One Man's Terrorist Read online

  The killing of the two soldiers provoked a torrent of hostile commentary on the republican movement and the communities that sustained it. Speaking at a republican rally in the same Milltown cemetery that Michael Stone had attacked weeks earlier, Martin McGuinness denounced this ‘hysterical welter of condemnation and abuse of the decent people of West Belfast’. McGuinness also lashed out at ‘so-called constitutional-nationalist politicians and pro-British bishops’ who had ‘given moral succour and advice to the British war machine’ with their polemics against the IRA.2 However, his party was now willing to break bread with those politicians in the hope of finding common ground.

  There had been some ideological fine-tuning to clear the way for Sinn Féin’s approach to the SDLP. In his 1986 book The Politics of Irish Freedom, Adams suggested that the pressures of electoral competition had ‘unnecessarily brought out some of the class differences between ourselves and the SDLP’, and expressed his hope for ‘some kind of general unity, in which both parties would agree to disagree on social and economic issues and maximize pressure on points of agreement’.3 Adams had already spoken of ‘the dangers of ultra-leftism’ at Sinn Féin’s 1983 Ard Fheis: ‘Republicans have a duty to beware of any tendencies which would narrow our demands and our base.’4 Now he returned to the theme, dismissing ‘the ultra-left view, which counterposes republicanism and socialism and which breaks up the unity of the national independence movement by putting forward “socialist” demands that have no possibility of being achieved until real independence is won’.5

  Adams quoted James Connolly’s biographer Desmond Greaves in defence of this ‘stageist’ line on the Irish revolution. It was ironic to find Greaves, whose protégés Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan An Phoblacht had once assailed as communist infiltrators, now being cited as an authority in republican circles.6 Sinn Féin leaders worried that an influx of new left-wing members from groups like People’s Democracy after the hunger strikes was alienating more conservative sections of their base. At Bodenstown in 1986, McGuinness tried to calm troubled waters: ‘Not every person who argues new positions is a trendy lefty, and not everyone who advocates traditional republicanism is a right-wing traditionalist.’7

  Debates about the stages theory of revolution were mainly of interest to the ideological cognoscenti, but when Sinn Féin delegates voted to adopt a pro-choice policy at the 1985 party conference, that was a very different matter. The Fine Gael politician Michael Noonan attacked Sinn Féin for adopting a stance that would ‘extend the definition of legitimate targets to unborn children’, and the SDLP made great play of the issue during election campaigns.8

  Adams warned Sinn Féin activists that the party’s line on abortion was an electoral liability:

  We need to avoid issues which are too local, partial or divisive. This is not to say that we should be anti-feminist. On the contrary, I am proud to say we are not. It is a question of using political judgement in taking up issues and never adopting positions which weaken the overall thrust of the movement towards national freedom.9

  Although Adams disclaimed any wish to overturn the current policy, his real attitude was perfectly clear, and the party soon ditched its pro-choice line. The dispute over Sinn Féin’s abortion policy laid down a marker. The party leadership welcomed members from a left-wing background who had no ‘republican taboos’ – as one Adams ally, Joe Austin, put it – and could be relied on to support its political innovations.10 But these new recruits would not be allowed to push the leadership further than it wanted to go. By establishing a clear hierarchy of objectives, with national independence taking priority over socialism or feminism in the movement’s strategy, Adams left himself with plenty of leeway as he began reaching out to conservative nationalists.

  In his first exchange of documents with John Hume’s party, Gerry Adams argued that the IRA campaign had been ‘beneficial to the political aspirations of the nationalist community’, not least by strengthening the SDLP’s position in talks. He emphasized that Sinn Féin was ‘totally opposed to a power-sharing Stormont assembly’, and accused the SDLP of encouraging the British government to believe that a settlement along those lines was within reach: ‘Our struggle and strategy has been to close down each option open to the British until they have no other option but to withdraw.’11 Opening the debate for his party, John Hume rejected Sinn Féin’s view that partition was the result of British interference. For Hume, a British withdrawal without prior unionist consent could only result in carnage: ‘Each section of the community would seize its own territory and we would have a Cyprus/Lebanon-style formula for permanent division and bloodshed.’12

