It is one of the great unknowable unknowns of modern Irish history. If the arrests in Colombia and the devastation of the September 11 attacks in America had not come together to make any other course of action unthinkable, would the IRA have begun to decommission its weapons as early as it did, in October 2001, just a few weeks after the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed in clouds of dust and death? Or would it have waited for a more opportune moment, one that would perhaps have brought the greatest political or electoral windfall to the IRA’s political partners, Sinn Fein?
That the IRA would have had to begin disarming at some point had been the sine qua non of the peace process since at least the autumn of 1994 and the immediate effect of the September 11 attacks was to bring a sudden end to some five years of quibbling and prevarication. But it hadn’t always been such a dominating or difficult issue. The surprising aspect of the early, pre-cease-fire years of the peace process was the extent to which disarming the IRA did not figure, or figured so slightly in the various debates and negotiations. And when the cease-fire did come in August 1994 it was clearly Gerry Adams’s hope and expectation, at least as expressed to this writer,1 that the British and Irish governments, if not the unionists, would recognize that the demand for decommissioning was so potentially destabilizing to his project that they would shelve it, at least to a point far off in the future when it could cause the least internal disquiet. But IRA actions in the weeks after the declaration of the 1994 cease-fire forced the question to the fore and transformed decommissioning into an unavoidable and, for some, a mandatory test of the IRA’s bona fides.
Had the IRA kept to the letter and spirit of its cease-fire, it is possible that decommissioning could have been put off almost indefinitely, but the way the peace process strategy was constructed and sold to their IRA leadership colleagues by Adams and his allies determined otherwise. Unable and unwilling to spell out the huge ideological compromises waiting for the IRA and Sinn Fein down the road and obliged to clothe the process instead in hardline, republican garments, the ever-cautious Adams leadership had been forced to concede ground to Army Council colleagues, who insisted that the IRA be allowed to keep its war machinery in working order after the cessation began. The combined and particular effect of subsequent IRA activity undermined faith and trust in the cease-fire outside republican ranks and so the willingness of the IRA to put away its weapons for good became for many people a much more reliable and palpable index of its intentions than the IRA’s words or those of its political leaders, however seductive and enticing they might have sounded.
While the British and Irish governments led by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern did not ever, for their own reasons, regard decommissioning in quite this light, it was a vital test for unionists who would be asked, and were expected, to share power with the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. It was clear, especially after the Good Friday Agreement had been negotiated and Sinn Fein had signaled that it would indeed take seats in government, that no unionist leader could or would agree to sit at the same cabinet table as Sinn Fein unless the most tangible expression of the threat of renewed violence, the IRA’s stocks of explosives and weapons, was being removed from the equation. But once decommissioning had been pushed to the top of the agenda and linked to Sinn Fein’s participation in the power-sharing Executive, the issue assumed the potential either to destroy or secure the peace process. From thereon the question of whether or not the IRA would decommission its weapons and, if so, when the process would be completed and how convincingly it would be done, dominated Northern Ireland and Anglo-Irish politics for over a decade, and in a way no other issue had.
On the surface a debate raged over whether the Adams leadership would or would not be destabilized—and the peace lost or strengthened—if the demand was pressed too hard. It was a sharply divisive debate, in the media, in government and, most damagingly, in Northern Ireland society where it helped widen sectarian faultlines. The Sinn Fein and IRA spinmachine fed furiously into this debate, skilfully recruiting many in the media and government to the view that for Adams and his allies, IRA decommissioning was a bridge too far. But the available evidence strongly suggests that all this was a canard, constructed for strategic reasons. The truth was that very soon after the Good Friday Agreement was ratified, the principal obstacle in the way of the Adams leadership undertaking decommissioning was removed with minimal internal dissent and from thereon the Army Council, which Adams utterly dominated, could have started to disarm whenever it wished. But instead of starting the process and shoring up the power-sharing agreement and their unionist partners in government, the Provo leadership decided to use decommissioning to their advantage. By employing delays in delivering disarmament and withholding transparency from the process—and justifying this on the grounds of internal opposition—the Adams leadership divided and destabilized mainstream unionism, rendered their SDLP rivals almost irrelevant, and polarized Northern Ireland politics to the advantage of the extremes. But most important of all, the way decommissioning was manipulated enormously assisted Sinn Fein’s bid to become the master of the Northern nationalist house and a new, rising electoral power in Southern politics.
GERRY ADAMS and his colleagues in the leaderships of the IRA and Sinn Fein did not achieve these electoral goals unaided. Elections in Britain and the south of Ireland in the summer of 1997, a year or so before the Good Friday Agreement, had brought new governments to both countries and with them significantly positive consequences for Sinn Fein’s peace process strategy, not least in the way the republican leadership was thereafter able to handle decommissioning.
In the Irish Republic, the Fianna Fail party, whose roots lay in the anti-treaty IRA of 1921, combined with the Progressive Democrats to replace the so-called Rainbow Coalition of Fine Gael, Labour, and Democratic Left. The Fine Gael party, whose leader John Bruton was taoiseach, was historically ill disposed to physical-force republicanism and both Bruton and the leaders of Democratic Left, who could trace the lineage of their party back to the Official IRA and the often violent and bloody split with the Provisionals in 1969–70, viewed Sinn Fein’s leaders with a baleful eye and their conversion to peaceful politics with barely disguised skepticism. Under the controlling hand of the Rainbow Coalition, the peace process, from Sinn Fein’s point of view, had experienced near-fatal turbulence. The new Fianna Fail-dominated government led by Bertie Ahern was, however, a horse of an entirely different color. Fianna Fail was ideally positioned to assist the Provisional leadership to lead their people out of warfare. Not only was Ahern’s party on the same ideological waveband as Sinn Fein but some seventy years earlier Fianna Fail had made a very similar journey away from violence. Ahern and his colleagues could recognize something of themselves—or at least their predecessors—in Adams and his supporters. But there was another compelling reason to indulge the Provisional leaders. The peace process was hugely popular in the Irish Republic and Gerry Adams was its charismatic architect. As Adams’s approval ratings in the Republic soared, electoral support for Sinn Fein began to swell dramatically and Fianna Fail would increasingly find itself in competition with Sinn Fein for the same constitutional and populist republican vote. While some foresaw the day when the two parties would merge, for the time being they were both rivals and putative coalition government partners. Ahern would need to tread carefully in his dealings with Sinn Fein, especially over decommissioning, for fear of alienating their common electoral base to the Provos’ advantage.
But the more significant political change was in London, where Tony Blair had led New Labour to a stunning landslide victory over John Major’s Conservatives. Whereas the Major government’s instinctive distaste for dealing with the Provisionals was reinforced by its slim parliamentary majority and consequent dependence on the support of unionist MPs, Blair had a huge 180-seat majority in the House of Commons and the freedom to act as he wished. It soon became clear that, despite maternal roots in the planter, Protestant community of County Donegal and his embrace of the “Irish unity only with consent” principle, Blair’s sympathies lay more with Irish nationalists, as did many of his generation in Britain who had grown up with the “Troubles” and watched events across the Irish Sea with a mixture of guilt and horror. A speech he gave in Belfast at a critical moment in the peace process offered a revealing insight into his mindset: “For years”, he told his audience, “nationalist [Northern] Ireland felt treated as second-class citizens. Let me cross out the word “felt”. They were treated as second-class citizens.”2 Later he would compare Muslim terrorists who had bombed London in July 2005 not to the IRA bombers who had twice devastated the City of London and slaughtered innocent revellers in bars in Birmingham and Guildford but to “the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland”.3 No other British prime minister had pinned colors to the mast in such a way, but then no other prime minister spent as much of his tenure in Downing Street dealing with Northern Ireland as Blair would.
While the approach of the Major government to the Provos was characterized by caution, suspicion and grudgingly slow recognition of the IRA’s and Sinn Fein’s bona fides, Blair, aided by his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, took a different tack. If the Major government could be accused of overusing the stick in its dealings with the Provisionals, then Blair and Powell faced the charge of proffering the carrot too often and too easily. In particular Blair appeared to have accepted almost uncritically the view that the project crafted by Gerry Adams was a delicately balanced, vulnerable creation that could be thrown out of kilter in an instant if the IRA’s hard men wished. Integral to this approach was the belief that the IRA could sustain a return to war, notwithstanding all the radically altered circumstances on the ground. While other observers concluded that between them the ravages of time on IRA capabilities, the impact of the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, the complete control over the IRA exercised by the Adams leadership, the weakness of his opponents and the likelihood that renewed violence would exact punishment from the Catholic electorate suggested otherwise, the Blair government seemed to differ. One American participant in the peace process offered the view that Blair’s priority in dealing with the IRA was to eradicate even the smallest risk that the IRA might again devastate London with huge Canary Wharf-size bombs, especially when Britain also faced a threat from Islamic jihadists. Indulging Adams and sacrificing politicians like Unionist leader David Trimble, he added, was in Downing Street’s view a small price to pay for Blair’s peace of mind.4 Despite accumulating evidence that the IRA neither had the ability to deliver Canary Wharf-type bombs nor wished to resume armed struggle, Blair and Powell persevered in the view that if Adams’s leadership and the peace process were to be preserved, then movement could not be much faster than that judged prudent by the Provisionals’ own chiefs, and was best achieved through inducements and concessions, even by quos often given in the absence of any quids. Side deals with the Provisional leadership, extra sweeteners to seal agreement, became a permanent feature of all-party negotiations under Blair’s watch. In one sense the British prime minister’s approach recognized that Adams was selling the IRA short and that he needed cover to complete the task of ending its war, but in another way the Blair–Powell doctrine was tailor-made for the Provisionals’ post-September 11 strategy of manipulating decommissioning for political and electoral gain.
WITHOUT A doubt the peace process journey would have been much less problematic and arduous for the IRA, the risk of internal schism minimized dramatically, if all the other parties to the process had accepted that the best way of obtaining decommissioning was not to make it an issue but to regard it as something that would evolve naturally with the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and the passage of time. At one level the Provos had reason to hope—if not expect—that something like this might have been possible. In the long history of Ireland’s often violent quest for independence and self-determination, republicans had never been obliged to give up their weapons before being allowed to enjoy the fruits of peace. To the contrary, the precedents, especially recent ones, showed that governments in both parts of Ireland had either not made or pressed the demand or had tolerated the IRA merely burying or dumping its arms after a campaign had ended. In 1921 the British government of Lloyd George agreed the terms of a cease-fire and began settlement talks with republicans without decommissioning. This is also what had happened at the conclusion of the Irish civil war in May 1923 when the IRA’s Chief of Staff, Frank Aiken, had called a cease-fire and ordered volunteers to “dump arms.” Three years later de Valera broke with Sinn Fein and set up Fianna Fail, bringing the bulk of IRA units, along with their “dumped” weapons, with him, and when he took his new party into the Dail a year later the absence of decommissioning was no bar to their entry. Likewise, when the IRA campaign of 1956–62 ended, the organization’s weapons were dumped and within a short time the hard-line unionist government led by Lord Brookeborough agreed to release IRA internees and prisoners. The fact that the IRA held on to its weapons was no impediment to this. In practice the IRA’s opponents were happy to accept the organization’s defeat and declined to insist upon its humiliation.
