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  The Unwinnable War

  Over the next few months, the pieces began falling into place for a second ceasefire. In May 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour Party trounced John Major’s Conservatives in the UK general election. Sinn Féin’s vote share in Northern Ireland rose from 10 to 16 per cent, with seats for Gerry Adams in West Belfast and Martin McGuinness in Mid-Ulster. A few weeks later, Fianna Fáil’s new leader, Bertie Ahern, returned his party to government in Dublin, while Sinn Féin won its first seat for a southern constituency since the Border Campaign. Blair and Ahern went on to provide continuity of leadership in the two states for the next decade. The new Taoiseach had criticized John Bruton during the election campaign for his handling of the peace process; Blair maintained a ‘bipartisan’ line in public while Major was still in power, but soon indicated that Sinn Féin could enter talks without decommissioning by the IRA.26

  A second ceasefire came into effect in July, and Sinn Féin signed up to a set of principles drafted by the US mediator George Mitchell, committing the party to ‘exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues’ and ‘total disarmament of all paramilitary organizations’ in the framework of an eventual settlement.27 Adams led a Sinn Féin delegation into talks soon afterwards. Paisley’s DUP withdrew in protest, but David Trimble kept his party in the mix, while refusing to engage directly with Sinn Féin.28

  Acceptance of the Mitchell Principles proved to be the final straw for Michael McKevitt, the IRA’s quarter-master general, who had spearheaded the challenge to Adams. After another Army Convention in October 1997 that strengthened the hand of the leadership, McKevitt and his supporters broke away to form a group known as the ‘Real IRA’.29 McKevitt’s new organization soon acquired a political shadow, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, that accused Sinn Féin of betraying republican principles. But the effect of his departure was to splinter the internal opposition to Sinn Féin’s new approach.

  Two small parties represented the loyalist paramilitaries at the talks: the UDA’s political mouthpiece, the Ulster Democratic Party, and the Progressive Unionist Party, aligned with the UVF. After the DUP’s exit, their presence alongside Trimble’s party satisfied the need for at least half of the Unionist electorate to be involved in the process. These groups proved to be more flexible than their bigger rivals on the terms of a peace settlement, so long as the Union remained in place. Infuriated by this accommodating stance, the UVF’s Mid-Ulster commander Billy Wright tried to lead his comrades back to war, setting up his own organization, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), after the UVF expelled him in 1996.30

  Wright’s death inside the Maze prison in December 1997 sparked off a round of sectarian killings by the LVF and its UDA allies, but the loyalist ceasefire ultimately held. The shooting of Wright was the main intervention by a largely inactive INLA while the talks were in progress, although some INLA activists worked with McKevitt’s Real IRA to carry out bomb attacks.31

  Tony Blair had scrapped Labour’s ‘unity by consent’ policy after becoming the party’s leader and removed its chief advocate, Kevin McNamara, from his position on the front bench. He used his first speech in Northern Ireland as prime minister to deliver a warm endorsement of the Union.32 Blair’s administration was no more willing to play the role of ‘persuader for unity’ than its predecessor had been. On the short-term question of decommissioning and Sinn Féin’s entry into talks, the new governments gave Gerry Adams exactly what he needed. However, the Heads of Agreement paper they published in January 1998 had a much weaker ‘all-Ireland’ element than the Framework Documents produced by Major and John Bruton in 1995.33 The republican leadership had lowered its sights and was prepared to accept cross-border institutions with substantial powers in lieu of a united Ireland; now, even that objective looked to be slipping away as the final stage of negotiations began.

  After a flurry of last-minute brinkmanship, the parties agreed on the text of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in April 1998.34 The Downing Street Declaration had already laid down the broad parameters for a deal, leaving various secondary elements to be haggled over. In simple terms, the SDLP got most of what it wanted over power-sharing arrangements, David Trimble got most of what he wanted over cross-border structures, and Sinn Féin got most of what it wanted over decommissioning and prisoner releases. The republican negotiating team ditched its opposition to a new regional assembly, and watched Trimble secure the hollowing out of a paper on North–South institutions.35 But they kept the timetable for the release of prisoners down to two years, and made sure there was no requirement for decommissioning in advance of Sinn Féin’s entry into government.

