By one of those flukes of history, or perhaps owing to good intelligence about his enemies’ intentions, Adams had emerged from the October 1996 Convention not only intact, albeit badly mauled, but with a stronger majority on the Army Council than he had enjoyed before the meeting. Because of the way the IRA worked, the dissidents had only one chance to destroy him, and although they had come very close, their effort had failed. It was unlikely they would get a second chance. Encouraged and heartened by its achievement, the Adams camp prepared for the next and most crucial part of the journey from war to peace.
The old Army Council had agreed to end the 1994 cease-fire only when it became unavoidably clear that otherwise it would be defeated at the Convention demanded by the Executive. Going back to war in February 1996 was a matter of political survival for Adams and his supporters. But with their grip on the Army Council firmer after the October 1996 Convention, they could now resume the peace process with vigor and steer the IRA toward another cessation, this time better informed about their opponents and better prepared to meet their threat. Martin McGuinness had promised the delegates at the Convention that there would be no second cease-fire, but there would be.
Even before the Convention met, Adams had been in secret negotiations with the British prime minister, John Major, using the SDLP leader, John Hume, as a mediator, and afterward that diplomacy intensified. He had told the Convention that he did not believe the British were serious about hosting talks in which Sinn Fein members involved, but within weeks of the Convention he was engaged in what clearly were businesslike discussions with Downing Street whose goal was to remove the obstacles in the way of a new cease-fire and to open the road to talks in which Sinn Fein would play a central and definitive role.
Four issues dominated the Adams-Major negotiations. To begin with, there was uncertainty about whether Sinn Fein would be allowed to enter interparty talks at all or if they did about the conditions that would be attached to this. Even if Sinn Fein was allowed into the talks, it was not clear whether or not there would be a deadline for agreements. Adams again feared being drawn into an open-ended process whose only result would be to once again enervate the IRA and unsettle the rank and file. The unresolved issue of IRA decommissioning still hung over the peace process, as did the price Sinn Fein would exact from the British: “confidence-building measures,” as they were euphemistically called, in return for a new cease-fire. All these issues were on the table for discussion, and problematic though they were, the fact that Adams and his allies wanted to talk about them was a remarkable testament to their persistence.
Notwithstanding the outright hostility and doubt the IRA rank and file expressed about the peace process at the October 1996 Convention, Adams, McGuinness, and others in their camp made it abundantly clear in one public statement after another in the fall of 1996 and the early months of 1997 that a second cease-fire was not only attainable but desirable. At the end of November 1996, Martin McGuinness indicated that the IRA might be prepared to accept George Mitchell’s proposal that talks and decommissioning should happen in parallel. The Derry republican had once again been appointed Army Council chairman but by this stage was no longer Northern commander, that job having gone to a Belfast veteran instead. He was later quoted as saying, at the beginning of February 1997, that there was nowhere else for republicans to go but to the negotiating table. Writing in the Irish Times at the end of that month, Gerry Adams promised that any new cease-fire would be “genuinely unequivocal” as long as the preconditions governing Sinn Fein’s involvement were removed.1 These were men who were confident not only about where they wanted to go but in their ability to get there. The Army Convention was already a distant memory.
Other signals pointed unmistakably in the same direction. On February 12, 1997, the IRA in South Armagh shot dead a British soldier manning a roadblock at Bessbrook. The dead soldier, Stephen Restorick, had been killed by a sniper using a formidable Barrett Light 50, the only weapon in the IRA’s arsenal whose bullets could penetrate British flak jackets. This deadly weapon had killed some dozen soldiers and policemen in single-shot sniper attacks, most of them at the hands of the South Armagh men. There was an outcry at Restorick’s death, prompted in part by his grieving mother’s impressively moving interviews on television. A month later Gerry Adams wrote a letter of condolence to Mrs. Restorick, an unprecedented act for a member of the IRA Army Council ostensibly at war with the British. During the same month he told the Irish News in an interview that he could deliver an IRA cease-fire if the package was right. His Saint Patrick’s Day message, now accorded the same status in the media as those from mainstream Irish and Irish-American politicians, included a statement saying that the achievement of a permanent peaceful settlement through peaceful dialogue must be everyone’s goal.
AT THIS POINT events completely out of the control of Adams or anyone else in Ireland intruded—to the advantage of the peace process. A British general election was announced in mid-March, and the polls all showed a likely victory for Tony Blair’s New Labour Party and defeat for the Conservatives, whose approach to the peace process had been hamstrung by doubts over Adams’s bona fides and the party’s own historical links to unionism. The removal of John Major would set the scene for a radical reassessment of London’s policy toward Sinn Fein.
The British election also promised to strengthen the Adams camp in another very important way. The forum election of 1996, designed to jumpstart political talks, had resulted in a boost in support for Sinn Fein, and it seemed as if the 1997 election would do the same, at least as long as the IRA did not score any own goals. In the month before polling, the Army Council had secretly authorized what became known as “a tactical period of quiet” to help Sinn Fein’s chances while simultaneously the party’s leaders talked up the chances of peace. The party was unashamedly courting a pro-peace vote from the Catholic electorate. It was a clever tactic, not least because it created an expectation of a second cease-fire that Sinn Fein—and the IRA— could not ignore.
Blair’s New Labour signaled its readiness to cater to Sinn Fein’s needs in a way that had never happened when John Major led the British government. The party’s new Northern Ireland spokesperson was Mo Mowlam, a down-to-earth politician whose wheeler-dealer style and sometimes coarse approach unsettled unionists but appealed enormously to nationalists. At the end of March 1997 she announced that if the IRA called a cease-fire, Sinn Fein could be in talks by the start of June, just two months afterward. Adams and other Sinn Fein leaders welcomed her remarks, not least because she omitted any reference to the need for IRA decommissioning.
Tony Blair duly romped home in Britain in May 1997, with a huge parliamentary majority—enough to give him maximum flexibility on the peace process—while in Northern Ireland Sinn Fein made a significant electoral breakthrough, with Adams recapturing West Belfast from the SDLP and Martin McGuinness winning in Mid-Ulster, where the campaign was about which nationalist party, Sinn Fein or the SDLP, was best placed to defeat the DUP’s Reverend William McCrea, a Free Presbyterian minister and outspoken loyalist who was hated by local nationalists. Sinn Fein’s support across Northern Ireland rose to its highest-ever level, to 127,000 votes, or 16.1 percent of the total vote in Northern Ireland. A month later its vote rose even further, to 16.9 percent, in local council elections. The party was within striking distance of the SDLP, and it was clear beyond doubt that Sinn Fein’s future political growth was inextricably attached to progress in the peace process and to the declaration of another cease-fire. To the barely disguised delight of nationalists and the anger of unionists, Mo Mowlam was appointed the new Northern Ireland secretary.
Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place a month after the British general election, when in the Irish Republic the parties that had made up the Rainbow Coalition were ousted and a Fianna Fail–Progressive Democrats combination replaced them. The general election in the Republic meant that the Fianna Fail leader, Bertie Ahern, was the new taoiseach and in charge of Northern Ireland policy. Martin Mansergh was back in Government Buildings and soon once again serving cups of tea and plates of biscuits to Father Reid. Gerry Adams welcomed the development; his old pan-nationalist partners were back in place and stronger than ever. In mid-May, Blair traveled to Belfast to confirm that interparty talks would begin in June. If Sinn Fein wanted to join the peace train, he warned, then it had better make up its mind quickly, or the train would leave the station without it. To help it make up its mind, he offered exploratory talks between Sinn Fein and his officials, an offer the Provisional leadership accepted with alacrity. Soon Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly were meeting the NIO’s John Chilcot and Quentin Thomas. The stage had been set for the beginning of the final negotiations for the second IRA cease-fire.
AS ALL THESE political developments were unfolding, the IRA’s campaign was falling to pieces. The special unit created by Northern Command, which had so successfully restarted the IRA’s campaign in the North with the bombing of Thiepval barracks, was rolled up by the RUC and its leader incarcerated within days of the Convention. It was clear from the pattern of arrests that the British security authorities were extremely well informed about its activities and had placed some of the unit members under surveillance long before arrests were made.
Deprived of this cutting edge, the IRA leadership turned to the ordinary ASUs to deliver the goods. At the 1996 Convention, Brian Gillen, the Belfast commander, had complained about the September 1993 Army Council order banning commercial bombing. Despite that, the new Council reim-posed the restriction and ordered the ASUs to concentrate instead on security force targets, particularly British soldiers. As in the late 1980s, this was a case of setting the IRA an examination it could never hope to pass—as the Army Council must have known—and it failed miserably. As one bungled or in effective operation followed another and as more and more Volunteers were arrested, one RUC officer was prompted to describe the IRA’s efforts as “a pathetic, grubby little war.”2 Even the most loyal republican would have found it difficult to disagree.
The IRA mounted dozens of attacks in the North during this period, but very few ever came near hitting their target. The IRA’s killing rate dropped significantly. By mid-1997, a year or so after the cease-fire had ended, the IRA had succeeded in killing just two soldiers and two civilians. When its Lurgan, County Armagh unit killed two RUC men in June 1994, there was public outrage, and it was clear the attacks had embarrassed the Sinn Fein leadership, even though the unit was merely implementing Army Council strategy. The Clinton White House, in particular, made its anger personally known to Gerry Adams.
The overreliance on the South Armagh battalions proved to be very costly. The knowledge that the big English bombs originated there made it imperative from the British viewpoint to score some major successes against the local IRA, if only to prove that South Armagh was not unassailable. The fact that IRA activity elsewhere in the North had considerably diminished freed British intelligence resources and gave the various agencies the space to accomplish the deed. Eventually undercover soldiers and police swooped on a farm near Crossmaglen in April 1994, arrested seven men, and captured the Second Battalion’s only Barrett Light 50 rifle. It was the worst blow against the South Armagh IRA that most in the area could remember, and the message was clear. If the British could hit the South Armagh IRA, then the war was as good as over.
There was another, even more compelling reason for the IRA’s failures. By 1996 the organization was broke and owed money everywhere, not least to Slab Murphy, who had lent the IRA some of the proceeds from his cross-Border business operations and had not been repaid. The IRA habitually lived in a state of penury, as Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna had reminded the Convention. The IRA managed to stay just about afloat, he said, but never got ahead. Financial shortages had worsened after the loss of the Eksund, when the angry Libyans had canceled the promised cash payments.
Gerry Adams’s trips to the United States had briefly raised Army Council hopes that its fortunes could be improved. The prospect of thousands of dollars flowing into the IRA’s coffers was indeed was one of the reasons the Council had so readily authorized his trip. But Adams, aided by Howell, had set up a new fund-raising group to supplant the long-standing American structures, centered on Noraid. Called Friends of Sinn Fein (FoSF) and based in Washington and Manhattan, New York, it was initially funded by the billionaire businessman Charles “Chuck” Feeney. FoSF was ultimately to raise vast amounts of money, primarily through $1,000-a-plate dinners in ritzy New York hotels where figures like Adams would speak, mingle, and network with figures from corporate Irish-America. Despite all this newfound wealth, the IRA’s hoped-for millions of dollars never materialized. Unknown to the Army Council, FoSF agreed to a deal with the Department of Justice in Washington, which meant that every dollar raised and spent in Ireland had to be accounted for and the books audited by an accountant nominated by the federal government. The officer board of FoSF was furthermore obliged to sign an undertaking that the funds would not be used “for any unlawful purpose,” which effectively meant that none of the money could legally be allowed to go to the IRA.3
When some officials from FoSF subsequently traveled to Ireland to meet Sinn Fein’s finance officers, Adams banned the IRA’s director of finance, John Deery, from attending the meeting, and when tackled by members of the Council, he blamed others for negotiating a poor deal with the U.S. government. The IRA would not get Sinn Fein’s cash, by either the front door or the back.
To add to the IRA’s fund-raising problems, Noraid had been considerably run down by 1996 and was in a very divided state, the result of internal disputes over the direction taken by the peace process, especially in the influential Bronx and Brooklyn chapters of the New York division. Many rank-and-file Noraid members were resentful of FoSF and saw its formation as a sign that the leadership in Ireland had decided to discard them after all their years of faithful service in favor of wealthier and more respectable friends. By 1996 traditional Irish-America was contributing negligible amounts to the IRA’s coffers. In the past these contacts had enabled the IRA quite easily to raise up to $50,000–$100,000 in emergencies—for example, to fund a special operation—but not any more. One way or another the IRA’s ability to run an effective military campaign in 1996 and 1997 was severely hampered by its poverty.
