In
a
review of Enda Staunton’s well-researched
book, The Nationalists of Northern Ireland 1918-1973,
I made the following tentative observation:
A
large portion of this book addresses itself to the
career of Joe Devlin who wins sympathetic treatment
from the author. Looking through the window that
this work constitutes it emerges that no figure
within Northern nationalism in the 65 year period
covered looms as largely as this man, although the
events of the last thirty years may allow historians
to ease him out from that pole position. So one
wonders just how definitively the focus will transfer
from Devlin to Gerry Adams when a book covering
the hundred years from 1918-2018 comes out, as it
most likely will.
Such
a suggestion prior to the IRA ceasefires of the
mid-1990s would have seemed preposterous, the sort
of propagandist cant put out by PR people on behalf
of the politicians they serve. That it could be
written in 2003 without as much as raising an eyebrow
underlines the prominence that the indisputably
capable Sinn Fein leader has established for himself.
Frequently, opinion polls in the Republic of Ireland
place him as the most popular political leader in
the country ahead even of the nation’s leader,
Bertie Ahern. This is made all the more remarkable
given that during one of Mr Adams’ earlier
terms as MP for West Belfast, the then Taoiseach,
Dr Garret Fitzgerald, could in public arrogantly
refuse to acknowledge his existence when confronted
by him on a Dublin street.
In
today’s political climate ignoring the leader
of Sinn Fein comes with a strong health warning.
The Irish business class demonstrated that it understood
this all too well when a matter of days ago it convened
to listen to Gerry Adams outline his party’s
plans for the future. A radical might well observe
that the business class sat James Connolly on a
chair and shot him but placed Adams on a seat at
the top of the table and sat at his feet. But to
emphasize the lack of radical threat posed by Sinn
Fein to the establishment is tantamount to devaluing
the growing importance of both Gerry Adams and the
party he leads within Irish political life. There
is a surfeit of politicians posing no threat, but
none whose star is on the rise as rapidly as that
of the Sinn Fein leader.
When
discussing with a friend what I should write for
tonight’s short biography - which no matter
how detailed is restricted by brevity to a number
of small still shots - he suggested that I work
on themes already developed in Hope And History,
the latest book by Gerry Adams. This seemed a strange
suggestion. I felt, borrowing from Ambrose Bierce
in The Devil's Dictionary, that the main problem
with his book was that its covers were too far apart.
The totality of Adams was not going to appear in
its pages. Despite being hot of the printing press
Adams’s second autobiography trailed quite
some distance behind A Secret History Of The
IRA by the investigative journalist Ed Moloney
which had already been on the bookshelves a year.
Those who wanted the genuine article voted with
their money and bypassed the ersatz account offered
by Adams. Evidence of a kind for Samuel Goldwyn’s
assertion that no one should write their autobiography
until after they are dead. I readily admit to not
having read the book. I suppose I would like to
credit the late anarchist writer John McGuffin for
this choice. While eulogising the acerbic scribe
at his cremation in Belfast Eamonn McCann informed
us that McGuffin had once told him about having
so many books to get through ‘and still there’s
bastards writing more.’ Being waylaid by skewed
self-serving tomes is something I prefer to avoid.
Although, in fairness to Adams, not to read what
he has himself written inhibits a more rounded understanding.
Part two of his life outside the IRA might be a
best seller amongst members of the Sinn Fein cumann
in Outer Mongolia or the bars of New York but it
was just not for me.
By
now it may be apparent to the audience that I am
making no attempt to pass myself off in equally
counterfeit fashion as a detached or neutral observer.
Indeed, many would feel with some justification
that my contribution over the past decade to the
discourse on republicanism and the strategy devised
and developed in the main by Gerry Adams has been
that of a hostile witness. Those gracious enough
to have turned up this evening can reach their own
conclusions as to whether that hostility colours
my presentation to the point of mere bias or groundless
prejudice.
A
particular myth I would like to put to rest is one
I only recently discovered. Because it was a plug
by a friend I shall graciously refrain from being
over zealous in my refutation of it. I found myself
described as 'an acknowledged international expert
on Irish Republicanism.' It was a description with
strong shades of the Life of Brian to it. My discomfort
on learning this was in anticipation of other people
reading it and actually believing it. I no longer
study Irish republicanism with the academic rigour
or commitment employed during the years of writing
a PhD thesis where the researcher volunteers to
lead the existence of a walking footnote. Small
wonder that Michael Bywater could write in the Observer
a number of years ago, ‘now you have to be
really stupid to get a doctorate.’ These days
I restrict myself to providing a running, but limited
commentary, on the state of play within Provisional
republicanism. And I readily subscribe to the view
of Donald R. Gannon that 'where facts are few, experts
are many.' It is not, therefore, my intention to
persuade those who listen that my account is definitive
or short on weaknesses. All history is representation.
The authoritative account is definitive to the degree
that it has managed to suppress other versions.
Much of my work, in both academia and political
journalism has concerned itself with rupturing the
metanarrative, filling in the holes with the voices
of those the regime of silence has imposed the rule
of hush on. I am persuaded by Ryzsard Ryszard Kapuscinski
who writes
Silence
is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take
pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet
… How many victims of silence there are, and
at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands.
