Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (13 page)

Gerry Adams had talent-spotted Brendan Hughes, realising that he had great skills conceiving and planning operations. When Adams was made Commander of the Second Battalion, he persuaded Hughes to join him on the Battalion staff as his Operations Officer, and it was after this that the Second Battalion took the lead role in Belfast. Hughes didn’t want to leave D Company, but he did. And he came to regret the close ties he was to forge with Gerry Adams.

Without doubt, 1972 was the year of the Provos. Never again would the IRA be as strong at it was that year and never again would it come as near to achieving its military goal, forcing the British out of Northern Ireland. In late June the British and the IRA negotiated a ceasefire and in early July the British government and the IRA leadership met in London, a secret but nonetheless significant rerun of history and the first official contact between the two since 1921 when Michael Collins and Lloyd George met to agree the Treaty. It was an extra ordinary moment for the Provisional IRA. Their predecessors had spent the years since the civil war in the wasteland of Irish politics, defeated and increasingly marginalised by the governments in Dublin and Belfast, seemingly destined to be a quaint, occasionally troublesome but essentially irrelevant relic of a bygone era. Yet just two-and-a-half years after their birth the Provos had fought the British to the negotiating table. No wonder that, in Belfast, the IRA’s Volunteers relaxed their guard and partied in the Falls Road’s many bars, brandishing their weapons openly as grateful neighbours plied them with drink.

But the celebrations were premature. The 1972 ceasefire might well have been the high point of the Provisional IRA’s short life but it was also the bend in the road. Not long after their historic meeting in London, the IRA in Belfast would carry out one of the most notorious botched bombings of the Troubles on a day known as ‘Bloody Friday’, and that would mark the beginning, first of its political isolation and then of its military decline. This would also be the year of Adams, Bell and Hughes, the ‘Young Turks’ of the Belfast IRA who would first elbow aside the old guard in the city and then set their sights on capturing the IRA’s national leadership. For one of the trio, Gerry Adams, 1972 would be the year in which
he would establish his credentials as the Provisionals’ foremost strategist, in which capacity he would eventually take the IRA from war to peace, from isolation to seats in government. The other two, Bell and Hughes, would journey only part of the way with him before falling out with each other bitterly, like Michael Collins and Harry Boland had in the aftermath of the 1921 Treaty, in the way it always was with the IRA. But that year was also to be remembered for a darker chapter in the Provisional IRA’s history, the year when it began ‘disappearing’ people, individuals whose activities would bring embarrassment or shame to the IRA had the world known them or because their deaths would cause political difficulties. Brendan Hughes was a witness, and a participant, in it all.

Gerry Adams very nearly missed out on the 1972 ceasefire. More than that, if it hadn’t been for the solicitous concern of an IRA comrade and friend, it is possible that recent Irish history would almost certainly have charted a different course. Although it appears counter-intuitive to say the least, no one had striven harder to persuade the British to start interning IRA members than Adams, Bell and Hughes. The IRA in Belfast knew it was only a matter of time before the swoops would start and better that when they came in they did so on the IRA’s terms. The Unionist Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, was a big fan of the measure – he had helped implement it during the 1956–62 campaign when it had worked well – and his supporters were baying for it. But Gerry Adams and his allies knew that the Provisional IRA was more or less a blank page to British Intelligence. While the RUC Special Branch’s offices held numerous files on the old men of the 1940s and the Border Campaign, some of them inches thick, the Provisional IRA was full of young recruits whose existence and life stories were completely unknown. It would not be long, however, before that changed and so the Second Battalion in Belfast, commanded by Adams, with Hughes still in charge at that time of D Company and Bell still heading C Company, set out to force internment onto the agenda before the British could improve their knowledge of the IRA’s battle order. The escalation of
rioting, bombings and shootings worked and the pressure for internment from Faulkner and his angry supporters increased. In August 1971, the British swooped, but it was a political and security disaster. Many of those arrested had little or no connection to the IRA and some were simply political activists. The operation was also one-sided; Nationalists were targeted while the increasingly violent Loyalists were left alone. Internment outraged even moderate Nationalist opinion and the SDLP led a Catholic walk-out from public life that effectively doomed the Stormont system of government. And with their ranks swelled by new recruits eager to settle scores with the British, the IRA grew in strength and capability, spreading out of Belfast into Derry, Armagh and Tyrone.

