A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  He struck a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the republican protesters. Generally nationalist in his outlook, he rejected the IRA’s violent methods but believed it was important to understand why it was that people joined the IRA and supported the use of violence. He believed it was vital that he talk to republicans, and in those days very few Catholic priests did. The IRA prisoners liked and respected him. “He was seen as a gentle, hopeful, optimistic man, continually giving us comfort,” recalled one former protesting prisoner.15 When asked by Sinn Fein before he started his own fast to the death which priests he trusted and was most friendly with, Bobby Sands gave Reid’s name as one of only three he could list. “Not much use that, is it?” he asked acidly in a smuggled communiqué to Danny Morrison just before he went on his hunger strike.16

  The prisoners may have trusted Reid, but the authorities suspected him of ferrying messages to and from the IRA leadership. “The screws would never search [Father] Toner, who brought in tobacco and stuff, but on two occasions Reid was strip-searched,” said the same ex-prisoner.17 Although his search did not entail the humiliating examination of the anal passage, either by hand or mirror, routinely meted out to IRA inmates, it was nevertheless an embarrassing and insulting experience. The priest bore his ordeal without protest.

  The IRA prisoners respected Reid, but they were sometimes frustrated by his naïveté, a criticism the British would share later when his joint diplomacy with Gerry Adams began to get serious. “He told us once,” remembered the former prisoner,

  that he’d been to the American consulate in Belfast to try to drum up support [for the H Block protesters]. I asked him who was there, and he said the ambassador, officials, and an English guy. I said who was the Englishman, and he said someone called Oldfield. “My God!” I said, “that was Maurice Oldfield of MI6.” It turned out that they had asked him a lot of questions about Brendan Hughes and others in the prison leadership. They were trying to build up a profile, and he was innocently helping them.18

  All the priests who visited the jail or who got involved in the protest were given nicknames by the IRA prisoners. Father Denis Faul, who said Mass every Sunday in the prison, was initially admired by the prisoners and his nickname, Denis the Menace, indicated a certain endearment that turned to bitter hostility when he opposed the hunger strike and the Adams leadership in late 1981. Father Tom Toner, the official Catholic chaplain, was Index, after the F(inancial) T(imes) Index. Cardinal O Fiaich was Saggart Mor, literally “big priest” in Irish. Father Alec Reid became known as Behind the Scenes. “He was always telling us not to worry, things were going on behind the scenes, and it would all turn out okay,” recalled the same IRA inmate.19 He said it so often that the prisoners, half cynically, renamed him.

  Reid put enormous faith in secret talks that had been opened with Thatcher by Cardinal O Fiaich and the bishop of Derry, Edward Daly. The threat of a hunger strike in March 1980 prompted the dialogue in which O Fiaich and Daly argued with the British that a small concession on scrapping the prison uniform, just one of the IRA’s five demands, could avert a great disaster. Of all people in Ireland, the republican-leaning Catholic primate and his colleague from Derry knew just how destabilizing and emotional an IRA hunger strike could be. In late October 1980 the crisis came to a head. The prisoners announced their plans for a hunger strike, and O Fiaich and Daly frantically pressed the British for the concession on prison garb. The British responded with a piece of smoke and mirrors that greatly embittered the clerics. The prison uniform would be scrapped, Margaret Thatcher’s Northern Ireland secretary, Humphrey Atkins, told them, and be replaced by “civilian-style clothes.” It did not take much probing to discover that “civilian-style clothes” were just the old prison uniform renamed and redesigned. Disappointed and disillusioned, the clerics withdrew. Four days later the first hunger strike began.

