John Major knew that if he was to make any progress on Ireland he would have to win the next General Election since he was very much regarded as the caretaker Prime Minister whom fate had thrust into Margaret Thatcher’s shoes. He was also conscious that his Premiership had to be put to the nation which would bestow on him, or not, the authority to continue. Major called the election for 9 April 1992. The omens did not look good. At the start of the campaign, one of the Downing Street officials asked the Prime Minister’s wife, Norma Major, if she had ordered a removal van.1 He was being realistic not facetious, but there was no need for packing: Major remained in Downing Street with a majority of twenty-one seats, defying most predictions. The Labour pretender, Neil Kinnock, had run a highly professional, super-smooth campaign, orchestrated to the last sound-bite, carefully staged rally and soft-focus-image TV party political broadcast. In contrast, John Major took to his ‘soap box’, fending off eggs and other unsolicited missiles, to bring his message to the people. The soap box won. Ireland was never an issue in the campaign, nor had it ever been in any British General Election in living memory. There was good news for Major in Northern Ireland, too, with the SDLP vote up 2.4 per cent and the Sinn Fein vote down 1.4 per cent. But best news of all in the province for the Government was that Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat to the SDLP candidate, Dr Joe Hendron, not least because Protestants on the Shankill Road, part of the West Belfast parliamentary constituency, cast their votes strategically for Hendron to ensure Adams’s defeat. It was not often that loyalists voted for the SDLP.
The day after the election, as the Tories were still rubbing their eyes in partial disbelief and celebrating Major’s victory, the Government was given a reminder of what lay ahead when the IRA rocked the City of London with a huge explosion at the Baltic Exchange. Three people were killed in the blast, including a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Danielle Carter. The IRA’s warning was inadequate. The bomb caused £800 million worth of damage, eclipsing the £600 million that had been the total cost of the damage in Northern Ireland since the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969. The IRA had welcomed Major to Downing Street with mortars and were now serving him notice on the day after his victory that, although Ireland had not been an election issue, it had not gone away.
Major did not need reminding. With the giant sweep-up operation in the City under way and insurance companies holding their heads in their hands, Major reshaped his Cabinet and summoned his old friend Sir Patrick Mayhew to Downing Street. Mayhew, who had been Attorney-General since 1987, was at home when he got the call and did not know whether he was being summoned for a job or the sack. ‘It was a lovely sunny day,’ he told me, ‘so I picked a camellia that was in flower, stuck it in my buttonhole and up I went.’ Before the Prime Minister could say anything, Mayhew congratulated him on his ‘terrific achievement’ of winning the election on his own and said he just wanted to get that out of the way first. Major then offered him the job of Northern Ireland Secretary. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t say any of the solemn things that people are supposed to say on these occasions,’ he said, ‘I simply said, “Whoopee!”’
The Baltic Exchange bomb reinforced what the Prime Minister and his officials knew already from the mortar attack on Downing Street: however good intelligence on the IRA might be in the province, it was sadly lacking in London. Major ordered the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to carry out an urgent review and make recommendations to improve the structure of intelligence-gathering on the mainland. The review was conducted by Ian Burns who had been transferred from the Northern Ireland Office to the Home Office’s Police Department. Ever since its origins in 1883 (to combat Irish terrorism), the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch (then known as the Irish Special Branch) had been responsible for countering the IRA. Clearly by the early nineties, with mortar bombs raining down on Downing Street, there was a feeling in high places that Special Branch was not up to the job. MI5, which was gradually emerging from the shadows under its new Director-General, Stella Rimington, was waiting in the wings to take over. Reports of a fierce turf war between the Met’s Special Branch and MI5 were probably not exaggerated. The Security Service won and in May 1992 the Home Secretary announced that MI5 would take over as the lead agency in the battle against the IRA. There was dismay in Scotland Yard at what some Special Branch officers saw as a snub but a working relationship was established, bonded in the face of the common enemy.
