Belfast is one of those Victorian cities that looks its best in winter, during the dark, gloomy and wet months of the year; in summertime it is a city to vacate, if one can. This has something to do, perhaps, with the predominance of red brick in the city’s buildings and the unsettling effect of bright sunshine reflected from rows of russet-stained houses. Overcast skies, rain streaming down the roof tiles and days when dusk begins to fall not long after lunchtime seem to suit the architecture of Belfast much better. December 2004 was a particularly dark month. Weather records show that there were less than fifty-one hours of sunshine during the entire month and Monday, December 20, was a typical day. The sun shone for just over two hours, peering fitfully through gaps in clouds that from time to time deposited a light drizzle over the city. That night, temperatures dropped below freezing, to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, a cold night for Belfast.
The dark winter months were also the season the IRA preferred. The cover of darkness allowed them greater rein and it was no accident that Army Conventions were invariably held at this time of the year or that it was in these months that the IRA had brought its Libyan weapons to Ireland. But those days had gone, or so it seemed, and the city had reason to be cheerful. Christmas was just a few days away and once again it promised to be a peaceful holiday. It had been ten years since the IRA had called its first cease-fire and while a political settlement was still beyond reach there was a growing conviction that the bad old days of bombs and bullets would never return. People were getting used to the idea that they could travel without being held up at security force roadblocks or contemplate a night’s drinking or a meal in one of the city’s many new restaurants without the fear that it might end in a hail of machine-gun bullets. Traders in the city centre were looking forward to a bumper holiday season. Peace and currency-related price differentials that favored the shopper were tempting thousands of newly affluent Southerners to abandon their fear of the North in favour of bargain-hunting, and there were predictions that this year’s holiday business in Belfast would rise by as much as five percent. On the evening of December 20, as office workers streamed home, their journey was cheered by Christmas lights and decorations strung around the city hall and the festive, expectant melodia of carols piped into the frosty evening air.
At 11 o’clock that night, as the city centre emptied and began slipping into slumber, the phone rang in the control room of the Police Service of Northern Ireland in the Knock district of East Belfast and soon, nothing would ever be the same again. At the other end of the phone was a twenty-four-year-old bank official called Chris Ward, a Catholic from Poleglass, a rambling estate of public sector housing built in the 1980s to accommodate the overflow from West Belfast. Ward was a beneficiary of Northern Ireland’s reformed work practices and held down a good, pensionable job with the Northern Bank, one of four local clearing banks that had the right to print their own distinctive notes. There were more Catholics working in the banking sector in 2004 than ever before in Northern Ireland’s history. Long a preserve of the Protestant lower middle classes, fair employment laws that came into force in the late 1970s, and which were beefed up after the IRA cease-fires, obliged the banks to appoint their workforces on the basis of merit rather than background or nepotism. Ward’s work was in the underground vault of the Northern Bank’s Belfast cash center in Donegal Square, adjacent to city hall, which distributed notes to the bank’s ninety-five branches and to hundreds of ATMs scattered around the country. It was Christmastime and there were an awful lot of notes in the vault that day.
Ward’s phone call to the PSNI was to tell the police that a great number of those notes had just been stolen in an audacious, meticulously planned robbery carried out with military-style efficiency by an armed and determined gang. The night before, as he and his family watched television, armed men had tricked their way into his home and Ward had been abducted and his family held hostage, guarded in the house by armed men. He was driven to Loughinisland, near Downpatrick, County Down, to the home of Kevin McMullan, a colleague and supervisor at the cash center. Earlier, men posing as PSNI officers had called at the McMullan home and, pretending to have bad news for Kevin’s wife Karen, gained entry to the house. There had been a bad car crash in County Tyrone involving her sister, they claimed, but this was a lie. The men produced handguns, tied up Kevin, blindfolded Karen and took her away. That night the gang forced the two bank officials to an upstairs bedroom and coached them in the parts they would play in what the following day would be the world’s largest robbery of cash from a bank. Members of the gang were very forensically aware; they wore surgical gloves, overalls and had masks over their faces. Even their hair had been cut short so as to reduce the chance that discarded strands might provide vital DNA evidence to the police. The gang also questioned the men about procedures at the bank, but it was more a case of double-checking what they already knew. Both the bank and the PSNI would say later that the gang was very well informed about security at the cash centre. With their families held as hostage Ward and McMullan had little option but to cooperate.
The next morning the two men arrived at work as usual, armed with mobile phones supplied by the gang to communicate with them. In the afternoon, Ward took £1 million from the vault, placed it in a holdall and, following the gang’s instructions, left the building. Outside he passed the bag over to a man waiting at a nearby bus shelter. This was the gang’s way of testing if the police had been alerted. At the close of business the rest of the staff went home but Ward and McMullan stayed on. Eventually a white transit van pulled up in an alleyway beside the bank where Ward and McMullan were waiting with trolleys piled high with what appeared to be rubbish, shredded documents and so on. But underneath the covering of garbage lay green cardboard boxes stuffed with banknotes which the two bank officials had removed from the vault. These they rolled through a gate and into the alley where the van was loaded. A passer-by would assume that the van was carting away bank rubbish and be completely unaware that an audacious robbery was taking place. The van drove off and forty minutes later it returned, suggesting that the gang had an operational headquarters not far away. Ward and McMullan were waiting with more trolleys piled high with rubbish-covered boxes of cash. The gang could have returned for a third run but decided against it—perhaps this would have been tempting fate. The vault had not been emptied entirely but as the scale of the raid emerged that became an academic point. By the time Northern Bank’s management had finished their sums the following morning it was clear that the gang had netted a huge haul: £26.5 million in all; £16.5 million in new Northern banknotes and £10 million in old notes and various currencies.1
It took the PSNI eighteen days to confirm publicly what the dogs in the Belfast streets had already guessed, which was that only one organization had the manpower, discipline, track record and intelligence skills to carry out such an ambitious robbery and that was the Provisional IRA. Precisely why the PSNI chief constable, Hugh Orde, held back for so long is still unknown. Unionists blamed this slowness on policing reforms introduced as part of the process of weaning the Provos into democratic politics. In particular, they claimed, the Special Branch had been vitiated; well-placed informers had been discarded in a vetting procedure designed to weed out disreputable types, leaving the Branch blind and able to learn of IRA activity only too late. It seems, however, that the PSNI knew almost immediately who was responsible. Others speculated that the delay was not the fault of any weaknesses in police intelligence but was caused by political considerations and inspired by British and Irish governments at a loss what to do in the face of such brazen criminality, knowing that their Nelson’s eye approach to previous IRA activity had finally caught up with them and perhaps hoping something would happen to save them from having to confront the IRA’s political leadership.
IF POLITICAL FUNK by the two governments explains the delay in responding to the Northern Bank robbery, one obvious reason was that ten days before the robbery Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern had come within an ace of announcing a comprehensive agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP and they didn’t want to lose it entirely. The scale and ambition of the putative deal were astonishing given the glacial pace of events in the previous seven years and it would have been surprising had the two prime ministers not paused before reacting to the Northern Bank heist, given the potential that this would have to destroy a deal that was still, technically, on the table. The near settlement, after all, would effectively have brought the peace process to a conclusion by completing the Provos’ journey into constitutional politics. Its principal elements were:
• The completion of IRA decommissioning by the end of December 2004;
• A commitment by the IRA to permanently end all paramilitary activity;
• Verification of this by the new Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC);
• Policing and justice to be devolved to the power-sharing Executive;
• Sinn Fein commitment to win party approval for joining the North’s Policing Board and recognition of the PSNI;
• Agreement by the DUP and Sinn Fein to nominate candidates for first and deputy first minister posts;
• Restoration by March 2005 of the Assembly, Executive and North–South Ministerial Council and abolition of the British government’s power to suspend them.
Barely a year had passed since the decommissioning crisis that had fatally undermined David Trimble and paved the way for a new Assembly election. Suddenly all those internal difficulties and weaknesses which had allegedly prevented the Adams leadership from rapid and decisive action had melted away like snow off a ditch in springtime. There had been no dramatic changes in the IRA’s internal structures or mechanics in the meantime to explain this startling transformation; the same Army Council that had refused Trimble decommissioning transparency in October 2003 and declined to explicitly state that its war was over was by December 2004 suddenly willing to approve the completion of decommissioning and declare a permanent end to all IRA activity. The willingness of the IRA to make such a commitment was compelling evidence that the protestations in the years before about the great internal obstacles in the way of such moves were self-serving. Observers with long enough memories recalled how the 1981 hunger strikes had been handled with a similar sleight of hand. Throughout the protest figures like Gerry Adams had protested that the Army Council could not order it to end, but after Sinn Fein had extracted the maximum political profit, the Army Council brought it to a halt with the stroke of a pen.2
What had changed was that, thanks to the Assembly election, Sinn Fein was now the dominant nationalist party and their once powerful rivals, the SDLP, reduced to a shadow of what the party had once been. Those friendly to Sinn Fein would argue that having now proved that politics worked the Provo leadership had the self-confidence to move into acts of completion. A more cynical view held that the decommissioning issue had served its purpose and, having exploited it in order to attain nationalist electoral hegemony, it was time for the Provos to seize their political prizes, including a Sinn Fein deputy first ministry, and do a final deal. Whichever version is correct, one reality is undeniable: had the Adams leadership’s claim of internal resistance to decommissioning been correct—and on the scale asserted between 1998 and 2003—then the 2004 deal would never have been possible.
The other element that made the 2004 deal viable was that the DUP’s dislike of the Good Friday Agreement was not so deep or strongly held that its leadership would reject the opportunity of taking power, even if the cost was having to share it with loyalism’s mortal enemy. Although the DUP had boycotted the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, once the power-sharing Executive was up and running the party’s leaders decided that the ministerial posts on offer by virtue of the DUP’s electoral strength were too tempting to reject. And so the party’s deputy leader, Peter Robinson, and the North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds became ministers in the Executive. They declined to attend full Executive meetings or to take part in the North–South institutions but otherwise they enjoyed and exercised the full benefits and powers of office. While they did this, they sniped away at David Trimble from the sidelines over issues like decommissioning and continuing IRA activity. As Trimble lifted unionism’s heavy load, the DUP sat and waited for him to stumble and fall, which in the November 2003 Assembly election he finally did, allowing the DUP to do to the Ulster Unionists what Sinn Fein was doing to the SDLP. The DUP benefited electorally from the IRA’s stance on decommissioning every bit as much as Sinn Fein and if some observers could see in the DUP a mirror image of the Provos’ cynical opportunism, it was understandable.
The path to the deal had been reasonably smooth, at least by the standard of previous years. The IRA’s attempted abduction in February 2004 of a republican dissident, Bobby Tohill, from a Belfast city-center bar, which Gerry Adams attempted to characterize as “a bar room brawl”, briefly revived doubts about the IRA’s intentions. But by May, following contacts with Sinn Fein and the DUP during a review of the Good Friday Agreement, Blair and Ahern declared themselves confident that a deal could be finalized by the autumn. European elections in June confirmed the electoral dominance of Sinn Fein and the DUP. The seat held since 1979 by the former SDLP leader John Hume, who had quit politics entirely in February 2004, went to Bairbre de Brun as Sinn Fein outpolled the SDLP by a margin of five to three. Ian Paisley had also retired from Europe and his seat went to a DUP barrister, Jim Allister, who more comprehensively trounced the Ulster Unionist candidate, winning two votes for every one for the UUP. In September the Northern parties and the two governments decamped to Leeds Castle in Kent for talks which later resumed in Belfast. By the end of November all the elements of the deal had been agreed bar one.
Once again the process was being held up by the lack of transparency in the proposal for IRA decommissioning. Although the Army Council agreed that it would fully disarm within weeks and that two clerical figures, one Protestant and the other Catholic, could witness the event, it was refusing to accept the DUP’s nominee. Paisley wanted to nominate the Reverend David McGaughey, a former Presbyterian moderator and a strong opponent of ecumenism. He had once called the Catholic Church’s teachings “unbiblical” and often excoriated the IRA; he was, in DUP eyes, a figure likely to be more credible to Protestants than the IRA’s choice.3 Nor was the IRA prepared to allow the clerical witnesses freedom to describe in detail what they had seen. One exchange between the DUP and Tony Blair over this issue gave a revealing insight into the British prime minister’s elasticity in such negotiations. The DUP pointed out that the decommissioning act barred such witnesses from speaking out unless they had been given permission to do so and since the IRA was refusing to relax this rule, the IICD could not budge either. The witnesses would have to stay silent and their contribution would thus be greatly devalued, unless a way could be found around the problem. “Blair’s answer to that was ‘Well, the moment these people come back they can resign [from the IICD] and speak,’ recalled one DUP participant. “We pointed out that the legislation says they must stay silent ‘during or after they leave the service’ and Blair said ‘It’s up to them’. We said back, ‘We’re talking about Christian ministers here, they’re not going to come back and break their word on these issues!’”4
A bigger problem was posed by a proposal that the decommissioning event be photographed and the pictures published so as to convince unionists. The republicans rejected this idea outright. Publicly and in the privacy of negotiations they maintained this was because to do so would be to allow the IRA to be to humiliated. But another effect of photographs appearing would be to remove any doubt whatsoever that when IRA and Sinn Fein leaders assured their grassroots that de Chastelain “had been conned” and no guns had been destroyed, they had been lying.