POLITICAL EVENTS accelerated after the changes of government in Dublin and London. The British made a crucial move in mid-June 1997, when officials gave the Provisional negotiators, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, an aide-mémoire setting out the terms for Sinn Fein’s entry to inter-party talks. The document outlined five elements to the deal. First, the IRA would have to call an unequivocal cease-fire and hold to it for at least six weeks. Second, Sinn Fein delegates to the talks would have to make clear their commitment to the Mitchell principles. Third, the British would agree to a deadline for the conclusion of the talks, and they suggested May 1998. Fourth, the republicans would have to agree that decommissioning would happen along the lines suggested by Senator George Mitchell, although it would no longer be a precondition for participation in talks. And fifth, there would be confidence-building measures on both sides. The British committed themselves to the principle of parity of esteem and equality in cultural and economic matters and to respect for human rights. They recognized the sensitivity of the prisoner issue and made a commitment to develop a police service capable of securing widespread support. The republicans in turn should bring an end to punishment attacks. If all went according to plan the interparty talks would go into recess over the summer, as these matters were working themselves out, and in September resume with Sinn Fein present. They would then have eight months to hammer out a deal.
Compared with the Conservatives, the New Labourites were bending over backward to return Sinn Fein and the IRA to the process, an indication, perhaps, that Tony Blair and his colleagues had a better understanding of what Adams and his colleagues were trying to do. After all, Blair had completed a somewhat similar journey himself after his election as Labour leader in 1994, cleansing the party of the last vestiges of its postwar socialism.
Blair was also far more flexible on the question of IRA decommissioning, the issue that had broken the 1994 cease-fire. He and Ahern announced agreement in June on a proposal that would supposedly see political talks and decommissioning happening in parallel. As the politicians hammered out a wider deal, an international body, to be headed by the Canadian general John de Chastelain, would handle IRA and other paramilitary disarmament. The deal effectively meant that issue was put on the back burner in the hope that a political settlement might create more favorable circumstances for it to actually begin. All this indicated a greater British sensitivity to Adams’s internal management needs.
The British aide-mémoire did not mention British withdrawal or even indicate that the subject would be on the agenda for discussion once talks had started. It did, though, offer Adams and his colleagues the one element they needed to sustain the peace process and confound their critics—the prospect of speedy entry into negotiations, which they could characterize, internally, as encompassing such core isues as British withdrawal. The imperative for Adams was to get into talks quickly and to silence those who would claim that the process was about weakening the IRA with a lengthy, unproductive, and drawn-out cessation. Once Sinn Fein was in talks, as the peace camp must have known, it would be a different matter, for then the leaders could more easily control events and their own supporters.
RANK-AND-FILE IRA attitudes, however, had not changed much since the Convention, and the evidence suggested that a majority was still strongly against a new cease-fire, not because the campaign was floundering but because the British terms did not measure up to the expectations nourished by a twenty-five-year war. In June the IRA’s most senior commanders met in Donegal to consider the aide-mémoire at an all-night meeting. Present was the Army Council, GHQ staff, and brigade, battalion, and ASU commanders, perhaps thirty of the cream of the IRA. Overwhelmingly the view from the meeting was against another sos, and the British aide-mémoire was rejected.
The meeting has entered IRA mythology not just because of this decision but because it was thoroughly compromised. Undercover Gardai Special Branch officers had the meeting place under surveillance and photographed the delegates as they arrived and left. It was one of the worst security breaches in the Provisional’s history. “Everyone would have been identified, everyone had been docked,” said one source with knowledge of the meeting.4 Suspicion about the identity of the informer behind the betrayal helped to further sour internal relations.
In Dublin, Adams found another Fianna Fail wheeler-dealer sitting in the taoiseach’s office. Forty-five-year-old Bertie Ahern had succeeded the unfortunate Albert Reynolds in early 1995 and headed a government in which the Progressive Democrats were a minority partner. He had perfect Fianna Fail credentials. He was born in working-class North Dublin, his mother came from a republican family in County Cork, while his father had fought with the IRA during the war of independence and then followed de Valera when he abandoned armed struggle for parliamentary methods. Long regarded as an ambitious and talented politician, he was promoted to the front bench by Charles Haughey, who became something of a mentor. With the benefit of his intimate vantage point, Haughey once said of Ahern that he was “the best, the most skilful, the most devious and the most cunning” of them all.
Once Ahern took office, contact between the Provisionals and Irish civil servants intensified as they worked out their set of cease-fire terms, separate from the British. By the end of June the officials, led by Sean O hUiginn of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Paddy Teahon of the Justice Department, and Padraig O hUiginn of the taoiseach’s office, produced a 1,700-word document that was sent to the Army Council, setting out the Irish government’s view of what would happen after the IRA declared a new cease-fire.
According to Irish government sources the terms were divided into two parts, those dealing with security matters and those concerning political issues. The security proposals were these:
(i) Ten IRA prisoners would be released by Christmas 1997; the gradual early release of prisoners halted in February 1996 would be resumed; IRA prisoners serving forty-year sentences (for murdering Irish police officers) would be considered for Christmas parole.
(ii) Emergency antiterrorist legislation would be reviewed.
(iii) IRA prisoners would be moved from the old jail in Portlaoise to the new modern open jail at Castlerea, County Roscommon.
(iv) The Irish government would aim for a political settlement that included the creation of a new policing service in Northern Ireland, which could enjoy cross-community support.
(v) The Irish government would seek to achieve paramilitary decommissioning in the manner suggested by the Mitchell report and would expect the republicans to work in good faith to achieve that objective. (However the Ahern government also gave the IRA Army Council important guarantees about decommissioning, as one key Irish source recalled. “What we told them was that we realized that it could only happen with the co-operation of the IRA and as part of a phased political process,” he said. “I think the exact phrase we used went something like this: ‘IRA decommissioning would only happen in the context of a benign dynamic founded on political confidence and cannot be achieved on a peremptory basis.’”)5
The Irish government, Ahern’s message continued, would oppose any effort to expel Sinn Fein from talks if any of the other participants made “a peremptory” demand for IRA disarmament. Only a breach of any of the six Mitchell principles would constitute a justified reason for such action, it added.
The political terms were these:
(i) The Irish government would take a leadership role and would give the peace process momentum.
(ii) The aim of interparty talks would be to create a new political dispensation that would address and overcome previous political failures going back to the 1921 settlement. But the principle of consent would underlie any deal; the settlement would have to command the support of both political communities in the North.
(iii) The Downing Street Declaration, the Mitchell principles, and the framework document would be the basis of the Irish government’s position in talks, but the aim would be to create new power-sharing government institutions, effective North-South bodies, and parity of esteem for both communities in cultural and economic matters.
(iv) No constitutional option, including Irish unity and independence, would be excluded from the negotiations, and the Irish government would work for institutional and longer-term constitutional change in co-operation with the British.
