The Provisionals were less than enamoured of the Downing Street Declaration but realized they had nowhere else to go if they wanted to journey down the political road. The ‘Brits’ and the Dublin Government had set the agenda and the principles of the Declaration were set in stone. However hard Sinn Fein tried to chip away at them, the message came back that they were wasting their time. Demands from Gerry Adams for ‘clarification’ were seen by the British as an attempt to buy time. There was, however, a sophisticated understanding of his position, given the difficulty he and McGuinness faced in holding the Republican Movement together in the face of a Declaration that was clearly not what the IRA had been fighting for. There was increased concern in Provisional circles when, shortly after the Declaration, Sir Patrick Mayhew raised the issue of the ‘decommissioning’ of terrorist weapons as part of any settlement. Decommissioning was the ‘D’ word that was to haunt politicians, governments and paramilitaries on all sides for the rest of the century and beyond. (Decommissioning was less emotive than ‘disarmament’, with its connotations of surrender.) The Declaration had not mentioned the word itself but had stated that ‘peace must involve a permanent end to violence’ and that dialogue on the way ahead was only open to ‘democratically mandated parties which establish a commitment to exclusively peaceful methods’.1 Adams read the warning signs and knew the damage the issue was likely to do to the Republican Movement and the support he needed to carry the peace project through. ‘This is what they want,’ he said. ‘They want the IRA to stop so that Sinn Fein can have the privilege twelve weeks later, having been properly sanitized and come out of quarantine, to have discussions with senior civil servants on how the IRA can hand over its weapons.’2 It was an ominous shot across the bows of the ‘Brits’.
In political terms, Sinn Fein was clearly swimming against the tide. That was nothing new but now the circumstances were different. An opinion poll conducted in the Irish Republic showed that 97 per cent of the population believed that the IRA should end its campaign at once.3 Significantly, the Provisionals did not reject the Declaration out of hand, knowing that in the end they would have to come to terms with it and work it to the best of their advantage. Adams’s position was strengthened, however, on 29 January 1994 when the Americans granted him a ‘limited duration’ visa to address a one-day peace conference organized by one of President Bill Clinton’s most powerful financial backers, William Flynn. Adams took America by storm. I remember watching television coverage with IRA prisoners in the Maze whilst making a BBC Panorama programme on the secret back-channel talks. The prisoners clapped and cheered and were clearly ecstatic at the reception that the man they regarded as their leader was receiving across the Atlantic. But their enthusiasm for the Sinn Fein President was not matched by their enthusiasm for the Declaration. There was even talk of more bombs in London on the grounds that that was still the only lesson the ‘Brits’ would understand.
Major was furious that Clinton had personally authorized the granting of Adams’s visa, against the advice of the US State Department, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the US Embassy in London, all of whom had taken heed of British objections. They had been told that Adams was still a ‘terrorist’ whose organization had not only not renounced violence but not even given its support to the Downing Street Declaration. Relations between Downing Street and the White House were to deteriorate even further when Adams was granted more visas and given the go-ahead to make fundraising trips to America. Other Sinn Fein leaders were given visas, too. At one stage, Major did not return Clinton’s calls as a sign of his anger at the lack of support he felt he was getting from the American President. ‘Here we were, well on the road towards a settlement, and there were principal Sinn Fein figures going to America where they were going to raise more money,’ he told me. ‘We knew what that money was being used for. It would have been used for arms. So of course we were very peeved. We thought it was a bad signal to give at that time.’
Meanwhile, the IRA carried on killing soldiers and policemen, planting fire-bombs in London’s Oxford Street and even mortaring the runway at Heathrow airport. None of this surprised Major and his Cabinet who by now were well used to the Provisionals’ tactic of talking and killing at the same time. The Prime Minister knew that the increasingly dangerous stalemate had to be broken and he had to take the initiative. He finally agreed to ‘clarify’ the specific points of the Declaration that Sinn Fein maintained were unclear and amplified the offer of exploratory dialogue which had been made during the secret talks of the previous year. He now made a formal offer of a meeting within three months of the IRA’s announcement of a cessation of violence. Since Adams had already scathingly referred to the twelve-week ‘quarantine’ period made during the secret talks, this was not in itself significantly new, but now the Prime Minister himself, not the BGR, was making it.4
Gradually, the IRA moved towards its cease-fire but in the increasing shadow of violence from the loyalist paramilitaries who also had a cease-fire in mind and were equally determined to call it from a position of strength. Their strategy professed to be to escalate the ‘war’ in order to bring it to an end. In the months prior to the IRA and loyalist cessations in 1994, the IRA killed nineteen people and the loyalists thirty-seven. For the third year running the UFF and UVF had ‘out-killed’ the IRA.5 The UVF headed the list with twenty-five killings, twice as many as its UFF rival. The most notorious attack took place on 18 June 1994 when UVF gunmen opened fire on customers in the Heights bar in the tiny village of Loughinisland, County Down. Most were football fans watching television as Ireland played Italy in the World Cup. Six Catholics were shot dead, including an 87-year-old pensioner, Barney Green. He had put on his best suit for the occasion.6 The UVF claimed it was retaliation for the INLA’s killing of three of its members two days earlier as they were standing talking on the Shankill Road. It seemed like Greysteel all over again. People could not believe that peace was in the air in the midst of such horror. They thought the Downing Street Declaration was supposed to mark the beginning of the end.
