by Ed Moloney
Again the evidence is that the Adams leadership, fearing a second defeat, which would be impossible to dress up in any but the thinnest of garments, also opposed the second hunger strike. But that was only at the beginning. As events unfolded, the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership realized that the political potential from the prison protest was immeasurable. It was a realization that would propel the organization into serious electoral politics and herald a phase in the Provisional’s department that would usher in the peace process.
To the surprise of many observers, the hunger strike deaths did not lead to the enormous upsurge in IRA violence that many observers had predicted. The widespread expectation was that the organization would cause mayhem when their imprisoned colleagues began to die, but although there was considerable street violence and some continuing IRA violence, including one devastating land mine attack by the South Armagh Brigade that killed five British soldiers, the organization resisted the temptation to throw everything into war. The relatively restrained response to the prison protest surprised even IRA activists. To those with long memories, however, the summer of 1981 carried echoes of the summer of 1970 in Ballymurphy when, at Adams’s urging, the IRA was held back while increasingly vicious but well-organized rioting between Catholic civilians and the British army alienated thousands of people, drove scores into the ranks of the IRA, and transformed this slice of West Belfast into the strongest republican redoubt in the city. Something similar happened throughout nationalist Ireland during the summer of 1981.
In October the hunger strikes came to an end as more and more of the prisoners’ families brought their sons off the protest, usually when they had slipped into comas and were unable to stop them. The end also came not long after the appointment of a new, more accommodating British secretary of state, Jim Prior, who announced concessions on prisoners’ clothes and other issues. As the prison settled, Sinn Fein began to prepare for elections. In an interview with the author shortly after the protest ended, Gerry Adams announced that he would recommend that Sinn Fein embrace electoral politics when the party met for its November Ard Fheis.13
Writing in An Phoblacht – Republican News in 1984, three years after Bobby Sands began his hunger strike, Adams revealed that the main effect the hunger strikes had was to fast-forward the move toward electoralism. It made it “easier to argue for an electoral strategy within Republican ranks,” he wrote, effectively admitting that this had been his ambition and goal for some time.14 Before the hunger strikes, one of Adams’s leading advisers had confided to the author that resistance from rank-and-file IRA activists meant that persuading people to fight elections would be a slow and lengthy business. Sinn Fein might be permitted by its conservative membership and by the IRA to fight elections at the council level, but the prospect of larger-scale contests, for seats at Westminster, was probably some years down the line.15 The election of Bobby Sands in the Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election of April 1981 transformed that scenario and made it possible, much sooner that anyone had imagined, for Sinn Fein to fully embrace electoral politics.
The idea of making some sort of electoral intervention on Sands’s behalf appears to have originated with Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey. If Sands was to stand for the Westminster parliament, there was only one seat that he could conceivably win, and that was Fermanagh–South Tyrone, which had been held by the independent nationalist Frank Maguire since 1974. There were other nationalist seats but both, West Belfast and Derry, were held by Gerry Fitt and John Hume, respectively, bitter political enemies of the IRA who would do the prisoners no favors. Maguire, on the other hand, was effectively a republican MP, although his official designation was Independent. A former IRA commander in Fermanagh, he had been interned during the 1956–62 Border Campaign and took a more or less abstentionist attitude to the Westminster parliament. He never got around to making his maiden speech, for example, and he rarely attended the House of Commons, although his vote did keep a minority Labour government in office at key moments.