(v) The Irish government’s embassies in Washington and London would give the peace process the highest priority and remain in continuous contact with the White House, Congress, the U.S. business community, and Irish-America. Dublin would reopen the doors for Sinn Fein to establishment America, in other words.
(vi) The taoiseach’s door would be open to Sinn Fein, there would be no question of refusing any joint meeting with Adams and Hume, and there could be continuous consultation between Sinn Fein and the Irish government during the coming negotiations if desired. Channels involving Adams’s key advisers and government officials could be reactivated.6
The Irish government’s terms acknowledged the dilemma that the Adams leadership found itself in over decommissioning as a result of the constitutional changes forced through, against Adams’s wishes, at the 1996 Convention. It was almost as if Ahern and his advisers knew all about them. The change to the IRA constitution deprived Adams of all flexibility on the issue by insisting that only a Convention could authorize disarmament. The Executive dissidents had tied the Army Council’s hands completely. Even though they had failed to overthrow Adams, the legacy of their effort was still destructive. Ahern’s terms allowed for all this.
The effect of the dissidents’ success on the decommissioning question was that if either the British or the unionists pushed the arms issue too hard, it would break the cease-fire and the Adams leadership. He and his supporters did attempt to argue that the Executive change was an addition to the 1986 constitution, not an amendment, and that they could, if they wished, still negotiate on IRA guns. But this was a controversial reading of the 1996 constitution, and the leadership could not be sure of the grassroots response if it went ahead on that basis. The way the Ahern government had formulated the guarantee on decommissioning cushioned the Army Council, however. It postponed the resolution of the problem of IRA guns until enough political progress had been made to give the Adams camp the room to restore the pre-1996 IRA constitution.
In essence the British and Irish political terms were nothing more than a restatement of Northern Ireland policy as it had evolved under the direction of both governments since the early 1970s. A number of characteristics defined this policy: a commitment to equality, acceptable security institutions, a power-sharing government involving nationalists and unionists, and the creation of North-South bodies, what the British had christened “the Irish dimension,” were prime among them. But the principle of consent was the ideological foundation stone of the two governments’ approach. There could be no constitutional change, no end to partition, unless a majority in Northern Ireland freely said so. These features, in varying proportions, had been the essential ingredients of virtually every political initiative since the fall of the Sunningdale agreement in 1974, and the political talks process that Sinn Fein was about to enter would be no different.
With the British and Irish governments’ terms on the table and broadly acceptable to the Adams camp, the only question left to decide was the timing of the second cease-fire. The difficulty here was that events had conspired to produce the right conditions for a new IRA cease-fire just as the North was about to enter the worst phase of the summer Orange marching season.
THE ORANGE marching season was a nightmare period in Northern Ireland’s already violence-crammed calendar. Thousands of Orange parades took place every summer, from Easter through the end of September, and each took more or less the same form. Columns of be-sashed and occasionally bowler-hatted Orangemen would march from their Orange hall to a church or a meeting place accompanied by flute-playing, drum-thumping bands, hold a prayer service, and then march back again and disperse. At one or two points in the season, the Twelfth of July being one, Orangemen from Belfast and from each of Northern Ireland’s six counties would congregate for larger parades, impressive and colorful occasions that celebrated Protestant culture and history. But most parades were small, local affairs, and most passed entirely without incident. In one or two places, however, trouble could be guaranteed, usually where demographic changes meant that the Orangemen’s route took them through Catholic areas. On these occasions tribal passions could easily be roused as Orangemen insisted on exercising their ancient rights, while Catholics resented what they saw as an attempt by the Orangemen to parade their supremacy.
For the preceding two years a church parade of Orangemen in Portadown, County Armagh, had pitched much of the North into serious conflict, and 1997 looked as if it would be no different. The Orangemen’s route home to Portadown Orange headquarters from the picturesque Church of Ireland at Drumcree took them through a Catholic enclave around the Garvaghy Road. Population shifts meant that a once mixed area had become overwhelmingly nationalist, and for several years local residents had been campaigning to bar the Orangemen from their district. The British, under pressure from Dublin and the United States, had initially supported the residents but for two years running had buckled in the face of overwhelming Orange pressure.
On one occasion, in July 1995, some ten thousand Orangemen and their supporters had laid siege at Drumcree, and running battles broke out between them and RUC riot squads. After two nights of trouble, and confrontations on the pretty hillsides around Drumcree that uncannily resembled scenes from a seventeenth-century battle, the Orangemen were allowed to make their way through the Catholic area. In July 1996 the siege lasted five days, and this time the masses of Orange supporters at Drumcree were supported by thousands more loyalists elsewhere in the North who brought transport links and the centers of many Protestant towns to a standstill. There were riots at Drumcree and in many Protestant areas of the North. Again the authorities relented, and the Orangemen were allowed to march but in circumstances that infuriated Catholics. They were forced through the Garvaghy Road by police riot squads that batoned and physically removed nationalist protesters. This triggered several days of widespread rioting in Catholic districts, during which a youth was crushed to death by a military vehicle in Derry.
The 1997 Drumcree siege was shaping up for a repeat performance. The possibility that Protestants might once again bring Northern Ireland to a halt and that the IRA might be obliged to respond violently was right at the top of the list of problems facing the newly installed Labour secretary of state, Mo Mowlam. Her senior officials were advising her to bend once again to the Orange gale and to allow, as one of them put it, “Orange feet on the Garvaghy Road” that July. A British policy document, later leaked to the media, showed that as early as June 20, two weeks before the march was due to happen, Mowlam’s advice was to try to negotiate a peaceful “controlled [Orange] parade” on the Garvaghy Road as “the least worst option.”7 This involved Mowlam in something of a ruse. Elaborate negotiations between her and the Garvaghy residents group were arranged, with a view to agreeing a compromise with the Orangemen, but it seemed that she—or at least her officials—had already decided. It did not matter that much what the residents had to say to her.
The third siege of Drumcree was due to begin on Sunday, July 6. Loyalists were threatening mayhem, Mowlam had secretly decided to give the Orangemen their way, and the disposition of the IRA in the face of all this was crucial. It was in these circumstances that four days before, on July 2, the Army Council met and by a vote of seven to nil voted secretly to renew the 1994 cease-fire and to accept British and Irish terms for Sinn Fein’s entry to inter-party talks. The decision was kept well hidden, even from rank-and-file IRA members, however, until July 19, seventeen days afterward and nearly a fortnight after the Drumcree parade had once again been forced and batoned through the Garvaghy Road.