  The prisoners remember Reid as being extremely optimistic about O Fiaich’s efforts. The cardinal had visited the H Blocks in July 1978 and was so upset by the sight of prisoners living in their own excreta that he issued an angry statement comparing the conditions in the H Blocks to the sewers of Calcutta. The prisoners now had a powerful friend, and after the Calcutta remarks Reid assured the prisoners that O Fiaich would see Thatcher and “could sort it out.” So it was that the failure of the O Fiaich–Daly mission hit him hard. He fell ill and suffered a nervous breakdown. Disappointed, guilty, and fearful, Reid decided to quit his prison diplomacy, but before he left he made one last attempt to stop the protest, as the prisoner’s leader, Brendan Hughes, recalled: “When the hunger strike was planned, he begged me not to start it, and when I said no, he asked to speak to someone else to try to persuade them. So I sent Sands to see him, and Bobby was as strong as I was.”20

  IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE to understand the relationship that was built up between Gerry Adams and Father Alec Reid without first appreciating the extraordinary influence that the Redemptorist Congregation exercised on the Catholic population of West Belfast during the Sinn Fein president’s childhood. When Reid visited Adams to plead for Tommy Cochrane’s life in October 1982, he came not as just another Catholic cleric but as a member of a community that for nearly a hundred years had shaped and molded the views and attitudes of Adams’s family and those of the rest of his community.

  Founded in 1732 by Alphonsus Liguori, the lawyer son of wealthy aristocrats from Naples, the Redemptorists, whose official title is the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, are the Jesuits for the poor and working classes. Bound by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and steeped in the Irish Marian tradition, they are renowned for a “hellfire and damnation” style of preaching that is designed to strike fear of death and an eternity spent in the fiery pits of hell into the hearts of waverers. They are often invited to conduct intensive missions in parishes where the church authorities believe the congregation has become lax. “We provide a 64,000-mile service for the faithful,” a member of the order once told the author.21

  The Redemptorists set up their first base in Ireland in 1853 but did not come to Belfast until 1896, when a surge in the city’s Catholic population, the result of rapid industrial growth and an influx of linen workers from rural areas set alarm bells ringing amongst the Irish hierarchy. Concerned that his burgeoning flock, numbering some 100,000 by the turn of the century, would fall prey to the droves of assiduous Protestant evangelists who roamed Belfast in those days, the then bishop of Down and Connor, Dr. Henry Henry, asked the Redemptorists to set up shop, and they readily agreed. They chose to establish their base in the area around Clonard off the Falls Road in West Belfast, a crowded district of small terraced streets where many of the migrant Catholic linen workers had been housed.

  The growth in Belfast’s Catholic population drew an increasingly hostile Protestant reaction, and from the mid-nineteenth century onward, animosity to and intolerance of the newcomers grew. A series of vicious citywide riots gradually imposed a sectarian and political segregation on the map of Belfast. Protestants in the adjacent Shankill Road area particularly resented the arrival of the Redemptorists in Clonard. During the construction of the first church building, there were threats of violence. “This threat became very real in the winter of 1899,” the congregation’s official history recorded, “and for several days and nights, local men patrolled the area to defend the Monastery should it be attacked.”22 These tensions were replayed seventy years later during the violent August of 1969, when loyalist mobs invaded the Clonard area and burned down Bombay Street, only yards from the monastery buildings. It was said their real target was the monastery church, from whose tower, according to Protestant mythology, IRA snipers could fire down on the Shankill. No one knew or understood, and perhaps even sympathized with, the Defenderist roots of the Provos better than the Redemptorists of Clonard.

  The West Belfast that Gerry Adams grew up in was steeped in the influence of the Redemptorists. The most direct influence on the future IRA leader, his friends, and family wa
s exerted through the confraternities that the congregation had run for many years. There were three “confos,” as Adams and his contemporaries called them, one for “ladies,” one for men, and another for boys. A society of lay Catholics, usually led by a Redemptorist priest, the confos would meet separately every week to say prayers, sing hymns, and hear a stirring sermon on Catholic doctrine from one of the Clonard priests. The confraternities were the Redemptorists’ way of ensuring that the faithful stayed faithful. The societies had flourished in West Belfast. By 1957, when Adams was old enough to join, the male confraternities had hit record numbers; nearly 9,300 West Belfast males were on the books that year.

