A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  AS ALL THESE political developments were unfolding, the IRA’s campaign was falling to pieces. The special unit created by Northern Command, which had so successfully restarted the IRA’s campaign in the North with the bombing of Thiepval barracks, was rolled up by the RUC and its leader incarcerated within days of the Convention. It was clear from the pattern of arrests that the British security authorities were extremely well informed about its activities and had placed some of the unit members under surveillance long before arrests were made.

  Deprived of this cutting edge, the IRA leadership turned to the ordinary ASUs to deliver the goods. At the 1996 Convention, Brian Gillen, the Belfast commander, had complained about the September 1993 Army Council order banning commercial bombing. Despite that, the new Council reim-posed the restriction and ordered the ASUs to concentrate instead on security force targets, particularly British soldiers. As in the late 1980s, this was a case of setting the IRA an examination it could never hope to pass—as the Army Council must have known—and it failed miserably. As one bungled or in effective operation followed another and as more and more Volunteers were arrested, one RUC officer was prompted to describe the IRA’s efforts as “a pathetic, grubby little war.”2 Even the most loyal republican would have found it difficult to disagree.

  The IRA mounted dozens of attacks in the North during this period, but very few ever came near hitting their target. The IRA’s killing rate dropped significantly. By mid-1997, a year or so after the cease-fire had ended, the IRA had succeeded in killing just two soldiers and two civilians. When its Lurgan, County Armagh unit killed two RUC men in June 1994, there was public outrage, and it was clear the attacks had embarrassed the Sinn Fein leadership, even though the unit was merely implementing Army Council strategy. The Clinton White House, in particular, made its anger personally known to Gerry Adams.

  The overreliance on the South Armagh battalions proved to be very costly. The knowledge that the big English bombs originated there made it imperative from the British viewpoint to score some major successes against the local IRA, if only to prove that South Armagh was not unassailable. The fact that IRA activity elsewhere in the North had considerably diminished freed British intelligence resources and gave the various agencies the space to accomplish the deed. Eventually undercover soldiers and police swooped on a farm near Crossmaglen in April 1994, arrested seven men, and captured the Second Battalion’s only Barrett Light 50 rifle. It was the worst blow against the South Armagh IRA that most in the area could remember, and the message was clear. If the British could hit the South Armagh IRA, then the war was as good as over.

  There was another, even more compelling reason for the IRA’s failures. By 1996 the organization was broke and owed money everywhere, not least to Slab Murphy, who had lent the IRA some of the proceeds from his cross-Border business operations and had not been repaid. The IRA habitually lived in a state of penury, as Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna had reminded the Convention. The IRA managed to stay just about afloat, he said, but never got ahead. Financial shortages had worsened after the loss of the Eksund, when the angry Libyans had canceled the promised cash payments.

  Gerry Adams’s trips to the United States had briefly raised Army Council hopes that its fortunes could be improved. The prospect of thousands of dollars flowing into the IRA’s coffers was indeed was one of the reasons the Council had so readily authorized his trip. But Adams, aided by Howell, had set up a new fund-raising group to supplant the long-standing American structures, centered on Noraid. Called Friends of Sinn Fein (FoSF) and based in Washington and Manhattan, New York, it was initially funded by the billionaire businessman Charles “Chuck” Feeney. FoSF was ultimately to raise vast amounts of money, primarily through $1,000-a-plate dinners in ritzy New York hotels where figures like Adams would speak, mingle, and network with figures from corporate Irish-America. Despite all this newfound wealth, the IRA’s hoped-for millions of dollars never materialized. Unknown to the Army Council, FoSF agreed to a deal with the Department of Justice in Washington, which meant that every dollar raised and spent in Ireland had to be accounted for and the books audited by an accountant nominated by the federal government. The officer board of FoSF was furthermore obliged to sign an undertaking that the funds would not be used “for any unlawful purpose,” which effectively meant that none of the money could legally be allowed to go to the IRA.3

  When some officials from FoSF subsequently traveled to Ireland to meet Sinn Fein’s finance officers, Adams banned the IRA’s director of finance, John Deery, from attending the meeting, and when tackled by members of the Council, he blamed others for negotiating a poor deal with the U.S. government. The IRA would not get Sinn Fein’s cash, by either the front door or the back.

