Through most of the 1980s, the ‘Brits’ had almost despaired of finding an internal political solution in Northern Ireland that might bring an end to the conflict which by the beginning of the decade had claimed well over 2,000 lives, almost 600 of them were soldiers and policemen.1 Given that there were precious few signs that unionists were prepared to reach a realistic political accommodation with the nationalist SDLP, the ‘Brits’ felt they were banging their heads against a brick wall. Nevertheless, they realized that politics could not be allowed to die, not least because they saw Sinn Fein making significant political gains in the wake of the hunger strike. Accordingly, British political strategy through most of the decade ran on twin tracks: to try to stem the rise of Sinn Fein, and to bring the Dublin Government into the political equation in order to boost the constitutional nationalists of the SDLP. The ‘Brits’ had no intention of giving in and capitulating to IRA violence. A new context had to be explored in which the political deadlock might gradually be broken. For most of the decade, this context certainly did not include Sinn Fein. They were to be marginalized not encouraged. On the threshold of the decade, the NIO’s Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Kenneth Stowe, who had been instrumental in ending the first hunger strike, wrestled with the problem and decided a new, more imaginative approach had to be tried.
In dealing with all these issues in Northern Ireland, one was in a perpetual state of exploration. Will this help, can we make some ground here, can we open up a subject in this way? Can we see a way of just inching our way forward? What was clear to me was that we could not address our concerns solely in a dialogue between London and Belfast. It was unreal to suppose that we could achieve a stable society in Northern Ireland and one with an economic future without the collaboration of the Republic. Therefore we wanted to create an axis between London and Dublin as well. The Irish Government also wished to create it, as it could not have been done only from one side. Whatever one attempted in Northern Ireland, sooner or later you would hit a veto somewhere. What we wanted to do was to broaden the ground of debate, to create a wider context, remembering always that we were now addressing another partner in Europe. It’s to do with looking at the overall relationship of two member states within it, each of whom has a profound interest in the stability of Northern Ireland.
Sir Kenneth set the political compass for the course that almost two decades later was to lead to the Good Friday Agreement. Certainly he did not foresee where it would lead at the time and simply plotted the direction with his fingers crossed, secure in the knowledge that it had to be an improvement on the political atrophy in the North. He knew that a start had to be made with the two Prime Ministers who had both come to power in 1979, Mrs Thatcher in London and Charles Haughey in Dublin. It was appropriate that Downing Street should play host for the inaugural meeting, held on 21 May 1980. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister was mindful that unionists might get the wrong idea when they discovered she had been dining with the Taoiseach who ten years earlier had been involved in the gun-running scandal that engulfed the Irish government.2 With this in mind, Mrs Thatcher told the House of Commons on the eve of the meeting that ‘the future of the constitutional affairs of Northern Ireland is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland, this government and this Parliament and no one else.’3 It seemed like Haughey was being given his marching orders before he even crossed the threshhold of Number Ten.
The following day, the Taoiseach arrived bearing the gifts of a Georgian silver teapot, which was much appreciated by the British Prime Minister who was not averse to flattery and charm. They lunched in the small dining room at Number Ten and Sir Kenneth was well pleased with the result. ‘It was a significant step forward in a new relationship,’ he said. ‘The exchanges were courteous and formal. I think they were only too well aware of their own standing and what lay behind them, so they were very cautious.’ Unionists were behind Mrs Thatcher and republicans in his Fianna Fail party behind Charles Haughey. ‘There was no personal animosity, neither do I recall there being any personal warmth. This was very, very high-level political business and they were two very accomplished politicians at work. That seemed to me to be the essence of their relationship.’ The post-prandial communiqué referred to a ‘unique relationship’ between the two countries and promised closer political cooperation.4 There was self-interest on both sides. Thatcher wanted tougher security from Dublin and more speedy extradition of IRA suspects from the South whilst Haughey, true to the tradition of his party and family (his father had been commander of the IRA’s Northern division),5 wanted the ‘Brits’ out of the North, although not at the point of a gun.