Silence demands that concentration camps be built
in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous
police apparatus with an army of informers. Silence
demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and
without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice --
of complaint or protest or indignation -- disturb
its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence
strikes with all its might to restore the status
quo ante - the state of silence ... Today one hears
about noise pollution, but silence pollution is
worse. Noise pollution affects the nerves; silence
pollution is a matter of human lives. No one defends
the maker of a loud noise, whereas those who establish
silence in their own states are protected by an
apparatus of repression. That is why the battle
against silence is so difficult.
But
like that which it seeks to deconstruct, my own
narrative can hardly claim critic’s privilege
and seek to recoil in silence at the first hint
of challenge.
What
is important is that I outline to the audience the
context which leads me to make the observations
that I do. Mindful of how Foucault described and
dismissed the old notion of truth as being one whereby
thought conforms to things, I readily concede that
context is often alibi.
There
are two planks to the context I offer. The first
is rooted in structuralism and the second in a form
of power politics pursued by exceptionally adept
political actors. On the first aspect, I have throughout
my work, in seeking to better comprehend Provisional
republicanism, sought to ground it in certain structural
phenomena as distinct from tradition spawned ideological
factors. Provisional republicanism is for the most
part a post-1969 phenomenon. It was born out of
conjunctural protest rather than being the reigniting
of some long dormant flame. It truly arose from
the ashes of Belfast’s Bombay Street in 1969
and not the rubble of Dublin’s O’Connell
Street in 1916.
In
some ways this helps explain the ease with which
the Provisionals both settled for and celebrated
an internal Northern Ireland solution in the Good
Friday Agreement of 1998 which bore no resemblance
to the concerns that absorbed those rebels in the
GPO almost a century ago and whom, ironically, the
Provisionals still gather annually at Easter to
commemorate. While the gap between Good Friday and
Easter Sunday is a matter of two days, trying to
bridge the ideological distance that separates the
two would be akin to attempting to walk to the moon.
How many sets of two days would that take?
Without
seeking to labour the point, Provisional republicanism
mushroomed in response to the manner in which the
British behaved while they were in the North
of Ireland. For traditional republicanism, the British
being in Ireland at all was a sufficient
raison d’etre to wage war. This dichotomy,
while certainly blurred in the opening years of
the conflict as different discourses, interpellations,
ideologies, legitimisations, competed with and often
complemented one another, was nevertheless evident
to those who engaged in some archaeological digging
and sifting, and who rather than impose some linear
order on what they found were willing to look at
the discontinuities which subvert otherwise neat
rounded conceptualisations.
Those
who see in Provisional republicanism a discontinuity
with the republicanism that went before can readily
understand that the Provisional Republican Movement’s
acceptance of the internal solution contained within
the Good Friday Agreement was not the act of treachery
on the national question that more traditional republicans
like to allege. Yet, Ed Moloney is undoubtedly correct
to contend:
the
future of the Good Friday Agreement now rests with
a party which began its existence dedicated to the
destruction of the government of Northern Ireland
and the partition settlement that underlay it, but
the same party has ended up, utterly and absolutely
dependent on them.
Nevertheless,
the GFA did address in substantive ways the very
problems that because they went unsolved themselves
conjured into being a problem-solving agent - the
Provisional IRA. Once the problem that brought it
into being showed serious signs of receding, it
is not to be marvelled at that the Provisional IRA
too began its own process of recession.
As
for the aspect of power politics pursued by ambitious
political actors, political scientists and historians
seem reluctant to explain Provisional republicanism
in terms of power and expansionism or account for
this in any way by recourse to the psychology and
appetites of certain key players. There is a tendency
to stay on the terra firma of ideology and tradition.
Where a divergence does occur it is to be found
in the nonsense churned out by the academic terrorism
industry; or alternatively in the more persuasive
conceptualisations of protest movement theory. There
is an understandable tendency to baulk at the prominence
given to outstanding leaders. The great man or woman
of history perspective that ignores broader social
phenomena and political forces lends itself to a
very slanted explanatory narrative. In fact it could
be argued that from an extreme structuralist perspective
why bother with political biography at all? After
all, are such biographies not mere dust covers that
tell us virtually nothing of what lies within?
But
in trying to construct a biography of Gerry Adams,
it seems much too mechanistic, deterministic and
reductionist to explain this particular political
actor as only the product of wider societal structures
and forces and not as a powerful political agent
in his own right.
As
Moloney argues, one of the reasons for the IRA ultimately
giving up on the objectives for which it had fought
its war was:
the
influence of Gerry Adams, even though this will
annoy, and already has annoyed, those who say it
relies too much on the Great Man theory of history.
I make no apology because while I do believe that
societal forces shape history, I also believe that
individuals shape it as well. Would we have had
Stalinism without Stalin, Nazism without Hitler,
Marxism without Marx or Paisleyism without Paisley?
