Republican enthusiasm for the injection of an American dimension into the situation was a reflection of the leadership's calculation that Clinton's support might make it easier to sell a compromise to the more fundamentalist elements of the IRA. The price of the creation of a pan-nationalist front with the blessing of the White House would be a ceasefire, and this was bound to remind the ‘republican base’ of the last nearly disastrous ceasefire of 1975. In 1986 Martin McGuinness had declared: ‘Our position is clear and it will never, never, never change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.’41 Yet by the early 1990s it was clear to Adams and his closest allies that, as Danny Morrison put it in a letter to Adams in 1991, ‘I think we can fight on forever and can't be defeated. But, of course that isn't the same as winning or showing something for all the sacrifices.’42 The purpose of the ‘Irish peace process’, as Sinn Féin described its deepening involvement with constitutional nationalist parties in both states, was to obtain a settlement amounting to joint sovereignty that could be presented as transitional to the final goal of a thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic. In return the IRA would deliver an open-ended cessation of violence. The devastating bombs in London in 1992 and 1993 were aimed at increasing republican leverage once all-party talks about a settlement got under way.
US involvement was important as a compensatory device that allowed the republican leadership to recover from its profound disappointment with the Downing Street Declaration produced by John Major and Albert Reynolds on 15 December 1993. When Reynolds had dispatched his amended version of the Hume–Adams document to Major in June 1993, it was still heavily republican in content, with references to Britain as a ‘persuader’ of unionists towards Irish unity and the demand for a specific time-frame within which unity was to be attained.43 However, this was little more than an opening gambit as Reynolds had accepted that the notion of ‘persuasion’ was incompatible with the principle of consent. Despite his frustration with Major's much more cautious approach to the possibility of an IRA cessation, Reynolds did not shift on this fundamental point, and he was also concerned, as was Major, that mainstream unionism in the person of figures such as James Molyneaux and the Church of Ireland Primate Robin Eames would not reject any joint declaration.
Republican violence made it all the more necessary for the two Prime Ministers to distance themselves from ‘Hume–Adams’. On 23 October an IRA attempt to kill the leadership of the UDA in a bomb attack on the Shankill Road resulted in the death of ten people, nine of them shoppers or passers-by who were killed when the Provisionals' bomb went off prematurely. The day before the carnage Hume had told the House of Commons that his talks with Adams provided ‘the most hopeful dialogue and the most hopeful chance of lasting peace that I have seen in twenty years’. He called on the two governments to ‘hurry up and deal with it’.44 Hume now seemed dangerously isolated in his partnership with the republican movement, and Adams further shredded the tattered moral credibility of ‘Hume–Adams’ by helping to carry the coffin of the IRA bomber killed in the attack. On 30 October the UDA, using its nom de guerre of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, wreaked its revenge for the Shankill bombing when two of its men machine-gunned customers in the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, County Londonderry, killing six Catholics and one Protestant.
On 27 October Dick Spring, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, had announced to the Dáil six democratic principles that should underpin any settlement. These included a rejection of talks with those who used, threatened or supported violence, and no change in the North's constitutional position without the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland.45 Two days later, after a meeting between Major and Reynolds at an EU summit in Brussels, the Prime Ministers developed the six principles as a seemingly explicit alternative to the Hume–Adams document. As Reynolds privately informed his press secretary, ‘Hume–Adams was being declared dead, in order to keep it alive, in the same way as Adams carried the bomber's coffin, because otherwise he couldn't deliver the IRA.’46 Despite further embarrassment when, in November, news of the ‘back-channel’ discussions with republicans leaked to the press, Major was still prepared to continue with discussions aimed at producing an IRA ceasefire.47 At the same time he intensified the process of consultation with Molyneaux and other unionist leaders to attempt to ensure that any joint declaration would at least have the acquiescence of the majority community.
The Joint Declaration was signed at a ceremony at 10 Downing Street on 15 December 1993. It was a relatively brief document of eleven paragraphs, but underneath a certain opaqueness of style there was considerable originality and sophistication. This was particularly so in the complex language of the Declaration's fourth paragraph, in which the British government agreed ‘that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish’.