One of MI5’s first acts in its new over-arching role was to visit every police force in the country to carry out an intelligence audit on every IRA suspect on their books. The result was 1,000 names which were then categorized and computerized. It then set about recruiting agents in Great Britain with connections going back to Belfast where most operations started. In Northern Ireland, one in every twenty people approached by MI5 officers with a view to becoming an agent signed up. Recruiting on the mainland was unlikely to prove any easier with an even tighter network of IRA activists.
In Downing Street, policy towards the IRA did not change. The message to the Republican Movement remained the same. Stop the killing and HMG will be prepared to listen. Sir Patrick Mayhew carried on where Peter Brooke had left off and sent the IRA another public message on 16 December 1992 in a keynote speech at Coleraine on ‘Culture and Identity’. It did not need decoding.
Unity cannot be brought nearer, let alone achieved, by dealing out death and destruction. It is not sensible to believe that any British Government will yield to an agenda for Ireland prosecuted by violent means … provided it is advocated constitutionally, there can be no proper reason for excluding any political objective from discussion. Certainly not the objective of a united Ireland through broad agreement freely and fairly agreed …
… in the event of a genuine and established cessation of violence, the whole range of responses that we have had to make to that violence could, and would, inevitably be looked at afresh …2
The words could almost have been taken from Merlyn Rees’s speaking notes in the run-up to the 1975 IRA cease-fire and the secret talks that followed.
Just over two months later, on 22 February 1993, the IRA made what John Major and Sir Patrick Mayhew considered an astonishing response that added an extra dimension to what Major had thought was possible. The Prime Minister had no doubt it came from the Provisional IRA’s Army Council (PAC), routed through Martin McGuinness. Major believed that both McGuinness and Adams were members of the PAC. ‘That a settlement could be delivered without them did not seem to me to be credible,’ he told me. ‘If there was to be an agreement, it had to involve Adams and McGuinness, so great was their authority within their own Movement.’
The response came in the form of a message that MI5 told Major and Mayhew had been sent by Martin McGuinness. The ‘message’ was transmitted by the Contact to the MI5 officer known as the British Government Representative (BGR), who then transmitted it to his superiors. They then passed it on to Number Ten and the NIO. Major received it late in the afternoon of a ‘pretty miserable, dreary, dark day’ as dusk was falling. He was working on his own in the Cabinet room when his Private Secretary came in with the ‘message’. It was written down as follows.
The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to an end. We wish to have an unannounced cease-fire in order to hold dialogue leading to peace. We cannot announce such a move as it will lead to confusion for the Volunteers because the Press will interpret it as surrender. We cannot meet the Secretary of State’s public renunciation of violence [as read into his Coleraine speech], but it would be given privately as long as we were sure we were not being tricked.3
Major and Mayhew both took advice from the Security Service and were assured that the message was genuine. Major knew he had to take it very seriously. If it was merely a publicity stunt, then the worst that could happen would be egg on the Prime Ministerial face. But if it was real, then there was the possibility of a genuine breakthrough leading to round-table talks and an acceptable settlement to the interminable dispute. Sir Patrick Mayhew was equally up-beat.
I certainly didn’t regard it as a ‘white flag’. I was very pleased that it had come and I certainly wasn’t expecting it. I wanted to regard it as a recognition that, contrary to the IRA’s belief over many years, the British Government was not going to be shoved away from the principle of consent and democracy by violent attacks, whether in Northern Ireland or in the City of London. If it was that, then I wanted to sustain that conversion to politics and abandonment of violence.
