A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  As the riots raged in Derry, civil rights leaders tried to ease the pressure on the Bogsiders by appealing to nationalists elsewhere to stage protests and demonstrations so as to stretch RUC numbers and resources. The ploy succeeded but with consequences that few could have foreseen. In Armagh a thirty-year-old Catholic man was shot dead by a party of B Specials in riots that had followed a civil rights rally. But the worst trouble was in Belfast, where that night five people died in gun battles between the RUC, loyalists, and republicans.

  There were two trouble spots. In Ardoyne, a small nationalist enclave in North Belfast, two Catholics were shot dead by the RUC in clashes that were to follow a classic pattern. First rival crowds gathered to exchange insults and the occasional stone. The RUC arrived and almost immediately clashed with nationalists. As the clashes worsened, Catholics built barricades and threw gasoline bombs and stones at police, who invariably replied with baton charges. Behind the police came mobs of loyalists, many armed with guns and gasoline bombs, setting fire to homes and public houses as they swept through. Soon gunfire was echoing through the small streets, and mobs fought hand-to-hand battles.

  The worst trouble was where it had always been worst, in the jungle of side streets that linked the nationalist Falls Road with the fiercely loyalist Shankill Road, the setting for regular outbreaks of rioting that dated back a hundred years. The two roads, with their crowded streets of small two-story homes, converged in a V-shape near the city center, and it was here, where they were closest, that the worst violence took place. The trouble began outside a police station on the Falls Road when a republican crowd protested and continued with clashes between the RUC, B Specials, and loyalist crowds on one side and nationalists on the other in and around Divis Street where the V of the Falls and Shankill narrowed. A Protestant member of a crowd trying to break through onto Divis Street was shot dead by one of two IRA gunmen firing from the roof of a nearby school. The RUC returned fire, and a gun battle ensued that left three policemen wounded. The RUC reaction to this was dramatic. Senior officers deployed armored cars fitted with Browning heavy machine guns. The weapons could fire high-velocity bullets over a range of 2.5 miles and were completely inappropriate for use in a heavily populated urban area. The results were again grimly predictable. A nine-year-old Catholic boy was killed when a bullet tore through the walls of his bedroom in an apartment block in Divis Street and removed the back of his head.

  The next day the situation deteriorated dramatically. A local-born British soldier home on leave was shot dead by the RUC near his home in the Divis Flats complex. Earlier in the day serious rioting had broken out in the mid-Falls area when a Protestant mob invaded the Clonard district, burning homes as they came. Their target was Clonard Monastery, home of the Redemptorist order, whose priests later played such a significant role in the peace process. There was fierce street fighting and a lot of gunfire. One teenage boy, Gerald McAuley, was shot dead. A member of the republican youth wing, the Fianna, he was the first IRA member killed in the Troubles. The loyalists were eventually repulsed, but not before they had burned down much of Bombay Street under the shadow of Clonard Monastery, forcing its terrified inhabitants to flee. Earlier six hundred soldiers from the Third Battalion of the Light Infantry had taken up positions in Catholic and Protestant districts between the Falls and Shankill Roads but were seemingly unable to stop the destruction. Belfast’s infamous peace line had been drawn; soon it would take a more solid form and a twenty-foot-high wall would eventually be erected, making the division permanent. The Troubles had begun.

  After two days of rioting and disturbances across Northern Ireland, eight people lay dead—two Protestant, the rest Catholics. Much of West and North Belfast resembled a war zone. Barricades blocked dozens of streets in nationalist areas, erected to prevent loyalist incursions and to keep out the RUC; scores of houses had been torched, bars lay wrecked and looted, and public transport had ground to a halt. Some seven hundred people had been wounded or injured and nearly three hundred buildings destroyed or badly damaged. Belfast was no stranger to such sectarian conflict. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and again during the 1920s and 1930s, there had been fierce rioting, burnings, and gun battles, but the scale and intensity of the violence of 1969 was beyond living memory. Everywhere anxious Catholics organized street defense committees and began patrolling their areas. Less visible but more traumatic was the intimidation and forced evictions that had occurred throughout the city. The British government later set up a commission of inquiry into the events, headed by a senior judge, Lord Scarman, which concluded that 1.6 percent of all households in Belfast had been forced to move between July and September 1969 and that Catholics had suffered most. Over fifteen hundred Catholic families, Scarman said, had been forced from their homes, five times the number of Protestants. That summer hundreds of Catholic families sought refuge in the safety of ghettos like West Belfast, as the biggest forced population movement in Europe since the Second World War began.

