Ironically, on 11 September 2001, the ‘hand of history’ helped break the decommissioning deadlock when Osama bin Laden’s suicide bombers flew three hijacked passenger planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, causing the death of over three thousand civilians. The scenes, watched by the world on live television were literally incredible and millions who switched on thought they were watching some disaster movie. But this was no movie. President George Bush Jr. immediately declared a ‘war against terrorism’ and against those states who supported and gave succour to the terrorists. Afghanistan’s extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime, the Taliban, that had harboured bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network and sanctioned its training camps, were the first target. Bush was true to his word as B-52 bombers began their relentless campaign whilst America’s unsavoury allies, the Northern Alliance, did the fighting and the killing on the ground – with a little help from the CIA and American and British Special Forces. The SAS were now combing caves and hunting for bin Laden in the mountains instead of scouring the wilds of South Armagh and East Tyrone for the IRA.
In Ireland, the Republican Movement looked anxiously on, concerned that President Bush might restore the IRA to the State Department’s terrorist list thus seriously damaging the support, credibility and dollars that Sinn Fein had assiduously reaped from across the Atlantic during the Clinton Administration. It was also concerned that the White House might veto the visas given to prominent Provisionals that made lucrative fundraising events possible. The IRA had been taken off the list following its cease-fire and the last thing it wanted was to see that position restored, thus jeopardising all the political advances they had made over the previous decade. Many Unionists insisted that Bush should never have given the IRA such a reprieve given the atrocities it had committed over the years, citing the carnage of ‘Bloody Friday’ (1972), the La Mon restaurant (1978), Remembrance Day in Enniskillen (1987) and the Shankill Road fish shop (1993), to mention but a few.
Nevertheless, in recognition of its commitment to the peace process President Bush did not put the IRA back on his terrorist list. No doubt he was advised by the ‘Brits’ who saw the danger of the process unravelling and decommissioning vanishing even further over the horizon. Sinn Fein, at the time, had problems enough with the Bush administration since three republicans had been arrested at Bogota airport on 11 August 2001 after consorting with the anti-Colombian government and anti-US guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The guerrillas were Washington’s sworn enemies not only because they were determined to overthrow the US-supported Colombian regime but beause they were regarded as ‘narco-terrorists’ who contributed to the flooding of America with Colombia’s biggest cash crop – cocaine. For republicans to be caught in such company was hardly likely to enhance their standing with conservative Irish Americans who were pillars of the business community and hitherto amongst Sinn Fein’s strongest financial backers. One of the three men arrested in Bogota was Martin McCauley who had narrowly escaped death at the hayshed near Kinnego in 1982 when it was attacked by undercover RUC anti-terrorist officers (see here). It was a rare moment when Sinn Fein was caught on the back foot in the propaganda war. Unionists were gleeful that in their eyes the hypocrisy of the IRA had finally been exposed at a time when it had declared a cease-fire. It was never established precisely what the visitors were up to but it seemed that British intelligence may have monitored their movements and that they were testing sophisticated new equipment in the vast area of the Colombian jungle controlled by the FARC. There was speculation that the exercise was in preparation for ‘a big nudge’ in England should the ‘Brits’, in the IRA’s eyes, continue to drag their feet over delivering their side of the peace process on policing, ‘demilitarisation’ and related matters. The ‘Real’ IRA was alreadly active in England and the prospect, however unlikely, of the IRA returning to its military campaign in London and elsewhere was causing the intelligence services a considerable headache.