Whether the British knew anything of this decision can only be guessed at, but there can be little doubt that knowledge of the IRA leadership’s move could only have strengthened Mo Mowlam’s hand in dealing with Nationalist opposition to that year’s Orange protest. By renewing the cease-fire on July 2, the Army Council had, in effect, given Mowlam the go-ahead to push the Orange marchers through their own district. The IRA, it was saying, was not disposed to respond violently if that happened. And even if Mowlam knew nothing of the secret IRA decision, the effect was the same. As for the IRA’s volunteers, they were put on standby during the parade in case of trouble, little knowing that their leaders were unlikely to order them into action in any but the most exceptional circumstances.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, July 6, a large force of British soldiers and policemen moved into the Garvaghy area to seal it off, and violent clashes with local Catholics left seventeen residents hospitalized, according to their spokesman, Breandan MacCionnaith. After daylight there was more violence as the nationalists were penned in a car park by a large force of policemen and soldiers. At one stage an open-air Mass was held in the car park in an almost grotesque display of victimhood. After the Orangemen had marched through the area and the security forces begun to withdraw, the crowd chanted after them, “No cease-fire!”—an ironic cry in the circumstances. There were riots in some nationalist areas, and in nearby Lurgan the IRA burned a train, but in Belfast members of the organization were on the streets restraining would-be rioters and ordering off-licenses to close in case drink inflamed angry crowds. Elsewhere, at the urging of IRA commanders, the response of republicans was deliberately low-key.
THE ARMY COUNCIL’S decision set the stage for the next and last confrontation with the Executive dissidents, and once again it was over the issue of which of the two had the final say on the formulation of IRA policy.
At the 1996 Convention the Executive had secured a promise from members of the Army Council that it would, as a body, consult more regularly and closely with other sections of the IRA, in particular with the Executive, GHQ, and OCs, over matters like a second cease-fire. But the promise was honored more in the breach than in the observance. Before the May 1997 British general election, the Army Council ordered a “tactical period of quiet” to help Sinn Fein’s chances, in effect declaring an unofficial if short cease-fire. But it had consulted no one else in the IRA about the move. The Executive complained about the absence of consultation, and the Army Council apologized, promising this would not happen again.
Within two months the Army Council once more acted unilaterally, this time by declaring the second cease-fire. Not only were bodies like the Executive and GHQ staff not consulted about the decision; they were not informed of it until just before the public announcement, and that rankled deeply, bringing long-held resentments once more bubbling to the surface. This time there was no apology from the Army Council. The Adams camp insisted that the Council had given no such undertaking at the Convention and that it was obliged to consult the Executive only when the first four months of a cease-fire had ended and an extension was required.
As things worked out, the only member of the Executive entitled to sit in on Army Council meetings, Micky McKevitt, had been out of circulation when the cease-fire decision had been taken, and so the Council had been able to keep the decision a closely guarded secret from all but its own members and members of the Adams think tank. It was not until two weeks later, on the eve of the public announcement, that the Executive found out what had happened. But this time Adams and his allies were better prepared to deal with their dissidents.
After a special request from the Army Council chairman, Martin McGuinness, the full Council met the full Executive on July 16 to report the July 2 cease-fire decision and agree the impending public announcement. The Army Council had met three days before and ratified the cease-fire vote, and the decision would be made public within forty-eight hours or so. McGuinness told the Executive that the Army Council had been fully consulted and informed about the background and was now united. According to a detailed account of these encounters, he gave three reasons for the renewed sos. There was a new government in Britain, the Sinn Fein vote was rising, and the combined pressure of the Irish government and the Clinton White House had forced the British to set a specific date, September 15, for the start of talks and a deadline for their conclusion, May 1998. The sos, in other words, would be time-limited and could not be extended indefinitely.
The decommissioning precondition had been dropped, he said, and went on to predict that as far as the Army Council was concerned there never would be actual decommissioning. In fact, he added, it was a good thing that the issue had been left unresolved, because this would justify a breakdown in the cease-fire later on. In the meantime Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna had been given authority to mount operations if necessary. The cease-fire would not be comprehensive and all-embracing, in other words. There would be enough leeway to calm anxious nerves in the rank and file.
Gerry Adams was then questioned by the Executive and, according to this account, like McGuinness, he justified the new sos on tactical grounds. The new cease-fire would not be permanent, he suggested, and the IRA would eventually return to armed struggle if its terms were not met. The Mitchell report merely demanded that Sinn Fein consider parallel decommissioning, and so the party would consider it until the cows came home but would never come to an agreement. Sinn Fein’s involvement on this basis would ensure the collapse of the talks. The Army Council, Adams went on, wanted decommissioning to be left unresolved. Either the British would be broken on the issue and the unionists faced down, or the unionists would refuse to go into talks unless the IRA disarmed, and the process would collapse in circumstances in which the unionists and the British would be singled out for blame by constitutional Irish nationalism—Fianna Fail and the SDLP principally—and by the international community. Either way, taking a firm line against decommissioning would be to the IRA’s advantage.
What was striking about the remarks made to the Executive by Adams and McGuinness was the extent to which both men still encouraged the view that the peace process was a just tactical ploy, designed to bring political advantage, but not intended to culminate in a political settlement of the sort that only a few months later, in April 1998, would be agreed. They similarly bolstered the view that the IRA would go back to war if its goal of achieving a promise of British withdrawal was not realized. Refusal to decommission would be the lever, Adams said, which would both cause the talks to collapse and get the IRA back to armed struggle in the most favorable of circumstances. Again actual events have demonstrated how unreliable these assurances were. Not only did Sinn Fein negotiate a deal in 1998 in which British withdrawal was never explicitly conceded or even mentioned, but in October 2001 the IRA began to destroy its caches of weapons and explosives in a bid to keep the deal from collapsing. Adams was right in one regard. The unionists did make an issue out of decommissioning, but it was not they who were faced down.
Of the two surviving “soldiers” on the Army Council, only Slab Murphy spoke up, saying that he believed the sos was the right way to go. But privately he and McKenna were saying that they really were opposed to the move and had gone along with the new cease-fire in order only to preserve IRA unity.
The discussion between the Army Council and the Executive got heated. The Army Council argued strongly that there really was no alternative; the IRA was having recruiting problems and needed something to boost membership and nothing boosted recruitment better than a cease-fire. Anyway, the Adams camp added, this was just a new phase of the struggle, and the IRA would eventually be back at war. Adams outlined the negotiating strategy. Sinn Fein would aim to maximize and strengthen the framework document and renegotiate the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which had partitioned Ireland and established British authority over Northern Ireland. If things went well, he said, there might be no need for armed struggle in four or five years time, but a Convention would decide that. If the Executive failed to back the Army Council, the Irish government would get to hear of it and see it as a vote of no confidence in his leadership, and that would weaken Sinn Fein’s bargaining leverage. Gerry Kelly assured the Executive that the talks were, as he put it, “shite” and would produce nothing.8 Brian Keenan, now completely in support of the Adams camp, said this was just a strategic decision and the Executive members should get their heads around it. Go through the tunnel, he urged.