Would we have the Treaty without Michael Collins
or Fianna Fail without DeValera? Possibly, but all
these things would have been very different phenomena
without their influence. I believe that Gerry Adams
has had a similar impact on the development of the
Provisionals and the peace process and I suspect
that the real motive of those who make this criticism
is their wish to deflect attention away from some
of the unflattering light shed on Adams’s history.
The
same structural factors that produced Provisional
republicanism without doubt also created its leader,
Gerry Adams. But his agency which involved a keen
strategic mind, a tenacious will to lead and control,
a manipulative intellect that marginalised opponents
while at the same time interpellating obedient followers
and allies, helped, as one commentator put it, to
turn the Titanic in a bath tub. People might be
excused for feeling that Adams hailed from the Clausewitzean
school with his firm grasp of the latter’s
‘wonderful trinity’ - summed up elsewhere
as an ‘ability to think things through, to
proceed to formulate a set of limited goals, and
to then methodically achieve them by using a combination
of violence, opportunism, and rational calculation.’
The
main thrust of the critique I have mounted for a
number of years is not powered by any ideological
or emotional attachment to the glorious Irish republic.
I no longer believe that nationalism any more than
Catholicism should have a totalising call on our
allegiances. Even less so does my critique arise
from any hankering for the physical force tradition.
Rather I have found myself seriously out of sync
with the Orwellian world that republicanism has
descended into, one where ‘subtlety, ambiguity
and dissembling have become the principal features
of the peace process.’ Orwell made the point
that in a time of universal deceit the one revolutionary
act was to tell the truth. I feel an acute embarrassment
and sense of discomfort when Sinn Fein leaders behave
in television studios like Comical Ali. This is
not proffered in a self-righteous moralistic sense.
Rather, it is said in the context of critique. Truth
is indeed, as Foucault claimed, the product of multiple
constraints. But if we are to better understand
a world characterised by major power disparities
then comprehension, clarity, certainty and accuracy
are weapons we are ill-advised to discard. Otherwise,
we should become writers of fiction rather than
political analysts. Would the audience here tonight
bother to attend if they were to be told in advance
that I was only a visitor to prisons rather than
having served 18 years in prison for IRA activity?
It may well be a truism but it seems to me that
totalitarianism does its work in the dark. It is
aided by secrecy and silence. And the disparity
in power that plagues the world does so, as Foucault
asserts, because ‘power is tolerable only on
condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.
Its success is proportional to its ability to hide
its own mechanisms.’ The question of accuracy
and openness is therefore inextricably linked to
the democratisation of society and the pursuit of
social justice, and can only be supported through
the existence of structures of transparency and
dissent which function to monitor the centres of
power.
A
major blockage hindering movement towards such openness
is the manner in which republicanism under the leadership
of Gerry Adams has become what I have termed elsewhere
a corporate lie. Indeed in Sinn Fein’s more
unguarded moments traces of uncharacteristic frankness
seep through. Leading party member and Adams aide,
Jim Gibney, puts it as follows:
If
there is one big lesson coming out of the peace
process over the last ten years, it is words like
'certainty' and 'clarity' are not part of the creative
lexicon that conflict resolution requires if it
is to be successful. Can anyone point to a period
over the last ten years when such words were used
and they helped the peace process here? Words like
'clarity' and 'certainty' are part of the fundamentalist's
political dictionary. They derive from an arrogant
mentality, which assumes legitimacy and moral superiority.
Demanding such words causes crisis and paralysis.
They clog the peace process engine up with gunge.
They box people into a corner. Pursuit of such words
or their equivalent encourages intransigence by
those seeking their use and by those burdened to
produce them. Give me the language of ambiguity.
It has served the people of this country well over
the last ten years. It has oiled the engine of the
peace process. Long may it continue to do so.
Protest
as he might, no serious appraisal of the role of
Gerry Adams can avoid the nature of his relationship
with the Provisional IRA. His continuous denials
that he has ever been a member of the organisation
have few takers. Many are of the view that his anger
at public discussion of his purported links with
the IRA is a recent phenomenon, something which
coincided with the emergence and progress of the
peace process. But as far back as 1983 when ‘peace
process’ was a term yet to enter Irish political
lexicon, Adams could be found publicly and vociferously
protesting his non-involvement. In response to an
article in the Irish Times which described
him as ‘Provisional IRA vice-president’,
instead of ‘Provisional Sinn Fein vice-president’,
his solicitors objected on the grounds that to associate
Adams with the Provisional IRA amounted to a ‘monstrous
libel.’
Among
the population at large in Northern Ireland ...
[the article] has rendered our client's prestige
and integrity in doubt and diminished the pristine
temper of his political character … Not only
has his character thus been ravaged but in the tumultuous
cauldron of Northern Ireland, as it is, our client,
being a prominent political figure, has his very
life and limb, and of those about him, endangered
as a result of this libel …(the article) has
rendered our client in his political business and
private life, among his friends and acquaintances
and political allies, subject to suspicion and disaffection
and among his political foes, disapprobation, contempt
and an aggrandisement of derision.
The
forcefulness of the accusation has if anything strengthened
over time. 21 years after the complaint to the Irish
Times Adams resorted to claiming he was flabbergasted
when confronted with the current Taoiseach’s
expressed assumption that he indeed had been an
IRA member. Nor has the derision his solicitors
complained about diminished. Even many of his own
colleagues just laugh when they hear the denials.
