Under the guiding and skilled hand of Gerry Adams, the think tank, and others, the IRA had been ushered into a cease-fire, the first in twenty years, and for Father Reid and the Sinn Fein leader, this culmination of their secret diplomacy was a truly remarkable achievement. A dialogue begun with the kidnapping and killing of UDR Sergeant Thomas Cochrane in 1982 had borne sweet fruit some twelve, patient years later, and the architects of the enterprise could afford to congratulate themselves on what they had done. This cease-fire was qualitatively different from any that preceded it, for it was predicated on a secret set of agreements that, if implemented, would end not just the Troubles but possibly bring to a conclusion the age-old tradition of armed-struggle republicanism in Ireland. A breakthrough had surely been made, even if there was still a long way to go.
None of this was at all clear in the heady days of September 1994 as Northern Ireland began to get used to a new way of living. The precise terms of the cease-fire were kept secret, and consequently there was not even agreement on what the IRA cease-fire meant or whether it was supposed to be permanent or short-lived. Irish politicians like Albert Reynolds had been pressing for a permanent cease-fire; otherwise, he said, Sinn Fein would not have a chance of getting into serious political dialogue. And so the language of the IRA cease-fire statement and comments made by senior republican figures like Adams and McGuinness in the ensuing days were anxiously scanned for clues as to the IRA’s real intentions. Republican leaders did their best to reassure the British, Irish, and American political leadership that the cessation was indeed permanent, but it was a difficult exercise, primarily because their rank and file needed to hear quite the opposite message—that the cease-fire was a tentative and tactical move that would be quickly abandoned if it failed to produce results.
In order to describe the 1994 cease-fire in terms that would set grassroots’ minds at rest, the think tank had come up with an Irish word designed to convey the temporary and probationary nature of the cease-fire. The word was sos, which translates into English as a pause, a cessation, an interval, and a rest. The word, which in everyday IRA usage became simply “the suss,” succeeded in suggesting the IRA leadership’s determination not to be sucked into a long and fruitless cease-fire. Other reassuring signals were sent to the base. The first IRA “War News” column in An Phoblacht – Republican News published immediately after the August 31 announcement, for example, repeatedly called the cease-fire a “suspension.”1 The message that the cessation would be temporary, if necessary, was reinforced by senior republican figures at private republican “family” meetings attended by IRA and Sinn Fein supporters in the days and weeks after the declaration.2 By the end of September 1994, more comforting messages to the republican base were dispatched, Adams saying in Boston that if the causes of the conflict were not removed, no one could say that another IRA leadership would not come along, while McGuinness insisted that there was no such word as “permanent” in the republican dictionary. Both were fairly broad hints that the IRA would, if needed, resume its violence.
The truth was that a permanent cease-fire was just not in Adams’s gift, at least in such explicit terms. The IRA simply would not have tolerated it, and the Army Council would have resisted it. If the cessation was to become enduring, it would have to evolve and develop naturally as political circumstances allowed. The sort of cease-fire demanded by Reynolds and others was not what Adams had been able to persuade the Army Council to back.
Far from being permanent, the cease-fire the Army Council voted for in August 1994 had to be reviewed after just four months, a time frame chosen by chance. In theory the Army Council had endorsed the short, speculative cessation that had been predicted in the media, but it was cleverly disguised. The weeks leading up to August 31, 1994 had seen numerous conjectural reports about a three-month cease-fire, much of it encouraged by think tank briefings to the media, the author included. Other reports said the cease-fire would last for six months. By choosing a four-month cease-fire, Sinn Fein leaders could honestly and credibly deny media speculation about a three-or six-month-long cessation and this served to reassure the British, Irish, and Americans that it was indeed meant to be permanent.
There were echoes of the ambiguity inherent in the TUAS strategy document in all this, another compelling clue that the Sinn Fein peace strategy derived its dynamic from the ability of the party’s leadership to send out differing messages to different constituencies. It also spoke to the readiness of recipients, especially Sinn Fein’s own supporters, to believe them. Otherwise the peace process could never have moved forward.
These conflicting messages plagued the cease-fire in its early months and contributed in no small way to British skepticism about the bona fides of the Sinn Fein leadership. Part of the problem derived from the fact that the bulk of agents run by British intelligence inside the IRA knew nothing of this subtle dissembling. While the Sinn Fein leaders might say one thing to the British and Irish governments in public or even private, the intelligence briefings from MI5, the military, and particularly the RUC Special Branch reflected the quite different story being told to the IRA grassroots.
There were also pieces of hard evidence that could not be ignored by the British. The IRA had broken the secret agreement not to recruit or train its members during the cease-fire. It had also engaged in some targeting and continued to produce explosives. Much to the discomfort of the Adams faction, the Army Council “soldiers” had interpreted literally an obligation in the IRA constitution to keep the IRA “as efficient as possible” and insisted that it be honored, despite the secret undertakings given to the British and Irish governments.3 In response, the British resumed surveillance of IRA leaders. The British could not be sure whether all this meant that the Army Council wanted to keep the IRA in fighting trim so that it could slip back into war or whether it was merely trying to reassure the rank and file. In this state of uncertainty, they opted for a cautious, slow-moving, and often suspicious approach to the cease-fire, and it was this that proved its undoing.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL eight months into the cessation that the British secretary of state, Sir Patrick Mayhew, began to think that the Provisionals probably were genuine, and by that time it was very likely too late.4 The British were used to thinking the worst about the Provos, and for good reason, but evidence that has emerged from inside the republican world suggests they were wrong. From accounts given by key IRA personnel, it appears that not only was the cease-fire called in defiance of the wishes of most rank-and-file IRA members but that it had been structured in such a way that, surreptitously, the cessation could be extended again and again no matter what the grassroots thought.
IRA activists had strongly registered their opposition to a cease-fire not long after the Downing Street Declaration had been published. In February 1994, six months before the cessation was called, a mini-Convention was held in Donegal and came out strongly against stopping the campaign. The meeting brought together the Army Council, GHQ, Northern Command staff, brigade commanders, and operations officers, a total of nearly forty of the IRA’s most senior and important personnel. Three-quarters of them, according to one estimate, rejected the cease-fire option.5 Voicing their opposition did not halt the process, but the Donegal meeting did give the leadership a good idea of who was for and who was against their strategy.
The movement toward the cease-fire was kept a closely guarded secret, its detail known only to the Army Council and the Adams think tank. IRA activists were given private assurances that the media speculation— which by the summer of 1994 was intense—was groundless, and this continued right up to the eve of the cease-fire announcement. Even Gerry Adams joined in. Ten days before the declaration, just a day or two before he would formally propose the cease-fire motion at the Army Council meeting in County Donegal, he issued a public statement describing the media speculation as “news to me.”6
The IRA rank and file was not consulted or briefed about the decision, and preparation for military operations continued until a few days beforehand, as one activist recalled. “A week before there was no word of a cease-fire,” he said. “I had just delivered a van to——for a big bomb they were planning. I was being pushed to get jobs done, targets were being readied, and then four days before we heard what was coming. It hit me like a thunderbolt.”7 IRA prisoners likewise were kept in the dark. The Northern IRA was given some notice, but the IRA in Southern Command got none at all. Most IRA members in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Kerry, and Galway first heard of the cease-fire on the day it was declared, and they heard it first on television or radio news broadcasts, not from their leaders. Even in the North not all areas were briefed about the cease-fire; Tyrone, where support for the Adams strategy was at its most lukewarm, was kept in the dark almost to the end.