However, just as Sinn Fein was reeling from the Colombian debacle, the spotlight was suddenly turned back onto Belfast and away from the Republican Movement. By the end of June 2001, a bitter confrontation had erupted along the sectarian interface in North Belfast where 7,000 Catholics in Ardoyne face 1,000 Protestants in the Glenbryn estate. Ever since the current conflict began, the area has been a sectarian flashpoint but the two communities were now poliarised as never before. On the face of it, the issue was about a short, 400 yard journey to a girls’ primary school. The problem was that the school, Holy Cross, was Catholic but located in Protestant Glenbryn. Traditionally Catholic mothers from Ardoyne had taken their children to Holy Cross through Glenbryn without a problem, but in the heated atmosphere of yet another of Belfast’s ‘long hot summers’, this was to cease. Loyalists in Glenbryn now declared that Ardoyne’s mothers and children could no longer walk the quarter of a mile up the Protestant stretch of Ardoyne Road to Holy Cross. This was Drumcree, where the Catholic residents of the Garvaghy Road did not allow Protestant Orangemen to march down their road, in reverse. But the issue was about much more than a short journey to school. It was about territory and winners and losers. To loyalists, Catholics were getting everything in the peace process whilst Protestants were losing everything. Holy Cross was a line in the sand. Nor were the protests and confrontations entirely spontaneous, any more than they were at Drumcree. With so much at stake in the bigger political picture, Sinn Fein and the loyalist Ulster Defence Association were prominent in organising protests on their respective sides under the banners of different community groups. So savage were the scenes of violence that the RUC officers, clad in black riot gear and looking like Darth Vader, had to escort the children and their mothers to school with soldiers on standby to provide backup. The images of tearful little girls sheltering behind their parents as they ran a gauntlet of loyalist taunts and missiles under heavy police and military escort, shocked not just the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic but other parts of the world. It was as if nothing had changed in thirty years and the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement had never happened. No wonder the ‘Brits’ despaired. However, on 26 November 2001, loyalists suspended their protest following mediation, realising that the photographs splashed on the front of newspapers worldwide and seen globally by television viewers were only helping republicans and wounding the Protestant cause. Critically, after Colombia, Holy Cross turned the tables and the Provisionals were now seen not as the allies of a South American terrorist group but, as in 1969, the defenders of the nationalist community in Ardoyne and elsewhere from loyalist attack. In that too, nothing seemed to have changed.
Nevertheless, the Colombian arrests and the tragedy of 11 September still threatened to cause the Repulican Movement irreparable damage and reverse the remarkable political progress that Sinn Fein was now making. In the Westminster General Election on 7 June 2001, when Tony Blair won a second Labour landslide victory with a parliamentary majority of 166 seats, Sinn Fein met with unprecedented success, winning four seats and finally eclipsing the SDLP which held onto its three. Pat Doherty won West Tyrone: Michelle Gildernew won Fermanagh and South Tyrone, the seat won by the IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands, in 1981; and Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness held their seats in West Belfast and Mid-Ulster respectively. (Previously Sinn Fein had held two Westminster seats with Gerry Adams elected as MP for West Belfast in 1983, 1987 and 1997 – he lost in 1992 – and Martin McGuinness as MP for Mid-Ulster in 1997.) Amid the celebrations, Martin McGuinness MP attributed his party’s success to ‘Sinn Fein’s peace strategy’ and declared that it was ‘well on the way to becoming the largest political party in the North’.1 Sinn Fein’s rise had indeed been spectacular and Danny Morrison, the former leading Provisional, probably never envisaged just how prophetic his famous ‘Armalite and Ballot box’ phrase was when he uttered them at Sinn Fein’s annual conference in 1981, a few months after Bobby Sand’s historic election victory (see here). Over the following twenty years, the party had seen its share of the vote in local elections more than double, from 10.1 per cent in 19822 to 20.66 per cent in 2001.3
But the ‘Brits’ had little to celebrate: not only did Sinn Fein overtake the SDLP to become the largest nationalist party in the province but Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had trounced David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists (UUP). The DUP won a record five seats against the UUP’s six after Trimble watched three of his party’s seats being washed away by the Paisley tide. The centre, which the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 had been designed to strengthen, caved in to the nationalist and Unionist extremes as a result of the impasse over the full implementation of its provisions, most notably on decommissioning. This strengthening of the extremes was confirmed a few days later when the local election results were announced. (Polling had taken place on the same day as the Westminster election but the count was held over.) Sinn Fein won a further 34 seats, with 20.66 per cent of the vote and the SDLP lost 3 with 19.42 per cent; the DUP won 40 more seats and the UUP lost 31.4 Nevertheless, encouragingly for the ‘Brits’, the moderates of the UUP and the SDLP remained the parties with the largest number of seats. Significantly, as a result of the Westminster and local elections of 7 June 2001, the political map of Northern Ireland changed as the province was effectively re-partitioned along ‘green’ and ‘orange’ lines. The nationalists of the SDLP and Sinn Fein now controlled most of the South and West (South Down, Newry and Armagh, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Mid-Ulster, West Tyrone and Foyle) and the Unionists of the UUP and DUP controlled most of the North and East (Lagan Valley, Upper Bann, South Antrim, East Antrim, North Antrim and East Londonderry). The exception in this Unionist heartland was Gerry Adams who was elected for the fourth time in predominantly nationalist West Belfast.
