A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  For the preceding two years a church parade of Orangemen in Portadown, County Armagh, had pitched much of the North into serious conflict, and 1997 looked as if it would be no different. The Orangemen’s route home to Portadown Orange headquarters from the picturesque Church of Ireland at Drumcree took them through a Catholic enclave around the Garvaghy Road. Population shifts meant that a once mixed area had become overwhelmingly nationalist, and for several years local residents had been campaigning to bar the Orangemen from their district. The British, under pressure from Dublin and the United States, had initially supported the residents but for two years running had buckled in the face of overwhelming Orange pressure.

  On one occasion, in July 1995, some ten thousand Orangemen and their supporters had laid siege at Drumcree, and running battles broke out between them and RUC riot squads. After two nights of trouble, and confrontations on the pretty hillsides around Drumcree that uncannily resembled scenes from a seventeenth-century battle, the Orangemen were allowed to make their way through the Catholic area. In July 1996 the siege lasted five days, and this time the masses of Orange supporters at Drumcree were supported by thousands more loyalists elsewhere in the North who brought transport links and the centers of many Protestant towns to a standstill. There were riots at Drumcree and in many Protestant areas of the North. Again the authorities relented, and the Orangemen were allowed to march but in circumstances that infuriated Catholics. They were forced through the Garvaghy Road by police riot squads that batoned and physically removed nationalist protesters. This triggered several days of widespread rioting in Catholic districts, during which a youth was crushed to death by a military vehicle in Derry.

  The 1997 Drumcree siege was shaping up for a repeat performance. The possibility that Protestants might once again bring Northern Ireland to a halt and that the IRA might be obliged to respond violently was right at the top of the list of problems facing the newly installed Labour secretary of state, Mo Mowlam. Her senior officials were advising her to bend once again to the Orange gale and to allow, as one of them put it, “Orange feet on the Garvaghy Road” that July. A British policy document, later leaked to the media, showed that as early as June 20, two weeks before the march was due to happen, Mowlam’s advice was to try to negotiate a peaceful “controlled [Orange] parade” on the Garvaghy Road as “the least worst option.”7 This involved Mowlam in something of a ruse. Elaborate negotiations between her and the Garvaghy residents group were arranged, with a view to agreeing a compromise with the Orangemen, but it seemed that she—or at least her officials—had already decided. It did not matter that much what the residents had to say to her.

  The third siege of Drumcree was due to begin on Sunday, July 6. Loyalists were threatening mayhem, Mowlam had secretly decided to give the Orangemen their way, and the disposition of the IRA in the face of all this was crucial. It was in these circumstances that four days before, on July 2, the Army Council met and by a vote of seven to nil voted secretly to renew the 1994 cease-fire and to accept British and Irish terms for Sinn Fein’s entry to inter-party talks. The decision was kept well hidden, even from rank-and-file IRA members, however, until July 19, seventeen days afterward and nearly a fortnight after the Drumcree parade had once again been forced and batoned through the Garvaghy Road.

  Whether the British knew anything of this decision can only be guessed at, but there can be little doubt that knowledge of the IRA leadership’s move could only have strengthened Mo Mowlam’s hand in dealing with Nationalist opposition to that year’s Orange protest. By renewing the cease-fire on July 2, the Army Council had, in effect, given Mowlam the go-ahead to push the Orange marchers through their own district. The IRA, it was saying, was not disposed to respond violently if that happened. And even if Mowlam knew nothing of the secret IRA decision, the effect was the same. As for the IRA’s volunteers, they were put on standby during the parade in case of trouble, little knowing that their leaders were unlikely to order them into action in any but the most exceptional circumstances.

  In the early hours of Sunday morning, July 6, a large force of British soldiers and policemen moved into the Garvaghy area to seal it off, and violent clashes with local Catholics left seventeen residents hospitalized, according to their spokesman, Breandan MacCionnaith. After daylight there was more violence as the nationalists were penned in a car park by a large force of policemen and soldiers. At one stage an open-air Mass was held in the car park in an almost grotesque display of victimhood. After the Orangemen had marched through the area and the security forces begun to withdraw, the crowd chanted after them, “No cease-fire!”—an ironic cry in the circumstances. There were riots in some nationalist areas, and in nearby Lurgan the IRA burned a train, but in Belfast members of the organization were on the streets restraining would-be rioters and ordering off-licenses to close in case drink inflamed angry crowds. Elsewhere, at the urging of IRA commanders, the response of republicans was deliberately low-key.

  THE ARMY COUNCIL’S decision set the stage for the next and last confrontation with the Executive dissidents, and once again it was over the issue of which of the two had the final say on the formulation of IRA policy.

  At the 1996 Convention the Executive had secured a promise from members of the Army Council that it would, as a body, consult more regularly and closely with other sections of the IRA, in particular with the Executive, GHQ, and OCs, over matters like a second cease-fire. But the promise was honored more in the breach than in the observance. Before the May 1997 British general election, the Army Council ordered a “tactical period of quiet” to help Sinn Fein’s chances, in effect declaring an unofficial if short cease-fire. But it had consulted no one else in the IRA about the move. The Executive complained about the absence of consultation, and the Army Council apologized, promising this would not happen again.