Although a settlement that would see Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness share the top political jobs in Northern Ireland was within reach, the DUP was still refusing to have face-to-face talks with Sinn Fein and it had to rely on the British for information about the republican negotiating stance. The British kept the Provos’ refusal to allow photographs to be taken from the DUP and instead directed the negotiations towards the question of when photographs would appear. The DUP wanted immediate publication but agreed to delay this until the Executive was up and running, an event planned for the following March. This idea came from the new US envoy to the peace process, Mitchell Reiss. Then Ian Paisley publicly called on the IRA to express repentance for its past violence; the republicans should be made to wear “sackcloth and ashes,” he said. By the end of the first week of December the issue of photographs had stalled the negotiations but this didn’t mean they had failed. Gerry Adams said that Sinn Fein should accept everything in the British—Irish proposals except the decommissioning plan and when Blair and Ahern traveled to Belfast on December 8, they published the full text of the planned and sequenced agreement. In the past the Provos had always withdrawn their proposals if negotiations broke down but this time they stayed on the table for all to see, at least for a while. Only the practicalities of final decommissioning stood in the way of a settlement; the principle had been conceded. The problem Gerry Adams and his leadership colleagues then faced was how to revive the deal without having to address the DUP’s demand for photographic proof of decommissioning.
IT WAS against this background that news of the Northern Bank robbery broke and London and Dublin struggled to construct a response. The eighteen-day hiatus between the raid and the PSNI chief constable’s announcement of IRA culpability had at least given the governments time to ponder what this should be. When Hugh Orde finally pointed the finger at the IRA, both Blair and Ahern were quick to back him up. It was evident that the two leaders realized that the huge scale of the robbery meant that turning a Nelson’s eye to IRA activity was no longer sustainable. But what had brought this about? The governments knew that the IRA had put together a special robbery team and that it had been active throughout 2004. In May the IRA had staged a multimillion-pound theft of white goods, freezers, washing machines and the like, from a wholesale supermarket in Dunmurry, on the edge of West Belfast. In September, several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of produce were stolen from the Strabane, County Tyrone, branch of the supermarket chain Iceland. In October, cigarettes with a retail value of over £2 million were stolen from a bonded warehouse in Belfast docks. Both this robbery and the raid in Strabane involved abductions and hostage-taking and may have been practice runs for the much bigger Northern Bank heist.5 Yet neither London nor Dublin had protested to the republican leadership. What made the difference, clearly, was the scale of the Northern Bank robbery. That made a tough response obligatory.
The governments played the role of outraged and betrayed partners. While Tony Blair called on republicans to end all criminal activity and said unionists would be justified in spurning Sinn Fein as a government partner until that happened, Bertie Ahern took the offensive, presumably on the grounds that a fellow nationalist could get away with saying things to the Provos that a British leader could not. Immediately after Hugh Orde’s announcement, the taoiseach implicated the Sinn Fein leadership in the crime. The robbery, he said, was “obviously being planned at a stage when I was in negotiations with those that would know the leadership of the Provisional movement.” Ahern didn’t quite name Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness but everyone knew what he meant. A few days later he gave an RTE radio interview and went a step further. “This was an IRA job. This was a Provisional IRA job. This was a job that would have been known to the leadership. This was a job that would have been known to the political leadership. That is my understanding. I am upset, quite frankly, that in the period when we were in intensive talks trying to get a comprehensive agreement that my information is now that people in very senior positions would have known what was going on.”6 The following month the Republic’s justice minister, Michael McDowell, filled in the blank spaces, naming Adams, McGuinness and Martin Ferris as members of the Army Council and alleging that the Provisional movement was “engaged in massive criminality,” earning millions of pounds which was laundered through a network of solicitors and accountants.7 In the coming months McDowell, a leading member of the Progressive Democrats, would emerge as the Provisionals’ most acerbic critic, given free rein by government colleagues to vent his deep dislike of the IRA and Sinn Fein. As much as anything else, this was a reflection of the newly enhanced role the Northern Bank robbery had given to Garda intelligence and McDowell’s Department of Justice in formulating Irish policy on the peace process.
Bertie Ahern’s and Michael McDowell’s logic was that if Adams and McGuinness had, as Army Council members, given the go-ahead for the Northern Bank raid, then it surely followed that they had foreknowledge of other major IRA operations, like the Colombian adventure, the Castlereagh raid and “Stormontgate”. The notion that the IRA organized operations behind their backs was therefore a fiction—and the governments knew this. And if this was the case, then it was possible also that the parallel presentation of Adams and McGuinness as moderates battling against hard-liners and obliged to move slowly and carefully was also a fabrication which the two governments had either fallen for or decided to indulge. The Northern Bank robbery did nothing less than raise large question marks against British and Irish policy towards the IRA in the post-Good Friday Agreement years.
The Provisionals’ response to all this was predictable. The Sinn Fein denial featured the now-familiar assertion of pot-stirring by British securocrats who had staged the robbery, as they had the Castlereagh break-in and the “Stormontgate” spy ring, in order to damage the peace process and blacken Sinn Fein. Only Sinn Fein’s most uncritical supporters in Irish America fell for this. The IRA also issued a terse, two-line statement denying responsibility and then in early February took the December 2004 proposals off the table. When that failed to impress the governments, the IRA warned London and Dublin not to “underestimate the seriousness of the situation,” an implied threat that the cease-fire could break down.8 If the statement was meant to spread alarm in London and Dublin, it signally failed; the days of pretending the IRA could go back to war had ended as comprehensively as had tolerance of its excesses.
So why had the IRA authorized the Northern Bank robbery? One obvious answer was the £26.5 million in proceeds, a sum that could be invested in lucrative, money-making ventures. In February, the Gardai recovered £60,000 in raids in Cork and Dublin that was subsequently traced to the Northern Bank cash center and arrested several people, including one man who was found trying to burn sterling banknotes in his back garden. Meanwhile the investigation of a County Cork-based finance company, Chesterton Finance, which had been tied to the discovery of £2.3 million in Northern Bank-linked cash, forced the resignation of Phil Flynn, a non-executive director of Chesterton, as chairman of the Irish branch of the Bank of Scotland. Flynn, an associate of Bertie Ahern, was a former vice-president of Sinn Fein and a leading trade unionist who had, in the public eye at least, dropped out of republican politics. Subsequent police inquiries led to Bulgaria where intermediaries for the IRA were said to have been interested in buying a £15 million apartment block, a hotel and a shopping centre as well as a small bank, which police suspected would be used to launder this [Bulgarian] and other investments.9 The Northern Bank raid had lifted a small corner on the IRA’s burgeoning financial empire. Always broke and casting around for money when the war was raging, in peace-time the IRA had little on which to spend its revenues and had amassed a small fortune. According to one authoritative claim, by 2006 it had built up an investment portfolio worth some £200 million in hotels, discos, bars and apartments in the Caribbean, Portugal, Turkey and of course both parts of Ireland.10
But the IRA’s political leaders, who were as astute a group of strategists as could be found in any political organization, must have known that the Northern Bank raid would be a robbery too far. The robbery took place just a week before Christmas, days before the peak of the seasonal shopping spree, when demand at outlying branches of the bank for notes would be at its height and stocks at the cash center consequently large. A Northern Bank spokesman confirmed that it would not have been unusual for the cash center to be holding as much as £26.5 million, given the time of the year,11 while other banking sources said there was perhaps twice as much cash in stock on the night of the raid, more than £50 million. Suggestions that the IRA was taken by surprise by the amount of cash available sit uneasily beside the evidently high level of inside information about the bank’s affairs and procedures in the IRA’s possession. The gang’s questioning of Chris Ward and Kevin McMullen alone pointed strongly in that direction, as did the timing of the robbery. It seems very likely that the IRA would have been fully aware beforehand that the haul would be very large and that the political consequences would therefore be profound and wide-ranging. If the IRA had taken £2.6 million they might have got away with it and the governments enabled to turn a blind eye once more. But knowingly stealing £26.5 million was an entirely different matter, something no one could ignore. If Adams and McGuinness had known about the robbery before it took place, as the Irish prime minister alleged, then they would surely have known this too.
Claims by Bertie Ahern that Sinn Fein leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness knew the raid was imminent as they negotiated the December 2004 peace deal with him are credible for two reasons. One is that, once again, the mastermind behind the raid was the IRA’s director of intelligence, Bobby Storey, the loyal disciple of the Adams leadership who had organized the Castlereagh and Stormontgate operations on behalf of the Army Council.12 Another compelling clue was provided by the Independent Monitoring Commission in a report of May 2005. This pointed out that in the draft peace agreement published by London and Dublin in early December 2004, a statement to be issued by the IRA was to have included a commitment “not to endanger anyone’s personal rights and safety.” Yet when the IRA issued its own version of this statement on December 9, eleven days before the robbery, these words had been excised from the text, which otherwise read exactly as anticipated by the two governments.13 Participants in the negotiations also say that during the talks, the Sinn Fein delegation fiercely resisted the wording about “personal rights and safety.” Since the Northern Bank robbery most assuredly did lead to the endangerment of “personal rights and safety,” the obvious explanation for Sinn Fein’s negotiating stance and the December 9 IRA statement was that they were well aware of the planned robbery and the abductions and hostage-taking that it would entail. It also suggests that the robbery might well have gone ahead even if there had been a deal with the DUP.
In the days and weeks that followed the robbery the damage caused to the Provisionals mounted. IRA criminality became an issue and was fueled when on a popular RTE television programme, Derry Sinn Fein leader Mitchel McLaughlin refused to describe Jean McConville’s murder and disappearance in 1972 (when Gerry Adams was Belfast Brigade commander) as “a crime.” The spotlight then turned on the IRA’s chief of staff, Slab Murphy, in South Armagh and to the IRA’s involvement in cross-Border smuggling, counterfeiting and other forms of criminality. Michael McDowell then named Gerry Adams as an IRA leader, the first time his claim to have no links to the IRA had been challenged in such a public and damaging way by the Irish government. Bertie Ahern then ended any possibility that the killers of a Garda Special Branch detective, Jerry McCabe, shot dead during a Post Office robbery in County Limerick in June 1996, would be released. Four members of the IRA unit responsible were convicted and sentenced to between eleven and fourteen years in jail, but the Irish government, ever sensitive to the feelings of Garda rank and file, refused to release them along with other IRA prisoners under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA Army Council and Sinn Fein had denied the robbery was an authorized operation, but a subsequent internal inquiry found that the robbery had been approved but that Garda McCabe had been accidentally shot by a member of the gang. They went on the run and were eventually arrested in circumstances that caused controversy inside the IRA following allegations that their apprehension had been contrived to end Sinn Fein’s embarrassment over the affair.15 Sinn Fein leaders then took up their case and their release was, until the Northern Bank robbery, a side deal to the final settlement agreed with Dublin. The days of indulging the Provisional leadership had come to an end, at least for now. As one Irish Times political reporter put it: “The [governments] new stance marks nothing less than a fundamental break with the tolerance of fudge and ambiguity, qualities deliberately deployed for 10 years to help the process along.”16
As the damage intensified, the language used by Sinn Fein’s leaders underwent subtle changes. Former IRA adjutant-general Gerry Kelly called the robbery “wrong.” Along with Adams and McGuinness, Kelly had held face-to-face talks with Bertie Ahern before the raid and was presumably one of those in the “political leadership” the taoiseach had classed as having foreknowledge. Martin McGuinness, who initially had strongly supported the IRA denials, modified his line, saying: “Whoever carried out the robbery are also hostile to the Sinn Fein agenda and the peace process, and under no circumstances should any of these people get their way in the ongoing discussions which will have to take place if we are to resolve our political difficulties.”17 A few days later he went further: “If the IRA had been involved… there would have been a defining moment in Sinn Fein’s leadership’s work with the IRA. It would have been totally and absolutely unacceptable to me.”18
It was clear that by robbing the Northern Bank, the IRA had shot itself badly in the foot and the organization’s political leaders needed to prepare their supporters for the radical corrective action that would be needed if lost ground was to be recaptured. The only credible way to do that would be if the IRA disposed finally of its remaining weapons. Whether or not figures like Adams and McGuinness had guessed that the robbery would cause huge political fallout or had endorsed it in the hope that it would, a resolution of the decommissioning impasse had nonetheless been opened up. But the story was only beginning.
EVER SINCE BRITISH paratroopers had gunned down fourteen men during a civil rights march and demonstration in Derry against the use of internment without trial in January 1972, the events of “Bloody Sunday” had assumed iconic importance in the Northern nationalist psyche. What the bulk of nationalists viewed as the outrageous cover-up of the day’s bloodshed was orchestrated by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Widgery, at the tribunal of inquiry named after him. The Widgery tribunal had, for many, become a metaphor for British misrule in Northern Ireland, and its conclusions, which were published just eleven weeks after the killings and essentially took the British army’s version of events at face value, saying that the shooting spree had been justified when soldiers had been fired upon. Lord Widgery’s strongest criticism of the paratroopers’ action was to say that their firing had at times “bordered on the reckless”. By the 1990s there was a consensus stretching way beyond Irish nationalism that the Widgery tribunal had been deeply flawed. As new evidence emerged about the events, a campaign to reopen the inquiry won the support of the Irish government and in January 1998, British premier Tony Blair announced that a new inquiry would be held. Headed by Lord Saville of Newdigate, assisted by Canadian judge William Hoyt and Australian judge John L. Toohey, the new tribunal was to last six years and cost a staggering £400 million,19 a boon to Northern Ireland’s already Troubles-enriched legal profession, but setting up the new inquiry was a move that the British doubtless regarded as a preparatory soothing balm for the Provisional movement as the Good Friday Agreement negotiations moved towards a conclusion.