After the Downing Street Declaration, the ‘Hume–Adams’ phraseology continued to dominate the political scene, but its content was dramatically altered. One of the most effective slogans of Irish nationalism had been given new, decidedly softer conceptual content, and this had been done by a Fianna Fáil-led government. The self-determination of the Irish people was conceded by Britain but only on the basis that the Irish government wished to operate that principle in favour of Irish unity with the support of a majority in the North. Superficially, the rhetoric of the ‘Hume–Adams’ process had been conceded, but the process had been stripped of its content in a quite dramatic way. The British were now ‘facilitators’, not for Irish unity but for an agreed Ireland, and an agreed Ireland, by definition, could not be a united Ireland until there was majority consent in the North.
Divisions amongst republicans over how to evaluate the Declaration were soon apparent. Mitchel McLaughlin, the prominent Sinn Féin leader from Derry, claimed that the general reaction of republicans was one of disappointment. At a meeting of around 400 republican activists, many of them ex-prisoners, at Loughmacrory in County Tyrone in December there was no support for the Declaration.48 Yet Adams insisted that the Declaration represented a significant shift by the British, who had for the first time, if in a heavily qualified manner, recognized the right of the Irish people as a whole to self-determination. He was even to claim that it ‘marked a stage in the slow and painful process of England's disengagement from her first and last colony’.49 Tensions within the republican movement were exacerbated by Major's talk of a ‘decontamination period’ for Sinn Féin before they could enter into dialogue with the governments and the other parties about the way ahead. It was also made clear by the British government that the IRA would have to decommission its weapons before Sinn Féin would be admitted to all-party talks.50 Dick Spring compounded the republican leadership's problems when he too announced that republican participation in talks would necessitate movement on the arms issue.51
Yet, if many rank-and-file republicans saw in the Declaration little more than the ‘Unionist veto’ disguised in more ‘green’ verbiage, Adams and his supporters in the leadership detected real possibilities of political advance for Sinn Féin, North and South. Reynolds did all he could to play on Adams's desire for a republican political breakthrough in the Republic. The ban on Sinn Féin from radio and television in the Republic was removed in January 1994, and Reynolds announced that a Forum for Peace and Reconciliation would be set up to allow all the parties in the Republic to consider ways in which ‘agreement and trust’ could be developed between the ‘two traditions on the island’. Republicans were being invited into the mainstream in the Republic; Reynolds also ensured that Adams would be elevated to the status of an international statesman, provided he gave clear evidence that he was committed to ‘conflict resolution’. Crucial here was Clinton's decision in January, against the wishes of Major and the US State Department and Department of Justice, to grant a visa
to Adams to allow him to attend a high-profile one-day conference on Northern Ireland in New York, organized by leading figures in the corporate wing of Irish-America. Clinton's decidedly ‘green’ Irish ambassador, Jean Kennedy-Smith, was also important in making Adams and his colleagues understand that with sufficient tactical ingenuity they could look to powerful allies in Washington.
When the leadership of the republican movement prepared IRA volunteers for a ceasefire in the summer of 1994, they emphasized the importance of a powerful pan-nationalist alliance supported by the White House. In a key strategy document entitled ‘TUAS’ that was circulated at the time, the main factors they identified as favouring an initiative were:
Hume is the only SDLP person on the horizon strong enough to face the challenge.
Dublin's coalition is the strongest government in 25 years or more.
Reynolds has no historical baggage to hinder him and knows how popular such a consensus would be among the grassroots.
There is potentially a very powerful Irish-American lobby not in hock to any particular party in Ireland or Britain.
Clinton is perhaps the first US President in decades to be substantially influenced by such a lobby.