The non-IRA republican base, people who would vote for Sinn Fein and work for the party during elections, knew even less about the impending events and were stunned when the cease-fire came, as one vivid account of a republican meeting in Derry held just after the declaration became public, described: “It was an extraordinary meeting because it soon became clear that a significant number of those present were in open disagreement with the decision of the IRA leadership to call the ceasefire. As for those who did support the cease-fire it was not so much because they knew why. Indeed they seemed to be as surprised by the totality of the decision as everyone else.”8 In West Belfast, Sinn Fein stage-managed a celebratory cavalcade of cars that toured the area, its occupants waving large Irish flags and honking horns. At a rally in Andersonstown, Gerry Adams was presented with a bouquet of flowers and surrounded by smiling Sinn Fein politicians. The crowd, however, was largely subdued and puzzled.
In the face of such anxiety, the Army Council used two arguments to calm its supporters. One was to urge the rank and file to keep faith and trust in the leadership, and here the record—and thus trustworthiness—of a leadership that had smuggled tons of weapons from Libya was constantly and relentlessly invoked. The other argument, possibly the most powerful of all during these days, said that only the British stood to gain by division and discord within the IRA. Those who stirred dissent and criticism were, in effect, doing the British a huge favor, and they should therefore keep silent or risk being accused of helping the enemy, IRA leaders said. This appeal for unity by and large worked, but it was not an inexhaustible argument.
The decision to review the cease-fire after four months may have enabled Sinn Fein leaders to field awkward questions from the media, but its effect was to position the review at times that made it more difficult to argue for going back to war. The first four-month review, for instance, was scheduled to take place in the month of December. That meant that if the cease-fire was ended, it would happen around the festive period, a bad time in public relations terms to go back to bombing and shooting. Although the cease-fire was going badly for the leadership at this time and would continue to worsen, the Army Council, predictably, decided against a resumption and put the decision off for another four months.
That meant the next review would be around Easter 1995, a predictable time of the year for republicans to resume war, given the association with the Easter Rising of 1916. The British would surely be waiting for the IRA to do just that. So again the Council opted to preserve the cease-fire and told the volunteers that it would end after Easter and to get ready to return to active service then. But again another review was ordered. As the weeks ran into months and the cease-fire ran into more and more trouble, IRA activists were repeatedly told to prepare for a resumption of hostilities, which never quite happened. “They were told forty times they were going back,” remembered one commander.9 Adams’s approach to the cease-fire, the reassurance contained in TUAS in particular, may have persuaded the rank and file that the military option was still viable, but every month without violence made it more difficult for the IRA to launch a sustainable campaign of armed struggle. Not only was the IRA itself getting rusty with inactivity, but the longer the cease-fire lasted, the more popular it became, especially in the IRA’s strongest areas, where the communities had borne the brunt of nearly two decades of violence and were now tasting peace and relative serenity for the first time.
THE CEASE-FIRE ran into trouble fairly quickly. The British response was slow and cautious, and not until mid-October 1994 did John Major make what he called “a working assumption” that the IRA cease-fire was permanent. Even so, talks between Sinn Fein and NIO officials, only talks about talks, would not commence until December 1994, when technically the IRA leadership was supposed to review the entire enterprise. There was no sign yet of Sinn Fein’s sitting down with British ministers, much less of a British readiness to discuss their withdrawal from Northern Ireland. By this stage full-blooded negotiations with the British should have begun. Not that there was no movement at all by the Major government. Blocked Border roads were gradually reopened in October 1994, the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fein that prevented Gerry Adams’s voice from being heard on the BBC had been lifted, and British soldiers were wearing soft hats instead of battle helmets as they patrolled the streets and fields, signaling the start of a military de-escalation. But the British ambassador to Ireland was still under instructions to boycott the opening session of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin Castle because of the presence of Sinn Fein delegates. By the end of November, Adams and Hume were obliged to issue a strongly worded statement calling for demilitarization to be speeded up. Talks should commence “without further delay,” they said.10
The British instinct for caution was reinforced significantly when the IRA shot dead a postal worker in the course of a robbery in the Border town of Newry in mid-November. The victim, Frank Kerr, a fifty-three-year-old single Catholic from South Armagh, died when three armed raiders dressed as postal workers held up staff in the main sorting office and tied them up. Kerr resisted, struggled with the robbers, and was gunned down. The robbery had been carried out by the South Armagh IRA but it was very quickly disowned by the Army Council, which claimed that the operation, while the work of its members, had not been sanctioned by the leadership. Publicly Adams expressed shock at the killing, and Father Reid traveled to Dublin to assure officials that this was indeed the case. Reid had however been misinformed. According to IRA sources the robbery had been given a broad sanction by the Army Council, inasmuch as a general permission had been granted to continue “fund-raising” activity, cease-fire or no cease-fire. It was a necessary part of the job of keeping the IRA “as efficient as possible,” as the Army Council “soldiers” had insisted must happen, and anyway the IRA always needed money.
The Kerr killing had an immediately negative impact on the cease-fire, in that the Major government stiffened the demand for IRA decommissioning as a precondition for Sinn Fein’s entry to the political talks. It brought to the top of the agenda an item that was to haunt the peace process for years to come. Decommissioning of IRA weaponry had been simmering away on the back burner for much of the period leading up to the cease-fire. The Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, had mentioned it as something that would have to happen eventually, as had the Irish deputy prime minister, Dick Spring—but it was not yet the dominating issue it would become. Major had merely said that IRA disarmament would have to figure in any overall deal, but by the end of the year, as a result of the Kerr killing, he was much more specific and demanding. A Sinn Fein promise on guns would not be enough, he said, and there would have to be “significant progress” on the matter before Sinn Fein could sit at the negotiating table. Mayhew was making the demand detailed by January 1995, saying that Semtex and heavy machine guns would have to be put out of commission. During a trip to the United States to coincide with the Saint Patrick’s Day festivities in March, Mayhew introduced the Washington Three test, a series of decommissioning hurdles the IRA would have to jump before Sinn Fein could join negotiations. First, said Mayhew, there must be a willingness in principle to disarm progressively; next, agreement on the method of decommissioning; and third, a start to the process. Otherwise Sinn Fein would stay outside the negotiating chamber.