Devlin-McAliskey conceived the idea of asking Maguire to temporarily relinquish the seat to allow an H Blocks candidate to run. Confident that he would respond positively, she made plans to visit him, and, if he agreed to go along with the proposal, Sinn Fein would be presented with a fait accompli. The idea of “borrowing” the seat was born. Just before her trip and only five days after Sands had begun his fast, Maguire suddenly died and the whole situation changed. The seat was now vacant, and a race began to fill it. Maguire’s family and the local Catholic church wanted his brother Noel to run in the by-election, and McAliskey let it be known that if that happened she would run against him on the H Block ticket. Some Sinn Fein leaders, Ruairi O Bradaigh in particular, were keen to run her in the seat, but O Conaill suggested running Sands instead, and Bernadette Devlin-McAlisky agreed to stand aside. Sinn Fein leaders, virtually the entire Ard Comhairle along with the Fermanagh republican Owen Carron, met in Clones, County Monaghan, to discuss the idea but initially rejected it. Locals feared that because Sands was an outsider in this most parochial of areas, nationalist voters would stay at home. The convention ended, but no one would leave. “People hung about talking, having little discussions and were clearly dissatisfied with the outcome,” remembered one delegate. “The outcome was a second convention, and the proposal went through. Adams had to be convinced. O Conaill was the main mover. He was convinced Sands could win. He had been IRA organizer there in the 1950s, he knew the area, knew the people, he’d even been shot there. He convinced everybody.”16
The drama was not quite over. The SDLP’s Austin Currie, a local man and a fierce opponent of the Provisionals, toyed with the notion of standing against Sands, but he relented after enormous pressure was applied by his SDLP colleagues to dissuade him. The SDLP feared that it would be blamed if Sands was beaten and then died, and no one in the SDLP, no matter how much he or she despised the Provos, wanted to carry that burden. Noel Maguire also flirted with the idea of running, but amid dark hints of threats against him he withdrew at the last moment. As the deadline for nominations neared, Adams hid in a nearby Catholic church ready to withdraw Sands if another nationalist candidate decided to run. It wasn’t necessary. Sands had a clear run against a local unionist farmer, Harry West. In the charged atmosphere of the time, nationalists swallowed whatever reservations they had about the IRA’s violence and elected Sands.
Caution was again the overriding consideration in Adams’s mind when the next opportunity arose to put hunger strikers before the electorate, this time in the Republic’s general election of June 1981, a month or so after Sands’s death. After much bickering between rival republicans, the decision was made to run nine prisoners in selected constituencies, four of them hunger strikers. The National H Blocks Committee had been divided over the issue. Some wanted to run nonprisoner candidates who would take their seats in the Irish parliament, where it was possible they could hold the balance of power and determine who made up the next government. But Adams vetoed the idea. No one on the committee could give him a guarantee that they would be able to hold the next Irish government to ransom. “He wouldn’t take the risk of any dissension within Sinn Fein about abstentionism,” recalled a member of the committee.17 It was a missed opportunity. Two prisoners won seats to the Dail, the hunger striker Kieran Doherty in Cavan-Monaghan and Paddy Agnew in Louth, who actually topped the poll. The result took Ireland’s media completely by surprise and threw Irish politics into turmoil. The broader election had produced a virtual dead heat between Fianna Fail and its opponents, Fine Gael and Irish Labour, who wanted to form a coalition government. The two seats won by IRA prisoners came at the expense of Fianna Fail; had Doherty and Agnew been able to take their Dail seats, or if nonprisoner candidates had run, the pro–hunger striker candidates would have held the balance of power and the history of the prison protest and much subsequent Anglo-Irish history might well have been very different.
While caution had dictated Adams’s attitude to the firs
t two hunger strike elections, his demeanor changed after Sands’s death when a by-election to replace the dead prisoner loomed. His principal concern was to ensure that Sinn Fein held on to the prize of the Fermanagh–South Tyrone seat, but there were problems. Following Sands’s election the British had changed the electoral law to prevent serving prisoners from seeking election, so nominating another prisoner was out of the question. That was not all. Nationalist voters in Fermanagh–South Tyrone had been won over to support Sands with the promise that the hunger striker would merely “borrow” their votes in order to publicize the prisoners’ cause. Once the hunger strike was over, the seat could again be contested freely by mainstream nationalists. Under British parliamentary rules the writ for any by-election had to be moved by another serving MP, but no one at Westminster wanted to see another contest held while the prison fast was still under way. In June the Welsh nationalist MP Daffyd Ellis Thomas phoned the National H Block’s Committee to say that he would move the writ for the by-election whenever they wanted, but the committee demurred. Sinn Fein was not quite so backward. Behind the committee’s back, Thomas was contacted and he agreed to set the by-election machinery in motion. Sinn Fein then imposed Owen Carron as a “Proxy Political Prisoners” candidate, and in August he romped home, easily beating the local ex-UDR officer Ken Maginnis and actually increasing Sands’s majority.
