A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  At the same time that Reid had sent his lengthy message to Haughey, in May 1987, he dispatched a similar document to the Derry office of the SDLP leader. Hume responded cautiously. He had done one favor for Reid before, according to Tom King, when he had pressed the then NI secretary to give a private assurance of Britain’s neutrality to Adams, but the Reid letter was the first formal request to Hume to involve himself fully in the process.

  Hume met Reid several times, first in June 1987 and then in August and again in September, before agreeing in December 1987 to meet Adams. Like the Fianna Fail leader, Hume was cautious about supping too close to the Provos. As all this was happening, Haughey was putting together his own alternative to the face-to-face dialogue demanded by Adams. The proposal was simple: he would suspend his direct involvement and instead nominate John Hume to represent him and to act as a sort of go-between for the Irish government. This would solve the problem of having to meet Adams directly while preserving the initiative. Adams protested angrily, but he had little choice. He agreed, on one condition, to which Haughey readily assented: the communication line between him and Haughey through Father Reid would remain active, while Haughey would promise to reinvolve himself if and when necessary.19 There was another condition that Haughey insisted upon. The dialogue between him, Reid, and Adams was to be kept hidden from the SDLP for fear that it would be leaked and Haughey ruined. Hume was deliberately not told about the contacts and for long afterward believed that his subsequent meetings with Adams marked the start of the peace process. In retrospect this was a key moment, for it gave the peace process an identity it did not entirely deserve. Thereafter the process would be known as the Hume-Adams process, and with that the SDLP leader was set on the path that would eventually lead to a Nobel Peace Prize and international acclaim. The choice of Hume as Haughey’s representative had an unexpected bonus. The SDLP leader’s association with the Reid-Adams enterprise gave it a level of acceptability it otherwise would have lacked, especially in the Republic, where Hume’s standing was exceptionally high. Haughey began the Irish part of the peace process, but Hume gave it respectability.

  It was at this point that Haughey brought in his talented Northern adviser, Martin Mansergh, a former diplomat in the Department of Foreign Affairs whom Haughey had made his principal point of communication with Northern parties. There then began a partnership that was to last for more than a decade in which the Redemptorist priest would carry written and oral messages between Adams in Belfast and Mansergh in Dublin, who would in turn analyze and pass them on to his political master, Haughey at first and, in later years, Albert Reynolds and then Bertie Ahern.

  Much to the anger of the unionists and the great surprise of the rest of the world, the first of a series of talks between Sinn Fein and the SDLP took place on January 11, 1988, at Clonard Monastery. It was the public working out of the secret agreement arrived at by the nationalist leaders. For two hours Hume and Adams discussed and agreed arrangements for wider negotiations involving delegations from each side. The meeting had been requested by “a third party interested in creating political dialogue,” the two men said in a veiled reference to Alec Reid. As always the Redemptorist’s role would remained cloaked in shadow.

  In March the delegations met at the Redemptorists’ retreat house, St. Gerard’s on Belfast’s Antrim Road. Adams was accompanied by three key allies—Danny Morrison, a fellow Army Council member and director of publicity for both the IRA and Sinn Fein; Mitchel McLaughlin, a veteran Sinn Fein member from Derry; and Tom Hartley, a former Sinn Fein press officer from West Belfast and a driving force behind the bid to politicize the Provisionals. It was a carefully balanced delegation. Adams and Morrison represented the Army, but the image presented by McLaughlin and Hartley to the outside world and certainly to the SDLP was of figures who had spent their republican careers entirely in Sinn Fein with no or next to no involvement in IRA matters.

  Hume came with his own top team: Seamus Mallon, his County Armagh-born deputy; the university lecturer Sean Farren, one of Hume’s closest confidants; and Austin Currie, a somewhat independently minded figure from County Tyrone who could trace his political genesis back to the old Nationalist Party. There were five more meetings that year, in March, May, June, July, and September. One meeting was a private head-to-head between Hume and Adams; otherwise the party delegations were involved. Haughey agreed to send Mansergh and a junior TD, Dermot Ahern, to low-level meetings with Sinn Fein, which took place in the Redemptorist house in Dundalk with Father Reid present. Two such meetings happened, one in May, the other in June.