The caution of the British meant that they moved very slowly toward the release of IRA prisoners, one of the goals of the Adams strategy. The cease-fire had been made possible in no small measure because of an Irish government promise to press London for prison reform, but it was not until August 1995, a year into the cessation, that the British moved, when Mayhew restored 50 percent remission for sentenced prisoners. This concession had first been given to the IRA in 1976, when special-category or political status was removed, but taken away by the Thatcher government in 1988 in punitive response to the post-Eksund offensive. In IRA eyes it was hardly a concession at all, merely a return to what had been.
Events south of the Border intervened to complicate a rapidly deteriorating situation for the Adams leadership. In mid-November, Albert Reynolds was forced to resign as taoiseach after his party was embroiled in a sordid scandal centered on his government’s failure to prosecute a pedophile Catholic priest. Reynolds’s partners in government, Labour, refused to deal with his successor, Bertie Ahern, and joined instead with Fine Gael, whose leader, John Bruton, became the new taoiseach. It was a devastating blow for the Adams cease-fire strategy. TUAS derived its credibility from the creation of a pan-nationalist alliance, and while Fianna Fail was clearly a nationalist party, and a fit partner for Sinn Fein, Fine Gael certainly was not, at least in the eyes of Provo supporters.
The political successors of Michael Collins, the man who had negotiated the hated Treaty of 1921, Fine Gael had a controversial history, and at one stage in the 1930s was linked to Ireland’s version of the fascist movement. The party took a traditionally tough attitude toward the IRA, and a Fine Gael–Labour coalition government in the mid-1970s pursued the IRA relentlessly. Under the leadership of Garret FitzGerald, Fine Gael developed a name for being more friendly toward unionists than toward nationalists, although political self-interest drove the party into an alliance with the SDLP in the mid-1980s when Sinn Fein first started to win electoral support. FitzGerald himself bitterly opposed the notion of talking to the Provos and had quarreled with the British over the issue. His successor, John Bruton, would have been regarded by Adams’s followers as even more sympathetic to the unionist case, so much so that few would quarrel with the sobriquet “John Unionist” bestowed upon him by Albert Reynolds.
To say the least, Bruton’s elevation made it difficult for Adams to convince anyone in the republican movement that the pan-nationalist alliance still had meaning. Bruton had no appetite for the strategy and signaled this in an unmistakable fashion in October 1995, when he pointedly refused to meet jointly with Adams and Hume in their capacity as leaders of Northern nationalism. It was a terrible blow to the TUAS strategy, and to Adams’s credibility.
The change of government brought important changes in the personnel handling the peace process, and the dismay of the Provos grew. Out went the trusted Martin Mansergh, who had been the Southern link with Adams via Father Reid since 1987, and in came a new adviser to the taoiseach, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Sean Donlon, whose credentials were very different from Mansergh’s. Whereas Mansergh was a thinking republican, Donlon was seen, by the IRA at least, as someone who sympathized with FitzGerald’s tough antirepublicanism while he was minister for foreign affairs. To make matters worse for Adams, Bruton put together a coalition cabinet and included as ministers members of the Democratic Left, the latest manifestation of the Workers Party, the successors to the hated Goulding IRA. It was called the Rainbow Coalition, but it created a black nightmare for Adams.
Under Bruton’s leadership the Irish government moved closer to the British on the key issue of IRA decommissioning. Both governments believed that there had to be some progress on the issue, some signal that it would happen at least, before Sinn Fein could be safely let into talks. That alone was sufficient to set alarm bells ringing in the IRA. It all confirmed the worst fears of activists that once again the real aim of the British, the Irish, and their allies was to weaken and divide the movement, much as they had done in 1974 and 1975. Adams’s cease-fire strategy was supposed to create pressure on the British to quit Northern Ireland, not the weakening and emasculation of the IRA. The state of the cease-fire by the end of 1995 raised dark questions about the wisdom of the Adams leadership in going down this dangerous road. Far from showing any inclination to talk to the Provisionals, the British were as determined as ever to defeat them, or so it seemed.
TO ADD TO the leadership’s problems, discontent at rank-and-file level became increasingly visible. When, for instance, it was revealed in November 1994 that Sinn Fein had secretly agreed to accept political training, in such basic skills as fund-raising and fighting elections, from the National Democratic Institute in Washington, a body it had once accused of being a CIA front when it gave the SDLP training in the mid-1980s, there was a revolt. At the party’s Ard Fheis in February 1995 the leadership could only watch in embarrassment as delegates overwhelmingly passed a motion condemning as “undemocratic” the notion that Sinn Fein should accept aid or training from the Americans.
When the British prime minister, John Major, visited Derry in May 1995, local republicans rioted, venting their frustration at the British stalling tactics. The incident seriously embarrassed the Sinn Fein leadership. The occasion had been arranged so that Mitchel McLaughlin, whose non-IRA credentials were impeccable, could publicly shake hands with the British prime minister, thus signaling another stage in Sinn Fein’s journey out of isolation. Instead McLaughlin could only watch helplessly as the rioters got stuck into the RUC and Major’s travel plans were quickly changed. The handshake was abandoned.
In the same month Sinn Fein accepted an invitation to attend a ceremony at Islandbridge in Dublin to commemorate Irish people who had died while serving in the British forces during the Second World War. Tom Hartley was sent along—colleagues later said he had to be dragged there—and pointedly remarked to the media that he was there because Gerry Adams could not accept the taoiseach’s invitation. The downward spiral in Hartley’s Sinn Fein career probably began at that moment. The incident deeply unsettled the Provo base. No Irish republican had ever honored Irishmen who had donned British uniforms.
It was not all bad news for Sinn Fein. Adams was granted a fund-raising visa by Clinton, which allowed him to raise money for Sinn Fein—eventually millions of dollars—while the British slowly began troop withdrawals and then agreed to transfer selected IRA prisoners from British to Northern Ireland jails. Meanwhile the Boundary Commission redrew the West Belfast Westminster consituency in such a way that Adams was bound to regain the seat he had lost to the SDLP in 1992. The framework documents were also published by the British and Irish governments in early 1995, offering a power-sharing administration in Belfast and cross-Border bodies linking government reponsibilities in Belfast and Dublin. The idea was to enhance cooperation and even gradual integration in some economic and social matters between the two states. This was not British withdrawal, but at least it was some movement.
Even so the balance sheet showed more red ink than black, and in the face of rank-and-file unease the leadership was forced to toughen its profile. At Eastertime in 1995 Adams made an thinly veiled threat to take his supporters onto the streets and warned the British they would soon be faced with “the sound of angry voices and stamping feet” unless there was progress.