Every year the deaths of Bloody Sunday were commemorated by the people of Derry in a march that traced the same route as on that fateful day and the nearest weekend to the anniversary would be taken up with talks, films and music organized by and for the community still affected by the tragedy and for republicans throughout Ireland. By January 2005 the Bloody Sunday commemoration ranked alongside June’s trip to Bodenstown, August’s West Belfast festival and the annual Sinn Fein Ard Fheis as occasions for pilgrimage when Provisional supporters from all over the country would gather to reaffirm their political faith, renew acquaintances and enjoy the craic.
On Sunday, January 31, 2005, Belfast republicans had as usual traveled to Derry to take part in the march and then returned to Belfast by bus. In Magennis’s Bar in central Belfast that evening a crowd of perhaps two dozen republicans, most of them Sinn Fein members or supporters but some who were senior figures in the Belfast IRA, gathered for a drinking session after the journey. Magennis’s Bar is situated in May Street, behind Belfast’s Law Courts and was a popular lunchtime haunt for barristers, solicitors and their clients. At night time and at the weekend, however, Magennis’s clientele was very different—much of the bar’s trade came from the adjacent Markets area and nearby Short Strand across the River Lagan, two small nationalist enclaves well known for their republican activism. Amongst the drinkers in the bar that night were two friends, Brendan Devine and Robert McCartney, a thirty-four-year-old father of two small boys from Short Strand who was engaged to be married later that year to his long-time partner Bridgeen Hagans.
The pair hadn’t been to Derry but they knew many of the republicans in the bar and had cause to be wary of them; there was a history of bad blood between some of the IRA men and Brendan Devine. A row began when one of the IRA men challenged them over rude gestures they were making to each other, which were seen as being directed at a woman in their company. The matter was quickly settled but one IRA man was not satisfied and began an argument with Devine. He was the senior IRA man present, Gerard “Jock” Davison, a former Belfast Brigade commander.20 Davison had once been associated with anti-Adams elements on the Brigade staff, and was even considered by them at one point as a potential new chief of staff if their conspiracy against the pro-peace strategy leadership had succeeded. But Davison had since defected to the peace process camp. The events in Magennis’s Bar that night were later painstakingly reconstructed by the family of Robert McCartney, the PSNI and the local media and, although elements were denied by Davison, no independent evidence has emerged to disprove their account. During the brawl, Davison was reported as having “glanced at some of his IRA associates and to have drawn his finger across his throat, a signal as to what he wanted done to Mr. McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine.21 The row between Davison, his IRA associates and Devine ended when Devine’s throat was slashed open and a bottle smashed over his head; blood spilled everywhere, mixing with shards of glass on the bar floor. There was a lull, significantly, between that violence and what followed a few minutes later. According to one informed source, a gun was sent for but, before it arrived, the IRA men had managed to obtain other weapons, including knives.22 As that was happening, Robert McCartney half-carried his friend Brendan Devine out of the bar but as they staggered into a nearby alleyway, the IRA gang, up to eight-strong according to eye-witness testimony given later to the PSNI, pursued them, kicking and punching them and fatally stabbing McCartney and leaving Devine badly injured.23 McCartney was left to lie bleeding profusely as the IRA gang returned to the bar where, led by Davison, they ordered customers not to talk about what had happened while an IRA team was dispatched to clean up the bar to destroy any forensic evidence of the fight and to remove CCTV security footage. No attempt was made to help McCartney nor even to send for an ambulance. A passing PSNI patrol discovered him and he was taken to hospital where he died the next day. It was later established that Robert McCartney’s murder was not the result of a bar brawl that had got out of hand but was premeditated and planned.
If it hadn’t been for Robert McCartney’s five sisters, Gemma, Paula, Claire, Catherine and Donna, and his partner Bridgeen Hagans, it is possible that his murder would have been quickly forgotten, filed away as just another manifestation of the knife culture then spreading throughout Belfast. The murder of Robert McCartney was not an authorized IRA operation but it had been carried out by IRA members and, his family insisted, was then covered up and witnesses silenced by the IRA. “Their cover-up and their clean-up operation afterwards was meticulous,” said Paula McCartney.24 The campaign the McCartney family launched to bring the killers of their brother to justice would have implications for the peace process that at the time no one could have anticipated.
The most puzzling aspect of the events that followed concerns the way the Provisional leadership, Sinn Fein and the IRA, handled calls for the killers of Robert McCartney to be dealt with. There was no nationalist sympathy at all for the IRA gang responsible and seasoned strategists like Gerry Adams would very quickly have known that. What had happened to Robert McCartney was in no way political and couldn’t remotely be associated with the IRA’s struggle or Sinn Fein’s political agenda. In fact the killers had abused and misused IRA resources by employing a forensic team to destroy evidence of an indisputably criminal act. A vigil in the Short Strand a few days afterwards demonstrated the depth of grassroots feeling in a district whose fierce loyalty to the Provisional IRA had been sealed thirty-five years earlier when Belfast IRA commander Billy McKee and two other men had fought off an armed loyalist assault on the area at the cost of one of their lives and severe bullet wounds to McKee. Some 1,500 people turned out, a significant proportion of the area’s population—most of them, like some in the McCartney clan, Sinn Fein supporters and voters. One account of the vigil posted on the internet described members of the crowd openly using terms like “scum of the earth” and “animals” to describe the killers.25 These were the Provisionals’ own grassroots excoriating members of the IRA.
The cost to the IRA leadership associated with bringing the affair to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion by obliging the killers to turn themselves in, as the IRA arguably could have done, or by assisting the collection of eyewitness evidence against them, was very low and the benefits potentially very high. The murder of Robert McCartney had after all happened in the wake of a bank robbery that had stained the IRA with the charge of gangsterism and criminality. Bringing the killers to justice or to distance the IRA from them convincingly would have gone a long way to repair the damage and the move would surely have been popular with nationalists. Just over a year later both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness would publicly urge the alleged abductors of Bobby Tohill to turn themselves in for trial after the men had absconded. Yet they and their associates would dodge and weave to avoid taking an equally resolute position against Robert McCartney’s murderers.
Towards the end of February the IRA announced that it had court-martialled and dismissed three of its volunteers involved in the events. One of these was “Jock” Davison. But within days the IRA sent a very different message about Davison’s status in the organization when he walked through the Short Strand area beside Bobby Storey, the IRA’s director of intelligence and one of Gerry Adams’s most fervent supporters. It was a brazenly defiant gesture, meant to signify that he was still in the fold and able to enjoy the protection of the IRA. A few weeks later Davison was seen canvassing for Sinn Fein candidates in local elections. The implied leniency towards Davison was later confirmed by the IRA which told the McCartneys that Davison was expelled because he had been involved in a bar brawl but would be allowed to reapply for IRA membership after six months. Davison had been charged by the IRA with a minor offence; he could have been court-martialled with the far graver crime of misusing IRA resources—employing IRA members to forensically cleanse a non-IRA operational scene. Other IRA members convicted of similar activity in the past had been shot dead by the organization.
Robert McCartney’s sisters had compiled a list of Sinn Fein members who were in the bar at the time of the attack, all of them potential eyewitnesses, which they passed on to Gerry Adams. The Sinn Fein president then announced that a number of party members had been suspended until the legal process was completed, adding that he had urged them to make statements to the police, either via a lawyer or to the police ombudsman, about what they had seen. But those suspended—allegedly some twelve party members—were, according to Sinn Fein, not on the list supplied by the McCartneys and the party refused to name them.26 Nothing happened to those named by the family. Catherine McCartney is in little doubt what this meant: “They’re telling lies, they didn’t suspend anyone. They didn’t name them for that reason.”27 The witness statements turned over to the police turned out to be useless. Some were unsigned, others maintained they had seen nothing, an unlikely claim given the violence of the affray, or that they had been in the toilet at the time of the incident, an assertion that led some to suggest wryly that Magennis’s Bar must have had the largest toilet of any pub in Ireland. When one witness did agree to be interviewed by PSNI detectives, the detectives’ questions were so lengthy and probing that afterwards no other Sinn Fein member would come forward.28 When two men were eventually charged in connection with the McCartney murder, they were housed in a remand wing of a local jail reserved for republicans, something that couldn’t happen without the say-so of the IRA Command structure.
At one point the McCartney family met with the IRA, which afterwards issued a statement saying that an offer had been made to shoot the men responsible. But according to Catherine McCartney this never happened: “One of them said these people [the killers] meant nothing to him and he would shoot them in the morning. That was just an expression. The only thing they offered was to make it impossible for them to abscond. Some said it was for the benefit of their grassroots, so that they could say, ‘We offered to shoot them but they refused. What more do they want?’ But I don’t know why they did it.”29 Whatever the reason, the incident put the IRA in an even worse light, especially across the Atlantic.
In March, the White House announced that President Bush had invited the McCartney sisters to the annual St. Patrick’s Day bash, an event that since Bill Clinton’s time had given Gerry Adams the opportunity to revel amid the powerful friends that the peace strategy had won Sinn Fein. But this year, on the advice of the new U.S. peace process ambassador Mitchell Reiss, no Northern politicians would be invited. This was the Bush administration’s way of signaling its displeasure over the Northern Bank robbery and Sinn Fein’s part in it. It was also a sign that the Americans were ready to take a tougher line with the Provos than either Tony Blair or Bertie Ahern would ever contemplate. Disinviting Sinn Fein alone would have allowed Gerry Adams to don the mantle of victimhood, and it might have prompted the SDLP to side with him, so it was decided to bar all politicians from the celebrations. While all the North’s political parties lost out, Sinn Fein would be hurt most of all. The prospect of the McCartney sisters supping inside the White House while Gerry Adams languished outside enraged Sinn Fein’s supporters and prompted Martin McGuinness to warn the McCartneys, just as they arrived in Washington, to “be careful” not to stray into party politics. The menace in McGuinness’s words again made things worse for the Provos with Irish America.
The trip to Washington by the McCartney sisters signaled the most serious and sustained assault by the Irish-American political establishment on the Provos since the start of the peace process. It began when Sinn Fein’s most valuable friend in Irish America, Senator Ted Kennedy, abruptly cancelled a planned meeting with Gerry Adams, an unmistakable snub which was underlined when Kennedy later squired the McCartney sisters and Bridgeen Hagans around the Capitol building. The presence of the McCartney sisters, Kennedy said, sent “a very powerful signal that it’s time for the IRA to fully decommission, end all criminal activity and cease to exist as a paramilitary organisation.”30
As a huge media pack struggled in the corridor, the McCartneys met Kennedy, Senators John McCain, Christopher Dodd and Hillary Clinton, the last two long-time allies of Adams, in a congressional office to tell them about their brother’s murder and the Provos’ inadequate response. Dodd and Clinton joined the chorus calling for the IRA to end all its activities and later sponsored a Senate resolution that condemned IRA violence and criminality, supported the McCartney family and described as “outrageous” the IRA offer to shoot the killers of Robert McCartney. Another long-time IRA supporter, Congressman Peter King of Long Island, who had backed the Provos since the hunger strikes when it was not fashionable to do so, called on the organization to disband. New York Representative Jim Walsh, head of the Friends of Ireland group in Congress, openly criticized Sinn Fein’s handling of the McCartney murder: “I get the sense that the IRA has lost its discipline… They [Sinn Fein] have not handled it well. I do think they have handled it very poorly… They should have been far more aggressive about getting to the bottom of this murder.”31
In New York, Richard Haass, Bush’s first Irish peace process envoy and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, hosted a breakfast speaking event for Gerry Adams and delivered a blunt lecture to the Sinn Fein president: “The risk is that over time they [the Sinn Fein leaders] will suffer the fate of people such as Yasser Arafat of being ostracized. Gerry Adams does not want to become someone who’s unwilling to choose [as] in Mr. Arafat’s case between the olive branch and the gun. Mr. Adams and, more broadly, the republican movement, has to make the choice 100% to play by democratic rules, to play a political game only.”32
On the eve of Saint Patrick’s Day, Senator John McCain addressed the American-Ireland Fund dinner and, with Adams sitting just a few yards away, launched a blistering attack on the Provos. To repeated bursts of applause from the mostly Irish-American audience, McCain said no one could now describe the IRA as “anything better than a criminal syndicate that steals and murders to serve members’ personal interests.”33 One U.S. official commented: “He just peeled the paint of the walls in that building that night.”34 Donna McCartney noted in her diary: “[I]… just watched Adams during the Senator’s speech. He stared ahead and looked really grim. I didn’t expect him to clap when there was criticism of Sinn Fein, but he didn’t even put his hands together when McCain praised our courage. That speaks volumes. I realize now how badly this is going for Adams.”35 The next day Bush greeted the McCartneys in the Oval office and the Provos’ misery was complete.
Later that day, Bertie Ahern told Irish media correspondents that Sinn Fein faced “total exclusion” in the United States unless the IRA disbanded and ended criminality. Every leading U.S. figure he had spoken to, he said, wanted to “see action now”; patience in Washington was wearing thin.36 Ahern was quick to spot that the U.S. action had shifted the advantage away from Sinn Fein but the irony here is that prior to all this both his government’s officials and the British had been criticizing Mitchell Reiss for the decision to bar Adams from the White House. This was not the first or last time they would clash with the Bush envoy over his more muscular approach to the Provos. Nor had either the Irish or the British offered sympathy or support to the McCartney girls and neither government had attempted to pressurize the Sinn Fein leadership to turn over his killers. Only the Americans had helped the family.