Later that year, on 8 December 1980, in the shadow of the first hunger strike, Haughey reciprocated his new-found friend’s hospitality by entertaining the highest-powered British delegation ever to visit the Irish Republic in the splendour of Dublin Castle, once the seat of British power in Ireland. The meeting was officially part of the European bi-laterals between member governments. The delegation consisted of Mrs Thatcher, Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, Home Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, and Northern Ireland Secretary, Humphrey Atkins. The resultant communiqué became a political landmark: the British and Irish Governments agreed to set up special study groups to examine ‘the totality of relationships within these islands’.6
Despite the impression an over-eager Haughey tried to create, however, the constitutional position of Northern Ireland was not discussed. There were predictable roars of ‘betrayal’ from Ian Paisley and profound dismay amongst unionists. But Stowe was encouraged. ‘The points in that communiqué were significant and have remained significant, although they were not able to be exploited very quickly.’ At the time, Sir Kenneth could have had no idea of just how significant they were to be, given the way the politics were to unfold. ‘If you roll the clock on nearly twenty years, that is pretty well what the Good Friday agreement has achieved,’ he said. ‘But we had no expectation then that it would ever get that far. We could hope, but it was no more than a very, very early stage in identifying that the relationship between London and Dublin could be of crucial importance in resolving the problems of Northern Ireland and to mutual benefit.’
Even as the two Prime Ministers met, events were coming to a head in the Maze prison whose repercussions were in the long term to change the shape of Northern Ireland’s political landscape. The ending of the first hunger strike led to the impasse over prisoners wearing their own clothes which in turn led to the second hunger strike and the election of Bobby Sands to Westminster. It was proof to the Provisionals that politics worked. Nor was Sands’s election the aberration the sceptics portrayed it to be. When Sands died and the parliamentary seat became vacant again, Sinn Fein’s Owen Carron, who had been Sands’s election agent, contested the by-election as an ‘Anti-H Block Proxy Political Prisoner’ candidate and won, increasing Sands’s vote by 786 on an increased turnout of 88.6 per cent.7
Two months later during Sinn Fein’s Ard Fheis (annual conference) at the Mansion House in Dublin, Danny Morrison took the platform to assure the party faithful and the sceptics in the Republican Movement that politics did not mean that the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ was about to take second place. Morrison will go down in the history of the Republican Movement’s ‘struggle’ for many reasons but he will be best remembered for coining the phrase the ‘Armalite and Ballot Box’. Contrary to the belief that the concept and the wording of it had been carefully discussed beforehand with Adams and McGuinness and the leadership of the Republican Movement, it was a purely ‘off-the-cuff’ remark that Morrison thought up minutes before he rose to his feet. When the words were uttered, McGuinness, who was sitting beside Morrison on the platform, looked up and said, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Morrison seemed to be making up policy on the hoof. In fact, the phraseology was not as neat as history would have it. His actual words were, ‘Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’8 However, the actual words came out, they did encapsulate the policy that the Republican Movement was to follow for most of the next two decades until the IRA’s second cease-fire, following Tony Blair’s election in 1997. The notion that Provisionals could move towards their goal of a united Ireland by pursuing a twin strategy of violence and politics convinced most of the doubters who by this time had realized that, were the ‘Brits’ to leave Ireland, it wouldn’t be at the point of a gun. The ‘long war’ was now to be fought on two fronts.
A year after Morrison’s exhortation, the strategy passed its first test when, on 20 October 1982, Sinn Fein’s triumvirate of Adams, McGuinness and Morrison all won seats in the election to the Assembly set up by Secretary of State, James Prior, in which he held out the promise of ‘rolling devolution’. The theory was that the more responsible its elected members turned out to be, the more powers Westminster would devolve. But it never worked out that way and the Assembly was finally dissolved in 1986. The elections were the first that Sinn Fein had contested on a province-wide basis since the outbreak of the conflict in 1969. The party won five of the seventy-eight seats with 10.1 per cent of the vote. The SDLP, Sinn Fein’s rival for the nationalist vote, took 18.8 per cent.9 A week later, the IRA exploded the 1,000-lb bomb that killed the three policemen on the Kinnego embankment. Armalite and Ballot Box were marching hand in bloody hand. But Sinn Fein’s most spectacular electoral success came at the Westminster General Election on 9 June 1983 when Gerry Adams contested the safe nationalist West Belfast seat and won, beating the incumbent, Gerry Fitt (formerly SDLP but now running as an Independent candidate), and the SDLP’s Dr Joe Hendron. The nationalist vote was split, giving Adams a famous victory with a majority of 5,445 votes over Hendron who came second. The contest was bitterly fought with Adams’s nationalist rivals presenting the issue as a choice between violence and democracy. Province-wide, Sinn Fein won 13.4 per cent of the vote while the SDLP won 17.9 per cent.10 The writing was now on the walls of Belfast and Derry and James Prior did not like what he saw.