  With hindsight the curious feature of the talks is the extent to which they were conducted in public. In sharp contrast to the secret diplomacy that had occurred from 1982 and 1983 onward, each session of the 1988 Sinn Fein–SDLP talks was known about almost as soon as it had taken place, courtesy of detailed briefings to the media. After the first meeting, both Hume and Adams readily agreed to be interviewed by the author and other journalists. Adams, for instance, used the interviews to call speculation that a cease-fire was on the agenda “mischievous and erroneous” and denied that Haughey knew about the meeting beforehand or that Hume had come armed with what he termed “concrete proposals.”20 In April documents that had been exchanged by the parties were leaked at a high level to the author and published in the Sunday Tribune.21 In September, when the talks officially concluded, both sides made their respective papers public, and these were reproduced in full in the Irish Times.22

  The structure of the talks raised questions about the reason for the publicity and whether more would have been achieved had the two parties kept their dialogue secret, as they very soon did. Not least of the advantages of maintaining secrecy was that both Hume and Adams would have avoided the very extensive unease that emerged in their respective parties as a result of the publicity surrounding the meetings.

  The Sinn Fein–SDLP talks did, however, make one significant achievement; activists in both parties became accustomed to the notion that once deep and bitter enemies could sit around the same table and talk. The dialogue also managed to introduce into nationalist and republican political discourse many of the key concepts and language of the peace process. Seen as a conditioning process, the 1988 talks between the SDLP and Sinn Fein make a great deal of sense.

  ALMOST AS SOON AS the public talks ended, the private dialogue between Adams and Hume started, and this continued in secret for five years, until one Saturday morning in April 1993, when Gerry Adams and Father Alec Reid met John Hume in his house in Derry, on the edge of the Bogside and in circumstances that almost guaranteed that someone would see them. They were spotted and the story was made public. A statement subsequently issued by the two men used the precise language of Reid’s “Concrete Proposal.” They were engaged, they said, “in a political dialogue aimed at investigating the possibility of developing an overall political strategy to establish peace and justice.”23

  Although hopes were high that progress could still be made, the reality was that the year 1988 had seen the process falter. The promise of an IRA cease-fire held out in Father Reid’s first messages to Haughey and to Hume in the spring of 1987 had not been fulfilled. The intensity of the IRA’s military campaign was such as to deter the British from taking any more risks, while in nationalist Ireland the conviction grew, as Martin Mansergh was to say later, that the Provisionals still had some distance to travel. “Both the SDLP and Fianna Fail,” he wrote, “formed the view separately that northern republicans were not then ready to end their campaign, and that the primary aim of any continuing dialogue was to end their political isolation and build a broad front.”24 Neither party was prepared to accept that outcome, he added.

  ALTHOUGH CONSIDERABLE progress had been made in advancing the theology and in shoring up the political foundations of the peace process, the truth was that Adams and his supporters still had an enormously long way to go before they could persuade, maneuver, or cajole the IRA to accept a cessation.
None of the mainstream nationalist parties were aware that the Army Council had been kept in the dark about much of the process prior to the talks with the SDLP or that the details of the Reid-Adams proposals were still a secret to all but Adams and his close advisers. It had taken Adams and his supporters in the Provisionals five years to overthrow and remove the O Bradaigh–O Conaill leadership and to move the Provisionals into electoral politics. It would take a lot longer to end the armed struggle.

  The peace process did not quite end when the SDLP and Sinn Fein concluded their public dialogue. Not only did Hume and Adams continue to meet regularly and in secret—the first meeting, at the invitation of the Re demptorist superior in Ireland took place in the order’s Dublin house within weeks of the official ending of the dialogue—but in October an extraordinary event by the standards of 1988 took place at a private conference in the German town of Duisburg in the Ruhr valley.

  Four of Northern Ireland’s senior politicians were there. Peter Robinson, the shrewd, ascetic deputy to the Reverend Ian Paisley, represented the hard-line DUP; Jack Allen, a gregarious publican from Derry, came from the largest unionist group, the Ulster Unionists; Austin Currie came from the SDLP; and Gordon Mawhinney, the deputy leader of Alliance, represented the moderate, middle-of-the-road liberals. The weekend conference had been organized by Irish and German churchmen in an attempt to get peace talks going back in Belfast. The meeting had the blessing of the party leaders, and hopes for a breakthrough were high.

  What made the gathering doubly significant was the attendance of Father Alec Reid, who participated as the representative of Gerry Adams, albeit an unofficial one. All the participants knew beforehand that he was to be there as someone familiar with the views of Sinn Fein, and so did their party leaders. His presence kept the unionists in terror of discovery for months afterward. At that time, talking to Sinn Fein was possibly the most unforgivable sin in the book, and even being in the same room as a surrogate figure like Reid would have caused an outcry.

  At that stage the prospect of participating in political talks did not concern Sinn Fein or Gerry Adams—the IRA’s raging war ruled that out. But Reid was there to give the unionists a highly important message, as one account of the weekend conference recorded:

  Alec Reid spoke of the two traditions and how essential it was to enter into a dialogue with the right spirit. It was a Republican tradition to use violence but if we do [sic] enter dialogue he was certain that we would find that they were not so difficult. In his view the Republican Movement must be dealt with—it represents the views of the Nationalist people. They are pursuing the right of the Irish people to determine their own future and would pursue that right by political means if given reasonable opportunity.25

  As a political event the Duisburg conference was a sideshow, but its significance was twofold: the Sinn Fein leadership was signaling a willingness to join the mainstream, while the readiness of unionists to accept Father Reid showed that they were not entirely appalled at the prospect. Everyone knew that if Sinn Fein wanted to become constitutional politicians, the IRA’s campaign had to end.

  The peace process hadn’t stopped, but it had slowed down, and further movement was spasmodic. Hume and Adams met only four times in 1989, as the IRA’s post-Eksund “Tet offensive” worked its way through failure and one setback after another. In February 1989 Haughey made another bid to advance the “stepping stones” strategy when he told the Fianna Fail Ard Fheis that an end to the IRA’s violence could dramatically change things. Using language that could have been taken wholesale from the Reid document, Haughey said that such a development

  would open up, as it did in the New Ireland Forum, the possibility for a broad consensus among Nationalists on how to achieve political stability based on justice. Our efforts, supported by a large majority of Irish people everywhere, could then be constructively directed to persuading our Unionist countrymen that their future lay with us in a partnership of equals and in convincing the British government that the future of Ireland could and should be left to all the Irish people to decide for themselves.26

  This was the Reid-Adams formula for national self-determination, almost word for word.

  Later that year Hume incorporated Reid’s twofold consent formula into a practical proposal, suggesting to his party conference in November that any political settlement agreed by the Northern parties and the two governments should be put to the whole Irish people in twin referenda, held in the separate jurisdictions on the same day. Such a proposal, which Hume had first floated way back in 1981, would mean, he said, that from a nationalist/republican viewpoint “for the first time the people of this island would have expressed self-determination on how we live together.”27 It would also remove, at a stroke, the basis for the IRA’s opposition to the 1921 settlement, rooted as that was in the fact that the unionists had flouted the principle of all-Ireland self-determination.

  It was around the same time that the Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Brooke, chose to make his neutrality speech, directing it at Gerry Adams and his allies from the heart of his constituency in Westminster. Such a public declaration had been the missing part of the secret British correspondence, but now Brooke was rectifying that omission. Offering Sinn Fein a full political role in Northern Ireland’s affairs if the IRA’s violence ended, Brooke tackled two of the issues raised in Alec Reid’s “stepping stones” document. “The British Government,” he said, “has no selfish strategic or economic interests in Northern Ireland; our role is to help, enable and encourage. Britain’s purpose, as I have sought to describe it, is not to occupy, oppress or exploit but to ensure democratic debate and free democratic choice.”28 Reid had said the British would need to declare their neutrality and agree to sponsor a dialogue with which they would not interfere. Peter Brooke had delivered. Slowly the “stepping stones” were being laid.

  ALTHOUGH THE PEACE PROCESS was moving forward, its speed was not much faster than a glacier’s, and nearly everyone agreed on the reason for that. As long as Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister, Adams could never deliver the IRA leadership or grassroots. IRA supporters would condemn even the suggestion of a deal with Thatcher as surrender. Nor could the participants be confident that a declaration of the sort outlined in the Reid-Adams proposal from Thatcher’s lips would carry any weight in the Provo heartlands. The hatred between them was just too deep. Suddenly, three weeks after Brooke’s “neutrality” speech, the logjam was removed and the glacier picked up speed. An internal Tory Party crisis forced Thatcher to resign, and with her went the last, great obstacle to an IRA cease-fire.

  Thatcher’s departure revived the process. Her successor, John Major, was by and large an unknown quantity on Northern Ireland, but in its way this was an advantage. The fact that he carried no political baggage on the Northern Ireland issue meant that he could, if he wanted, be more flexible and even imaginative in his approach. There was also an important change in the bureaucracy. At the Northern Ireland Office, John Chilcot became the new permanent secretary. A former British Home Office official, Chilcot had little difficulty buying into the theory of the peace process and quickly grasped what Adams was attempting to achieve. He constructed his own pipeline into the process via John Hume, and through that contact Chilcot would also get to know Adams’s mind. Along with his talented deputy, Quentin Thomas, and the British cabinet secretary, Sir Robin Butler, the three officials were to make up the British negotiators during the tortuous road to the 1994 cease-fire.

  Despite Thatcher’s fall and Brooke’s neutrality declaration, progress was still painfully slow. In Dublin the process had stalled. Haughey and Hume distrusted Adams’s motives, made suspicious by his failure to deliver on earlier promises of an IRA cease-fire, and the talking had slowed down. Neither man was aware at that stage that Adams’s foray into the peace diplomacy had been undertaken without the Army Council’s knowledge or approval and that his every step had to be carefully measured. By 1990 the Redemptorists wanted to
withdraw Father Reid from the process amid fears about his health, but Haughey had urged them to persist and they relented.

  Finally, in the early part of 1991, Haughey was spurred to action. He assembled his own team of Irish civil servants to spearhead a new initiative, choosing to extend knowledge of the peace process beyond his private office. Dermot Nally, an experienced diplomat whose involvement in Northern Ireland matters went back twenty years, headed the team. He was secretary to Haughey’s cabinet, the Irish equivalent of Sir Robin Butler. Despite his distaste for the Department of Foreign Affairs [DFA], Haughey decided to include two of its senior officials, Noel Dorr, who headed the DFA, and Sean O hUiginn, a senior official in the Anglo-Irish division whose remorseless logic would irritate the British and earn him the sobriquet “The Dark Prince.” O hUiginn, from Boho in County Mayo, had been the first Irish joint secretary to the Anglo-Irish secretariat. Opposite him, representing the British, sat Mark Elliott, the Foreign Office official whose trips to Derry were so secret only manuscript records were made of them.

  In the autumn of 1991 Hume and Adams produced the first draft of a model joint British-Irish government declaration incorporating, inasmuch as they affected the British, Reid’s “stepping stones.” Mansergh and O hUiginn made changes, and when John Major traveled to Dublin for his first Anglo-Irish summit in December 1991, Charles Haughey handed him a copy of this document, known as “Draft 2.”

  According to its terms the British would say that they had no “selfish, strategic, political or economic interest” in staying in Northern Ireland and that they wished only to see the Irish people live together “in unity and harmony.” Dublin would accept that Irish self-determination was subject to Reid’s twofold consent principle and agreed to set up a permanent convention that would advise on ways to exercise self-determination.29 This would convene whether or not the British agreed to put their name to the declaration. Thus began the complex and often tortuous intergovernmental negotiations that would lead in a mere two years to the Downing Street Declaration.