Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (57 page)

The UVF campaign in Mid-Ulster indisputably shattered Republican morale. In these years a small industry grew up in County Tyrone and in Belfast devoted to making Republican homes secure against attack. Heavy grille doors would be installed in homes to deter intruders, often placed at the bottom of the staircase so that when the family retired to bed at night they could lock themselves upstairs, hopefully out of harm’s way. The presence of such precautions was a sure sign that the house was a Republican one. In Tyrone the precautions could be even more elaborate. In one home visited by the author at the time there were a number of such doors downstairs preventing access from several directions, each one strengthened by heavy steel girders which could be lowered through holes in the floor of the master bedroom above last thing at night. Republicans lived in terror in such areas, fearful of strange cars driving past in the middle of the night and constantly on the outlook for a violent attack. Some moved home regularly. During one night-time visit made by the author to a Tyrone IRA member’s home, the host’s sleeping wife was having a nightmare upstairs. Her moans were clearly audible from the bottom of the staircase: ‘Please don’t shoot!’ The impact of all this was captured by another local Republican interviewed by the author in 2000: ‘As the killings grew, the demand grew to do something. People were afraid because it seemed the Loyalists had a free hand. People were afraid to be identified with Sinn Fein, not just the IRA. You could be shot for having the same name as a Republican or for being a Sinn Fein councillor. Meanwhile the IRA was doing nothing to protect people.’
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A key feature of the UVF campaign in Tyrone, and the wider Loyalist effort, is that the assault on Republicans was being paralleled
by the British Army in two ways. In Tyrone, ambushes set by the SAS became an accepted way of taking on the IRA. Starting with the ambush in Loughgall, which wiped out the cream of the East Tyrone Brigade in May 1987, through to February 1992, when an IRA unit was similarly ambushed near Coalisland, the SAS killed twenty IRA activists. British Military Intelligence also gave the Loyalists a helping hand. In 1987, a British Army outfit known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) recruited and placed an agent at the top of the UDA’s Intelligence Department in order to ensure that ‘proper targeting of Provisional IRA members [took] place prior to any shootings’.
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Brian Nelson worked for the FRU until 1990, when he was exposed during a British police inquiry into British military collusion with the UDA. Whether Nelson’s recruitment was just a coincidence and unconnected to the wider Loyalist strategy – or whether the UDA was not alone in being infiltrated in this way by the British and that a similar agent or agents had been placed inside the UVF – are among the great unknowns from the Troubles. But there can be little doubt that the combined effect of the Loyalist assault was to sharpen the general Republican appetite for ending the conflict and, in the key area of Tyrone, to ensure that the expected Republican opposition to the peace process there would be minimal.

Those in the UVF and the PUP including David Ervine who had the task of trying to unravel the mysteries of the emerging peace process in the late 1980s and early 1990s had two main problems. The first was that the process was a bit like an iceberg; only the tip was visible above the waves while the rest, the bulk of the ice, was hidden from public view. The second problem was that it was difficult to judge the bona fides of those involved. The Provos were sending out mixed signals; one day Gerry Adams would talk of peace and the next day the IRA would commit an outrageous act of violence to balance the scales. Then there was the British government. A long and often difficult history of dealing with various administrations in Britain had taught Unionists to distrust their overlords in London and always to suspect the worst. If the Provos were genuine about seeking peace would British self-interest ensure that it would happen on Nationalist terms and at the expense of Unionism? Some Unionists, Ian Paisley being the prime example, had made a career out of predicting precisely this sort of betrayal and he always had a receptive audience. The peace process, he maintained, was a Republican plot to destroy Ulster, a view largely echoed, at least initially, by his mainstream rivals in the Ulster Unionists. The irony about this phase of the Troubles was that it was the hard men of Loyalism, the UVF and UDA, who had spent years slaughtering Catholics and sending bombs south of the border who had the more open minds about the matter and who took the time and trouble to investigate whether or not the peace process really presented the threat assumed by Paisley and others.

The process had its origins in the 1981 hunger strikes. Although the protest was best remembered for the deaths of ten IRA and INLA prisoners and the hostility provoked between Nationalist Ireland
and the British prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, its significance lay in one of its unintended consequences. Thanks to the untimely death of Frank Maguire, the sitting Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone, the hunger strikers’ leader and former Maze O/C, Bobby Sands, was able to stand in the subsequent by-election and, to the delight of the Provos and the alarm of nearly everybody else, he won. By June, four prisoners had died and that month hunger strikers or their supporters stood in the Irish general election where they won two seats in the Dail. Local council elections in Northern Ireland meanwhile saw significant victories for candidates supporting the hunger strikers and then Owen Carron retained Bobby Sands’s seat, giving the SF leadership a real, live MP to tour around the country. After these successes, going fully political seemed the logical next step for Sinn Fein even though it marked a real fork in the road for the Provisional movement. After all, one of the breaking points with the Officials in 1969–70 was the then Republican leadership’s obsession with electoral politics to the exclusion of military methods. Elections equalled sell-out to the new Provisionals and it is against this yardstick that the U-turn of 1981–82 should be seen. The move was significant for another reason, the impact of which took several years to manifest publicly. Securing support at the hustings meant that the political leadership of Sinn Fein had been offered both an alternative to violence and the possibility of exercising real political influence and power in both parts of Ireland. But there was a downside for the IRA. As time wore on the contradictions between electoralism and violence grew, the reality that IRA violence often cost votes harder to deny. This brought closer the day when the Provo leadership would have to choose between one and the other.