They laugh even more when he sends loyal gofer Richard
McAuley to pretend he was the author of the Brownie
article in which Adams made that sole public admission
of IRA membership. McAuley of course overlooked
the fact that in the article Adams had referred
to his wife and child. McAuley was not married at
the time and had no children. Why am I prompted
to think of Mark Twain here? Was it he who said
if the world only thinks you are an idiot you should
refrain from opening your mouth and confirming it.
Nevertheless, while it is true to say that I have
met Adams in the course of my republican activity
at no time did I meet him in an IRA capacity, either
his or my own. On the few occasions that such meetings
did take place, they were strictly in a Sinn Fein
capacity.
Yet
it is remarkable that in all the books written on
Irish republicanism and the IRA, apart from Mr Adams’s
own, no one has ever defended him against the charge
of IRA membership. And while I have no first hand
knowledge of his involvement in the IRA, to assert
that he should be given the benefit of the doubt,
if it is permissible to use such a term in present
circumstances, would be to fly in the face of all
that has been written by journalists, academics,
historians and students of republican politics.
This
biography will, like the Irish Taoiseach, assume
that Mr Adams and membership of the IRA have by
no means been mutually exclusive. While it is fashionable
within Sinn Fein today to label securocrats or mischievous
journalists those who insist on accusing him of
IRA membership, a celebrated book by a Ballymurphy
community activist, Ciaran de Baroid, stated unambiguously
that Adams was O/C of the Provisional IRA’s
Belfast Brigade.
By
the time he had ascended to this position, according
to Moloney:
Adams’
list of military achievements was already a lengthy
and impressive one: he had made his home Ballymurphy
the strongest IRA area in the city; as commander
of the Second Battalion in Belfast, his IRA units
had pioneered the use of the car bomb and had forced
the British to introduce internment before their
intelligence on the IRA was complete, with the result
that internment was a military and political disaster.
He had ordered the importation of the Armalite rifle
from America, which for a while made the IRA in
Belfast better armed than the British Army. With
the destruction of an undercover British spy ring
in West Belfast, he made a name as a counter-intelligence
genius on a par with Collins and he had also made
a reputation for ruthlessness, as the disappearance
of Jean McConville and others would also bear grim
witness … After promotion to the top IRA job
in Belfast, the IRA bombed London for the first
time and valuable links were made, via his old ally
Joe Cahill, with the Libyan regime of Col Gaddafi.
Born
in 1948 Gerry Adams spent the best part of his developmental
and formative years in West Belfast. By his own
account he joined the Republican Movement in the
mid 1960s. His father was a former Belfast IRA volunteer
who had served some time in prison for his part
in an ambush on the RUC in the 1940s. His early republican
involvement predated the forming of the Provisionals
in 1969, but as he says himself in that era Belfast
republicanism was an incestuous affair, with the
movement based around a number of older republican
families which had passed the flame down over the
years.
The
pogroms against nationalists in 1969 changed the
fortunes of republicanism but in doing so it also
changed the nature of republicanism. Even prior
to this a considerable sea change had been in train
under the Dublin based leadership of Cathal Goulding
and Tomas McGiolla. Their task was to take republicanism
out of its isolation which they put down to its
incorrigible attachment to the tradition of physical
force which even when not activated always sat as
an army in waiting, watching patiently for the right
opportunity to strike at the old enemy – Britain.
Goulding
and McGiolla wanted to take the gun out of politics
and, certainly without the sophistication of Adams,
it is true to say that they embarked upon a peace
process of their own. They saw the unification of
Ireland taking place in three stages which won the
opprobrium of the Provisionals who broke away from
their erstwhile comrades. The label Stalinist was
oft used to describe both the Officials and the
stages theory. Stage one was democratisation of
the Northern state; stage two was unification, and
stage three was socialism. In order to get the strategy
off the ground the armed dimension of republicanism
had to be jettisoned otherwise the input of the
unionist working class considered so necessary for
the democratisation to occur would not be forthcoming.
Belfast
was at the centre of opposition to the new departure
within republicanism and Adams often waxed critical
of the stages strategy. But the Belfast stance was
not in any deep sense ideological. Although the
Provisional IRA officially formed in December 1969,
the embryonic structure of the new organisation
was already in place as a result of the defence
committees which had sprang up in response to the
loyalist and state violence of 1969. While the leadership
strata of these committees largely comprised people
with a republican history, those who provided the
body of defence had no previous republican involvement.
When these become subsumed into the Provisional
IRA, they provided the dynamic and character for
the organisation. It has been noted that early Provisional
IRA leaders in Belfast were both amazed and dismayed
at the influx into the ranks. Amazed because it
was evidence of a popular insurrection which they
had never before experienced, and dismayed because
the republican pedigree of the new recruits was
non-existent. Even today the more ideological republican
discourses are replete with pejorative references
to sixty-niners, i.e. those who joined the Republican
Movement for conjunctural reasons and not because
it was in their blood.