The activists were told that the initials stood for ‘tactical use of armed struggle’, which implied that, if the ceasefire tactic failed, the armed struggle would resume. The two governments and the Americans were given the more soothing message that TUAS stood for ‘totally unarmed strategy’.52
The involvement of Reynolds and Clinton was conditional on a radical shift in the IRA's position. Both reacted angrily when, in pursuit of the ‘tactical use of armed struggle’ in the forlorn hope that the British could still be coerced into acting as ‘persuaders’ for unity, the IRA mortared Heathrow Airport in March 1994.53 Back at the time of the spat with Major over Adams's visa, Reynolds had privately declared that ‘Sinn Féin will pay a price for going to Capitol Hill. A lot of powerful people went out on a limb for Adams. If he doesn't deliver, they'll have him back in the house with steel shutters [Sinn Féin headquarters on the Falls Road] so fast his feet won't touch the ground’.54 When the IRA declared a three-day ceasefire in March it was received with cold contempt by Adams's ‘allies’ in Dublin and Washington; and by the beginning of the August, after some more gruesome loyalist murders of Catholics and with rumours of an imminent IRA cessation that would be time-limited and reserve them the right to defend nationalist communities, Reynolds let Adams know that republicans could be as quickly consigned to the margins as they had been recently brought in from the cold:
I've told them that if they don't do this right, they can shag off… Otherwise I'll walk away. I'll go off down that three-strand talks/framework document road with John Major, and they can detour away for another 25 years of killing and being killed – for what?’55
The IRA declaration of a ‘complete cessation of military operations’ on 31 August 1994 was therefore in part the product of a carrot-and-stick strategy on the part of the Irish government aided by the White House. Fear of political isolation if London and Dublin proceeded with the inter-party talks process from which they were excluded was a factor. So was the realistic assessment that ‘republicans at this time and on their own do not have the strength to achieve the end goal’.56 At the core of the leadership's optimism about ‘the new stage of struggle’ was the information it had obtained from Reynolds about the ongoing discussions with the British on the Framework Document that the two governments were drafting as a basis for a new and decisive round of all-party talks. The document, laden with cross-border institutions, was given an all-Ireland ethos designed to be seductive to republicans. From this perspective a ‘transitional’ settlement combining strong North–South institutions and a process of radical reform of the northern state would create conditions for unity over a period of fifteen to twenty years. Central to this process was the further fragmentation and weakening of unionism. But could republicans continue to count on unionism remaining inertly divided between Paisleyite rejectionism and Molyneaux's crab-like adjustment to the strategic initiatives of others?
Unionism and the Peace Process
James Molyneaux had tried to counter the lurid doom-mongering of Paisley by stressing his ability to have the unionist position respected at the highest levels in Westminster and Whitehall. His ‘friends in high places’ approach came near to foundering in 1985, and only the disarray of the DUP in the aftermath of the Agreement saved him. The publication of the Framework Document seemed to many in the UUP to show that their leader had been fooled again because of a naive faith in the goodwill of a British Prime Minister. Molyneaux, who had been denounced by Paisley for going to Dublin during the 1992 talks process, had been confident that the collapse of the talks would consolidate a shift in British government attitudes away from sympathy with nationalism. Given the Major government's precarious position in the House of Commons, he expected that it would give sympathetic attention to unionist concerns, particularly the demand for a Northern Ireland Select Committee to end the situation whereby Northern Ireland legislation was dealt with through Orders in Council. Although he did get satisfaction on this issue, he had seriously underestimated the attractive power of republican revisionism to any British government. When the Framework Document was published, it contained provision for North–South institutions that to many unionists appeared to be alarmingly autonomous and powerful. As Graham Walker notes, ‘The Unionist Party now found it difficult retrospectively to justify its acquiescence in the Downing Street Declaration and was roundly condemned by Paisley, who identified this as a key development in encouraging the government to pursue a path inimical to Unionist interests.’57
The Framework Document dealt a fatal blow to Molyneaux's leadership. In March 1995 Lee Reynolds, an unknown 21-year-old student, obtained 15 per cent of the votes in an audacious leadership challenge to Molyneaux. In the summer, Molyneaux resigned after his party lost the North Down by-election, a prime UUP seat, to an arch Molyneaux critic, Robert McCartney, QC, leader of the small UK Unionist Party.