The Executive case, put mostly by McKevitt and Gillen, basically revolved around their lack of trust in the Adams camp and the fear that, having been debilitated once by a cease-fire, the IRA could only get weaker if it went into a second one. The IRA rank and file was also distrustful, they said, and would react badly to the decision. There was the possibility of major dissension, a fear that the talks would get nowhere and a conviction that the IRA was being pushed so far into a corner that it would have no alternative but to continue with a strategy that would lead to its demise.
There were angry references to what the Executive clearly regarded as a bogus promise given to it by the Army Council chairman, Martin McGuinness. At the previous Executive meeting, in May, McGuinness had given a firm assurance that there would be no second cease-fire—the only people talking about a cease-fire, he had said, were members of the Executive— and this guarantee had been repeated at the June meeting of Army Council, GHQ staff, and OCs in Donegal. That made it twice since the 1996 Convention that McGuinness had given such a pledge, three times within nine months, if the Executive version was to be believed.
Adams eventually called a halt to the discussion and suggested that they take up a motion expressing the Executive’s support for the Army Council decision. His motion failed to find a proposer or seconder, and it fell. A second proposal, to reconvene the Executive so that the whole matter could be discussed in the absence of the Army Council, was passed by eleven votes to one. The difference between the two votes measured the gulf that now separated the Army Council and the Executive. A meeting that had been testy and bad-tempered ended with McGuinness’s telling the Executive that the cease-fire decision would be made public at midnight on Friday, July 18. In fact it was not publicized until the Saturday afternoon. But no matter what the Executive might think about it, the cease-fire would go ahead.
The second Executive meeting was held on July 18, with Martin McGuinness the sole representative of the Army Council present. It was a largely inconclusive event; no new decisions were made or previous ones reconsidered, but again there was a heated exchange between McGuinness and the Executive. Complaints were repeated. The first sos had lasted too long, training and the production of explosives had been for nothing, and the Army Council had not kept a promise to strengthen the Army during the period of the cease-fire. The whole struggle was going political; the IRA had no sense of direction at all and was being turned into what one Executive member complained was a “wooden spoon.” The Army Council had broken a promise to improve consultation with the Executive; the Volunteers were not happy. And so on.9
McGuinness replied that after the joint Army Council–Executive meeting, he and Adams had held further talks in Dublin and secured a commitment from the taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, that if the unionists refused to join the talks, Dublin and London would continue negotiating without them, even if that meant they were talking only to the SDLP and Sinn Fein. That was an even stronger reason for supporting the sos, he said. The Executive, he added, now had only three options: to accept the cease-fire, defer a decision for four months, or say that they had no confidence in the Army Council and convene an extraordinary General Army Convention. The Army Council, he added, would happily facilitate a special Convention. That McGuinness made this offer indicated that this time the Adams camp believed it could win it. For the Executive dissidents, McGuinness’s confidence was an ominous sign. As the meeting broke up, McKevitt, Frank McGuinness, and the Executive chairman, Seamus McGrane from County Louth, decided that the ASUs should be canvassed for their views about the new cease-fire. They confidently expected these would be overwhelmingly hostile, but until the mood of the IRA was gauged there would be no quick decision. The Army Council would have to wait.
WITH A SECOND CEASE-FIRE declared, there was a need for a new strategy to replace or at least augment TUAS. Not least of the reasons for this was that TUAS had been less than a spectacular success. The pan-nationalist alliance envisaged by TUAS combined with pressure from the Americans was supposed to have been strong enough to force the British to move in all sorts of directions, but the collapse of the 1994 cease-fire testified to the failure of this idea. And so the think tank came up with a new strategy to replace it, according to informed IRA sources. The problem with the idea, known as the “integrated strategy,” was that no one could understand what it was supposed to mean or what it was supposed to achieve. Its critics were troubled by two features in particular. The “integrated strategy” set no goals, outlined no methods nor any timetable. There was nothing distinctive about it. The second feature—more disturbing to the IRA’s “soldiers”—was the absence of any military element. The “integrated strategy” sounded like a combination of politics and violence, but it was really all about politics. There was no role for the IRA, no place for armed struggle.
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell had, unwittingly or otherwise, created an ideological minefield that would eventually bring the long-simmering divisions in the IRA leadership into the open. At the request of the British and Irish governments, he had set out a number of key principles that would have to underlie paramilitary involvement in political talks, and he had included them in his report on decommissioning to the two governments in early 1996 (see appendix 6). They included a commitment to nonv-iolence and to the principle of decommissioning. The British and Irish governments had both insisted that if Sinn Fein wanted to attend the inter-party talks, it would have to sign up to the principles. Gerry Adams had readily agreed to Sinn Fein delegates’ signing, but that was not the problem. The difficulty was that some delegates, particularly the leadership figures, were also IRA members. Three of them, Adams, McGuinness, and Doherty, were Army Council members no less. On one reading of the Mitchell principles, an IRA Volunteer would be breaching the IRA constitution if he or she signed up to them and therefore would be liable for expulsion.
The Mitchell principles became the last battleground between the Executive and the Army Council. The Executive took a hard line on the principles and argued that they represented a direct infringement of the IRA’s constitution. A commissioned study concluded that one consequence of acceptance would be a de facto recognition of the unionist veto, and that struck at the very heart of the reason for the IRA’s existence. Accepting the Mitchell principles, the study argued, would be tantamount to abandoning the struggle to rid Ireland of the British presence.
Another joint meeting between the Army Council and the Executive was arranged, this time on the latter’s initiative. It took place on August 27, 1997, and once again was a heated, fractious affair. The Executive insisted that the Mitchell principles were aimed at getting republicans to legitimize the Northern Ireland state, while the challenge they made to the IRA’s right to use force and hold arms, it said, would bring about the demise of the Army. If the IRA accepted the Mitchell principles, there could be no going back, and if the Army Council subsequently did claim that it had been duped into signing up, no one would believe it. Its reputation would be in tatters.
