A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Adams was once more free, but he would never again hold the post of chief of staff. The disaster at La Mon had happened on his watch as chief of staff, and while he was clearly not responsible for the bungled warnings that caused the deadly inferno, the use of La Mon-style incendiary bombs had been approved by an IRA leadership of which he was then a crucial part. As soon as he was arrested, his place had been taken by Martin McGuinness, who occupied the position for the next four years while Ivor Bell replaced McGuinness as Northern commander; on his release Adams became McGuinness’s deputy, the IRA’s adjutant-general. The takeover of the IRA begun inside the cages of Long Kesh was complete and the Adams—McGuinness era had begun.

  The months after Adams’s arrest were quiet as the IRA attempted to recover the swaths of political and propaganda ground lost after La Mon. Operations diminished in both number and scale, and the use of the deadly blast incendiary bomb virtually ceased. But in November 1978, two months after Adams’s release from jail and his assumption of the Northern Command post, the IRA offensive resumed. On the night of November 30, sixteen towns were bombed in the space of a one-hour period; altogether that month more than fifty bombs exploded across Northern Ireland, injuring nearly forty people. At the same time the Army Council authorized a new bombing campaign in England, and that Christmas police leave in London was canceled in expectation of a bombing blitz. By coincidence or otherwise, Adams’s release from prison signaled an upsurge in IRA violence.

  Humphrey Atkins’s view that the post-1977 IRA was becoming a greater menace received its most powerful endorsement from one of the British army generals charged with combating the organization. An assessment of the IRA threat written in November 1978 by Brigadier James Glover, an intelligence specialist who later became the British army’s commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, fell into the IRA’s hands and was released by the IRA’s publicity department in May 1979. If Gerry Adams had been asked to write Glover’s report, he could hardly have done a better job. The brigadier’s central conclusion was an alarming one for the British government but music to the IRA’s ears. The Provisional IRA, he wrote, “has the dedication and the sinews of war” to maintain the then current levels of violence for the foreseeable future. He went on, “The Provisionals cannot attract the large number of active terrorists they had in 1972–73. But they no longer need them. PIRA’s organisation is now such that a small number of activists can maintain a disproportionate level of violence… though PIRA may be hard hit by Security Force attrition from time to time, they will probably continue to have the manpower they need to sustain violence….” He also paid a compliment to Adams’s skills in revamping the IRA: “[B]y reorganising on cellular lines PIRA has become less dependent on public support than in the past and is less vulnerable to penetration by informers.”

  For years the official British propaganda view of the typical IRA Volunteer painted a picture of thugs motivated by subhuman criminality, but Glover recognized not only that this was rubbish but that the IRA itself was a great deal more sophisticated than was ever publicly admitted. “Our evidence of the calibre of rank-and-file terrorists does not support the view that they are mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and the unemployable. PIRA now trains and uses its members with some care…. They are constantly learning from mistakes and developing their expertise… there has been a marked trend towards attacks against the Security Forces and away from action which, by alienating public opinion, both within the Catholic community and outside the province is politically damaging.” Glover’s final judgment underwrote the entire Adams project: “The [republican] Movement will retain popular support sufficient to maintain secure bases in the traditional republican areas,” he wrote.13

  Meanwhile Adams was using his post as adjutant-general to consolidate his standing in the eyes of the rank and file. His brief included enforcing discipline and reviewing IRA unit strength all over the country. The circumstances of the late 1970s were very different from those of 1973, when Adams was last on active service. Internment had been phased out, and while the authorities would dearly have loved to put him back in jail, they lacked the evidence to convict him in court, as Roy Mason had learned to his cost. Adams was now able to move around freely, and as he did so his influence outside Belfast grew, as a contemporary recalled:

  Unlike any of his predecessors he was by this stage not on the run. He could go anywhere and spend days at a time reviewing units. He would arrive at a house, for instance, where there had been a death in the family and sympathize, telling them that he and Colette had prayed at Clonard for whoever it was, you know, showing a charming, personal touch. He made contact at a human level in a way his predecessors couldn’t, and that helped him to disseminate his message and win support.14

  LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN was arguably the best-known and possibly best-respected member of the British royal family. A naval hero, he had served with distinction during the Second World War, commanding a British destroyer, the HMS Kelly, which was torpedoed several times in an incident immortalized in Noel Coward’s 1942 film In Which We Serve. He went on to serve as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia between 1943 and 1946, after which he was named viceroy of India, in which capacity he oversaw the turbulent and violent handover of power to the Congress Party and the partition of India into separate Muslim and Hindu states. It was, however, his role as adviser and confidant of the British royal family that really marked him out as a significant figure. As cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and mentor to Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, Mountbatten was eagerly sought out for his advice and experience by a dynasty going through painful and unwelcome changes in the media-conscious, iconoclastic latter half of the twentieth century.

  The seventy-nine-year-old Mountbatten had a soft spot for Ireland. Since the early 1970s he had vacationed for part of each summer at Mullaghmore on the Bay of Donegal between Bundoran and Sligo on the northwest coast. It was a dangerous spot for such a high-profile member of the British establishment to spend his vacations. Bundoran was a popular resort with Derry folk, and inevitably the summer crowds enjoying a vacation break would include IRA members and sympathizers who would be bound to hear of Mountbatten’s presence and might be tempted to strike a spectacular blow against the British royal family. But Mountbatten ignored the security advice to think twice about spending time there and continued to enjoy his fishing and boating expeditions off a section of the Irish coastline that everyone agreed was spectacularly beautiful.

  His stubbornness cost him his life. On August 27, 1979, he died instantly when a fifty-pound radio-controlled bomb exploded on his thirty-foot pleasure craft, reducing the vessel to matchwood. Mountbatten died alongside his fourteen-year-old grandson, his daughter’s mother-in-law, and a fifteen-year-old boat boy from Enniskillen. It was clear that the IRA had known all about Mountbatten’s vacations for some time but had deliberately chosen this moment to move against him. The new British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had just taken office. She was a hardline opponent of Irish republicanism who was known to sympathize with the unionists and whose close friend and adviser on Northern Ireland matters, Airey Neave, had been killed by a bomb planted by the violent splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), during the 1979 British general election campaign. Mountbatten’s killing, as the IRA must have known, could only drive the new prime minister to adopt tough security measures of the sort that in the past had sustained and nourished the IRA.

  The British establishment and media were only beginning to digest the enormity of this disaster when, later the same day, news of another catastrophe came in. On the shores of Carlingford Lough, a picturesque stretch of sea that divides County Down in the North from County Louth in the Republic, a two-truck convoy of British paratroopers was making its way from the soldiers’ base in Ballykinler to Newry when a huge bomb, hidden beneath hay on a trailer parked by the roadside, was detonated by a radio signal. The explosion devastated the convoy. Six soldiers died inst
antly, and when their shocked and disoriented colleagues came under sniper fire from across the bay, they sought refuge in the ruins of a gate lodge at a spot called Narrow Water. The frantic survivors radioed for assistance, and within twenty-five minutes a large Wessex helicopter carrying soldiers from the Queen’s Own Highlanders arrived and cautiously landed in a nearby field. No sooner had the reinforcements disembarked than another huge bomb, hidden near the gate lodge, was detonated. Another twelve soldiers were killed and a score or more seriously injured. Among the dead was the CO of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, Lieutenant Colonel David Blair, who was so close to the explosion that his body was literally vaporized by the force of the blast. It was a classic guerrilla ambush that drew the grudging admiration of the British, but there was no concealing the scale of the calamity. The death toll was the highest of the Troubles for the British army and represented the worst casualties suffered by the Paras since the Battle of Arnhem in 1944. In the annals of Anglo-Irish conflict it equaled or surpassed the famous Kilmichael attack of November 1920 in which the West Cork IRA commanded by the legendary guerrilla leader Tom Barry had ambushed a convoy of auxiliary police and, depending upon the version of the incident, killed seventeen or eighteen of their number.15