  Trimble seems to have expected Sinn Féin to leave before the talks were over, relieving him of the need to sell a package that would put republicans in a power-sharing administration.36 If so, he underestimated the party’s determination to remain inside the tent, even at the price of major ideological concessions. In order to secure his flank against internal opposition, Trimble extracted a letter from Tony Blair at the last minute, promising measures to exclude Sinn Féin from the regional government if decommissioning did not begin ‘straight away’.37 As the academic Padraig O’Malley pointed out, the text of the GFA itself did not impose any such obligation on Sinn Féin; that was what the party’s leadership had signed up to, not a bilateral commitment from Blair to the UUP.38 Ian Paisley geared up to oppose the Agreement in any case, accusing Trimble of selling out to the Provos.

  At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in May 1998, Gerry Adams was careful not to oversell the GFA, describing it as ‘another staging-post on the road to a peace settlement’ rather than a settlement in its own right: ‘British rule has not ended. Neither has partition. That is why our struggle continues.’39 Adams strengthened his case for a ‘Yes’ vote by welcoming the ‘Balcombe Street Gang’ onto the stage to receive a ten-minute standing ovation. The men, who had spent the last two decades in British jails after carrying out a series of bomb attacks in the 1970s, were on day release after their recent transfer to Portlaoise prison. Their presence reminded delegates that the Agreement would bring the IRA’s prisoners home and helped secure an overwhelming vote to endorse it, clearing the way for Sinn Féin to take its seats in a new Northern Ireland Assembly.40 Adams concluded his speech with a new tactical emphasis: ‘We go into this next phase of struggle armed only with whatever mandate we receive, armed only with our political ideas and our vision of the future.’41

  Nationalist support for the GFA was sky-high: the overwhelming majority of Northern Irish nationalists voted in favour, and there was a 95 per cent ‘Yes’ vote in a simultaneous plebiscite south of the border. But just 57 per cent of unionists endorsed the deal.42 Most unionists reacted with horror to the performance staged by the Sinn Féin leadership in Dublin, which weakened David Trimble’s position in the referendum campaign. Hard as it might be for their opponents to accept, the republican movement needed something to sweeten the pill after signing up to a political framework it had rejected out of hand for decades. The federalism of Éire Nua and the abstentionist policy never mattered as much to the northern Provos grouped around Gerry Adams as they did to their estranged comrade Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. But a firm belief that the state in Northern Ireland could never be reformed was absolutely central to their ideology. Now they would be haggling over the extent of such reforms for an indefinite period.

  In total, the IRA accounted for nearly half of those killed between 1966 and 2001: over 1,750 people. Just over one in two of the organization’s victims fitted its own definition of legitimate targets (soldiers, police and prison officers, or loyalist paramilitaries).43 By the standards that the IRA set for itself, its war ended in failure.

  That outcome was both predictable and predicted from an early stage. Northern Ireland was a small, densely populated area on the fringe of Western Europe, with no mountains or jungles for guerrillas to shelter in. But the challenges that the region’s physical geography posed were ultimately less important than
its social geography. Guerrilla movements need popular support to overcome the military advantages enjoyed by their opponents, yet the IRA faced implacable opposition from the unionist majority throughout the conflict. If the whole of Northern Ireland had been like West Belfast or South Armagh, the Provisionals could easily have won. In that scenario, of course, partition would never have been viable in the first place. The surprising thing is not that the Provos eventually compromised on their demands, but that they managed to avoid outright defeat.

  Internal critics of Gerry Adams had warned that his electoral strategy would undermine the IRA from the moment it got off the ground.44 But it could well be argued that Sinn Féin’s political growth in the 1980s extended the war beyond its natural lifespan, by giving the movement’s leadership reason to hope it could still win. After all, the dual campaign from 1981 to 1994 comfortably outlasted the ‘pure’ military struggle of the 1970s, and went on for much longer than any previous republican insurgency, from the ‘Tan War’ to Operation Harvest. Once Sinn Féin hit its electoral ceiling, it should have been clear that republicans would find victory elusive. From that point on, it was a question of securing the best deal they could achieve.

  Facing charges of betrayal from republican splinter groups, Adams and his comrades had one trump card: a widespread belief that armed struggle was a political dead end, even if the fruits of Sinn Féin’s alternative strategy left much to be desired. Richard O’Rawe, an IRA veteran who fell out with the republican leadership in the most acrimonious way, still defended their change of course without hesitation: ‘Of course I support the peace process. Like or dislike Gerry Adams, he has to be given credit for ending the unwinnable war.’45

  Michael McKevitt’s Real IRA dealt a hammer-blow to republican militarism in August 1998 when it planted a bomb in Omagh that killed twenty-nine civilians: the worst individual atrocity of the entire conflict. Having threatened to build up a head of steam, the group had little choice but to call a ceasefire in the wake of the carnage, although its uncompromising perspective suggested that it would eventually return to war. As long as the ‘dissidents’ were bent on restarting an unpopular armed campaign that had no prospect of forcing Britain to withdraw, there was little chance they would pose an effective political challenge to the Provos.

  ‘Crablike towards their goal’

  The period since 1998 is still very hard to view in a long-term perspective. The making and remaking of the Good Friday Agreement has been in progress for almost as long as the IRA’s armed struggle, without completing the transition from current affairs to history. Due to the limited availability of sources, any judgement on the post-conflict years must be rather tentative. Even so, we can identify some crucial landmarks, and examine some of the underlying factors beneath the surface of events. As both supporters and opponents would agree, this was a time in which Sinn Féin and the IRA remained absolutely central to the politics of Northern Ireland, forcing the other players to respond to their initiatives whether they liked it or not.

  In the afterglow of the 1998 referendum, many observers expected that David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists would go on to dominate the region’s political life in tandem with the SDLP. But Trimble’s insistence on prior decommissioning – ‘no guns, no government’ – blocked the speedy formation of a power-sharing executive. The impasse dragged on for several years, while reports of continued IRA activity, from Colombia to Castlereagh, began to accumulate. Trimble’s authority as the leader of Unionism steadily drained away, and he dismissed eventual moves by the IRA on decommissioning as inadequate for his political needs. In the meantime, republican and loyalist prisoners won their freedom, and a commission headed by the Conservative politician Chris Patten delivered a report on police reform that Unionists greeted with fury.

  The political stalemate did Sinn Féin little harm at the ballot box, and the party overtook the SDLP for the first time in the UK general election of 2001. When Paisley’s DUP surpassed the Ulster Unionists in regional elections two years later, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern sought to broker a compromise between the new communal hegemons, at first to little avail. But in September 2005, after coming under intense pressure, the IRA announced the full decommissioning of its arsenal. Two years later, Sinn Féin concluded a deal with Ian Paisley to form a power-sharing government that became a lasting feature of the political scene.

  Describing what happened is straightforward enough; accounting for why it happened is a much trickier business. In public and in private, the Sinn Féin leadership had a simple explanation for the slow pace of decommissioning after 1998: their overriding fear of a split. Critics dismissed that claim out of hand, and chided Blair for his alleged reluctance to call Sinn Féin’s bluff. In Britain, a cluster of journalists and academics associated with hawkish, right-wing think tanks took up these arguments, already commonplace among anti-agreement Unionists.46

  But a writer with a very different political outlook, Ed Moloney, also became a forceful spokesman for the ‘appeasement’ thesis. According to Moloney, Adams and his comrades could have begun decommissioning ‘very soon after the Good Friday Agreement was ratified’, having secured their control over the IRA. Instead, they opted to stall in pursuit of electoral advantage, an approach that ‘divided and destabilized mainstream unionism, rendered their SDLP rivals almost irrelevant, and polarized Northern Ireland politics to the advantage of the extremes’.47 The two governments were ‘naive, not to mention foolish’ in their stance towards the IRA: Blair in particular, Moloney suggested, ‘would concede virtually anything that was asked of him’.48 Given the importance of decommissioning for the whole course of events after 1998, this argument deserves careful scrutiny.