There were more ominous signs of discontent. Not long after Adams’s Easter address the IRA shot dead a notorious drug dealer, Micky Mooney, in Belfast. It used a new cover name, Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD), to disguise its role, but this fooled few people, least of all the IRA rank and file, who gained some reassurance from this brief return to the use of firearms. DAAD was back in action in September 1995 when a second drug dealer was killed. Again this was the IRA leadership sending out the signal to its own people that it was not afraid to go back to the gun. Adams had personal experience of the unrest in the ranks a few days earlier when he was faced with a restless crowd that had marched to Belfast City Hall to commemorate the August 1971 internment operation, an annual high point of the republican calendar. When a voice from the crowd shouted, “Bring back the IRA!” Adams, in a memorable phrase, replied, “They haven’t gone away, you know!”11
Sentiment within the IRA was running strongly against the cease-fire and the TUAS strategy by mid-1995. It was inevitable that opposition to the Adams policy would become more organized and structured and that moves would be made to return the IRA to war. As in every other period of republican turbulence, the twelve-person IRA Executive became the focus of unrest and the vehicle for rebellion. IRA Executives had historically regarded themselves as the conscience of the rank and file and believed they had a brief to ensure that the Army Council never stepped too far out of line with grassroots feeling. It would be no different this time.
The IRA Executive of 1994–96 had a grievance with the Army Council and Adams so serious that the rift between them was particularly bitter. During the tortuous negotiations leading to the Downing Street Declaration and then to the cease-fire, the Executive had been excluded, on security grounds, from the information loop. Only the Army Council and the think tank knew what was going on, and the fact that the latter was a body that had no constitutional status at all served to deepen the resentment on the Executive. The Council refused to share information about the peace process with the Executive for fear of a leak to the British, and the memory that no such consideration had kept the chairman of the Army Council from hinting at the Eksund shipment deeply rankled. When the Army Council declared the August 1994 cease-fire, the Executive was treated just like the rest of the IRA, despite its elevated status. A few days beforehand two Executive members were briefed and told to inform the other ten. The lack of consultation and this offhand treatment served to further alienate the Executive.
The 1995 Executive was a body that the Army Council could ill afford to ignore for long. Its members included key GHQ staff and members of both Southern and Northern Command. It met formally every six months or so, but informally its members were in more regular contact. In the absence of any sign that the British were contemplating negotiations about withdrawal, the number of Executive members ranged against the Adams strategy grew. By the summer of 1995 it stood at ten out of twelve, an overwhelming majority. The Executive’s complaint was straightforward. With the British barring Sinn Fein from talks and the Dublin government seemingly unable to influence them otherwise, the IRA was in trouble. The longer the sos lasted, the weaker the IRA would become, both politically and militarily, the Executive argued. If the sos did not end soon, its members complained, the game would be up.
THREE MEN EMERGED as the sharpest critics of the Adams strategy. One was Micky McKevitt, the quartermaster general who, along with Slab Murphy, had masterminded the Libyan arms shipments. The second was the IRA’s director of engineering, Frank McGuinness, a young Dubliner whose department kept the organization supplied with explosives and improvised weaponry. The third was the Belfast commander, Brian Gillen, who headed the IRA’s largest brigade area. Between them they encompassed the bulk of Southern Command and the most politically important section of the organization in the North. Their internal political clout was enhanced by the fact that McKevitt’s partner, Bernadette Sands, was a sister of the dead hunger striker and Provisional icon Bobby Sands. They later married. As a group they presented a formidable opposition to Gerry Adams and his allies.
The British ensured that the tide moved ever more strongly in the Executive’s direction. Earlier in 1995 the Army Council had ordered a canvass of rank-and-file views, and Adjutant General Gerry Kelly was given the task of testing the waters. He toured Ireland talking to the activists, and his report to the Council made depressing reading for the peace party. Virtually every brigade area was unhappy and anxious, worried that its leaders had been tricked by the British and the Irish governments into adopting a strategy in which both advance and retreat seemed likely to weaken the IRA. Feelings against the strategy were particularly strong in Belfast, Tyrone, Derry, Monaghan, and South Armagh, and IRA leaders would have had to be deaf and blind not to have known that the level of discontent was sufficiently high that it was only a matter of time before the opposition took a more tangible and even dangerous form.
Activists of this period paint a picture of an IRA that was in considerable turmoil. “A number of people at leadership level promised all sorts of things about going back to war,” recalled one. “The volunteers were led up the hill so many times only to be led down again that it was embarrassing. The state of the IRA was causing great concern, morale was at an all-time low, and there were very heated meetings where people would shout that they had been misled.”12
The Executive met in August 1995 to consider a situation that was visibly deteriorating. The Army Council sent along McGuinness and McKenna to give a briefing. The message they brought was a depressing one: Sinn Fein’s efforts to get into talks were running into the sand, and the Army Council members did not see the cease-fire lasting much longer. In fact they went as far as giving the Executive an assurance that it would be called off soon. Reassured, the Executive eased the pressure.
But the cease-fire survived, and the Army Council made no move to end it. Politically the autumn and winter of 1995 brought some softening of the British line on decommissioning, and this had the effect of forcing republicans to respond positively. At the end of November, on the eve of a historic visit to Northern Ireland by Bill Clinton, the British and Irish governments announced agreement on the so-called twin track approach to political negotiations. While preparatory talks involving the two governments and the political parties got under way, an international commission chaired by the former U.S. Senate Democratic majority leader, George Mitchell, would consider how best to address the problem of IRA decommissioning.
Sinn Fein had endorsed this approach, first formulated by John Hume, earlier that month when Martin McGuinness formally presented it to the British. The party also agreed to make a submission to the Mitchell body, but the Army Council “soldiers” blocked an attempt to include an IRA figure in the delegation, as Adams and others had urged. After meeting the Mitchell commission, Martin McGuinness said his party had proposed that armed groups dispose of their own weapons in a process that could be overseen by an independent third party, a proposal that ultimately was adopted by the British and the Irish governments. The logjam was easing, but it was too little and too late.
As 1995 drew to a close there were more ominous signs of IRA discontent, nearly all of them in Belfast, where Brian Gillen held sway. They came in the form of a burst of killings during December of alleged drug dealers, most of them small-time figures, by the IRA cover group DAAD. Starting on December 8 the IRA killed four times, and the killing continued into the New Year. A fifth drug dealer was shot dead in January 1996 in Lurgan, where the local IRA leader was also a critic of the Adams strategy. The DAAD killings were a barometer of rank-and-file unease and a measure of the current weakness of the peace camp in the IRA leadership.
The dam eventually burst. In early January 1996 the Executive met, and eleven of its twelve members supported a resolution calling for an extraordinary General Army Convention, which they demanded should be held by the end of February or beginning of March. Already suspicious about the Army Council’s intentions, the Executive set out to force its hand. Knowing that a Convention would almost certainly vote to end the cease-fire—and might well also replace the Adams leadership—the Army Council met on January 31 and by a unanimous vote called off the cease-fire. After fifteen months of relative peace it seemed that the process itself, not merely the cease-fire, might be over.