There were inevitable calls for Trimble’s resignation following the UUP’s setbacks at the polls (although the predicted meltdown was avoided) and continuing threats to his leadership by the anti-Agreement factions within his own party, but the First Minister cleverly held them off, walking the tightrope whilst his enemies and friends held their breath to see if he would fall. They watched over the weekend of 30 June 2001 to see if he would stand by the post-dated letter of resignation he had lodged to be acted upon in the absence of any IRA move on decommissioning. No more was offered and so Trimble resigned as First Minister. Copious obituaries were written but, like the report of Mark Twain’s death, they were exaggerated.5 The sword on which Trimble fell was made of cardboard not steel. The Secretary of State, Dr John Reid, then suspended the Executive for six weeks while the parties tried to put a compromise package together. The stalemate was to last much longer.
Trimble’s resignation was a tactic to put pressure on the IRA to actually begin the process of decommissioning instead of just talking about it. By late summer, the tactic seemed to be working. On 8 August, the IRA issued a statement that said it had agreed a scheme with General John de Chastelain and his colleagues on the Decommissioning Body to put ‘arms completely and verifiably beyond use.’ The statement said, ‘This was an unprecedented development which involved a very difficult decision by us, and problems for our organisation. While mindful of these concerns, our decision was aimed at enhancing the peace process.’6 Six days later, however, the IRA withdrew the statement because Trimble and the UUP had rejected it on the grounds that it did not go far enough. Both sides were playing hardball.
The Republican Movement, like Trimble, had to play its cards carefully. Sinn Fein, with two Ministers on the Executive, knew that if the Good Friday institutions collapsed the responsibility for the demise of the Executive would largely be laid at its door because of the IRA’s refusal to begin decommssioning. Republicans were in the business of consolidating their political gains and not in the mood to sanction anything that might erode them. Moreover, Sinn Fein’s spectacular advances in the Westminster and local elections of 2001 were calculated to be a springboard for the party’s campaign in the Republic’s General Election due to be held in 2002. The party had its eyes on half-a-dozen potentially winnable seats that might lead to its holding the balance of power in a coalition government in Dublin. Ironically whilst Sinn Fein had been carving such remarkable political inroads in the North, its campaigns in the South had not met with commensurate success. By 2001, the party had 62 local councillors in the Republic and one TD (Member of Parliament), Caoimhghm O Caoláin, who represented the border constituency of Cavan/Monaghan. The South’s electorate was traditionally wary of a party whose other face was the Provisional IRA. If Sinn Fein were to make significant political advances across the border, then the Republican Movement’s long-term strategy would seem to be falling into place with Ministers in government both North and South as a stepping stone to the united Ireland for which the IRA had fought, killed and died. Sinn Fein wanted nationalists on both sides of the border to see it as the party of peace and not as wreckers of a peace process that had brought republicans such great political dividends, not least the release of their prisoners.