Some
may claim ‘he would wouldn’t he’
in response to a claim by the British agent Freddie
Scappaticci aka Stakeknife that during his imprisonment
he did not have the attitude that ‘I'm doing
this for Ireland.' But Scappaticci’s imprisonment
predated his recruitment by the British military
as an agent, and research bears out that only a
minority of Provisionals were steeped in a strong
sense of ideology or history. Bernard Fox, a republican
activist of three decades, provides a revealing
insight into the mindset of those flocking to the
ranks of the Provisional IRA. When he first approached
one of the organisation’s leaders seeking a
gun for the purposes of protecting his family and
friends he was asked ‘could you shoot a British
soldier?’ Fox was shocked. ‘At that time
I hadn’t the idea that it was the British Government’s
fault.’ Something no traditionalist would admit
to.
Subsequently,
Belfast republicans were responsible for organising
the Provisional IRA in its formative stages throughout
the North of Ireland. This gave Belfast a centrality
to republicanism which it has retained ever since.
But their organisational skills and sense of fidelity
to republicanism would never have caused the explosion
of Provisional IRA activism had it not have been
fuelled by the strategies of the British state.
Reluctantly forced to commit itself to greater interventionism,
which ran counter to its governing instincts, the
British state’s initial strategic objective
was to defend the status quo. As the status quo
was unionist the state found itself in opposition
to those opposed to the unionist system of government
- nationalists. In its efforts to quell rebellious
disquiet the British state through three crucial
measures produced insurrection. The Falls Curfew
of July 1970; Internment of August 1971, and Bloody
Sunday of January 1972. It was against this background
of widespread nationalist working class insurrection
that Gerry Adams first came to prominence.
Moloney
credits Adams with being the strategic mind behind
the building of an infrastructure of a resistance
community in West Belfast’s Ballymurphy where
he was the local IRA leader prior to internment.
From there he is said to have progressed to lead
the IRA’s second battalion which was responsible
for most of the organisation's successful strikes
against the British military. Although keen to stress
that he was a member of Sinn Fein, there is little
in the public record that outlines his role within
the party other than the occasional letter to the
papers. But at that time it was common practice
for the local IRA leader to pen a statement and
claim it was the work of the non-existent Sinn Fein
PRO. Significantly, others in the party at the time
do not recall Adams as having any party profile.
The
Provisional IRA which, somewhat inaccurately, claimed
to have started an offensive campaign in February
to secure a British declaration of intent to withdraw
from Ireland, nevertheless set itself an interim
demand which was achieved in March 1972 with the
suspension of the Stormont parliament. It was the
first major political concession by the British
since the outbreak of violence. Adams was arrested
the same month in Belfast and held in both the Maidstone
prison ship and Long Kesh internment camp.
In
his absence the IRA prosecuted its war aggressively
as it pushed for the final objective. Now that the
Stormont parliament was out of the way the conflict
was, in the discourse of the Provisionals indisputably
one between Irish republicanism and British imperialism.
By the summer of 1972 faced with a campaign of unprecedented
ferocity the British agreed to a truce with the
IRA. Prior to the truce the leaders of the Belfast
Brigade informed the organisation’s chief of
staff, Sean MacStiofain, that there would be no
truce unless Adams was first freed from internment.
According to the Provisional IRA’s own book,
Freedom Struggle, the British acceded to
the demand and released a senior officer of the
Belfast Brigade.
At
the talks in London in July 1972, the British were
confronted by a delegation which the chief of staff
later stated was exclusively IRA - no Sinn Fein.
The British were clearly impressed with Adams. He
did not strike them as the streetwise young thug
they expected to meet. The impression was one that
did not melt quickly. General Sir James Glover,
who is credited with having played a key role in
shaping security policy in Northern Ireland later
identified Gerry Adams as a ‘man with whom
we can do business.’
The
British were not alone in viewing Adams as the man
to do business with. A former SDLP politician revealed
in the 1990s that as far back as 1972 John Hume
had decided that Adams was the power behind the
IRA throne. While there was much speculation in
the early 1970s that Hume was focussing his attention
on a senior IRA leader, Daithi O’Conaill who
had accompanied Adams to preliminary talks with
the British upon his release from internment, Hume
felt that the Belfast republican rather than O’Conaill
was where the main energy should be concentrated.
How much such thinking was behind the discussions
between the Belfast Brigade and the Church linked
Central Citizens Defence Committee in 1973, is something
that has not yet been adequately assessed. As we
know the Church would be central to the facilitation
of the later peace process and Adams was its point
of contact.
Although
MacStiofain favoured a continuation of the truce,
Republican Forum summed up the prevailing attitude
within republicanism. It was nowhere more pronounced
than amongst the Belfast delegates, three of whom
attended the London talks:
The
temporary negotiations broke down and amounted to
nothing more than an attempt by the British government
to entrap the IRA in a prolonged truce, assess the
probability of a cease-fire and evaluate the then
IRA leadership.
According
to Moloney, ‘it was one of the reasons why
those leaders, including Gerry Adams, brought it
to an end after only a fortnight or so.’