  To add to the IRA’s fund-raising problems, Noraid had been considerably run down by 1996 and was in a very divided state, the result of internal disputes over the direction taken by the peace process, especially in the influential Bronx and Brooklyn chapters of the New York division. Many rank-and-file Noraid members were resentful of FoSF and saw its formation as a sign that the leadership in Ireland had decided to discard them after all their years of faithful service in favor of wealthier and more respectable friends. By 1996 traditional Irish-America was contributing negligible amounts to the IRA’s coffers. In the past these contacts had enabled the IRA quite easily to raise up to $50,000–$100,000 in emergencies—for example, to fund a special operation—but not any more. One way or another the IRA’s ability to run an effective military campaign in 1996 and 1997 was severely hampered by its poverty.

  POLITICAL EVENTS accelerated after the changes of government in Dublin and London. The British made a crucial move in mid-June 1997, when officials gave the Provisional negotiators, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, an aide-mémoire setting out the terms for Sinn Fein’s entry to inter-party talks. The document outlined five elements to the deal. First, the IRA would have to call an unequivocal cease-fire and hold to it for at least six weeks. Second, Sinn Fein delegates to the talks would have to make clear their commitment to the Mitchell principles. Third, the British would agree to a deadline for the conclusion of the talks, and they suggested May 1998. Fourth, the republicans would have to agree that decommissioning would happen along the lines suggested by Senator George Mitchell, although it would no longer be a precondition for participation in talks. And fifth, there would be confidence-building measures on both sides. The British committed themselves to the principle of parity of esteem and equality in cultural and economic matters and to respect for human rights. They recognized the sensitivity of the prisoner issue and made a commitment to develop a police service capable of securing widespread support. The republicans in turn should bring an end to punishment attacks. If all went according to plan the interparty talks would go into recess over the summer, as these matters were working themselves out, and in September resume with Sinn Fein present. They would then have eight months to hammer out a deal.

  Compared with the Conservatives, the New Labourites were bending over backward to return Sinn Fein and the IRA to the process, an indication, perhaps, that Tony Blair and his colleagues had a better understanding of what Adams and his colleagues were trying to do. After all, Blair had completed a somewhat similar journey himself after his election as Labour leader in 1994, cleansing the party of the last vestiges of its postwar socialism.

  Blair was also far more flexible on the question of IRA decommissioning, the issue that had broken the 1994 cease-fire. He and Ahern announced agreement in June on a proposal that would supposedly see political talks and decommissioning happening in parallel. As the politicians hammered out a wider deal, an international body, to be headed by the Canadian general John de Chastelain, would handle IRA and other paramilitary disarmament. The deal effectively meant that issue was put on the back burner in the hope that a political settlement might create more favorable circumstances for it to actually begin. All this indicated a greater British sensitivity to Adams’s inter
nal management needs.

  The British aide-mémoire did not mention British withdrawal or even indicate that the subject would be on the agenda for discussion once talks had started. It did, though, offer Adams and his colleagues the one element they needed to sustain the peace process and confound their critics—the prospect of speedy entry into negotiations, which they could characterize, internally, as encompassing such core isues as British withdrawal. The imperative for Adams was to get into talks quickly and to silence those who would claim that the process was about weakening the IRA with a lengthy, unproductive, and drawn-out cessation. Once Sinn Fein was in talks, as the peace camp must have known, it would be a different matter, for then the leaders could more easily control events and their own supporters.