North Down was referred to as the North's ‘gold coast’ because of its high concentration of prosperous Protestants. These were the so-called ‘contented classes’: those who had in material terms done very well under direct rule. A major factor in the well-being of this group was the growth of the public sector, which had been expanded as a fire damper against political violence. By the 1980s public sector employment accounted for 42 per cent of the total workforce, compared to 27 per cent a decade earlier.58 Even under Thatcher, government policy in Northern Ireland remained strongly interventionist and quietly Keynesian. The result was a massive expansion in the size of the subvention that was paid by the Treasury to the region and reflected the difference between what was raised locally in taxes and the amount of public expenditure injected into the region. While the subvention was tiny in the early 1970s, by the mid 1990s it had become huge, standing at about £3.7 billion annually.59
The economic dependence of the North on the British Exchequer raised a serious practical obstacle to Irish unity and also provided a strong prudential argument against the ‘little Ulster’ vision of the DUP. The material well-being of the Northern Protestant middle class was another factor that British policy-makers might have hoped would buttress moderate unionism. However, the problem with this economic underpinning of the Union was that it tended to encourage a largely privatized lifestyle that wanted to insulate itself as much as possible from politics. For many middle-class Protestants the lives of their working-class co-religionists in North and West Belfast were as much an unknown and alien territory as those of the inhabitants of the Falls Road and Ardoyne. The problem facing any attempt to develop a more politically rational and proactive unionism had its social roots here. As the Church of Ireland leader Robin Eames explained to the Opsahl Commission: ‘To many the political process in Northern Ireland is already irrelevant. The opting out of the middle class is a definite factor at
play. For those whose work, recreation or social life is untouched by the community of fear, there is a reluctance to get involved.’60
The ‘community of fear’ reflected not simply ongoing violence but a broader perception of decline and retreat amongst Protestants. It was the obverse of rising nationalist and republican self-confidence and reflected demographic and electoral trends.The Catholic share of the North's population increased from a third to at least 40 per cent between 1971 and 1991 and there were unionist fears that the 2001 census might show the Catholic share as 46 per cent.61 Although demographers disagreed as to the likelihood of a future Catholic majority because of declining Catholic birth-rates since the 1980s, such qualifications did little to calm more atavistic interpretations of imminent victory or defeat in an ethnic breeding contest. A rising nationalist and republican share of the vote – from 31 per cent in the early 1980s to 43 per cent in 2001 – had a similar effect. Even those tendencies that might have been seen as providing sections of the Catholic community with a material stake in partition were read through Orange spectacles. Thus the strengthening of fair employment legislation in 1989, which by the mid 1990s was contributing to an increase in the Catholic share of employment in virtually every occupational grouping,62 was read as a Dublin government-inspired stratagem for discrimination against Protestants. Such fearful pessimism would remain a major influence in unionist politics throughout the 1990s.
In the leadership contest that followed Molyneaux's resignation, David Trimble was seen as the most articulate and dangerous candidate of the right. This in part reflected his role in the major confrontation between the security forces and the Portadown Orangemen who were blocked from marching from Drumcree Church down the Garvaghy Road in July 1995. The Garvaghy Road was one of a number of areas where Catholic residents claimed that changing demography required that ‘offensive’ parades be curtailed. Sinn Féin had played an important role in the establishment of such residents' committees, in part as an example of ‘unarmed struggle’.63 The increasing confrontation over marches also reflected unionist fears about the new interventionist role of the Irish state in the North through the institutions and rights agreed at Hillsborough in 1985.64 As tens of thousands of Orangemen came to give support and others blocked roads and the port of Larne, Trimble, in whose constituency the conflict was taking place, was intensively involved in attempts to resolve the issue. However, the undoubtedly positive role he played in bringing the stand-off to a peaceful conclusion was obliterated by his indulgence in a piece of street theatre with Ian Paisley, when the two clasped hands in what nationalists interpreted as a triumphalist gesture as they greeted the Orangemen after they had been allowed to march down the Garvaghy Road.
Ireland Since 1939 Page 46
