Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  There was one very good reason for this dissonance in the Provos. The IRA’s leadership, the Army Council, was unaware of Adams’s discussions with Father Reid and Cardinal O Fiaich, much less the proposal they had constructed between them or the implied acceptance by Adams of the consent principle. But, in 1988, the Council did authorise peace negotiations, which would be based upon a British declaration of its intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland at some point in the future, even the far distant future. Traditional IRA policy said that if the British agreed to withdraw then they must do so without delay, in the lifetime of a British parliament, so that a successor administration could not renege. But in 1988, the IRA leadership agreed to modify this significantly and a secret decision was made to extend the period for withdrawal up to twenty or thirty years hence. Any consequent all-Ireland conference would, in the leadership’s view, be convened to determine the future shape of a united Ireland, albeit one that might not come into being until the second or third decade of the new millennium. What the conference was not supposed to do was to discuss the shape of a new Northern Ireland, an arrangement that could only copper-fasten partition; equally, in the IRA’s eyes, it could not hap pen unless Britain came up with the withdrawal pledge and a date by which British involvement in Irish affairs would finally cease.

  As far as the Army Council was concerned, the talks between John Hume and Gerry Adams were supposed to be about drawing up a statement distilling all of this into an agreed statement – the so-called Hume–Adams Document – and then presenting it to the British and the Irish governments for their endorsement. Predictably, the talks stalled over the vital issue of a date for British withdrawal, with neither government at all inclined to go down a road that would be regarded as a victory for the IRA’s violence and a rejection of a principle that had underpinned government policy in Northern Ireland for decades. The date was never agreed and the two governments went ahead with their own statement, preserving the consent principle. The outcome of the inter-governmental dialogue was fully consistent with the secret proposals put together by Father Reid and Gerry Adams but utterly in conflict with traditional, and current, IRA policy. But it was the governmental version that provided the basis for the rest of the peace process and ultimately the Good Friday Agreement. In doing so they were incorporating a blueprint agreed by the Sinn Fein president largely behind the backs of most in the IRA’s top echelons. Adams and those around him were playing a dangerous game for huge stakes and it complicated enormously the task of those, like David Ervine, the UVF and the PUP, who were trying to make sense of it all.

  Although much of this was played out behind closed doors, enough seeped into the public domain to suggest strongly that something serious was stirring in the undergrowth, that the Provos seemed to be seeking an end to the conflict. For instance while the 1988 Hume–Adams contacts were accompanied by indignant denials from Adams and Martin McGuinness, the hardline Northern Commander of the IRA, that a ceasefire was on the table, a few weeks before, Adams had told a Dublin magazine, ‘There’s no military solution, none whatsoever. Military solutions by either of the two main protagonists [in the North] only mean more tragedies. There can only be a political solution …’50 While IRA violence continued, it was clear that its violence was becoming more of a liability and a burden, reflected not least in Sinn Fein’s increasingly stagnant and disappointing electoral performances. One IRA unit in Fermanagh had been disbanded for killing a former police reservist visiting his relatives in County Donegal, one of several sectarian killings along the border. There were other signs of a scaling down: the IRA stopped firing volleys at paramilitary funerals, the policy of retaliation for Loyalist killings was refined and leaders, including Gerry Adams, became more vocal in their criticism of IRA activity, especially civilian killings, which harmed Sinn Fein’s electoral prospects. Sinn Fein published a series of policy documents that all had ‘peace’ as a theme, in which elements of the Reid–Adams proposals figured prominently, such as pan-Nationalism or the all-Ireland conference. Sinn Fein councillors agreed to take an oath of office, abjuring the use of violence and both the party and the IRA began working the judicial system, notably in civil cases.

  The task facing the Sinn Fein leadership was a tough one. They had to say and do what they could to convince the two governments they were ready to deliver peace on terms London and Dublin would find acceptable, while reassuring their grassroots and the IRA rank and file that they were not selling out. It all made reading the tea leaves extraordinarily difficult for the Loyalists, and when the British joined the game publicly an already complex and opaque story was further muddied. In an interview marking his first hundred days in office, Tom King’s successor, Peter Brooke, conceded that the IRA could not be militarily defeated and that in the event of a ceasefire the British government would need to be ‘imaginative and flexible’ in its response. Twelve months later, in November 1990, Brooke took the diplomacy a step further with a statement declaring that the British had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in staying in Northern Ireland. This went a long way to meet one of the Reid–Adams conditions, British ‘neutrality’, for a ceasefire cum settlement. Clearly, the effort was getting serious.

  The semaphor traffic around Sinn Fein intensified from 1990 onwards both in public and in secret. Just before Peter Brooke’s neutrality speech, for example, the British intelligence agency MI5 re-opened the so-called ‘pipeline’ to the IRA, the secret conduit beween them that had been used fitfully from the first IRA ceasefire in 1972 onwards to send messages back and forth. The UVF and the PUP, along with their UDA partners in the CLMC, had by early 1992 created their own ‘pipeline’ to the two governments, to discover both how serious the peace overtures were and whether these threatened the Unionist position. The key moment for the UVF and PUP came in June 1992 when one of Gerry Adams’s closest confidants, a former IRA prisoner called Jim Gibney, gave the annual Bodenstown address. Bodenstown cemetery in County Kildare holds the grave of Wolfe Tone, one of the leaders of the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion and widely regarded as the founding father of modern Irish Republicanism. For many years the keynote speech at Bodenstown had been used by the IRA leadership to enunciate military and political policy and 1992 was no exception.

  The key sentence in Gibney’s address read: ‘We know and accept that the British government’s departure must be preceded by a sustained period of peace and will arise out of negotiations involving the different shades of Irish Nationalism and Unionism.’51 Gibney’s remarks were remarkably candid, for they reflected the still-secret Reid–Adams proposals rather than the approach endorsed by the Army Council. The IRA leadership envisaged the all-Ireland conference happening as a result of a British declaration of withdrawal, not the other way round. In fact the Reid–Adams formulation contained no guarantee that British withdrawal would ever happen, merely that a period of political stability and amity between Unionists and Nationalists might create conditions favourable to unity by consent. Gibney’s speech had not been cleared by the Army Council beforehand and when the IRA’s Chief of Staff, Kevin McKenna, confronted Gerry Adams he was told that Gibney’s speech had been written in haste and that the deviation from IRA policy was a clumsy mistake on his part. Two days later Gibney ‘clarified’ his speech, saying that before peace could happen the British would need to declare their long-term intention to withdraw. Unaware of the IRA’s internal bickering, the UVF and the PUP took the Gibney speech at face value, judging it – correctly as it turned out – to be an accurate reflection of the Sinn Fein leadership’s intentions. In fact, so delighted were some in the UVF/PUP camp that they could hardly believe what they were seeing.

  Q. How significantly did the Jim Gibney speech play in the deliberations of the UVF and PUP?

  A. Big style. Huge … the discussions were about the question, ‘Where does this stand up against everything we know about the IRA?’ And that’s exactly the point that I’m making, that the UVF Provo experts were
struggling [to work out] what was going on within the Republican movement, but eventually we all came to the same conclusion: the game’s on. And it was hard to believe at first, it really was, and for some [of us] very hard to believe, because it was like, you know, an abandonment of the whole raison d’être [of the IRA], which was something huge. I don’t think anybody would suggest that an IRA ceasefire, one now that has held ten years, is of little significance; it’s of huge significance, and the debate and discussion process and indeed the elite management processes [inside the Provos] that must have taken place to get to that point were such that we were saying, ‘Good grief, you know, amazing’, and we were amazed and fellas would be saying to you, ‘Fuck, this is hard to believe’, people who had been watching for a lifetime, and we all came to the same conclusion: the game was on and the Provos were playing …

  By the end of 1991, Charles Haughey’s reign as Taoiseach was coming to a close. When an old scandal about the wiretapping of Dublin journalists by an earlier Haughey administration resurfaced, he resigned and in January 1991 was replaced by Albert Reynolds, a figure not known hitherto for his interest in Northern Ireland. Reynolds had inherited a peace process from Haughey that had slowed considerably and, with none of Haughey’s Republican baggage to hold him back, he relaunched it. The dialogue between John Hume and Gerry Adams had continued in the background with both governments aware of what was being discussed. In April 1993 the secret talks became public knowledge when, by chance or otherwise, Adams was spotted entering Hume’s home on the edge of the Bogside. The two men announced that despite protests from Unionists and the intense hostility of elements in the Dublin media, they would continue their dialogue.52 Long before that, the UVF and the PUP had concluded that they needed to know much more and so they set out to rectify the deficit. The intelligence-gathering effort they launched involved dialogue with Nationalists, mostly Catholic priests known for their access to the IRA, the Irish government and with the Provos themselves. David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson, a former UVF prisoner who had been jailed for a double murder of Catholics in 1974, did most of the digging. Their diplomacy mirrored the Republicans’ in striking ways; they had to tread carefully for fear of alienating their base and chose to employ intermediaries to talk for them, not least because of their status as independent witnesses.

  Well, there was a series of conduits, I mean it was done in a number of ways. We would have been talking to a few priests; I spoke to [them] on a fairly regular basis. One then would find oneself in Dublin as a community worker, touching base with people, trying to make sense and get an understanding of what the mood music was, what the attitudes were, and hopefully be able to assess what the government attitude was. So those things were going on; they were all genteel enough because they had to be, to be brash at all would have placed people in, I think, specific and serious danger, and not just from the other side but from our own side. ‘What the fuck are they doing there?’ would have been the question, you know. ‘What’s he doing talking to them?’ I think people have got to remember that as time moved on the degree to which contacts had to be made intensified to the point where there was clear requirement to talk to church emissaries on both sides and even indeed as far up as the Archbishop. It was clear by that time there was a game on, [but] what was that game, what was it about? Was the integrity of Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom under threat or challenge? All Unionists at some point or another, if not constantly, believed that the British government was betraying them; people were very nervous about what the British government might be doing and that had to be seen against the backdrop of commentaries by Conservative Secretaries of State, constantly playing megaphone diplomacy with the Republicans, and in that respect, you know, the more that the game intensified, the greater the risks associated with trying to find out what the hell was going on … What you found was that you were painting almost by numbers. People were coming back and they were giving their little tuppence worth but it was not a process that you could … sit down and say in what sequence this happened and who said what where and how. It would be very difficult. You’ve also got to remember that you were functioning on behalf of an illegal organisation so it was never documented, which is a tragedy, a lot of it was not documented, that is who went where and saw who and when and all of that, and it’s a pity we didn’t do that.