When the wording of the ‘message’ subsequently became public, McGuinness was enraged and denied he had ever said any such thing, let alone in a message. Given its provocative wording about needing ‘advice [from the ‘Brits’] on how to bring it to an end’, McGuinness could do little else. Whatever the interpretation put on it by Mayhew, its wording would suggest surrender and that was the last thing on McGuinness’s mind. The intelligence services had put the IRA under great pressure but had certainly not won a military victory. As the IRA rightly pronounced, it was ‘undefeated’. The flip side was that it had not won. There was almost certainly a degree of confusion over the ‘message’. It may have been that the Contact or, more likely, the BGR was interpreting too liberally McGuinness’s general sentiments in the hope of giving the peace process a much-needed impetus at a critical time.
Behind the scenes, events moved quickly.4 The British responded promptly to the ‘message’ they had received, assuring McGuinness in a document forwarded by the BGR, via the Contact, that ‘all those involved share a responsibility to work to end the conflict’; that there was need for ‘a healing process’; that it was essential that ‘both sides have a clear and realistic understanding of what it is possible to achieve’, and that there was ‘no blueprint’ but a search for ‘an agreed accommodation, not an imposed settlement, arrived at through an inclusive process in which the parties are free agents’. Critically, the Government emphasized that there was no question of accepting any prior objective of ‘ending partition’. It accepted, however, that ‘the eventual outcome of such a process could be a united Ireland but only on the basis of the consent of the people of Northern Ireland’.5 In the light of what was to happen a few days later, one sentence in HMG’s submission was of paramount importance. It stressed that ‘any dialogue could only follow a halt to violent activity’, which it accepted ‘in the first instance would have to be unannounced’.6 The document was dated 19 March 1993. When the BGR handed it over to the Contact, he also passed on an oral message recognizing the difficulties involved for both sides and warning ‘that all acts of violence hereafter could only enhance those difficulties and risks, quite conceivably to the point when the process would be destroyed’.7
The following day, 20 March 1993, the IRA exploded two bombs concealed in litter bins in Warrington, near Liverpool, when the town centre was packed with busy Saturday shoppers. Warnings were given but they were inadequate. Two young boys died in the blasts. One of them, Jonathan Ball, was only three years old. He had been out shopping for a Mother’s Day present. Twelve-year-old Tim Parry had been going to buy a pair of football shorts. Jonathan died cradled in a nurse’s arms and Tim died in hospital five days later. He had been running away from the first bomb and was caught by the second. Public revulsion was almost on the scale of Enniskillen. Thousands of letters of sympathy poured in, consoling the parents in their grief. A Timothy Parry Trust Fund was established to promote greater understanding between Great Britain and Ireland, North and South, and Tim’s parents became tireless campaigners for peace.8 Jonathan’s parents said, ‘If these initiatives lead to peace in Ireland, we shall be better able to bear our pain. If not, Jonathan’s death is a meaningless blasphemy.’9 As ever in such circumstances, it was difficult to find words of condemnation that were strong enough. Sir Patrick Mayhew expressed ‘disappointment’ as well as revulsion. ‘Here again they appeared to believe that violence, however disgusting and however random, was going to advance their political thinking,’ he said. ‘Equally it was important not to be deflected from our political analysis by yet another manifestation of that mistake.’ The ‘Brits’ intended to press on.
Following the Government’s message of 19 March, a face-to-face meeting in Derry between the BGR and Martin McGuinness had been scheduled for 23 March, arranged through the auspices of the Contact. The Provisionals expected that the BGR’s boss, John Deverell, would also be there. To the IRA, such a meeting would be a breakthrough. It was agreed by the Contact, the BGR and the Provisionals that both sides should be represented by two delegates with McGuinness and Gerry Kelly on the republican side and the BGR and John Deverell on the British side. When the meeting was arranged, neither party had any idea that Warrington would intervene. Neither McGuinness nor Kelly knew the minutiae of the IRA’s plans in England.