Unknown to the public, the Americans had actually been much tougher on Adams. The U.S. administration had told Sinn Fein that any fund-raising by Gerry Adams or other figures during the St. Patrick’s Day festivities would be unwelcome and that if Adams persisted in his application for a fund-raising visa to cover the trip it would be rejected, with consequent embarrassment that would be impossible to hide. The Provos got the message and Adams quietly abandoned the bid, settling instead just for a visitor’s visa. When the Sinn Fein leader addressed hundreds of supporters at a trade union hall in New York, the plastic buckets that would usually have been passed around the crowd and filled with $20 and $50 notes were nowhere to be seen. The Robert McCartney murder was now hurting Sinn Fein in its most sensitive spot, its wallet.
The Provos had gone through a bruising time in America and the irony was that it all could have been avoided had Adams and his colleagues taken Jim Walsh’s advice and been “more aggressive” about getting to the bottom of the McCartney murder. So why hadn’t they done this?
From her close vantage point, Catherine McCartney suspects that, along with the Northern Bank robbery, Sinn Fein’s disastrous handling of her brother’s murder provided the IRA leadership with a route out of the decommissioning cul de sac: “If you look at it in the broader picture of Gerry Adams, the Northern Bank and then Robert’s murder, the pressure he was being put under. He knew the only thing he could offer was decommissioning… I would say that Sinn Fein manipulated Robert’s murder as much as anyone did to get themselves to a point where they knew they had to go and decommission. They knew they were going to have to do it, but never on Paisley’s terms.”
It was also, she believes, about policing and the fact that Sinn Fein knew that republicans would sometime soon have to sign up to the PSNI. “I think the thinkers in the party who could see the vacuum that they had left, squabbling over the police, that they couldn’t ride two horses for ever and couldn’t leave the Nationalist community in the hands of what essentially would be gangs. At the end of the day they could have had Robert’s murder solved within weeks had they wanted to and it wasn’t because of their love for ‘Jock’ Davison and that other crowd that they didn’t. It was for some other reason.”37
This was not the first time in the long and tortuous evolution of the peace process that the Adams leadership had used the IRA’s own excesses against itself, to curb the IRA and then manoeuvre, cajole and even compel the organization to take political paths that otherwise might never have been contemplated. Sometimes, as in the case of the Colombian adventure and the September 11 attacks which forced the beginning of decommissioning, the opportunity fell into their laps. At other times the matter appears more contrived. The endorsement of the IRA’s “human bomb” tactic in the autumn of 1990 by both Northern Command and the Army Council was an example of this. It was sanctioned at a time when Adams and other republicans were openly criticizing the IRA for military operations that alienated nationalist public opinion by killing civilians, yet despite all this the go-ahead was given. Predictably the tactic backfired badly. The first human bomb attack in Derry involved strapping a local Catholic in the driving seat of a bomb-laden van and exploding it at a checkpoint before he could escape. The operation carried appalling PR consequences for the IRA but these validated Adams’s criticisms of the conduct of the IRA’s war and profoundly undermined the Provos’ militarists to the advantage of those urging an alternative political course.
The murder of Robert McCartney arguably fell into the same category as Colombia and September 11, an unforeseeable event whose subsequent handling nonetheless assisted the move towards final decommissioning and the ending of all IRA activity. But was the Northern Bank raid the equivalent of the “human bomb” tactic of 1990, an operation approved by the IRA’s political leadership in the knowledge that its consequences would force the organization to contemplate far-reaching measures? Alongside the identity and motives of the traitor who betrayed the Eksund, this is one of the more intriguing, unsolved mysteries of the Irish peace process.
BY THE TIME Gerry Adams left New York and Washington after the Saint Patrick’s Day holiday he had come very close to admitting that the IRA had indeed carried out the Northern Bank robbery and that it had been a bad mistake. As he told the Council on Foreign Relations meeting during a question-and-answer session following his speech: “The Northern Bank robbery was totally and absolutely wrong, it should not have happened, and any other actions that one could conceive of, and all, all because there is now an alternative. There’s now a way to move forward through entirely peaceable and democratic means.”38 Why, if the IRA had not robbed the bank, did Adams make reference to the existence of a peaceable and democratic alternative, presumably that offered by the peace process? These were words that only made sense in the context of IRA culpability for the raid.
He also used language about the Robert McCartney murder of a condemnatory quality and passion that, to say the least, was in sharp contrast to Sinn Fein and the IRA’s ducking and evasion back in Belfast: “And let me tell you about the killing of Robert McCartney. Sinn Fein did not kill Robert McCartney, and neither did the IRA. And the people, apart from Robert McCartney’s immediate family, who have been most angry and frustrated over this man’s death are people like myself, because I have given, as have many others, our entire lives—whatever people think about us, we’ve given our entire lives to this struggle. And for republicans—and there are rogue republicans; there are a very, very small number—to behave like thugs, to take this man’s life, to sully what we feel is our good name—and I have travelled extensively. I’ve been speaking from Cork to Tyrone, through Dublin, Wexford, and I can tell you the hundreds and thousands of Irish republicans feel exactly the same as I do. And the only way that the family will get justice is on their own terms: through a court, through people being held accountable for their actions… And what I have said very, very publicly—and I’ll put my reputation on the line—is that those people who did this should be man enough—should be man enough—if I had got myself, by some freak, caught up in this situation and I had been responsible for killing Robert McCartney and I had woken up the next day, I would have walked straight into whatever I thought was the appropriate body and admitted what I had done. That’s what I would do. I think that those who did this are behaving in a most cowardly way and are motivated entirely by self-preservation.”39
The message sent by Irish America and the Bush White House had hit home. “One, Sinn Fein does want to bring about an end to the IRA,” he went on to tell the Council on Foreign Relations. “Two, Sinn Fein, I think with others, will be successful in achieving that; and then, three, for Irish republicans, the alternative to the IRA has to be Sinn Fein.” Perhaps unwittingly, he went on to suggest that persuading the IRA rank and file would not be that difficult: “I found when we were on the cusp of last December that there was a huge, an emotional backlash against what we were trying to do, and not so much from what you would call IRA people—who seemed to be fairly, I suppose, philosophical that they, their leadership was going to move into this new phase and that they would go with it—but others who in some way maybe felt that the IRA represented them against the British, against British aggression, against the British army occupation and so on.”40
Adams and his Sinn Fein entourage departed the United States for Ireland on or around March 18, 2005. Just nineteen days later, on April 6, almost exactly a month before another Westminster election at which Sinn Fein hoped to complete the demolition of the SDLP, only thirteen weeks after the Northern Bank raid and just nine weeks after Robert McCartney’s killing, Adams began to do what he had promised at the Council on Foreign Relations conference. Flanked by elected and prospective Sinn Fein candidates gathered at Conway Mill in West Belfast and careful to use the word “we” when referring to Sinn Fein, and “you” when talking of the IRA, Adams urged the IRA leadership to fully embrace political methods. “The IRA”, he said, “is being used as the excuse [by rejectionists] not to engage properly in the process of building peace with justice in Ireland.”41
The Irish deputy prime minister, or tanaiste, Mary Harney, described the Conway Mill event as another example of Adams talking to himself, but nonetheless in due course, and to no one’s surprise, on July 28 the IRA announced an end to its campaign of armed struggle, ordered its volunteers to dump arms and to pursue republican goals by only peaceful means. It also disclosed that the decommissioning of IRA weapons would be completed quickly and verified by two clerical witnesses, one Catholic, the other Protestant. The Provisionals’ ever-slick publicity machine provided the electronic media with a DVD featuring long-time IRA prisoner Seanna Walsh reading the Army Council statement, an act that at an earlier time could conceivably have landed him in trouble with the police. Walsh was a former commander of IRA prisoners in the H Blocks who had shared a cell with Bobby Sands, the IRA icon, and taken part in the lengthy “blanket” and “no-wash” protests prior to the hunger strikes that claimed Sands’s life. Twice convicted of explosives offences, he had spent twenty-one of his forty-eight years on earth in prison and, finally released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, he had become a committed supporter of the Adams leadership.
In many ways Seanna Walsh was a prototypical Provisional IRA member, a fitting choice to declare an end to its armed struggle. He had joined the IRA after loyalists intimidated his family out of a mixed area of South Belfast, forcing them to flee to the safety of Catholic Short Strand. At around the same time a friend, Patrick McCrory, was shot dead by the loyalist paramilitary group the UDA. Like so many of his colleagues, especially in Belfast, Walsh’s motivation in becoming an IRA volunteer sprang as much from an obligation to protect his community and assert its rights as anything else. In its statement, the Army Council felt obliged to refer to the reason why the Provisional IRA had come into being in the first place and the fear that now there would be no one to perform that role: “The issue of the defence of nationalist and republican communities has been raised with us. There is a responsibility on society to ensure that there is no reccurrence of the pogroms of 1969 and the early 1970s.” In effect, the IRA was relinquishing its raison d’être and handing the job to others, not least the security forces under the control of the British government. In some respects these were the most meaningful words in its valedictory.
What was otherwise striking about the IRA announcement—the most far-reaching and significant since the birth of the Provisionals in 1970—was that the decision to end the war had not been taken at an Army Convention. For years the IRA’s political leaders had told all who would listen that only a Convention could declare an end to armed struggle, just as Martin McGuinness had assured republicans in early 1994 that a cease-fire would have to be ratified by a Convention. Not only was the cease-fire declared without such endorsement but the final act in the IRA’s life as an army of national liberation had been taken by seven men sitting in a room, after a consultation process amongst the IRA rank and file about whose outcome only the barest details were made known to them afterwards and which at all times was firmly under the control of those seven men or others acting for them. In its way, this is as good a metaphor as any for Gerry Adams’s leadership of the IRA and the way he and his colleagues brought them into war, and then out of it.
There only remained the matter of carrying out the decommissioning of the last of the IRA’s weapons. The weeks before and after the IRA’s statement were spent in scouring arms dumps throughout Ireland. General de Chastelain’s IICD issued certificates, valid on both sides of the Border, exempting anyone carrying IRA weapons from dumps from prosecution, should they be intercepted. The weaponry was deposited at central sites, warehouses, outbuildings and even houses where the IRA’s interlocutor with the IICD, Brian Keenan, oversaw the preparation of inventories to hand over to de Chastelain and his two colleagues for checking. Each IRA weapon, rocket-launcher, box of ammunition and packet of Semtex explosives was numbered with a green tag.
On or around the weekend beginning September 17 the actual decommissioning process commenced and lasted for most of the following seven days. The two clerical witnesses, both approved by the IRA leadership, arrived to join de Chastelain and his two colleagues, the Finnish Brigadier Tauno Nieminen and the American diplomat Andrew Sens. One was the Revd Harold Good, a former Methodist president, a liberal and ecumenist who had long engaged the IRA in dialogue, and had persuaded its leadership to apologize for the bombings of “Bloody Friday”. Good was not the choice of most unionist politicians, who had argued that only a hard-line evangelist would be believed by their people. Nor would they have chosen the Catholic clerical witness. In some ways it was fitting that Father Alec Reid was there to witness what many regarded as the final act in the IRA’s life as an army since he had been there at the beginning of the peace process, back in 1982, when his dialogue with Gerry Adams began. Unionists would have great doubts about his part in the events, arguing that he was too credulous of the IRA. When a month later he said he still believed IRA denials of involvement in the Northern Bank robbery many of them felt their doubts had been well justified.
Although these two clerics would be witnesses, the same confidentiality restriction that had bedevilled earlier phases of the decommissioning process applied to what they could say now and what the IICD could reveal. For much of the next week, the IICD members and the witnesses were ferried from one location to another in a blacked-out van. “I spent a lot of the time on the road asleep,” Father Reid said later. “We could not see where we were going. We did not know where we were going. And we didn’t want to know.”42 The Redemptorist priest would later reveal that decommissioning took place at nine locations altogether.43 As for the process itself, de Chastelain was guarded: “I can only tell you that we worked a number of days, and long hours. I am not looking for sympathy, but it was six in the morning, until late at night, with the three of us involved at each event. Brigadier Nieminen and I have handled every weapon that was put beyond use, to examine it, to identify it… counting, weighing.”44
According to the later account provided by Father Reid to the Irish Times, the process was at times even convivial: “We were very well looked after, I can tell you that… We had two or three picnics. We would be working away and one of the IRA people would shout, ‘Come on, we’ll get a few sandwiches’. They had sandwiches, flasks of hot water, coffee and all kinds of bits and pieces, cups of soup… we would chat.”45
But when it came to the sort of detail that could overcome deep unionist skepticism about the process, none of the salient facts were made public by de Chastelain or the two witnesses. Key questions such as where decommissioning took place, how many events there were during that week, what weaponry and how much of the IRA’s arsenal was put beyond use went unanswered. The most important aspect of all, how the weapons were decommissioned, has never been revealed and is still a matter of intense speculation. The IICD will only say that the decommissioning was done in a way consistent with its legal obligation to put weapons “permanently inaccessible or beyond use.” Two of the most obvious ways of destroying weapons, blowing them up or cutting them into pieces with heavy industrial saws, as happened to some of the Loyalist Volunteer Force’s weapons in December 1998, can presumably be eliminated, the first on the grounds that it would have been hard to keep such events from public notice, and the second because it would have been just too impractical. Nor is it likely that weapons were dumped at sea since the limited accounts suggest land-based activity.