It was the acrid whiff of surrender accompanying the concept of decommissioning that gave the Provisionals another reason to hope that the peace process parties, particularly the governments, would soft-pedal the issue. The word itself conjured up the image of defeated soldiers laying their guns at the feet of a gloating, victorious enemy before being marched off to a prison camp, and that was the last impression that the Sinn Fein leadership wished to promote. The governments shared the view that a disarming process that implied surrender could be fatal to the Adams project and it is one reason why they and the IRA preferred the phrase “putting arms beyond use” to describe the process. The success of Adams’s years of manoeuvering and edging his movement into the peace process was vitally dependent on his followers accepting the notion that what was happening was a tactical ploy consistent with the IRA’s traditional goals and not a strategic shift that meant accepting all that they had been pledged to destroy. Ideally, being allowed to keep their weapons and letting them rot away in dumps—“trust in rust” as the phrase had it—was the best way of ensuring the fealty of the IRA rank and file. Accusations that Adams and his allies had engineered a sell-out would be considerably strengthened if the IRA gave up its weapons.
While the Sinn Fein leadership hoped that the governments would not press the disarmament issue too forcefully, decommissioning was fated to take center-stage by virtue of the less than straightforward way that the Adams leadership had brought their more hard-line IRA colleagues into the peace process. The hard-liners had been persuaded to call a cease-fire in 1994 and give the political process a chance on the foot of assurances that the move was merely tactical—the cease-fire would be time-limited, would be dependent on the British giving Sinn Fein a speedy entry into talks, and if it all failed then war would be resumed. Indeed, at this stage the demand for decommissioning was portrayed during IRA leadership discussions as a casus belli that would justify breaking the cease-fire and was once described in such terms by Adams’s closest ally, Martin McGuinness, during a high-level internal IRA meeting.5 So when the cease-fire was called, Adams and his allies on the Army Council were in no position to deny demands from others in the leadership that the IRA be kept in fighting trim through continuing recruitment, training, production of explosives, intelligence gathering and “fund-raising”, a euphemism for robberies.
The members of the South Armagh IRA unit that raided Newry post office in November 1994, less than three months into the cease-fire, were acting under this type of Army Council dispensation and had it not been for the fact that in the course of the robbery a postal worker, Frank Kerr, resisted the robbers and was shot dead, the event might not have had the reverberations it did. A huge political row followed the Kerr killing. While the Army Council denied that it had been an authorized operation, not many people believed them and the effect of the killing was to destroy any credibility attached to the Adams leadership’s already ambiguous assurances that the cease-fire was permanent. If it was not possible to put trust in the IRA’s words, the skeptics concluded, then actions would be needed instead and they turned to decommissioning as a more tangible way of establishing republican credentials. The Major government in London began by hardening its language on decommissioning and in March the following year outlined a new policy that became known as Washington Three, after the preconditions set for Sinn Fein’s entry into negotiations. Enunciated by then Secretary of State in Northern Ireland Sir Patrick Mayhew during the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in America, the conditions barred Sinn Fein from political talks until the IRA publicly agreed three things: its willingness to decommission, its agreement on the modalities of decommissioning, and finally to actually make a start to decommissioning its arms. Prior to the killing of Frank Kerr, decommissioning had largely been a side issue, as much an aspiration as anything else, but afterwards it was propelled to the top of the political agenda and stayed there.
Washington Three was the high mark in hard-line attitudes towards decommissioning, both on the part of the British government and, notwithstanding an image very much to the contrary in nationalist eyes, David Trimble, whose decade-long leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party and brief reign as Northern Ireland’s first minister ultimately came to an end because of his perceived weakness on the issue. In January 1996, ten months after the Washington Three conditions were announced and only a few weeks before the breakdown in the IRA cease-fire which Mayhew’s intervention had helped to precipitate, an international commission headed by former US Senate leader George Mitchell weakened Washington Three and thus set in motion a lengthy process of diluting the terms under which IRA disarmament would happen. Mitchell concluded that decommissioning prior to all-party talks was just not attainable and he recommended a number of adjustments in the way it should be approached thereafter. Rather than happening as a precondition to talks, it could take place during negotiations and should be governed by a number of guidelines: the process should suggest neither victory nor defeat; it should be overseen by an independent body; it should result in the complete destruction of armaments; paramilitary groups should be allowed to destroy their own weapons and the process should be verifiable. In other words, IRA decommissioning should not be cast as a precondition but instead be done voluntarily and on terms acceptable to the IRA leadership, albeit overseen and agreed by an outside body, the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), which was established in 1997. The Mitchell Report shifted the decommissioning debate decisively in the republicans’ direction and towards the view that it would be a mistake to hard-pedal the issue, a view that was reinforced by the breakdown of the cease-fire just days after it was published.
The Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998, agreed only eight months after the IRA had restored its cease-fire, balanced the Provisionals’ acceptance of the consent principle against a guaranteed place in government for Sinn Fein, the release of IRA prisoners, an equality agenda, cross-Border cooperation and reform of the RUC. But decommissioning was left hanging, largely unresolved. The parties to the agreement, Sinn Fein included, merely confirmed their intention “to work constructively and in good faith with the Independent Commission, and to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years” of planned referenda on both sides of the Border that would endorse the agreement—in other words by the end of May 2006.6 One extraordinary feature of the tortuous negotiations that had led to the agreement was the minimal degree to which IRA disarming had featured in them. According to Dean Godson’s seminal and hugely detailed account of David Trimble’s stewardship of the Ulster Unionists during the peace process, Trimble, who became first minister of the power-sharing Executive, the Northern Irish version of prime minister, claimed he had not made an issue of IRA arms because he, like many others, did not foresee that Sinn Fein would take its seats in the planned new power-sharing Executive.7 Whatever the truth of that, the loosely worded terms of the Good Friday Agreement gave the Provos huge latitude to dodge and weave around the issue.
Once Sinn Fein’s delegation agreed to recommend the deal to a wider party conference, it was clear that the republicans intended to take their place in government and decommissioning immediately resumed its prior centrality and importance. Trimble’s ally and fellow negotiator, Jeffrey Donaldson, had already signalled his uneasiness by walking out of the unionist delegation at the end of the negotiations in protest at the terms for decommissioning. Two of Donaldson’s cousins were RUC officers killed by the Provisional IRA and his stand reflected the feelings of many Northern Protestants. The prospect of Sinn Fein leaders becoming government ministers was a shock whose tremors were felt along the length of Ireland’s political spectrum, but the idea that this could happen while the same leaders ran a still well-armed private army was especially noxious to unionists.
In a bid to shore up Trimble and win unionist support in the upcoming referendum, Tony Blair gave Trimble a side letter within hours of the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, confirming the British view that IRA decommissioning should start by June 1998, less than two months after the successful April negotiations. The letter had no legal status, and its terms could never be imposed, but the incident was revealing. Whereas Trimble and other unionists might be forgiven for not realizing that the peace process strategy crafted by Adams meant that Sinn Fein would participate in government, the British and Irish governments had no such excuse. Both governments had engaged in years of secret diplomacy with Adams and it would be extraordinary if they had not realized that being in government was the logical end of the path Adams had taken, in fact the raison d’être of his strategy. Decommissioning was thus always very likely to become an issue, at least for unionists, but the fact that neither government, especially the British, wanted to tie the IRA’s disarming to any of the concessions in the Good Friday Agreement—such as the release of prisoners—indicated their preference to soft-pedal the issue. In this context Blair’s side letter can be seen as a hastily contrived and even desperate effort to cover Trimble’s exposed flank, but it gave republican leaders cause to believe that in Tony Blair they had a British leader who would be reluctant to jeopardize the peace for the sake of destroying already silent IRA weapons.
Although it was not the only issue that figured in post-Good Friday Agreement negotiations to set up the power-sharing Executive and cross-Border bodies, IRA decommissioning dominated them in the same way they would dominate the politics of the peace process for the next six years. The first post-Good Friday Agreement talks on decommissioning began in March 1999 at the Saint Patrick Day’s celebrations in Washington, when David Trimble abandoned the demand that disarming should be a precondition to Sinn Fein entry to government, and at a meeting with Adams agreed the principle of “jumping together”, the sequencing approach implicitly endorsed by George Mitchell back in 1996. But after a conference at Hillsborough Castle failed to get the IRA to deliver, Trimble tacked again and let it be known that he would now accept decommissioning “days” after the Executive was formed. (Gatherings at Hillsborough Castle, the British monarch’s official residence in Northern Ireland during royal visits but used as a home by the serving British Secretary of State, became a permanent feature of political life after 1998, usually to deal with crises or to broker deals. Although their delegates were surrounded by the symbols and trappings of British royalty, including a Throne Room where the visiting monarch would receive VIPs and there was a strong possibility their conversations were being electronically monitored by British intelligence, Sinn Fein, interestingly, never objected to the venue.) In July 1999, Blair declared that he had detected a “seismic shift” in the IRA’s attitude to decommissioning and agreed with Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahern on an approach that implicitly killed off the idea of simultaneous decommissioning.8 The IRA would only have to indicate a willingness to decommission for devolution to be triggered. But a bad reaction from his party obliged Trimble to harden his position, notwithstanding any signals he may have given to the contrary, and the proposal stalled.
These negotiations were to set a pattern for dealing with IRA arms that could best be compared to a ritualistic, but very tedious slow waltz in which, every few months, Sinn Fein and the unionists would take to the floor to the same tune. While the dance would invariably begin full of hope and promise it would always conclude in the same unhappy way, usually with David Trimble tripping over Gerry Adams’s feet and landing on his face. No less than five British Secretaries of State tried their hand at leading the orchestra during these years—Mo Mowlam, Peter Mandelson, John Reid, Paul Murphy and Peter Hain—while the events’ virtuoso, Tony Blair, supported by Irish premier Bertie Ahern, chalked up thousands of man-hours, perhaps 40 percent of his time in Downing Street, according to some estimates, trying to get Adams and Trimble to complete the waltz in step and unmarred by tumbles.
After the debacle of July 1999, when the “seismic shift” in the IRA’s decommissioning policy detected by Blair turned out to be not much more than a slight tremor, George Mitchell was once again prevailed upon to return to Ireland in an effort to get Sinn Fein and the unionists to agree a way forward. The significance of the deal he put together in November 1999 was that it formally ditched decommissioning as a precondition for Sinn Fein’s entry to government. Devolution would happen on December 1, 1999, but while the IRA agreed to nominate Brian Keenan as its interlocutor to the IICD, it would not have to actually come up with the “product” i.e. weapons to be decommissioned, until the end of January 2000. Trimble got the deal approved by his party only by lodging a post-dated resignation letter, due to come into effect on February 1 if the IRA had failed to keep its side of the deal. Despite Sinn Fein signing up to the Mitchell deal, January 31 came and went without the IRA delivering any product—merely a promise from Keenan that the IRA would take the most minimal step forward and begin examining the modalities of decommissioning.
