the Ard Fheis, was a recognition of the republican movement’s weakness: “[W]e can’t win this struggle alone…,” he said.23 This would reemerge years later as the central argument for calling a cease-fire. Crucially the strategy also envisaged Sinn Fein’s making alliances with parties that were opposed to the IRA’s violence. “Participation in this movement,” a leadership document stated, “should not be dependent on one’s attitude to armed struggle. Those involved in the movement would have the right to their own individual positions on armed struggle.”24 In practice, as a moment’s reflection would have revealed, prospective constitutional allies would refuse to consider a relationship with Sinn Fein unless ending the armed struggle was on the agenda. The H Block prisoners were, in their terms, right. In an important sense this was history repeating itself. It was precisely this fear that constructing alliances with non-Republicans would dilute the armed struggle that had persuaded the founders of the Provisionals to reject Cathal Goulding’s version of broad-front politics, the “National Liberation Front,” exactly twenty years before.
The move to drop abstentionism contained a hugely significant message for Haughey and the British, but it was by no means the only signal sent in these crucial years. In March 1987, a month before the publication of “A Scenario for Peace,” the IRA’s Northern commander, Martin McGuinness, bowed to Catholic Church pressure in Derry and announced that the IRA would review the practice of firing volleys over the coffins of IRA Volunteers in church grounds. McGuinness’s retreat came in the wake of a public protest from the bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, after two masked men had fired handguns over the coffin of Gerard Logue, a twenty-six-year-old from the Gobnascale area of the city who had been killed accidentally by his own weapon while on active service. Logue’s funeral cortege had been surrounded by police and soldiers in a bid to prevent a paramilitary display, but at the door to St. Columba’s Long Tower church the IRA had seized the chance to give their fallen comrade the traditional farewell salute. Daly accused the IRA of reneging on an understanding not to violate church grounds in this way, and he said that in the future the bodies of paramilitary members would not be allowed on church premises in the city.25
Bishop Daly, unlike his namesake in Belfast, had supported the secret diplomacy of Father Alec Reid and was an enormously popular figure in Derry. Television coverage of him waving a bloodstained handkerchief as an improvised flag of truce at heavily armed British troops as he tried to secure safe passage for one of the fatally wounded civilians shot on Bloody Sunday became one of the visual icons of the Troubles. McGuinness’s decision not to seek a fight with Daly over the funeral issue was understandable in the light of all that, but it also served to highlight a largely unnoticed IRA policy change that had significantly demilitarized its funeral rites. The practice of firing volleys over IRA coffins, whether in church grounds or not, had at one time been part of the ritual of defiance, but by this stage had ended in Belfast. The change coincided with the expulsion of Ivor Bell and his hard-line, militarist allies and with the beginnings of Father Reid’s secret peace enterprise. Instead the IRA now paid “tribute” to martyred colleagues by firing volleys over their wreath-bedecked photograph, usually after the funeral had taken place. The effect of McGuinness’s concession was to extend the change to Derry, the second city of Provisional republicanism. The change had been partly forced upon the IRA by a tougher British security force presence at IRA funerals, but the fact that the leadership chose not to make an issue out of this, when it could easily have sought violent, destabilizing street conflict by staging firing parties, was a subtle signal to both governments and a concession to the Catholic Church allies whose friendship Sinn Fein sought.
Republicans still tried to bury their fallen colleagues with other military trappings. Tricolors and IRA berets and gloves were draped over caskets, and corteges would be accompanied by marching color parties in displays that often led to ugly confrontations with RUC riot squads. These caused violence and tension, but in circumstances less calculated to cause death and more likely to generate sympathy from a wider nationalist audience.
Similar signals were sent by an Army Council decision to demilitarize the color party that led the march into Bodenstown graveyard each June for the annual commemoration of Wolfe Tone. The Goulding leadership had used this public ceremony to advertise its own ideological shifts, and ever since the split in 1969 the Provisionals had insisted that their color party at the annual ceremony be an IRA one, complete with all the customary paramilitary trappings, masks, and uniforms. It symbolized their republican purity and the adherence to armed struggle. In June 1987, however, the color party was suddenly civilianized, much to the disappointment and puzzlement of the rank and file. In the Iris Bheag of September 1987, a correspondent called “The Weasel” complained bitterly. “Of all the people I spoke to about the change in policy in relation to colour parties at Bodenstown,” he wrote, “not one single person agreed that it was a good policy and nearly all agreed that it was sapping the morale which went with previous parades before the policy change.”26 In the same issue, “Sea Hag” commented, “I wouldn’t have seen [the colour party] go by only that someone next to me said it was passing.”27 “The Weasel” unwittingly detected the subliminal message contained in the move: “Defiance was always one of our strong points, without it we will be left to the history books.”28
There were other adjustments in Provisional theology every bit as significant. In February 1988, a year later, a Catholic civilian, twenty-four-year-old Aidan McAnespie, was shot dead as he walked through a British army checkpoint at Aughnacloy, on the Tyrone-Monaghan Border, en route to a local Gaelic football game. Despite British protestations to the contrary, McAnespie’s family alleged the killing had been deliberate and cited a history of harassment and verbal abuse directed at the dead man by soldiers manning the checkpoint. The Irish prime minister, Charles Haughey, chose to cause a diplomatic row with the British over the incident. He ordered a senior Garda officer to investigate the death, and quietly the IRA and Sinn Fein instructed its councillors and supporters to cooperate with him. The importance of the move was enormous; traditional republican dogma forbade cooperation with the Irish police force in such matters on the grounds that the police enforced the laws of what was seen as an illegal state. Again a writer in Iris Bheag hinted at the internal controversy this had caused: “Some thought it was wrong because it legitimised what we in Sinn Fein do not see as legitimate.”29 The underlying message to Haughey and to the Southern security authorities was unmistakable. The Army Council, under Adams’s direction, was in a very real way conceding to Haughey its traditional claim to be the only legitimate government in Ireland.
A similarly significant signal was sent to the British the following month when, for the first time since the split with Goulding, the organizers of the annual Easter Provisional republican parade to the IRA plot at Milltown cemetery in West Belfast filed for permission from the RUC to hold their march. The traditional refusal to ask official leave carried legal penalties, but rather than extend recognition to the Northern Ireland state that filing for an RUC permit implied, the organizers were normally quite happy to bear the consequences. Later in the year Sinn Fein began to use the courts in Northern Ireland to challenge unionists who were refusing to give the party’s councillors seats on committees. It was the first time ever that republicans had resorted to British justice in this way to seek redress.
The effect of all this was to flag an important message that only a few could detect. The bulk of the republican grassroots were distracted by the noise of the IRA’s ongoing war, which was by 1988 in the midst of the postponed “Tet offensive,” and those who did notice were satisfied with the explanation from Adams’s colleagues in the Sinn Fein leadership that it was all a ploy to win sympathy in the South and among the greener fringes of constitutional nationalism in the North. None of them could have guessed the real significance and meaning of the changes.