On 31 August 1994, amidst rising expectations, the long-awaited announcement of an IRA cease-fire finally came. In its statement the IRA said:
Recognizing the potential of the current situation and in order to enhance the democratic peace process and underline our commitment to its success, the leadership of Oglaigh na Eireann [the IRA] have decided that as of midnight, Wednesday 31 August, there will be a complete cessation of military operations. All of our units have been instructed accordingly …
We believe that an opportunity to create a just and lasting peace has been created … We note that the Downing Street Declaration is not a solution, nor was it presented as such by its authors. A solution can only be found as a result of inclusive negotiations.7
The predominant mood was not one of jubilation but more of relief that, with luck, the ‘war’ might be over and Northern Ireland freed from the nightmare it had endured for twenty-five years. There were celebrations in the republican heartlands and emotional words about the sacrifice that IRA Volunteers had made in the ‘struggle’ but there was no feeling that the IRA had won: it had held out against the might of the ‘Brits’, dealt them crushing blows and finally forced them to recognize the legitimacy of the Republican Movement. The IRA was ‘undefeated’. The word ‘victorious’ was notably absent. John Major was pleased but not satisfied. The word ‘permanent’ was nowhere to be seen in the IRA’s statement. That had been one of the issues on which, in the end, the secret talks had foundered. The Prime Minister remained sceptical about the IRA’s long-term intentions, given that the magic word was missing. ‘I had my doubts,’ he told me. ‘There was no indication from them that satisfied me that they were really not going to return to violence if things didn’t go their way.’ Nevertheless, all the advice the Prime Minister received from his security advisers suggested that the cessation was genuine and likely to last.
In the end, Major decided to make ‘a working assumption’ that the cease-fire was meant to last. He could do little else but he still had his doubts. ‘It wasn’t a conviction in my heart that it was definitely going to be permanent. I didn’t believe that it was,’ he told me. ‘But I believed that we had to roll with that particular tide and see if we could turn what looked like a temporary but welcome cessation into something that was continuous.’
Everyone now waited to see if the second piece of the paramilitary jigsaw would fall into place. Would the loyalists also declare a cease-fire? When I had talked to the leaders of the UDA/UFF and UVF prisoners in the Maze earlier that year, it was quite clear that if the IRA stopped killing, the loyalist paramilitaries would stop too. They had always maintained, to hollow laughter from the Provisionals, that their violence was purely reactive. Six weeks later, the loyalist paramilitaries, under their umbrella organization, the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC), announced their cease-fire. The UFF had killed one Catholic, John O’Hanlon (32), on the day after the IRA’s ‘cessation’ and then stopped. The CLMC’s announcement was made by the former UVF commander, ‘Gusty’ Spence, who almost thirty years earlier had been convicted of one of the first murders of the present conflict. Unlike the IRA, Spence apologized for the grief the loyalist paramilitaries had caused.
By the autumn of 1994, for the first time in a quarter of a century, the future looked bright with the guns on both sides of the paramilitary divide falling silent. But to the Republican Movement, the continuation of their silence depended on the progress made towards the all-party talks they had been led to believe would follow the IRA’s cessation. The optimism was infectious. At about this time I talked to a senior British civil servant who had been intimately involved in the peace process almost from its very beginning. When I asked him how long he thought it would be before a final settlement was reached, he said, ‘About five years.’ It was at least four years more than I had anticipated. His estimate was far better than mine.
