A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  IT WAS, of course, next to impossible for the IRA to conduct its violence without risking civilian life. Given the conditions under which it fought, especially in urban areas, and the obvious limits on its ability to rehearse operations, civilian casualties were inevitable. Unable to wage the “clean” war that the Sinn Fein leadership demanded and incapable of delivering the quantity and quality of “military operations” necessary to inflict significant casualties on the British army, the IRA saw its war gradually, slowly run down. The preconditions for a public move into the real peace process agenda had arrived.

  Adams turned to an institution that he had utilized before when he had wanted to influence the IRA’s direction. In the past he had used it to push the Army Council in a radical military and political direction, but now he would use the Revolutionary Council in an effort to steer the IRA away from violence and toward the still-secret peace strategy. In its first manifestation the Revolutionary Council had been an exclusively IRA body, but when Adams again turned to it, he ensured that Sinn Fein was invited to send members to its meetings. The Army Council was, of course, represented at its gatherings, as were the heads of GHQ departments, but this time the Revolutionary Council would also include key members of the Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle in its deliberations, figures who, like Adams, were unhappy at the conduct of the IRA’s violence. Composed of some twenty-five to thirty people, the cream of the IRA and Sinn Fein, and chaired by Adams himself, the Revolutionary Council would meet two or three times a year, and although its decisions and opinions were not binding on the Army Council, it was in practice difficult if not impossible for the IRA’s leaders to ignore them. Although billed as a way of improving communication and understanding between the IRA and Sinn Fein, the Revolutionary Council would in this form be used by the Adams camp as a tool to rein in and curb the IRA.

  One IRA source familiar with its deliberations explained how this worked.

  Its function was supposed to be to explore the best way forward. Sinn Fein people raised bad operations, and the IRA people raised criticisms of Sinn Fein statements, but really it was aimed at pointing out to the IRA the error of its ways. It began restricting operations—attacks on school buses were banned, an attempt made to stop killing off-duty UDR men was made but failed, booby traps were restricted and then phased out because they were too indiscriminate, the bombing of factories stopped, and so on. Sinn Fein people said we were putting our own people out of work. They came out against the hoaxes that we were using to cause economic damage. At one stage they were regular Friday events in Belfast, but first they got them banned in the mornings because they were hitting their people going to work and then they were banned in the evening because they affected their people going home. Eventually they were phased out altogether. The Adams faction won the day.27

  Although the Revolutionary Council was moving the IRA in the direction Adams wished, it was often a hard struggle, and on at least one occasion he was forced to play his ace, in the knowledge that his value to the movement was inestimable. On that occasion, after two Australian tourists mistaken for off-duty British soldiers had been killed in Holland in May 1990, he threatened to quit the IRA and then sought Army Council permission to criticize and condemn IRA operations. When he was refused, he then came up with a second idea. This was to formally and publicly separate Sinn Fein from the IRA, although in practice he and other prominent Sinn Fein figures in the IRA leadership, like McGuinness, would continue to hold their seats on the Army Council. “It lost,” recalled one source, “when a consensus emerged that if Adams went down that road, he and others could no longer hold leadership positions in the Army. McGuinness didn’t back it either. It would have been a sham division but would have allowed Sinn Fein to criticize the IRA and distance themselves from it. But it was rejected out of hand so strongly that it was never heard of again.”28

  Adams was frustrated but nevertheless later managed to put some formal distance between Sinn Fein and the IRA. Sinn Fein let it be known in January 1991 that the party would no longer act as “proxy spokespersons” for the IRA. A Sinn Fein source told the Irish Times, “The IRA can speak for itself.”29 Adams’s biographers noted that from this time on it became increasingly difficult to meet the IRA; such meetings were no longer held in Sinn Fein offices, and Sinn Fein stopped faxing IRA statements to the media.30 The Sinn Fein’s publicity machine had been separated from the IRA’s. The author had a bizarre personal experience of what this meant. On one occasion an appointment to meet an authorized IRA spokesperson turned into a scene from a B spy movie, complete with instructions on which newspaper to read at which café table. The instructions were too complicated, and the meeting never happened. Prior to this a simple phone call would have ensured a rendezvous.

  In 1991 Martin McGuinness joined in the criticism echoing Adams’s impatience with IRA mistakes and distancing himself from the organization publicly, even though he was the organization’s military chieftain in Northern Ireland.

  Nowhere in the Sinn Fein constitution does it state that if you become a member or supporter of Sinn Fein do you have to support armed struggle. It doesn’t say anywhere whatsoever that you have to support the IRA and I think personally from within the republican movement that that is a position which we should be moving towards in the future. That we have to say to people that you can support Sinn Fein and you can support the republican analysis of what’s wrong in the six counties and you don’t necessarily have to support every single IRA operation which takes place.31

  Skillfully employing the Revolutionary Council–Army Council mechanism, the Adams camp managed to control and gradually restrict IRA operations, but still the PR disasters—“fuck-ups” as the Provo base called them—continued. The worst of these came in January 1992, when eight Protestant workmen were killed in a 500-pound IRA land mine explosion at Teebane Crossroads on the main road between Cookstown and Omagh in County Tyrone; the blast destroyed their van and tossed their bodies into nearby fields. They had been working for a building company contracted to carry out repairs at the British army base at Lisanelly, Omagh. Opposition to the Provisionals sharpened in the Republic afterward and took tangible form when Dublin City Council banned Sinn Fein from using the Mansion House for its annual Ard Fheis. The council cited Sinn Fein’s support for the IRA as the reason.

