Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (59 page)

The sixteen or so months between the April 1993 disclosure that John Hume and Gerry Adams had ‘resumed’ their meetings and the IRA ceasefire of August 1994, have to be among the most turbulent in recent Irish history. Again, some of the events were played out in public but much happened in secret; extraordinary acts of violence at times seemed to doom the peace process to failure but each time the process was dragged back from the edge.

As if to reassure its grassroots that there would be no sell-out, the IRA launched a bombing blitz in the spring of 1993 within days of the Hume–Adams meeting in Derry. A huge truck bomb in Bishopsgate in the City of London devastated the financial district while many of the targets in Northern Ireland seemed designed to provoke Loyalist anger; the Glengall Street headquarters of the Official Unionist Party was blitzed by a 1000-pound lorry bomb and the centres of the predominantly Protestant towns of Portadown, Newtownards and Magherafelt were badly shattered. As the British and Irish governments wrestled with the Hume–Adams dialogue, important gestures were made by Dublin to the Provos. Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds made a secret offer to lift the ban on Sinn Fein appearing on the Irish electronic media while the Irish
president, Mary Robinson, travelled to West Belfast to shake hands with Gerry Adams, albeit well out of the view of the TV cameras. In September, the IRA called an unofficial seven-day ceasefire to mark the presence of a delegation of influential Irish-Americans who were in Ireland on a peace-process fact-finding mission. The move was intended to impress the Americans and through them to recruit the Clinton White House to the Nationalist side of the peace debate. The Sinn Fein leadership had expanded the notion of pan-Nationalism to incorporate Irish America in the hope that the combined pressure would persuade the British to move positively.

Also in September, John Hume and Gerry Adams suspended their talks, saying that they had reached sufficient agreement to create the basis for progress and were forwarding a report on their deliberations to Dublin. In fact no such report existed; the ploy seemed calculated to add pressure on the governments to move in their direction. Their statement was the trigger for an upsurge in Loyalist violence. Over the next month or so attacks by the UVF, the UDA or the Red Hand Commando averaged one a day. Under pressure from their grassroots to retaliate, the IRA decided to strike at the leadership of the UDA. A bomb was placed inside a fish shop in the floor below the UDA’s headquarters, timed to explode as the Loyalist leadership was holding its weekly meeting. The IRA’s intelligence was faulty and so was the plan. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing one of the IRA team and nine Protestant shoppers, four of them women and two schoolgirls. The UDA leadership had not been meeting at the time. The Loyalists struck back and within a week had killed twelve Catholic civilians. The worst single incident was in Greysteel, County Derry, on Hallowe’en weekend, where the UDA machine-gunned customers in the Rising Sun Bar, killing six Catholics and one Protestant. As if to reinforce the impression that events were spiralling out of control, a consignment of weapons bound from Poland for the UVF was intercepted on a cargo ship in Teesport, England. Its cargo included nearly two tonnes of high explosives.

This was the background to the unveiling of the Downing Street Declaration (DSD) in mid-December, 1993. Stripped of a date for British withdrawal at the insistence of both British premier John Major and his Irish counterpart Albert Reynolds, the DSD was not what the IRA Army Council had been hoping for. Instead the document restated the principle of consent in terms that could have come straight out of Father Reid’s playbook and offered Sinn Fein a place at the conference table if the IRA ended its violence. Meanwhile the Irish government broadly hinted that it would alter its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland to reflect the need for consent, a significant concession to Unionists. The British were staying and Northern Ireland, that is the Unionist majority in effect, would be a separate unit in the exercise of Irish self-determination, just as Father Reid had envisaged and the UVF/PUP had demanded.
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Not surprisingly the IRA Army Council rejected the document but Adams persuaded his military colleagues to keep the judgement secret and to ask for ‘clarification’ of the document instead, a move that helped tie the IRA into a process that would lead eventually to the Good Friday Agreement and the fulfilment of the Reid–Adams blueprint. With the exception of Paisley’s DUP, mainstream Unionists reacted with equanimity to the Downing Street Declaration while the UVF said it did not feel threatened and would not support any ‘publicity stunt’ organised by Paisley.

In the wake of the DSD, Sinn Fein became the target for a stream of government-supplied ‘goodies’ designed to make retreat from the process by the IRA costly enough to give it pause for thought. The media ban on Sinn Fein in the South was lifted by Albert Reynolds in January 1994 and the next month Gerry Adams was granted a forty-eight-hour visa to visit New York, during which he was fêted as a media star cum statesman by Irish America. The British government’s anger at the move served only to strengthen Adams’s hand in his dealings with the Army Council. The violence continued apace in the background, with both Republicans and Loyalists killing freely. The former INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey was shot dead by unknown assailants; Loyalist attacks
on the SDLP intensified, as did the killing of Catholics and people associated with Republicanism, and in April members of the UVF’s sister organisation, the Red Hand Commando, brutally beat and shot dead a Protestant woman, Margaret Wright, who had wandered into an illegal drinking club where she was mistaken for a Catholic.

According to David Ervine, a Loyalist ceasefire was tentatively planned by the CLMC for July and the intention was twofold: first to pre-empt the IRA ceasefire if possible and second to ensure that the Loyalist groups were not left behind when the IRA cessation came. But then the Republican violence ramped up, followed closely by that of the Loyalists. In mid-June, an INLA gunman sprayed shots into a group of men standing near the PUP’s offices on the Shankill Road, killing the UVF’s Shankill Commander, Trevor King, and two other UVF men. The next day the UVF struck out wildly, killing one Catholic and two Protestants mistaken for Catholics. But worse was to follow twenty-four hours later when UVF gunmen sprayed customers in the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, County Down, as they were watching a World Cup football game between Ireland and Italy, killing six Catholics and wounding five more. On 10 July 1994, two days before the 12th, the IRA fired forty shots at the home in Magherafelt, County Derry, of DUP MP the Reverend William McCrea, two of whose relatives, Leslie Dallas and Derek Ferguson, had been shot dead by the IRA, which claimed both had been active in the Mid-Ulster UVF. The following day, 11 July, the IRA killed Ray Smallwood, a key UDA member of the CLMC’s peace team, and at the end of the month two South Belfast UDA men were also shot dead. Ervine was close by when Smallwood was shot and tried to help him, but to no effect. These killings, and that of Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, long suspected of colluding with Northern Loyalists against the IRA, were regarded by some as score settling by the IRA prior to their ceasefire. Smallwood had tried to kill Bernadette McAliskey and her husband Michael back in 1981, while the two UDA men had killed the wife of a South Belfast Sinn Fein councillor. But the UVF and the PUP
took a darker view, suspecting that the aim was to ensure that when the IRA called its ceasefire, Republicans would have sole possession of the mantle of peace.