One Man's Terrorist Read online

  But the work of journalists with good republican sources tends to confirm the wisdom of a cautious attitude. In January 2000, Suzanne Breen identified decommissioning as one compromise that the IRA’s grassroots could not stomach: ‘It has touched a deep chord. The vast majority are firmly opposed to even a token hand-over.’ She predicted that any move in that direction by the movement’s leadership would supply a major boost to the Real IRA: ‘The mood in the general nationalist community is firmly against a return to conflict but the republican base remains more ambiguous.’57

  Two years later, Breen argued that it was still necessary for the Army Council to allow intelligence-gathering and weapons training to continue, even at the price of political embarrassment for Sinn Féin, ‘in order to keep their base occupied’.58 At the beginning of 2003, as speculation mounted that the Provos were going to stand their units down for good, she found ‘caution, disbelief and some resignation’ among IRA Volunteers in Belfast. Her report suggested that the salami tactics used by Adams to marginalize his opponents had paid off.

  One IRA member told Breen that the movement was now ‘too far down the road to turn back’, even though he was unhappy with the outcome of the peace process: ‘I thought we would be heading towards a united Ireland. I’d have called anyone a liar who had suggested we would sit in Stormont or disarm, let alone wind up.’ Another ‘disillusioned Provisional’ had no intention of linking up with the dissidents: ‘They are not seen as alternatives. The only place for people like me to go is home.’59 Breen still detected ‘considerable discontent within IRA grassroots, particularly in Tyrone and Fermanagh’ a few months later.60 The Sinn Féin leadership may well have exaggerated the strength of internal opposition as a negotiating tactic, but they did not invent it altogether.

  There is also an unacknowledged tension in Moloney’s own account of these years. The final catalyst for wholesale decommissioning in 2005 came from two events that were extremely damaging for Sinn Féin: the Northern Bank robbery in December 2004, for which the IRA was immediately held responsible, and the brutal killing of Robert McCartney after a row with IRA members in a Belfast pub. The circumstances of the bank heist suggested that it must have had prior approval from the Army Council, unlike McCartney’s murder.61

  According to Moloney, McCartney’s death was ‘an unforeseeable event whose subsequent handling nonetheless assisted the move towards final decommissioning’. But the Northern Bank robbery was something more calculated, ‘an operation approved by the IRA’s political leadership in the knowledge that its consequences would force the organization to contemplate far-reaching measures’.62

  Whether or not this hypothesis is correct, it can hardly be reconciled with the rest of Moloney’s argument. If the republican leadership had had a free hand to decommission the IRA’s entire arsenal from 1999 onwards, there would have been no need for them to compromise Sinn Féin’s position by giving the IRA a rope with which to hang itself later on.

  Spinning Plates

  The overall impression we get from Moloney’s narrative is that Sinn Féin approached the period after 1998 with a carefully thought-out strategic master plan. It appears much more likely that they improvised in response to events, knowing roughly where they wanted to end up but ducking and weaving along the way. An apt metaphor for the challenge facing them came from Moloney himself, who once compared the way Sinn Féin was handling the weapons issue to ‘that old circus act in which a juggler tries to keep an ever-growing number of plates spinning atop rows of bamboo poles’.63

  Ironically, Gerry Adams used a very similar image when discussing the republican peace strategy: ‘As any juggler worth his balls knows, keeping more than two in the air at the same time requires a lot of focus and concentration.’64 Adams and his comrades certainly wanted to extract the maximum political advantage from disposing of the IRA’s arms, but they also had real difficulties in bringing their supporters to that point. In much the same way, David Trimble exploited a genuine threat to his own leadership from within the UUP to lobby for concessions from Blair’s government.65

  In Moloney’s version of the juggling metaphor, it was only a matter of time before things went wrong for its subject: ‘Eventually he overreaches himself, tries to spin one plate too many and the rest begin to fall.’ That moment came in the early months of 2005, after Robert McCartney’s death and the Northern Bank robbery. If the Provisional leadership did possess the authority to order full decommissioning back in 2003, a move at that point would have left Sinn Féin with a stronger hand to play than after the September 2005 statement. Trimble’s waning political fortunes had encouraged republican hesitancy, as his advisor Steven King acknowledged: ‘Perhaps a card or two had to be kept back just in case they were in negotiations with the DUP in a few years’ time.’66 But in the end, the Provos still had to surrender their most valuable bargaining chip before attempting to strike a deal with Paisley. Sinn Féin’s decisive entry into government came from a position of weakness and political isolation.