  Conflicting ideas of what ‘self-determination’ entailed were the main stumbling block to agreement between the two parties. In its response to Hume, Sinn Féin insisted that ‘nationalists and democrats cannot concede a veto to unionists over Irish reunification.’ There was a subtle change of emphasis when discussing the arrangements that would have to be made after Britain announced it was going to withdraw from Northern Ireland: ‘There must be due provision for the rights of northern Protestants and every effort made to win their consent. By adopting such a policy the British would be joining the persuaders.’13 But overall, this was a restatement of long-held republican principles that could not be reconciled with Hume’s analysis of the conflict. When the discussions wrapped up without agreement, Adams issued a statement criticizing the SDLP for its claim that Britain was no longer opposed to Irish unity: ‘To confer neutrality on the British Government would be to confer neutrality on the Turkish Government whose military invasion has partitioned the island of Cyprus.’14 In a new book published soon after the talks, the Sinn Féin leader railed against ‘so-called constitutional nationalists’ who were ‘prepared to accept the legitimacy of the state so long as the section of the Catholic population whose interests they represent are incorporated into it’.15

  Adams still argued that the exercise had been ‘good for the morale of the hard-pressed nationalist community which would clearly support joint action on their behalf’.16 However, there seemed to be little chance of such unity materializing after John Hume launched a withering attack on the Provos at his party conference in November, branding them as ‘fascists’ who had ‘killed six times as many human beings as the British Army, thirty times as many as the RUC and 250 times as many as the UDR’.17 A few weeks later, Sinn Féin’s Tom Hartley and Martin McGuinness joined a small group of demonstrators at Burntollet for the twentieth anniversary of the People’s Democracy march. Bernadette McAliskey told the marchers they were ‘still on the road’ after many years of struggle, and insisted there could be no peace in Ireland ‘so long as this country is divided and partitioned and governed by the British’.18 Some of her audience must have wondered if they would be returning to Burntollet in another two decades to face the same depressing vista.

  Several hints at a change in strategy could be detected over the following year. In January 1989, Gerry Adams stressed that IRA violence was a tactical question, not a matter of principle: ‘It is up to those who don’t believe it’s legitimate to come up with alternatives.’ At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis later that month, he urged IRA Volunteers to be ‘careful and careful again’ in seeking to avoid civilian casualties, and Martin McGuinness announced that the IRA leadership had disbanded a unit in west Fermanagh for unethical behaviour.19

  As Ed Moloney pointed out soon afterwards, Adams and McGuinness were effectively setting the IRA a test it would never be able to meet: ‘If the Army, the UDR and the RUC with all their training, discipline and practice make “mistakes” – as they have consistently done down the years – how much more likely is it that the IRA will too?’ Thanks to ‘localized sectarianism, the brutalization of a twenty-year war, plain incompetence and the inability of any guerrilla organization to fight a civilian-friendly campaign while hurting its enemy’, the clean war sought by the Sinn Féin leadership was ‘probably undeliverable’.20

  Delegat
es at the 1989 Ard Fheis voted in favour of a motion calling for an ‘all-Ireland anti-imperialist mass movement’ that would bring together ‘the broadest range of social and political forces’. Gerry Adams described the proposal as a formal acknowledgement that Sinn Féin could not win on its own. The only speaker to oppose it directly was Donegal’s Johnnie White, a veteran activist who had been commander of the Derry Officials at the time of Bloody Sunday, when Martin McGuinness was his Provisional counterpart. White said that he had no problem with the idea of a broad front in principle, but didn’t like the subtext he discerned behind the motion: ‘Who are we trying to attract – members of the SDLP and Fianna Fáil?’21

  The results of Northern Ireland’s European election later that year drove home the urgency of a new venture from the Provos. In 1984, Danny Morrison had been hoping to supplant John Hume; this time, the SDLP leader simply crushed Morrison, winning almost three times as many votes. Combined with Sinn Féin’s dire performance in the South, this was clear evidence that the party’s rise had stalled.