  These were the events that finally forced the festering divisions within the IRA into the open. The riots and gunfire, the threat to their neighborhoods and communities, had brought back into circulation republicans who had quit in disgust at the Goulding-Johnston leadership, and now they had a serious charge to lay at their opponents’ door. The move to the left, they angrily protested, and the leadership’s obsession with politics had led to a military rundown of the IRA, and this had left Catholic areas defenseless. The emphasis given to politics over military matters by Goulding and his henchmen, they argued, meant that the IRA had failed in its primary role in the North, to protect its own people. The anger within this relatively small group of disgruntled former IRA men would simmer throughout the autumn and early winter of 1969 before bursting to the surface in the most serious split in the ranks of physical-force republicanism since the awful Irish civil war.

  Throughout the years leading up to the tumultuous events of August 1969, Gerry Adams suffered, as he wrote years later, divided loyalties within the warring IRA: “I was in a strange position, one of a small cadre with contacts in both factions.”18 His father, his uncle Liam Hannaway, and many family friends like the future Provisional IRA chief of staff Joe Cahill sided with the traditionalists. But Gerry Adams, a generation younger, clearly took with enthusiasm to some aspects of Goulding’s strategy, especially the emphasis on political activity, and was ambivalent about others like the dropping of abstentionism. Most important, he stayed in the Goulding-led IRA and refused to follow the example of his father’s friends, many of whom had quit the organization in protest against its policies.

  In many respects his track record as a young republican was a model of what Roy Johnston had in mind; indeed in one interview he recalled attending lectures given by Johnston to the Wolfe Tone Society in Belfast, saying he had found them “excellent.”19 Adams threw himself into the sort of agitational activity that the new leadership firmly believed would win them working-class support. He was to the fore in housing campaigns like that in 1966 which opposed the building of high-rise apartments in Divis Street in the Lower Falls Road section of Belfast. He advocated other forms of political work that traditional IRA members frowned upon, such as producing local news sheets to deliver door to door. This was not the sort of work of which soldiers approved. The young Adams also supported Goulding’s notion of the National Liberation Front, the left-wing alliance that his father’s generation suspected had opened the door to Communist influence. In 1967 Adams could be found attending the inaugural Belfast meeting of NICRA, whose activities gave substance and meaning to Goulding’s strategy.

  On the defining question of dropping abstentionism, Adams adopted a position that in years to come would be the hallmark of his approach to such internal controversies. “Although I was opposed to dropping the traditional abstentionist policy, I had no objection in principle to developing a debate on electoral strategy or abstentionism….”20 The distinction between the two was
sometimes difficult to discern, since urging “debate” about abstentionism could be regarded merely as a way of creating the space within which the “debate” could be won. It was a clue that he was much more pragmatic about the issue than many of those who helped him found the Provisionals.

  Adams’s sole disagreement with the Goulding-Johnston approach was over their idea that Northern Ireland could be transformed into a normal democratic society, one in which left-wing issues could unite Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Nationalist, in common cause. His experience on the streets of Northern Ireland, he believed, flew in the face of this. That view was formed, according to his own account of events, early on in his political activity when along with other Sinn Feiners he had forged links with Protestants living on the New Barnsley housing estate, adjacent to his native Ballymurphy, in a campaign to demand a pedestrian crossing at a spot on the busy main road dividing the estates where a child had been killed by a car. The campaign was successful, but the Protestant-Catholic unity proved to be short-lived when a Paisleyite politician from the Shankill Road arrived to stir up fears of popery and republicanism among the Protestants of New Barnsley. Adams later commented acidly on the episode: “If the State would not allow Catholics and Protestants to get a pedestrian crossing built together, it would hardly sit back and watch them organising the revolution together.”21

