by Peter Taylor
The Contact, like Hume, must have been despondent at the outbreak of events that he too had striven so hard to avoid. He had been out of the country during the dreadful week that had begun on the Shankill and ended at Greysteel. But distance had not blunted the sense of urgency. He immediately got in touch with the BGR and arranged to meet him in London on 2 November on his way back to Derry from abroad. It was the day after the bitter exchange between Hume and Major in the House of Commons. It appears that the Contact left the BGR in no doubt what his feelings were about the way he believed the Government had squandered the opportunity for peace by effectively ending the secret dialogue with the Provisionals. The Contact did not pass on any message to the BGR from McGuinness. McGuinness was therefore astonished when he learned that, after the meeting, the BGR had passed on to the Government the following ‘message’ purporting to come from ‘the leadership of the Provisional Republican Movement’.
You appear to have rejected the Hume–Adams situation … Now we can’t even have a dialogue to work out how a total end to violence can come about. We believe that the country could be at the point of no return. In plain language, please tell us as a matter of urgency when you will open dialogue in the event of a total end to hostilities. We believe that if all the documents [i.e. the respective position papers] are put on the table – we have a basis of an understanding.21
McGuinness was outraged and felt he had been duped by the BGR and the ‘Brits’. He knew the Contact was blameless because the London meeting had been attended by a third party who was a personal friend of McGuinness and had come over from Derry to observe. It appears the BGR fabricated the message on the basis of his conversation with the Contact in London and, no doubt with some embellishment, presented it as a message from McGuinness. With its reference to ‘a total end to violence’ and ‘a total end to hostilities’ it contained the words the Government had been waiting months to hear. Perhaps with the best of intentions, the BGR had taken the initiative, as he had done in attending the meeting in Derry with McGuinness and Kelly earlier in the year, in the hope of breaking the dangerous stalemate and pushing the peace process forward. He knew how close the IRA was to calling off the campaign and was probably trying to bridge the gap between the Provisionals and HMG to avoid more Shankills and Greysteels.
The Government, unaware that McGuinness had nothing to do with the message, sent a fulsome reply, saying it was ‘of the greatest importance and significance’ and offering a meeting for ‘exploratory dialogue’ within weeks ‘following an unequivocal assurance that violence has indeed been brought to a permanent end [author’s emphasis]’.22 HMG thought the IRA had finally agreed to end its campaign for good but the IRA had done nothing of the kind. McGuinness sent the Government a message repudiating what had erroneously been presented as the IRA’s position by the BGR and pointing out that it had been done entirely on his initiative ‘without our authority and knowledge’. This may have been the reason, on top of the unauthorized meeting with McGuinness and Kelly, that the BGR’s services were deemed to be no longer required. The BGR had broken the rules again. McGuinness subsequently told me that the Government had ‘abused the Contact to destruction’ and that the dialogue was now over. John Major probably knew nothing of the dispute over the provenance of the latest ‘message’ but was sufficiently encouraged by it to make an upbeat speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on 15 November in the City of London. ‘There may now be a better opportunity for peace in Northern Ireland than for many years,’ he said.23 At the time he did not know just how shaky the foundation was. Despite his optimism, peace was not just around the corner. Things were to get worse before they got better.
A fortnight later, on Sunday 28 November, the Northern Irish journalist Eamonn Mallie delivered a bombshell on the front page of the Observer when he revealed that the Government had been involved in secret talks with the IRA. It was the last thing the Government needed at this difficult and sensitive time. The source of the leak of a dialogue that had been kept secret since Michael Oatley first set it up almost three years earlier was never established. The Provisionals themselves, still smarting from what they regarded as the Government’s abuse of the Contact and the dishonesty of the BGR, were probably prime suspects. Sir Patrick Mayhew faced the media on what must have been one of the most embarrassing days of his political life. He had been informed of Mallie’s story around midnight on Saturday and was characteristically determined to take on the media the following morning. He called a press conference for 11 a.m. at Stormont Castle. He admitted he was nervous. ‘There they all were, slavering for blood, a good opportunity to screw this Minister.’ Although what Sir Patrick said was technically true – that the Government had not been negotiating with the Provisionals – the distinction between that and conducting a dialogue through third parties did not placate the Press. The Secretary of State’s conscience was clear, however, as he knew that the meeting between the BGR and McGuinness and Kelly in March had not been authorized by the Government. But Mayhew was more concerned about the reception he would get when he made a statement to the House of Commons.
I remember saying to my officials when we had a conference on the video link on the day when I was going to make my statement to the House, ‘I’m determined to sail through this storm and come out the other side’ and that’s exactly how I felt. And one of them said, ‘Well if you sink, a lot of us will sink with you.’ On that rather morose note I climbed into the aeroplane and took off for Westminster. I didn’t sink.
Despite his worst fears, Sir Patrick got almost a hero’s reception from both sides of the House when he made his statement. It was as if Honourable Members were relieved that the Government was taking such risks for peace. Their anger was reserved for a Government that did not.