I think my reaction was almost one of despair that they were going to elect someone whom we considered to be a terrorist and who was not going to play any part at Westminster. I had no doubts at all that he belonged to the Provisional IRA. I think he encapsulated the Armalite and Ballot Box completely. What a waste the whole thing was.11
Five months later, on 13 November 1983, the new MP for West Belfast was elected as President of Sinn Fein, ousting Ruairi O’Bradaigh who had led the political wing of the Republican Movement since 1970. It was not only a clear indication that the Northerners were now in charge but an early sign of the split that was to come three years later when O’Bradaigh, David O’Connell and the dissidents who supported them walked out of the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis to form Republican Sinn Fein (RSF). The issue that tore the Movement apart was its new leadership’s determination to change Sinn Fein’s constitution so its members could take seats in Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament. This was anathema to the traditionalists and the ways were parted with a degree of bad blood. At least there was no real blood on the floor. Supporters of the dissidents subsequently set up the Continuity IRA (CIRA), claiming that it alone had the right to claim the IRA’s historic mantle since the Provisional IRA had sold out. In his first Presidential address, two months after thirty-eight IRA prisoners made their dramatic mass break-out from the Maze, Adams reassured delegates of the primacy of the IRA’s military campaign.
Armed struggle is a necessary and morally correct form of resistance in the Six Counties against a Government whose presence is rejected by the vast majority of the Irish people … There are those who tell us that the British Government will not be moved by armed struggle. As has been said before, the history of Ireland and of British colonial involvement throughout the world tells us that they will not be moved by anything else. I am glad therefore to pay tribute to the freedom fighters – the men and women Volunteers of the IRA.12
On 18 December 1983, the ‘freedom fighters’ took their campaign to London once again, killing three policemen (including a WPC) and three civilians in a car bomb attack outside Harrods when Knightsbridge was crowded with Christmas shoppers. The police had been called to the scene minutes before the blast. A hundred people were injured, including fourteen members of the Metropolitan Police. With three dead civilians and so many injured, the IRA said the attack had not been authorized by the Army Council.13 It was not what the new President of Sinn Fein had had in mind.
A year later, the IRA struck the most devastating blow in its history when it almost wiped out Mrs Thatcher and most of her Cabinet as they gathered at the Grand Hotel in Brighton for the Conservative Party’s annual conference. At 2.45 a.m. on 16 October 1984, a 20-lb bomb strategically placed behind a bath panel in Room 629 exploded, collapsing four floors in the centre of the building like a house of cards. The bomb had been triggered by a sophisticated electronic timing device, similar to those found in video recorders.14 It had been set about a month earlier and timed to explode when the Prime Minister and members of her Cabinet were asleep. Five members of the Conservative Party were killed, including Sir Anthony Berry MP (59) and Roberta Wakeham (54), the wife of John Wakeham, the Tory Chief Whip. More than thirty people were injured, many of them seriously, including Margaret Tebbit, the wife of the Industry Secretary, Norman Tebbit, who was himself dug out of the rubble after a four-hour rescue operation by firemen.15 Mrs Thatcher, whose bathroom was badly damaged by the explosion, miraculously survived. In defiance of the IRA and its works, the Prime Minister insisted it was business as usual and addressed the conference as planned. She received an eight-minute standing ovation.
Many months before the conference I had talked to a senior Provisional. He was surrounded by young lieutenants who showed respect for the man who was clearly regarded as their military leader. At some stage, Mrs Thatcher’s name inevitably came into the conversation. The person looked me straight in the eye and said she was going to pay. This was a time when memories of the hunger strike were fading – at least for the British – and I naïvely asked, ‘For what?’ ‘You’ll see,’ he said. Brighton was no doubt what he meant.