Remarkably, by the autumn 2001 as the political wrangling continued, there were signs of movement, driven not by Trimble’s resignation but by the events of 11 September. Gerry Adams was clear in his condemnation of the terrorist attacks. Addressing the Northern Ireland Assembly two days after the tragedy he said, ‘I unequivocally condemn those who carried out these attacks and have sent my deepest condolences and sympathies to the people of the United States.’ He went on to re-affirm his organisation’s commitment to the peace process, despite all the remaining problems. ‘When viewed in the awful context of other conflicts, or in the enormity of human suffering in New York and Washington, it is true to say that great progress has been made here. Is this to be squandered? … I re-dedicated myself and our party to do our very best to resolve the problems that confront us all.’7 Sinn Fein subsequently announced that all proceeds from its annual ‘Friends of Sinn Fein’ fundraising dinner in New York on 1 November 2001, due to be attended by the party’s President, Gerry Adams, would go to the families of construction workers killed in the World Trade Centre attack, many of whom had traditionally supported the republican cause.
In the background, under growing pressure not only from the British and Irish governments but from the Bush Administration too, the logjam was gradually being loosened as Adams’ spech indirectly suggested. Adams and McGuinness now had to persuade the IRA to move on the most sensitive and difficult issue it faced, even more difficult than the decision to call the cease-fire in 1994 when, although not defeated, it had not won the ‘war’. Again, both men proved themselves to be master tacticians. They knew that however convinced their tight circle was that strategically the political course the Republican Movement had embarked upon was correct, many of the IRA’s rank and file continued to harbour serious doubts when it came to the issue of decommissioning. If the question were put to a vote amongst Volunteers on the ground, it would almost certainly be rejected. Therefore the presentation of the case, the formulation of the wording and the constitutional mechanism whereby it could be approved by the IRA were absolutely critical if the Republican Movement’s peace project was not to founder. The mechanism to circumvent opposition lay hidden in the IRA’s Constitution. Section 5 (a) stipulates that the ‘Supreme Authority’ of the Irish Republican Army is the ‘General Army Convention’ consisting of delegates from every IRA unit on the island of Ireland. Constitutionally the Convention is scheduled to meet every two years ‘unless the majority of these delegates notify the Army Council [the seven member body that runs the ‘war’] that they deem it better for military purposes to postpone it’. Adams and McGuinness calculated that if decommissioning or ‘putting arms beyond use’ were put to delegates at a Convention representing all IRA Volunteers on the ground, there would almost certainly have been a split between the leadership and the rank and file. One split, following the Extraordinary Army Convention in 1997 that led to the emergence of the rival ‘Real’ IRA, was enough. At that time the Convention had been called to discuss a motion proposed by a small, but powerful dissident faction to oppose the Republican Movement’s signing up to the Mitchell principles of non-violence and to propose the ending of the IRA’s cease-fire (see here). Although the resulting split was relatively small, it was a risk the leadership was not prepared to take again. In practice because of the ‘war’ the Convention seldom met except to debate and ratify key decisions as above in 1997 and likewise in 1986 when it agreed to end ‘abstentionism’, thus permitting Sinn Fein to stand for election to the Irish Parliament (Dail Eireann). Again, the decision split the Republican Movement (see here). However, the Constitution stipulates that ‘when a General Convention is not in session … the Army Council shall be the Supreme Authority’. It is this body that then has ‘the power to conclude peace or declare war’, so8 without the Convention to discuss the issue of decommissioning, constitutionally the Army Council could make the decision on behalf of the IRA. This is what happened, thus minimising the risk of a split that was likely to have been far more disastrous than the ‘Real’ IRA split of 1997. The agreed form of words was important as hairs were split with republican precision. The IRA would not be handing over its weapons to the ‘Brits’ but would be ‘putting them permanently beyond use’ in a way and at a time of its choosing. Although the decision to do so in principle had already been taken as indicated by the IRA statement of 8 August 2001, there is little doubt that the events of 11 September accelerated the process. Had they not done so, decommissioning would probably have taken place some time before the Irish Republic’s election in 2002 as Sinn Fein would have been unlikely to maximise its vote if the electorate knew that the party was still linked to a secret army with its arsenals still buried beneath Irish soil.