The Belfast Commander of the IRA, Joe Cahill, disappeared down to Dublin after internment and Seamus Twomey, another veteran of the 1950s, took his place. Gerry Adams eventually joined his Brigade staff while Ivor Bell took over the Second Battalion. Adams didn’t last too long in his new job. On 14 March 1972, he was arrested and interned. Like most senior IRA figures of the day, Adams had gone on the run after internment was brought in and rarely slept more than one night in the same bed. He had married Colette McArdle, from a West Belfast Republican family, in July 1971 and without doubt his post-August 1971 lifestyle was hardly one that most typical newlyweds would wish to have. None the less, he arranged a house for Colette, now pregnant, in Harrogate Street in the Clonard district off the Falls Road where from time to time they could get together. During one overnight visit, British troops swooped, apprehended him and after he was positively identified he was interned, first on the
Maidstone
prison ship moored in Belfast docks and then in Long Kesh.

Adams would have remained in Long Kesh but for a sequence of events that began in Derry on Sunday, 30 January 1972, ‘Bloody Sunday’, when paratroopers opened fire during a civil rights march protesting against internment. Fourteen men and youths were killed that day and soon all Ireland was ablaze in anger. On the day of the funerals the British Embassy in Dublin was burned to the ground
and in the face of escalating fears that the Northern instability could infect the entire island, Whitehall suspended the Stormont parliament and imposed Direct Rule. The atmosphere changed noticeably in the Nationalist community almost immediately. A women’s peace movement surfaced in West Belfast and after Official IRA members kidnapped and killed nineteen-year-old William Best, a Derry Catholic who had joined one of the British Army’s Irish regiments and was visiting his family, there was a wave of public protests by Derry Catholics and the Official IRA called off its offensive war against the British. The pressure on the Provos to follow suit intensified and after some back and forth with the British that was facilitated by SDLP leaders John Hume and Paddy Devlin, the IRA agreed a ceasefire while the British, led by the new Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw, accepted a proposal to hold talks with the IRA leadership.

There were two conditions set by the IRA. One was the conferral of non-criminal status on their prisoners – the IRA called it POW status, the British preferred the phrase ‘special category’ – which the British conceded. The other was the release of Gerry Adams. It was a seminal moment in his life for, had he not been freed, Adams would have stayed in Long Kesh, possibly for another three years, and by the time he got out of jail not only would the IRA’s best years have been behind it, and an opportunity to make his name lost for ever, but it would be facing defeat. His big chance to lead the IRA in Belfast, and later in all of Ireland, would never have come, and it is possible that the peace process would never have happened, or that someone else would have led it. Brendan Hughes was not privy to the leadership’s deliberations before the ceasefire, although he remembered Ivor Bell ‘being totally arrogant, totally mischievous and planning to dress down’ for the meeting with Whitelaw. He also recalled that it was Bell who insisted that his friend Gerry Adams be released for the meeting with the British.

Thanks to Ivor Bell, Gerry Adams was released from Long Kesh in time to leave his mark on the ceasefire episode, and if Hughes would later criticise Bell for arranging Adams’s release it was because both men would in later years accuse Adams of betraying the cause they had all once fought for. Hughes’s parting of the ways would not come until the 1990s, after a long spell in jail, but the spat between Ivor Bell and Gerry Adams came much earlier. By 1983 Bell was IRA Chief of Staff and as keen as he had been in 1972 to intensify the armed struggle. But by this stage the Provos had embraced the ballot box along with the Armalite, and with such enthusiasm that Bell’s doubts and suspicions grew about where Adams was leading the movement. Briefly arrested on the word of an IRA ‘supergrass’ who later recanted, Bell lost his post as Chief of Staff but stayed on the Army Council from where he plotted Adams’s overthrow. The ploy failed and in 1984 Bell was charged with undermining the IRA leadership, an offence that technically carried the death penalty. Instead he was court-martialled and dismissed from the IRA. There was an additional punishment; he was declared
persona non grata
and former IRA colleagues were told to shun his company. It had been less than a dozen years since he had extricated Adams from the clutches of internment but to both men it must have seemed more like a lifetime.

