Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  Optimistic calculations about the DUP took account of the fact that, while denouncing the Agreement, it had actively participated in all the Northern institutions created by it. Its Assembly members sat on committees with republicans, including committees chaired by members of Sinn Féin. It had taken up the positions in the Executive that it was owed under the d'Hondt rules. Its two ministers did not participate in the meetings of the Executive because of the presence of Sinn Féin ministers but continued to run their respective departments; meanwhile, the party depicted their ministers as ‘whistle-blowers – exposing each of Trimble's further concessions to Sinn Féin’.111 Commentators noted a further public mellowing when they dropped their policy of not sharing a television or radio studio with Sinn Féin members. The problem remained that the DUP had overtaken the UUP precisely by a relentlessly negative campaign, one that depicted the peace process and the Agreement as an exercise in ‘appeasement’ that was structurally biased against Protestants and the Union. For many DUP activists and supporters, ‘Sinn Féin–IRA’ was a slouching beast of ‘unreconstructed terrorists’. However pragmatic some members of the DUP political class might have become, they would face formidable problems in selling their participation in government with republicans to many of their supporters.

  Despite this, Blair was intent on pushing both the DUP and republicans into serious negotiations, and in November the governments gave the parties their proposals for a comprehensive agreement. In the weeks leading up to the arrival of Blair and Ahern in Belfast for what was hoped to be the unveiling of an agreement on 8 December 2004, there were signs that the DUP was prepared to go some distance in accommodating republicans. DUP demands for radical changes in the Agreement were watered down to the provision that all ministers would be voted for as a slate – thereby avoiding the embarrassment for the DUP of its Assembly members having to cast specific votes for republican ministers, as the previous system would have required. For such a fig-leaf the party was prepared to accept the devolution of policing and justice powers within months, with the inevitability of republican control of at least one of these ministries. However, once again, the two Prime Ministers were to be disappointed. The failure of the negotiations was initially blamed by republicans on the DUP demand for photographs of the decommissioning process. Such claims were given some plausibility by a speech of Paisley's to DUP supporters in Ballymena in which he had proclaimed that republicans needed to be publicly humiliated and that the IRA should don ‘sackcloth and ashes’. In fact, the photographic documentation of decommissioning was agreed to by both governments with the proviso that the photographs would not be made publicly available until the formation of the Executive in March 2005.

  On 20 December, shortly after the breakdown of negotiations, a gang of twenty armed men took over the houses of two officials of the Northern Bank and threatened to kill their families unless they cooperated in removing £26 million from the bank's vaults in the centre of Belfast. On 7 January 2005 the Chief Constable of the PSNI, Hugh Orde, declared that the IRA had been responsible for the biggest bank raid in the history of the UK and Ireland.112 Sinn Féin was faced with a united front of criticism from London and Dublin as Bertie Ahern contemptuously dismissed Martin McGuinness's attempt to blame the crisis on ‘securocrats’ in the Northern Ireland Office and Adams's claim that he believed the IRA when it denied involvement in the bank raid.113 Both Ahern and Michael McDowell, the Republic's Minister for Justice, accused the Sinn Féin leadership of actively misleading them in the December negotiations because of their supposed prior knowledge of the planned robbery. McDowell pointed to the recent hi-jacking of a truck carrying cigarettes worth £1.5 million and the multimillion-pound robbery of a wholesalers in West Belfast – both of which the Garda and the PSNI blamed on the IRA – in his labelling of the IRA as ‘a colossal crime machine’.114

  Republican discomfiture was soon intensified after a dispute in a central Belfast pub on 30 January led to the death of a working-class Catholic from the Short Strand area of East Belfast. Robert McCartney was stabbed to death by a group that included senior members of the IRA in the Markets and Short Strand areas who were returning from the annual Bloody Sunday demonstration in Derry. The murder produced an avalanche of negative media comment on the continuing coercive role of the IRA in working-class Catholic communities. The victim's sisters and partner launched a high-profile campaign to bring his killers to justice in which they were highly critical of Sinn Féin. It was not easy for republicans to label the sisters as working to a ‘securocrat’ or ‘anti-peace process agenda’, as they were committed Sinn Féin voters. Internationally the campaign did major damage to the party, ensuring that Adams and McGuinness were excluded from the annual St Patrick's Day jamboree at the White House while the sisters were welcomed by Bush. Domestically, with Westminster and local elections due on 5 May, Adams's ambition to obliterate the SDLP once and for all, something that many commentators had thought likely until the end of 2004, looked increasingly problematic.

  As with the first IRA act of decommissioning, which had been brought about by Trimble's success in having Blair agree to the suspension of the institutions, it was a serious threat to Sinn Féin's political ambitions that seemed to be most effective in producing movement from the IRA. On 6 April, as the election campaign opened, Adams made a public appeal to the IRA to abandon violence in favour of politics. In a predictable piece of peace-process theatre, the IRA responded to Adams by promising to give his appeal ‘due consideration’.115 The IRA's ‘internal consultation’ process would not produce any result before the election, and it was unclear whether it would do much to help Sinn Féin weather the storm created by the Northern Bank and McCartney murder.