With the Good Friday Agreement slipping into irreversible meltdown, British Secretary of State Peter Mandelson stepped in to suspend the Assembly and the Executive and thereby preserve them for a better day. In retaliation, the IRA withdrew Brian Keenan from his dialogue, such as it was, with the decommissioning body. There it rested until Blair and Ahern returned to Belfast in May and another deal was struck in which the IRA agreed in principle to decommission an unspecified amount of arms and, until that happened, to allow two international luminaries, a former president of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, and the ANC trade unionist-turned-millionaire businessman, Cyril Ramaphosa, to inspect IRA weapons in arms dumps on a regular basis to ensure they had not been moved and therefore used. This so-called Confidence Building Measure (CBM) was sufficient to restore the power-sharing institutions but, crucially, Sinn Fein had got back into government without any indication that the IRA might actually start to physically disarm. In fact the arms inspectors visited IRA dumps three times on behalf of the IICD, the last occasion in May 2001, and not only was there no decommissioning during this time but there was not even a single meeting between the IRA and the decommissioning body from June 2000 until March 2001. It wasn’t until August 2001 that Brian Keenan and the IICD even agreed upon the method by which the IRA would put its weapons beyond use. In a matter of six years the terms for IRA decommissioning had slipped dramatically in favor of the republicans, from being a precondition to Sinn Fein’s participation in talks about a settlement to the point where Sinn Fein ministers had been in government for over a year without the IRA giving up a single gun or bullet.
Another tedious and especially convoluted waltz began in July 2001 when the parties were shipped off to a country house in Shropshire, England, for inconclusive talks which were followed, in the ensuing weeks, by a dizzy series of events. Trimble and his ministers in the Executive first resigned and the Assembly was then suspended twice (with foresight, the architects of the 1998 deal had anticipated a troubled journey and wrote a one-day, repeatable suspension power into the GFA legislation which could bestow six-week breathing spaces during a crisis indefinitely). Then the IRA agreed on the modalities of disarming, then it withdrew from the IICD, only to return to decommission for the first time when the combined impact of the Colombia arrests and the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington shamed and pushed it into action. It was noteworthy that when decommissioning did take place for the first time, it was due not to the diplomatic skills of Tony Blair or Bertie Ahern but because of hubris on the part of the IRA in the jungles of South America and bloodthirsty daring by Osama bin Laden and his jihadist warriors.
SO WHY did it take so long for the Provos to begin disarming? And why were the governments so reluctant to put pressure on the Provos to move more speedily and convincingly in the direction of decommissioning? After all, the peace process was essentially a covenant between the Provos and constitutional democrats in Britain and Ireland in which the latter agreed to bring Sinn Fein in from the cold and to treat them in the same way as other democrats as long as the IRA left all its violent ways behind, including its guns. One part of the bargain, power-sharing, had been implemented, or was at least irreversibly on the way to being so, yet despite an implied promise or understanding that decommissioning would take place within two years of the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA had still not agreed how or when it would destroy its arsenals three years after the deal had been struck. Not only that, but as incidents like Colombia illustrated, the IRA’s propensity to mount operations that threatened the integrity of the cease-fire was undiminished. The IRA’s part of the bargain was not being honored. The governments would have been entitled to respond accordingly but they always baulked.
The reason, of course, was that both governments had bought heavily into the argument that Gerry Adams and his colleagues had limited freedom of movement and could not move much faster than their slowest and most recalcitrant colleagues. Given the IRA’s turbulent history between 1995 and 1997, this was a reasonable view but it was also one that was unique to its time and circumstances. As the years passed and the realities on the ground changed in their favor, the IRA leadership’s hand strengthened and so did its leeway on the issue of weapons. The question is not whether Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and their various advisers were wrong in 1998 to think there was a limit to how fast or far Gerry Adams could move his IRA colleagues, but whether they were naive, not to mention foolish, to believe or to behave as if this was still the case by late 2001 and during the next four long years.
In theory there were two areas in which an external threat existed to the Adams leadership that was sufficiently strong to limit their freedom to move. The first was the threat posed by its most recent home-grown dissident group, the Real IRA, and the second was the possibility that the Real IRA would link up with the other two dissident republican groups, the Continuity IRA, associated with Ruairi O Bradaigh’s republican Sinn Fein, which came into being after the 1986 split in the Provisionals, and the INLA, the left-wing, violent but feud-prone breakaway group from the Official IRA. Pledged to reverse the Adams sell-out, this coalition would be a formidable opponent and a natural magnet for disgruntled members of the Provisionals.
The fear of a split was one reason Gerry Adams moved so cautiously and slowly when he and Father Reid began developing the peace process after 1982. Adams had experienced at first hand the bitter and often bloody fracture between the Provisionals and the Officials in the 1970s and knew how physically dangerous and politically damaging such schisms could be. That split had been due in no small measure to Cathal Goulding’s confrontational style and because his political goals had been so transparent as to forewarn his enemies and rivals. Adams knew that if he was to deliver the Provisionals into the peace process intact and undivided, he had to avoid the most egregious of Goulding’s errors, as he told Irish government officials many years later.9 By moving slowly and carefully and keeping his cards close to his chest, Adams hoped to avoid the sort of split Goulding had created.
In fact a split turned out to be unavoidable and given that Adams’s ambitions for the Provisionals dwarfed Goulding’s agenda, this was to be expected. But Adams’s caution meant that when the break with Micky McKevitt and his supporters came it was probably too late for the dissidents to make a significant enough impact on the Adams strategy. It is arguable that the dissidents stayed their hand for too long, faltered at the prospect of unseating Adams and delayed delivering the fatal blow while they themselves turned out to be vulnerable to infiltration by Adams’s loyalists posing as fellow rebels. The very fact that the McKevitt group was ultimately obliged to leave the IRA was itself a convincing sign that they would never get off the back foot. They had failed to topple Adams at the 1996 Army Convention and had been trounced at the 1997 Convention. They could either stay in the Provisionals and face humiliation, marginalization and ultimately ejection, or they could leave. They chose the latter but by so doing they ensured that Adams and his allies remained in control of the bulk of IRA weapons and of most of its structures, and in possession of an undiminished claim to republican legitimacy.
McKevitt and his allies had chosen a piece of ideological high ground for the battleground with Adams. They fought their battle in opposition to the Mitchell Principles which committed the IRA to peaceful methods and to decommissioning. These were concessions that were like fingers dabbling in the IRA’s soul, but McKevitt’s critique had not cut much ice with the IRA rank and file in the place where it mattered—the Northern war zone. The failure of the McKevitt rebellion was testament to two defining features of the Provisional movement. The response of the Adams camp to McKevitt’s attack was to say, effectively, “We’ll accept the Mitchell principles but not mean it.” This was evidence of the extent to which Adams had successfully reduced every cherished republican belief to a tactic that could be bent and twisted to suit requirements. He was able to do so because he had a compliant membership who had been motivated to join and fight with the Provisionals not because they believed in the values of traditional Irish republicanism but by an atavistic need to confront and strike back at unionism and loyalism, in and out of uniform. So it was that the Adams leadership had much less difficulty jettisoning the IRA’s most defining beliefs, like opposition to the consent principle, than it did with decommissioning weapons, the instruments of defence and confrontation.
There were other factors. Adams and McGuinness were Northerners with a trusted track record, republican superstars in the eyes of the grassroots, who had rescued the IRA from near defeat in the 1970s and brought undreamed-of electoral success, whereas McKevitt and his supporters were Southerners with whom IRA and Sinn Fein activists in Belfast, Derry and elsewhere in the North had had little direct contact or knowledge. And so it was that, thanks to such factors, the bulk of the Provisionals’ Northern Command stayed loyal to the Adams leadership in the end, while the dissident group, called Oglaigh na hEireann (Army of Ireland) by its founders but soon to be dubbed the Real IRA by the media, got most of its support from the IRA in Southern Command, especially in McKevitt’s quartermaster’s department, in the engineering department led by Dubliner Frank McGuinness or along the Border. The split was a seminal moment in the evolution of the peace process because it revealed how shallow the Provisionals’ political ideology really was and how easily the movement could be led into greater and wider ideological compromise. From the moment the McKevitt rebellion failed to topple Adams, the IRA leadership could be confident that if disaffected members left, they would leave as individuals or in small groups and that the threat of an organized, coherent opposition had faded.
The Real IRA’s leaders were aware of their weaknesses and so contact was made with the Continuity IRA and the INLA and their political leaders in an effort to forge a common military and political strategy against the peace process and the Provos. On the military front, the three groups co-operated and pooled resources to launch a bombing campaign which began with a van bomb attack on the RUC station at Markethill, County Armagh, in September 1997 and continued throughout 1998 with a series of car bomb and mortar attacks, mostly in County Armagh. The attempt to write an agreed political manifesto proved to be much more problematic. The difficulty was that Ruairi O Bradaigh, the president of republican Sinn Fein, Continuity IRA’s political wing, and Micky McKevitt, whose 32-County Sovereignty Movement represented the Real IRA, had taken opposing positions during the bitter 1986 split over recognizing the Dail. O Bradaigh had walked out of the Provisional Sinn Fein Ard Fheis with his supporters when Adams won the abstention vote, whereas McKevitt had not only stayed within the fold but had stood alongside Adams during the angry lunchtime confrontation with O Bradaigh and his people on the Sunday the vote was taken. The Real IRA people still didn’t care about abstentionism and believed holding on to it would mean political isolation, while for O Bradaigh it remained a defining matter of political principle. Dividing them was both an ideological gulf and the memory of an angry confrontation that still rankled; the combination of political and personality differences meant achieving an agreed political programme was nigh impossible.10
Any remaining chance that the three dissident groups could make common cause was literally evaporated on August 15, 1998, when a car bomb exploded in the County Tyrone market town of Omagh, killing twenty-nine people. The death toll was the worst for any single incident of the Troubles, the result of an inaccurate telephone-warning which actually drove people into the path of the bomb rather than away from it. The bombing had been the work of all three dissident groups. Continuity IRA provided the target and the intelligence, the Real IRA the code word, materiel and manpower, while the INLA provided the car used to ferry the bomb. The fact that a Real IRA code word was used meant that it got the blame. Neither the INLA nor Continuity IRA volunteered their role in the blast, leaving the Real IRA to carry the can alone, an aspect of the incident that further soured relations between them. Within three weeks both the INLA and the Real IRA had called cease-fires, although in the latter’s case it was not to be a permanent cessation.
Dissident unity had been smashed within a year of the Real IRA’s break with the Provisionals and none of the three groups was thereafter able to mount any sort of serious challenge to the Provisionals, who took to terming them, contemptuously, “micro groups.” Further evidence that the Provos regarded the Real IRA as a minimal threat came in October 2000 when, in broad daylight and with little attempt to disguise their identity, Provo gunmen in Ballymurphy shot dead twenty-six-year-old Real IRA member Joe O’Connor, pumping seven shots into his head as he sat in a car outside his mother’s house. There had been a recent history of friction between the Real and Provisional IRA in the area and O’Connor’s death was meant to send a message to the dissident group’s leadership. Had the Provos believed that there was any chance the Real IRA would have retaliated or that the group posed a real threat to Provo hegemony, O’Connor’s killing would never have been sanctioned. In the same year the Real IRA abandoned its cease-fire and carried out a series of bomb attacks in England, including an anti-tank missile fired at MI6’s headquarters, but these were few in number and never even remotely approached the scale of the threat that had been presented by the Provisional IRA. If anything, the attacks underlined the group’s marginal influence on republican politics.