The British stuck to their promise of exploratory talks with Sinn Fein when, on 9 December 1994, just over three months after the IRA’s cessation, the Sinn Fein delegation drove up to Stormont’s Parliament Buildings in black taxis. On a cold, bright sunny morning, I stood with dozens of other journalists and watched history being made as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, in suits and ties and with briefcases in hand, disappeared through the side entrance of Stormont with the rest of the Sinn Fein delegation. Inside the ‘Brits’ were waiting. This was a very different Martin McGuinness from the young IRA leader I had first met in Derry in 1972. Now he would be eye-balling his old enemies. One of the British officials across the table who had been working on the peace process for a good many years had no doubt about McGuinness’s position. ‘We assumed he was on the Army Council when we talked to him,’ he told me. ‘It wouldn’t say much for the Army Council if he wasn’t.’ In a carefully prepared opening speech, the British official chairing the meeting mentioned arms and the disposing of them and was met with ‘stony faces’ all round. The British appear to have mentioned the word ‘decommissioning’ itself towards the end of the meeting. ‘Initially it was a way of getting off the “permanency” hook,’ one of the officials present told me. ‘We got hung up on it and it came to haunt us. At one stage in our discussions, Martin McGuinness said we could sort out the modalities [of decommissioning] in ten minutes and when I said, “OK, let’s do it,” he danced away.’
Once caught on the decommissioning hook, there was no getting off it. The British claim that although it might not have been specifically mentioned as such, it was always understood that dealing with terrorist weaponry on both sides was one of the issues to be addressed once the cease-fires were in place, and all-party talks were the next step. The loyalist paramilitaries were to be involved in them on the same terms as Sinn Fein through the medium of their own political parties, with the UDA/UFF represented by the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP) and the UVF by the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). The Provisionals insist that the issue of decommissioning was never raised during the secret back-channel exchanges with the British. Michael Oatley believes they are probably right and it was certainly not something he mentioned at his seminal meeting with Martin McGuinness in January 1991. ‘It would have been a ridiculous thing to raise,’ he told me. ‘After all, it was a fundamental tenet that it wouldn’t be on offer.’ I asked him why it was so illogical to ask the IRA to decommission its arsenal if the IRA was genuinely interested in peace.
The argument for decommissioning has been dishonestly presented from the outset and offers a powerful threat to the peace process. There are three reasons why it is not sensible to press the IRA to decommission at this stage.
The first is that it would have little practical effect in reducing the risk of renewed violence. Weapons will always be available to those in Ireland who have support and the means to pay for them. The IRA has both. The issue is not whether guns are held or can be obtained, it is whether they are to be used.
The second is that it is provocative and makes more difficult the task of those who are leading the Republican Movement to abandon terrorism in favour of politics. Republican Volunteers who joined up to pursue a campaign of violence and who have been persuaded to support instead a political and non-violent strategy are not ready to take this further step and do not want to be asked for it. They see it, rightly, as a call to surrender. The provocative effect is gleefully recognized by politicians who wish to destroy the Belfast Agreement without being held responsible for doing so.
The third is that the pressure is selective. Why put pressure on the IRA, which maintains a disciplined cease-fire, while loyalist groups are equally disinclined to give up their weapons and are clearly prepared to use them? The climate for decommissioning, on either side, is simply not there.
The IRA in its modern form developed as a response – like the introduction of British troops – to the loyalist campaign of ethnic cleansing: the eviction from their homes of thousands of Catholic families in 1969. Every step it takes along the political path surrenders a measure of its capacity for violence. That is progress enough. Why insist on meaningless forms – unless political progress is not what you want?
To the IRA, decommissioning was the issue above all others that was most likely to trigger the split that the leadership was so desperate to avoid. What was critical, the Provisionals countered, was that the guns remained silent and not that they were handed in or destroyed. It was the intention to use them that mattered. The IRA had never decommissioned in its entire history and it had no intention of starting now. As it became clear to the Provisionals that, if they were to be party to a final settlement, concessions would have to be made that were hitherto unthinkable in their ideology, the Republican Movement agreed that whatever else the IRA agreed to, it would never hand over its weapons. Nothing could have been more categoric. When I asked one senior Provisional if there would ever come a time when the IRA might do so, he said, ‘Five million years, in the short term.’
Unionists and the British Government saw the issue through entirely different eyes. If the IRA was serious about its cease-fire and about peace, they argued, why did it need its guns? They remain convinced that the IRA insisted on holding on to them because at some stage it intended to use them again. But to John Major, decommissioning was both a political and a security issue. He really did believe that if the IRA was serious in giving up violence for good, which he doubted, it had no reason to hang on to its guns. He therefore believed it was critical that the IRA should begin to hand over or destroy some of its weapons before it was allowed to take part in all-party talks. This was known as ‘prior decommissioning’. The fact that the IRA refused to do so simply confirmed Major’s scepticism about the Provisionals’ long-term intentions.