Carron’s victory was the perfect springboard for Sinn Fein’s entry as a party into electoral politics, standing in its own name and not that of hunger-striking prisoners. Carron’s victory came, however, at a price. Throughout the hunger strikes the Army Council had refused to intervene and order the prisoners to quit, even when it became clear that, despite election victories and widespread international publicity for the prisoners’ cause, Thatcher would not bend and that any more deaths would be futile. The Army Council had that power and had used it in the past. The former chief of staff Sean MacStiofain had been ordered to end his fast in 1972, for example. As the hunger strikes intensified, so did the demand from some that the IRA leadership should intervene to end the deaths. In early August 1981, after the seventh hunger striker had been carried out of the jail in a coffin, Adams agreed to go into the jail to speak to the hunger strikers. He had come under enormous pressure to do this from prisoners’ families and their Catholic Church adviser, Father Denis Faul, and eventually he relented, or so it seemed.
According to the accounts of those who were present, Adams met six of the hunger strikers in the prison hospital canteen and gave them a frank assessment of their situation. He told them that it was likely Mrs. Thatcher would let them die, and he went on to describe what was on offer from the Mountain Climber, Michael Oatley. But he left it up to the prisoners themselves to decide whether or not to end the protest. The IRA would support and understand them, he said, if they agreed to end the hunger strike either individually or collectively. But it was evident that neither he nor the IRA would order or even ask them to call a halt.18 With the weight of Bobby Sands’s sacrifice and the agonizing deaths of other comrades bearing down upon them, the prisoners unsurprisingly decided to continue their protest. Their decision meant that when the second Fermanagh–South Tyrone byelection was held two weeks later, prisoners were still dying in the H blocks, and with nationalist emotions running high, Owen Carron’s victory was assured. The SDLP once again stood down in his favor, and with a clear run against the sole unionist candidate he won by an even greater margin than Bobby Sands. When Adams addressed the next Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in the winter of 1981 to urge that they fight elections, he had in Carron a real live MP standing beside him as proof of the potency of fighting elections. Adams had spurned the opportunity to order an end to the prison fast, but by doing so created the most favorable circumstances for Sinn Fein’s change in political direction.
As the hunger strike headed toward its conclusion, Sinn Fein threw away any pretense that the National H Blocks Committee was an independent organization. At a conference in Dundalk in September, chaired by Adams’s Army Council colleague Ivor Bell, block voting removed all but two of its non–Sinn Fein members. By this stage of the protest the National H Blocks Committee had created a national structure of support groups throughout Ireland that rivaled and even exceeded Sinn Fein’s, and once the protest ended, a concerted effort was made to absorb these local committees into the party.
Then, with not even a whimper, the eight-month-long hunger strike ended. On the morning of Saturday, October 3, a brief statement announced that the most traumatic prison protest in IRA history was over. The end came as a relief. One hunger striker’s family after another had intervened to take their sons off the protest as unconsciousness overwhelmed them, and it was clear that further fasts were pointless and even counterproductive. The stage had been reached where the motives of Provisional leaders like Gerry Adams for not ending the protests were being openly questioned by clerics like Father Faul, once a sympathetic friend of the IRA prisoners but now a bitter opponent of the Sinn Fein leadership. Ten men had died awful deaths inside the jail, many more perished outside; nationalist politics had been radicalized in a way not seen since the 1916 Rising when the British had executed its leaders, while Mrs. Thatcher had become a hate figure beyond parallel in Irish history. The stage had also been set for Sinn Fein to emerge as an electoral force in Irish politics, at first in the North but eventually in the South too. Quietly, meekly, and with almost no notice taken by the media, the National H Blocks Committee voted itself out of existence, and scores of its supporters moved over to Sinn Fein. “The fact was that after the hunger strikes the republican movement was swamped by new young members,” explained one former Sinn Fein leader. “Some H Block committees just became SF branches overnight.”19 The decision by Sinn Fein to contest elections and to embrace this as a strategy was a formality.