The meeting almost did not happen. The BGR turned up in Derry at the appointed time and place but Deverell did not. A degree of confusion surrounds what happened. Either Deverell realized that such a meeting would be inappropriate three days after Warrington, given the Government’s insistence that dialogue could only follow ‘a halt to violent activity’, or he had never intended to go anyway, or he knew nothing about it. Such are the unanswered questions that hang over this critical meeting. John Deverell did not live to provide an answer as he was one of twenty-five British intelligence officers who died on 2 June 1994 when their helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre on the way to a counter-terrorism conference.
In the end the Derry meeting only took place at the insistence of the Contact who knew how important it was to maintain his own credibility and the credibility of the peace process. The Contact was present and minutes were taken on the Provisionals’ side. When Sinn Fein subsequently published them, they made extraordinary reading. According to Sinn Fein, the BGR said that Mayhew, having tried to ‘marginalize and defeat the IRA’, had now changed tack, as evidenced by his Coleraine speech, which was ‘a significant move’: Mayhew was prepared to involve Sinn Fein, not because he liked them, but because he realized that the process ‘cannot work without them’. This preamble was, according to the Republican Movement’s minutes, then followed by a series of astonishing sentences.
Any settlement not involving all of the people North and South won’t work. A North/South settlement that won’t frighten unionists. The final solution is union. It is going to happen anyway. The historical train – Europe – determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change. This island will be as one.10
On the face of it, it seemed to be the message that the IRA had waited for more than two decades to hear from the ‘Brits’: that ‘the final solution is union’ and ‘this island will be as one’. I understand that Sinn Fein’s account of the meeting is broadly accurate, although the BGR was perhaps not quite as blunt as its record suggests. The minutes concluded by saying that the opportunity for formal meetings between the two sides ‘must be grasped’ as soon as possible. According to Sinn Fein, the BGR ended by saying that HMG would agree to talks the minute the IRA agreed to an undeclared cessation of violence. This suspension of violence would last for two to three weeks, during which time talks would take place. The BGR had already assured the Provisionals that at these delegation meetings, the British would convince the IRA that ‘armed struggle is no longer necessary’.11
Sinn Fein assumed, quite naturally, that the BGR was acting on behalf of HMG and was authorized to say what he did. He was, after all, the ‘British Government Representative’. Sir Patrick Mayhew did not find out about the meeting until many months later in the autumn of 1993 and was furious when he did. He regarded the meeting as a clear breach of HMG’s condition that there would be no face-to-face dialogue until the IRA had agreed to a cessation of violence, albeit unannounced. The Secretary of State had been kept in the dark and was appalled when he found out not only that the BGR had met McGuinness and Kelly but that he was alleged to have said what he did.
If it was true, it would have been dangerously and damagingly outside the remit because of reasons which hardly need explaining. So that was very unfortunate. It may have been an expression of this man’s personal views. It was certainly not an expression of the views of the British Government or a fulfilment of anything he’d been authorized to do or say.
One of Mayhew’s officials who was involved in the ‘back channel’ told me that the BGR ‘severly damaged’ HMG policy by having the face-to-face meeting. ‘When news of the secret meeting broke, there was anger, confusion and a feeling that we had been let down,’ he said. ‘Our whole strategy was to be straight with them [the Provisionals] and build up trust. We were “banging on” about no face-to-face meeting before an IRA cease-fire and they couldn’t understand that because they’d already had one. It just made things more difficult.’ What really happened at that vital meeting and what was actually said remains one of the unresolved mysteries of the secret, backstage manoeuvres that finally led to the IRA’s ‘cessation’ eighteen months later and the subsequent talks between the Government and the Republican Movement.
In the weeks and months that followed the Derry meeting between the BGR, McGuinness and Kelly, the talks about talks ran into the sand. In the view of the ‘Brits’ they were driven there by the IRA’s actions. On 24 April, the IRA launched a devastating attack in the heart of the City of London. This time the target was the NatWest tower in Bishopsgate. The bomb, made up of 1,000 lbs of fertilizer explosives packed into the back of a van, caused even more damage than the IRA bomb at the Baltic Exchange the previous year. The insurance bill was estimated to be more than £1,000 million. Despite the fact that eighteen ‘mostly accurate’ warnings were given, a News of the World photographer, Edward Henty (34), was killed.12 John Major’s reaction was similar to Sir Patrick Mayhew’s after Warrington. He was dismayed but not surprised.