You were asking unionists and others to sit down at a table with people who had an Armalite and a bomb underneath the table which, if the talks got to a sticky phase, they would then take out and use. Was that likely to engender an atmosphere at the talks that would lead to a proper settlement? Now they had the option. Some prior decommissioning. We didn’t try and embarrass them. I said at one stage that they could melt down their weapons and build a statue of Eamon de Valera wherever they liked with the product of melting down their weapons. We were trying to get them into talks in a way that other people would talk to them. If ‘the conflict is over’, as the Provisional Army Council said, what was the need for weapons? What was the need to prevent at least a token destruction of weapons to show that they were genuine?
Politically the issue was crucial for Major. His whole strategy was to ensure that unionists became wedded to the peace process and, once involved, stayed with it. They were now led by David Trimble, who had succeeded James Molyneaux as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), following Molyneaux’s resignation on 28 August 1995. Trimble defeated the favourite, John Taylor, not least because of the high-profile, hard-line stance he had taken at Drumcree the previous month.8
If the Prime Minister was doubtful about the IRA’s commitment to a permanent cessation of violence, unionists, whose community had for so long borne the brunt of its campaign, were even more sceptical. Major knew that the chances of getting them into all-party talks involving Sinn Fein were virtually zero unless the IRA moved on ‘prior decommissioning’. But it soon became clear that it was a non-starter: the Provisionals would not accept decommissioning as a prelude to a settlement.
The Government’s resolution to stand firm on the issue was confirmed by intelligence reports that indicated that although the IRA was on cease-fire and military operations had ceased, military activities had not. Sir Patrick Mayhew knew from his intelligence briefings precisely what the IRA was up to during its cease-fire period.
Governments are not blind and it would be very remiss if, after a campaign of that sort against violence for so long, we had been blind. I think that we knew a lot of what the IRA was doing and what we knew was sufficiently disturbing to prevent us regarding this as a total abjuring of violence. As time went on, unfortunately, we came to know that their preparations were continuing: their targeting of future assassination victims, their development of new weapons, their testing of new weapons, their recruiting of more Volunteers and so forth. We knew that that was going on and it appeared to be increasingly incompatible with the belief that a proper cease-fire was what they had in mind.
There were no more bombings and killings but Volunteers were not inactive. ‘Ken’, the ‘Det’ operator who was expert at concealing micro-cameras, confirmed that during the cease-fire period, the ‘Det’ was still in business.
We declared a cessation of aggressive operations although covert surveillance still did carry on. We would never have been able to scale that down to non-existent surveillance, due to the untrustworthiness of the IRA. We found out that they were still targeting people, such as policemen and individuals from opposing [loyalist] organizations, and planning operations for the future. So covert operations still had to go ahead.
Nineteen ninety-five was the first year in Northern Ireland for more than a quarter of a century in which no member of the security forces was killed. This is what the IRA meant when it referred to ‘a complete cessation of military operations’. Violence, however, did not abate completely, as the IRA shot dead six suspected drug dealers, mainly under the flag of convenience Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD). Paramilitary beatings and knee-cappings also increased in the vacuum of so-called ‘peace’. Between the IRA and loyalist cease-fires in 1994 and the end of 1995, the Provisionals carried out 148 ‘punishment’ attacks and the loyalists 75.9
As the first anniversary of the IRA cease-fire came and went, there was still no sign of movement towards all-party talks nor indication that the IRA was going to move on decommissioning. The IRA and its Volunteers on the ground became increasingly restless at the lack of progress towards the inclusive dialogue they had been led to believe would follow their cease-fire. The Government stood firm on decommissioning and so did the IRA. Neither side was going to blink first. I remember meeting two senior Provisionals in Dublin towards the end of 1995 on the eve of President Clinton’s visit to London and Belfast at the end of November and they were clearly extremely worried at how critical the situation had become. They wondered if the British Government had any idea of the narrowness of the ledge on which they were standing and how difficult it was to keep the IRA on-side, given the lack of political progress. They did not make threats but it was quite clear that the threat was there.