  The long stalemate over decommissioning obscured the fact that Sinn Féin was becoming an increasingly conventional political party. The Provos had been the purest example of an anti-systemic movement in Western Europe: not only did they possess their own army, which doubled as a community police force, they also had their own media, entertainment industry and even transport system (the ‘black cabs’ of West Belfast). When Gerry Adams argued for Sinn Féin to scrap its abstentionist policy back in 1986, he referred in passing to the question of ‘electoralism as a means of revolutionary struggle’, which had ‘affected all struggles in areas where parliaments with universal suffrage exist’. Sinn Féin’s link to the IRA campaign was, he argued, the true guarantee of its revolutionary character.67 As the party finally severed that link, the full extent of its transformation since the 1980s should have been readily apparent.

  One activist, Féilim Ó hAdhmaill, had expected a return to ‘the mass mobilizations of the civil rights period, producing a type of republican intifada’ after the IRA ceasefire.68 But the only real example of that came from the community protests against Orange marches in the late 1990s. The mobilization of the Garvaghy Road residents in Portadown was a clear-cut success: in spite of heavy pressure from David Trimble, reinforced behind the scenes by Tony Blair, they secured the banning of the march in 1998, and all subsequent efforts to overturn that ban proved fruitless.69 By 2004, as Jonathan Powell observed, the Drumcree march was a ‘dead letter’.70 Away from flashpoints like Drumcree, however, there was little room for mass participation in Sinn Féin’s new struggle.

  Northern Ireland probably had more elected representatives per capita than any region in Europe, and a remarkably high proportion of Sinn Féin’s activist base became involved in electoral work, whether directly as councillors and Assembly members or indirectly as research assistants, constituency workers, etc. A much smaller group managed the high politics of the peace process: very often it would be just Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, or even Adams alone, who took part directly in negotiations.71 The enervating, stop-start, ‘Groundhog Day’ character of the talks led to widespread apathy, as Suzanne Breen observed in 2003: ‘Most people have simply switched off. In pubs, taxi depots and cafés, in-depth analysis focuses on the race for the English Premiership, not that for the peace deal. The strategies of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger arouse much more interest than those of Gerry Adams and David Trimble.’72

  Back in the 1970s, ‘Brownie’ and his comrades had proclaimed the need to eliminate ‘spectator politics’ and mobilize the republican base. Now the peace process had created a new form of spectator politics, and it was losing the battle for audience share.

  If Sinn Féin had become a rather conventional vote-winning machine, it was at least a very efficient one. The party’s vote in regional elections rose from 16.7 per cent in 1998 to 23.5 per cent in 2003 and 26.2 per cent four years later, largely at the expense of the SDLP. By 2007, it had 63 per cent of the
nationalist vote. Although there was some attrition in traditional strongholds, Sinn Féin remained completely hegemonic in West Belfast, taking five of the constituency’s six Assembly seats that year with 70 per cent of the total poll. The party had made deep inroads into the middle-class Catholic electorate without forfeiting its original base. Republicans were naturally delighted to overtake the SDLP, but that pleasure must have been tinged with a nagging recognition that they had stolen much of its political wardrobe. After vowing to overthrow the state for so many years, the Provos were now trying to manage and reform it as best they could on behalf of the nationalist minority, just as the SDLP had originally set out to do.

  Sinn Féin’s claim to have changed its methods but not its goals rested on a few slender reeds. One was the argument that the GFA’s tightly ring-fenced cross-border institutions would somehow unleash a ‘transitional dynamic’ leading inexorably to Irish unity.73 This belief had little objective basis, as Fianna Fáil’s chief ideologue Martin Mansergh pointed out: ‘There is no evidence, let alone inevitability, from international experience that limited cross-border cooperation necessarily leads to political reunification.’74 In 2005, a careful analysis by Jonathan Tonge found the binational aspects of the Agreement to be ‘woefully thin’.75 British sovereignty may not have been as intrusive as before, but when vital interests were at stake, its undiluted character became readily apparent.