  RANK-AND-FILE IRA attitudes, however, had not changed much since the Convention, and the evidence suggested that a majority was still strongly against a new cease-fire, not because the campaign was floundering but because the British terms did not measure up to the expectations nourished by a twenty-five-year war. In June the IRA’s most senior commanders met in Donegal to consider the aide-mémoire at an all-night meeting. Present was the Army Council, GHQ staff, and brigade, battalion, and ASU commanders, perhaps thirty of the cream of the IRA. Overwhelmingly the view from the meeting was against another sos, and the British aide-mémoire was rejected.

  The meeting has entered IRA mythology not just because of this decision but because it was thoroughly compromised. Undercover Gardai Special Branch officers had the meeting place under surveillance and photographed the delegates as they arrived and left. It was one of the worst security breaches in the Provisional’s history. “Everyone would have been identified, everyone had been docked,” said one source with knowledge of the meeting.4 Suspicion about the identity of the informer behind the betrayal helped to further sour internal relations.

  In Dublin, Adams found another Fianna Fail wheeler-dealer sitting in the taoiseach’s office. Forty-five-year-old Bertie Ahern had succeeded the unfortunate Albert Reynolds in early 1995 and headed a government in which the Progressive Democrats were a minority partner. He had perfect Fianna Fail credentials. He was born in working-class North Dublin, his mother came from a republican family in County Cork, while his father had fought with the IRA during the war of independence and then followed de Valera when he abandoned armed struggle for parliamentary methods. Long regarded as an ambitious and talented politician, he was promoted to the front bench by Charles Haughey, who became something of a mentor. With the benefit of his intimate vantage point, Haughey once said of Ahern that he was “the best, the most skilful, the most devious and the most cunning” of them all.

  Once Ahern took office, contact between the Provisionals and Irish civil servants intensified as they worked out their set of cease-fire terms, separate from the British. By the end of June the officials, led by Sean O hUiginn of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Paddy Teahon of the Justice Department, and Padraig O hUiginn of the taoiseach’s office, produced a 1,700-word document that was sent to the Army Council, setting out the Irish government’s view of what would happen after the IRA declared a new cease-fire.

  According to Irish government sources the terms were divided into two parts, those dealing with security matters and those concerning political issues. The security proposals were these:

  (i) Ten IRA prisoners would be released by Christmas 1997; the gradual early release of prisoners halted in February 1996 would be resumed; IRA prisoners serving forty-year sentences (for murdering Irish police officers) would be considered for Christmas parole.

  (ii) Emergency antiterrorist legislation would be reviewed.

  (iii) IRA prisoners would be moved from the old jail in Portlaoise to the new modern open jail at Castlerea, County Roscommon.

  (iv) The Irish government would aim for a political settlement that included the creation of a new policing service in Northern Ireland, which could enjoy cross-community support.

  (v) The Irish government would seek to achieve paramilitary decommissioning in the manner suggested by the Mitchell report and would expect the republicans to work in good faith to achieve that objective. (However the Ahern government also gave the IRA Army Council important guarantees about decommissioning, as one key Irish source recalled. “What we told them was that we realized that it could only happen with the co-operation of the IRA and as part of a phased political process,” he said. “I think the exact phrase we used went something like this: ‘IRA decommissioning would only happen in the context of a benign dynamic founded on political confidence and cannot be achieved on a peremptory basis.’”)5

  The Irish government, Ahern’s message continued, would oppose any effort to expel Sinn Fein from talks if any of the other participants made “a peremptory” demand for IRA disarmament. Only a breach of any of the six Mitchell principles would constitute a justified reason for such action, it added.

  The political terms were these:

  (i) The Irish government would take a leadership role and would give the peace process momentum.

  (ii) The aim of interparty talks would be to create a new political dispensation that would address and overcome previous political failures going back to the 1921 settlement. But the principle of consent would underlie any deal; the settlement would have to command the support of both political communities in the North.

  (iii) The Downing Street Declaration, the Mitchell principles, and the framework document would be the basis of the Irish government’s position in talks, but the aim would be to create new power-sharing government institutions, effective North-South bodies, and parity of esteem for both communities in cultural and economic matters.