By that time, the Army Council had decided enough was enough and it was imperative to hit the ‘Brits’ again and hit them where it hurt the most, as close to the City of London as possible, given the ‘ring of steel’ around the area after the Baltic Exchange and Bishopsgate bombs. Plans were also laid towards the end of 1995 for a series of attacks on the mainland that would follow the after-shock of the ‘big boomer’ that was designed to mark the end of the cease-fire. By December 1995, the huge bomb that would deliver the IRA’s message was already being put together in South Armagh, the area that British intelligence had found most difficult to penetrate. There were no ‘Det’ cameras in place to monitor bomb-making nor Special Branch or MI5 agents to tip off their handlers. The ‘Brits’ were aware that something was afoot but did not know what it was nor when or where the IRA would strike.
Meanwhile, John Major and John Bruton, who had succeeded Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach on 15 November 1994, were still trying to break the political deadlock over decommissioning and open the path to all-party talks. They came up with the idea of a ‘twin-track’ approach in which decommissioning might take place in parallel with talks. To that end an International Body on Arms was established to investigate what might and might not be possible. It consisted of three eminent international statesmen: former US Senator George Mitchell, who was Chairman; General John de Chastelain, a former Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff and former Ambassador to Washington; and Harri Holkeri, a former Finnish Prime Minister who was the epitome of neutrality. Their contracts were for six months. Mitchell had no idea he would be there for four years and de Chastelain into the next century.
Major asked the three wise men to report if possible by the end of January 1996 in the hope of commencing all-party talks by the end of February. Major and Bruton kept their fingers crossed that their distinguished foreign visitors would sever the Irish Gordian knot. Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party, which was instinctively deeply hostile to foreign ‘meddling’ in the province’s affairs, in particular when it involved Clinton’s friends, was muted in its response because Senator Mitchell had impressed its members in his former role as the President’s Special Adviser for Economic Initiatives in Ireland.10 Mitchell knew his task would not be easy.
The Unionists quite rightly wanted some reassurance. They did not want to have talks occur in a setting in which the threat of violence or the use of violence influenced the negotiations. That’s the reason for the request for prior decommissioning. It soon became obvious to us, very soon into our consultation, that prior decommissioning, however desirable, was simply not a practical approach. It wasn’t going to happen. The British Government wanted prior decommissioning and they wanted inclusive negotiations and it became clear that they could not have both.11
As a compromise, Senator Mitchell and his colleagues worked out a set of principles to which all participants in all-party talks had to sign up, hoping that unionists would accept agreement to these ‘Mitchell Principles’ in place of actual decommissioning, at least at this stage. They included a commitment to ‘democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues’; the total disarmament of all paramilitary organizations; a renunciation of the use of force to influence the outcome of all-party negotiations, and an end to ‘punishment’ beatings and killings. Sinn Fein said it accepted them all, thus securing admission to all-party talks without the IRA making any move on decommissioning. But the International Body did not rule out decommissioning further down the line. Its report, delivered on 24 January 1996, concluded:
… there is a clear commitment on the part of those in possession of such arms to work constructively to achieve full and verifiable decommissioning as part of the process of all-party negotiations [author’s emphasis]; but that commitment does not include decommissioning prior to such negotiations …12
Major was surprised at Mitchell’s optimism, which appeared to bear no relation to any indication that the British Government had received. The Senator later confided in him that he had stretched the point ‘for tactical reasons’ and privately suspected that the IRA was on the point of breaking its cease-fire.13 This coincided with the intelligence that Major himself was receiving and on which he had privately briefed President Clinton at Downing Street. Mitchell’s report helped but it was not a magic wand. Major then decided that the only way to get the parties together was to call an election for a Northern Ireland Assembly, which would at least be a starting point for the process of negotiations. Unionists welcomed the prospect but Sinn Fein and the SDLP were bitterly opposed to the idea which they dismissed as a unionist ploy and an attempt to reinstate the Stormont of old.
To the Republican Movement, the Government’s decision to go for elections was the last straw. At 6.59 p.m. on Friday 9 February 1996, the huge bomb the IRA had been secretly preparing in South Armagh exploded at South Quay in London’s Docklands, in the car park of a building near Canary Wharf. The scene of devastation was shocking, like something out of the Blitz. A coded telephone warning had been given but the evacuation of the area was not complete. Two men, Inan Ul-haq Bashir (29) and John Jeffries (31), who worked in a nearby newspaper kiosk, were killed in the blast. They had been warned by a police officer to leave but they never made it.14 Shortly before the bomb went off, the IRA issued a statement. ‘Instead of embracing the peace process, the British government acted in bad faith with Mr Major and the unionist leaders squandering this unprecedented opportunity to resolve the conflict,’ it said. ‘The blame for the failure thus far of the Irish peace process lies squarely with John Major and his government.’15
The ‘Brits’ now had to pick up the pieces.