The events of these dramatic and traumatic days finally came to a climax on 15 December 1993 when John Major and Albert Reynolds stood shoulder to shoulder in Downing Street and told the world that the two Governments had reached agreement on the principles that would underpin a settlement. It became known as the ‘Downing Street Declaration’ (or ‘Joint Declaration’) and was the result of weeks and many sleepless nights spent hammering out a deal. Reynolds had originally pressed Major to embrace the Hume–Adams dialogue but Major refused on the grounds that it would have been the kiss of death to unionists. Reynolds also tried to get the British Prime Minister to declare that HMG would act as a ‘persuader’ for Irish unity. Again, this was rejected for the same reasons. Major’s priority was to keep the unionists on board, knowing from history and experience their capacity to wreck any settlement. The final document was far less ‘green’ than Albert Reynolds would have liked but after lengthy horse-trading the Taoiseach felt it was something that he and constitutional nationalists could live with. The tortuous wording of the Declaration, painfully crafted by British and Irish mandarins, gave all sides some, if not all, of what they wanted. Crucially, it gave unionists the guarantee five times that nothing would be done against the wishes of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.
The Prime Minister, on behalf of the British government, reaffirms … that they have no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland.
The role of the British government will be to encourage, facilitate and enable the achievement of… agreement… They accept that such agreement may, as of right, take the form of agreed structures for the island as a whole, including a united Ireland achieved by peaceful means on the following basis.
The British government agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.24
With the unionist ‘guarantee’ that the Provisionals had spent years fighting to destroy so firmly enshrined in the Joint Declaration, it was not surprising that the Republican Movement was not happy, despite
the fact that its overall colour was ‘green’. The question for the ‘Brits’ now was how to bring the Provisionals on board and, crucially, to get the IRA to silence its guns and declare that its campaign was over for good. Both Major and Reynolds had no doubt, from intelligence via their contacts, that at some stage the IRA would declare a cease-fire and join the peace process. The question was when.
Chapter Thirty
Getting Rid of the Guns
January 1994–February 1996
The Provisionals were less than enamoured of the Downing Street Declaration but realized they had nowhere else to go if they wanted to journey down the political road. The ‘Brits’ and the Dublin Government had set the agenda and the principles of the Declaration were set in stone. However hard Sinn Fein tried to chip away at them, the message came back that they were wasting their time. Demands from Gerry Adams for ‘clarification’ were seen by the British as an attempt to buy time. There was, however, a sophisticated understanding of his position, given the difficulty he and McGuinness faced in holding the Republican Movement together in the face of a Declaration that was clearly not what the IRA had been fighting for. There was increased concern in Provisional circles when, shortly after the Declaration, Sir Patrick Mayhew raised the issue of the ‘decommissioning’ of terrorist weapons as part of any settlement. Decommissioning was the ‘D’ word that was to haunt politicians, governments and paramilitaries on all sides for the rest of the century and beyond. (Decommissioning was less emotive than ‘disarmament’, with its connotations of surrender.) The Declaration had not mentioned the word itself but had stated that ‘peace must involve a permanent end to violence’ and that dialogue on the way ahead was only open to ‘democratically mandated parties which establish a commitment to exclusively peaceful methods’.1 Adams read the warning signs and knew the damage the issue was likely to do to the Republican Movement and the support he needed to carry the peace project through. ‘This is what they want,’ he said. ‘They want the IRA to stop so that Sinn Fein can have the privilege twelve weeks later, having been properly sanitized and come out of quarantine, to have discussions with senior civil servants on how the IRA can hand over its weapons.’2 It was an ominous shot across the bows of the ‘Brits’.
In political terms, Sinn Fein was clearly swimming against the tide. That was nothing new but now the circumstances were different. An opinion poll conducted in the Irish Republic showed that 97 per cent of the population believed that the IRA should end its campaign at once.3 Significantly, the Provisionals did not reject the Declaration out of hand, knowing that in the end they would have to come to terms with it and work it to the best of their advantage. Adams’s position was strengthened, however, on 29 January 1994 when the Americans granted him a ‘limited duration’ visa to address a one-day peace conference organized by one of President Bill Clinton’s most powerful financial backers, William Flynn. Adams took America by storm. I remember watching television coverage with IRA prisoners in the Maze whilst making a BBC Panorama programme on the secret back-channel talks. The prisoners clapped and cheered and were clearly ecstatic at the reception that the man they regarded as their leader was receiving across the Atlantic. But their enthusiasm for the Sinn Fein President was not matched by their enthusiasm for the Declaration. There was even talk of more bombs in London on the grounds that that was still the only lesson the ‘Brits’ would understand.
Major was furious that Clinton had personally authorized the granting of Adams’s visa, against the advice of the US State Department, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the US Embassy in London, all of whom had taken heed of British objections. They had been told that Adams was still a ‘terrorist’ whose organization had not only not renounced violence but not even given its support to the Downing Street Declaration. Relations between Downing Street and the White House were to deteriorate even further when Adams was granted more visas and given the go-ahead to make fundraising trips to America. Other Sinn Fein leaders were given visas, too. At one stage, Major did not return Clinton’s calls as a sign of his anger at the lack of support he felt he was getting from the American President. ‘Here we were, well on the road towards a settlement, and there were principal Sinn Fein figures going to America where they were going to raise more money,’ he told me. ‘We knew what that money was being used for. It would have been used for arms. So of course we were very peeved. We thought it was a bad signal to give at that time.’
