A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  FIFTEEN

  Cease-Fire

  The Army Council made a secret decision in 1988 that was to have enormous consequences for the peace process. It abandoned the traditional IRA demand that if the British ever did withdraw from Ireland they must do so within the lifetime of a British parliament. Instead, it decreed that from that moment onward the IRA would be more flexible and could settle for a much longer time line for British disengagement. No new deadlines were set, but there was a consensus that if Britain was prepared to leave Northern Ireland and signaled this to the IRA, the process could take as long as fifteen or twenty years to be completed and the Army Council would be content.

  The decision was kept a tightly guarded secret, especially from the IRA rank and file, and for a very good reason. Had they known that this key, almost defining, policy had been diluted, most IRA Volunteers would have been alarmed or at the very least deeply unsettled. The demand for a speedy British withdrawal had been a Provisional policy since 1972 when, during the cease-fire of that year, Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofain told British ministers that he wanted their political and military withdrawal to be completed within two and a half years. Early IRA leaders took a tough line on this issue, partly because they did not trust the British to keep their word and partly because they feared that if the process of withdrawal was dragged out, loyalists would have enough time to sabotage it. Under the leadership of O Bradaigh and O Conaill, the Army Council realized how inflexible the demand was and instead called for “planned, phased and orderly” British disengagement, but Adams and the Young Turks of the IRA seized upon this as yet another sign of the old guard’s weakness. When he and his allies secured control of the Army Council, the official policy was toughened up. Britain, if Adams and his allies got their way, would have the lifetime of a parliament, a mere four to five years, to complete its departure from Ireland. The sharp contrast with the earlier inflexible and tough approach meant that opting instead, as the 1988 policy change indicated, for a lengthy and leisurely withdrawal would set the alarm bells ringing loudly at grassroots level, especially if the change was set beside other developments, such as the talks with the SDLP. For that reason the grassroots were simply not told about it.

  At the Army Council meeting that changed IRA policy, most of the talking was done by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. They argued, persuasively by all accounts, that the old policy was a handicap at a time when the IRA’s strategy was to forge an alliance with constitutional nationalists. If people like the SDLP leader John Hume or Fianna Fail’s Charles Haughey were to be won over to a joint strategy, the IRA’s adherence to such a rigid and unreasonable demand would be an obstacle. Not only that, but the British themselves would, if serious withdrawal talks ever started, regard the four- to five-year time line as simply undeliverable, and it would have to be softened anyway. And there was another argument. The unionists would be bound to resist any attempt by Britain to disengage from Northern Ireland, but that resistance was likely to be fiercer if the deadline was short. A protracted process could draw the sting out of the situation and give unionists enough time to get used to the new circumstances and provide republicans with the space within which to persuade them of the benefits of change. The Army Council, partly on the basis that the talks with the SDLP and the government in Dublin were only tactical, secretly endorsed the arguments.

  The change was accepted by the Army Council for two very important reasons, and in theory these made the change less significant than it had first appeared. Although Britain could take up to twenty years to quit the North, the Army Council nonetheless agreed—with Adams and McGuinness assenting—that the IRA would still not end its military campaign unless and until the British gave a public commitment that they were actually going to leave. The IRA would still bomb and shoot the British to the negotiating table, in other words. Nor could the time frame for withdrawal be left vague or open-ended. The British would have to specify a date by which their political and military presence would be ended. Those bottom lines remained IRA policy after 1988 despite the new policy, or so the Army Council believed.

  It is no exaggeration to say that the policy change made the peace process internally viable for the Adams leadership, because it created a framework for ambiguity without which the real peace process would have foundered. Thanks to the change, traditional, uncompromising republicans on the Army Council could look at the negotiations that made up the peace process and believe that they were entirely consistent with the long-held goal of forcing Britain to leave Northern Ireland. But the same policy was also perfectly compatible with the other, more secret process going on behind the backs of the Army Council and based on the secret redefinition of withdrawal that Adams and Reid had secured from the British in 1987, a withdrawal that was confined to a promise not to interfere politically in all-party talks and which would pave the way to a settlement based on the constitutional integrity of the Northern Ireland state. It is the genius of the Reid-Adams enterprise that from the outside the two scenarios looked the same and could coexist quite happily. They looked the same but in fact were very different. One was about getting the British out of Ireland; the other was about getting Sinn Fein into constitutional politics.