Frankly, we thought it was likely to bring the whole process to an end. And we told them repeatedly that that was the case. They assumed that if they bombed and put pressure on the British at Bishopsgate or with some outrage or other, it would affect our negotiating position to their advantage. In that judgment they were wholly wrong. Every time they did that, they made it harder not easier for any movement to be made towards a settlement. They hardened our attitude, whereas they believed that their actions would soften it. That is a fundamental mistake the IRA have made with successive British governments throughout the last quarter of a century.
The Bishopsgate bomb was followed by a series of huge bombs in the centre of Belfast (20 May), Portadown (22 May) and Magherafelt (23 May), causing millions of pounds’ worth of damage. Major decided that enough was enough and, on 17 July 1993, after even more bombs and killings, sent a blunt message to the IRA. It said that a temporary halt to violence was not enough and that ‘dialogue leading to an inclusive political process’ could only begin ‘after we have received the necessary assurance that organized violence had been brought to an end’. Major described this as ‘a holding message’. ‘I thought it essential to show the Provisionals that these tactics would not wash … We were determined to make them realize that terrorism and talking were incompatible … [The message] repeated our insistence on a lasting end to violence. It began to seem we were in a blind alley.’13
By this time, Major was looking in other directions, too, because he realized that for a settlement to work it had to involve all parties. He recognized that the IRA were a critical component but by no means the only one. He also knew that if and when the Army Council declared ‘a lasting end to violence’, the Republican Movement would have to be realistic in what it thought it could achieve at the negotiating table with all the other parties and in particular with the unionists, assuming, of course, that they could be persuaded to sit in the same room and negotiate with the representatives of the IRA. The Prime Minister’s frustration with the IRA’s insistence on killing and talking at the same time was understandable. With this attitude ingrained in the republican psyche, there seemed little chance of making significant progress. No wonder Major thought he was in ‘a blind alley’. He firmly believed that the Provisionals were serious in seeking to end their campaign but felt that their actions were contradictory.
By the summer of 1993, several different dialogues were being conducted at different levels in different places with the common objective of trying to make the peace process work. The British were communicating indirectly with the IRA through the Contact. John Hume was talking to Gerry Adams. John Major was talking to the unionists and to Albert Reynolds in Dublin. And the loyalist paramilitaries, who also recognized that at some stage the killing would have to stop, were talking to the Belfast Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Roy Magee, and Archbishop Robin Eames, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.14 For the peace process to work, all strands would somehow have to be brought together. It was like juggling plates whilst wearing a blindfold. John Major, through whose fingers at some stage all the threads ran, did not underestimate the task. ‘Building a peace in Northern Ireland is like playing multi-dimensional chess,’ he said. ‘You need everything in place at the right time.’
Gerry Adams and John Hume had resumed in earnest the discussions they had begun in 1988, and on 24 April 1993 set out an agreed position on the elements for a settlement.
1 That an internal settlement [i.e. within Northern Ireland] is not a solution because it obviously does not deal with all the relationships at the heart of the problem.
2 That the Irish people as a whole have a right to national self-determination.
3 That the exercise of self-determination is a matter for agreement between the people of Ireland.
4 That an agreement is only achievable and viable if it can earn and enjoy the allegiance of the different traditions on this island.
Major knew that unionists would not accept this since to them ‘self-determination’ was a euphemism for ‘Brits Out’. Tempering this was one of the main purposes of Major’s dialogue with Reynolds. He had to persuade the Taoiseach that the critical factor in establishing a set of principles that would underpin any settlement was republican recognition that unionists must be allowed to give their consent to any agreement. In other words, they could not be coerced. The ‘consent’ principle was the key to any overall settlement. John Hume had long accepted the principle, and Albert Reynolds accepted it too.15 Gerry Adams, however, did not because the Republican Movement had always maintained that the unionists’ insistence on their right to say ‘no’ – the unionist ‘veto’ – had been the stumbling block to the resolution of the Irish problem.