  It is useful to compare Moloney’s picture of Blair and Ahern as IRA dupes with the account of the peace process supplied by Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Powell sympathized with the need for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to ‘move crablike towards their goal, in cautious and gradual steps, never revealing in full to the movement their eventual destination’. There was, he believed, a convergence of interests between his government and the Provo leadership, since they were both determined to avoid an IRA split: ‘We did not want to have to make peace lots of times with republican splinter groups. We wanted to do it once.’49

  For Powell, determining where Sinn Féin’s bottom line actually lay was an art, not a science, and there was no particular virtue in testing them to the limit ‘just for the pleasure of feeling we had got the deal at the lowest possible price’.50 Ed Moloney described the ultimate reward for such patience very well: ‘Since it was the IRA’s own leaders who were winding up the armed struggle, it was coming to an end with a certainty and finality that no amount of security successes could have guaranteed.’ Moreover, the political price being asked in return would have been considered ‘impossibly modest’ just a few years earlier.51

  Although Powell did not say so explicitly, Blair’s attitude towards the IRA clearly owed something to his commitments elsewhere. The period bookended by the Good Friday Agreement and the decommissioning statement of 2005 saw British forces deployed in action on a scale unknown since the last days of empire. With an almost messianic zeal, Blair held up armed struggle as the path to liberation for oppressed peoples, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq. Powell does not appear to have noticed the irony: his memoir scolds Martin McGuinness for ‘cheekily’ criticizing the bombing of Afghanistan – ‘he should know a thing or two about bombing campaigns, we thought’ – but there is no hint of self-awareness when Powell recalls Blair nipping out of crisis talks to strong-arm the Chilean president before a crucial vote on Iraq.52 Those who accused Blair of pandering to the Provos were often keen supporters of his strategy in the Middle East.53 They were reluctant to admit that the flip side of military boldness in Basra or Helmand was a more cautious approach in South Armagh.

  Ed Moloney detected ‘an intriguing clue as to how the IRA leadership really regarded Blair’ in paper
s seized by police officers investigating an alleged republican spy ring: ‘One document referred to the British Prime Minister by his IRA code-name: “The Naïve Idiot”.’54 If word of this got back to Downing Street, Blair might well have chuckled at such self-aggrandizing bravado. The pay-off for his ‘naivety’ was the freedom to dispatch troops to far-flung locations without having to worry about exposing the British state’s soft underbelly. By one estimate, at least one-third of the IRA membership still consisted of ‘internal dissidents’ after the Real IRA split.55 From Blair’s perspective, keeping those sceptics under the thumb of Gerry Adams was a bargain-basement approach to counter-insurgency.

  It is hard to imagine that a fresh republican campaign could have matched the Provisional war of the 1970s and 80s, much less that it could have succeeded where the Provos failed. But violence on a more limited scale would still have destabilized the region and obliged the British government to commit forces on the home front, just as the ‘war on terror’ was entering its most ambitious phase. Blair’s line on decommissioning looks more like a calculated trade-off between policy objectives than the product of gullibility.

  If the supposed fear of large-scale defections had been no more than a cynical ploy used by Adams to strengthen his movement’s bargaining position, we might have expected word of this to reach the highest levels of government. After all, one Sinn Féin activist on the fringe of the party’s inner circle, Denis Donaldson, was subsequently revealed to be a British agent. Powell’s account suggests genuine uncertainty about the balance of opinion within the IRA.56 The future release of state papers may reveal that Powell’s colleagues knew more than he let on.