  This latter formulation was kept secret from the Army Council, for the very simple reason that it would have been rejected out of hand had it been placed in front of its members in that form. The Reid-Adams restatement offended two key principles that had underscored the IRA’s long war with the British. One was that the unionists did not have and could not have a veto on Irish unity. The principle of national self-determination in its customary form stated, as the document prepared by MacStiofain for the 1972 cease-fire talks put it, “that it is the people of Ireland acting as a unit that should decide the future of Ireland.”1 The fact that the principle had been breached in the 1921 Treaty was the reason for the IRA’s existence. The other principle stipulated that the British would have to make a public declaration of intent to withdraw within a specified period of time. The Army Council after 1988 was prepared to be more open-minded about how long that period could be but would not budge from the view that it must be specific and stated. To do otherwise would open the door to Britain’s backing out of the deal. The Reid-Adams formula explicitly accepted the principle of consent and, because of that, precluded any move by Britain to withdraw against the unionists’ wishes, no matter what the time frame.

  Not only was the Reid-Adams formula kept secret from the Army Council, but so too was the early diplomacy with Britain and the Haughey government. Senior figures were not told of Gerry Adams’s correspondence with Tom King or of Father Reid’s mediation with both King and his successor, Peter Brooke. The Army Council was never officially informed about the first meetings Reid had with the Fianna Fail leader on behalf of Adams, and Reid’s lengthy message to Haughey in May 1987 containing the secret offer of an IRA cease-fire was also kept hidden. It was not until 1988, when Adams told the council of an offer of talks with Fianna Fail and the SDLP, that the Army Council obtained as much as a glimpse of what had been happening.

  Even then the affair was treated casually. Adams told the council that the initiative for the approach had come not from him but from Haughey, who had used Father Reid, a figure he described as an old friend of Adams, to make the connection. At the start the talks were classified as merely exploratory and were considered so insignificant that Adams was obliged to give the Army Council only oral reports on what had taken place. Had the talks been seen as at all consequential, there would have been written reports, and very possibly a subcommittee would have been established to control the contacts. But there was none of that. Sinn Fein was authorized to send along representatives to the meetings, but the Army Council was somewhat blasé about the dialogue. Over the years it had received hundreds of requests to meet and talk to all sorts of people and had long since adopted an open attitude to such overtures. All requests for dialogue were granted, but only a very few produced any
thing of interest. The talks with the SDLP and Fianna Fail were put into that category.

  THE RESULT of all this was that there were really two peace processes running in the years leading up to the 1994 IRA cease-fire. One process was that which the Army Council believed was under way. Its aim was to secure a British commitment to withdraw from Northern Ireland, after which there could be negotiations about the time line within which that was to happen and the arrangements deemed necessary to satisfy the requirements of unionists. The other peace process was founded on a fundamental redefinition of British withdrawal, one that would allow Sinn Fein to accept the principle of consent and to negotiate a deal with unionists that fell short of what most republicans would traditionally regard as Irish unity. Both peace processes were able to shelter under the same rhetorical umbrella, but inevitably the conflict between them would from time to time burst to the surface. They were fundamentally and mutually inconsistent, and on occasion this problem became public, confusing those who were not privy to internal Provisional politics and Adams’s need for careful management.