  Trimble went to the electorate with the less than compelling message that ‘Rebuilding a moderate coalition here and refocusing London on what should be done will not be easy.’ Paisley, turning his back on the previous December's attempt to do a deal with republicans, provided a traditional Manichaean blast: ‘the peace process is in reality a pit of perdition. To enter into government with the terrorists of IRA–Sinn Féin would be treason.’116 It was only too easy for the DUP to use the bank robbery and the McCartney murder to depict Trimble as the unwitting stooge of an unreconstructed republican movement. Trimble knew better: that they reflected the disreputable side of a movement in transition. He had little doubt that, like many other national liberation movements with which republicans liked to compare themselves, Sinn Féin would end up comfortably ensconced in power, albeit within a partitionist context. But it was the UUP who would pay the price for the protracted nature of the republican movement's move away from militarism. The UUP's vote slumped by 9 per cent to 17.7 per cent, and it lost all but one of its seats. At 33.7 per cent, the DUP's vote was almost double that of the UUP.

  The SDLP's performance was the surprise of the election. Widely expected to be reduced to one seat, Eddie McGrady's in South Down, it won three. Although it lost Newry and South Armagh to Sinn Féin, Durkan easily retained Hume's seat in Foyle, while the party also won South Belfast because of a split in the unionist vote. The party had fought a tough campaign that focused on the recent graphic examples of republicans' continued linkages with criminality and violence. It was doubtful, however, that the ‘McCartney’ effect would sustain the party in the longer term. Sinn Féin's support – 24.3 per cent of the vote and five seats – had continued to grow. Nevertheless the result was a major disappointment for republicans who had confidently expected to win Foyle and reduce the SDLP to a sole MP at Westminster. This would have allowed them to claim with some foundation to be the party that represented the nationalst community in Northern Ireland.

  The reverberations of the bank robbery and the McCartney murder were decisive in bringing some sort of closure to the long-drawn-out process of haggling over IRA arms. On 28 July the IRA issued a statement that its Army Council had ‘ordered an end to the armed campaign’. All IRA units had been commanded to dump a
rms and Volunteers instructed to ‘assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means’. The governments' concern about republicans' previous reluctance to fully embrace democracy was reflected in the instruction that ‘Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.’ There was also a commitment to put its arms ‘beyond use as quickly as possible’. Unionist sceptics would still be refused any photographic verification and would have to be satisfied with two clerical witnesses, one of them a Protestant.117 The process culminated in late September, when General de Chastelain and his staff, together with the two clergymen, witnessed the disposal of what the General referred to as ‘the totality of the arsenal of the IRA’.118

  Despite its historic significance the announcement of the decommissioning of IRA weapons received a muted response. In part this reflected unionist suspicion of anything the IRA said or did. The DUP questioned the credentials of the witnesses: one was Father Alec Reid, a long-time confidant of Gerry Adams, and the other a liberal Methodist. Others, while accepting that the IRA had rid itself of much of its arsenal, argued that it was far from going out of business. Sceptics could point to the reports of the body set up by the two governments in 2004 to monitor the paramilitary ceasefires. The Fifth Report of the International Monitoring Commission in May 2005 claimed that the IRA was still recruiting and training new members. It was heavily engaged in organized crime, including the smuggling of fuel and tobacco and sophisticated money laundering. It concluded ‘the Provisional IRA remains a highly active organisation.’119 However, by the end of 2005, there were indications that the organization had become dormant. This reflected the governments’ insistence that, despite decommissioning being what Blair had described as a ‘step of unparalleled magnitude’,120 unionist confidence in republican intentions would need to be consolidated by further reports from the IMC.

  Had the IRA, two years earlier, said and done what it did in July and September 2005, Northern Ireland may well have had a functioning and inclusive government by the end of 2003. In the intervening period Trimble's brand of unionism, which had demonstrated an ability to deal directly and flexibly with republicans, had been displaced by the DUP's more absolutist and populist variety. But it remained possible that, having displaced the moderates, the DUP would end up on very similar political territory to that formerly occupied by Trimble. For the party had moved far from a root-and-branch denunciation of the Agreement. Its demand now was not that it be scrapped but that it be operated in a more balanced manner. The party had been in negotiations with Sinn Féin, although indirectly. Even after the McCartney–Northern Bank storm, it was careful not to rule out entering government with republicans if Sinn Féin could demonstrate a complete break with paramilitarism. This was the pragmatic face that it put forward in negotiations with other parties and governments. The message to its supporters and the broader unionist community was more unreconstructed. It was that a vote for the DUP was a vote to end concessions, for an alternative to the ‘push-over unionism of David Trimble’. The DUP had depicted every significant development since 1998 as part of the piecemeal dismantling of the Union. The problem for the party was that, having blamed Trimble's leadership for acquiescing in this process and boasting, as Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the DUP, did, that ‘unionism is now under new management', there was little evidence that DUP dominance would produce any major rethink in British policy.