In March 2001, the Real IRA was dealt a huge blow when Micky McKevitt was arrested and subsequently tried, convicted and given a twenty-year prison term on the basis of evidence provided by a US sympathizer who had infiltrated the group’s inner sanctums at the behest of the FBI and MI5. The agent, David Rupert, a German-American and part Mohawk Indian with no direct links to Ireland, was a serial bankrupt, tax defaulter and failed businessman from upstate New York who had been expelled by Continuity IRA’s American support group and then, at the urging of the FBI and MI5, turned his attention to the Real IRA. The fact that such a disreputable character was able to get so close to the Real IRA leadership was hugely embarrassing but it also confirmed a widespread perception in the republican community that the dissident group had been widely infiltrated and that those who joined it were only risking imprisonment or worse. The revelations about Rupert were a deterrent to seasoned Provisionals tempted to jump ship and increasingly the group turned to inexperienced and poorly motivated teenagers for recruits. The Real IRA also succumbed to an affliction common to Irish revolutionaries when in October 2002 it split after one faction, based in Portlaoise prison, accused the leadership outside the jail of corruption. By the time the Provisionals decommissioned for the first time, the dissident threat had been reduced almost to the level of a minor nuisance.
WHATEVER JUDGMENT British and Irish intelligence made on the dissident threat, it is clear that Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern continued to view the Adams leadership as vulnerable to internal criticism. The conviction took hold that if the IRA was compelled to move too fast or too far, the Provisionals’ unity could be threatened and there would be unthinkable consequences for the peace process. This produced an extraordinarily conflicting mindset about the leaders of the IRA in government circles in Britain and Ireland.
At one level the governments behaved as if Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were telling the truth when they claimed they had never had any links to the IRA, or in McGuinness’s case that he had severed them in 1972, and that the IRA leadership was separate from them and took decisions by itself, heeding the advice of Adams and McGuinness only when it suited. Given their access to intelligence briefings, both premiers certainly knew otherwise, particularly that Adams and McGuinness were not just senior members of the Army Council but that they were the IRA’s senior strategists and that no decisions would ever be made without their knowledge and approval. A former colleague of the two leaders, John Kelly, a founding member of the Provisional IRA and a scion of one of Belfast’s best-known republican families, put it well when asked whether figures like Gerry Adams would be aware of IRA operations: “I go back to what the Bible said, that not a sparrow falls from the sky but that the man above does not know about it and Gerry Adams in terms of the republican movement is the man above. He is God, so he knows and would want to know and would be disappointed if he didn’t know everything that happens within the republican movement and nothing will be hidden from him.”11 For reasons that defy understanding, both governments acted as if they believed otherwise.
A bizarre example of how this sort of fantasy infected government thinking occurred after the Colombia arrests and was described in detail by Dean Godson: “When the three [IRA members] were arrested, however, there was a level of disbelief in the highest reaches of Government: [John] Reid [Northern Ireland Secretary], for one, told Sir Ronnie Flanagan [RUC Chief Constable] that he believed that the three men may have been in Colombia without the knowledge of Adams and McGuinness. Furthermore, Jonathan Powell [Blair’s Chief of Staff] told Trimble on 29 August 2001 that he thought that Adams and McGuinness had lost an internal battle inside the movement.”12 Just before the Colombia arrests, during the July 2001 Shropshire conference, Tony Blair approved a package of concessions dealing with policing and demilitarization for Adams to present to his colleagues, even though intelligence officials had told him that the IRA was active in the central American country.13 Blair would have known that Adams was aware of what was happening in Colombia and the only explanation for his behaviour in Shropshire is that he believed Adams was an unwilling participant and that he needed to be strengthened to withstand his hard men. In fact the British prime minister continued indulging Adams in this way for years afterwards, even though intelligence officers had told him that at one meeting senior republicans had half-jokingly suggested sending a list of especially extravagant demands to Downing Street to show that Tony Blair would concede virtually anything that was asked of him to ensure the survival of the Adams leadership.14 And an intriguing clue as to how the IRA leadership really regarded Blair emerged from a pile of IRA documents seized by police investigating a spy ring based at the British government complex at Stormont in the autumn of 2002. One document referred to the British prime minister by his IRA code-name: “The Naive Idiot”.15
In fact the expedition to Colombia had been authorized by the Army Council, upon which both Adams and McGuinness sat. In overall charge was their fellow Army Council member Brian Keenan, who also played a part in setting up the affair, traveling to and from Colombia and exploiting family links in New York to put the arrangement together.16 According to Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell, if the deal had not been intercepted the IRA would have been paid as much as $35 million by the Colombian FARC guerrillas for training in explosives and mortar production.17 FARC could well afford such generous payments. A left-wing liberation guerilla group with ties to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, FARC held unchallenged sway over much of Colombia’s eastern region where the bulk of the country’s coca and poppy crop is grown, harvested and turned into drugs that are destined for the US market. One estimate put the region’s drug trade turnover in 2001—of which FARC held a majority share—at $300 million.
If evidence given at a 2002 hearing of the US Congressional House International Relations Committee is correct, then the IRA team in Colombia was of such a calibre that the suggestion that it was a freelance or unauthorized operation appears so far-fetched it approaches fantasy. As for Sinn Fein’s claims that those arrested in Bogotá were interested in ecotourism or had come to study the Colombian peace process, Committee chairman Rep. Henry Hyde dismissed these as “an insult to our intelligence.”18
The team, all of whom traveled on false identities, consisted of some of the organization’s most experienced and senior explosives engineers, whose republican curricula vitae had also included trusted, senior roles in Sinn Fein. The head of the training team, according to testimony provided by the chairman of the Colombian armed forces general staff, General Fernando Tapias, was Niall Connolly, who doubled as Sinn Fein’s representative in Havana, Cuba, and had lived there since 1996. He had also worked as a volunteer for the Irish Foreign Service for ten years before that and was named by General Tapias as the man who was first introduced to FARC by the Basque paramilitary group, ETA, around the time he moved to Cuba. He traveled under the alias David Bracken, a Dublin boy who was accidentally killed in 1965. Tapias claimed that Connolly, whose brother Frank, a Dublin journalist, had also allegedly traveled to Colombia on false identity papers, was “well known for his expertise in firearms and explosives.”19 The second key figure was James Monaghan, who had joined the Provisionals’ engineering department way back in 1970, rapidly becoming one of the IRA’s foremost bomb-making experts, and was, at the time of his arrest, the IRA’s director of engineering, in charge of the department that produced all the IRA’s home-made explosive mixes, detonating devices, mortars and other improvized weaponry.20 Monaghan’s post meant that he automatically sat on the IRA’s GHQ, near the very pinnacle of the organization, only a bracket or two on the organizational chart away from Adams and McGuinness. He had also served with the two men on Sinn Fein’s ruling executive, the Ard Comhairle. The deputy director of the engineering department, Martin McAuley, from County Armagh, was the third member of the team arrested. McAuley had been wounded near Portadown, County Armagh, by a crack police squad in 1982, in one of a series of so-called “shoot-to-kill” incidents that caused a bruising scandal for the RUC when they were investigated by Greater Manchester police chief John Stalker. McAuley had also been Sinn Fein’s director of elections in Upper Bann. Two other suspected IRA figures, “Kevin Noel Creemley” and “Margaret Steindoughtery”, were arrested at the same time as the three men but were let go for lack of evidence. Tapias said that a further two IRA members had been traced visiting the FARC area four months before, “John Francis Johnson” and “James Edward Walker”. The training team’s principal task, Tapias told the committee, was to show FARC how to manufacture and use mortars capable of traveling 3,000 meters.
There were claims and reports subsequently that among a total of some twelve to fifteen IRA operatives, tracked as having entered and left Colombia during this period, was Padraig Wilson, a recently released former commander of IRA prisoners at the Maze jail.21 Wilson was a close ally and supporter of Gerry Adams and had been used by the leadership as a conduit to announce IRA concessions on decommissioning in 1988 via a newspaper interview. The overall director of the Colombian adventure, Brian Keenan, was another Adams loyalist who had backed his strategy at critical points, not least during the McKevitt-inspired revolt in 1996 when Keenan pretended to sympathize with the rebels to gather vital intelligence for the Adams camp. At the time of the Colombia arrests, Keenan was the IRA’s contact man with the IICD, a mark of the trust the Adams leadership had placed in him. The second key figure in the IRA’s Colombian team was Gerry Adams’s cousin Davy Adams, and if all these claims are true then it would be stretching credibility to suggest that both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had been left out of the loop in an operation of such critical importance to the IRA. The idea also that all this could or would be organized behind their backs and that characters like Keenan and Wilson, not to mention Adams’s own cousin, would abandon years of loyalty to Adams to undermine him was a notion whose absurdity was matched only by the naivety of those in government ready to believe it was possible. Nonetheless, as government ministers and officials reached out to excuse the Sinn Fein leadership and as Adams denied all knowledge of Connolly’s role as Sinn Fein’s “Man in Havana”, the party’s public relations machine whirred into action to separate the Adams leadership from Colombia by hinting to the media that Keenan had embarked on a solo run in South America, just as a few years earlier the same spin doctors had characterized Wilson’s 1998 remarks on decommissioning as his own. A few gullible journalists had fallen for the latter piece of fiction but the best brains in the British government swallowed the former.
At another level entirely, both governments cheerfully acknowledged that Adams and McGuinness did in fact have sway over the IRA leadership and had authorized various IRA operations. But this was viewed in a very different light, one that characterized their actions as a necessary and legitimate part of the working out of the peace process. The line of thinking went something like this: Adams and McGuinness would never be able to take the IRA’s hard men with them if they knew where the peace process was really heading; so to keep the hard men happy and on board, Adams et al. would have to give them their head and approve operations like robberies, gun-running and the like; but at some point down the road matters would be so far advanced that the peace process would be irreversible and at that point the hard men could be brought to heel. Until that happened the best policy was to turn a Nelson’s eye to all but the most outrageous IRA operations and give Adams and McGuinness the benefit of the doubt.
In one exceptionally egregious example of this type of thinking, an official speaking on behalf of the late Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam had characterized the killing of a Belfast punishment shooting victim by the IRA in August 1999 as “internal housekeeping”.22 But the Irish authorities could be every bit as economical with the truth, as one brazen armed robbery in Dublin, also in 1999, demonstrated. On January 5, 1999, an armoured car carrying some £600,000 was travelling through Dalkey in south Dublin when its path was blocked by a large transit van. It was then rammed by a flat-bed lorry onto whose superstructure had been welded two heavy girders that stuck out like a medieval battering ram. The impact of the girders smashed open one of the armored car’s rear doors. Masked men armed with AK-47 automatic rifles jumped out of the van and swarmed around the car, making off with a dozen bags of cash. These they threw into the boot of a waiting Ford Granada getaway car but the vehicle’s engine stalled and wouldn’t start up again. The impact of the bags of cash had triggered a safety valve in the boot designed to stop the flow of petrol to the engine, thus reducing the chances of a fire in the event of a rear-end collision. The only mistake made by the robbers, in an otherwise meticulously planned and executed operation, was their choice of escape car. Forced to abandon the money, the gang made their getaway in another car which they hijacked after firing shots at the driver, who was cut around the head and shoulders by flying glass from his shattered windscreen. The gang had switched off the safety catches on their weapons, indicating they probably would have engaged the Irish police if necessary.