In 1982, the new Northern Ireland secretary, James Prior, eager to leave a mark on British and Irish politics, launched an initiative aimed at creating a power-sharing government in Belfast. It was a cautious effort, based on the idea that powers could be transferred to local politicians slowly and gradually as trust between them grew. The first stage was the election of a new assembly to replace the old
and long-suspended Stormont parliament and it offered Sinn Fein its first outing under its own name. Sinn Fein’s performance stunned the political establishment. But winning 10 per cent of the vote and five seats in the Prior assembly was only one dividend. The other was that the SDLP, the moderate, constitutional and majority voice of Nationalism, was put under considerable threat. Some 40 per cent of Nationalists had plumped for Sinn Fein and the party’s potential to overtake the SDLP was a prospect that worried in particular the government in Dublin. It was at this point that the soon-to-be leader of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, began discussions, first with a Redemptorist priest based in West Belfast, Father Alex Reid, and subsequently with Cardinal O Fiaich and other Catholic clerics, aimed at creating a political alternative to the IRA’s armed struggle.

By 1986–87, in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the initiative was ready to be launched. Essentially the proposal said that in return for a place for Sinn Fein at the negotiating table, the convening of a conference involving all the parties, Unionist and non-Unionist, and a British assurance of non-interference or ‘neutrality’, then the IRA would declare a ceasefire that implicitly, if the conference reached a settlement, could become a permanent one. As a prelude to this, Sinn Fein proposed the creation of a pan-Nationalist alliance with the SDLP in the North and Fianna Fail in the Republic, which could pressurise Britain into convening the all Ireland conference and bring the IRA into ceasefire mode. Implicit in all this was that nothing would infringe the consent principle, that Irish unity could happen only with the consent of a majority of Northern Ireland’s population. It was there, unspoken and unacknowledged, at the heart of the process.

Through Father Reid, Gerry Adams, who was by now MP for West Belfast, contacted the Fianna Fail leader and soon to be reinstalled Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, and the new British Northern Ireland secretary, Tom King, to outline these ideas. In the case of Haughey, Father Reid ferried messages back and forth from Gerry Adams but when Adams sought direct, face-to-face contact, the first
stage in constructing pan-Nationalism in effect, Haughey baulked. His colourful history included allegations that as a government minister after the violence of August 1969 he had provided guns to the nascent Provisionals and was thus to blame for the rise of the IRA. Terrified that meetings with Adams would be leaked and his career destroyed, Haughey suggested instead that the SDLP leader, John Hume, should take his place. And so, in 1988, the SDLP and Sinn Fein leaders met to discuss and debate their respective analyses of the political situation. When the subsequent series of meetings involving party delegations ended that autumn, Hume and Adams continued to meet secretly until, by chance or otherwise, their dialogue became public in April 1993.

If the world of Northern Unionism was suspicious about this Nationalist liaison then the Irish and British governments were downright sceptical. Right from the start, and all the way through to the end of the process many years later, the Provos’ bona fides were a subject for debate and disagreement. One reason for this was that the IRA’s violence continued apace and actually was intensified during 1988. Gerry Adams’s words of peace were clashing with the reality on the ground. Tom King ended the dialogue with Father Reid when, in August 1987, the IRA was discovered reconnoitring his home in Somerset, in the West of England, presumably prior to an assassination attempt. The following year IRA violence soared, fuelled by hundreds of tonnes of recently imported modern weaponry supplied by Libya. Only when King was succeeded by Peter Brooke in 1989 did the process resume. If the British were doubtful, Haughey was worried. It was no accident that Haughey turned down Adams’s request for direct contact in the wake of the Enniskillen bomb, the November 1987 botched IRA attack on the UDR that instead killed eleven Protestant civilians in a crowd that had gathered for a Remembrance Day service. Antipathy to the IRA soared in the Republic, adding to Haughey’s nervousness.

There was one very good reason for this dissonance in the Provos. The IRA’s leadership, the Army Council, was unaware of
Adams’s discussions with Father Reid and Cardinal O Fiaich, much less the proposal they had constructed between them or the implied acceptance by Adams of the consent principle. But, in 1988, the Council did authorise peace negotiations, which would be based upon a British declaration of its intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland at some point in the future, even the far distant future. Traditional IRA policy said that if the British agreed to withdraw then they must do so without delay, in the lifetime of a British parliament, so that a successor administration could not renege. But in 1988, the IRA leadership agreed to modify this significantly and a secret decision was made to extend the period for withdrawal up to twenty or thirty years hence. Any consequent all-Ireland conference would, in the leadership’s view, be convened to determine the future shape of a united Ireland, albeit one that might not come into being until the second or third decade of the new millennium. What the conference was not supposed to do was to discuss the shape of a new Northern Ireland, an arrangement that could only copper-fasten partition; equally, in the IRA’s eyes, it could not hap pen unless Britain came up with the withdrawal pledge and a date by which British involvement in Irish affairs would finally cease.

As far as the Army Council was concerned, the talks between John Hume and Gerry Adams were supposed to be about drawing up a statement distilling all of this into an agreed statement – the so-called Hume–Adams Document – and then presenting it to the British and the Irish governments for their endorsement. Predictably, the talks stalled over the vital issue of a date for British withdrawal, with neither government at all inclined to go down a road that would be regarded as a victory for the IRA’s violence and a rejection of a principle that had underpinned government policy in Northern Ireland for decades. The date was never agreed and the two governments went ahead with their own statement, preserving the consent principle. The outcome of the inter-governmental dialogue was fully consistent with the secret proposals put together by Father Reid and Gerry Adams but utterly in conflict with traditional, and current, IRA policy. But it was the governmental version
that provided the basis for the rest of the peace process and ultimately the Good Friday Agreement. In doing so they were incorporating a blueprint agreed by the Sinn Fein president largely behind the backs of most in the IRA’s top echelons. Adams and those around him were playing a dangerous game for huge stakes and it complicated enormously the task of those, like David Ervine, the UVF and the PUP, who were trying to make sense of it all.

Although much of this was played out behind closed doors, enough seeped into the public domain to suggest strongly that something serious was stirring in the undergrowth, that the Provos seemed to be seeking an end to the conflict. For instance while the 1988 Hume–Adams contacts were accompanied by indignant denials from Adams and Martin McGuinness, the hardline Northern Commander of the IRA, that a ceasefire was on the table, a few weeks before, Adams had told a Dublin magazine, ‘There’s no military solution, none whatsoever. Military solutions by either of the two main protagonists [in the North] only mean more tragedies. There can only be a political solution …’
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While IRA violence continued, it was clear that its violence was becoming more of a liability and a burden, reflected not least in Sinn Fein’s increasingly stagnant and disappointing electoral performances. One IRA unit in Fermanagh had been disbanded for killing a former police reservist visiting his relatives in County Donegal, one of several sectarian killings along the border. There were other signs of a scaling down: the IRA stopped firing volleys at paramilitary funerals, the policy of retaliation for Loyalist killings was refined and leaders, including Gerry Adams, became more vocal in their criticism of IRA activity, especially civilian killings, which harmed Sinn Fein’s electoral prospects. Sinn Fein published a series of policy documents that all had ‘peace’ as a theme, in which elements of the Reid–Adams proposals figured prominently, such as pan-Nationalism or the all-Ireland conference. Sinn Fein councillors agreed to take an oath of office, abjuring the use of violence and both the party and the IRA began working the judicial system, notably in civil cases.

The task facing the Sinn Fein leadership was a tough one. They had to say and do what they could to convince the two governments they were ready to deliver peace on terms London and Dublin would find acceptable, while reassuring their grassroots and the IRA rank and file that they were not selling out. It all made reading the tea leaves extraordinarily difficult for the Loyalists, and when the British joined the game publicly an already complex and opaque story was further muddied. In an interview marking his first hundred days in office, Tom King’s successor, Peter Brooke, conceded that the IRA could not be militarily defeated and that in the event of a ceasefire the British government would need to be ‘imaginative and flexible’ in its response. Twelve months later, in November 1990, Brooke took the diplomacy a step further with a statement declaring that the British had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’ in staying in Northern Ireland. This went a long way to meet one of the Reid–Adams conditions, British ‘neutrality’, for a ceasefire cum settlement. Clearly, the effort was getting serious.

The semaphor traffic around Sinn Fein intensified from 1990 onwards both in public and in secret. Just before Peter Brooke’s neutrality speech, for example, the British intelligence agency MI5 re-opened the so-called ‘pipeline’ to the IRA, the secret conduit beween them that had been used fitfully from the first IRA ceasefire in 1972 onwards to send messages back and forth. The UVF and the PUP, along with their UDA partners in the CLMC, had by early 1992 created their own ‘pipeline’ to the two governments, to discover both how serious the peace overtures were and whether these threatened the Unionist position. The key moment for the UVF and PUP came in June 1992 when one of Gerry Adams’s closest confidants, a former IRA prisoner called Jim Gibney, gave the annual Bodenstown address. Bodenstown cemetery in County Kildare holds the grave of Wolfe Tone, one of the leaders of the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion and widely regarded as the founding father of modern Irish Republicanism. For many years the keynote speech at Bodenstown had been used by the IRA
leadership to enunciate military and political policy and 1992 was no exception.