It
is claimed that Adams upon release became the adjutant
of the Belfast Brigade. Although frequently alluded
to in the press as the man primarily responsible
for the Bloody Friday bombings towards the end of
July 1972, people who were in senior leadership
positions within the IRA at the time and who are
today critical of Adams, nevertheless claim that
the day’s events had been planned while he
was interned and were put on hold to permit the
truce to take hold. Once Seamus Twomey, the leader
of the Belfast Brigade moved South in the autumn
of 1972 to take up a position on the GHQ staff,
Adams is alleged to have taken over the organisation
in the Northern capital, a position he is said to
have retained up until his arrest in July of the
following year.
During
that period the IRA maintained its offensive war
against the British. It was also an era which witnessed
the emergence of one of the most unsavoury aspects
of the IRA campaign, the disappeared. This came
to haunt Adams during the years of the peace process
when he had to ward off accusations - but never
quite managed to suppress them - that he had in
fact been responsible for introducing the policy.
During
the period that the IRA was pursuing its military
campaign, the British were devising a strategy which
is best summed up as an alternative to republicanism.
This came to light at the Darlington conference
in 1972 when the outline of British proposal was
presented. The two central planks of the proposal
were a cross border body and some form of power
sharing in the North. The British aim was simply
to defeat republicanism by excluding republicans
and republicanism. The jewel in the crown of this
strategic objective came in 1974 when the Sunningdale
Agreement came into effect. Adams was scathing of
the outcome and accused the SDLP, because it had
endorsed the arrangement, of being the first Catholic
partitionist party.
Imprisoned
from 1973 to 1977 first as an internee and then
as a sentenced prisoner, a status he attained as
a result of trying to escape from prison while interned,
he observed the movement as it was drawn into a
ceasefire and also a campaign of sectarian assassination.
Both these events post-dated the collapse of the
Sunningdale Agreement. Although Des O’Hagan
of the Worker’s Party would later claim that
Adams had once said to him that he would wade up
to his knees through Protestant blood to achieve
a united Ireland, the volume of evidence, both documented
and anecdotal, indicates that Adams harboured no
sectarian animosity towards Protestants. While the
IRA had flirted with sectarian killings during the
summer of 1972, members of the organisation in North
Belfast testify to his unremitting anger at such
developments. Moreover, throughout 1975 and 1976
along with Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes, two key
leaders in the Belfast IRA but now imprisoned, he
was at the forefront of opposition within Long Kesh
to the IRA’s descent into sectarian warfare.
Within
the cages of Long Kesh Adams developed a strong
reputation as a formidable opponent of the truce
of 1975. Those close to him point to his ability
to discern that the British had in fact no intention
to withdraw but were merely using the truce in which
to carve out new strategic space in which they could
introduce the three pronged offensive of Ulsterisation,
normalisation and criminalisation in a bid to secure
their alternative to republicanism. His ability
to outline a strategic alternative, which became
known as the long war, proved the effective catalyst
to his being propelled to a position of national
leadership.
Upon
release in 1977, according to Colm Keena, Adams
quickly moved into ‘a powerful position within
the Republican Movement.’ This, according to
Moloney, is a euphemism for having a seat on the
IRA’s army council. Prior to his release a
Northern Command had been set up within the Provisional
IRA with responsibility for the day-to-day management
of the war. Although the leadership that had negotiated
the truce were responsible for introducing the measure
it reflected the balance of forces on the republican
ground. Throughout the year Adams began a process
of descaling the eyes of these within the movement
who had believed that the British could be truced
out of Ireland. This was an extension of the arguments
he had put forward in the Brownie Columns from his
prison cell and which appeared in the Republican
News from 1975 until his release. A seminal
moment came in June 1977 when Jimmy Drumm, much
against his will but as a sort of punishment for
having been part of the current which had both encouraged
and engaged in preliminary talks with British approved
representatives, read out the address which indicated
a shift in policy. In essence Drumm was declaring
that the British were not going while simultaneously
announcing the beginning of a long war to secure
British withdrawal. There would be no more truces
with the British until they had publicly stated
their intention to withdraw.
According
to Keena:
Adams
wanted to publicise the new analysis of the way
forward. It was time to build those aspects of the
movement which had been lost following the split
with the Officials and, as Adams saw it, reap the
benefits of a lot of the political work which had
been done in the 1960s. Now it was time for the
Provisionals to join the vanguard of anti-imperialism
north and south of the border. He wanted to introduce
republicans to a more sophisticated struggle not
just a militant ‘Brits out’ one but a
campaign to rout British control in its many forms
from the entire Ireland …The British, the assembled
crowd was told, were not about to leave; in fact
they were intent on stabilising the North. The war
of liberation could not be fought successfully ‘on
the backs of the oppressed in the six counties,
nor around the physical presence of the British
Army.’ Socialist republicans had been isolated
round the armed struggle and this was dangerous.
They were calling for the development of a strong
political movement in the entire island, committed
to anti-imperialism. Republicans were to forge links
with the workers and radical trade unionists, to
create an irrepressible mass movement which would
ensure mass support for the continuing armed struggle
in the six counties and make for a competent force
in the event of a serious conflict.