Preparations for the breakdown had actually begun two months earlier when, under the cover of the autumn’s dark evenings, South Armagh IRA members, directed by Slab Murphy, began preparing a huge truck bomb. Slab had correctly anticipated events. After the Army Council decision, the go-ahead for the bomb was given, and the device was smuggled over to England, where it was left in the underground car park of a six-story office building near Canary Wharf Tower in South London. At seven in the evening on February 9, it exploded, destroying the office building, killing two men, and, at a cost of around £100 million, devastating some of London’s most expensive commercial property.
SHORTLY BEFORE the explosion Gerry Adams phoned the National Security Council at the White House to say that he was “hearing some very disturbing news” about the cease-fire and would call back later with more details. Before he could get back the bomb exploded. The Army Council had sanctioned Adams’s phone call at his request. The Sinn Fein leader had argued that otherwise he would lose all credibility with Clinton and his people. The episode was a piece of description that helped cast Adams in the role of the frustrated peacemaker, squeezed between his own hard-liners and an inflexible British government. It was a convenient cover story, but it was not too far from the truth.
As far as official IRA policy was concerned, not only was the cease-fire over but so was the Adams strategy. The new military and political policy that replaced TUAS was straightforward, simple, and direct. The IRA would once more send huge blockbuster bombs to London and other English cities, having suspended this tactic in the midst of the Hume-Adams talks in 1993, and would not stop doing this until the British agreed to enter meaningful talks encompassing withdrawal. Only then would the IRA contemplate another cease-fire. It was back to the trenches, or so it seemed; back to comforting political certitudes. The “soldiers” on the Army Council were again in the ascendancy—at least for the time being.
At its January meeting the Executive had called for an extraordinary Convention to take place by the beginning of March, but by Easter there was still no sign of one. The Army Council had asked Pat Doherty to convene the meeting, but despite his usually excellent contacts and knowledge of County Donegal, he reported back to the Council in May that he had been unable to locate a suitable venue. Amid suspicions that the delay had been contrived, the Executive complained directly to Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna, who relieved Doherty of the task and handed it over to Micky McKevitt. By that point the evenings were getting brighter, and the IRA was again under intense surveillance on both sides of the Border. For security reasons the Convention was postponed until the end of October, when darker evenings would give the IRA cover for its gathering.
Doherty’s inability to find a meeting place for the Convention bought Adams and his allies a precious nine months during which events were to give them a fighting chance to survive the special IRA Convention. With the British starting to regret their earlier intransigence on decommissioning, elections were held to a new Northern Ireland Forum, from which negotiating teams for planned interparty talks were to be chosen. Sinn Fein scored its best-ever election result, winning over 116,000 votes, some 15.5 percent of the vote, and seventeen seats. Much of Sinn Fein’s success was ascribed to moderate nationalists’ switching from the SDLP to Sinn Fein so as to strengthen the Adams faction in what everyone instinctively knew was a struggle with hard-liners. It was encouraging evidence for the peace camp in Sinn Fein and their supporters in the Army Council that if the cease-fire was renewed, there could be even greater electoral dividends to be won.
The huge bomb at Canary Wharf may have devastated one of London’s smartest new commercial districts, as well as demonstrating the threat still posed by the IRA, but it also had serious negative consequences for Sinn Fein, not least dismaying and weakening those establishment figures in Ireland, Britain, and the United States who had heavily invested in Gerry Adams. Probing questions began to be asked about whether or not the Sinn Fein president had lied to the president of the United States about his peaceful intentions, for example, or if he had not, how much control he really did exercise over the IRA. And if he was a broken reed, as some in the three governments believed, then there was a strong argument against having any further dealings with him.
THE IMPACT OF the Canary Wharf bombing disguised a troubling reality for the IRA, and this was that the manner of its execution was actually a sign of military weakness. The bomb had been made up and delivered by the IRA in South Armagh, and this was an eloquent demonstration that by the 1990s British intelligence had well and truly gotten on top of the IRA’s England department. Not only did MI5 and the RUC Special Branch have well-placed agents in Ireland and Britain feeding them information about the IRA’s plans, but the routine surveillance work carried out by the British police forces—the regular checking of boardinghouses, digs and so on that occasionally brought priceless snippets of intelligence—had improved enormously since the 1970s when the IRA first began its attacks in England. The intelligence agencies had also become more sophisticated. Fifteen or twenty years earlier the police would have moved to make arrests at the first sighting of an IRA suspect; by 1995 they had learned to sit back and observe suspects for perhaps as long as a year before striking, knowing that such in-depth surveillance could yield valuable intelligence and roll up scores of IRA activists. The consequence was that IRA operations in England had become much more difficult to organize, more complex and time-consuming, and also much more expensive, a big drawback for an organization that was always teetering on the edge of penury and debt. The IRA in South Armagh was the only section of the organization its leaders could be reasonably confident had not yet been penetrated by the British, and so responsibility for important operations in England was given to it.
The problem for the IRA was that there was a limit to the number of big bombs that could be gotten out of South Armagh, and by definition these attacks were bound to be infrequent. In order to sustain the impact of the campaign, GHQ was obliged to activate existing units in England, with consequences that only highlighted the IRA’s shortcomings. Ed O’Brien, a twenty-one-year-old IRA member from County Wexford who had been living quietly in London for some time awaiting orders from GHQ, was activated in February 1996, but his IRA career was destined to be short-lived. A bomb he was carrying on a London bus on February 18 exploded prematurely, killing him instantly. The circumstances of the explosion suggested that the device he was carrying might well have been tampered with, possibly by the British. Small bombs were set off outside restaurants during the next six weeks, and at the end of March two bombs placed underneath Hammersmith bridge exploded only partially, a classic sign of interference by the security forces. The most compelling evidence that the British had thoroughly penetrated the IRA’s operations in England came in July there, when eight men were arrested and a bomb factory discovered in West London. Two months later the IRA member Diarmuid O’Neill was shot dead, five others arrested, and ten tons of homemade explosives, Semtex, and weapons captured by police, again in London. There were occasional IRA successes. In mid-June the commercial and shopping center of Manchester was devastated by a huge van bomb that injured two hundred people; but the circumstances suggested hasty planning and the absence of the IRA’s usual caution in preparation. Overall the balance sheet painted a less than inspiring picture of success.
NONE OF THIS made good news for Adams and his allies as they waited for the extraordinary Convention to finally meet. While the IRA’s failures in England strengthened the objective arguments for a cease-fire, there was every chance that the setbacks would instead be blamed on Adams and his supporters, who in an uncanny echo of the criticism leveled at the 1975 IRA leadership, would carry the can for leading the IRA down this path in the first place. As the preparations for the Convention intensified, so the need for a military success grew and, with that, so did the pressure to resume the IRA’s war on the streets of Northern Ireland.