  Security reform was one such interest. In 2001, Blair’s government appointed the Canadian judge Peter Cory to investigate several killings where there were strong suspicions of state collusion, including the murder of Pat Finucane. Cory recommended a public inquiry into Finucane’s death, warning that it ‘could be seen as a cynical breach of faith’ if Blair demurred.76 While there was never any question of the British state dismantling its own security machine, an inquiry would have been a symbolic act of decommissioning, turning the page on a very ugly chapter in that machine’s history. However, the untrammelled investigation that Cory called for never took place. It was one thing to reconstitute the RUC as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), after watering down some of Chris Patten’s ideas for reform to keep the process within safe limits.77 A wide-ranging inquiry that was bound to implicate ‘mainland’ institutions like the Army and MI5 was a very different matter. The British state settled down for a grinding war of attrition, doing its best to keep evidence of collusion out of the public domain.78 That made it harder for Sinn Féin to support the PSNI, a precondition for its entry into government with the DUP, although the party leadership eventually got its way over the issue at the 2007 Ard Fheis.79

  The other source of consolation for the Provos was their political growth in the South, which appeared to lend substance to an all-Ireland vision. Having won its first seat in 1997, Sinn Féin took five in 2002, then surged past the Irish Labour Party with 11 per cent of the vote in the European election two years later. Sinn Féin’s southern representatives included men like Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin and Seán Crowe, who had been republican activists since the hunger strikes, and the IRA veteran Martin Ferris, reputedly a member of the Army Council when he claimed a seat for the party in Kerry.80 But its successful candidate for Dublin’s Euro-constituency, Mary Lou McDonald, came from a new generation, a ‘peace process levy’ to supplement the ‘H-Block levy’ of the 1980s.

  Southern politics provided the main outlet for Sinn Féin’s residual leftism, as the only electoral niche available lay on the Labour Party’s left flank. This was a much softer variety of left-wing politics than that of the 1980s, swapping Third World liberation movements for Nordic social democracy as a source of inspiration.81 It was still a distinctive message in a state dominated by centre-right parties, and Sinn Féin looked set to grow in the general election of 2007.

  As polling day approached, the party announced that it was ‘ready for government, north and south’.82 The Dublin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh argued that a republican presence around the cabinet table in both Irish states would help create ‘a truly national government’.83 This argument leaned heavily on one of the main cross-border institutions, the North/South Ministerial Council, which brought together ministers from both jurisdictions to discuss matters of common concern. While the presence of Sinn Féin representatives from either side of the border would certainly have had great symbolic value for republicans, strictly speaking it would make no difference to Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. Once again, the road to Irish unity was being paved with wishful thinking.

  Sinn Féin’s only plausible route into government was as a junior coalition partner for one of the centre-right parties, most likely Fianna Fáil. The party leadership had seen off motions at the previous year’s Ard Fheis that sought to exclude that option.84 Now they abruptly ditched a plan to raise corporation tax in order to ease their passage towards government office.85 Having sacrificed principle for power, Sinn Féin found itself with neither. The party increased its vote share slightly but lost one of its five seats, and was in no position to drive a bargain of any sort with Fianna Fáil. A conservative newspaper columnist, Noel Whelan, expressed his satisfaction at the outcome: ‘Whereas in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin is now a catch-all party dominant on the nationalist side, in the Republic it has been, and it now appears will continue to be, a niche party on the far-left, ardent-republican end of the spectrum.’86 Throughout the peace process, the republican leadership had relied upon an image of dynamism and forward thrust to keep its supporters motivated in the face of constant U-turns.87 Now, with the IRA off the stage and Sinn Féin’s electoral growth becalmed, there was no mistaking the sense of historic closure.

  Epilogue

  Towards the Republic?