While
his dichotomy is not entirely accurate MLR Smith
has described this as a move away from a mono-military
strategy to one which he termed a total strategy.
Adams seemed to be pursuing the ideas he had developed
in Cage 11 when he wrote an unpublished booklet,
Ireland’s British Problem. Many of his
colleagues in the prison viewed this work as a form
of strategic bible. Much of it was addressed to
building Sinn Fein and using the party as a revolutionary
tool which would become immersed in the community
and forming alternative democratic structures. The
IRA was expected to benefit immensely from this
type of relationship. Meanwhile, as Republican Forum
put it:
the
IRA underwent a radical internal reorganisation.
Throughout the vast majority of the country the
old companies and battalion system was abandoned
and the cell structure model of organisation was
adopted.
After
the arrest of Seamus Twomey, by now the organisation’s
chief of staff, Adams, according to Moloney and
supported by Smith, moved into the IRA’s number
one spot. He was also to assume the vice-presidency
of Sinn Fein. It was on his watch that the La Mon
bombing took place in February which saw twelve
innocent people lose their lives in an incendiary
operation that went disastrously wrong. Arrested
the following morning and remanded to prison on
a charge of IRA membership, Adams’s tenure
as chief of staff was the shortest in the history
of the Provisional IRA.
Upon
his acquittal and release in the autumn of 1978,
Adams once again reengaged with the ‘total
strategy.’ The IRA was soon to have its finest
hour when on one single day in August 1979 it killed
18 British soldiers and in a separate operation
killed Lord Mountbatten. The Northern Command which
was responsible for the day’s events was proving
its capability as well as demonstrating its control.
Nevertheless,
despite its success against the British the Adams
strategy had internal opponents who had to be outmanoeuvred
and much of this was accomplished when in the words
of Republican Forum, after a prolonged period of
internal debate, Sinn Fein rejected the Eire Nua
policy document. This policy rejection represented
a major blow to the O' Bradaigh-O'Conaill faction,
who were responsible for the introduction and promotion
of Eire Nua. The main thrust of the critique from
Adams was that Eire Nua was a sop to unionists.
Adams was moving towards a hegemonic position within
republicanism by appearing more militant than his
opponents.
The
hunger strikes of 1981 gave the Provisionals the
attention they had only previously dreamed of and
were the catalyst for the electoral rise of Sinn
Fein. Like the defence structures that were absorbed
into and formed the backbone of the Provisional
IRA, the Relatives Actions Committees that arose
in response to the prison protest, too were absorbed
into the body of the Republican Movement, only the
beneficiary this time was the party rather than
the army. Adams effectively managed the hunger strike
from outside the prison, maintaining regular contact
with the prisoners’ leader Brendan McFarlane
and on occasion visiting dying hunger strikers.
But the plans for building Sinn Fein had been developed
long before the hunger strikes and in the estimation
of Joe Austin, a former Sinn Fein councillor, the
hunger strikes expedited the strategy by only three
years.
But
it not only expedited the strategy it transformed
it. Rather than providing an alternative structure
to the state as Adams had earlier envisaged in his
jail writings, Sinn Fein was now set, under the
armalite and ballot box, to become an electoral
force, and susceptible to cooption by the state.
By
1983 Adams strengthened his position immeasurably
within the Provisional Movement when he became the
MP for West Belfast. Six months earlier, still capitalising
on the alienation produced within the nationalist
community by the Thatcher governments handling of
the hunger strike he had won a West Belfast assembly
seat; a feat emulated elsewhere by four of his colleagues
including Martin McGuinness. Flushed with this success
he effortlessly assumed the presidency of Sinn.
It was a major achievement for both him and the
forces behind the long war strategy. Northern republicanism
had been the force behind the Provisional IRA. Now
that presence was being formalised in leadership
structures. It was the culmination of an approach
that had seen the establishment of the Northern
Command, the toughening up of a position which was
identifiably northern driven which rejected the
O’Bradaigh leadership’s federalist position
in favour of a unitary state, and the amalgamation
of An Phoblacht, the official organ of the
movement with Republican News which was largely
viewed as the organ of Northerners, in particular
the Belfast Brigade.
The
first half of the 1980s were characterised by a
move to the left which was more perceived than real.
While many left wing activists who had worked in
the relatives Actions Committees and were absorbed
into Sinn Fein brought their own influence to bear,
a more plausible explanation of the leftward shift
was a calculation on the part of the Adams leadership
that the Thatcher government might not survive the
next election and that it was useful to appeal to
a sizeable section of left wing Labour MPs who might
be members of the governing party. Adams was at
best a cautious socialist, maintaining in 1979 that
he knew no one in Sinn Fein who was a Marxist. How
easily he forgot Brian Keenan. While in 1985 Adams
had suggested that it might not be a good idea for
Sinn Fein to overtake the SDLP electorally, as it
would result in a dilution of social radicalism,
by November 1986 he was telling Irish Times
that socialism was not on the agenda.