  There was no shortage of examples of this. Cease-fire speculation, for example, reached fever pitch in the weeks and months following Peter Brooke’s 100-day interview, in which he made a guarded offer of talks with Sinn Fein in the event of an IRA cease-fire. Brooke, as he revealed to the author many years later, had been motivated by the secret contacts with Father Reid and was deliberately probing for a response from Adams. The media, understandably, smelled a story. A claim that the Army Council was considering a cease-fire was duly published in February 1991 in the Irish Press, whose editor Tim Pat Coogan had played a role in the Adams-Reid diplomacy. The speculation was not entirely ill-founded. Adams was working toward a cease-fire but his organization did not know it. All this alarmed the Sinn Fein leadership, and the party’s press officers worked feverishly to deny it. Typical was the briefing given to the author at the time. “There are no grounds,” insisted an IRA spokesperson, “for believing that the IRA is contemplating any kind of ceasefire or that there is a debate on the role of armed struggle… the next time there would be a cessation of hostilities would be when the Brits declared for withdrawal.”2 That was the official Army Council line, and it was echoed a few weeks later at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. In March, Sinn Fein held a private conference in West Belfast, and the media were allowed in for Gerry Adams’s opening remarks. Reports of a radical change in republican policy were “mischief-making,” he declared.

  The secret diplomacy with the British and Irish governments demanded, however, that from time to time Adams send an entirely conflicting signal, to reassure those with whom he was dealing that he was serious about the peace project. Within days of his angry dismissal of cease-fire speculation as “mischief-making,” Adams sat down in front of a British Channel Four television crew and, with his spoken words dubbed by an actor because of broadcasting restrictions, said the complete opposite. Interviewed by the Irish Times journalist Mary Holland, he was asked if the IRA would suspend its campaign in order to get talks with the British off the ground even if there was no public declaration of a cease-fire. Adams’s reply was unequivocal. Republicans, he said, “would not be found wanting” if faced with such a possibility. “I am saying that if talks such as you… outlined were on the cards that no intransigence or obstacles would be placed in the way of such talks…. [T]here is a need for people to be pragmatic….”3 It was as close as he could come without actually using the words that an IRA cease-fire was on the table for negotiation.

  The Channel Four interview, which was broadcast in April, caused an uproar in the IRA’s upper reaches. Adams had not cleared his remarks with the Army Council, and Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna was obliged to send the message out to the grassrooots that this was Adams playing word games. Nothing had been seriously meant, he told the rank and file. A few days later the Easter Rising commemorations were held, and a hard-line military message was relayed by the Army Council. The message was amplified by Adams, who told the crowds that the struggle would continue as long as there was a British presence in the North.

  UNDER THE ADAMS LEADERSHIP of the IRA, the word “cease-fire” had become so discredited that it was never used in republican exchanges except when assurances were needed that one would never happen again, at least not until the British had left Ireland. “Cease-fire” was associated with the leadership of O Bradaigh and O Conaill and the disastrous 1975 cessation when the IRA was brought to the brink of defeat. Not even at Christmastime, when the IRA active-service units took a few days’ break to spend the holiday with their families, was the word used. The festive cease-fire was always an unofficial, undeclared affair. No one called it a cease-fire, because to do so was regarded as a sign of weakness, something that called into question the leadership’s commitment to armed struggle.

  When Martin McGuinness spoke up at an Army Council meeting in the winter of 1990, and proposed that there be a three-day publicly declared cease-fire starting on December 24 and ending on December 26, it was therefore an event of major significance, the first crack in the iceberg and a signal whose significance would not be lost on the British or the Irish governments.

  McGuinness’s proposal caused consternation in the Army Council. Three members, Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna, Slab Murphy, and Joe Cahill, along with QMG Micky McKevitt, immediately denounced the proposal as unconstitutional. They claimed that the 1986 Army Convention had passed a motion saying that the next time there was a cease-fire, no matter how short or long, it would have to be approved by a special or extraordinary IRA Convention. McGuinness, they insisted, had no constitutional authority for the move. That was the signal for a major row. Adams insisted they were wrong. The 1986 Convention had passed no such motion, he insisted, and Pat Doherty was dispatched to unearth the minutes from the relevant documents dump. When these were retrieved, they showed that Adams appeared to be right, but the minutes were not the original handwritten notes taken at the meeting but the typed-up version prepared afterward. The row rumbled on amid muttered allegations that the record of the 1986 Convention had been doctored, while other delegates to the Convention were consulted about their memory of the event. In the face of the record produced by Doherty, however, most Army Council members relented, and the cease-fire went ahead, announced to the media in a way that generated even more speculation about the IRA’s intentions.