Meanwhile, the IRA carried on killing soldiers and policemen, planting fire-bombs in London’s Oxford Street and even mortaring the runway at Heathrow airport. None of this surprised Major and his Cabinet who by now were well used to the Provisionals’ tactic of talking and killing at the same time. The Prime Minister knew that the increasingly dangerous stalemate had to be broken and he had to take the initiative. He finally agreed to ‘clarify’ the specific points of the Declaration that Sinn Fein maintained were unclear and amplified the offer of exploratory dialogue which had been made during the secret talks of the previous year. He now made a formal offer of a meeting within three months of the IRA’s announcement of a cessation of violence. Since Adams had already scathingly referred to the twelve-week ‘quarantine’ period made during the secret talks, this was not in itself significantly new, but now the Prime Minister himself, not the BGR, was making it.4
Gradually, the IRA moved towards its cease-fire but in the increasing shadow of violence from the loyalist paramilitaries who also had a cease-fire in mind and were equally determined to call it from a position of strength. Their strategy professed to be to escalate the ‘war’ in order to bring it to an end. In the months prior to the IRA and loyalist cessations in 1994, the IRA killed nineteen people and the loyalists thirty-seven. For the third year running the UFF and UVF had ‘out-killed’ the IRA.5 The UVF headed the list with twenty-five killings, twice as many as its UFF rival. The most notorious attack took place on 18 June 1994 when UVF gunmen opened fire on customers in the Heights bar in the tiny village of Loughinisland, County Down. Most were football fans watching television as Ireland played Italy in the World Cup. Six Catholics were shot dead, including an 87-year-old pensioner, Barney Green. He had put on his best suit for the occasion.6 The UVF claimed it was retaliation for the INLA’s killing of three of its members two days earlier as they were standing talking on the Shankill Road. It seemed like Greysteel all over again. People could not believe that peace was in the air in the midst of such horror. They thought the Downing Street Declaration was supposed to mark the beginning of the end.
On 31 August 1994, amidst rising expectations, the long-awaited announcement of an IRA cease-fire finally came. In its statement the IRA said:
Recognizing the potential of the current situation and in order to enhance the democratic peace process and underline our commitment to its success, the leadership of Oglaigh na Eireann [the IRA] have decided that as of midnight, Wednesday 31 August, there will be a complete cessation of military operations. All of our units have been instructed accordingly …
We believe that an opportunity to create a just and lasting peace has been created … We note that the Downing Street Declaration is not a solution, nor was it presented as such by its authors. A solution can only be found as a result of inclusive negotiations.7
The predominant mood was not one of jubilation but more of relief that, with luck, the ‘war’ might be over and Northern Ireland freed from the nightmare it had endured for twenty-five years. There were celebrations in the republican heartlands and emotional words about the sacrifice that IRA Volunteers had made in the ‘struggle’ but there was no feeling that the IRA had won: it had held out against the might of the ‘Brits’, dealt them crushing blows and finally forced them to recognize the legitimacy of the Republican Movement. The IRA was ‘undefeated’. The word ‘victorious’ was notably absent. John Major was pleased but not satisfied. The word ‘permanent’ was nowhere to be seen in the IRA’s statement. That had been one of the issues on which, in the en
d, the secret talks had foundered. The Prime Minister remained sceptical about the IRA’s long-term intentions, given that the magic word was missing. ‘I had my doubts,’ he told me. ‘There was no indication from them that satisfied me that they were really not going to return to violence if things didn’t go their way.’ Nevertheless, all the advice the Prime Minister received from his security advisers suggested that the cessation was genuine and likely to last.
In the end, Major decided to make ‘a working assumption’ that the cease-fire was meant to last. He could do little else but he still had his doubts. ‘It wasn’t a conviction in my heart that it was definitely going to be permanent. I didn’t believe that it was,’ he told me. ‘But I believed that we had to roll with that particular tide and see if we could turn what looked like a temporary but welcome cessation into something that was continuous.’
Everyone now waited to see if the second piece of the paramilitary jigsaw would fall into place. Would the loyalists also declare a cease-fire? When I had talked to the leaders of the UDA/UFF and UVF prisoners in the Maze earlier that year, it was quite clear that if the IRA stopped killing, the loyalist paramilitaries would stop too. They had always maintained, to hollow laughter from the Provisionals, that their violence was purely reactive. Six weeks later, the loyalist paramilitaries, under their umbrella organization, the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC), announced their cease-fire. The UFF had killed one Catholic, John O’Hanlon (32), on the day after the IRA’s ‘cessation’ and then stopped. The CLMC’s announcement was made by the former UVF commander, ‘Gusty’ Spence, who almost thirty years earlier had been convicted of one of the first murders of the present conflict. Unlike the IRA, Spence apologized for the grief the loyalist paramilitaries had caused.