Security sources suggest that guns, bullets, rocket-launchers and the like may have been plunged into fast-setting concrete while explosives like Semtex were boiled away in water.46 But this possibility raises as many questions as it answers. Where was the concrete, in holes in the ground or in containers, and if the latter, what happened to them, where are they now? Would it be possible to separate the weapons from the concrete after the IICD had departed? Did the IICD stay around to ensure the concrete had set solidly? Where are the sites and are they secure? And so on.
The same lack of clarity surrounds the amount of weaponry decommissioned and the question of whether or not the IRA had given up all its weaponry. The IICD’s remit said that records of what had been decommissioned could be publicly released only when the entire process had ended and since neither of the two largest loyalist groups have, at the time of writing, even started to give up their weapons it may be a very long time before that happens. De Chastelain maintained that the weapons put beyond use related to the inventories of IRA weaponry provided by security force intelligence on both sides of the Border. But these inventories described ranges of quantities, not precise quantities. Only in the case of the Libyan weaponry could the authorities be confident that they knew more or less exactly what was in the IRA’s arsenals. In the 1990s, the Libyan leader Colonel Qaddafi had handed over to the British Foreign Office manifests of weapons he had supplied to the IRA as part of his effort to rehabilitate himself with the West, and the authorities needed only to subtract from this the weaponry used up or captured to work out what was left. But how could it be known how much the IRA had in its dumps before this or what weapons were smuggled in afterwards?
It came down to accepting de Chastelain’s assurances that he believed the IRA had told him the truth. “We are talking about flame-throwers, surface-to-air missiles, we are talking about rocket-propelled grenades, both commercial and home-made; heavy machine guns, all of the things you have seen in the papers. Of course, we have no way of knowing for certain that the IRA hasn’t retained arms. But it is our understanding from discussing with them and our belief in what we had done that they were sincere when they said that. This time, when we said, ‘Is this everything?’, they said, ‘Yes, this is everything’. That certainly wasn’t the case two years ago.”47 Although skeptical unionists were unconvinced, there could be little doubt that an awful lot of weaponry had been put out of commission and with it the IRA’s ability to resume war.
Two weeks later, at a public meeting in South Belfast jointly hosted by the Reverend Good, Father Alec Reid described one incident at the end of the week they had spent with the IRA and the IICD which did more than anything else said or written to convince the outside world that something of significance had indeed happened: “I was surprised, you know, we used to go to these sites and you have all this war material, if you like, guns and explosives and bullets and all this kind of thing, all very carefully prepared, most of it with tags, all numbered by the IRA people so that the three people, the three commissioners then were given an inventory of everything that was there with a number and all that.
“It was very, very well prepared. But one of the first things I saw was this man carrying a Kalashnikov and as far as I could see it was loaded and I was wondering, ‘In the name of God’, you know? I noticed that he was kind of the lookout as well, and he had this thing either over his shoulder or carrying it in his hand. And everywhere we went, there was a man out there with, this Kalashnikov was there and you could see it was loaded.
“So, I began to wonder, were they afraid the dissidents would come in and try and rob the guns? In the end, I picked up that they were defending the site but particularly defending the three commissioners. They were providing a bodyguard if you like. But then at the end of the, the very last act, this gun, the bullets were taken out of it and it was handed over to General de Chastelain by the senior IRA person, the person who was in charge of the whole operation of the decommissioning.
“And it was kind of a significant moment, that this was the last gun, and the man handing it over was quite emotional. He was aware, I think, that this was the last gun.”48
TO CLAIM THAT that the IRA’s July statement or the final decommissioning carried out in September 2005 were greeted with universal acclaim would be something of an exaggeration. Many unionists, for one, were still inclined to cast a deeply skeptical eye on anything and everything the Provos said or did. By this stage it was also apparent that the Northern Bank raid, the murder of Robert McCartney and its subsequent cover-up, added to all the IRA’s previous escapades, had had a cumulatively corrosive impact on a wider section of opinion, on both sides of the Border. While the IRA’s words were welcome and de Chastelain’s assurances widely accepted, experience had taught many the foolishness of immediately accepting that the IRA was for real. Not only that but the IRA’s and Sinn Fein’s lies over the bank robbery had been pretty transparent. While there were understandable doubts over the identity of the culprits behind Castlereagh and a possibility that “Stormontgate” may have been contrived or exaggerated by the British, robbing banks was something the IRA did. Sinn Fein and the IRA were also badly affected by their handling of the McCartney murder. The brutality and cold-blooded nature of the killers contrasted starkly with the dignity of the dead man’s sisters as they campaigned for justice in Ireland, America and Europe, winning plaudits for their courage and persistence. By not taking assertive action against McCartney’s killers, Gerry Adams and others in the Provo leadership were widely perceived to be shielding the worst sort of thugs. What that did was to raise up again an image of the republican movement that had been seemingly banished years before. If the Northern Bank and the McCartney murder had helped the Adams leadership throw the IRA monkey off their backs, the events were also the first in a long catalogue of woes for the republican movement that would stretch over the next two years and prick the image of invincibility.
Gerry Adams had timed his call to the IRA to step down a month before the May 2005 Westminster election and while he denied this was deliberately done with an eye to the polls, it was obvious that Sinn Fein hoped his speech would give the party a boost and even help it finish off the SDLP. The Provos were casting a hungry eye on two of the SDLP’s three House of Commons seats: Newry and Armagh, whose incumbent, the former SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon, had retired from politics, and Foyle, the seat held by John Hume for decades and now being defended by the new, less than charismatic SDLP leader Mark Durkan, against Sinn Fein’s Mitchel McLaughlin. Of the two seats it was Foyle that the Provos coveted most of all. The third SDLP seat, South Down, held by Eddie McGrady, was thought unwinnable this time round, but in four or five years’ time, when McGrady had retired and if Sinn Fein worked hard, it might fall into the party’s lap. If everything went well Sinn Fein could end up with six seats at Westminster to the SDLP’s one. But it didn’t work out like that at all. Newry and Armagh fell to Sinn Fein as expected, but in Foyle, Durkan easily beat McLaughlin, much to the consternation of the Provos, who managed to secure only two votes for every three cast for Durkan. In addition, the SDLP was a surprise victor in the usually safe Ulster Unionist seat of South Belfast, where Alastair McDonnell, the new SDLP deputy leader, was the beneficiary of a split unionist vote and some tactical voting against the Sinn Fein candidate, Alex Maskey, who had distanced the IRA from the McCartney killing by attempting to describe it as the result of knife culture as opposed to IRA thuggery. The election ended with Sinn Fein holding five seats at Westminster to the SDLP’s three, a result that consolidated Provo support but which was far from the romp their strategists had anticipated.
There was compelling evidence that the bank robbery and the McCartney killing had also tarnished some of the lustre on Sinn Fein in the South, where a general election was to be held in May 2007. Sinn Fein had targeted the Republic for significant electoral growth and if that worked out and the party polled as well as its leaders hoped, then Sinn Fein might even be in line for cabinet seats as part of a coalition government before the decade was out. In October 2004 an opinion poll carried out for the Irish Times by TNS MRBI showed Sinn Fein winning the support of 12 percent of the electorate, making it the fourth largest party in the state, and Gerry Adams scoring a 51-point leadership approval rating with voters, only 2 percent behind that of the prime minister, Bertie Ahern.49 At that point the party could be confident that it was well on target. Events in the North then intervened, but self-inflicted disaster in the South also hit the Provisionals. In early February, just as the McCartney scandal was building up steam, five Dublin men were convicted of IRA membership after they were found in a van used for Sinn Fein electioneering in possession of a sledgehammer, a stun gun, pickaxe handles and CS gas spray, along with election posters for Aengus O Snodaigh, the Sinn Fein TD for Dublin South, Central.50 The previous November, Niall Binead, also an election worker for O Snodaigh, was convicted of IRA membership and his trial was told he was running a spying operation targeted at government ministers and TDs.51
The impact of all this was soon evident in the opinion polls. By March 2005, Sinn Fein’s support had plummeted by a quarter down to 9 percent, while Adams had suffered a catastrophic fall in his approval rating to 30 points, the lowest since it was first measured.52 If the Provos were hoping that ending its war and then completing the decommissioning process, would help Sinn Fein retrieve all this lost ground, they were to be disappointed. By May 2006, nearly eighteen months after the Northern Bank robbery, Sinn Fein’s support was still at 9 percent, while Adams’s rating had risen only to 39 points.53 Towards the end of September, a Sunday Business Post poll put Sinn Fein at 8 percent, while an Irish Examiner survey conducted at around the same time showed an alarming drop in Sinn Fein’s support in Dublin, where the party would have to do well in order to grow to just 5 percent.
THE NORTHERN BANK raid and the McCartney killing had tarnished the Provos with a criminal image and their enemies in the South, in particular the combative justice minister, Michael McDowell, rarely missed a chance to remind voters of the Provos’ criminality and supposed links to cross-Border smuggling, money-laundering and counterfeiting. Nobody in the Provisional movement was more associated with the label of criminality than its chief of staff, South Armagh IRA veteran Tom “Slab” Murphy, whom the British and Irish authorities had long believed ran a fuel-smuggling empire from the family farm in Ballybinaby, which literally straddles the Border. In May 2004 the BBC named him as the UK’s richest smuggler, with a fortune estimated at between £35 and £40 million.54 Throughout the years of the IRA cease-fire the British and Irish governments had resisted pressure, especially from the Bush White House, to pursue “Slab” Murphy on the grounds that to do so would alienate a key figure on the Army Council and possibly set the IRA in South Armagh against the Adams peace project. In early October 2005, just days after the IRA had decommissioned the last of its weapons, officers from the British Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) raided businesses in Manchester while their Irish counterparts, the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), raided premises in Dundalk, just south of the Border. Briefings from CAB sources suggested that they suspected that “Slab” Murphy had built up a significant property portfolio in Britain to launder the proceeds of cross-Border smuggling and the raids were aimed at discovering evidence against him.55 In November 2006, nine Manchester properties worth £1.25 million owned by Slab Murphy’s brother, Francis, were frozen by a court order sought by the ARA.
Six months later, in March 2006, some 300 police officers, backed by British and Irish troops, raided Slab Murphy’s farm in South Armagh. The IRA’s chief of staff was given a few minutes’ notice of the raid and slipped through the security cordon, leaving behind a half-eaten breakfast on the kitchen table. The police seized nearly £700,000 in cash and cheques, twelve vehicles, some 30,000 cigarettes and fuel from the farm. During the raid, a preliminary income tax assessment of £3.5 million, based on his estimated smuggling income over the years, was left beside Murphy’s breakfast plate.56 This would have to be paid unless Slab could prove that his income was less than the estimate and that would necessitate airing the smuggling allegations in court, possibly opening the way to criminal proceedings. Following the raid Gerry Adams publicly threw his weight behind the IRA’s chief of staff: “Tom Murphy is not a criminal. He’s a good republican… and very importantly he is a key supporter of Sinn Fein’s peace strategy and has been for a very long time.” Slab also denied the allegations, but as he fled his breakfast table that March morning it would be surprising if the thought had not crossed his mind that no one, least of all Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness, had told him that losing his fortune was part of the peace process script.
What the moves against Slab Murphy signified in unequivocal fashion was that when the IRA decommissioned the last of its weapons, the consideration and protection they had afforded its leaders had evaporated, along with the implied threat they represented of renewed armed struggle. Also gone, but only if the British and Irish governments had the necessary political will, was Sinn Fein’s excessively generous leverage in the political process. For years the republican party’s unionist and nationalist opponents had complained that when Sinn Fein came to the negotiating table there was a metaphorical gun hidden under their seats and stacks of real ones piled outside the door. Not any more.
MARCH 1, 2005, was the twenty-fourth anniversary of the day that Bobby Sands began his sixty-six-day-long hunger strike to the death, and the Sinn Fein leadership—as they did every year at this time—were making ready to remember his sacrifice and that of his nine comrades in speeches, rallies and marches around Ireland that would last until August. They were also gearing up to make the next year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1981 hunger strikes, one of constant commemoration and celebration of the ten dead hunger strikers who had perished during that never-to-be-forgotten year. It was also the day of publication of a book, written by one of Bobby Sands’s prison colleagues, that would challenge the most cherished assumption of the hunger strikes and shake the Sinn Fein leadership, Gerry Adams in particular, to its core. Remembering the hunger strikers would never be the same again for many republicans who had lived through it.
The ten dead hunger strikers were the Provisional IRA’s icons, the equivalent for the modern-day IRA of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion executed by the British in the wake of their failed rising. Just as the martyrs of 1916 were venerated for having inspired the war of independence of 1919–21 that followed, so the hunger strikers were presented by the Sinn Fein leadership as the forerunners of the peace process strategy, their names and memories invoked in support of the Adams leadership at every occasion. The hunger strikers had been protesting at the British government’s determination to treat them as criminals and their campaign for political status—especially their willingness to starve themselves to death to achieve it—had helped validate the IRA in the eyes of its supporters and had reverberated around the world. The protest had five demands: the right to wear civilian clothes, the right not to do prison work, the right of free association, the right to receive weekly parcels and visits and unlimited letters and the return of remission lost during a five-year protest during which IRA prisoners would wear only a blanket and refused to slop out, instead smearing the walls of their cells with excreta. In 2005, as in every year since the 1994 cease-fire, the memory of the hunger strikers was employed to legitimize the IRA’s modern, non-military methods and strategy.