THROUGHOUT the early part of the next year, 1982, the new British secretary of state, Jim Prior, spent his time constructing a new political initiative that he termed “rolling devolution.” Under Prior’s scheme the unionist and nationalist parties would be rewarded by a gradual and increasing return of powers to a local elected Assembly at Stormont if they could show they were able and willing to share power. Despite objections from both camps and lukewarm support from Margaret Thatcher, Prior pressed ahead with his scheme and announced elections for that October. In April, Sinn Fein declared that it would definitely field candidates on an abstentionist basis, and that rattled the SDLP, worried by the alienating impact on their supporters of the lengthy hunger strikes. After weeks and months of agonizing, the SDLP then decided that, while it would contest the election, it too would not take seats in Prior’s Assembly. The hunger strikes had made both nationalist parties in the North abstentionists.
Adams had great difficulty persuading the IRA to allow him to stand for election to the planned new Assembly. At an Army Council meeting in July 1982, he and McGuinness indicated their interest in running, Adams in West Belfast and the chief of staff in Derry. But the Army Council voted four to three against, on the grounds that neither man could be an elected representative and be able to carry out his IRA role at the same time. But Adams came back. At a second meeting in August, Joe Cahill, who had voted against, was absent on vacation, and Adams put the proposal once more. In the meantime Adams had won over one key figure, a County Donegal–based member of the Council, and the vote went in Adams’s favor, four to two. McGuinness and Adams were, however, forced to make a concession to the skeptics. Both men were allowed to run but on condition they give up their IRA roles, McGuinness as chief of staff and Adams as adjutant-general. McGuinness’s departure paved the way for Ivor Bell to become chief of staff.20 Adams’s ally Brian Keenan, by now a prisoner in England, wrote from his cell in Leicester jail that he “emphatically” supported the move and endorsed the Army Council’s decision. Keenan wrote, “It is not enough for Republicans to say, with reference to the Army, actions speak louder than words. We must never forsake action but the final w
ar to win will be the savage war of peace. To those of us who have struggled for years in a purely military capacity, it must be obvious that if we do not provide honest, recognisable political leadership on the ground, we will lose that war for peace.”21 Not for the first or last time, Keenan sided with Adams at a critical juncture.
To again reassure the IRA, that November’s Sinn Fein Ard Fheis obliged election candidates to “be unambivalent in support for the armed struggle.” But in the run-up to Prior’s Assembly election there was a subtle shift in the rhetoric. Again An Phoblacht – Republican News was the first to reflect the change. In a front-page editorial the paper declared that, while “Irish freedom will only be achieved by armed struggle… it needs to be said loudly and unequivocally that freedom, unity and the creation of conditions by which we can proceed to the democratic, socialist republic will not be achieved by armed struggle alone and that armed struggle of a revolutionary nature cannot even be sustained without popular logistical back-up and support.”22 A few months earlier armed struggle alone had been the only way forward. Now that would not be enough. The contradictions between the Armalite and the ballot box were beginning to be acknowledged. The hunger strikes had wrought many deep changes in Irish society, but it would be some time before the effects of this would become visible.
PART THREE
A Secret Process
Father Alec Reid giving the last rites to a British soldier killed by an angry mob after he had stumbled into an IRA funeral procession in 1988. Reid’s secret diplomacy, in conjunction with Gerry Adams, laid the foundations for the Irish peace process. (Trevor McBride, Belfast)
SEVEN
“Behind the Scenes”
It was Friday, October 22, 1982, just two days after Sinn Fein’s first outing as an electoral party in the contest for seats to Jim Prior’s new “rolling” Assembly in Belfast, and the Irish media and political establishment were just beginning to digest the implications of a stunning Sinn Fein performance. The party had won the support of 10 percent of the electorate, some 64,000 votes, and had secured five seats to the new parliament, one won by Adams in West Belfast, another by McGuinness in his native Derry. As horrified constitutional Irish nationalists and stunned British politicians grappled with the meaning of all this, in the rolling countryside that surrounds the historic cathedral city of Armagh, not far from the town of Markethill, members of the South Armagh IRA drove up beside fifty-four-year-old Thomas Cochrane and with one swipe of a wooden club sent him flying off his motorbike. Known as Tommy to his friends and family, Cochrane was a part-time sergeant in the local unit of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the mostly Protestant local militia that had replaced the B Specials way back at the outset of the Troubles. He was also an Orangeman, a member of the Lurgyross Orange Heroes Lodge, which met near his home in Bessbrook.