At last to the relief of the ‘Brits’, the IRA fulfilled its promise, or at least began to do so. On 23 October 2001 the IRA issued the statement the ‘Brits’ and many others had long been waiting for. It was short in length and short on detail but momentous in its historic significance. The IRA had never done anything like this before and, as the statement made clear, it was only doing so now ‘to save the peace process and to persuade others of our genuine intentions’.9 The statement did not detail what the IRA had done other than to confirm that it had acted in compliance with the agreement reached with General de Chastelain in its statement of 8 August 2001. The statement from the General and his colleagues was tantalisingly brief. ‘We have witnessed an event which we regard as signifcant in which the IRA has put a quantity of arms beyond use. The material in question includes arms, ammunition and explosives.’10 There were no reciprocal moves by the loyalist paramilitaries. It was a triumph for the Canadian soldier and diplomat who had so patiently waited, encouraged and eventually helped deliver what most informed observers believed to be impossible and that senior Provisionals had sworn would never happen, except, as one of its leaders once told me, ‘never in a million years – in the short term’. What precisely took place was never made clear. Certainly there was no explosion in the forest in the dead of night as an IRA arms dump was blown up, nor was there the sound of grinding machines as weapons were destroyed, nor perhaps even the sound of concrete mixers as dumps were sealed. There were even rumours of locks monitored by Global Positioning Satellites. Nevertheless, the most realistic assessment was that one or more dumps had been sealed in one way or another and weapons thereby rendered ‘permanently beyond use’. Tony Blair, who throughout his Premiership had laboured so tirelessly to keep the peace process on track, was delighted and relieved. It was a ray of good news in a world still recovering from the shock of 11 September. He said ‘we have worked for this moment for three and half years’ since the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998. Perhaps this really was the ‘hand of history’.
With the IRA having made its historic move, the road was clear for David Trimble to seek re-election as First Minister. But it was not a foregone conclusion that he would succeed. When two members of his own party failed to support him because they thought he had been hoodwinked by the IRA, Trimble failed by one vote to become First Minster a second time. It was only on 6 November 2001 when the non-sectarian Alliance Party controversially decided to cast its votes as ‘Unionist’ that Trimble finally made it. But even then, he was not completely out of the woods. The dangerous rumblings from dissidents in his own party plus the belligerent opposition of Paisley’s increasingly confident DUP, made Trimble’s future and the future of the Executive and Assembly still far from guaranteed. If the IRA was serious, the First Minister’s opponents argued, then they must decommission all of their arms. A couple of dumps simply were not enough. The issue, like the writing on the IRA mural, had ‘not gone away’.
Shortly after the IRA’s symbolic act of decommissioning, the ‘Brits’ reciprocated by beginning to dismantle some of the army’s fortifications in border areas which had caused local people such anger, and the IRA a variety of problems, since most were stuffed with surveillance equipment. One of the first to go was the ‘supersangar’, the 15 tonne, 22 metres-high watchtower in Newtonhamilton in South Armagh. It was dismantled on 25 October, two days after the IRA statement.12 The process was unofficially known as ‘sequencing’ to indicate that the ‘Brits’ were responding to the IRA’s move. At last the Good Friday Agreement seemed to be falling into place, despite the opposition of Paisley’s DUP and some members of Trimble’s own party.