In a very real sense the Sinn Fein leadership was right to make the claim, for a straight line can be drawn between the events of 1981, the Good Friday Agreement and everything else that happened during the peace process. Bobby Sands’s chance election as the MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone in a Westminster by-election had enabled the Provisional leadership to fast-forward what before the hunger strikes had been modest and long-term plans for Sinn Fein to become an electoral party. At a later stage in the protest, two other prisoners were elected to Dail Eireann at an Irish general election, and after Bobby Sands’s death another by-election was held in Fermanagh–South Tyrone, which was won by Sands’s polling agent, former teacher and Sinn Fein activist Owen Carron. That winter, after the hunger strikes had ended, Gerry Adams was able to go to the annual Sinn Fein Ard Fheis and, with Owen Carron on the platform as living proof of the viability of the tactic, win party support for the strategy of fighting elections while waging a violent war of national liberation. The so-called ballot box and Armalite strategy was born. A year later, Sinn Fein won seats to a new Northern Assembly and, with a political alternative to violence now available, shortly afterwards Gerry Adams began his talks with Father Alec Reid and the peace process was underway. The rest, as they say, is history—but none of it could have happened without the hunger strikes.
The deaths inside the H Blocks of the Maze prison in 1981, as well as outside, were relentless. An immovable British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, faced an irresistible force of republican hunger strikers and after Sands died, one by one, they went to their graves. The hunger strike was organized in such a way that it became a drip-feed of death, each hunger striker beginning his protest a week or so after the one before him. After Sands, the Tyrone IRA legend Francis Hughes died, and then on May 21 the third and fourth hunger strikers, South Armagh IRA man Raymond McCreesh and Derry INLA man Patsy O’Hara, who began their protest at the same time, died. After the fourth death a large gap, potentially six weeks long, opened up before the next likely death, slated to be Belfast IRA man Joe McDonnell. During this time the prisoners’ public relations officer, Richard O’Rawe, drafted a statement moderating the rhetoric of the prisoners’ demands, in particular dropping language about “political status,” a neuralgic term as far as the Thatcher government was concerned, and it was published on July 4. As he later wrote in his 2005 book Blanketmen, the effect of the statement was immediately to encourage the British to open negotiations. It is his account of what he knows of those negotiations that has proved to be so explosive for the Adams leadership.
According to his account, the day after the statement was made public, July 5, the commander of the IRA prisoners, Brendan “Bik” McFarlane was called out for a visit with Danny Morrison, the former Sinn Fein and IRA publicity director and a long-time member of the Adams think tank. McFarlane came back and in a “comm”, a message written on a cigarette paper sent down to his cell, he told O’Rawe that the British had begun confidential contact with the IRA leadership and had made an offer to end the hunger strike. Four of the prisoners’ five demands, including the crucial insistence that IRA prisoners be allowed to wear their own clothes instead of a prison uniform, could be granted if the protest ended. O’Rawe wrote that Morrison had said that a British intermediary, code-named “Mountain Climber”, who was believed to be an officer in British intelligence, had passed on the offer. O’Rawe and McFarlane, conversing in Irish for security reasons, discussed the offer for several hours and, concluding that 80 percent of the protesters demands had been met, they wrote a “comm” out to the IRA leadership saying that the prison leadership wanted to accept the British offer.
The response was a “comm” sent back from an IRA leader, code-named “Brownie”, saying that the British offer was regarded as inadequate, that four hunger strikers had died for much more and not for this offer.57 The Mountain Climber offer shriveled on the vine and three days after O’Rawe had learned of the British approach, Joe McDonnell died. The offer was briefly revived later in August, just before, at the request of hunger striker relatives, Gerry Adams visited the protesters in the hospital wing of the Maze prison. Adams outlined the renewed offer but declined to say that it was good enough for the protest to end or, on behalf of the Army Council, to order the men to end it as some relatives had wanted, and he left it to the prisoners to decide. Weighed down by the deaths of their comrades and the fear that ending the protest in such circumstances would amount to betrayal, they decided to carry on. By this stage six prisoners had died—Joe McDonnell and Martin Hurson had succumbed since the first Mountain Climber initiative, and a further four would die before the protest finally ended in early October.
The effect of the failure of the Mountain Climber initiative, both in early July and then in August, was that the hunger strike was still ongoing when on August 20, 1981, the second Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election was held. Sands had won the first by-election but on his death the seat became vacant. Since the Thatcher government had rushed through a law barring convicts from standing for parliament, Owen Carron, Sands’s Sinn Fein election agent, was put forward instead. The fact that the prison protest was still underway when election day dawned had enormous implications for the outcome. Sands and later Carron both contested the Fermanagh– South Tyrone seat on the basis of an informal understanding that as long as IRA men were on hunger strike, other nationalists, principally the SDLP, would agree to allow them a free run. In this way the seat was being “borrowed” by the H Block prisoners and once their protest was over normal politics in the constituency would resume. The fact that IRA men were starving to death and dying in defiance of Margaret Thatcher, a politician who was particularly disliked by all shades of Irish nationalist opinion, meant that there was a huge incentive on the part of the Catholic electorate of Fermanagh–South Tyrone to vote for Carron. The IRA leadership’s rejection of the Mountain Climber offer in July had ensured not just that the hunger strike would still be underway but that the by-election would be governed by the same local understanding that had applied during Sands’s election. On election day Owen Carron was not only the sole nationalist candidate standing, but the continuing threat of hunger-strike deaths brought thousands of nationalists out to vote for him. Had the hunger strike ended after nominations had closed, for instance when Adams had visited the prison hospital, the heat would have gone out of the situation and many nationalists, especially those in the constituency who usually voted for the SDLP, would not have felt the same pressure to support Carron. The result would almost certainly have been his defeat. But instead Carron was easily elected. One especially significant consequence of this was that Adams’s bid to win his party over to an electoral strategy was considerably strengthened. The import of O’Rawe’s assertion is that the hunger strikes were kept going longer than necessary, and six of the ten dead hunger strikers sacrificed so that Gerry Adams could lead Sinn Fein into electoral politics.
“Brownie”, the IRA leader who in O’Rawe’s account had advised the prisoners’ leaders not to accept the Mountain Climber proposal, was none other than Gerry Adams, using the same pen-name he had invented when imprisoned in the 1970s so that he could write pseudonymously articles for Republican News. At the time O’Rawe believed that Adams was writing to McFarlane on behalf of the Army Council but he now believes that Adams ran the protest on the Council’s behalf: “I have since learned that a subcommittee [of the Army Council] was designated to manage and monitor the hunger strike. Given that ‘comms’ were coming in two or three times a day it is simply not possible to believe that the Council could have been kept informed of all the developments. Could the Council even have met regularly during that turbulent period? Adams ran the whole show. He sent the ‘comms’ in. He read the ‘comms’ that came out. He talked to the ‘Mountain Climber’. He ran everything from A to Z. Nobody knows the hunger strike like he knows it.”58
In 1985, O’Rawe was asked by Adams, along with two other republicans, to sift through the IRA’s archive of “comms” from the 1981 hunger strikes and to remove any letter that made reference to the “Mountain Climber” and the role he had played. He was then to make the sanitized collection available to the Guardian reporter David Beresford, who was researching and writing what became his seminal book on the protest, Ten Men Dead. By mistake, one comm mentioning the secret British official was overlooked and in this way Beresford and the world learned of the Mountain Climber. Gerry Adams’s intention, according to O’Rawe, was to keep Mountain Climber’s role completely hidden. In the course of this task, O’Rawe also searched for the comm he and McFarlane had sent out accepting the British offer, only to find that it was not in the archive. Its absence, he wrote, “was surely significant.”59
The impact of O’Rawe’s book on the Provisionals was strengthened by the fact that he had street credibility with rank-and-file supporters. He was not one of the republican movement’s political enemies but a fellow former IRA man with a long family history of involvement in IRA politics. He had also been on the H Blocks’ “blanket” and “no wash” protests alongside those who had died and was sufficiently highly regarded to be appointed to the IRA’s prison staff. After his release from jail, he worked for a while in the Sinn Fein press office in Belfast and later supported the Adams peace process strategy. He decided, he said, to speak out about events that had weighed heavily with him for so long only when it had become clear that the IRA’s violence was over and no damage could be done to its war effort. At the time of the 1981 protest many republicans had been greatly troubled that the IRA leadership had allowed the hunger strike to last so long and that many prisoner deaths had been pointless. O’Rawe’s explanation of this period made a great deal of sense to them.
Publishing his account was certainly not cost-free. Some, including this writer, had advised him not to publish his book because of the personal vilification that he would suffer, but he persevered. And the vilification was intense, as he later described: “All of a sudden I was persona non grata, someone who was to be ostracized. The smears started. People who I had been friends with avoided me. One person who I shared a cell with on the blanket refused to speak to me. Friends I had all my life blanked me out and made it clear when I went in to a pub that I was not welcome in their company. The leadership apologists ‘cut the tripe out of me’ on television, radio, newspapers—anywhere they had the chance. They tried to attribute false motives to me. They said it was about money. All of this was bullshit.”60
Sinn Fein’s usually slick and well-coordinated publicity machine reacted clumsily to O’Rawe’s account. While Gerry Adams initially opted for silence, other aides contradicted and tripped over themselves. Bik McFarlane flatly denied there had been any offer from Mountain Climber or that the exchanges with O’Rawe described in Blanketmen had happened: “There was no concrete proposals whatsoever in relation to a deal,” he said.61 All that Morrison had told him, he maintained, was that the British had opened up a line of communication, but he, McFarlane, shouldn’t get his hopes up too high.
Morrison’s own account was very different. Mountain Climber had indeed made an offer, he said, which he had outlined to McFarlane, but the deal had stalled when a request from the prisoners that the British verify and confirm the offer was turned down.62 McFarlane insisted there was no deal, while Morrison said there was one but it was killed off by the British, not the Adams leadership. Later, on an RTE television documentary, Gerry Adams claimed, to general astonishment, that he hadn’t known or heard of Mountain Climber until after the hunger strikes.63 O’Rawe has since let it be known that he has independent verification of his exchange with McFarlane and will release it if necessary. As the battle between them continued, the hugely damaging accusation that the peace process strategy was constructed on a foundation consisting of the graves of six republican hunger strikers who needn’t and shouldn’t have died was fated to hang forever over Gerry Adams’s head.
AT MOMENTS OF crisis during the years of the peace process and especially when the IRA was singled out for blame, the Sinn Fein leadership was fond of shifting responsibility instead on to British “securocrats,” so-called bureaucratic elements in the security establishment who, supposedly because of self-interest and hatred of the Provisionals, had set out to sabotage the process. The term began to appear in the Provo lexicon in 1995, around the time that the Washington Three decommissioning conditions were promulgated by the then Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew. It was apparently borrowed from South Africa where the ANC, long-time allies and friends of the IRA, had coined the term to describe elements in the apartheid system who were resisting change.64 As the peace process continued and its problems multiplied so did the frequency of the word in Sinn Fein speeches and statements. The securocrats were blamed for the Castlereagh break-in and for Stormontgate in particular. Way back in 1997, Gerry Adams even blamed them for suggesting he was on the IRA’s Army Council. Asked who these securocrats were, he replied: “Whether it’s the London civil servant who coordinates security, or the head of the RUC or the British generals, or whether it’s the people in MI5 or MI6 who don’t have another pot to stir, there are people who want to stick with the old security agenda rather than move to a new political agenda.”65 Blaming “securocrats” served a double purpose for the IRA and Sinn Fein: it conveyed the impression that republicans were still in struggle with the British while suggesting that if the British security establishment wished to destroy the peace process, then the strategy had to be injurious to British interests.
The existence of often compelling evidence to the contrary was never a deterrent to the claim being trotted out by Sinn Fein figures. For example, the “head of the RUC,” or at least the RUC‘s assistant chief constable at the time Gerry Adams offered his definition of a securocrat, was Sir Ronnie Flanagan who, in 1995, publicly expressed the very un-securocrat thought that the best possiblity of ensuring peace was if organizations like the IRA remained intact and under the control of their leaderships. When the issue of IRA decommissioning began to assume greater importance in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the staunchest critics of those insisting the IRA had to disarm before Sinn Fein could enter government was Michael Oatley, an MI6 officer who had had many dealings over the years with senior IRA figures as far back as the mid-1970s, and who was said to have used the “Mountain Climber” code-name at one point. He wrote of the decommissioning demand: “This tactic might be described as the picador approach to introducing a terrorist organization to the attractions of the political arena. No doubt, if sufficient barbs are thrust into its flanks, the animal will eventually, with reluctance, charge. The picadors can then claim the beast was always a ravening monster.”66 As for the other branch of British intelligence, MI5, its agents had worked with the FBI to persuade David Rupert to infiltrate the Real IRA and to bring Michael McKevitt to court on terrorist charges after the Good Friday Agreement was concluded. An MI5 committed to destroying the peace process would surely have left the Real IRA and McKevitt alone. Former RUC and PSNI Special Branch commander Chief Superintendent Bill Lowry also claimed that MI5 had pressured him to minimize the scale of the Stormontgate spying operation so as not to damage the Adams leadership, and he furthermore disclosed that in 1996, at the time of the crucial IRA Convention and Adams’s clash with Michael McKevitt, the Special Branch successfully stopped a number of anti-Adams delegates from getting to the meeting. As it was, Adams survived the Convention by the skin of his teeth but he might not have without the assistance of Bill Lowry and the Special Branch securocrats.67
Nor did it matter if, from time to time, the Sinn Fein accusations were so wide of the mark they embarrassed those making them. In the midst of the furore caused by the Northern Bank robbery, two of the Provisionals’ most senior figures, Martin McGuinness and Pat Doherty, launched an assault on the Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Joe Pilling, for remarks he had made during a trip to the United States. Doherty said: “The NIO’s top securocrat, Joe Pilling stated, at what he thought was a private meeting in the US in October, that the worst case scenario would be that Sinn Fein would become the largest party in the North and that the priority was to stop this happening. The full frontal onslaught now being rolled out against Sinn Fein is therefore no coincidence.”68 McGuinness added: “This is the NIO line of the last 30 years. It is a position of failure and it is evidence of a British system that seeks the defeat of Irish republicanism.”69 Pilling was the NIO’s most senior official at the time of the Good Friday Agreement negotiations and it was largely at his urging that the issue of IRA decommissioning was decoupled from the release of IRA prisoners.70 Thanks to him, hundreds of IRA prisoners got out of jail without their leaders having to surrender as much as a single bullet. If Pilling truly was a securocrat and was seeking the defeat of the peace process strategy, would he have done this?