In the wake of the devastation and death, the IRA issued a chilling statement.
Mrs Thatcher will now realize that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.16
A criminal investigation on an unparalleled scale immediately got under way. Almost 4,000 dustbins of debris were removed for forensic examination, 38,000 records were logged and 6,000 statements taken. More than 800 inquiries were made in fifty countries as detectives tried to trace guests on the Grand Hotel’s list.17 In particular, police inquiries focused on the previous occupants of Room 629. In an astonishing piece of detective work, all were traced, except one man who had signed the registration card as ‘Roy Walsh’ and booked into the hotel with another man a month earlier. ‘Roy Walsh’ was the name of a member of the IRA unit who had bombed the Old Bailey and other London targets in 1973. On the registration card the police found a palm print and a finger print which they eventually matched with those on record of a teenager convicted for theft in England many years before.
The prints belonged to Patrick Magee, a Belfast man whose family had moved to Norwich when he was four years old and whose grandfather had been in the IRA in the 1920s. Magee left school at thirteen, got into trouble with the authorities and police, and eventually returned to Belfast in 1971 and joined the IRA.18 After a complex surveillance operation, he was arrested on 24 June 1985 in a Glasgow flat along with an IRA unit that had been planning to explode bombs with delayed timers at several English seaside resorts. Arrested with Magee in the raid were Peter Sherry, a former Sinn Fein by-election candidate who had met up with Magee at Carlisle railway station when Magee had been under surveillance; Gerard McDonnell, another Maze escaper; and two women, Martina Anderson, a former Derry beauty queen, and Ella O’Dwyer, from a respectable middle-class family in the Irish Republic with no republican connections.19 On 11 June 1986, all five were sentenced for conspiring to cause explosions in England. Magee was the only one convicted for the Brighton bomb. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he served a minimum of thirty-five years. In fact, he became the 277th paramilitary prisoner to be released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, having served fourteen years of his sentence. On 22 June 1999, the ‘Brits’ ’ most notorious prisoner, and now a graduate of the Open University, walked free from the Maze prison as Dr Patrick Magee Phd, BA (first class hons).20
Far from making the Government more amenable to engaging in dialogue with the Republican Movement, the outrage of Brighton made it even more determined to hit back on both the military and political fronts. Mrs Thatcher, the Iron Lady of the hunger strike, was in no mood to do business with members of an organization that had just killed five of her friends and colleagues and tried to kill her. Four months after the Brighton bombing, on 28 February 1985, her determination was reinforced when an IRA mortar bomb hit the canteen of Newry RUC station, killing nine police officers as they were eating their evening meal or relaxing. Newry was the RUC’s Warrenpoint, the Force’s biggest loss in a single day in the whole of the conflict. Despite the setbacks inflicted by the SAS, the IRA was still a force to be reckoned with.
If the SAS and the ‘Det’ were spiking some of the IRA’s Armalites, the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) was designed to spoil Sinn Fein’s Ballot Box. It was signed by Mrs Thatcher and the Irish Prime Minister, Dr Garret FitzGerald, at Hillsborough Castle, County Down, on 15 November 1985, nine months after the IRA’s lethal mortar attack. From the point of view of the ‘Brits’, it was designed primarily to do two things: to arrest the apparently inexorable rise of Sinn Fein (in May its candidates won fifty-nine seats in the district council elections – which it contested for the first time – with 11.8 per cent of the first-preference votes);21 and to enlist more support from Dublin for more stringent security measures against the IRA who, despite Mrs Thatcher’s discussions with Charles Haughey at the beginning of the decade, were still using the Republic as a haven and operational base with apparent impunity. The discussions that led up to the signing of the Agreement were conducted in the utmost secrecy by a joint Anglo-Irish working party led by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, and his Irish opposite number, Dermot Nally. Mrs Thatcher instructed Sir Robert Andrew, the NIO Permanent Under Secretary, not to mention a word in Belfast since a leak could torpedo the whole endeavour. Being his Prime Minister’s obedient servant but also feeling loyalty to his Northern Irish officials in Belfast who were out of the loop, Sir Robert observed the letter of the Prime Minister’s instruction. ‘I told the Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service in strict confidence in London,’ he said, ‘because I wanted his reactions.’ Being a unionist from hat to handbag, Mrs Thatcher was never wholly enthusiastic about the Agreement anyway and was only finally persuaded of its merits by Sir Robert Armstrong. He regarded getting the Prime Minister to put pen to paper at Hillsborough as the greatest achievement of his governmental career.