  After the IRA's statement the British government announced a dramatic programme of ‘demilitarization’ that would see the number of British troops reduced to a maximum of 5,000 within two years, together with rapid movement on the closure of security installations along the border. The four ‘home’ battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment were also to be disbanded. The successor to the UDR, the RIR battalions were 4,000 strong, and the announcement produced a wave of street protests and Protestant paramilitary violence.121 In early September the rerouting of an Orange march on the Springfield Road led to the most intense period of loyalist violence for well over a decade. Fusillades of shots were fired at the police, roads throughout loyalist areas in Belfast were blocked with burning vehicles, and there was widespread antipolice rioting.

  The violence led the new Secretary of State, Peter Hain, to declare that he took unionist concerns seriously.122 But there was no indication that the main lines of government policy would be more than tweaked at the edges. There was more unionist angst over proposed legislation to provide an amnesty for ‘on the runs’: IRA members who were outside the UK evading arrest. The government was also considering further police reform plus the official legitimation of restorative justice schemes that republicans had promoted as an alternative to the presence of the police in Catholic working-class areas. While the idea behind such initiatives was to make it possible for Sinn Féin to support the new policing structures, their short-term effect would be to make it unlikely that the DUP would risk going into government with republicans in 2006. Some elements of the DUP and many of those who voted for them preferred the continuation of direct rule to the return of devolution with Martin McGuinness in government. But such a disposition came up against the aversion of the British political class to the prospect of decades more of direct involvement in the running of the province. It also clashed with the strong ‘little Ulster’ mentality of many unionists, who resented local decisions being made by outsiders. Most fundamentally it ignored the fact that, although the Agreement helped to accommodate the republican movement to partition, it was also associated with the consolidation of a more confident and assertive northern nationalism. In the absence of devolution this would push direct rule towards shared decision-making between London and Dublin, further limiting unionists' involvement in the governance of Northern Ireland.

  There are therefore strong negative incentives for the DUP's political class to deal with republicans, apart from the attractions of salaries, status and patronage that the return of devolved government would bring. The amount of agreement reached in December 2004 demonstrated a capacity for pragmatism at the top of the party. However, the powerful components of anti-Catholicism and demonization of republicans in the party's ideology will make the selling of such a deal to grass-roots members and supporters difficult. If it succeeds, the result will not be the ‘new Northern Ireland’ that Trimble looked forward to in the optimism of 1998.123 In many ways it will, as some progressive critics of the Agreement claim, institutionalize sectarianism. But underpinning it will be an implicit recognition by the two most obdurate forms of unionism and nationalism that the future of Northern Ireland cannot be settled on their own terms. In that at least the drafters of the Agreement might be able to claim a victory.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1994), ix.

  2. John Peck, Dublin from Downing Street (Dublin, 1978), 18.

  3. Martin Mansergh, ‘Taoiseach Serious in Ruling Out SF Support’, Irish Times, 26 November 2005.

  4. Jonathan Haughton, ‘The Dynamics of Economic Change’, in William Crotty and David E. Schmidt (eds.), Ireland and the Politics of Change (London and New York, 1998), 27.

  5. Quoted in Paul Bew, Henry Patterson and Paul Teague, Between War and Peace: The Political Future of Northern Ireland (London, 1997), 228.

  6. Bernadette Hayes and Ian McAllister, ‘Public Support for Political Violence and Paramilitarism in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 17, 2005.

  7. Bew, Patterson and Teague, 90.

  8. Irish Echo Online, 16–22 November 2005.

  1 The Legacy of Partition

  1. David Officer, ‘In Search of Order, Permanence and Stability: Building Stormont 1921–1932’, in Richard English and Graham Walker (eds.), Unionism in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1996), 142.

  2. Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland 1921–1996: Political Forces and Social Classes (
London, 1996), 28.

  3. Paul Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912–1916 (Oxford, 1994).

  4. Enda Staunton, The Nationalists of Northern Ireland 1918–1973 (Dublin, 2001), 7.

  5. Austen Morgan, Labour and Partition: The Belfast Working Class 1905–1923 (London, 1991), 269.

  6. Michael Farrell, Arming the Protestants (London, 1983), 168.

  7. Graham Ellison and Jim Smyth, The Crowned Harp: Policing Northern Ireland (London, 2000), 23.

  8. ibid., 23.

  9. Memorandum by S. G. Tallents, Colonial Office Papers, PRO, CO 906/24.

  10. Paul Bew, ‘The Political History of Partition: The Prospects for North–South Cooperation’, in A. F. Heath, R. Breen and C.T. Whelan (eds.), Ireland North and South: Perspectives from Social Science (Oxford, 1999), 408–9.

  11. Bew, Gibbon and Patterson, 241–2.

  12. J.J Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), 238.

  13. Tallents's memorandum, CO 906/30.

  14. Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London, 1976), 84.

  15. Letter from Adrian Robinson to F. M. Adams, Press and Publicity Officer, Stormont Castle, 21 November 1944, PRONI, HA/32/1/649.