John Major’s juggling was made even more difficult by the Westminster arithmetic. As his parliamentary majority became increasingly slender as a result of a string of lost by-elections, the votes of the nine Ulster Unionist MPs under their uncharismatic but politically astute leader, James Molyneaux, became increasingly critical to the Government’s survival. On 22 July 1993 Major only survived a critical vote on the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty (which was opposed by the powerful Euro-sceptic wing of his party) because of the support of the Ulster Unionists. Nevertheless, Major insisted that he never let the narrowness of his majority and the consequent importance of unionist votes in the House of Commons affect his decisions on Ireland. He bridles at any suggestion that he might have done. ‘That is a piece of propaganda that a proper light on history will show to be utterly false,’ he told me. ‘I can tell you categorically that at no time was there a deal with the unionist parties that put the survival of the Conservative Government before the peace process. At no time, in any way. I was not prepared to put at risk the process that I had started at the beginning of the 1990s for purely political ends. I was not prepared to do it and I did not.’
By autumn 1993, the situation had seldom looked bleaker as, once again, the province seemed on the brink of the abyss. On Saturday 23 October, two IRA men from Ardoyne, Thomas Begley and Sean Kelly, walked into Frizzell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road, carrying a bomb. They were dressed in white coats to give the impression they were making a delivery. Their target was an office of the UDA/UFF located directly above the shop. The IRA believed that Johnny Adair and the command staff of the UFF’s ‘C’ company were meeting there. The bomb had an eleven-second fuse, theoretically enough for the bombers to shout a warning and clear the shop before the explosion. The blast was designed to go directly upwards not outwards.16 The bomb went off prematurely, collapsing the building and killing Begley and nine Protestants. Fifty-seven people were injured. The room above was empty. The UFF had stopped meeting there when they suspected it was under security force surveillance.
Begley was buried with IRA honours, another martyr to add to the list. Had he wiped out Adair and the UFF leadership, his community would have seen him as a hero. Gerry Adams was one of those who carried his coffin, thus inviting nigh-universal condemnation for associating himself with such an atrocity. But, as the RUC Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, told me, ‘In a pragmatic way, I don’t think he had much option.’17 Not to have done so would have damaged Adams’s credibility in his own community and made it even more difficult to bring the Republican Movement along with him and accept the compromises that he knew might be necessary in the search for peace.
Sean Kelly, the other IRA bomber, who was seriously injured but survived, was given nine life sentences. Giving his verdict, the judge said, ‘This wanton slaughter of so many innocent people must rank as one of the most outrageous atrocities endured by the people of this province in the last quarter of a century.’18 Few would have disagreed. Kelly was among the last batch of prisoners to be released under the Good Friday Agreement in the summer of 2000. He said he accepted that he would be a target for the loyalist paramilitaries for the rest of his life. ‘Honestly, it was an accident and if I could do anything to change what happened, believe me, I would do it,’ he said. ‘While we did go out to kill the leadership of the UDA, we never intended for innocent people to die.’ He acknowledged he would have to live with what he had done for the rest of his life. ‘I am an ordinary guy who got caught up in the conflict.’19
The loyalist paramilitaries exacted dreadful revenge. During the week following the bombing of Frizzell’s fish shop, the UVF shot dead two Catholics and the UFF two more. But it was to be seven days before the nationalist community felt the full force of the loyalists’ terrible revenge. On 30 October 1993, Hallowe’en Eve, UFF gunmen walked into the Rising Sun bar in the village of Greysteel outside Derry, shouted ‘Trick or Treat?’ and opened fire on the horrified customers with an AK 47 and a Browning pistol. Six Catholics, one of them eighty-one years old, and one Protestant were mown down. The perpetrators were subsequently released under the Good Friday Agreement.
