by Peter Taylor
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 C
atholic.
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.