Without a doubt there were elements within the security forces, especially locally raised units, whose hostility to the Provisionals would have been sufficiently deep to tempt them into acts of sabotage against the Adams project. But it hardly makes sense to suggest that at an institutional or leadership level, MI5, MI6, military intelligence or the RUC/PSNI Special Branch would share this animosity. The IRA’s campaign of violence was, after all, being brought to an end on terms that in the past would have been dismissed as impossibly modest, and since it was the IRA’s own leaders who were winding up the armed struggle, it was coming to an end with a certainty and finality that no amount of security successes could have guaranteed. Far from obstructing this process, it was entirely in the interests of the British security establishment that they should lend a helping hand.
FREDDIE SCAPPATICCI WAS one of the IRA’s most feared and disliked members, a man whose name could send a shiver of sheer terror down the backs of fellow republicans. It was Scappaticci’s work for the IRA that caused this type of reaction. Scappaticci, or “Scap” as he was known to fellow IRA men, had spent the bulk of his paramilitary career in the IRA’s security department, which had the job of rooting out British double agents in the organization, IRA members who had been turned by the police or military and were betraying secrets to the enemy. Scap eventually rose to the top, becoming director of security, from which position his vantage on the IRA was unprecedentedly extensive, his knowledge of its internal affairs impressive. The security department’s remit and powers were wide. Its task was to identify suspected informers, interrogate them, persuade the guilty to confess and then hand them over to others in the IRA who would courtmartial them and then, if convicted, despatch them with a single shot to the back of the head. Attracting the interest of the security department was not good for an IRA member’s health.
Scap was a member of five families of Italian origin which had been involved with republican paramilitaries during the Troubles, one of an estimated 1,800 people of Italian extraction in Northern Ireland whose ancestors were late nineteenth-century economic migrants, mostly from the area south of Rome. They arrived in Belfast via northern England and opened fish and chip shops and ice cream parlors. Most were assimilated fully, invariably into working-class Catholic areas, and many lost their ability to speak the language and their interest in Italy. Sometimes the only link to their past was the Christian names their parents would choose. A bricklayer by trade who hailed from the Markets district of Belfast, Scap joined the IRA at the start of the Troubles and was interned in 1971; after release in 1974 he rejoined and worked in IRA intelligence. When the security department was set up, he gravitated towards it.
The idea of the IRA creating a proper counterintelligence unit had its origins in Long Kesh in the mid-1970s when Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell began debriefing IRA members arriving in prison to discover what the authorities knew or wanted to know about the IRA. When the criminalization process began a few years later, and IRA volunteers started cracking under interrogation, Belfast Brigade set up a unit to debrief anyone who had survived police questioning without confessing or being charged. This was partly to discover what the RUC knew or was interested in, but also to look for clues that would suggest a volunteer had been turned. Thus was born the security department which grew in size and scope over the years, expanding to cover Northern Command’s area of operations and then all the IRA. The department was tasked with vetting recruits and investigating IRA operations that had gone wrong. Those who worked in the department, and especially those who led it, knew an awful lot about the IRA’s business.
Not surprisingly, the British security authorities made a priority of infiltrating the security department and turning those of its members it could, and there are at least three instances where it is known or strongly suspected that they were successful. One was Brendan “Ruby” Davison, an uncle of Jock Davison of Robert McCartney infamy, who was shot dead by loyalists in the late 1980s. Another suspected traitor was the late John Joe Magee, a former British soldier who headed the department before Scap. The third was Freddie Scappaticci himself. Between them, these informers or suspected informers would have been able to give the British a priceless insight into the IRA.
Scap’s role as an informer came to light at least in part thanks to the exertions of a former British soldier, a staff sergeant who had worked with military intelligence in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. He had come across Scap by chance, was deeply troubled by what he learned and when he left the army set out to tell as much of his story as he could to the media. The soldier, a chirpy, friendly native of Manchester who used the pseudonym “Martin Ingram”, worked as an agent co-handler in a special outfit called the Force Research Unit (FRU) whose headquarters were in Thiepval barracks near Belfast. One evening Ingram was serving as the duty officer in FRU’s headquarters when the phone rang. It was a policeman in Derry who had a Belfast man, Freddie Scappaticci, under arrest for drunk driving. Scappaticci had asked the police to ring the FRU who would vouch for him and extract him from his difficulty. Ingram consulted the files and contacted Scap’s handlers who arranged for his release.
Ingram learned that Scap’s FRU code-name was “Steaknife”71 and that an official blind eye had been turned to the many executions Scap had engineered. Scap was a “walk-in”, someone who had volunteered their services rather than being blackmailed or bribed into service, as was usually the case with informers. In his case, Scap was allegedly seeking revenge for a bad beating at the hands of IRA colleagues. Ingram was appalled at the fact that, through the double agent, the British army was sanctioning murder and also by the possibility that some of Scap’s victims might have been innocents set up to die to give the informer credibility while others were genuine agents sacrificed to preserve Scap’s cover. Freddie Scappaticci was eventually exposed as a double agent by the media in May 2003.
The IRA had known about Scap’s treachery for some years but had taken no action against him, despite the enormous damage he had done. Clearly the embarrassment would have been enormous had Scap been found, like many of his victims, dumped by the side of a road in South Armagh, his hands bound behind his back and the brains blown out of his head. Many questions would have been asked and some would have been directed at the Adams, leadership. Scap’s elevation in the security department, along with that of John Joe Magee, had been engineered in the mid-1980s by Gerry Adams, who had got their predecessors thrown out.72 The two men would be intensely loyal to Adams over the best part of the next two decades and many republicans suspected that part of their brief was to hunt down and expose internal critics of the leadership or its strategies, including of course the peace process strategy. Whatever the truth, the fact remains that the basic rule of counterintelligence, that key figures should be replaced or rotated regularly to minimize any damage caused by treachery, was not followed in their case. They stayed at or near the top of the security department for many years, causing incalculable damage to the IRA. When the IRA finally did come to suspect Scap, he was allowed to live and he settled in Andersonstown in the heart of West Belfast. When he was exposed, Scap denied everything, threatened but then abandoned court action to clear his name and finally fled to Italy, where he now lives.
The Force Research Unit which ran Scap had agents in other Northern Ireland paramilitary groups, including the largest loyalist outfit, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), a group responsible for many bombings and assassinations of Catholics. The key FRU agent inside the UDA was its head of intelligence, Brian Nelson, a former British soldier who had worked as a double agent in the UDA since the 1970s. By the late 1980s Nelson, who was from the fiercely loyalist Shankill Road part of Belfast, was living and working in Germany in the building trade, but in 1987 he was tracked down by MI5 and persuaded to return to Belfast to resume spying for the FRU. He became head of UDA intelligence, compiling information on republicans provided by his FRU handlers which he would hand over to the UDA’s assassination squads. In theory he would also inform his FRU handlers, who were supposed to tell the RUC so that murder plots could be intercepted and gunmen arrested. In most cases the army did nothing of the sort. Part of the reason for persuading Nelson to return to Belfast was, in the words of FRU’s commander, to “persuade the UDA to centralize their targeting through Nelson and to concentrate their targeting on known Provisional IRA activists,” and military intelligence had little interest in obstructing the UDA.73
One of those set up for assassination by the UDA, courtesy of intelligence provided by Nelson, was the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was gunned down in his family home in February 1989. Nelson had told his handlers of the plot but they did nothing to stop it. Separately, the RUC Special Branch had learned that Finucane had been targeted from another UDA informer, William Stobie, the quartermaster who supplied guns to the assassination team. The police also failed to act, even afterwards when they could have caught the killers with the murder weapons. Finucane, who had been Bobby Sands’s solicitor, was the principal defence lawyer for arrested IRA suspects in Belfast and his family was steeped in republican activity. A brother John was killed on IRA active service in a car crash in 1972; another brother, Dermot, was on IRA GHQ staff, and a third brother, Seamus, was on the Belfast Brigade staff, at a time when the Brigade opposed the Adams peace strategy. While the UDA asserted that Pat Finucane was also an IRA member, this was widely denied, not least by the RUC chief constable. But his work on behalf of IRA clients meant that all the branches of British security in Northern Ireland had a reason to view Finucane with hostility.
The FRU’s relationship with Nelson came to light when the UDA boasted about its improved intelligence on the IRA and released video footage of military security documents and photomontages to which it had access. A police inquiry by an English team led to Nelson who was charged with murder. At his trial he cut a deal with the prosecution and pleaded guilty. In return for a ten-year jail term he spared the British army days of embarrassing and revealing court testimony. The FRU’s commander, Colonel “J”, as he was identified, gave mitigating evidence claiming that Nelson had saved over 200 lives.
In fact the English police inquiry had established that only two lives had been saved as a result of Nelson’s work with the FRU.74 One was Freddie Scappaticci, who was targeted by the UDA soon after Nelson became the group’s intelligence chief. According to “Martin Ingram”, the FRU stepped in to save their most valuable IRA agent and steered the UDA assassins away from Scap and towards another republican of Italian extraction, Francisco Notarantonio, an elderly IRA veteran from Ballymurphy who was duly shot in his bed in October 1987.75
The other person whose life was saved by Brian Nelson and the FRU was Gerry Adams. The UDA had tried to kill Adams once before, in 1984, when he was ambushed by UDA gunmen in Belfast city centre in a plot reportedly known beforehand to British intelligence.76 Adams survived with remarkably light wounds. A second UDA plot to kill Adams was hatched around August 1988 when the group discovered that the Sinn Fein MP visited a public housing office in downtown Belfast on behalf of his constituents on the same day each week. At first they contemplated shooting him from nearby scaffolding but then the UDA learned that Adams’s armor-plated car had one weakness – the roof had not been protected. The UDA obtained a limpet mine and planned to draw up beside Adams’s car as he left the office and place the mine on the roof, as close to his head as possible, and set it to explode after five seconds.77 Nelson told his handlers about the plan. In 1984, British intelligence agencies may have allowed the attempt on Adams’s life to go ahead but this time they intervened to save him. The limpet mine was discovered in a police raid and the plot was abandoned. Nelson’s FRU handlers subsequently told him, according to extracts from his diary published later, that killing Adams would have been, “totally counter productive… Adams and his supporters were committed to following the political path.”78
MI5 had a permanent liaison officer stationed with the FRU and would have been aware of the intelligence provided by Brian Nelson. By this stage Adams had, via Father Reid, opened a dialogue with the then Secretary of State, Tom King, in an effort to advance the peace process. Given the FRU’s decision to save Adam’s life, it seems reasonable to assume that British intelligence knew of these contacts and recognized the huge potential of the path Adams was taking. If the securocrats really wished to scupper the peace process, they had missed an ideal opportunity to strangle the infant at birth by turning a blind eye to the killing of its principal architect. At the very least one question remains unanswered: why did British intelligence allow Pat Finucane to die but not Gerry Adams?
ANOTHER INTRIGUING EXAMPLE of securocrat benevolence towards the peace process came towards the end of 2005 when the Stormontgate scandal of October 2002 returned with a sensational vengeance. Three men, including one senior Sinn Fein official, fifty-five-year-old Denis Donaldson, had been charged with spying offences, but suddenly on December 8, the Public Prosecution Service announced that charges against the three men were being dropped “in the public interest.” Under new disclosure rules, the prosecuting authorities were obliged to reveal any relevant details to the defence and had only Donaldson been on trial no problem would have arisen. The difficulty facing the prosecution was that unless the presiding judge ruled otherwise, they would have to tell Donaldson’s co-defendants, one of whom, Ciaran Kearney, was his son-in-law, that the man standing beside them in the dock had been a British spy for around two decades. The judge refused an application from the prosecution to keep the information secret and, faced with the prospect that the trial would collapse in spectacular fashion, the plug was pulled.
The detail of what happened next is far from clear but the events followed upon each other like scenes from a spy movie. On December 15, Donaldson was contacted by a Special Branch officer and shortly afterwards met Sinn Fein’s Northern chairman, Declan Kearney, to confess his secret past. Two days later Gerry Adams announced that Donaldson had admitted to being a spy while Donaldson himself read a statement to RTE television in which he denied there had been a spying ring at Stormont but admitted: “I was recruited in the 1980s after compromising myself during a vulnerable time in my life. Since then I have worked for British intelligence and the RUC/PSNI Special Branch.”79 Donaldson had a notorious reputation as a womanizer but his sexual appetite apparently ranged wider. According to a security source, the British recruited Donaldson when they found out about one of his sexual peccadilloes and blackmailed him. But for some time before Stormontgate he had “gone dead as an agent.”80 According to security sources, Donaldson was working for a GHQ intelligence unit headed by Bobby Storey, and ran the spy ring, using his post as Sinn Fein’s head of administration as cover.81 For reasons that remain unexplained, he had not told his handlers about the Stormont spying operation and a wish to punish their out-of-control agent was one reason why he was charged.82 Gerry Adams claimed that the PSNI had warned Donaldson that he was about to be “outed” by the media and it was this that caused him to confess to republican colleagues. It may have been that forcing Donaldson into the open was the Special Branch’s final revenge on their errant agent.