Progress was also being made in the equally vexed area of policing. On 4 November 2001, the name, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was consigned to history to the deep regret of its officers, Unionist politicians and their community. As the name went, revered by one section of the community and reviled by the other, the new Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officially came into being, with Sir Ronnie Flanagan still at its head to oversee the transition prior to his announced retirement in 2002. It was no accident that it was no longer a police ‘force’ but was now a police ‘service’. On that day the first batch of new recruits, selected on a fifty-fifty Catholic/Protestant basis, began their training. Eight thousand people initially applied of whom 550 were deemed to be qualified candidates. Significantly, 154 of them (28 per cent) came from the Catholic community, a figure that would have been unthinkable before the Good Friday Agreement and the Patten Report. This meant that, given the need for a fifty-fifty intake, the new service could recruit around 300 officers, roughly 150 Catholics and 150 Protestants. With the birth of the PSNI, came the body that was to oversee the new service, the 19-member Northern Ireland Policing Board, again as recommended by Patten, that was to hold the Chief Constable and the police to account. Ten were politicians drawn from all the main political parties and nine were independent members. Sinn Fein, however, had refused to take up its two seats on the grounds that the reforms has not been far-reaching enough. Critically the SDLP had agreed to serve on the Board, thus effectively giving approval for Catholics to put on the new police uniform. Had the SDLP not done so, the Policing Board would have been almost meaningless as it would have been seen by nationalists as an almost exclusively unionist preserve, just as they perceived the old RUC. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Sinn Fein joined in too, but that depended on events. Sinn Fein’s Gerry Kelly challenged the SDLP’s decision and said it was making a mistake in trusting the ‘Brits’ to ‘change policing legislation,’13 and its chairman. Mitchel McLaughlin had already defended his party’s decision to boycott the Board, saying republicans were not about to buy ‘a pig in a poke’. ‘If the British government were moved some distance last year, then let us take some further time to get it right,’ he said ‘There is really no point in continuing with the failure of policing.’14 As 2001 drew to a close, the omens for policing began to look good. Remarkably, on 12 December, the Policing Board reached cross community agreement on a new badge for the new service, remarkably because such symbols had long excited powerful emotions on both sides. The new logo had something for everyone. It featured Saint Patrick’s cross surrounded by six symbols: a harp, crown, shamrock, laurel leaf, torch and scales of justice. Unionists got the harp and crown, which had been the symbols of the old RUC, and nationalists got the shamrock. Both sides, it was hoped, would get justice.15 Then, suddenly, on the very day the Board was reaching its decision, the past shook the present with two violent after-shocks from the murky world of intelligence that most thought and hoped was a thing of the past. Special Branch operations lay behind both, giving Sinn Fein, who demanded the Branch’s destruction as part of policing reform, propaganda on a plate. One shock involved a one-off killing, the other mass murder.
Early in the morning of 12 December 2001, William Stobie (51) was walking to his car outside his home in the Protestant Forthriver area of North Belfast when he was gunned down. He died almost instantly on the spot where he fell, hit by five bullets. Stobie was a loyalist and former UDA/UFF quartermaster for the Shankill Road’s ‘C’ Company, one of whose leaders was the notorious Johnny Adair. He had not only been in charge of ‘C’ Company’s weaponry but a self-confessed Special Branch agent. The ‘Red Hand Defenders’, a cover name used by the UDA/UFF, claimed responsibility for his death, saying he was killed for ‘crimes against the loyalist community’.16 Once exposed, few informers on either side lived to tell the tale. Stobie had been recruited by Special Branch sometime in 1987 in circumstances that were unclear. It may have been after he had been found in possession of arms or during police inquiries following the UFF’s murder of a young Protestant student, Adam Lambert (19) who was doing work experience on a building site off the Shankill Road. The killing was in retaliation for the IRA’s Enniskillen bomb that had exploded the day before, Remembrance Sunday, killing eleven bystanders. The UFF had mistakenly thought that their target was a Catholic.
By 1989, the ‘Brits’ had ‘C’ Company well penetrated. Special Branch was running William Stobie, and the army’s controversial Force Research Unit (FRU) was running its intelligence chief, Brian Nelson (see Chapter 26). Sometime on the morning of 12 February 1989, Stobie warned his Special Branch handler that he had provided weaponry for a gun attack later that evening on a prominent republican figure. He did not specify who the target was or where it would take place, but it became clear it was the solicitor, Pat Finucane, whose clients over the years had included many leading republicans, including Bobby Sands. Finucane was gunned down by masked UFF killers later that evening whilst he was having supper with his family. He was hit by fourteen bullets. The question was if Stobie had tipped off his handler earlier that day, why were the killers not stopped? British intelligence, through the agencies of Speical Branch, the FRU and MI5, would have had a pretty good idea who ‘C’ Company’s hit-men were, and could have placed them under surveillance and intercepted them at a ‘chance’ vehicle checkpoint as had happened on so many occasions. Then Pat Finucane might have lived. One possibility is that to have done so could have risked arousing suspicion over Stobie and exposing him as an agent. Another more conspiratorial explanation, that accords with the standard republican view of ‘collusion’, is that the ‘Brits’ were in no hurry to protect Finucane. As news of the killing spread, Sinn Fein described it as ‘an unravelling story of collusion which smells of the RUC Special Branch and British military intelligence getting rid of an embarrassment and potential problem.’17 As we have seen, the republican allegation against the FRU is that it used its agents to remove ‘undesirables’ and thus do the ‘Brits’ dirty work for them.