  As the civil rights campaign gathered pace and sectarian tensions were sharpened, Adams’s conviction that cross-community unity was a chimera hardened, as did his misgivings about the way the IRA leadership was handling the gathering crisis. “Riot situations were beginning to develop,” Adams wrote, “but neither the Belfast nor Dublin [IRA] leaderships were able to understand what was happening let alone to give proper direction.”22 As 1969 wore on and street conflict loomed, some republicans, North and South, began to agitate about the need to prepare for defense but found the Dublin leaders unsympathetic and wholly absorbed in their coming internal battles with the traditionalists. That summer IRA dissidents demanded to know from Goulding how much weaponry existed to defend the Northern nationalists. “When we asked what gear there was the reply was enough for one job, i.e., one rifle, one Thompson submachine gun, two short-arms [handguns], training stuff in other words,” recalled one.23

  Goulding and his allies ignored dangerous signals from Belfast. In late August a group of former IRA men, people who had long disagreed with the leadership and had either left or been expelled, met in the New Lodge Road district of the city to decide what they should do about the Belfast leader ship of the IRA then in the control of a Goulding loyalist, Billy McMillen. They were angry about McMillen’s failure to organize the August defense and they blamed Goulding for the Catholic deaths. Among them were Jimmy Steele, Joe Cahill, Billy McKee, John and Billy Kelly, Jimmy Drumm, Seamus Twomey, and a Southern ally, Daithi O Conaill. Gerry Adams was the only serving Belfast IRA man invited.

  The old guard resolved to oust McMillen, and in September its opportunity came when McMillen called a meeting of IRA commanders in the Lower Falls Road area. Armed men led by Billy McKee were sent to demand his resignation. McMillen refused, and after heated arguments a compromise was hammered out. The Belfast IRA would withdraw from Dublin control for three months, McMillen would add some of McKee’s men to his operational staff, and weapons would be sought. If Goulding had not abandoned his strategy by the three-month deadline, McMillen would be replaced and Belfast would be run by a separate Northern Command. Meanwhile the Belfast units would play no part in the coming debate about abstentionism, effectively opting out of it.

  The old guard clearly believed that Adams would be on its side not least because his father and all their family friends were. Adams had been deeply angered by the events of August. He had toured the city on August 16 to view the destruction and been appalled by what had happened in and around Bombay Street. He met his cousin Kevin Hannaway and others who had been in the thick of the violence. “The fighting here had been at very close quarters,” he later wrote, “yet the poorly armed defenders had repelled a large, much better armed group of attackers. What particularly incensed us was that Bombay Street was burned despite the presence of British troops who had been deployed around the area sometime beforehand.”24

  Even so, Adams still had a foot in both republican camps. He had a soft spot for McMillen, liked much of Goulding’s political approach but deplored his failure to defend Belfast’s Catholics. As the August riots subsided, it was the fear among republicans that their people were still vulnerable and needed proper defense that was really stirring opinion in their circles. For once republican fears were shared in the city’s working-class nationalist areas, and it was this harmony that fueled support for the Provisionals and eventually persuaded Adams to throw in his lot with them.

  Despite the violence and trauma of that summer and the divisions all this brought, the Goulding leadership proceeded with the plan to drop abstentionism. Goulding had set up an internal IRA commission under Sean Garland to examine the movement’s attitude toward the issue, and predictably it recommended that republicans take their seats in all three parliaments. The enlarged Army Council endorsed this by a vote of twelve to four, with four absentees. Ruairi O Bradaigh, John Joe McGirl, a friend of Adams from County Leitrim, Sean MacStiofain, and one other Northern republican were the dissenters, all of whom were to be to the fore in the impending split. An IRA Convention was called for December, and Goulding prepared well for it, ensuring that this time a majority of the delegates would be in his camp. They were, by a majority of thirty-nine to twelve. The anti-Goulding faction walked out and, with MacStiofain as its leader and new chief of staff, elected a caretaker IRA Executive and Army Council that would be loyal to the traditional principles and doctrines of republicanism.