The revelation that Donaldson had been a long-term traitor came as a deep shock to the wider Provisional movement and set off an almost hysterical bout of speculation about which senior figure would be exposed next. Donaldson, who was from the Short Strand area of Belfast, had been in the IRA from the outset. He was interned along with figures like Bobby Sands, subsequently rose in the IRA (this writer first interviewed him as a Belfast Brigade explosives expert in the late 1970s) and later was entrusted with delicate missions, such as a trip in the late 1980s to Lebanon for talks with Hezbollah in a bid to obtain the release of the Belfast hostage Brian Keenan (no relation to the IRA leader of the same name), held by Islamic Jihad for five years. By the time of Stormontgate, he was in the outer circle just beyond the Adams think tank, often charged with ensuring that leadership decisions were fully and properly enforced. His proximity to the inner circle was the reason for the widespread shock in the IRA and Sinn Fein since this opened up the possibility that British intelligence not only knew about the Adams strategy but had helped to shape it. Those who had dealings with Donaldson in the years before he was exposed as a spy knew him as a devoted disciple of the peace process strategy who would often become angrily defensive when others questioned where the process was taking republicanism.
Donaldson’s outing provoked charges from Gerry Adams of dirty tricks by “securocrats” who were trying to provoke, he said, another peace process crisis by forcing the IRA to execute him for informing. But there was evidence elsewhere to suggest that British intelligence had used Donaldson in the past to advance the peace process rather than to undermine it.
In the autumn of 1988, as the first public talks between Sinn Fein and the SDLP climaxed, Donaldson was sent to New York to be the IRA’s representative in the United States. From his very first night in the Bronx, where he was to live for the next year, Donaldson set about undermining figures who would later oppose the Adams strategy. The two principal people in his sights were the U.S. commander of the IRA, Gabe Megahey, a Belfast man who had lived in New York since the 1970s, and Martin Galvin, an Irish-American lawyer who was the publicity director of Noraid, the support group for IRA prisoners, and publisher of its weekly paper, the Irish People. Megahey once described himself as “a hard-liner”83 who was distinctly unenthusiastic about the republican movement’s political direction while Galvin was seen as an obstacle to Sinn Fein’s plans to leave its working-class Irish-American base behind and move into the American political and corporate mainstream.
The night Donaldson arrived in New York, Megahey and Galvin took him out for a drink in one of the many bars in Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, then a largely Irish area known for its IRA sympathies. Galvin had another appointment and after a while he left Megahey and Donaldson talking and drinking. The next morning Megahey rang Galvin in alarm to say that Donaldson had told him that the Belfast leadership wanted Galvin out and his days were numbered. Donaldson denied this, suggesting Megahey had a drink problem, while Donaldson’s boss in Belfast, think tank chairman Ted Howell also denied it.84 (Later Megahey’s dislike and suspicions of Donaldson sharpened when he was seen buying drinks for FBI men in the same Bainbridge Avenue bar.) Donaldson then moved against Megahey, first introducing him to a Belfast man who had been thrown out of Ireland by the IRA as a security risk and then reporting Megahey to Belfast for consorting with him. The IRA’s commander in America was stood down and nearly court-martialled. Megahey, who had a fierce shouting match with Donaldson over the matter, later recalled the IRA representative’s penchant for creating dissension: “He was always saying things like: ‘Oh, Ireland doesn’t like this person, Ireland doesn’t like that person.’ These were very hardworking people in Noraid being sidelined.”85
Donaldson drove other long-time Noraid activists to the margins of the group, people who were hard-line republicans and potential obstacles to the Adams peace process strategy. Important projects were sabotaged, like a proposed hunger strike movie starring Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. Whenever complaints were sent to Belfast, Ted Howell would invariably leap to his defence, saying, “Denis has tremendous Army credentials,… he was impeccable.”86 The clues that Donaldson was not what he seemed to be are evident in hindsight. He was never harassed by the FBI, was allowed to travel freely back and forth to Ireland and spoke openly about IRA matters on the telephone. He also took long trips to Cincinnati, allegedly to visit relatives but possibly to meet his handlers—but no one checked. His successor, Hugh Feeney, one of the 1973 London bombers, was by contrast arrested not long after his arrival in the United States and deported.
Megahey opposed the Adams strategy but later moved back into the leadership camp when the U.S. government threatened to deport him because of a prison term he had served for attempting to buy a surface-to-air missile from an FBI agent. Galvin quit his Noraid positions in 1994 after the first IRA cease-fire and following his departure Noraid was gradually run down and replaced by Friends of Sinn Fein (FoSF), a business-friendly, distinctly IRA-free support and fund-raising group. While Noraid had led street protests against British policy, raised money for IRA causes and sheltered IRA fugitives from Ireland, FoSF lobbied corporate Irish-America and politicians in Congress. Sinn Fein moved out of the backrooms of bars in the Bronx into the boardrooms of Park Avenue and Donaldson helped do the groundwork. Had his handlers really been out to undermine the peace process then it is more likely they would have instructed him to bolster Megahey, Galvin and other hard-liners in Noraid rather than undermine them.
BY THE TIME Denis Donaldson was revealed as a British spy, the IRA was powerless to take action against him, at least officially. To have done so, in the post-Northern Bank/Robert McCartney atmosphere, would have been such a serious breach of the cease-fire that it could have sunk Sinn Fein entirely. Although this example of IRA impotence against the work of British intelligence was a persuasive index of the changed times, the Provisionals had long employed double standards when it came to dealing with informers. While someone like Freddie Scappaticci, who had done more damage to the IRA than a dozen spies put together, had been allowed to live in order to spare the Adams leadership any embarrassment, others, like twenty-four-year-old Seamus Morgan from Dungannon, County Tyrone, were not so fortunate. Morgan’s crime against the IRA was to betray an empty arms dump and he paid for it with his life. He was shot dead and his body thrown by a roadside near Forkhill, County Armagh, in March 1982, his hands tied behind his back and white tape wrapped tightly over his eyes. His captors fed him whisky and vodka while he cried over photos of his children before his life was abruptly ended.87 The human rights group British Irish Rights Watch lists Seamus Morgan as one of Scap’s many victims.88
Donaldson appears to have believed that the days of the IRA killing traitors had gone forever. There seems to be no other explanation for his decision not just to stay in Ireland but to move to the Glenties, in County Donegal, to an area frequented by republicans and not far from a part of the county—one of Ireland’s most beautiful and remote areas—that had been dubbed “Costa del Provo” by the media. In fact the abundance of holiday homes owned by IRA and Sinn Fein leaders included a four-bedroom, £150,000 summer retreat in Gortahork built by Gerry Adams.89
Donaldson settled in a cottage some eight kilometers from Glenties on a remote bog road and it was there in mid-March 2006 that he was tracked down by a reporter from the Northern tabloid newspaper the Sunday World, who briefly interviewed him. Still denying there had been a Stormont spy ring, Donaldson opined: “All conflicts end in political solutions—it’s the only way.” Asked about his future, he replied, gesturing around him: “This is it.”90 The last person to see Denis Donaldson alive was sheep farmer Pat Bonner, who saw him driving his car in the midmorning of April 3, 2006. On the afternoon of the next day, Donaldson was found dead, lying near the front door of his cottage. A shotgun blast from close range had taken part of his right arm off and two spent cartridges were lying on the floor.
The IRA quickly issued a statement denying any part in his death. The authorities on both sides of the Border now believe that IRA members did kill him but that the operation was probably not authorized by the leadership. Gerry Adams issued a statement dissociating “Sinn Fein and indeed all those republicans who support the peace process” from the killing.
Even if the IRA Army Council had authorized Donaldson’s killing, Gerry Adams and his closest colleagues had contrived a way to avoid any suggestion they had been involved in the decision. Around the time of the July 2005 IRA statement that formally ended the armed campaign, Adams, McGuinness and Kerry Sinn Fein TD Martin Ferris had all quit the Army Council and three veteran activists, Bernard Fox, a former hunger striker from Belfast, Brian Arthurs from County Tyrone and Martin Lynch from Belfast, had replaced them. At the same time a seriously ill Brian Keenan was replaced by Sean “Spike” Murray, a Belfast activist who had succeeded Martin McGuinness as Northern commander in 1996. This move was designed to finally cleanse the Adams–McGuinness leadership of any IRA traces and to end damaging speculation about the Sinn Fein politicians’ part in future IRA actions—but it was a fiction. According to republican sources, Adams and McGuinness continued to control the Army Council, but from behind the throne. “Have you ever met [IRA chief of staff] Slab?” asked one former activist. “If you had you would know that he needs their advice and counsel, he’s that type. No IRA volunteer I know of has ever met Slab by himself. He always has someone with him to explain and guide him and it’s the same with the Army Council.”91 At least one of the three replacements, Bernard Fox, eventually realized the scale of the fraud and resigned in protest, but not before harsh words were exchanged with Martin McGuinness and Brian Keenan.92
It had been an annus horribilis or two for Gerry Adams and his colleagues in the Provisional leadership, but it did not end with Donaldson’s killing. In a burst of exuberance after Sinn Fein’s electoral triumphs, the West Belfast-based Andersonstown News group, publishers of weekly community papers and an Irish-language paper, unveiled a new, all-Ireland daily paper in January 2005 that would aggressively promote an Irish republican view of the world. Daily Ireland was a barely disguised platform for Sinn Fein and its appearance invited comparisons with the now defunct Irish Press group which had been founded by Eamon de Valera and supported his Fianna Fail party. Although a formal association was denied, the fact that, for example, its managing director Mairtin O Muilleoir was a former Belfast Sinn Fein councillor strengthened the suspicion. Irish justice minister Michael McDowell openly linked the Provos with the paper and compared it to the Nazi party newspaper Volkischer Beobachter.
If the founders of Daily Ireland imagined there was a market hungry for the Sinn Fein gospel, as there had been for de Valera’s Irish Press, they were to be sadly mistaken. The paper never managed to sell more than 10,000 copies a day, a miserable tally compared to other Irish newspapers: the Irish Independent’s circulation is around 160,000, the Irish Times has sales of 117,000 and the Irish News, which circulates only in Northern Ireland, sells 50,000 copies a day. Daily Ireland wasn’t even approaching a break-even point and in September 2006, after just 475 issues, the paper folded. Mairtin O Muilleoir blamed the British for refusing to allow Daily Ireland to tender for public service advertisements, thus starving the paper of revenue. The British responded by saying that the paper’s circulation was too low to be considered viable and pointed out that the Northern Ireland Office had given £556,000 in grants to the Andersontown News and £368,000 to the group’s Irish publication.93 The real reason Daily Ireland collapsed was because it failed to attract enough readers and that was a depressing message for Sinn Fein. It raised some troubling questions for the party’s leaders: was Sinn Fein’s popularity based on its ability to guide the IRA into peace rather than its politics? And once the IRA had completed that journey, would people still vote for Sinn Fein?
Three days after two shotgun barrels ended Denis Donaldson’s life, British premier Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern travelled to Armagh city to announce one more initiative. The suspended Assembly would be revived in mid-May and a deadline of November 24 set for agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP. If there was no deal by then, the Good Friday Agreement would be shelved. On May 22, Gerry Adams stood up in the Assembly chamber and nominated lan Paisley as first minister and Martin McGuinness as his deputy. Paisley’s response was curt. “Certainly not,” he replied. The circle had been closed. In 1964, riots over an Irish tricolour displayed in the window of a republican election office on the Falls Road, fomented by Ian Paisley, had persuaded a sixteen-year-old Gerry Adams to join the IRA’s junior wing. Forty-two years later they would once again be joined, but in a way neither could ever have imagined or foreseen.
In the weeks that followed, the DUP and Sinn Fein jostled for advantage in the talks that everyone knew would take place in the autumn, notwithstanding Paisley’s abrupt rebuff of Adams. Speculation that the Provo leaders would sign up to the new policing arrangements intensified but there could be no doubt that, like the cease-fires, the Good Friday Agreement, the principle of consent and IRA decommissioning beforehand, grassroots reservations would be skilfully managed to ensure a result already decided by the leadership.
In the late summer of 2006, republican circles in Northern Ireland were alive with stories of seasoned activists finally quitting the cause they had spent their adult lives serving. But no one expected them to flock to the dissidents or foment rebellion. It was far too late for any of that. As old comrades left, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness donned the mantle of international peacemakers, shrugged off the unresolved problems of Northern Ireland and strutted the global stage to offer their services— Adams in the Basque country to help broker a cease-fire between ETA and the Spanish government, and as a conduit between Israel and Hamas; while Martin McGuinness journeyed to Sri Lanka to urge the Tamil Tigers to learn the lessons of the Irish peace process and end its war.
As for the IRA, one well-placed security source offered this judgement: “They are adhering to the bargain. Their civil administration is not giving out punishment beatings, there is no major criminality, recruitment has stopped, we assume they have a handful of guns for self-protection but weapons are no longer an issue. They see the future entirely as being political.94
In this sense it really didn’t matter whether or not there was a deal between the DUP and Sinn Fein. After thirty-five bloody years and nearly 4,000 deaths, the war was finally and undeniably over.