The first that people outside this tight circle of Whitehall mandarins saw of the Agreement was when it was signed at Hillsborough Castle on 15 November 1985. From the outset, both Governments agreed in Article 1 that ‘any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of the people of Northern Ireland’. They recognized too that ‘the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland is for no change in the status of Northern Ireland’.22 These were the twin pillars of what became known as the principle of ‘consent’ and were to underpin all political developments for the next fifteen years. Dublin was now to have a direct say in Northern Irish affairs through the establishment of a Permanent Representative’s office at Maryfield outside Belfast and regular meetings of what became known as the Anglo-Irish Conference, at which British and Irish Ministers could co-ordinate policy and discuss contentious issues and matters of mutual interest, not least security policy. The Conference, as set out in Article 4, was to provide a framework ‘for the accommodation of the rights and identities of the two traditions’ and for ‘peace, stability and prosperity throughout the island of Ireland by promoting reconciliation, respect for human rights, co-operation against terrorism and the development of economic, social and cultural co-operation’. To Mrs Thatcher, Article 9 on cross-border cooperation on security was crucial, setting out mechanisms for co-ordinating ‘threat assessments, exchange of information, liaison structures, technical co-operation, training of personnel and operational resources’.
Nationalists and the SDLP were jubilant at what they saw as the provision of a voice – albeit through Dublin – they had long lacked. Despite the ‘guarantee’ underpinning the whole Agreement that a majority would not be coerced into constitutional change against its will, unionists were outraged and saw it as the latest and most perfidious betrayal by the ‘Brits’. Thousands of loyalists took to the streets to protest, most memorably at a huge rally outside Belfast City Hall, where Paisley roared one word three times to a crowd of around 100,000. ‘Never! Never! Never!’ Street protests turned to violence, policemen were attacked and their houses burned. There was even the bizarre sight of one ‘loyalist’ hitting a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary over the head with a Union Jack. It seemed like the long prophesied Protestant backlash had finally arrived. Mrs Thatcher and the Chief Constable, Sir John Hermon, stood firm. This time the ‘Brits’ were not going to cave in as they did over the 1974 UWC strike. Looking back on that turbulent time, Sir Robert Andrew provided a rare insight into the way officials were thinking and Mrs Thatcher’s response to their thoughts. In the run-up to the Agreement, Sir Robert and other senior officials were at Number 10 discussing Northern Ireland with Mrs Thatcher.
We were looking at the various options, from a united Ireland, to redrawing the boundary, to the full integration of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom and all the other possibilities. At one point the Prime Minister said, ‘Well, where shall we be in a hundred years’ time?’ And I and another very senior official, without collusion, said, ‘Well, probably a united Ireland, Prime Minister.’ To which the Prime Minister said rather forcefully, ‘Never! Never!’
In the light of his remark, I asked Sir Robert Andrew to elaborate on his view about the likelihood or inevitability of a united Ireland at some stage in the future.
The demographic trend is moving towards an eventual Catholic majority in Northern Ireland. Of course you can’t be certain that all Catholics would vote in favour of a united Ireland. You just can’t tell; but even if 51 per cent voted in favour of a united Ireland you’d still have 49 per cent who were opposed to it. So I think the thing to do is that somehow, between now and the time when there might perhaps be a vote in favour of a united Ireland, which the British Government has pledged to respect, one has got to try to make sure that if that transition were to come about, it would do so in a peaceful way rather than in a non-peaceful way.
Arguably, this is what the long-term political strategy of the ‘Brits’ is all about. But the first step was to end the violence by making it clear to the IRA that they were not going to win, at least not through ‘armed struggle’. The ‘Group’ – the SAS and the ‘Det’ – were the most powerful instruments in making sure the message hit home.