  Adams himself has nothing but fond memories of his days as a confrater. “One night a week,” he wrote in his autobiography,

  we used to go for our religious instruction to confraternity down in Clonard Monastery and if we left early we could spend the bus fare on sweets. We cut down the Springfield Road and joined hundreds of other boys in the chapel. To me Clonard was a wondrous place with high, high ceilings and a huge high altar. The altar boys wore long, red soutanes and white gowns. The priest’s incense spiralled upwards through the shafts of sunlight which came slanting down from stained-glass windows at the very top. It wasn’t a long service. Father McLaughlin, who was in charge of the confraternity, got up and made a joke or preached a sermon and then we sang a few hymns. I didn’t mind it all; in fact I found parts of it good fun.23

  The Redemptorists adapted well to the conditions of West Belfast and had little difficulty relating to the often violent world that some of their flock inhabited. A not untypical example of this coexistence of muscular Catholicism and physical-force republicanism was Gerry Adams’s maternal uncle Alfie Hannaway. An active republican from 1936, Alfie was first an organizer for the IRA boy scouts, na Fianna Eireann, and was responsible for recruiting Tom Williams, the legendary IRA man hanged in 1942. Alfie Hannaway was later promoted to the staff of the IRA’s Second Belfast Battalion, and in the early 1940s, as the IRA’s “English campaign” was fading, the Stormont government interned him. But Uncle Alfie wore another hat, which he donned weekly on behalf of the Redemptorists, as an obituary recorded:

  His strong faith which was nurtured alongside his Republican beliefs led him to a strong association with the Clonard Monastery and a lifelong friendship with the Redemptorist priests. A member of both the boys’ and men’s confraternities for over 60 years, he earned the nickname “The Bishop” among his work mates, and when he was seen approaching the comment came that there must be another retreat in the offing and he was looking for people to enrol.24

  The association between the Redemptorists of Clonard and the republicans could be seen in other ways. The Redemptorists’ celebrated annual novenas in West Belfast, nine intensive days of prayer, sermons, and services intended to refresh and strengthen religious belief, attract tens of thousands of local Catholics and transform the Clonard area into a huge religious carnival site. The novenas are held each June at around the time of the republican Bodenstown commemoration. The more spiritual republicans, like Alfie Hannaway, would spend the month of June first renewing their Catholic convictions in Clonard and then they would travel to County Kildare to reinvigorate their political faith at Wolfe Tone’s graveside.

  Gerry Adams may not have been as pious as Uncle Alfie Hannaway, but he too forged a close relationship with the Redemptorists, which worked to his benefit when he had to convince skeptics of his peaceful bona fides, as the New York–based insurance mogul Bill Flynn recalled when he met Adams at Clonard in 1991: “I’m a Catholic,” he told the writer Conor O’Clery. “Adams is a Catholic, a communicant. I would see these priests and brothers, living there, trying to help people, under poor conditions. To see them, and their respect and friendliness for Adams, I knew he had to be a man of peace.”25

  FATHER REID would later say to others who participated in his peace enterprise that the only chance of getting the IRA to the point of ending its campaign lay in putting together a process that had the imprimatur of the Catholic Church firmly stamped upon it. “Al would say over and over again that the church was the only body which could pull something like this off and that if she didn’t do it no one ever would,” recalled one confidant.26 Reid advanced a number of reasons why the church should get substantially involved. The first was that the IRA trusted Catholic intermediaries in a way it did not trust others. There was an encouraging record. Priests, many of them Redemptorists, had acted as messengers or go-betweens during the prison hunger strikes as well as in feuds between rival republican groups. Adams had himself been party to a lot of this activity and trusted the individuals concerned, especially Reid. The Redemptorist was not modest about his influence over the Adams’s leadership: “He told us, and I think we came to believe him, that he had more close and continual contact with them than any other priest and possibly more than any person outside the IRA,” said one government contact.27

  Reid also contended that the church would bring a special flavor to the effort arising from its extraordinary, centuries-old influence over Irish society. This, he would say, would bestow a moral authority and stature on the enterprise that would both legitimize it and add to the pressure on republicans to respond positively. Reid’s third point followed on from this. He argued that the church’s role in providing a neutral setting for the process would give cover to any other political parties who were talking to Adams and his colleagues. “The point he made, and John Hume grasped this particularly well, was that if there was a leak, responsibility could be shifted onto the church,” recalled an Irish participant.28