There could be no doubt about the seriousness of the charges made by the Executive. The Army Council was being accused of dishonoring and betraying the IRA’s core principles, and this battle could produce only victory and defeat; a compromise was out of the question. There might be more serious consequences. The recent history of republicanism had demonstrated how easy it was for such disputes to deteriorate into a shooting war. The conflict between the Executive and the Army Council was heading inexorably toward a split, and when splits happened and rival groups rushed to control and take over arms dumps, IRA history showed, anything could happen.
With the Belfast Brigade commander, the quartermaster general, and the director of engineering combined against them, Adams and his allies were facing the most serious challenge of their IRA careers. At the joint Army Council–Executive meeting in July, Martin McGuinness had physically tensed when he was told that signing the Mitchell principles would breach the constitution. He knew instinctively that matters were getting deadly serious.
When the dispute had first surfaced, in July, the Army Council argued that the Mitchell principles infringed no part of the constitution, but by the end of August it had reluctantly come around to accept that they did. However, at the August meeting Adams claimed that there were precedents that allowed the Council to give special dispensation to permit Sinn Fein members of the IRA to sign the principles and remain IRA members. If this dispensation was exercised again, then the Army Council could safely send delegates to the coming Stormont talks, he argued. There were two precedents for this, he said. One, in the 1980s, had allowed IRA members to recognize the Northern and the Southern courts so that they could present a defense against criminal charges; the second had allowed Sinn Fein councillors who doubled as IRA members to sign the British government’s mandatory antiviolence oath. One Adams ally, Danny Morrison, signaled his contempt for the British move at the time, saying he would sign the oath with his tongue sticking so firmly in his cheek that it would come through the roof of his mouth.
Adams’s argument went to the heart of his “tactical” approach to politics, in which promises would be made and pledges solemnly signed but not necessarily meant—or at least supporters told they were not meant. The Mitchell principles, Adams had said, were the same; they were just a piece of paper. In riposte McKevitt and his supporters claimed that the anti-violence oath could not be compared to the Mitchell principles. While the Mitchell principles intimately touched upon matters in the IRA’s constitution, the antiviolence oath had not. And so the argument went on, back and forth.
The two sides were deadlocked. A halfhearted attempt was made by the Executive to suggest a compromise. Sinn Fein should attend the Stormont talks on September 15, but only as Sinn Fein. Before signing the Mitchell principles, Army Council and other IRA delegates would formally resign from the IRA, which would then issue a public statement explaining why it repudiated Mitchell. The Army Council would acknowledge the efforts of Sinn Fein but emphasize that until Britain gave a formal promise to quit Ireland, the IRA would reserve the right to use armed struggle. This was a nonstarter and everyone knew it. Neither the British nor the Irish government was likely to accept such a dubious arrangement, and the unionists certainly would not— after all, the whole purpose of the exercise was to corral the IRA’s hard men inside a peace settlement, and the move would stymie that. Adams and the Army Council recognized the proposal for what it was—a way of unseating them or destroying their strategy—and they turned it down flat.
With debate exhausted, the Executive formally informed the Army Council that it had by a vote of ten in favor, one against—Gerry Kelly, the only firm Army Council supporter on the Executive—made a ruling that the Mitchell principles offended the IRA constitution and that if any Volunteer signed them, this would be a breach of the IRA’s most sacred rules. That having been done, there was really only one thing left. An extraordinary General Army Convention had to be called to decide who was in the right, the Executive or the Council. The Army Council readily agreed.
THE TASK of organizing the Convention was again given to Pat Doherty, but this time the County Donegal man had no problems discovering a secure venue, and he did so with commendable speed. The meeting was scheduled for mid-October in the Gweedore area, one of the most picturesque parts of County Donegal, only six or seven weeks after the decision to hold the Convention had been made. The fact that Doherty got the job gave the Adams camp an enormous advantage. Those who controlled the Convention controlled its timing, location, and all the logistical aspects of setting up the meeting. That advantage had lain with the dissident camp in 1996, but now it was with their enemies.
The Adams camp had effectively had the best part of a year to prepare for the meeting. When the Convention got under way, it soon became clear that they had used the period well. Under IRA rules delegates to an extraordinary Convention must, if physically possible, be the same delegates who attended the last Convention. This was based on the reasoning that if it was necessary to call an extraordinary Convention, it was most likely because of a problem that had arisen from its original meeting. It made sense that the same delegates should attend, delegates who would already be familiar with the issues. But many of the delegates who turned up in Gweedore had not been at the 1996 Convention and knew little about its wranglings and the various constitutional changes that it had approved.
Some delegates had been replaced, the result some said of promotions and demotions made since 1996. In one or two cases troublesome delegations had been replaced altogether. The Tyrone delegation, for instance, which in 1996 had declared a total lack of confidence in the Adams leadership, was completely new; the East Tyrone commander had been replaced as well. Another factor worked in favor of the peace camp. The argument between the Army Council and the Executive had been kept very secret. Most of the delegates were unaware even that there had been a dispute between them, never mind what the arguments were on either side.
The Executive had also made a fatal mistake when, at the August joint meeting with the Army Council, it suggested that Sinn Fein members of the IRA resign and then sign the Mitchell principles. This enabled the Army Council to accuse Executive members of attempting to stage a coup, a powerful argument in an organization where loyalty to the leadership was paramount. The Executive’s suggestion that Sinn Fein representatives resign from the IRA was seized on by the Army Council as evidence that the dissidents, not satisfied with their victories at the 1996 Convention, were now trying to overthrow the IRA leadership. Their real aim, said the Army Council, was not to save the IRA’s soul, as was claimed, but to take power themselves. Adams protested bitterly to the delegates: “They want me— me!—to resign from the Army.”10 The Executive was put on the defensive.
The advantage that derived from the decision to give the task of organizing the arrangements for the 1997 Convention to the Adams camp was soon evident. A large number of “guests,” perhaps as many as a dozen, were given special permission to attend. This was the first Convention ever that allowed nondelegates to attend, and even though they could not vote, the fact that the guests were given speaking rights—and invariably they spoke in favor of the Adams strategy—added strongly to the impression that the Convention was heavily on the leadership’s side. Their number included relatives of dead IRA heroes and venerable veterans like Joe Cahill and Joe B. O’Hagan, both former IRA leaders who had spent years in jail for the cause. Emotional speeches were given, promises made that there would be no sellouts, commitments to resign if there were. Others spoke of their faith and trust in the Adams-McGuinness leadership.