  The waning fortunes of its allies on the British political scene compounded the malaise. In June 1989, a conference of Tony Benn’s Socialist Movement greeted Gerry Adams with a standing ovation.22 However, Neil Kinnock and his associates had long since defeated Benn’s attempt to transform the Labour Party. As one journalist observed, Kinnock saw engagement with Irish republicans ‘in the same context as support for gays, lesbians and black sections – precisely the kind of policies which he perceives as major vote-losers’.23

  The Bennite MP Jeremy Corbyn infuriated his leader by inviting Adams to speak at a fringe meeting in Brighton during the Labour Party conference, which was due to be held in the same hotel the IRA had bombed five years earlier. But Labour’s Northern Ireland spokesman Kevin McNamara spoke trenchantly against a motion calling for British withdrawal.24 Labour’s policy of ‘unity by consent’, reaffirmed by McNamara, placed it closer to the SDLP than to Sinn Féin.

  At every turn, doors appeared to be slamming shut. In August 1989, Adams chaired a public meeting in West Belfast to discuss the legacy of the civil rights protests. His close ally Jim Gibney drew up a gloomy balance sheet: ‘I don’t believe that the political philosophy that has emerged from the struggle over the last twenty years has the capacity any more to motivate people.’ If the republican movement didn’t find some way out of its current impasse, Gibney warned, ‘you actually run the risk of being defeated’.25

  Hume–Adams

  As the new decade began, Sinn Féin members took part in the launch of the Irish National Congress (INC). The trade unionist Matt Merrigan, who joined Bernadette McAliskey on the INC’s executive, described it as ‘an attempt to build a movement of the oppressed and deprived’.26 A few weeks later, speaking at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, the party’s chairman Séan MacManus rejected ‘the one-sided concept of a republican ceasefire’. But the steady trickle of criticism for IRA operations continued: Richard McAuley warned that the IRA ‘must realize it damages the national liberation struggle’.27 One notable absence from the conference was Danny Morrison, following his arrest a few weeks earlier at a house where the IRA was holding a police informer. Morrison subsequently received an eight-year prison sentence, transforming Sinn Féin’s leadership triumvirate into an Adams–McGuinness duopoly, just as the party was about to enter a crucial period in its evolution.28

  An important republican ally that appeared to be going from strength to strength had clearly inspired the INC’s choice of name. The 1990 Ard Fheis heard electrifying news that the apartheid regime in South Africa was planning to lift its ban on the African National Congress. Gerry Adams hailed the announcement, which would ‘give great comfort to those groups and organizations throughout the world struggling to achieve national self-determination’.29 Sinn Féin had always supported the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, whose chairman, the exiled ANC militant Kader Asmal, brushed aside an attempt by Garret FitzGerald to have the party excluded from its ranks.30 However, it was only after Asmal’s death in 2011 that the full extent of his ties with the republican movement came to light in a posthumous memoir. At Asmal’s request, Gerry Adams had arranged for ANC guerrillas to be trained by the IRA in the late 1970s, and IRA members subsequently carried out reconnaissance on the ANC’s behalf for one of its most successful operations, the bombing of the Sasol oil refinery near Johannesburg.31 Adams was in no position to boast about this enterprise in public, but his party could always be sure of a warm welcome from ANC leaders as they entered the corridors of power.