  Despite all the warnings from figures like Gerry Adams, it seemed that the IRA was determined to carry out operations that embarrassed Sinn Fein, demoralized republican supporters and activists, and, arguably, served to undermine the armed struggle it self. To the outside world it sometimes looked as if all this was deliberate, that the IRA was, at best, uncontrollable and, at worst, at odds with Sinn Fein leaders like Adams over the movement’s political direction. There was a major difficulty with this view and that was that the IRA leadership did not exist in an insulated, self-contained compartment. Adams was a long-standing member of the Army Council, and the Council, as the supreme IRA body, decided Army policy. Metaphorically, the Army Council’s offices were just across the corridor from the offices of the people who ran the war on a day-to-day basis in GHQ, the English department, the European department, and Northern Command and who took their orders ultimately from the Army Council. The heads of these departments were sometimes also members of the Army Council and were often in close, intimate contact with each other. In the latter years of the IRA’s campaign, for example, three key figures—the organization’s director of operations, its Northern commander, and his deputy, the Northern Command adjutant—all had seats on the Army Council. If all these people had been privy to the peace process strategy—as should have been the case—and appreciated the need for a refined military strategy, Gerry Adams would not have had to lecture them so often about the need to be careful in the way that they fought the war. There could be only two explanations: either the Army Council was deeply divided about the strategy, or its members were largely ignorant of it.

  IN THE MID- and late 1980s the Army Counci
l had authorized Northern Command to vet brigade operations in Northern Ireland, and as the years went by that control tightened, much to the irritation of the IRA rank and file, who much preferred to operate on a loose leash. The reason for tightening control was simple. It meant that the leadership could more easily ensure that the IRA’s military strategy dovetailed with its political approach, a consideration that assumed enormous importance when Sinn Fein began contesting elections. Despite the requirement for a precisely directed military strategy, the record shows, according to well-informed IRA sources,32 that Northern Command approved and sometimes initiated the very operations that so often imperiled Sinn Fein’s political strategy, operations that frequently claimed civilian lives. They were not the haphazard, ill-thought-out enterprises that the Adams-McGuinness criticism made them out to be. In the case of McGuinness, he sometimes denounced operations that either he, as Northern commander, or his colleagues on Northern Command staff had approved or endorsed. In the case of Adams, he was condemning operations that had been approved in many instances by his closest political ally. Even though much of the criticism by Adams and McGuinness concerned the manner in which the operations had been carried out as much as the concept behind them, it was an extraordinary, not to say bizarre, inconsistency.

  According to these IRA sources, Northern Command had, for example, given the go-ahead for the Enniskillen bombing. Attempts by the IRA at the time to blame the disaster on local activists do not square with the fact that there were similar operations elsewhere that day, evidence of the sort of coordination that only Northern Command could organize. A bomb was found at Tullyhommon War Memorial on the Fermanagh-Donegal Border, set to go off at 11:00 A.M., when the Poppy Day service was set to start, while in Belfast a carload of explosives was defused at the headquarters of the Royal British Legion, which organized the annual war tributes.33 Northern Command had also vetted the Lisnaskea school bus bomb, the bomb at the Falls Road swimming baths, and the Border land mine that had killed the Hanna family, while the deaths of James and Eileen Sefton, which had so exercised Gerry Adams, came as a result of a plan vetted and approved by Northern Command.

  IT WAS AGAINST this background, and with the full approval of the entire leadership, that the IRA organized one of the most cold-blooded operations in its history, one that would be imitated years later on a much larger scale in lower Manhattan and on the streets of Jerusalem by Islamic extremists less concerned about the effect of their actions on public opinion. The use of the human bomb did not begin when Al Qaeda hijackers pointed passenger jets at the towers of the World Trade Center or when Hamas bombers blew themselves and scores of Israeli partygoers to pieces. It began in Derry a decade before.

  The first use of a human bomb by the IRA was one of those examples of Northern Command initiating an operation rather than approving one suggested by activists lower down the chain of command. In the autumn of 1990, the Command staff won the approval of the Army Council to mount the first of what was to be a series of human bomb attacks, although there was a crucial difference between these and the events that devastated the United States on September 11, 2001. Unlike the Islamic extremists of Al Qaeda, IRA men would not die in their version of the human bomb. The IRA’s device instead would be delivered by an uninvolved outsider, usually an innocent civilian, forced to ferry the explosive while his family was held hostage. As an operation calculated to undermine the IRA’s armed struggle, alienate even its most loyal supporters, and damage Sinn Fein politically, it had no equal; no other single act of violence perpetrated by the IRA during this phase of its campaign could match it.

  Armed and masked IRA men took the family of Patsy Gillespie hostage in the early hours of October 24, 1990, and forced him to drive a car loaded with 1,000 pounds of explosives to the British army checkpoint at Coshquin on the Derry-Donegal Border. Gillespie was chosen to deliver the device because he worked in the canteen of a local British army base, and in the minds of the IRA organizers that made him a legitimate target. He lived in the strongly nationalist Shantallow area of Derry and had refused to relocate even though four years earlier he had been forced to drive another IRA bomb into the city, although on that occasion his life had been spared. As soon as he arrived at the checkpoint, the bomb was detonated by remote control, tearing Gillespie and five British soldiers to pieces. A similar attack later the same day killed a British soldier near Newry, while another human bomb near Omagh was intercepted and defused. Attacks like these continued for a month, culminating in a foiled attempt to destroy the checkpoint at Roslea, County Fermanagh, with a 3,500-pound trailer bomb. In that incident members of a hostage family were tied to a tree while a relative drove the bomb to its target.

  Predictably, the human bomb tactic was a public relations disaster. What made the use of the human bomb so difficult to comprehend was that it had been proposed and supported by an IRA leadership that supposedly was in the midst of implementing a strategy aimed at winning political and electoral support on both sides of the Border. That similar attacks were repeated for weeks after Coshquin made the episode even more extraordinary. Adams’s lieutenants told journalists they were in despair at what the IRA had done, conveying the impression not only that the Sinn Fein leader had had nothing to do with it but that he was actively opposed to the tactic. One key adviser told the author at the time, “It’s gone down very badly with the base from the Ma’ [mother] on down. It might be different if it had been a one-off, but because it was done again it has had such a bad effect.”34 But the criticism and public outrage were entirely predictable and raised obvious questions. The IRA leadership, including Adams, was capable of seeing the negative consequences that resulted from, for example, placing a bomb on a school bus, yet they had unhesitatingly supported a tactic that involved forcing a father of three to drive a huge bomb to an army base and then, before he had the chance to escape, blowing him to smithereens.

  Only one thing can be said with certainty. The human bomb tactic fortified the peace camp within the Provisionals and weakened the militarists. The BBC journalist Peter Taylor, a veteran reporter of the Irish Troubles, put it well. “By actions such as this and the revulsion they provoked within the community,” he wrote, “the IRA inadvertently strengthened the hand of those within the Republican Movement who argued that an alternative to the armed struggle had to be found.”35

  THIRTEEN

  The Derry Experiment

  The deaths at Coshquin in October 1990 caused outrage in Derry, and there is little doubt the attack marked a low point in the fortunes of the IRA’s Derry Brigade. The local nationalist weekly paper, the Derry Journal, devoted three pages to the story. The banner headline on the front page called the attack “Bloody Wednesday,” and an editorial said the anger in the city was at a level not seen since Bloody Sunday 1972, when British troops had killed thirteen local men, gunning them down without warning or mercy.1 While nationalist and unionist politicians vied with each other to condemn the atrocity, and the city’s Catholic bishop, Dr. Edward Daly, called it “a callous, cynical, crude and horrible deed,”2 behind the scenes the deaths animated a mini–peace process that was to see the IRA in the city gradually and secretly de-escalate its violence in tandem with the British security forces. Although limited in scope and cautious in its application, this mutual de-escalation made Derry a laboratory experiment where the viability of a wider peace process was tested and the IRA enabled to signal to the British authorities a willingness to bring its long war to a controlled and phased end. In the process, both sides began to build the trust that would be needed if the IRA was to declare a much wider cease-fire.

  The IRA’s campaign in the rest of Northern Ireland would last for another four years, but in Derry the end came much quicker. Nobody could know it at the time, but the five British soldiers who perished in the Coshquin explosion were the last military personnel to die at the hands of the Provisionals’ Derry Brigade. Although seven more people were killed as a result of republican violence
in the city before the IRA called its August 1994 cease-fire, only two, both RUC officers, were members of the security forces. Once ranked as the second or third most active brigade in Northern Ireland, the IRA in Derry soon became one of the quietest in the whole organization.

  The mechanism that achieved this was modeled on Cold War superpower diplomacy of the sort that for so long had prevented an outbreak of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ultimately it led to both sides’ reducing and scrapping much of their arsenals of nuclear warheads. Known by the acronym GRIT (Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction), the strategy was devised when President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev were in office and it was employed by them a total of sixteen times in the early 1960s.3 Instead of demanding concessions from each other, GRIT involved one party to a conflict making a unilateral and publicly verifiable concession to the other. The prior agreement of the other party was not necessary for this to happen, and the strategy could be employed in the absence of formal talks or contact. The effect nonetheless would be to invite the other party to do the same. Failure to reciprocate meant that the erring party shouldered the blame for lack of progress, while agreement accelerated the process. GRIT was a safe way of pressurizing each party to de-escalate. Ideally the strategy would be progressive, as one academic expert explained: “With each exchange of concessions, trust grows and tension is reduced.”4