According to a detailed account of the 1997 Convention given to the author by two delegates, the Army Council had choreographed the transportation arrangements cleverly. The dissidents, some twenty or thirty in all, were all picked up together as one group, long after the rest of the delegates had arrived at the Convention. As the delegates already present awaited their arrival, they were quietly briefed to prepare themselves for a possible coup attempt by the Executive supporters. When the dissidents walked in, it was to a largely cold and unfriendly reception. With the dissidents isolated and the Convention full of leadership loyalists, McKevitt and his supporters faced certain defeat.
Once more the Convention lasted the entire night. According to one delegate it was a meeting of two halves. The first half saw Adams and his allies on the defensive as McKevitt and other dissidents spoke. The outgoing chairman of the Executive, Seamus McGrane, gave a lengthy speech detailing the four reasons behind the Executive’s decision to call the Convention. These were the unconstitutionality of the Mitchell principles, the Army Council’s failure to ratify the July cease-fire, the poor morale of IRA Volunteers caused by conflicting assurances from Army Council members about going back to war, and the Army Council’s treatment of the Executive (see appendix 4).
McGrane’s last complaint brought the Convention to angry verbal exchanges. McGrane accused the Army Council of deliberately withholding key documents from the Executive, not just peace process papers such as the Hume-Adams document but the minutes of the 1996 Convention, a document that would, he claimed, reveal the hostile mood of the delegates toward the idea of calling another cease-fire.
Martin McGuinness, he went on, had given the Executive an assurance that there would be no second sos in May, but “[w]e had only to wait a few weeks to see this commitment flounder.” McGuinness rose to tell the delegates that McGrane had been wrong, that all the documents he referred to had been given to the Executive. In fact the Army Council, he claimed, had done all in its power to facilitate the dissidents. At this point McKevitt intervened to call McGuinness a liar. Tempers were up, lines were drawn.
The second half of the Convention went in Adams’s favor. The Convention guests started to make their pro-leadership speeches, and other delegates joined in. Adams, who had dressed down for the Convention, forsaking his politician’s suit for jeans and a T-shirt, began to relax visibly, as did other leaders. A key development had swung the Convention out of the dissidents’ reach, and the Army Council knew it. The Belfast commander, Brian Gillen, had sat through the first half of the meeting in total silence. In 1996 he had been one of the most vocal critics of the leadership, accusing it of running down the IRA, but not this time. As the Convention reached its climax, the reason for his silence became clear. He had switched sides, abandoning the Executive dissidents and declaring his support for Adams and the cease-fire, in return for a secret promise of a seat on the new Army Council. At that point, with the influential Belfast commander on Adams’s side, the battle was effectively over.
The Executive had formulated four motions based on the points contained in McGrane’s speech, and the debate on the Convention floor developed into a dispute over whether the motions should be treated separately, as the Executive wanted, or amalgamated, as the Army Council wished. The vote was taken, and the Army Council won. The four resolutions were then voted down in one go. A separate motion declaring that the Army Council had the authority to grant special dispensation to the delegates at the Stormont talks also went through, clearing the way for Adams, McGuinness, and other IRA members to attend the political talks as Sinn Fein delegates. In each case the Army Council secured a comfortable 60–70 percent majority. The Executive had been thoroughly outmaneuvered.
It was almost over but not quite. Elections were held to the Executive and then to the Army Council. Brian Gillen’s volte-face had not gone down well with the delegates. He failed to get elected to the Executive, and when the decision came to fill the Army Council, Adams had to nominate him from outside the ranks of the Executive. The elections also saw the fall of Kevin McKenna. The chief of staff had been lucky to get reelected to the Executive in 1996. He had been given the distasteful task of assuring the IRA rank and file in 1994 that the cease-fire rumors were false, and then, when the sos was called, it was McKenna, among others, who constantly had to assure the grassroots that it would soon end. He was reelected at the 1996 Convention by only a few votes. By 1997 McKenna’s credibility with the rank and file had evaporated, and he made it back on the Executive only as a substitute. With Adams committed to promoting the apostate dissident, Brian Gillen, there was no room for McKenna on the Army Council. The Tyrone veteran had been a faithful and loyal servant of the Adams leadership, but once his usefulness was exhausted he was discarded. When rumors circulated afterward that he had been ousted because he disagreed with the cease-fire, Sinn Fein spin doctors spread the false story in the media that McKenna had quit because he had developed cancer. The story was concocted not so much for McKenna’s benefit but to scotch suggestions that such a senior figure might be opposed to the Adams strategy.
Slab Murphy was elected the new chief of staff and took pity on his old friend. He made McKenna the new quartermaster general, a position from which he later resigned. At the time of writing, the Provisional IRA’s longest-serving chief of staff was still living quietly in County Monaghan in virtual retirement, unable to exercise influence at the IRA’s highest levels and shunned by former dissident colleagues. The post-1997 Army Council was even more to Adams’s liking. Apart from himself and Martin McGuinness, it included Slab Murphy, Brian Keenan, Martin Ferris, Pat Doherty, and the new member, Brian Gillen. Adams now enjoyed a comfortable six-to-one majority, seven-to-nil now that Slab was all by himself and unlikely to kick over the traces.
As soon as the Army Council had been chosen, the substitutes joined the Executive. Once more there was an anti–Army Council majority on the body, although this had shrunk from a ten-to-two to a seven-to-five margin. The remaining dissident leaders—Seamus McGrane, Micky McKevitt, and Frank McGuinness—had been reelected, but it was obvious that they too would eventually follow McKenna into political oblivion. Two weeks after the Convention, on October 23, the new Executive met. McKevitt was the first to resign, citing the proposed acceptance of the Mitchell principles as his main reason. Five others followed, four of them, like McKevitt, members of GHQ staff and heads of department. The quartermaster’s department was next. The Belfast QM, all the Southern Command QMs, and a good number of those on the Border joined the rebellion. Much of the vital engineering department followed Frank McGuinness. A split was now a reality, and within days moves were under way to form a new IRA. Its founders would call it Oglaigh na hEireann, but the media would christen it, predictably, the Real IRA.
An IRA split had been a virtual certainty from the moment that Adams embarked on the peace process, such was the scale of the departure from traditional IRA ideology that the enterprise implied. The only questions at issue were the timing, scale, and damage that the split would cause. The fact that it took so long to occur, that the fracture came after two cease-fires had been called, irreversible changes made to republican beliefs, and the scene set for a potentially definitive settlement, not just of the Troubles in Northern Ireland but of the ancient and historic Anglo-Irish conflict, was testimony to the skill and determination of Gerry Adams and his allies. By the time the dissidents decided to move against Adams, it was already too late. And as the IRA delegates made their way home from the 1997 Convention, Adams had, after fifteen long years, finally taken the Provisionals beyond the point of no return.