  South Africa offered an intriguing template for the Provos, with a guerrilla movement unable to secure outright victory entering a process that was to some extent fluid and indeterminate in order to achieve its goals by other means. They discreetly reopened a backchannel for communication with the British government that had been dormant since the hunger strikes.32 Thatcher’s Northern Ireland secretary Peter Brooke supplied food for thought with an interview acknowledging that the IRA could not be defeated militarily.33 This matched what the NIO was saying in private. An assessment of the IRA’s strengths and weaknesses from February 1990 suggested that it still had ‘a sufficient pool of “volunteers”, mainly, but not exclusively, drawn from the lower strata of the deprived urban Roman Catholic working class’, along with an adequate supply of ‘weapons, explosives and money’, to persist with its campaign. There was no prospect of a swift military victory: ‘It seems more likely that the key factor in the ending of terrorist violence in Northern Ireland will be an acceptance by the PIRA/Sinn Féin leadership (which may be forced upon them by the wider nationalist community) that such violence has shown itself to be futile.’34

  The secretary of state soon backtracked from one historical allusion that suggested a willingness to pull out of Northern Ireland altogether: ‘Let me remind you of the move towards independence in Cyprus, and a British minister stood up in the House of Commons and used the word “never” in a way which within two years there had been a retreat from that word.’35 Brooke insisted that he had been talking about the possibility of talks with Sinn Féin, not a British withdrawal. He followed this up with a major speech insisting that Britain had no ‘selfish strategic or economic interest’ in keeping hold of Northern Ireland. The British government sent the Provos an advance copy of the text.36 In public, Gerry Adams responded by urging Brooke to act over the heads of the unionists: ‘The argument that the consent of this national minority, elevated into a majority within an undemocratic, artificially created state, is necessary before any constitutional change can occur is a nonsense.’37

  Of course, there was one clear difference between the Provos and their ANC comrades. No serious observer could deny that the majority of South Africans supported the ANC, although the voting laws of the apartheid system prevented it from registering that support at the ballot box. In contrast, about one-third of the nationalist population in the North voted for Sinn Féin, and barely a sliver of the southern electorate supported the party.38 Speaking at Bodenstown in June 1992, Jim Gibney frankly acknowledged this shortcoming: ‘We know and accept that this is not 1921 and that at this stage we don’t represent a government-in-waiting. We’re not standing in the airport lounge waiting to be flown to Chequers or Lancaster House; we have no illusions of grandeur. Idealists we are, fools we are not.’39

  Gibney left the timeframe for Irish unity open-ended, suggesting that British withdrawal ‘must be preceded by a sustained period of peace and will arise out of negotiations’. There was no mention here of the demand for withdrawal to be completed in the lifetime of a British parliament. He asked if republicans were fated to remain ‘hostages to an immediate past because of all the pain, suffering and commitment; to past views expressed, trenchantly, which in time solidified into unyielding principles’.40 Those who understood Gibney’s role in the movement as an outrider for Gerry Adams immediately grasped the significance of his intervention.41 Sinn Féin also hinted at flexibility about deadlines an
d transitional arrangements in its document ‘Towards A Lasting Peace in Ireland’, which Gibney described as ‘another stage in the maturing process’ for republicans.42

  A reassessment of Sinn Féin’s attitude towards the unionist community had partly inspired this shift. There was a distinct softening of the movement’s rhetoric, with much emphasis on the need to win ‘the greatest possible consent’ to constitutional arrangements for a new Ireland (but no endorsement of the ‘consent principle’ as such). The Derry activist Mitchell McLoughlin criticized the lack of empathy for unionists in republican circles, and broke a taboo against criticism of the IRA’s campaign: ‘One objective reality which must be faced is that many IRA activities from the northern Protestant perspective are perceived to be sectarian.’43

  However, the main purpose of Sinn Féin’s revisionism was to build bridges with the SDLP and the Irish government. ‘Towards a Lasting Peace’ urged those political actors to ‘forcefully and continually represent the interests of the nationalist people’ on the international stage.44 Just a few years earlier, Gerry Adams had spoken of ‘driving a wedge between the leadership of Fianna Fáil and the SDLP on the one hand and their members and rank-and-file supporters on the other’, warning that ‘unless the most radical social forces are in the leadership of the independence struggle then inevitably it must fail or compromise’.45 But his party now played down the social fractures in the nationalist community as much as it could. Most importantly, the republican leadership indicated their willingness to end the IRA’s war – ‘an option of last resort’ – if there was a ‘consistent constitutional strategy to pursue a national democracy in Ireland’.46