  Between them the combined slaughter at Narrow Water and the assassination of Earl Mountbatten threatened to pitch Northern Ireland into the sort of security crisis relished by the IRA. There were rows between the RUC and the British army over who should lead the security battle against the IRA, and Mrs. Thatcher was forced to referee. She appointed Sir Maurice Oldfield, a former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, as security coordinator in an effort to improve interservice intelligence operations. Despite the provocation, the incident did not, however, tempt Thatcher into the sort of precipitate response the IRA had hoped for. The IRA, under Adams as under any of its leaders, operated on the principle that the more Britain resorted to crude repression, the greater the degree of sympathy and support, passive and active, the organization could count on from nationalists. The classic example of that was the one-sided internment operation of 1971, which had boosted IRA ranks enormously. For years afterward the IRA lived in hope that the British would repeat that mistake. But Thatcher disappointed them.

  THE REAL LONG-TERM significance of the events of August 27, 1979, was that they enormously fortified Adams’s status in the IRA and thus his control of and influence over the republican movement’s political direction. In its review of 1979, An Phoblacht – Republican News gave the credit for Mountbatten, Narrow Water, and other military successes to the changes pioneered by Adams: “Last year was one of resounding Republican success,” crowed the paper, “when the IRA’s cellular reorganisation was operationally vindicated, particularly through the devastating use of remote-control bombs.”16 The IRA had been delivered from the disaster of 1974–75.

  It has become an accepted part of the mythology of this period in the IRA’s development that Adams’s reorganization plan rescued the organization from certain defeat and was responsible for a dramatic turnaround in its fortunes between 1977 and 1979. The truth may be more complex. To begin with, the cell system was largely a Belfast phenomenon. Some rural areas successfully fought to maintain their old structures and the operational spontaneity and local control that came with them. The South Armagh Brigade, whose members had planned and carried out the Narrow Water attack, was perhaps the best example of this. Even in Belfast the reorganizing was far from complete or universal, as one former battalion commander recalled: “The cells in Belfast were never really divorced from the old company structures, because they [the companies] were needed for logistics, safe houses, call houses, and so on.”17

  Those involved in fighting the war believed that a much more important factor in reviving the IRA after the 1975 cease-fire was the fact that the British had ended internment, and as a consequence scores of released IRA prisoners returned to active service. Internment was brought to an end officially in December 1975 as part of the cease-fire deal, and after this IRA suspects began to be processed through the courts and treated like ordinary criminals. As far as the Cage 11 dissidents were concerned, the criminalization policy that followed internment represented a major political setback, but according to another IRA commander it brought an unanticipated bonus for the organization:

  Myself and [Billy] McKee analysed the political situation at the time [late 1974]. Internment had decimated the ranks of the IRA and in Ardoyne we had only four active Volunteers. I was never consulted about the possibility of a ceasefire and I near blew a gasket when I heard in prison that the Feakle talks had taken place. But I can’t understand these people who say that the truce wrecked us. In my view it strengthened us. We had a lot of internees coming back in for active service. It was so unlike the situation in 1974 when we had four active Volunteers. By the start of 1976 we were bursting at the seams.18

  Nevertheless Adams received most of the credit for the IRA’s resurgence, and as his position strengthened he set his sights on removing the last obstacles in his way to unchallenged control of the republican movement. With Billy McKee ousted, the two most formidable remaining opposition figures were Daithi O Conaill and Ruairi O Bradaigh. The Belfast leader had once confided to a colleague on the Army Council the tactical approach he favored when going about the destruction and removal of political enemies, and it was this line of attack that he adopted to remove the Southern veterans: “ ‘You don’t confront people,’ he would say. ‘You isolate and marginalize them and then get rid of them.’ I often heard him say that,” the figure recalled.19 It was to be a long, arduous, and at times painful campaign against O Conaill and O Bradaigh, but in the end it succeeded—the pair was isolated, marginalized, and then discarded.