In 1999, in the wake of rising demands for a public inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane, Sir Ronnie Flanagan asked the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, to investigate the killing and the allegation of collusion, as Stevens had initially investigated the broader allegations of collusion between the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries in 1989 (see here). It was Sir John who brought Stobie’s involvement to light with the result that he was charged with involvement in Finucane’s murder and the killing of the young Protestant student, Adam Lambert. The case came to trial in November 2001. The key witness was a former journalist, Neil Mulholland, to whom Stobie had spoken, presumably as a means of self-protection. Stobie had also conducted an off-the-record interview in 1990 with the respected Belfast journalist, Ed Maloney. Maloney, however, obeyed the cardinal journalistic principle and refused to give the new Stevens inquiry his confidential notes that were taken at the time. Mulholland, however, did cooperate with the Stevens team and was due to become the chief prosecution witness in the trial at considerable risk to himself. But the case against Stobie collapsed when Mulholland indicated that he did not wish to testify as to do so might severely damage his health. To say he felt under pressure was probably a massive understatement. As a result, on 26 November 2001, the case collapsed and Stobie walked free from Belfast Crown Court. As he did so, Sinn Fein’s Assembly Member for West Belfast, Alex Maskey, who himself had escaped a UFF murder bid in 1994, launched into the ‘Brits’. ‘The role of the RUC Special Branch and British military intelligence in collusion and running agents within the loyalist death squads has not been explained. Cover up is still the order of the day,’ he said. ‘Are Stobie’s handlers now members of the new policing arrangements? The reality is that Special Branch still exists and exists as a secret police force. Nationalists and republicans will not support policing arrangements with an unaccountable wing, a Special Branch, governed by a culture of silence and operating with no controls, accountability or scrutinity.’18
Surprisingly, Stobie did not flee the country as might have seemed sensible given his exposure as a Special Branch agent but returned to the loyalist Forthriver area, having allegedly received assurances from his former UFF comrades that his life was not in danger. Stobie was either naïve or foolhardy or both. On 2 December 2001 the RUC warned him about his personal security. Ten days later he was shot dead, taking his secrets to the grave and fuelling even more vociferous demands for a public inquiry into the killing of Finucane and related loyalist shootings. Ironically Stobie himself had called for a public inquiry, describing himself and Mulholland as ‘pawns in a bigger game, caught up in a tangled web spun by very powerful people’.19
The day Stobie was gunned down, the second shock hit Special Branch, the Chief Constable, and the new Police Service of Northern Ireland. The implications were potentially even more damaging as the shock involved intelligence provided to Special Branch in advance of the ‘Real’ IRA’s Omagh bombing on 15 August 1998 in which 29 people died in the worst atrocity of the conflict (see here). The dramatic allegation, mirroring that in the Stobie/Finucane case, was that Special Branch had been provided with information by its agents but it had not been acted upon. Ironically, the shock was delivered in-house by the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s new Ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan who investigated the Omagh allegation and published her draft report on 12 December 2001. Mrs O’Loan is a former solicitor, law lecturer and member of the now defunct Police Authority, her remit as Ombudsman under the Police (Northern Ireland) Act of 1998 is to provide ‘an independent impartial police complaints service in which the public and the police have confidence’. Her office, with a hundred staff and a Chief Investigator on secondment from the Metropolitan Police, opened in November 2000. The Act and the establishment of the Ombudsman’s office were vital parts of the post Good Friday Agreement institutions designed to restore public confidence in the police, in particular on the nationalist side.