  Within two months the Army Council once more acted unilaterally, this time by declaring the second cease-fire. Not only were bodies like the Executive and GHQ staff not consulted about the decision; they were not informed of it until just before the public announcement, and that rankled deeply, bringing long-held resentments once more bubbling to the surface. This time there was no apology from the Army Council. The Adams camp insisted that the Council had given no such undertaking at the Convention and that it was obliged to consult the Executive only when the first four months of a cease-fire had ended and an extension was required.

  As things worked out, the only member of the Executive entitled to sit in on Army Council meetings, Micky McKevitt, had been out of circulation when the cease-fire decision had been taken, and so the Council had been able to keep the decision a closely guarded secret from all but its own members and members of the Adams think tank. It was not until two weeks later, on the eve of the public announcement, that the Executive found out what had happened. But this time Adams and his allies were better prepared to deal with their dissidents.

  After a special request from the Army Council chairman, Martin McGuinness, the full Council met the full Executive on July 16 to report the July 2 cease-fire decision and agree the impending public announcement. The Army Council had met three days before and ratified the cease-fire vote, and the decision would be made public within forty-eight hours or so. McGuinness told the Executive that the Army Council had been fully consulted and informed about the background and was now united. According to a detailed account of these encounters, he gave three reasons for the renewed sos. There was a new government in Britain, the Sinn Fein vote was rising, and the combined pressure of the Irish government and the Clinton White House had forced the British to set a specific date, September 15, for the start of talks and a deadline for their conclusion, May 1998. The sos, in other words, would be time-limited and could not be extended indefinitely.

  The decommissioning precondition had been dropped, he said, and went on to predict that as far as the Army Council was concerned there never would be actual decommissioning. In fact, he added, it was a good thing that th
e issue had been left unresolved, because this would justify a breakdown in the cease-fire later on. In the meantime Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna had been given authority to mount operations if necessary. The cease-fire would not be comprehensive and all-embracing, in other words. There would be enough leeway to calm anxious nerves in the rank and file.

  Gerry Adams was then questioned by the Executive and, according to this account, like McGuinness, he justified the new sos on tactical grounds. The new cease-fire would not be permanent, he suggested, and the IRA would eventually return to armed struggle if its terms were not met. The Mitchell report merely demanded that Sinn Fein consider parallel decommissioning, and so the party would consider it until the cows came home but would never come to an agreement. Sinn Fein’s involvement on this basis would ensure the collapse of the talks. The Army Council, Adams went on, wanted decommissioning to be left unresolved. Either the British would be broken on the issue and the unionists faced down, or the unionists would refuse to go into talks unless the IRA disarmed, and the process would collapse in circumstances in which the unionists and the British would be singled out for blame by constitutional Irish nationalism—Fianna Fail and the SDLP principally—and by the international community. Either way, taking a firm line against decommissioning would be to the IRA’s advantage.

  What was striking about the remarks made to the Executive by Adams and McGuinness was the extent to which both men still encouraged the view that the peace process was a just tactical ploy, designed to bring political advantage, but not intended to culminate in a political settlement of the sort that only a few months later, in April 1998, would be agreed. They similarly bolstered the view that the IRA would go back to war if its goal of achieving a promise of British withdrawal was not realized. Refusal to decommission would be the lever, Adams said, which would both cause the talks to collapse and get the IRA back to armed struggle in the most favorable of circumstances. Again actual events have demonstrated how unreliable these assurances were. Not only did Sinn Fein negotiate a deal in 1998 in which British withdrawal was never explicitly conceded or even mentioned, but in October 2001 the IRA began to destroy its caches of weapons and explosives in a bid to keep the deal from collapsing. Adams was right in one regard. The unionists did make an issue out of decommissioning, but it was not they who were faced down.

  Of the two surviving “soldiers” on the Army Council, only Slab Murphy spoke up, saying that he believed the sos was the right way to go. But privately he and McKenna were saying that they really were opposed to the move and had gone along with the new cease-fire in order only to preserve IRA unity.

  The discussion between the Army Council and the Executive got heated. The Army Council argued strongly that there really was no alternative; the IRA was having recruiting problems and needed something to boost membership and nothing boosted recruitment better than a cease-fire. Anyway, the Adams camp added, this was just a new phase of the struggle, and the IRA would eventually be back at war. Adams outlined the negotiating strategy. Sinn Fein would aim to maximize and strengthen the framework document and renegotiate the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which had partitioned Ireland and established British authority over Northern Ireland. If things went well, he said, there might be no need for armed struggle in four or five years time, but a Convention would decide that. If the Executive failed to back the Army Council, the Irish government would get to hear of it and see it as a vote of no confidence in his leadership, and that would weaken Sinn Fein’s bargaining leverage. Gerry Kelly assured the Executive that the talks were, as he put it, “shite” and would produce nothing.8 Brian Keenan, now completely in support of the Adams camp, said this was just a strategic decision and the Executive members should get their heads around it. Go through the tunnel, he urged.

  The Executive case, put mostly by McKevitt and Gillen, basically revolved around their lack of trust in the Adams camp and the fear that, having been debilitated once by a cease-fire, the IRA could only get weaker if it went into a second one. The IRA rank and file was also distrustful, they said, and would react badly to the decision. There was the possibility of major dissension, a fear that the talks would get nowhere and a conviction that the IRA was being pushed so far into a corner that it would have no alternative but to continue with a strategy that would lead to its demise.

  There were angry references to what the Executive clearly regarded as a bogus promise given to it by the Army Council chairman, Martin McGuinness. At the previous Executive meeting, in May, McGuinness had given a firm assurance that there would be no second cease-fire—the only people talking about a cease-fire, he had said, were members of the Executive— and this guarantee had been repeated at the June meeting of Army Council, GHQ staff, and OCs in Donegal. That made it twice since the 1996 Convention that McGuinness had given such a pledge, three times within nine months, if the Executive version was to be believed.

  Adams eventually called a halt to the discussion and suggested that they take up a motion expressing the Executive’s support for the Army Council decision. His motion failed to find a proposer or seconder, and it fell. A second proposal, to reconvene the Executive so that the whole matter could be discussed in the absence of the Army Council, was passed by eleven votes to one. The difference between the two votes measured the gulf that now separated the Army Council and the Executive. A meeting that had been testy and bad-tempered ended with McGuinness’s telling the Executive that the cease-fire decision would be made public at midnight on Friday, July 18. In fact it was not publicized until the Saturday afternoon. But no matter what the Executive might think about it, the cease-fire would go ahead.

  The second Executive meeting was held on July 18, with Martin McGuinness the sole representative of the Army Council present. It was a largely inconclusive event; no new decisions were made or previous ones reconsidered, but again there was a heated exchange between McGuinness and the Executive. Complaints were repeated. The first sos had lasted too long, training and the production of explosives had been for nothing, and the Army Council had not kept a promise to strengthen the Army during the period of the cease-fire. The whole struggle was going political; the IRA had no sense of direction at all and was being turned into what one Executive member complained was a “wooden spoon.” The Army Council had broken a promise to improve consultation with the Executive; the Volunteers were not happy. And so on.9

  McGuinness replied that after the joint Army Council–Executive meeting, he and Adams had held further talks in Dublin and secured a commitment from the taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, that if the unionists refused to join the talks, Dublin and London would continue negotiating without them, even if that meant they were talking only to the SDLP and Sinn Fein. That was an even stronger reason for supporting the sos, he said. The Executive, he added, now had only three options: to accept the cease-fire, defer a decision for four months, or say that they had no confidence in the Army Council and convene an extraordinary General Army Convention. The Army Council, he added, would happily facilitate a special Convention. That McGuinness made this offer indicated that this time the Adams camp believed it could win it. For the Executive dissidents, McGuinness’s confidence was an ominous sign. As the meeting broke up, McKevitt, Frank McGuinness, and the Executive chairman, Seamus McGrane from County Louth, decided that the ASUs should be canvassed for their views about the new cease-fire. They confidently expected these would be overwhelmingly hostile, but until the mood of the IRA was gauged there would be no quick decision. The Army Council would have to wait.

  WITH A SECOND CEASE-FIRE declared, there was a need for a new strategy to replace or at least augment TUAS. Not least of the reasons for this was that TUAS had been less than a spectacular success. The pan-nationalist alliance envisaged by TUAS combined with pressure from the Americans was supposed to have been strong enough to force the British to move in all sorts of directions, but the collapse of the 1994 cease-fire testified to the failure of this idea. And so the think tank came up with a
new strategy to replace it, according to informed IRA sources. The problem with the idea, known as the “integrated strategy,” was that no one could understand what it was supposed to mean or what it was supposed to achieve. Its critics were troubled by two features in particular. The “integrated strategy” set no goals, outlined no methods nor any timetable. There was nothing distinctive about it. The second feature—more disturbing to the IRA’s “soldiers”—was the absence of any military element. The “integrated strategy” sounded like a combination of politics and violence, but it was really all about politics. There was no role for the IRA, no place for armed struggle.

  Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell had, unwittingly or otherwise, created an ideological minefield that would eventually bring the long-simmering divisions in the IRA leadership into the open. At the request of the British and Irish governments, he had set out a number of key principles that would have to underlie paramilitary involvement in political talks, and he had included them in his report on decommissioning to the two governments in early 1996 (see appendix 6). They included a commitment to nonv-iolence and to the principle of decommissioning. The British and Irish governments had both insisted that if Sinn Fein wanted to attend the inter-party talks, it would have to sign up to the principles. Gerry Adams had readily agreed to Sinn Fein delegates’ signing, but that was not the problem. The difficulty was that some delegates, particularly the leadership figures, were also IRA members. Three of them, Adams, McGuinness, and Doherty, were Army Council members no less. On one reading of the Mitchell principles, an IRA Volunteer would be breaching the IRA constitution if he or she signed up to them and therefore would be liable for expulsion.