  Gerry Adams’s drive against O Conaill and O Bradaigh had actually started before the purge of McKee when, in July 1977, the Revolutionary Council was convened to expel a fellow West Belfast man, Gerry O’Hare, a former public relations man for the republican movement in Belfast who had risen to become editor in Dublin of An Phoblacht, the Provisionals’ Southern weekly paper. There were two reasons for the heave against O’Hare; one was his political friendship with O Conaill and O Bradaigh, and the other was the fact that as long as the editorship of An Phoblacht was in his hands, Adams would be unable to influence republicans south of the Border. The pretext for O’Hare’s removal was, however, a much less straightforward matter.

  O’Hare’s wife, Rita, one of the first women to join the male-dominated IRA and a formidable activist in her own right, had been badly wounded during an ambush of British soldiers in Andersonstown in 1972 in which she had taken part. She was arrested and charged, but because of her severe injuries she was given bail. On the eve of her trial she absconded across the Border and took up residence in Dublin. Like many IRA relationships, the O’Hare marriage had been battered by the Troubles and weakened by separation and worry. Gerry had been interned in the North and jailed in the South while the authorities relentlessly pursued his wife in the Republic and attempted to have her extradited back to Belfast for trial. Under the stress and strain, the couple had begun to drift apart. In 1975 the marriage was dealt a devastating blow when Rita attempted to smuggle a stick of gelignite into Portlaoise prison during a visit to an IRA prisoner and was caught. The three-year jail term meted out by the Special Criminal Court in Dublin sounded the death knell for their relationship.

  With the couple now married in name only and Rita confined to Portlaoise prison, sixty miles south-west of Dublin, Gerry O’Hare struck up a relationship with Grainne Caffrey, Daithi O Conaill’s sister-in-law and a first cousin of Ruairi O Bradaigh, and it was this that Adams and his allies seized upon to undermine the An Phoblacht editor. Internment and imprisonment had badly weakened family life in republican areas in places like Belfast, and one of the most divisive problems faced by IRA leaders was the constant allegation that prisoners’ wives were sleeping around, often with IRA men still at libert
y. At a Revolutionary Council meeting in July 1977, O’Hare was accused of setting a bad example to IRA Volunteers because of his relationship with Grainne Caffrey, and he was dismissed from the editorship of An Phoblacht. “O Bradaigh defended him saying that but for the absence of divorce legislation they [Gerry and Rita O’Hare] would have regularized their situation, but Adams and Co. were pitching their appeal to Twomey and McKee, who were both very conservative Catholics,” recalled one delegate.20

  The merciless ousting of O’Hare was the first move in Adams’s push to take control of the Provisionals’ public relations arm. O’Hare was replaced as editor of An Phoblacht by the Dubliner Deasun Breathnach, a member of a distinguished republican clan, but in reality control fell into the hands of Adams and his allies. While Breathnach became editor, power was transferred to an Adams appointee, Mick Timothy, who became manager of the weekly, and soon there were loud and bitter complaints about its content from the O Bradaigh–O Conaill wing.

  The takeover of An Phoblacht was interrupted by Adams’s arrest and imprisonment after La Mon, but following his release in September 1978 the campaign resumed with vigor, and the Army Council authorized what was officially termed a fusion of An Phoblacht and Republican News. The new weekly, An Phoblacht–Republican News (AP-RN), was unveiled on January 27, 1979, and its first lead story announced that the purpose of the fusion was to “improve reporting of the war in the North.” But there was a hint of another objective, one that would pitch the organization into ideological turmoil. “We also intend to provide an improved and widened forum for Republican debate on building a new Ireland,” it declared.21