The 1972 ceasefire began at midnight on 26 June. Ten days later an IRA delegation consisting of Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofain; his Adjutant Daithi O Connail; the Belfast Commander, Seamus Twomey; Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell and Martin McGuinness was flown by the Royal Air Force to London where in a flat in Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, they met the Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw; a junior minister, Paul Channon; a senior official from the Northern Ireland Office, Phillip Woodfield, and Frank Steele, an officer with the British Secret Service, MI6. Steele’s presence
marked the beginning of a long and tantalising interaction between IRA leaders and British Intelligence. The meeting achieved nothing in the way of bringing a settlement and peace closer. If afterwards the British declared themselves to have been disappointed by the IRA’s inflexibility, they were naive to have anticipated anything else. There was no movement from the IRA’s declared public position, nor any reason to expect it. The core demand, which MacStiofain read out to Whitelaw, was that Britain should declare its intention to withdraw from Northern Ireland by 1 January 1975, in just two-and-a-half years’ time, and that the guarantee to Unionists that constitutional change could come about only with the agreement of the people of Northern Ireland, the so-called Unionist veto, should be discarded. These were demands that a victorious general would put to a vanquished enemy, and while the British had certainly been battered by the IRA, they were far from beaten. From the British viewpoint, these were impossible demands. The meeting ended inconclusively; it was not even clear if there would be a second one.

On Sunday, 6 July, the ceasefire ended. A dispute with Loyalists in the Lenadoon district of West Belfast over housing Catholics in vacant Protestant homes was the immediate cause, although it could have one of a half-dozen other reasons. At an interface in Lenadoon called Horn Drive, a number of Protestant families had abandoned their homes because of nightly violence and a large number of Catholic families that had been intimidated out of housing estates in Rathcoole in North Belfast moved to occupy them. But a new Loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which had already forced one British Army climb-down on the Shankill Road, had threatened mayhem if this happened. Faced with a choice between taking on two powerful forces at the same time rather than the one they were already fighting, the British opted for the latter, as they had done at other critical points in Irish history. That Sunday afternoon, Seamus Twomey led a crowd of three thousand Catholics through Lenadoon along with a cavalcade of lorries piled high with furniture destined for
the abandoned homes. But the British Army had blocked the route to Horn Drive and soon fierce rioting broke out and, not long after, the IRA opened fire. Within an hour the violence had spread to Ballymurphy, where five local people were shot dead by British paratroopers. At 9 p.m. the IRA announced that the ceasefire had ended; it had lasted just over twelve days.

The conventional view then and ever since was that the ceasefire collapsed because the Belfast leadership wished it so. Not only was Whitelaw unwilling to discuss withdrawal but they suspected British trickery. Michael Collins had discovered in 1921 that nothing was worse for a guerrilla army than a ceasefire, an extended ceasefire especially so. The problem was not stopping the IRA; it was cranking it up into renewed action that was the hard part. Suspecting that the British knew this very well and would play for time and that the IRA in Belfast could force a more realistic response from the British by ratcheting up their violence, key Belfast Brigade figures took a hard line on the Lenadoon dispute. By contrast, the Dublin leaders, MacStiofain and O Connail, were thought to be keen to keep the truce alive in the hope that some political advantage could be extracted. Once again the views from Belfast and Dublin differed.

The British view of the IRA in Belfast, both at the time and later, chimed with this, except in the case of Gerry Adams. At a pre-truce get-together on the Derry–Donegal border held a few days after his release from Long Kesh, Adams and Daithi O Connail met two British officials, Phillip Woodfield of the Northern Ireland Office and Frank Steele of MI6, to discuss the arrangements for the ceasefire and the London meeting with Whitelaw. Woodfield wrote a report for Whitelaw, which was released in 2003, in which he made an assessment of the two IRA leaders: