One Man's Terrorist Read online

  Costello’s main contribution to the IRSP had he lived would have been his commitment to build it up as a credible force alongside the INLA, even though he rejected McAliskey’s call for political control over the military wing. The journalists Derek Dunne and Gene Kerrigan found that senior officers in the Irish police force ‘sincerely regretted’ Costello’s loss, as they ‘recognized that he was fundamentally political’ and feared that without his leadership, the INLA would simply become ‘a minor gun-happy outfit’.90 That was precisely what happened in the 1980s. Brendan Hughes, one of the most senior Provos in Belfast, had considered switching to the IRSP’s cage in Long Kesh before Gerry Adams talked him out of it.91 Future defectors tended to be loose cannons that the larger group wanted rid of.

  Soon after Costello’s death, Ronnie Bunting took over as the INLA’s chief of staff. A nervous, jittery man with much to be nervous about, Bunting was a particular hate figure for loyalist paramilitaries and the RUC because of his Protestant background. Under his leadership, the INLA carried out its most successful operation in March 1979 by assassinating the Conservative politician Airey Neave in the grounds of Westminster. Bunting was granted little time to savour the triumph: in October 1980, gunmen broke into the INLA leader’s home in West Belfast and shot him dead. Bunting’s widow Suzanne, who survived the attack, was adamant that his killers belonged to the SAS. There was a brief tussle over the funeral arrangements between Bunting’s comrades and his distraught father, Ian Paisley’s one-time associate, who insisted on a low-key family service. Eight members of the IRSP joined a handful of close relatives to see Bunting laid to rest in an Anglican cemetery that contained the graves of several United Irishmen.92 In his absence, the INLA began a downwards spiral into chaos.

  For all practical purposes, the Provisionals now had the field to themselves. The Officials were on a path towards complete marginalization, and there was no reason to fear that the IRSP and its military wing would displace them as the spearhead of resistance to British rule. Smaller groups might nibble around the edges of their base, but that was as far as the challenge went. However, the Provos had little time for self-satisfaction. Their capacity to fight on now depended on their willingness to borrow ideas from vanquished rivals. The left-republican project first devised by men like Cathal Goulding and Seamus Costello acquired a fresh lease of life as a new Provisional leadership sought its way out of a seemingly terminal crisis.

  7

  The Broad Front

  ‘A growing Marxist feeling’

  At Bodenstown in 1977, Jimmy Drumm delivered a speech on behalf of the Provisional leadership that curtly dismissed the hopes animating their campaign for the past six years: ‘A successful war of liberation cannot be fought exclusively on the backs of the oppressed in the Six Counties, nor around the physical presence of the British Army. Hatred and resentment of the Army cannot sustain the war, and the isolation of socialist republicans around the armed struggle is dangerous.’ Drumm insisted on the need for ‘a positive tie-in with the mass of the Irish people who have little or no idea of the suffering in the North’ if British rule was to be ended: ‘The forging of strong links between the Republican movement and the workers of Ireland and radical trade unionists will create an irrepressible mass movement and will ensure mass support for the continuing armed struggle in the North.’1

  The ideas expressed in Drumm’s speech came from Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison, two of the central figures in a group of younger northern Provos poised to take control of the movement. Adams set out his stall from Long Kesh in a series of articles under the pen name ‘Brownie’, when the Provisionals were at their lowest ebb since the Troubles began.

  The timing of the IRA’s return to war in 1976 could not have been worse, as the nationalist population had no real stomach for the resumption of armed struggle, even in republican strongholds. This war fatigue found an opportunity to express itself soon after the Provos resumed their campaign. British soldiers in Belfast opened fire on a car driven by an IRA member called Danny Lennon, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. Lennon was killed, along with three young children who were hit by the car. A spontaneous backlash against paramilitary violence mushroomed into the Peace People movement, whose demonstrations attracted crowds of up to 10,000.

  IRA supporters attacked the Peace People as stooges of the British, and they certainly received support from long-standing republican adversaries in the media and the Catholic Church. But as People’s Democracy pointed out, the protests also attracted many working-class Catholics from what had been the movement’s core constituency: ‘For everyone who marched, there were more who couldn’t stomach the hymn-singing, anti-IRA histrionics but who sympathized with the peace campaign. And many of them were the civil rights or anti-internment marchers of other days.’2

  It would be extremely difficult for the Provos to sustain a war in the face of such attitudes. Adams urged republicans to draw the right lessons from the demonstrations of 1976: ‘The peace campaign should remind us all that people are tired and that they desire peace. It is self-defeating, stupid and counter-productive to attack these people.’3 The armed struggle would have to continue, he insisted, but in a way that was ‘controlled and disciplined’: ‘Republicans must ensure that our cause and our methods remain within the bounds of our consciences.’4

  Already tainted by feuds and sectarian killings, the IRA now came under intense pressure from the security forces after the breakdown of the truce. The RUC routinely took Provo suspects to its interrogation centre at Castlereagh and coerced them into signing confessions, which non-jury Diplock courts then accepted as sufficient grounds for conviction. Such methods eventually became a source of embarrassment for politicians in London, but in the short term they were highly effective, delivering the benefits of internment with none of the political costs.5

  The British authorities demolished the ‘cages’ at Long Kesh to make way for a new prison, the Maze, whose inmates were to receive the same treatment as those convicted of violent offences in the rest of the UK. Laid out in H-shaped blocks and surrounded by a dense security cordon, this ultra-modern jail was designed to be escape-proof. To symbolize their loss of special-category status, newly convicted prisoners no longer had the right to civilian clothing. The first of those prisoners, Kieran Nugent, arrived in the H-Blocks in 1976 and refused to wear the uniform supplied. With no other garb available, Nugent wrapped himself in a blanket to keep warm. By the year’s end, there were more than forty ‘blanketmen’ in the Maze following his example.

  The Northern Ireland Office privately acknowledged that many republican prisoners were ‘not regarded as “criminal” by the communities from which they come’, and warned that this might give rise to problems down the line:

  Their organization and immediate friends and relatives are unlikely to become reconciled to society as long as there remains a substantial group whom they regard as ‘prisoners of war’. Any untoward event taking place in prison may therefore provoke limited violence outside the prison. Conversely the prisoners themselves, enjoying a measure of moral support from their own communities, are unlikely to settle down to serve their sentences quietly.6

  But this was a challenge that the British government expected to handle with comparative ease. Meanwhile, the security regime pushed the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment into the front-line of the struggle against the IRA. From London’s perspective, ‘Ulsterization’ had two obvious benefits. By granting the local police force a leading role, it drove home the message that republican violence was the product of a criminal conspiracy by terrorist ‘godfathers’ with no popular support. It also reduced the number of British soldiers being killed or injured by IRA attacks.

  Republicans were ill-equipped to mount a political challenge to Britain’s new offensive. People’s Democracy contrasted the mood of the Catholic ghettoes at the beginning of 1976 with the heyday of civil resistance: ‘The bulk of the minority population are apathetic if not host
ile. Let any organization, including Sinn Féin, call a demonstration now around some political demands and how many will turn up? Hardly any except their own members and a handful of dedicated activists.’7

  Adams and his comrades understood this all too well, and Drumm’s speech at Bodenstown was their attempt at a response. PD welcomed it as ‘a major development in Provisional thinking, which opens the way for intense and fruitful discussion within the anti-imperialist movement’. They had observed with keen interest a ‘complex and at times confused debate going on within the Provisionals’, which now emerged into public view: ‘A section of the movement, particularly in Belfast, has gradually but definitely moved away from militarism and from exclusive concentration on the Northern question.’8

  A new leadership team took shape around Adams that included young ex-prisoners such as Danny Morrison and Jim Gibney, with the northern Provo newspaper Republican News as its platform. In December 1977, the Irish police captured an IRA ‘staff report’ drafted by Adams and his associates which elaborated on their plans: ‘Sinn Féin should be radicalized (under Army direction) and should agitate about social and economic issues which attack the welfare of the people. SF should be directed to infiltrate other organizations to win support for, and sympathy to, the movement.’9 At Bodenstown in 1978, Sinn Féin’s Johnny Johnson took another step down the path opened up by Jimmy Drumm the previous year: ‘We promise the economically deprived, the poor and the oppressed our wholehearted support. We are not in this to exchange one set of capitalist rulers for another.’10 An observer from the British embassy noted a ‘growing Marxist feeling’ among the delegates at Sinn Féin’s 1978 Ard Fheis – ‘some of them even addressed each other as comrade!’ – and a palpable desire to strengthen the movement’s political interventions.11

  At the beginning of 1979, the Dublin-based An Phoblacht and Republican News merged with Morrison as editor, symbolizing a shift in the movement’s centre of gravity. Morrison recruited several contributors from the left-wing scene, including PD’s John McGuffin and the cartoonist Brian Moore (‘Cormac’), and turned the paper into a lively mouthpiece for the Provos with a highly effective distribution system that by-passed commercial newsagents.12

  Later that year, it was the turn of Gerry Adams to deliver another left-republican homily at Wolfe Tone’s graveside. He pledged to oppose ‘all forms and all manifestations of imperialism and capitalism’, and urged his audience to build ‘an economic resistance movement, linking up Republicans with other sections of the working class’.13

  For some Provisionals, this language was all too reminiscent of their hated rivals, the Officials. The role of a British Trotskyist called Phil Shimeld, who contributed articles to Republican News under the pen name ‘Peter Dowling’, particularly angered the old guard. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and his allies compared Shimeld to Cathal Goulding’s adviser Roy Johnston and noted where that experiment had led.14 In a bid to pre-empt such criticism, an early edition of Morrison’s new paper insisted that coverage of working-class struggles ‘doesn’t mean we are going “sticky”’.15 (The Officials had become known as ‘Stickies’ or ‘Sticks’ in the early 70s, after selling adhesive Easter lilies to mark the 1916 Rising.)

  But there was another strand of Irish Marxism that Adams and his comrades found much more attractive. Jim Gibney in particular paid close attention to the arguments made by People’s Democracy about the limits of republican militarism and the need for class politics.16 Michael Farrell was already a well-respected figure in republican circles, and his book The Orange State became a touchstone for opponents of British rule when it appeared in 1976. Based on extensive historical research, Farrell’s work set out the case for British withdrawal with a polemical force that no republican pamphleteer could match. The Provos hailed it as a vindication of their cause: when a second edition came out in 1980, Sinn Féin’s Richard McAuley described it as ‘a book not to be missed’.17

  Eamonn McCann had always been more sceptical of republicanism than Farrell. However, when McCann published a new version of his book War and an Irish Town in 1980, he dedicated the text to republican prisoners and rounded it off with an emphatic declaration of solidarity: ‘There is no such thing as an anti-imperialist who does not support the Provos and no such thing as a socialist who is not anti-imperialist.’18 The transformation of the Provisionals had enthused McCann, and he quoted the speech delivered by Gerry Adams at Bodenstown approvingly, but added a note of caution about the new platform: ‘Given the structure and traditions of the Republican movement it would be damnably difficult to put into effect. It would mean making a fundamental break from the politics of the founding father – at whose graveside he was speaking.’19 Danny Morrison’s An Phoblacht gave the book a friendly review, describing it as a ‘welcome and stimulating’ contribution to the debate: ‘McCann’s criticism aims to be honest, comradely and constructive, rather than smug or divisive.’20

  The Long War

  Another intervention from Eamonn McCann was much less welcome to the new Provo leadership. Towards the end of 1979, Gerry Adams drafted a new programme to replace Éire Nua that was Marxist in everything but name. The document called for private farms to be nationalized, however small the holding might be. Many rural republicans who made a vital contribution to the movement, allowing it to use their land for arms dumps, safe houses and training camps, were horrified by the idea of replacing family plots with ‘custodial ownership’. Opponents of the new line seized the opportunity to push back. On the eve of a special conference in October 1979, McCann published a story in a Dublin tabloid based on information from a well-placed source, predicting a dramatic shift to the left. A furious backlash confronted Adams, who had no choice but to deny the reports.21

  In an attempt to defuse the row, Adams gave an interview to the magazine Hibernia that An Phoblacht reprinted, seeking to reassure the movement’s conservative supporters: ‘I know of no-one in Sinn Féin who is a Marxist or who would be influenced by Marxism.’22 The same edition of the paper carried statements from both wings of the movement denying that it had embraced Marxist ideology.

  Several historians of republicanism have taken these statements as proof that the left turn initiated by Adams was a sham, or at most a weapon in his battle against the old guard.23 But the political context in which they were made suggests a more complex picture. Adams was unquestionably bending the truth with his claim that Marxism had no influence in the movement. One of his main concerns was to guard against another ‘Red Scare’: ‘In the past this sort of ploy has succeeded and many very good Irish radicals and organizations have been swamped by a combination of government, grassroots and Church attacks.’24

  In another interview, Danny Morrison tried to sidestep Catholic anti-communism by drawing attention to the role of priests in Latin American guerrilla movements: ‘There’s no reason why the revolutionary aspects of Marxism should not be taken up by Catholics.’ The Provisionals stressed the indigenous roots of their socialism – ‘a radical native brand taken from Tone, Lalor, Connolly and Mellows’ – as a way of deflecting conservative attacks.25

  In several important respects, the Provos were right to deny the parallels with Cathal Goulding’s movement drawn by their critics. When Goulding wanted to strengthen the IRA’s political thinking in the 1960s, he recruited intellectuals such as Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan from outside its ranks and gave them responsibility for drawing up a new programme. After Johnston and Coughlan parted company with the Officials, a new intellectual cohort, clustered around Eoghan Harris and the Industrial Department, performed much the same role in subsequent years. In contrast, the new Provo leadership kept figures like Michael Farrell and Eamonn McCann at arm’s length, drawing upon their work but never adopting their ideas wholesale. In time, they went on to produce an entire layer of capable, articulate politicians from within the ranks of the IRA.

  Another crucial divergence lay in their attitude towards the unionist population. Goulding�
��s supporters stressed the need to reach out to working-class Protestants, but the new Provisional leadership dismissed that out of hand and even saw their own movement’s Éire Nua programme as an unacceptable sop to loyalism. Journalist Ed Moloney suggested that the northern Provos led by Adams were ‘undeniably more sectarian than their southern counterparts’, and gave the following terse summary of their outlook: ‘The Northern state is irreformable and so are most northern Protestants.’26 One interview with a Provisional spokesman icily referred to ‘an element who call themselves Loyalists’, whose ‘traditional role’ had been to help perpetuate British rule: ‘These people play the role of a fifth column in Ireland. As such, they will be eliminated.’27

  A debate over armed struggle showed that the Provos were determined to keep their own counsel. People’s Democracy turned away from support for militarism after a split in the group’s ranks at the beginning of 1976: ‘Violent actions are largely irrelevant in the absence of a mass movement and detract from the building of such a movement. There was a tendency in our organization and in the left generally to avoid such criticism but elitist action without a mass movement is an act of despair and shows contempt for the masses.’28 For PD, it was essential to resurrect the tactics of the early 70s if the setbacks of recent times were to be reversed. Republican News dismissed this argument as the brainchild of ‘a whole mish-mash of left-wing groups and tired radical intellectuals, many of whom were mentally defeated by the Brits five or more years ago’. It rejected the idea that armed struggle had displaced mass action: ‘In fact the development of guerrilla warfare with popular support was the development of the struggle onto a higher level which a group like PD failed to match up to.’ Another article referred scornfully to ‘attacks from the revolutionary left on the war strategy of the oppressed Irish people’.29 If civil resistance was going to return to the political stage, it would have to find room alongside the IRA campaign.