  The row over the Christmas cease-fire of 1990 demonstrated in compelling fashion that the bulk of the Army Council knew nothing about the secret Reid-Adams enterprise. Adams may well have confided in individual members of the Council, figures like McGuinness and Doherty in particular, but had it been formally aware of what was going on and had endorsed the strategy, there would have been no row that Christmas. The Council would immediately have seen the sense in sending just this type of message to Peter Brooke. After all, the Northern Ireland secretary had just satisfied a crucial demand of the Reid-Adams dipomacy with a public declaration in London of Britain’s neutrality in Ireland and its indifference as to the shape of final settlement. If ever there was a time for the IRA Army Council to send a message signaling flexibility, this was it. And if the Council had been aware of and agreed with the Adams peace strategy, it surely would have done so.

  That was not, however, how the Christmas 1990 cease-fire was justified internally. McGuinness’s main argument was that it would be a popular move with the nationalist public in the North and with Sinn Fein’s potential pan-nationalist allies in the South. In briefings to the press, by contrast, out of the earshot of the Army Council and deniable as always, a clear link to the peace process was made. The Belfast nationalist daily Irish News reported a republican source as saying that the cease-fire was “a temporary respite to demonstrate the willingness of the IRA to respond to any genuine appeal for peace.”4 The following month Gerry Adams told the author, “What the IRA has demonstrated is that when it has the will it can stop,” adding that he personally was prepared to try “for
the very, very big prize.” Both statements were clear hints that he meant the three-day cessation as a signal to the British.5 But two days later he was giving the Sinn Fein faithful at their annual Ard Fheis in Dublin the opposite message: “In recent months the print media, especially sections of the British print media, have carried stories of my alleged involvement in the preparation of ceasefire proposals for Oglaigh na hEireann,” he told them. “If the issue were not so serious, these fictitious accounts could be ignored. Indeed they might even be the source of some amusement.”6

  THE ROAD to the IRA cease-fire of 1994 was littered with paper, in particular policy documents prepared by the Sinn Fein leadership that slowly, carefully, and formally edged the Provisionals toward a position that Gerry Adams and his confidants had reached privately long before. One of the most important and revealingly ambiguous of these pieces of paper was the Sinn Fein policy document “Towards a Lasting Peace in Ireland,” published in mid-February 1992, only days after Albert Reynolds had succeeded Charles Haughey as taoiseach of Ireland and agreed to take up his peace torch. Hailed in most accounts of the peace process as a seminal stage in the IRA’s journey toward a cease-fire, “Towards a Lasting Peace” was constructed and worded in such a way that both versions of the peace process could shelter comfortably underneath its ample roof.

  The “soldiers” on the Army Council would have had no problems with the document when they read it. Much of it repeated traditional republican dogma, updated to accord with the pan-nationalism that now imbued public IRA policy. None of them could have argued, for instance, with the document’s call on the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland “within a specified period.”7 That was Army Council policy, after all.

  But buried in the paper’s text was a crucial concession. Unionists, it said, could not impede the right of the Irish people to “national self-determination,” but their consent would nevertheless be needed for the “constitutional, political and financial arrangements” in a united Ireland. In other words, the unionists could not stop the British from leaving Ireland, but they had a veto on what replaced them. Unnoticed by most observers, “Towards a Lasting Peace” had opened up an ideological can of worms. The document was conceding the unionists’ right to consent in some circumstances but not in others. The point was that the right to consent is absolute, and the document came close to acknowledging that, if only implicitly. Nevertheless, by introducing the concept into public Sinn Fein discourse, Adams and his colleagues had edged the organization toward a more explicit acceptance of the principle of consent per se, and that was a central plank in the Father Reid strategy.