Just three weeks or so before the Convention, on October 7, two IRA car bombs exploded inside Thiepval barracks in Lisburn, the British army’s headquarters in Northern Ireland. It was the first attack in Northern Ireland since August 1994, twenty-six months before. The operation was a spectacular breach of British security, deeply embarrassing to security chiefs, and as a signal that the IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland had been resumed it could not have gone better for the Adams camp. The operation had been carried out by a special unit headed by the Northern Command’s intelligence officer, a West Belfast figure who had loyally policed the peace strategy in the Maze prison’s IRA wings on behalf of Adams until his release two years earlier. Northern Command had set up the unit to spearhead the resumption of violence in the North, and it had spent months infiltrating unionist areas to gather intelligence on RUC and security force targets. This was its prize operation.
Although the bombs exploded deep inside the Thiepval complex, somehow major loss of life was avoided. Only thirty-two people were injured— a small toll for two large bombs—but one of them, Warrant Officer James Bradwell, a forty-three-year-old married man, died of his wounds four days later. According to the description given by his daughter, his death could only have come as a relief. “The man I saw in hospital,” she said, “was a shattered human being. He had tubes attached to him and there were machines all around. He had lost all of his hair. His face was swollen up because of his burns. I stood there crying. I just could not stop myself.”13 John Major blamed what he called “this cold-blooded killing” on Gerry Adams, but the irony of Bradwell’s awful death was that it had quite possibly saved both the peace process and Gerry Adams’s political skin. Just two weeks after his death, on the last weekend of October, the extraordinary IRA Convention met at a venue in the Irish midlands. Thanks in no small way to Warrant Officer Bradwell’s agonizing death, Gerry Adams would survive the experience.
The Convention gathered in a much more optimistic mood than would have been the case had it convened the preceding February or March, when the meeting was originally scheduled. Gerry Adams came in for a dreadful hammering at the Convention, but there is little doubt that, except for the Thiepval bombing, the weekend meeting might well have spelled disaster for him and the peace process.
It began, as Conventions always do, with a report from the chief of staff. Celebrating his twelfth year in the job, Kevin McKenna referred to the bombing in glowing terms right at the start of his address to the sixty or seventy delegates. It was a classic attack, he told them, according to an account provided to the author by one delegate, just the right type of operation to restart the war in the North. The sos, he assured the IRA, had been only tactical and now it was over; war was resumed. There would be more operations like Thiepval, he promised.
ORGANIZING an IRA Convention is a massive and risky undertaking. It requires a considerable portion of the IRA’s manpower and resources to put together, and while great efforts are made to ensure that security is tight, the authorities North and South invariably get some inkling that it is about to happen. The most dangerous and difficult part of the exercise happens once a secure location has been chosen by the convenor and a date picked for the Convention. Around forty-eight hours beforehand a series of mini-Conventions must be held at the unit level and among battalion and brigade staffs so that delegates can be chosen and motions for debate framed.
The delegates are chosen on a basis of one for every ten IRA members, and, once the turnout at the Convention is known, that makes it possible to figure out fairly accurately the strength of the IRA. Some sixty delegates were present at the 1996 Convention, while another ten or so missed their pickups, and that suggests that the operational strength of the IRA in 1996 was around six hundred or at most seven hundred men and women.
Once the mini-Conventions have taken place, the chosen delegates are not allowed to return home but must immediately start to make their way to the larger meeting, a journey that can take over a day. Most delegates arrive exhausted and must then sit through a meeting that usually begins at midnight and may go on for five or six hours until dawn. A small number of people attend by right and do not have to have delegate authority to be there. The chief of staff, the adjutant general, the quartermaster general, and the seven members of the Army Council fall into that category, while the Executive and the GHQ are empowered to send two delegates each. Invariably the leaders arrive in a less weary state than do the rank and file, and that gives them a special advantage.
Between drivers, internal IRA security staff, and people looking after food and drink, nearly as many people were involved in setting up the 1996 Convention as took part in it. The delegates were taken to the 1996 location via four separate stops. At each one they had to change cars and were thoroughly searched and debugged using state-of-the-art electronic detectors. The location itself was under guard by members of the IRA’s security unit equipped with walkie-talkie radios and scanners. Before and during the meeting the local Garda station was kept under surveillance, and contingency escape plans had been made in case the meeting was raided. The delegates were under strict orders not to bring mobile phones or any other electronic apparatus with them, for fear that these could be detected by surveillance equipment and the meeting compromised. The rule was strictly enforced for every delegate bar one. The security searchers did not have the nerve to stop Gerry Adams from bringing in a Walkman, which he occasionally plugged into his ears, presumably to drown out speeches he would rather not hear.
Conventions go through a certain routine. First, a chairman has to be elected to lead the proceedings. At the 1996 meeting the election proved to be the opening salvo at the Adams leadership. A Sinn Fein loyalist, Pat Treanor, a councillor from Clones, County Monaghan, won but only narrowly. His opponent was a formidable adversary, none other than Brian Keenan, who had been finally released from English imprisonment in June 1993 and who had, since the 1994 cease-fire, widely advertised his criticism of the Adams strategy. A once faithful and loyal disciple of the Sinn Fein president, Keenan was now declaring himself to be a dissident. He was so strongly opposed to the TUAS strategy—or so it seemed—that he had made common cause with the rebels on the Executive, Brian Gillen, Frank McGuinness, and Micky McKevitt. Keenan lost by just two votes. The first round had gone to Adams.
After McKenna’s report Gerry Adams rose to address the Convention. One delegate remembers that he looked like someone under pressure. “He was very nervous, not confident, hesitant and very mindful of saying the wrong thing. He was very nice to everybody.”14 Adams had every reason to be nervous. Under Convention rules he and his supporters did not get to see the motions presented by IRA delegates until the night before, when the Council held a special meeting. When they did, they must have blanched. Adams had had little time to digest the motions and almost no time to construct a counterstrategy when he rose to speak. It was, by all accounts, a disappointing and defensive speech. An assurance that the cease-fire was tactical, echoing Kevin McKenna, was accompanied by a plaintive plea for unity. Not all members of the Army Council had voted for his strategy, but once the vote had been taken they had supported it, he said, and he urged the delegates to act in the same spirit.
If the Sinn Fein leader ran into difficulties at the Convention, it was because some of his most determined opponents were veterans of the 1986 Convention who had learned an important lesson from that experience about how to win the argument at such events. The key to success was to make sure that the effective motions were ones that required changes to the IRA’s constitution, and this is what happened at the 1996 Convention. Doing this was the only way to bind the hands of the IRA leadership. In 1986 numerous hard-line motions had been passed that their supporters believed had committed the Army Council to certain courses of action and policy positions, but because they did not alter the IRA’s constitution, they had been ignored afterward.
OVER 130 MOTIONS were submitted by the IRA’s rank and file to the 1996 convention, nearly 60 of which dealt with the peace strategy. All but a handful were critical of the Adams strategy either explicitly or implicitly, and it soon became clear that the dissidents had done their homework well. By far the bulk of the critical motions sought to change the IRA’s constitution. Those that did not, such as one motion submitted by the East Tyrone Brigade, were blunt and to the point. The peace process, said the East Tyrone delegation, had severely damaged the IRA and the struggle against British rule. The IRA in East Tyrone, it continued, had lost all confidence in the leadership. In the interests of unity the motion was withdrawn, but the point had nevertheless been forcefully made.