  Had news of Reid’s 1982 overtures to Adams leaked out at the time, there is little doubt that in the prevailing climate the Irish political and media establishment would have been aghast at the revelation of any contact between the church and the Provos. But the news would have shocked many republicans as well. The hunger strike scars were still fresh when Reid approached Adams and the memory of the role played by the church still rankled with rank-and-file Provos. During the prison protest, republicans had bitterly accused the Catholic hierarchy of betraying the hunger strikers and of kowtowing to the Thatcher government. The church’s stance, they claimed, had been supine and had encouraged Thatcher to take an unbending line on the prison protest, contributing in no small measure to the ten hunger strike deaths. While the reality may have been much more complex, the belief was strongly held. When the protest was finally abandoned, the IRA prisoners issued a public statement attacking the church with unprecedented acrimony. Accusing the church of being “intricately immersed in the field of politics and deceit,” the prisoners went on, “We contend that their position has at all times been established by political consideration rather than the Christian values of truth and justice. Therefore their stance has been extremely immoral and misleading.”29

  It was ironic therefore that it was to the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, and through him the Vatican that Alec Reid, and, indirectly, Adams, turned for assistance in advancing his peace project. O Fiaich responded warmly to the suggestion from Reid that they hold talks with Gerry Adams. “Reid was convinced, and in turn persuaded Tom O Fiaich that the church should get involved in devising an alternative to the IRA’s violence, that her resources, influence, independence, authority, and the lines of communication open to her all meant that the church should encourage and even initiate talks with Adams,” recalled one peace process confidant.30 Once Reid was able to tell the cardinal that Adams wanted to find a political alternative to violence and that he could deliver the IRA, O Fiaich agreed to take part. From then on, Reid could accurately describe his initiative as a church enterprise.

  IT WAS REID’S and Adams’s good fortune that at this time the occupant of Ara Coeli (House of Heaven), the Irish primate’s official residence in Armagh, was Tomas O Fiaich. Had it been anybody else, the Reid initiative would perhaps have fallen at the first hurdle. Born in Cullyhanna,
one of the most republican villages in South Armagh, O Fiaich was a staunch Irish nationalist, although one strongly opposed to the IRA’s armed struggle. An academic who for many years had headed St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth, County Kildare, the Irish church’s principal seminary, O Fiaich was appointed archbishop of Armagh in October 1977, in succession to the late Cardinal Conway, the Belfast-born conservative who had led the church during the turbulent years of civil rights protests and the birth of the Provisionals. Within two months O Fiaich was embroiled in controversy when, in an interview with the Dublin-based Irish Press newspaper, he showed his political colors. “I believe the British should withdraw from Ireland,” he said. “I think it is the only thing that will get things moving.”31 The comment stirred the DUP leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley, to dub O Fiaich “the IRA’s bishop from Crossmaglen.”32 Although Paisley got O Fiaich’s birthplace wrong, the label, in unionist eyes, was accurate and it stuck. O Fiaich was eventually elevated to the Irish primacy but only after a reportedly concerted British diplomatic effort to persuade the Vatican to choose someone else.

  O Fiaich’s decision to back Reid’s enterprise was bound to animate controversy in the Irish church, not least because it came at a time when political pressure to isolate Adams and Sinn Fein was growing. The origin of much of this pressure elsewhere in Ireland as well as Britain lay not in London but in Dublin. After Adams’s success in the 1982 Assembly election, the British let it be known that he and his four colleagues would have full access to Northern Ireland Office ministers to discuss constituency matters.33 Adams actually got to meet one of them, Housing Minister David Mitchell, with whom he raised the subject of poor living conditions in his native Ballymurphy. But it was to be one-shot event. The incoming coalition government in Dublin, headed by Garret FitzGerald, had followed these events with growing dismay. FitzGerald believed passionately that the Provos should be isolated and that to talk to them would only encourage IRA violence. He had angrily condemned the British for engaging in past cease-fire talks with the IRA, on one famous occasion going so far as to recruit U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to his cause, and so he successfully lobbied the NI secretary, Jim Prior, to reverse the decision. Sinn Fein was banished from respectable company and stayed that way for over a decade.