  The new dissident IRA bodies were interim and temporary; the Executive and Army Council could be ratified only by a General IRA Convention, which was not scheduled to meet until September of the following year. But until then they would represent the new group. News of the split and the formation of the rival IRA was leaked to the press by Goulding’s people in late December 1969, and in a statement confirming the story the new group claimed that already a majority of IRA units had sworn allegiance to the Provisional Army Council and Executive of the IRA. The tag “Provisional” stuck not least because it was a handy way for the media to distinguish the new group from those who had remained loyal to Goulding. His faction became known, inevitably, as the Official IRA. The two groups would later feud violently and bloodily about whose members had the right to call themselves republican, but there was little doubt that the new IRA, the Provos, as most activists would soon call the group, had arrived.

  Adams’s criticism of the leadership’s handling of this episode, written admittedly after he himself had successfully and painlessly accomplished in 1986 what Goulding had failed to achieve in 1969, suggests that his reservations had more to do with their clumsy tactics than with any qualms he might have had that Goulding was traveling in the wrong political direction. “At the very least,” he wrote, “the leadership should have recognised the need for new priorities and suspended its pursuance of the new departure in republican strategy until a more settled time.” He added, “For many of the dissidents the issue was not abstentionism itself but what it had come to represent: a leadership with a wrong set of priorities which had led the IRA into ignominy in August.”25

  Having secured the IRA Convention, Goulding pressed Sinn Fein to follow suit at its conference, or Ard Fheis, in Dublin in January 1970. A motion to drop abstentionism was carried but narrowly failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to change the party’s constitution. A Goulding supporter then proposed a motion of confidence in the IRA leadership, a roundabout way of achieving the same thing. Realizing they were about to be defeated, the dissidents walked out. Later that evening they met to set up an Executive for their own version of Sinn Fein and elected Ruairi O Bradaigh the first Provisional Sinn Fein p
resident.

  Adams’s own account has him missing the crucial debate, barred from the venue, Dublin’s Intercontinental Hotel, by a Sinn Fein official because he didn’t have the proper accreditation. Instead he went off to join an anti-apartheid protest at a rugby match between Ireland and the South African Springboks. His version of events is controversial not least because the only witness, the official who allegedly barred him, is long since dead. At the very least Adams’s memory of events is hazy since the walkout took place on a Sunday and the Springboks match was played the day before. Jim Sullivan, McMillen’s adjutant and one of those who stayed loyal to the Goulding faction, has claimed not only that Adams was present during the Sunday session but that he was sitting beside him when the walkout happened.26 Adams, he asserts, stayed in his seat and remained loyal to the Goulding leadership. Adams has denied this, but if his version of events is accurate and he was among those who did walk out, then he should have been at the meeting that set up the caretaker Sinn Fein Executive. But according to Ruairi O Bradaigh only two Northerners were present when the Provisional Sinn Fein came into being: Mary McGuigan from Ardoyne in Belfast and Liam Slevin from Beleek, County Fermanagh.27 Adams, he says, was definitely not there.

  Whatever the truth, Adams does concede that he did not immediately align himself with the Provisionals, and that admission is consistent with the Sullivan–O Bradaigh version of the 1970 Ard Fheis rather than his own. Before the December Convention, Ballymurphy republicans had asked for a meeting with Sullivan, which debated the IRA’s internal differences, and afterward Adams told Billy McKee, the leader of the Belfast dissidents, that the Ballymurphy unit had decided to sit on the sidelines “until we saw what way things were going to break.”28 This led to accusations at the time that Adams was waiting to see which side came out on top before joining it. It was not until four months later, in April 1970, that Adams officially brought the Ballymurphy IRA into the Provisionals, by which time the vast bulk of IRA companies in the Belfast Battalion, fifteen out of sixteen, according to one estimate, had deserted the Goulding leadership for the new organization.29 He had joined the winning team.