  In 1993, as the process accelerated, the UVF and the PUP recruited a Dublin-based trade unionist to be their contact, or ‘touchstone’ as Ervine called him, with the Reynolds government. On the face of it, Chris Hudson was an odd choice as a conduit. His father had been in the Old IRA, as the veterans of the 1919–21 Anglo-Irish War were called, and he had helped Eamon de Valera found Fianna Fail. His mother, the daughter of a mixed marriage, had fled Belfast in the 1920s with her family after a death threat from Loyalists while one of his closest friends, Fran O’Toole, the lead singer in the Miami Showband, had been killed by the UVF in 1975. But Hudson was an active member of the Peace Train organisation, which had been set up in 1989 to protest at repeated Provisional IRA bombings and bomb scares which closed the Belfast– Dublin railway line. Prominent in the Peace Train group leadership were activists in the Workers Party, the old Official IRA with which the UVF had such cordial relations inside Long Kesh. In addition, the UVF/PUP, either by themselves or in co-ordination with the UDA via the CLMC, used two other conduits, the Reverend Roy Magee, a Belfast-born Presbyterian minister who had a history of supporting Loyalist causes, and the Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop Robin Eames. All three mediated with both governments and the Loyalists were able to examine their reports for inconsistencies or to confirm their intelligence. Of the two governments, the UVF and the PUP found the Dublin government, first of Albert Reynolds and then his successor, Fine Gael leader John Bruton, the more helpful. That was hardly surprising since Dublin had a greater interest in securing a Loyalist ceasefire than the British since the UVF and the UDA were far more likely to bomb and kill in Dublin than in London. As far as any threat presented by the process was concerned, the test for the Loyalists was whether their views would be incorporated in the modified Hume–Adams Document that the British and Irish were working on during most of 1993. When the Downing Street Declaration was unveiled in December that year Article 5 outlined five pledges from the Irish government underpinning the principle of consent, much to the satisfaction of Ervine and his colleagues.

  I remember going to Dublin and a very senior UVF member was with me. We were both community workers, speaking on the platform in Dublin at a community affair and getting to know people and starting to talk to people and we met a guy … who had been a fairly outspoken advocate for peace in the Republic of Ireland, someone who we felt carried his own integrity. Whilst he could hardly be described as a rampant Loyalist, coming from an IRA background, his family had an IRA background, Old IRA background, in the Republic of Ireland, [and] it was clear that he wasn’t a kindred spirit of ours, maybe [he] was someone with integrity who could be a touchstone with the Irish government. He was headhunted, the UVF headhunted him; there are those fools who think that he somehow ingratiated himself with the UVF and then did a great job [but] it’s exactly the opposite way round. The UVF headhunted that man … We’re talking 1993 here [and we did this] because I’m not so sure we fully understood the game, and we had many, many concerns, one being the attitude of the British government. Since we weren’t breaking a whole lot of Delph with the British government … we felt it was a safe option to guarantee that you never ever, ever satisfied yourself with one answer and that therefore there had to be other sources and other touchstones that you could touch to assess the veracity of the information that was coming in to you. So the Irish government became vital and Chris Hudson was actually headhunted by the leadership of the UVF for a specific role in mediating with the Irish government and was tested in late 1993 in terms of insertion of material provided by Loyalism for the Downing Street Declaration. The six key principles t
hat were included verbatim in the Downing Street Declaration was our indicator very clearly that we were being heard, that not only was the conduit in place but it was open and working.

  Q. What type of things were being sent back and forward?

  A. Well, I think that from our own point of view it was probably a mixture of ‘What is happening?’ and ‘This better not be happening’. I would say that’s the simplistic way to put it, but it would be pretty accurate. ‘What’s going on? What really is happening here? What’s the outcome going to be? What about the principle of consent? Where are the democratic imperatives?’ Those types of things, plus: ‘I hope to fuck this is all above board and honourable, because you see if you play games here, this is deadly, this is very dangerous.’ It was a hard time, I mean, it was heady days in some respects and sometimes I look back on them and wonder why I’m not more grey, but I have to say I’m delighted to have taken part in it and delighted to have had the experience. I learned a lot, but, you know, the relationship between the UVF and the Irish government was hardly going to be particularly cordial, but the conduit worked. It was created by the UVF, the UVF forced its way in … to take part in the game and if the game was about peace and stability, why shouldn’t they? Indeed you could argue that governments should have been trying to encourage them into that position, but they were not, absolutely not.