  In one of the most penetrating studies of Sinn Féin’s development, published soon after the 2007 election, Kevin Bean identified a malaise that was much deeper than any polling setbacks. For Bean, what distinguished the Provos from revisionist predecessors like Fianna Fáil or the Officials was ‘not just the mood of defeat, but the sense of collapse and terminus’. Republicanism now seemed to be ‘intellectually exhausted, giving the appearance of an ideological project that has run its historical course’.1 In the decade since that book appeared, Sinn Féin has certainly managed to restore a sense of forward momentum on the electoral front. But has it been able to kick-start the republican project itself? Was the ‘underlying loss of historical confidence’ no more than a passing phase?2

  If the period since 1998 still resists any long-term assessment, the same point holds with even greater force for the last decade of Irish history, as the impact of the Great Recession has unsettled the usual patterns, just as it has disrupted political life throughout Europe and the wider world.3 A new balance has yet to emerge on either side of the Irish border, and it would be reckless to predict where Irish politics is likely to stand when it does. But even in the midst of a hurricane, knowing something about the nature of a ship and its crew makes it easier to predict whether it will reach its ultimate destination. Sinn Féin and the wider republican tradition of which it is part entered the crisis with some basic political characteristics whose importance has not diminished since 2008.

  The most ambitious attempt to change the party’s ideological coordinates since the Good Friday Agreement came from another product of the ‘peace process levy’, Eoin Ó Broin. Ó Broin, a middle-class Dubliner, joined Sinn Féin in the mid 90s and spent several years as a councillor in Belfast before returning to his home town, where he eventually became a TD in 2016. In the wake of the 2007 election, he criticized the party’s drift towards the centre ground: ‘Sinn Féin does not belong there and should not be in the business of trading fundamental redistributive policies in the hope of short-term electoral gain. That’s a kind of politics we should leave to Fianna Fáil.’4

  Ó Broin followed this up with a wide-ranging historical study of attempts to marry the republican tradition with left-wing politics.5 He associated two main strands of left republicanism with the
figures of James Connolly and Liam Mellows. For Connolly, a Marxist who spent his whole life in the workers’ movement, the struggles for socialism and national independence formed one indivisible whole; for Mellows, with his Fenian roots, class politics could serve as a booster shot to keep republican hopes alive. His left turn during the Civil War had been ‘a tactical shift, not an ideological one’.6

  As Ó Broin went on to argue, the Provos clearly stood in the tradition of Mellows, not Connolly. He criticized the ‘stageist’ line of Gerry Adams that held up Irish unity as ‘Sinn Féin’s “primary objective”, with democratic socialism relegated to the status of an “ultimate objective”’. This ensured that Sinn Féin’s brand of left-wing politics, ‘relegated to a future point in the struggle, would always be underdeveloped, as the more immediate needs of the national struggle took precedence’.7 Ó Broin urged his comrades to ‘abandon the key ideological formulation that has underpinned left republicanism since Mellows’ and ‘end the hierarchy of objectives implied in the party’s ideology, policy and strategy’.8 It was a compelling indictment, but given the weight of Sinn Féin’s history, and the organizational ballast that held it in place, there was never much chance that the party leadership would take it to heart. It would be a lot easier to respond to the setback of 2007 with ‘a tactical shift, not an ideological one’, tacking their sails to the left without attempting to rebuild the entire craft.

  That was precisely what happened after the financial crash of 2008 that plunged the southern economy into a deep crisis.9 A rising tide of disaffection lifted all purportedly left-wing boats as support for Fianna Fáil collapsed. Gerry Adams urged the Irish Labour Party to join a ‘new alignment’ that could end ‘the dominance in this state of two large conservative parties’.10 Labour, now led by a former Workers’ Party TD, Eamon Gilmore, predictably spurned that offer. An anti-austerity platform delivered Labour’s best ever result in the 2011 election, surpassing Fianna Fáil for the first time with almost 20 per cent of the vote, while Sinn Féin took 10 per cent and fourteen seats, establishing its strongest foothold in southern politics since the break with Éamon de Valera in the 1920s. Gilmore immediately took Labour into a coalition with Fine Gael to implement the same austerity programme that had cost Fianna Fáil most of its support. Five years later, Labour followed its electoral high point with a precipitous fall.