Politicians were by now almost beyond despair. John Hume, who wept at the funeral of the victims, blamed the lack of political progress for creating the vacuum in which such unspeakable horrors flourished. In the House of Commons, two days after Greysteel, Hume attacked Major for not seizing the opportunity, as Hume saw it, of using his deliberations with Gerry Adams as a basis for peace. Stung by Hume’s words and the emotion with which they were expressed, Major retaliated with an equally emotional riposte, saying that if Hume was implying that the Government should sit down and talk with Gerry Adams, he would not do it. ‘The thought would turn my stomach,’ he said. ‘I will not talk to people who murder indiscriminately.’20
The Contact, like Hume, must have been despondent at the outbreak of events that he too had striven so hard to avoid. He had been out of the country during the dreadful week that had begun on the Shankill and ended at Greysteel. But distance had not blunted the sense of urgency. He immediately got in touch with the BGR and arranged to meet him in London on 2 November on his way back to Derry from abroad. It was the day after the bitter exchange between Hume and Major in the House of Commons. It appears that the Contact left the BGR in no doubt what his feelings were about the way he believed the Government had squandered the opportunity for peace by effectively ending the secret dialogue with the Provisionals. The Contact did not pass on any message to the BGR from McGuinness. McGuinness was therefore astonished when he learned that, after the meeting, the BGR had passed on to the Government the following ‘message’ purporting to come from ‘the leadership of the Provisional Republican Movement’.
You appear to have rejected the Hume–Adams situation … Now we can’t even have a dialogue to work out how a total end to violence can come about. We believe that the country could be at the point of no return. In plain language, please tell us as a matter of urgency when you will open dialogue in the event of a total end to hostilities. We believe that if all the documents [i.e. the respective position papers] are put on the table – we have a basis of an understanding.21
McGuinness was outraged and felt he had been duped by the BGR and the ‘Brits’. He knew the Contact was blameless because the London meeting had been attended by a third party who was a personal friend of McGuinness and had come over from Derry to observe. It appears the BGR fabricated the message on the basis of his conversation with the Contact in London and, no doubt with some embellishment, presented it as a message from McGuinness. With its reference to ‘a total end to violence’ and ‘a total end to hostilities’ it contained the words the Government had been waiting months to hear. Perhaps with the best of intentions, the BGR had taken the initiative, as he had done in attending the meeting in Derry with McGuinness and Kelly earlier in the year, in the hope of breaking the dangerous stalemate and pushing the peace process forward. He knew how close the IRA was to calling off the campaign and was probably trying to bridge the gap between the Provisionals and HMG to avoid more Shankills and Greysteels.
The Government, unaware that McGuinness had nothing to do with the message, sent a fulsome reply, saying it was ‘of the greatest importance and significance’ and offering a meeting for ‘exploratory dialogue’ within weeks ‘following an unequivocal assurance that violence has indeed been brought to a permanent end [author’s emphasis]’.22 HMG thought the IRA had finally agreed to end its campaign for good but the IRA had done nothing of the kind. McGuinness sent the Government a message repudiating what had erroneously been presented as the IRA’s position by the BGR and pointing out that it had been done entirely on his initiative ‘without our authority and knowledge’. This may have been the reason, on top of the unauthorized meeting with McGuinness and Kelly, that the BGR’s services were deemed to be no longer required. The BGR had broken the rules again. McGuinness subsequently told me that the Government had ‘abused the Contact to destruction’ and that the dialogue was now over. John Major probably knew nothing of the dispute over the provenance of the latest ‘message’ but was sufficiently encouraged by it to make an upbeat speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on 15 November in the City of London. ‘There may now be a better opportunity for peace in Northern Ireland than for many years,’ he said.23 At the time he did not know just how shaky the foundation was. Despite his optimism, peace was not just around the corner. Things were to get worse before they got better.