  (iv) No constitutional option, including Irish unity and independence, would be excluded from the negotiations, and the Irish government would work for institutional and longer-term constitutional change in co-operation with the British.

  (v) The Irish government’s embassies in Washington and London would give the peace process the highest priority and remain in continuous contact with the White House, Congress, the U.S. business community, and Irish-America. Dublin would reopen the doors for Sinn Fein to establishment America, in other words.

  (vi) The taoiseach’s door would be open to Sinn Fein, there would be no question of refusing any joint meeting with Adams and Hume, and there could be continuous consultation between Sinn Fein and the Irish government during the coming negotiations if desired. Channels involving Adams’s key advisers and government officials could be reactivated.6

  The Irish government’s terms acknowledged the dilemma that the Adams leadership found itself in over decommissioning as a result of the constitutional changes forced through, against Adams’s wishes, at the 1996 Convention. It was almost as if Ahern and his advisers knew all about them. The change to the IRA constitution deprived Adams of all flexibility on the issue by insisting that only a Convention could authorize disarmament. The Executive dissidents had tied the Army Council’s hands completely. Even though they had failed to overthrow Adams, the legacy of their effort was still destructive. Ahern’s terms allowed for all this.

  The effect of the dissidents’ success on the decommissioning question was that if either the British or the unionists pushed the arms issue too hard, it would break the cease-fire and the Adams leadership. He and his supporters did attempt to argue that the Executive change was an addition to the 1986 constitution, not an amendment, and that they could, if they wished, still negotiate on IRA guns. But this was a controversial reading of the 1996 constitution, and the leadership could not be sure of the grassroots response if it went ahead on that basis. The way the Ahern government had formulated the guarantee on decommissioning cushioned the Army Council, however. It postponed the resolution of the problem of IRA guns until enough political progress had been made to give the Adams camp the room to restore the pre-1996 IRA constitution.

  In essence the British and Irish political terms were nothing more than a restatement of
Northern Ireland policy as it had evolved under the direction of both governments since the early 1970s. A number of characteristics defined this policy: a commitment to equality, acceptable security institutions, a power-sharing government involving nationalists and unionists, and the creation of North-South bodies, what the British had christened “the Irish dimension,” were prime among them. But the principle of consent was the ideological foundation stone of the two governments’ approach. There could be no constitutional change, no end to partition, unless a majority in Northern Ireland freely said so. These features, in varying proportions, had been the essential ingredients of virtually every political initiative since the fall of the Sunningdale agreement in 1974, and the political talks process that Sinn Fein was about to enter would be no different.

  With the British and Irish governments’ terms on the table and broadly acceptable to the Adams camp, the only question left to decide was the timing of the second cease-fire. The difficulty here was that events had conspired to produce the right conditions for a new IRA cease-fire just as the North was about to enter the worst phase of the summer Orange marching season.

  THE ORANGE marching season was a nightmare period in Northern Ireland’s already violence-crammed calendar. Thousands of Orange parades took place every summer, from Easter through the end of September, and each took more or less the same form. Columns of be-sashed and occasionally bowler-hatted Orangemen would march from their Orange hall to a church or a meeting place accompanied by flute-playing, drum-thumping bands, hold a prayer service, and then march back again and disperse. At one or two points in the season, the Twelfth of July being one, Orangemen from Belfast and from each of Northern Ireland’s six counties would congregate for larger parades, impressive and colorful occasions that celebrated Protestant culture and history. But most parades were small, local affairs, and most passed entirely without incident. In one or two places, however, trouble could be guaranteed, usually where demographic changes meant that the Orangemen’s route took them through Catholic areas. On these occasions tribal passions could easily be roused as Orangemen insisted on exercising their ancient rights, while Catholics resented what they saw as an attempt by the Orangemen to parade their supremacy.