Immediately afterwards there was intense speculation about the identity of those responsible. The robbery was too well planned and the robbers too heavily armed for it to have been the work of one of Dublin’s many criminal gangs and the finger of suspicion at once pointed to a republican paramilitary group of some stripe. For the same reasons, common sense suggested that the well-armed and resourced Provisionals, rather than the smaller and more amateurish dissident groups, had been behind the raid, but in the following days the Dublin newspapers and media performed alarming contortions in an attempt to put dissidents in the frame. Since the stories were written mostly by the media’s security correspondents, a group of reporters whose dependence upon the Garda press office for their bread and butter had been a legendary if less than distinguished feature of Irish journalism for many years, it was difficult not to conclude that their stories reflected what the Irish political and security establishment wanted to see reported—although by this stage in the peace process the media rarely needed such encouragement.
Immediately after the robbery, reporters cited Irish police sources as unequivocally blaming either the Real or Continuity IRA, but as the days passed and it became clearer that the expertise of the raid was beyond these groups, the coverage changed in a bizarre way. The reports began to concede that there were differences of opinion within the Gardai about who had planned the robbery and edged close to suggesting the Provos might have had some hand in it—but they stopped significantly short of actually saying so. Instead, reporters wrote that the robbers “had learned their trade with the Provisional IRA,” that they might have acquired weapons from the Provos and might also have attracted figures to their ranks “who must have been among the Provisional IRA’s most able and dangerous…”23 This was as close as the Dublin media, circa 1999, could come to saying that one of the most audacious robberies in the city’s recent history had been perpetrated by a group whose leaders were dealing with the government and its leaders on a daily basis to supposedly deliver peace to the island. The same report, which had coyly hinted at some mysterious Provisional IRA association with the raid, ended, inexplicably, by returning to safer ground: “Dalkey undermines the case that the dissidents are finished. Here was an expertly planned raid executed by terrorists who were quite prepared to kill anyone who got in their way. According to some Gardai, the raid has shown not only that these ‘dissidents’ are undeterred by the shame of Omagh and the so-called ‘draconian’ anti-terrorist laws and threats from the Provisionals, but that they appear to be determined to continue and even escalate their activities.”24 The same sort of doublespeak came from government ministers in the days after the robbery. There was an 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the room but no one in the Irish State, police, press or politicians, wanted to admit it.
In fact the robbery was a Provisional IRA operation which had been authorized by the Army Council and planned by the IRA’s finance department. It was remarkably similar to a bungled robbery in Limerick three years before which had gone badly wrong when a Garda Special Branch detective was shot and killed by IRA members who had also switched off their AK-47 safety catches.25 Had Irish police arrived on the scene at Dalkey any sooner than they did, then there might well have been fatalities that day as well. Within weeks Irish government officials were admitting privately that the Garda/media spin was incorrect and that the Provisionals had indeed been responsible. But publicly no Irish government minister or official would ever blame the Provos for what had been a barefaced and flagrant breach of their cease-fire.26 The effect of incidents like this—and there were many of them—was to tempt the IRA into more and more contumelious activity. Since the first cease-fire was called in 1994 this was the third brazen armed robbery carried out by the Provos. The first two had caused fatalities but neither had deterred the IRA from proceeding with the Dalkey robbery, and that was compelling evidence both of the contempt the IRA had for the Irish and British governments and its leaders’ confidence that neither administration would respond in anything like a punitive way. Given the timidity of the reaction to events like Dalkey, the IRA could hardly be blamed for pushing the envelope to its limit. The nature of government response also helped create an ideal set of circumstances for the Adams leadership in which no matter what the outcome of IRA activity, they, the leadership, would always come out ahead: if the IRA did something and neither London nor Dublin responded, then, to the great satisfaction of the IRA rank and file, their weakness would be evident for all to see, while the IRA would be able to pocket the proceeds of their operations. But if they reacted badly, which eventually they would have to, Adams and his allies would then be able to use this as a lever to push the IRA into making concessions necessary to keep the peace process alive.
The degree of unease within the Provisionals’ grassroots during the years between the departure of the Real IRA rebels and the first act of decommissioning is by definition impossible to measure accurately. Certainly the Adams leadership continued to behave as before, disguising and misrepresenting their moves to their grassroots as they had done since the peace process began. The way decommissioning was presented internally was a classic example of this. While the world hailed the decommissioning act of October 21, 2001 as a breakthrough and a brave initiative by the IRA leadership, the Provos’ rank and file were assured that it was a meaningless piece of theatre. The arms dump that had been decommissioned, the IRA told its volunteers, had already been discovered by the security forces and was under surveillance by them. The IRA had given up no arms that had not already been lost or compromised. A similar approach was taken to the next two acts of decommissioning, in April 2002 and October 2003. In one instance, the IRA told its members that the engineering department had been busy manufacturing bogus armaments, such as electronic fuses, and had fooled the head of the IICD, General John de Chastelain, into accepting faux weaponry. In another manifestly false claim, the grassroots were told that a senior member of the IICD had been caught by the IRA with another woman and was being blackmailed to lie to the world about the decommissioning process. Far-fetched though all this may sound now, it was actually believed at IRA grassroots level by enough people to matter, as one former IRA prisoner, Michael Benson, found out. Writing on The Blanket website he recalled: “One honest and sincere young man for whom I have the greatest respect and who unlike so many recent Republican converts actually found himself in Long Kesh told me that the Republican Movement had NEVER [writer’s emphasis] decommissioned anything and that de Chastelain had been conned. Conning there may well have been but I don’t think it was the Canadian General who was conned. And no doubt if there is another act of decommissioning that the foot soldiers will be again told some outlandish story.”27
Whether the Adams leadership really needed to resort to such dissembling, or did so in the knowledge that the intelligence feedback to the British and Irish would strengthen the view that Adams’s freedom of movement was indeed limited, or even that this was another example of Adams indulging his own legendary caution, the reality was clear. In various ways and for various reasons, the Adams leadership was altogether much stronger by 1999 than at any time since the failed putsch carried out by Michael McKevitt and his allies in 1996–97, and arguably more in control of the republican movement than at any other point in the peace process.
To begin with, the malcontents on the Army Executive who had led the revolt against the Adams leadership had been soundly defeated. The 1997 Convention had put them in a minority and when the McKevitt rebels left weeks later so did they, and the new IRA Executive that took over was much more to the leadership’s liking. There was little likelihood of trouble from this traditional source of internal unrest. In addition, the Army Council was, by a very comfortable margin, solidly in the Adams camp. The former chief of staff, Kevin McKenna, who had never liked the peace process, had departed, replaced by Tom “Slab” Murphy of the South Armagh IRA. “Slab” was a much less self-confident figure than his predecessor, as was evident by his demeanour during the 1994 Army Council meeting that declared the first cease-fire. Committed beforehand to voting against the cessation, he elected to sit on the fence when Joe Cahill suddenly switched sides to back Adams and give him victory. McKenna, by contrast, stuck to his guns and voted against, the only Army Council member to do so. A year after his appointment as chief of staff, Slab sued the Sunday Times for libel and lost badly after a less than spectacular performance in the witness box which did neither his image nor his authority on the Army Council much good. Aside from Adams and McGuinness, there were two other Sinn Fein stalwarts on the Council, Pat Doherty and Martin Ferris, the Kerry-based activist who had been jailed for his part in an arms-smuggling venture (betrayed by the spy Sean O’Callaghan). Both men were strong supporters of Gerry Adams. The remaining Council members were also on Adams’s side: Brian Keenan and Brian Gillen, the latter the former Belfast commander who had come over to Adams’s side during the 1997 Convention and had been elevated to the Army Council as a reward. On a bad day Adams could count on a six-to-one majority in his favor; on a good day all the Army Council members would vote for his proposals.
But the most significant improvement in Adams’s fortunes was that the changes in the IRA’s constitution pushed through at the 1996 Convention, notably the restrictions placed on the IRA leadership’s ability to decommission weaponry, were reversed at a Convention held in early 1999, the second since the eclipse of the McKevitt dissidents in 1997. The first, in 1998, had approved IRA members of Sinn Fein taking seats in the new power-sharing Assembly, a move that completed the ending of abstentionism begun in 1986. At the 1999 meeting, the Army Council had restored to it total control over the IRA’s “equipment and other resources” in between Conventions. The McKevitt constitutional changes had taken away control of IRA weaponry, specifically if they were to be decommissioned, and given it to the Convention, which became the only body with such authority. But this power had been handed back to an Army Council now fully under the control of Adams and his peace process allies and unthreatened by dissidents. There was only one caveat, and a minor one at that. The Army Council’s authority to dispose of IRA weapons was linked to Sinn Fein’s entry into the yet-to-be established power-sharing Executive.28 That restriction probably suited the Adams leadership since it buttressed the republican insistence that devolution must precede IRA disarming, an essential condition if the strategy of destabilizing Trimble and the SDLP was to succeed. The important point was that the leadership now had the authority to begin decommissioning whenever it wished and didn’t need to call a special Convention to win approval.
None of this deterred the Sinn Fein leadership from pretending otherwise. In 2000 the SDLP was told, for example, that decommissioning was unlikely because Sinn Fein “no longer” had much influence with the IRA, even though this was more than a year after the 1999 Convention.29 The Irish government accepted, seemingly without hesitation, the claim from Sinn Fein that “Adams did not have the votes” at a Convention to move on arms, a belief that cannot have been grounded in anything remotely resembling accurate intelligence.30 The Irish government flip-flopped alarmingly during these years, a sign that its understanding and analysis of the Provos was less than perfect. In February 1999, for instance, Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which he said that Sinn Fein would not get into government until and unless a start was made on decommissioning. Yet only four months later he performed a U-turn, saying decommissioning could begin only after Sinn Fein ministers were seated around the cabinet table. When another decommissioning deadline was missed, this time at the end of January 2000, the Irish government’s explanation was that Gerry Adams had tried to sell the idea “on a tour of IRA units around the country” but had given up, presumably because of the bad reaction.31 The truth, of course, was that the heavy lifting on decommissioning, such as it was, had already been done.
That the Irish government believed that before Gerry Adams or his colleagues could take risky and important decisions they needed to consult with and win the approval of the IRA rank and file seemed sensible—or at least it would have been if one was talking about any other organization, even one like Fianna Fail, but not the Provisional IRA. The whole point about the Adams peace strategy, the characteristic that made it really special, was that the entire expedition had been undertaken without the say-so or knowledge of the IRA’s rank and file and that if they had been given a real veto over the process it probably would never have got off the ground. The priority of the Adams leadership was never to seek and win the consent of the grassroots for what it wanted to do, but to side-step, identify, undermine or subvert opposition and then manoeuvre the IRA or Sinn Fein into the desired place.
Two key events that took place before IRA decommissioning was an issue stand out as examples of how, eventually, the question of IRA guns would be dealt with. The 1986 Ard Fheis, which approved dropping abstentionism in the Dail, gave the leadership the result it wanted not because Adams or any of his colleagues toured the rank and file and won them over by argument but as a result of a piece of political trickery that Tammany Hall would have been proud of. Fictitious Sinn Fein cumainn were invented and registered with head office and when the Ard Fheis came around, dozens of delegates, invariably IRA men loyal to the military leadership, were sent to vote to drop abstentionism on behalf of a non-existent membership. That’s how the leadership won the debate. Had they not done that, the proposal would probably have been comfortably defeated. In the run-up to the 1994 cease-fire, then Northern Commander Martin McGuinness publicly assured the republican grassroots that there would have to be an Army Convention before any cessation proposal was approved and the effect was to calm the ranks. But there never was a Convention because the Adams leadership knew they would probably lose the vote if there had been one. The first rule of IRA politics, as was very evident to the Adams camp in 1996, is never to call a Convention unless you know you can win it, preferably because your people are in charge of organizing it. No Convention was called before the 1994 cessation and, instead, the decision was left in the hands of the much more easily managed and manipulated Army Council. And it was the same story with decommissioning, once Adams had won the 1999 Convention.
Sleight of hand was, as always, employed by the leadership to ensure that the decommissioning issue was handled in the way it wished, notwithstanding opposition at grassroots IRA levels. One long-time and now former republican activist described how this process worked: “There is widespread consultation, but it’s not that simple. Command or Departmental OCs call meetings and there is the opportunity to put your case but then the leadership goes ahead and does what it wants. When asked, the leadership says, ‘We have consulted’ but the grassroots never find out what the overall result was because they only know about what took place at their own meeting. And if you say to them [the leadership] ‘We were against this or that’ the answer is that ‘well you don’t know how others we consulted felt’. The logic is that the leadership does what it wishes.”32
Irish government policy on decommissioning may have become what it was, due—at least in part—to the fact that policy-makers relied in large measure on the Sinn Fein leadership for their insight into IRA affairs, a dependence that had its origin in the Adams—Father Reid—Martin Mansergh chain established in the late 1980s. According to one senior Irish political source, policy formulation by the Dublin government in regard to the peace process, which was largely in the hands of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), happened with little or no reference to the Garda Special Branch or the Department of Justice during these years. The Irish Special Branch had agents inside the IRA who gave accounts of internal matters that could have assisted policy-making, but their information was ignored. “They [DFA] had been co-opted by the Provos,” asserted the source. “They ended up having a sort of Stockholm Syndrome relationship with them in which the rule was ‘Gerry’s problems are our problems’.” It wasn’t until 2005 that Garda intelligence was fed regularly into the process and by then it was far too late to influence the decommissioning process.33
The 1999 Convention imposed two other restrictions on IRA involvement in the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement. One prevented ranking IRA members from taking seats in the new Assembly, and as a result Gerry Kelly, an Assembly member for North Belfast, coud not be reappointed as adjutant-general. Another said that no IRA member could hold office in the new Executive, a restriction that possibly puts Adams’s own reluctance to take government office in a new light. This also had implications for Martin McGuinness, slated to be minister of education, when in December 1999 the deal brokered by George Mitchell paved the way for the Executive to be established. As Dean Godson noted, the Irish government became aware that Martin McGuinness “stopped going to IRA meetings” when he was appointed to the Executive, although it is not clear if Dublin fully understood why. Godson was told this was happening “so as to keep a clear division between ministers and ‘the movement’,” whereas it was in fact a condition that had been imposed by the 1999 Convention.34 These limits to the leadership’s freedom of movement were pretty mild and fell way short of the sort of hobbling measures that an unhappy and assertive IRA grassroots would have demanded, the sort of grassroots that the Sinn Fein leadership would afterwards maintain prevented greater or faster movement towards IRA disarming. The Adams leadership could be well satisfied at the outcome of the 1999 IRA Convention. It had restored the Army Council’s tactical flexibility and had encountered no real, organized opposition, while the Irish and British governments continued to believe, or acted as if they believed, that the opposite was the case.
MEANWHILE the destabilizing impact on unionism of the IRA’s dodging and weaving around the decommissioning issue was becoming more evident as well as threatening to the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble. He had significantly moderated his decommissioning stance since the Good Friday Agreement was signed and had dropped the demand that it be a precondition for Sinn Fein’s presence in government. Instead he accepted that it could happen after devolution was underway, although the deadline for this kept being extended further and further into the future. As this happened, unionist unrest intensified. Even when the IRA agreed to its first act of decommissioning in October 2001, Trimble won no relief from internal criticism. The IRA had moved, after all, not out of consideration for unionists’ susceptibilities but in self-interest, lest by not decommissioning the White House would place it in the same camp as Al Qaeda. Furthermore, Trimble had lost some of his Assembly members to anti-GFA unionist dissidents and was only re-elected as first minister when members of the Alliance Party and the Women’s Coalition temporarily redesignated themselves as unionists, a device that Trimble’s critics roundly condemned as shabby and demeaning. In some telling ways the first act of IRA decommissioning actually weakened Trimble.
Even though the IRA had begun decommissioning, it soon became clear that another difficulty had emerged. The IICD, which oversaw and verified the process, gave no details at all about what had happened. A 144-word statement outlining the first decommissioning act of October 2001 said merely that the IICD’s members had witnessed “an event” in which “arms, ammunition and explosives” were put beyond use. How much weaponry was decommissioned or precisely what type was not revealed and neither was the method of decommissioning. The IICD would not even say where the event had taken place, whether it was North or South of the Border or even in Ireland. The IICD’s statement after the second act of IRA decommissioning in April 2002 was even shorter, at 112 words, and again no details at all were given about what had happened.
The IICD was led by three members: Tauno Nieminen, a Finnish Brigadier-General, Andrew Sens, a former US diplomat and John de Chastelain, a retired General in the Canadian Army, who was the IICD’s chairman. Ironically, in view of subsequent events, de Chastelain’s appointment had been resisted by Sinn Fein since both his parents had links to British intelligence, his father as an MI6 officer in the Balkans during the Second World War, and his mother who was on the staff of Churchill’s legendary US-based spymaster, Sir William Stephenson. De Chastelain had sat on the Mitchell International Body, whose report in 1996 had established the need to avoid the appearance of surrender or defeat as a central principle in any disarming process. In line with that thinking, de Chastelain and his colleagues agreed an arrangement with Brian Keenan in which no detail pertaining to the decommissioning process would be made public.
“It became clear to us,” the IICD chairman explained, “in our continuing discussions with the IRA representative that they would only agree to decommission on that basis.” De Chastelain went to the two governments with that proposal and Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern agreed. “Now the IRA representative didn’t tell us this but I think they also had to do a selling job to their own rank and file about how things would be done,” he recalled, “… they didn’t want to be humiliated.”35 The confidentiality deal was negotiated, de Chastelain believes, by either late 1999 or early 2000, by which time the Army Council had recovered its authority over IRA weapons. Significantly de Chastelain now admits he knew nothing about the 1999 IRA Convention. Out of a wish not to be compromised, the IICD had eschewed links to the British or Irish intelligence network and therefore had no way of knowing about it.
The IRA’s confidentiality agreement with the IICD meant that no evidence that decommissioning had even happened could be made public and it was this that allowed the leadership to tell rank-and-file volunteers that de Chastelain had been conned. But it also unsettled an already uneasy unionist community, many of whose members assumed that the real purpose of the secrecy was to hide the fact that no weapons or a very insignificant number of them had been destroyed. One consequence was that an already weakened faith and trust in the IRA’s bona fides, Tony Blair’s veracity and David Trimble’s political leadership, slipped away at an accelerating rate. By October 2000 the slim majority of Protestants, 51 percent, who had voted in favor of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, had become a slightly larger majority, 53 percent, who would now vote against given a second chance.36 Just under three years later, according to a Joseph Rowntree Trust/Queen’s University Belfast poll, Protestant support had fallen to around a third. Trimble faced growing opposition from within his own party; at increasingly agitated meetings of his party’s supreme decision-making body, the Ulster Unionist Council, he was doing well if he won the support of more than 55 percent of delegates. In September 2000 disaster struck when in a by-election for the Westminster constituency of South Antrim, the Reverend William McCrea, a Free Presbyterian minister shipped in from far-off south Derry to fight the election and one of the wilder fundamentalists in Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, took what had been the Ulster Unionist’s safest seat in Northern Ireland, beating David Burnside, who was himself something of a hard-liner and critic of Trimble. Grassroots unionist sentiment was moving away from the moderate center ground and that process would quicken in the next few years.
Any hope that the start of decommissioning would signal a change of direction by the IRA was dashed on the night of Sunday, March 17, 2002, St. Patrick’s Day. Three intruders burst into a Special Branch office located deep in the Belfast headquarters of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the renamed Royal Ulster Constabulary, at Castlereagh in the east of city, overpowered the duty officer and made off with scores of files containing the code-names of double agents, the names of their handlers and details of the Special Branch’s complete battle order, including names and phone numbers. It was a devastating strike against British intelligence, and because the raiders appeared to have intimate knowledge of the Castlereagh base the authorities at first discounted IRA responsibility and assumed that the raid had to be an inside job, possibly carried out by disgruntled intelligence officers. The PSNI Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, said he would be “most surprised” if paramilitaries or civilians were responsible.37 A week later, however, the PSNI had changed its mind and began raiding and arresting leading republicans in Belfast and Derry. The Castlereagh raid was an IRA operation, the police had concluded, carried out with the assistance of a civilian accomplice working at the base, which was under reconstruction at the time and consequently not guarded with the customary level of vigilance.
Possibly because of the initial confusion about who was responsible, the impact of the Castlereagh raid was somewhat less explosive than it could have been, but angry unionists were nonetheless soon taking aim at the Provo leadership. Republicans in turn fiercely denied any IRA hand in the raid and accused malicious security force elements of staging it to discredit Sinn Fein and the peace process. This was yet another example of a long and concerted effort by the republican leadership to blame allegedly reactionary elements in the intelligence world, whom they dubbed “securocrats”, for IRA operations or other incidents that caused problems for the peace process.
As it turned out, the police investigation into the Castlereagh break-in was a slow-burning fuse. As raids and searches continued, the authorities uncovered more and more evidence that the IRA’s intelligence department was running an extensive spy ring at British government offices in the Stormont complex in east Belfast. According to one security source with intimate knowledge of the affair, the IRA had as many as five spies inserted into the lower levels of the civil service, or recruited by them, who were funneling sensitive documents to the IRA and Sinn Fein.38 Amongst these were papers listing the names and addresses of some 1,600 prison officers, and around 600 soldiers, policemen, politicians and civil servants. But the more significant material included position papers prepared by the British government for peace process talks, documents and correspondence from other parties to the Northern Ireland Office, and transcripts of phone conversations, including those between British premier Tony Blair and the US President George W. Bush. Some of the material was of value only to the IRA, but the bulk of it was potentially of enormous help to Sinn Fein’s leaders as they constructed their negotiating positions for talks with the British and other parties.
On October 4, 2002, a large force of PSNI officers raided Sinn Fein’s offices at the Stormont parliament and took away computer disks. Two days later, the head of administration for Sinn Fein at the Assembly, Denis Donaldson, and his son-in-law Ciaran Kearney, appeared in court charged with possessing documents likely to be of use to terrorists, and later a Stormont messenger was also charged. A bag full of British papers had been discovered at Donaldson’s home and the involvement of Donaldson, an IRA veteran and apparently loyal disciple of the Adams leadership from the Short Strand area of Belfast, would later reverberate massively within the republican movement.