A fortnight later, on Sunday 28 November, the Northern Irish journalist Eamonn Mallie delivered a bombshell on the front page of the Observer when he revealed that the Government had been involved in secret talks with the IRA. It was the last thing the Government needed at this difficult and sensitive time. The source of the leak of a dialogue that had been kept secret since Michael Oatley first set it up almost three years earlier was never established. The Provisionals themselves, still smarting from what they regarded as the Government’s abuse of the Contact and the dishonesty of the BGR, were probably prime suspects. Sir Patrick Mayhew faced the media on what must have been one of the most embarrassing days of his political life. He had been informed of Mallie’s story around midnight on Saturday and was characteristically determined to take on the media the following morning. He called a press conference for 11 a.m. at Stormont Castle. He admitted he was nervous. ‘There they all were, slavering for blood, a good opportunity to screw this Minister.’ Although what Sir Patrick said was technically true – that the Government had not been negotiating with the Provisionals – the distinction between that and conducting a dialogue through third parties did not placate the Press. The Secretary of State’s conscience was clear, however, as he knew that the meeting between the BGR and McGuinness and Kelly in March had not been authorized by the Government. But Mayhew was more concerned about the reception he would get when he made a statement to the House of Commons.
I remember saying to my officials when we had a conference on the video link on the day when I was going to make my statement to the House, ‘I’m determined to sail through this storm and come out the other side’ and that’s exactly how I felt. And one of them said, ‘Well if you sink, a lot of us will sink with you.’ On that rather morose note I climbed into the aeroplane and took off for Westminster. I didn’t sink.
Despite his worst fears, Sir Patrick got almost a hero’s reception from both sides of the House when he made his statement. It was as if Honourable Members were relieved that the Government was taking such risks for peace. Their anger was reserved for a Government that did not.
The events of these dramatic and traumatic days finally came to a climax on 15 December 1993 when John Major and Albert Reynolds stood shoulder to shoulder in Downing Street and told the world that the two Governments had reached agreement on the principles that would underpin a settlement. It became known as the ‘Downing Street Declaration’ (or ‘Joint Declaration’) and was the result of weeks and many sleepless nights spent hammering out a deal. Reynolds had originally pressed Major to embrace the Hume–Adams dialogue but Major refused on the grounds that it would have been the kiss of death to unionists. Reynolds also tried to get the British Prime Minister to declare that HMG would act as a ‘persuader’ for Irish unity. Again, this was rejected for the same reasons. Major’s priority was to keep the unionists on board, knowing from history and experience their capacity to wreck any settlement. The final document was far less ‘green’ than Albert Reynolds would have liked but after lengthy horse-trading the Taoiseach felt it was something that he and constitutional nationalists could live with. The tortuous wording of the Declaration, painfully crafted by British and Irish mandarins, gave all sides some, if not all, of what they wanted. Crucially, it gave unionists the guarantee five times that nothing would be done against the wishes of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.
The Prime Minister, on behalf of the British government, reaffirms … that they have no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland.
The role of the British government will be to encourage, facilitate and enable the achievement of… agreement… They accept that such agreement may, as of right, take the form of agreed structures for the island as a whole, including a united Ireland achieved by peaceful means on the following basis.
The British government agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.24
With the unionist ‘guarantee’ that the Provisionals had spent years fighting to destroy so firmly enshrined in the Joint Declaration, it was not surprising that the Republican Movement was not happy, despite the fact that its overall colour was ‘green’. The question for the ‘Brits’ now was how to bring the Provisionals on board and, crucially, to get the IRA to silence its guns and declare that its campaign was over for good. Both Major and Reynolds had no doubt, from intelligence via their contacts, that at some stage the IRA would declare a cease-fire and join the peace process. The question was when.