Mrs O’Loan began her investigation on 17 August 2001 following allegations made by an RUC agent and former British soldier codenamed ‘Kevin Fulton’ that two or three days before the Omagh bombing he had warned the police that he had heard from a senior member of the ‘Real’ IRA that there was ‘something big on’.20 He said he suspected the man was making a bomb and passed on the person’s name and car registration number. ‘Fulton’ did not mention Omagh or the precise location and time of the attack. It is said that the officer then logged the warning. It appears that there was an even earlier warning on 4 August 1998, eleven days before the attack, in which Special Branch was told of weapons being brought across the border and into Omagh for an attack on the police on 15 August.21 The key question that Mrs O’Loan and her team had to investigate was what happened to the intelligence Special Branch received. Was it passed on and could the slaughter of 29 people have been avoided? When Mrs O’Loan published her draft report it made devastating reading:
The police had received two warnings on 4 and 12 August 1998. The Chief Constable’s judgement and leadership were ‘seriously flawed’. The result was that the chances of detaining and convicting the Omagh bombers were ‘significantly reduced’.
Special Branch officers failed to pass on the warnings.
Besides also being highly critical of the way the RUC had conducted its investigation after Omagh – and the RUC’s own internal report into the original investigation had been critical – the Ombudsman’s draft report did claim that it was unclear that had action been taken on the warnings, the bombing would have been prevented. It then recommended that a new team of police officers from an outside force should investigate the bombing and the role and fuction of Special Branch should be reviewed.22 Reaction to Mrs O’Loan’s report was predictably split along nationalist and Unionist lines. The Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, was incandescent and hit back saying that the report was ‘wildly inaccurate’ and even remarking, uncharacteristically, that he would ‘commit suicide in public’ if it could be proved he was wrong.23 He attacked its ‘basic unfairness’ and its ‘wild and sweeping allegations’. He said ‘Fulton’ was unreliable. ‘I do not think these people have ever investigated a terrorist incident in their lives,’ he said. ‘I have to say that I am astounded by the ignorance that they have displayed in terms of how terrorist organisations operate.’24 He also pointed out that Mrs O’Loan had not conducted a proper, formal interview with him and therefore the report was the case for the prosecution without hearing the defence. Mrs O’Loan said she was ‘enormously saddened’25 by the Chief Constable’s response. Tony Blair gave his full support to the Chief Constable who had steered the RUC through its difficult transition to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Yet, the repercussions of the O’Loan report and the killing of William Stobie were destined to rumble on, and perhaps lift the carpet on still more embarrassing corners of the so-called ‘dirty war’.
In Ireland the ghosts of the past seldom rest but return to haunt the future epitomised most painfully by the ongoing Saville inquiry into the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’. Despite all the remarkable progress that has been made since the Good Friday Agreement, culminating in the establishment of new political institutions, a new police service and the first verifiable act of IRA decommissioning, the road ahead will still fall under the long shadows cast by the conflict. These shadows will be thrown not only by the raw sectarian hatreds generated once again at Holy Cross but from the murky world of intelligence gathering and the recruitment of informers and agents. The danger is that these shadows may still have the power to destabilise the future. The ‘Brits’ may have contained the IRA and encouraged it down the political road, even to the extent of giving its four Members of Parliament offices at Westminster, but now they have to consolidate the peace. Changing political institutions is difficult enough but changing hearts and minds is a challenge of a different dimension that will take years and generations to complete. As Tony Blair warned in his words after the IRA’s historic gesture on decommissioning, ‘We are a long way from finishing our journey but a very significant milestone has been passed’.26 There are still many more milestones to go before the IRA’s last bunker is sealed and a line is finally drawn under the ‘Brits’ 30 year ‘war’ against the IRA, thus sealing too the final peace in the centuries-old conflict between England and Ireland. Only then will it truly represent a ‘farewell to arms’.