Within a week the peace process was in the middle of a full-blown crisis. Faced with unionist threats to quit the power-sharing Executive, the British suspended the Good Friday Agreement institutions and direct rule was reinstituted. Once again IRA activity had collapsed the house of cards and raised dark questions in unionist minds about the wisdom of David Trimble’s seemingly interminable and unsatisfactory political liaison with the Provos.
Faced with widespread criticism, and doubtless encouraged by the question marks still in the public’s mind about the Castlereagh raid, the Sinn Fein leadership once again played the “securocrat” card. Party leaders alleged that the spy ring, quickly dubbed “Stormontgate” by the local media, was an invention of hostile intelligence officers who had contrived the affair to rescue David Trimble from hard-liners in his party who were moving against his leadership. The claim that “Stormontgate” had been staged to “Save Dave,” combined with TV footage of a PSNI raid on Sinn Fein offices that was clearly over the top, helped the Provos retrieve some ground, at least within the nationalist constituency. For instance, Martin Mansergh, who had spent years as the Irish government’s contact man with the Provos in the early days of the peace process and was by now an Irish senator, questioned the timing of the raid, which he said was reminiscent of what might happen in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
The security authorities in Northern Ireland had been aware of the spy ring for months but had been slow to act. If the testimony of one former senior intelligence officer involved in the affair is correct, then far from staging the operation to rescue Trimble at the expense of the Provos, British intelligence strove to minimize the damage that would accrue to them once it all became public. Former Chief Superintendent Bill Lowry, head of the PSNI Special Branch in Belfast who headed the operation, code-named “Torsion,” later said: “I felt during the whole operation that I was running, constant pressure from the security services [MI5], that it would be better if we didn’t take skulls, if we just took papers. It would leave Sinn Fein/Provisional IRA a chance of denying they were involved in it.”39 Lowry quit the PSNI weeks after “Stormontgate” was exposed and after a row with MI5 over his alleged contacts with media. This would not be the last time that republican claims of “securocrat” influence would be seriously questioned.
The other reason why the authorities stayed their hand was the hope that they would be able to ensnare the mastermind behind both the spy ring and the earlier raid on the Castlereagh Special Branch office. Both operations had been run by the IRA’s director of intelligence, Bobby Storey, a West Belfast IRA veteran who by this time had become something of a republican legend. An active gunman and bomber in the 1970s who had reputedly inspired Mairead Farrell, later killed by the SAS in Gibraltar, to join the IRA, he was jailed in the 1970s and again in 1981 for eighteen years after an ambush on British soldiers during the hunger strikes. Two years later he helped lead a spectacular IRA break-out from the Maze prison, the old Long Kesh, in which thirty-eight prisoners escaped. Around half were recaptured shortly afterwards, including Storey, who had tried to hide under water in a nearby river by breathing through a reed. Back in the H Blocks, he headed IRA security inside the jail, a job that entailed, inter alia, policing republican prisoners for dissent against the Adams leadership. After his release around the time of the first cease-fire, Storey—at 6’4” he was known as “Big Bobby” in IRA circles—rose in the ranks and was soon deeply involved in the organization’s intelligence work. Immediately after his release, Storey was appointed Northern Command intelligence officer and in that capacity he was to play an enormously significant role in saving Adams’s IRA skin. He helped organize and mastermind the bombing of Thiepval barracks, the British army’s headquarters in Northern Ireland, on the eve of the 1996 IRA Convention, and by so doing strengthened Adams’s hand with delegates as he faced criticism orchestrated and led by Michael McKevitt.
It is Storey’s close relationship with and uncritical support for Gerry Adams that adds a fascinating twist to the destabilizing events of 2002. Just as in the case of the Colombian adventure, it is inconceivable that operations on the scale of the Castlereagh raid and “Stormontgate” would have been unauthorized or unknown to members of the IRA’s Army Council, which included both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Nor is it likely or at all credible that someone like Storey, ever the loyal soldier, would undertake such missions knowing that they would or could undermine Adams. The logic of all this strongly suggests that Adams, as well as McGuinness, both knew and approved of operations like Castlereagh and the spy ring before they happened and that when Bobby Storey planned and crafted them, he knew it was with their support and endorsement, as IRA leaders.
The next obvious question is why did Gerry Adams and his allies in the leadership give the go-ahead to such activities? One part of the answer is a variant on the old response, “because they could,” in this case “because they could get away with them.” As Bill Lowry’s experience demonstrated, and the response of British and Irish ministers to previous incidents showed, there was huge reluctance on the part of officialdom to confront the republican leadership over such matters. In the cause of Adams’s careful and hopefully successful management of his hard men, all things, or virtually all things, were permissible.
Nonetheless, this course of action was not without huge risk for Adams and his allies. By this stage of the Troubles security force penetration of the IRA was extensive. The PSNI Special Branch, British military intelligence and MI5 had so many agents placed at different levels of the IRA that at the time of the first cease-fire in 1994 eight out of every ten IRA operations were known to the intelligence agencies, according to one very authoritative assessment.40 So when the Army Council authorized activity, whether it be an ambitious scheme like Stormontgate or a local shooting or abduction, the chances that it would come to light, notwithstanding the Nelson’s eye of British intelligence and the indulgence of the British and Irish governments, were statistically very high indeed.
One possible explanation for this risk-taking was that the political fallout from such operations made it worthwhile. Within unionism, the impact was always to strengthen hardliners like Ian Paisley’s DUP and undermine more accommodating figures like David Trimble. Destabilizing unionism was, by itself, a worthwhile prize for many nationalists. Not only that but against a background of rising unionist protest over sharing power with a Sinn Fein that was linked to a still very active and armed IRA, Trimble was obliged to toughen his language, if not his policy, on IRA decommissioning, and to deny Sinn Fein a place in government or restrict the workings of institutions like the cross-Border bodies until the matter was settled. All this had an equal if opposite effect upon nationalist opinion, which needed little encouragement to conclude that decommissioning was just an excuse invented or inflated by unionists to deny Sinn Fein, and the Catholics who supported it, the mandated right to participate in government.
To begin with, many Catholics had difficulty seeing David Trimble in anything resembling a friendly light or in accepting that he may have moderated his views over the years. His history and background had been one of association with the more hard-line, inflexible elements of unionism. He had, for instance, made political alliances with Paisley in the very recent past, most notoriously over the issue of the annual Drumcree Orange march, in Portadown, County Armagh, where each year local Orange lodges would attempt to march through a small Catholic area despite the intense opposition of its residents. For a number of years in the late 1990s the Drumcree march became an annual arm-wrestling match between unionism and nationalism and on one occasion, when the Orangemen won, Trimble danced a victory jig with Paisley through central Portadown and earned the undying hatred of many Catholics. In the 1970s he had joined the Vanguard party which had been founded by Bill Craig, the unrelenting unionist home affairs minister who had banned some of the early civil rights marches. In 1974 Trimble had sided with the loyalists opposed to the Sunningdale power-sharing deal and wrote the rule book for the Ulster Workers’ Council whose general strike had combined with loyalist paramilitary muscle to bring down the deal. The image of Trimble as a liberal proponent of power-sharing with republicans was difficult for nationalists to swallow and so the Trimble who toughened his rhetoric on IRA decommissioning and stopped Sinn Fein from sitting at the cabinet table looked not much different from the ungenerous, inflexible Trimble of old.
Nationalists also saw Gerry Adams’s stewardship of the Provisionals in much the same sympathetic light as Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, and agreed that he would have to manage his activists carefully and delicately if he and his peace project were to survive. In particular they sympathized with him on the question of IRA decommissioning and regarded unionist demands for it as tantamount to seeking a humiliating surrender. As the battle over IRA decommissioning lengthened and became more bitter, another effect was to make the SDLP largely irrelevant and reduce it to quasi-spectator status. The political impact of all this was to drive more and more nationalists into Sinn Fein’s camp and out of the SDLP’s, while increasing numbers of unionists deserted David Trimble for the DUP.
The election results during the years between the resumption of the IRA cease-fire in 1997 up to the “Stormontgate” affair show a decisive swing within nationalist politics to Sinn Fein. In the 1997 Westminster general election the SDLP was still the dominant bloc, winning three seats to Sinn Fein’s two and 60 percent of the nationalist vote. Four years later the situation had reversed. Sinn Fein outpolled the SDLP at the 2001 Westminster election by 51 percent to 49 percent and won four seats to the SDLP’s three. It was a very similar, if not quite so dramatic, story on the unionist side. In 1997 Trimble’s Ulster Unionists secured 71 percent of the Protestant vote to the DUP’s 29 percent and held ten seats to the DUP’s two. By 2001, however, the share of the UUP vote had fallen to 54 percent, while Trimble’s party now held just six seats to the DUP’s five.
The battle over decommissioning and controversies surrounding IRA activity had benefited the extremes to the disadvantage of the center ground in Northern Ireland politics. The message for Sinn Fein from all this was that more of the same might help the Provos deliver the coup de grâce to the SDLP and hand the party complete dominion over nationalist politics. Or, put another way, conceding transparent decommissioning to Trimble might resolve the political impasse and take the heat out of politics but very possibly at the cost of re-energizing the center ground of nationalist politics and reviving the SDLP. In a very significant sense this was history repeating itself, a history whose lessons Sinn Fein had digested well. In 1981, the fact that the hunger strikes were still ongoing when Owen Carron stood in a by-election to replace Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone meant that nationalists had a reason, almost an obligation, to turn out to vote for him. Had the hunger strikes been resolved before polling day, as they nearly were, Catholic voters would have stayed home in droves and Carron would never have won. Twenty years later, the decommissioning dispute would play a very similar motivating role on Sinn Fein’s behalf throughout nationalist communities in Northern Ireland. Like prolonging the hunger strike, Sinn Fein had everything to gain from drawing out the decommissioning dispute.
In the South the peace process, for somewhat different reasons, had also brought electoral benefits for Sinn Fein. The party had won its first Dail seat in the 1997 general election when Caoimhghin O Caolain won a seat in the Cavan–Monaghan constituency. In the 2002 election Sinn Fein’s tally rose to five seats and the party fared well enough elsewhere to suggest it might triple its tally of seats at the next outing. One of those to win a seat was Martin Ferris, in Kerry North, and his victory meant that three of the seven members of the IRA’s Army Council had been elected to parliaments in Ireland and Britain; if Pat Doherty had not left the Council in the interim, it would have been four. The peace process was enormously popular in the Irish Republic and the charismatic Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, especially so. Sinn Fein was also a new fresh face at a time when scandals about political corruption in other parties, especially Fianna Fail, abounded; the fact that the Provisionals’ leaders had just emerged from armed struggle suggested they were still guided by principle and unlikely to be subverted by brown envelopes stuffed with cash, at least for a while.
There was also a good deal of pan-nationalist sympathy with Sinn Fein over the decommissioning battle with David Trimble and it was surely no coincidence that the IRA’s second decommissioning event took place just weeks before the May 2002 Irish election, underlining the IRA’s perceived fealty to the peace process even in the face of Trimble’s unreasonableness. Indeed, some observers believe that but for the Colombia arrests and the September 11 attacks, this would have been the date for the first act of decommissioning. Adams and his allies were also aided by Trimble’s own personal failings, not least an inability to resist intemperate language. He had won no friends in the South, for instance, when in March 2002 he called the Irish Republic “a pathetic, sectarian, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural State.” Not surprisingly there was an indignant reaction in the Republic and Sinn Fein reaped the benefit. The message from the South, at least, was that denying transparency in the decommissioning process and continuing IRA activity while maintaining a rhetorical commitment to peace wasn’t doing the party any harm.
If, as many people believed, the goal of the Adams strategy was first to become the dominant nationalist party in the North and a significant political force in the South, and second to subsequently occupy seats around cabinet tables on both sides of the Border at the same time, then it was on the way to being realized.
ACCORDING to the rules of the Good Friday Agreement, the next Assembly election, and therefore Sinn Fein’s chance to deliver a knockout blow to the SDLP, was scheduled to take place in May 2003. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a proper opportunity until at least 2005, when the next local council and Westminster elections would take place, and that was too far off for comfort. The problem facing Sinn Fein’s strategists was that in the post-Stormontgate atmosphere there was no guarantee that there would still be an Assembly around in May 2003 to which elections would be held. The task facing them was to do just enough in terms of movement towards satisfying Trimble’s demands to keep him in the game and to get a date confirmed for the Assembly election while not doing so much that the fire under the decommissioning pot might be quenched.
And so the weary waltz recommenced, kick-started by an obliging Tony Blair who came to Belfast within days of the Assembly’s suspension. He brought a message of comfort and reassurance to Trimble in the form of a warning to the IRA that it could no longer be “half in, half out” of the process and that “a fork in the road had been reached” in relation to continued paramilitary activity. It was time for “acts of completion,” he declared. A few days later the Sinn Fein charm offensive began with a speech from Gerry Adams in which he talked of seeing a future “without the IRA” and admitted that IRA actions had strengthened unionist inflexibility. Blair had also announced an end to endless “inch by inch” negotiations—but in fact the two speeches were the signal for another yearlong bout of precisely that sort of diplomacy.
By March 2003 talk of another deal-saving agreement was in the air and, with speculation rife that it could include both a resolution of the IRA decommissioning impasse and an indication that the IRA’s war would be over for good, the parties and the two governments reassembled at Hillsborough Castle for talks that stretched into April and overlapped with the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Blair and President Bush met at Hillsborough Castle just as American troops entered Baghdad. Blair hoped to talk Bush into giving the United Nations a greater role in reconstructing a post-Saddam Iraq. He also wanted the American leader to join him in giving the Irish parties a pep talk. According to one well-informed Irish political source, Sinn Fein had hinted that this summit would be the occasion to announce an IRA acceptance of the demands being made of it, something that might help cast Bush, already being castigated as a warmonger, in the role of peacemaker, or at least peace helper.41 But as Irish officials arrived at Hillsborough, their glum faces signaled yet another disappointment and Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other White House luminaries had to settle for a tour of Hillsborough Castle and its Royal Throne Room instead of playing a supporting role in ending the Irish Troubles. As Sinn Fein leaders mixed and socialized with Bush and his entourage inside the Castle, outside a few party activists joined an anti-war rally. But the anti-war protesters were in no mood to indulge the spectacle of Provos riding two horses on this occasion and by all accounts gave them a dusty reception.
The talking stretched on for weeks and finally ended in early May 2003 in stalemate and a postponement of the Assembly elections. But before the blinds came down the IRA did just enough to ensure that the process would resume after the Orange marching season had ended and to preserve Sinn Fein hopes that the Assembly election might yet take place. The governments, through Tony Blair, were pressing the IRA to answer a number of questions: would the IRA end its activities, complete decommissioning and signal that the conflict would be over for keeps if the Good Friday Agreement was fully implemented? The IRA refused to give an explicit answer and instead Gerry Adams delivered a speech which replied “yes” to each question, albeit without stipulating a timeline. At this point events took a Kafkaesque turn. Rather than demand straight answers and honest dealing from the IRA, the governments instead asked if Adams had spoken with the IRA’s authority and eventually the IRA agreed that he had. By participating in this style of diplomacy, the British and the Irish not only signaled their unwillingness to confront either Adams or the IRA but they also gave implicit credibility and legitimacy to one of the peace process’s hoariest canards—that Adams had no direct ties to the IRA. Although he had been on the Army Council since the late 1970s, was a former chief of staff and adjutant-general and had been the IRA’s leading political—and before that military—strategist for twenty-five years, Adams himself continued to insist that he had never even been a member, so much so that many in the media had long since abandoned attempts to probe the matter. By asking whether or not Adams’s views reflected those of the IRA, Blair and Ahern gave credence to the idea that the Sinn Fein leader might not have any association with the IRA. If the way the IRA’s peace process strategy was constructed under Adams’s guiding hand is a reliable guide, then in much the same way that he talked to himself in the bathroom mirror each morning, Gerry Adams had probably helped to compose, and most certainly had approved, all three statements: the IRA’s first statement which declined to specifically answer Tony Blair’s questions, his own speech which did and finally the IRA’s confirmation that Adams’s affirmative answers reflected its own views. Asking if Gerry Adams spoke for the IRA was like asking George Bush if he spoke for the White House. In such ways did grown men manage the ending of one of Europe’s longest post-war conflicts.
It all started up again in October 2003 but in ominous circumstances for David Trimble when three of his MPs, Jeffrey Donaldson, Martin Smyth and David Burnside, who had won back the South Antrim seat in the 2001 election, resigned the party whip. They demanded “acts of completion” before the Good Friday institutions could be restored and this added significantly to the likelihood that another failure would end Trimble’s leadership. Senior Sinn Fein figures like Martin McGuinness warned, “We have no intention whatsoever of going near the IRA” unless an Assembly election date was offered and this appeared to have the desired effect.42 Irish premier Bertie Ahern threw his weight behind the demand, even though a good result for Sinn Fein would likely strengthen the Provos’ challenge to his own Fianna Fail party. Bush’s ambassador to the peace process, state department official Richard Haass, also backed elections, and by the end of the first week in October, Blair’s spin doctors were telling the media that an election date, November 13, 2003, had been penciled in. With an election all but confirmed, the only leverage on the IRA to do something significant had effectively been removed.
Once again speculation revolved around a deal that would involve a third and major act of IRA decommissioning, this time done in a credible and persuasive fashion, despite the confidentiality deal struck between Brian Keenan on behalf of the IRA and General de Chastelain for the decommissioning body. A statement from the IRA declaring an end to its activities and the conflict would be published and a commitment given by Sinn Fein to sign up to the new policing arrangements. Unofficially the election date was being described as a racing certainty. If the deal was anything like this, observers predicted, the Good Friday Agreement, the peace process and Trimble’s leadership of unionism would all be assured.
The full story and explanation of the extraordinary events that unfolded on the day the deal was unveiled, October 21, 2003, have still to be fully established. Nor is it known whether what happened was the result of incompetence or deliberate neglect, especially on the part of the governments. What can be said with certainty is that the day was a debacle for David Trimble and led directly to his political downfall—but it was a triumph for Sinn Fein, thanks to IRA obduracy. Despite all the speculation about a breakthrough deal, the sequence of events was characterized by sloppy preparation and the absence of required detail. There was no statement ending its war by the IRA, merely a variation on the bathroom mirror diplomacy of the previous May, and no promise that the IRA would start winding down. Gerry Adams issued a statement saying merely that full implementation of the GFA would “provide full and final closure of the conflict” and while the IRA announced that Adams’s statement “accurately reflects our position,” the reality was that his statement was conditional, aspirational and lacking in necessary detail. Arguably the Adams–IRA statements of May 2003 were actually more compelling. Nor was there any commitment by Sinn Fein to sign up to the new policing dispensation.
What brought the edifice tumbling down was the inadequacy of the decommissioning event. Although everyone had assumed that the chairman of the IICD, General de Chastelain, had persuaded the IRA to relax its insistence on secrecy, it seems nobody, least of all David Trimble, had bothered to check whether this had happened. In fact the IRA had not budged at all and this failure was compounded by what was widely agreed to have been a dreadfully unpersuasive public performance by de Chastelain. At a press conference to announce the third decommissioning event, a weary and distracted de Chastelain, who had spent several sleep-deprived days in the field with Keenan and the IRA, could give no more details about what had happened than on the two earlier occasions. Even though a large amount of IRA weaponry had apparently been decommissioned, much bigger than on the two previous times, it was hinted, de Chastelain struggled to find the right words to get this message across and a colleague, the American member of the IICD, Andrew Sens, had to intervene in an effort to compensate. But it was too late. The fact that no details were provided, no inventory of destroyed weapons supplied, no description of how the arms had been put beyond use and no timetable for future decommissioning published meant that an event advertised as hugely significant was no more credible or compelling to unionists than the earlier decommissioning acts. The culprit was the confidentiality agreement which de Chastelain had agreed with the IRA, and without which, the General insists to this day, decommissioning would not have been possible.43 All the non-IRA participants had failed to establish whether the confidentiality deal could be, or had been eased while Provo leaders sent out misleading signals. Martin McGuinness said that while there could be no independent witnesses to the decommissioning act the credibility problems associated with the two earlier decommissioning acts would be addressed. The third one, he told the media, “would prove more convincing for unionists.”44 That turned out to be an empty promise.
On the appointed day the IRA refused to budge from the confidentiality agreement and by so doing predetermined the day’s outcome. Neither the British nor the Irish had tried to ensure that it would do otherwise; in fact the effect of their conceding the Assembly election date to Sinn Fein some time beforehand was to virtually guarantee that outcome. Having himself failed to compensate for the governments’ shortcomings and with next to nothing to show for the day’s work, Trimble halted the day’s sequenced announcements, which were to have culminated in his agreement to restore the Assembly and Executive. By so doing he saved his leadership, at least for the time being. Sinn Fein had pocketed its election date, however—the announcement that an Assembly election would be held some five weeks later, on November 26, was the first act in the day’s sequenced events, announced at 7 a.m., long before de Chastelain’s disastrous performance in front of the media. As Sinn Fein prepared to go to the hustings it could argue to nationalist voters that the IRA had decommissioned more of its arsenal and indicated an intention to end the conflict, yet David Trimble and his unionist allies were still not satisfied and would not share power with republicans. If nationalists wanted to register their feelings about this they knew exactly how to mark their ballot papers on November 26.
No one was or could be surprised at the result of the Assembly election. Sinn Fein comprehensively hammered the SDLP, winning 58 percent of the nationalist vote, compared to the 44.5 percent it had secured in 1998. Its tally of seats in the 108-member Assembly rose from eighteen to twenty-four while the SDLP’s fell from twenty-four to eighteen. The fortunes of the two parties had been reversed exactly and as the largest nationalist party in the parliament, Sinn Fein’s likely nominee, former IRA chief of staff, Northern Commander and Army Council chairman, Martin McGuinness, would now become deputy first minister of Northern Ireland if the power-sharing Executive was ever restored. On the unionist side, Paisley’s DUP triumphed, more by mopping up fringe loyalist support than by making a huge inroad into Trimble’s Ulster Unionists. With thirty seats in the Assembly for the DUP, it would be Ian Paisley, not David Trimble, who would become first minister in a new government. By any stretch of the imagination it was an extraordinary result. As for Sinn Fein, the party’s leaders and strategists surveying the landscape afterwards could be forgiven for believing that everything they touched turned to political gold. The Midas touch had been with them for the better part of two decades. The only question was—would it last?