Gerry Adams won the second round when a motion on IRA membership submitted by the quartermaster’s department was debated. This would have barred IRA volunteers from joining any political party that recognized any of the partitionist institutions of government in Ireland or from swearing allegiance or giving recognition to them. It also forbade IRA members to make any pledge to refrain from the use of armed struggle to rid Ireland of the British presence.
The motion was a thinly veiled but full-frontal assault on Adams and the Sinn Fein members of the Army Council. It was aimed not only at stopping Sinn Fein from entering any Assembly established at Stormont as a result of talks flowing from the peace process but at preventing it from even joining negotiations with the other parties. The reason for this was that the Mitchell report had set preconditions for the entry of political parties to the talks process, one of which included a declared commitment to totally peaceful methods.
The second part of the motion, pledging IRA members to armed struggle, would have forced figures like Adams and McGuinness to choose between the IRA and Sinn Fein. Adams rose to oppose the motion in its entirety but focused on the second part. He was worried, he told the delegates, because if this motion was passed, the IRA would not be able to take back into its ranks prisoners who had been released from life sentences after signing a pledge of good behavior, something that was tantamount to recognizing the authority of British rule. Gerry Kelly asked what would happen if the IRA recruited members of the security forces or a prison guard. Would they be banned from IRA membership? Adams returned to add that if the Convention passed the motion, they could not insert any discretion. If the constitution banned some people from the IRA, no exceptions could be made. The motion was lost, largely because of objections to the bar on IRA membership, but the speed and force of the leadership’s response to the threat revealed its concern that the Convention could rob it of valuable negotiating flexibility when political talks eventually got under way.
Adams’s skills were unable to prevent defeat in the third battle, when the Convention turned to consider motions that were aimed at limiting the Army Council’s ability and power to call a cease-fire. The constitution had historically given the Army Council sweeping powers over when and how to declare a cease-fire, bestowing upon it the authority “to conclude peace or declare war” by a simple majority. The leadership needed to refer to a Convention only when the “conclusion of peace”—that is, the settlement signaling the end of the war—had to be ratified.15 That condition had never been tested, and no one was quite sure what it meant.
Whatever its real meaning, the mood of the Convention was clearly in favor of significantly restricting the Army Council’s powers to call future cease-fires and, by definition, it also sought to limit Gerry Adams’s ability to implement the peace process. This was a clear and unmistakable sign that the grassroots were deeply unhappy at the conduct of the sos. There were over twenty motions to this effect. All but a few either sought to time-limit any cease-fire called by the Council—three or six months appeared to be the favorite lengths—or they sought to force the Council to win approval elsewhere in the IRA if extensions were requested beyond the initial period. Delegates favored, in descending order, the involvement of the Executive, GHQ, or a commission of IRA commanders in this decision. The very presence of such motions on the Convention agenda amounted to an unprecedented censure of the Army Council and the Adams leadership, a sign that trust in them was no longer as firm or automatic as it had once been.
Feelings on the issue ran strong. The Belfast Brigade, represented by Brian Gillen, said a time limit should have been set on the 1994 cease-fire, and he complained bitterly about the Army Council’s September 1993 order tightening its control over operations and banning certain types of operations, such as the use of car bombs. This had removed all power at the local level, he complained. Moves to limit the Army Council’s authority were about restoring democracy in the IRA, not about tying people’s hands.
The delegate from Southern Command launched a full-frontal attack on Adams and his supporters. The sos, he complained, had been the work of a small, unrepresentative group of people and had succeeded only in causing widespread demoralization at the rank-and-file level. Southern Command’s motion would have given the Executive and GHQ staff a veto on any future move by the Army Council to declare a cease-fire. The Munster Brigade wanted all OCs to be involved in any future cease-fire decision. Only the Derry Brigade announced its support for the peace strategy, although it too was concerned that there was no contribution from the rank and file about how long a cease-fire should be allowed to last.
An Army Executive motion was chosen as representative of these critical sentiments. It stipulated that after a cease-fire was called, a Convention had to be held within twelve months to review it and that if the Council wanted to extend the cease-fire beyond the first four months, the decision had to be ratified by the Executive and again every four months thereafter. This was not just an attempt to curb the Army Council but also a bid to shift the balance of internal power decisively in the direction of the Executive. It was a direct challenge to Adams’s authority.
These assaults on his power base provoked desperate efforts by the Sinn Fein leader to deflect or dilute the challenge. Adams complained that if the British ever learned about the motion, it would give them an invaluable tactical advantage; once they knew that the cease-fire had to be reviewed after four months, they would delay and obstruct in an effort to create tension and foment a split within the IRA.
Adams entreated the Convention not to make any move that diluted the leadership’s power, but he urged that if it was determined to do so, it should break up the motion and disguise it by spreading it around the IRA’s constitution. That way the British might not see what had happened if or when a copy of the new constitution fell into their hands. Although he did not say so, Adams must also have known that once the British learned of the changes, they would know they were now dealing with a much weakened figure.
The Convention opted for Adams’s face-saving formula, ordered the Army Council to seek a four-month ratification from the Executive, but said the first post-cease-fire Convention should be held fifteen, not twelve, months after any new cease-fire. The motion was broken up and scattered around the constitution, as Adams had urged.
Worse was to come for Adams. Under the terms of the 1986 constitution, the Army Council effectively had untrammeled control over the IRA’s weapons and stores of explosives. The relevant section of the constitution approved at that meeting read, “All personnel and all armaments, equipment and other resources of Oglaigh na hEireann shall be at the disposal of and subject to the Army Authority, to be employed and utilised as the Army Authority shall direct.”16 Although there was some doubt as to whether the Convention or the Army Council constituted the “Army Authority,” it was clear that on a day-to-day basis the Army Council was that “Authority” and thus held control of the IRA’s weapons. McKevitt’s quartermaster’s department had tabled a motion that would have replaced this section and deprived the Army Council of all negotiating flexibility on the decommissioning issue.
The motive for the Executive’s move was clear, a suspicion that the Sinn Fein figures on the Army Council would cut a deal on IRA weapons if they could. The suspicion was not entirely without foundation. There had been conflicting, not to say confusing, signals emanating from persons like Adams and McGuinness regarding IRA weapons. While they continued, privately and publicly, to pour scorn on any notion that the IRA would decommission its weapons, they had at the same time authorized Sinn Fein to make a submission to the Mitchell body, outlining how it envisaged that the disarming would happen. There had even been an attempt to send an Army Council member along to talk to Mitchell about it. In another sign of where Adams might lead the organization, he had announced that Sinn Fein would sign up unilaterally to the six Mitchell principles, one of which committed participants at the talks to some sort of decommissioning process.
On the face of it, McKevitt’s motion removed any room for flexibility on the issue. It was unambiguously worded: “The Army Authority shall retain, maintain and ensure the safety of all armaments, equipment and other resources of Oglaigh na hEireann until such time as the sovereignty and unity of the Republic of Ireland has been attained. Once a settlement has been agreed, leading to a united Ireland, all decisions relating to decommissioning of armaments, equipment and other resources must be ratified by an Army Convention.”17 The motion was passed unanimously. Adams, McGuinness, and the peace strategy supporters on the Army Council had no choice but to vote along with everyone else. To have done otherwise would have been to vindicate the criticism and suspicion directed at them.
Once the Convention had ended and the delegates dispersed to their home areas, the Adams camp tried to retrieve the situation. For months afterward Army Council meetings were riven by disputes between the dissidents and the Adams camp over whether or not the McKevitt motion was an addition to the constitution or an amendment. The Adams supporters argued that it was an addition and that the 1986 formulation that gave the Army Council ultimate power over IRA weapons—and therefore the authority to decommission—was still in place. It was yet another clue that, with time, decommissioning would happen.
The Adams camp suffered other setbacks at the Convention. The Army Executive was given a new role by delegates and became “the custodians of the [IRA] constitution” with the right to rule and arbitrate on policy matters that infringed the constitution, while rank-and-file Volunteers were given the right to petition the Executive on such matters.18 That meant that the Executive could take issue with moves made in the peace process by people like Adams and McGuinness. Another motion was passed ordering the Army Council to maintain “the organisational integrity and cohesion… the political and military strengths and capabilities” of the IRA until the organization’s objectives, as defined in the constitution, had been attained.19 There would be no running down of the IRA, in other words, by either the front or the back door.
Most significantly of all, the Army Council was deprived of the power to make decisions by a simple majority. From then on five Council members at least would have to approve critical matters such as cease-fires.20 That came as close to a vote of no confidence in Gerry Adams and his allies as it was possible to get.
AS THE CONVENTION neared its conclusion, it also reached its climax, the point when delegates elected the new Executive. The question of who secured a majority of the Executive was a vital one, for that section could, in effect, select and choose the members of the Army Council and thus gain control of the direction and strategy of the IRA itself. The dissidents had hatched a plan to take over the Army Council in such a way, but it was entirely dependent on winning a majority of the members of the new Executive. The Convention would have to support the dissident candidates. Once they had done that, they could choose an Army Council of their liking, and Adams would be defeated.
The dissidents hoped to place Adams in a terrible dilemma. Their plan was to have their majority vote him onto the Council but then to hobble him by stacking the rest of the Council with their supporters. That way the beleaguered and isolated Sinn Fein president would then have to decide whether to stay, and be constantly outvoted, or go. The decision would be entirely his, while the dissidents could not be blamed for forcing him to go, thus losing the Provisionals their most charismatic spokesperson and leader. Either way the peace process would be dead, and so would the Adams strategy.
The last session of the Convention, in the early hours of the morning, saw the Adams loyalists on the outgoing Army Council make their pitch to delegates for election to the new Executive. Pat Doherty told delegates that the nine-month delay in holding the Convention was not his fault; it was entirely due to logistical problems. Joe Cahill assured them that he would not settle for anything less than a thirty-two-county socialist republic. He hadn’t mellowed with old age, he added. If anything, his views had hardened with the years. Kevin McKenna objected to suggestions that he or anyone else in the leadership would settle for anything less than the traditional goal of unity, while Gerry Kelly admitted that TUAS had not been properly defined or explained to the membership. Apologetic, meek, defiant, they all knew what was on the line.
But the turning point, according to one authoritative account, came when the outgoing chairman of the Army Council, Martin McGuinness, rose to speak.21 The old Army Council, he declared, had no intention of entering talks that would lead nowhere and had already decided there would not be a second cease-fire, and it would advise the incoming Council accordingly. It was as close as any leader came that night to declaring the death of the peace process, and it swung the meeting. Any question that either he and Adams would not be returned to the leadership vanished. But the dissidents were still on course for victory.
The elections were held, and Micky McKevitt topped the poll. The dissidents did well and secured a seven-to-five majority on the Executive. Joe Cahill was badly defeated and did not even make it as a substitute, one of those chosen to replace the Executive members elected onto the Army Council. Gerry Kelly was chosen as a substitute, but Adams got himself and four allies safely elected onto the Executive, including Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty, and Martin Ferris, who replaced Joe Cahill.
The dissidents, however, quickly ran into trouble, and so did the plot to destroy Adams. One of their successful candidates, the Dubliner Frank McGuinness, had missed his pickup and failed to make it to the Convention, although he was elected to the Executive in his absence. McGuinness was supposed to have been taken to the Convention by the IRA’s intelligence director, Martin “Duckser” Lynch, a West Belfast activist and Adams loyalist, but an extra leg was added to the Dubliner’s journey for some unexplained reason, and Lynch never linked up with him.
Frank McGuinness’s absence did not stop him from getting elected to the Executive, but it did prevent him from using his vote in the election of Army Council members. Even so it still looked as if the dissidents had the Army Council election in the bag; they had a six-to-five majority and could freely choose the new Army Council from among their own. But then Brian Keenan, who for long had played the part of a dissident, dropped a thunderbolt and announced that he was switching sides and would back Adams. With Frank McGuinness absent, a six-to-five majority for the dissidents suddenly became a one-vote advantage for Adams.
Sensing that events had turned dramatically in his favor, Adams moved for an immediate meeting of the Executive to elect the Army Council. The IRA constitution stipulated that such a gathering should take place within forty-eight hours of the Convention, but Adams was taking no chances. If Frank McGuinness was allowed to vote, then the Executive would almost certainly be deadlocked, with potentially disastrous results for the peace strategy. It was imperative from Adams’s viewpoint that the Executive meet immediately. The dissidents tried to delay the Executive meeting, but to no avail. Adams won the vote, and the Executive convened straightaway. The meeting took place as dawn was breaking and voted in an Army Council that, if anything, gave Adams and his allies an even stronger grip on the IRA than they had held before the Convention.
In addition to Adams, the Council now comprised Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty, Martin Ferris, Brian Keenan, who replaced the South Armagh– based Northern Command adjutant, Kevin McKenna, and Slab Murphy. The Army Council’s “soldiers” were now in an even smaller minority. The scope for continued internal conflict was still considerable, however. The Executive that was formed after the Army Council election was substantially unchanged from that which had called the Convention. Ten of its twelve members were opposed to the Adams strategy; one was against and one unsure. The three principal dissidents, Gillen, Frank McGuinness, and McKevitt, were still in place but were now painfully aware that their putsch had not succeeded. Adams had been battered and damaged by the Convention, but he had survived to wreak revenge on his dissident enemies. And as far as the peace process was concerned, that was all that mattered.