Within
two years of his assuming the leadership of Sinn
Fein the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed. Primarily
its purpose was to undermine the growth of the Republican
Movement in the wake of the hunger strikes which
had rendered redundant the British three pronged
strategy under the rubric of Ulsterisation. The
British were still into the business of marginalising
republicans and republicanism and were again, as
in 1974, seeking to coopt the Dublin government
into its strategic framework. Adams dismissed the
Agreement as a security initiative that would only
copperfasten partition. Yet it did have a certain
desired impact and Sinn Fein saw its vote begin
to decline.
In
1986 under the leadership of Adams the Provisionals
dropped their previous policy of abstentionism in
relation to the parliament on the Republic of Ireland.
For many traditional republicans this was a heresy.
And headed by O’Bradaigh and O’Conaill
this group left to form Republican Sinn Fein. It
was the second shedding of major strategic opponents
in two years. But unlike the first Provisionals
who walked out of the 1970 ard fheis this body did
not have an army in waiting. The Adams leadership
had successfully won the approval of the IRA at
the first IRA general army convention in 16 years.
Blame for running down the war and for engaging
in a disastrous ceasefire was firmly placed in the
lap of Adams’ old opponents. What this demonstrated
was that ideological concerns were of secondary
importance to fighting units in the North.
In
the view of Republican Forum:
In
order to guarantee the smooth endorsement of key
motions, the Adams-McGuinness faction packed the
Convention with delegates representing 'paper units'.
Despite widespread unease, the convention lifted
the ban on taking seats in Leinster House. Many
volunteers, while disagreeing with the policy change,
saw the need to maintain unity at a time when an
escalation of the campaign was being promised.
Republican
Forum argues that the real strategic significance
of the move was:
Adams
and McGuinness signalled their acceptance of the
legitimacy of the 26 county state and indicated
a desire to normalise relations as a prelude to
any possible "pan-nationalist" approach
towards the north.
The
following year a Scenario For Peace came out. What
followed it on the surface seemed anything but peaceful.
The IRA prosecuted its war unabated but because
of the rate at which it was inflicting civilian
casualties which was having a deleterious effect
on the Sinn Fein vote and completely grounding the
party as an electoral force in the Republic, the
military body found itself being warned by Adams
to be careful and careful again. In 1992 Towards
A Lasting Peace was issued. Despite documents coming
out with peace as a central theme, accompanied by
a shift in stress from a British declaration of
intent to withdraw to one of Britain accepting national
self-determination, the political antennae of the
membership seemed dulled. But peace had always figured
in Provisional discourse even from the supposedly
militarist days of MacStiofain. And national self-determination
was the first demand presented to the British at
the 1972 London truce talks. So members were quite
prepared to ignore suggestions in the press that
the Provisional leadership might be considering
suing for peace. They were reinforced in this belief
by the arms shipments of the late 1980s from Libya.
Those of us within the prison who stated that a
ceasefire was on the cards were told to go and boil
our heads. It was something we would hear ad infinitum
over the coming years as we predicted the slaughtering
of one sacred cow after another.
But
there was a clear sea change going on within the
Provisionals. According to Moloney, the first indications
that Adams was considering a move away from armed
struggle came with dialogue he engaged in towards
the end of 1982 with Fr Alex Reid. At a 2003 Galway
Lecture Moloney claimed that ‘Gerry Adams and
the small group of allies and advisers he has gathered
around him have been working to end the IRA’s
war and to replace it with a political alternative
for almost exactly twenty years.’ Anecdotal
evidence also indicates that around the time of
the 1982 Assembly elections at least one of Adams’s
aides was floating the proposal for a struggle that
was not armed. Critics of Adams believed at the
time that the aide in question was incapable of
formulating the plan and their suspicions began
to fall on Adams.
These
suspicions mushroomed but before they could take
the form of internal organisational opposition Adams
moved against his critics, resulting in the 1985
expulsion from the movement of a number of people
including one close colleague and a former chief
of staff, Ivor Bell, who along with Adams had attended
the truce talks of 1972, and was widely credited
with having drawn up the plans from prison that
would lead to a serious restructuring of the IRA.
Opposition from those opposed to any unarmed strategy
was further attenuated in 1987 with the effective
loss of the East Tyrone Brigade when it was ambushed
by the SAS and RUC. That brigade had been considering
breaking from the Provisional IRA because it suspected
the Adams leadership was not as committed to the
armed campaign as it proclaimed internally.
It
is significant that in a recent RTE interview the
former British Army Force Research Unit operative,
named Martin Ingram, claimed that when he returned
to Northern Ireland from Germany in the second half
of the 1980s, the situation was different from what
it had been during his earlier tour of duty. He
claims to have been aware of a secret peace process.
In Ingram’s account the IRA would hit the British
hard and sue for peace.
This
dovetails with Moloney’s account:
Subtlety,
ambiguity and dissembling became the principal features
of the peace process project. When finally unveiled
it came in two forms. In its first one, the one
the Army Council believed to be the real peace process,
its central feature was a pan-Nationalist alliance
involving Sinn Fein, Fianna Fail, the SDLP and Irish-America
whose combined strength would wring from the British
a date for withdrawal, possibly decades hence and
with full Unionist input into the new set-up, in
return for which the IRA would end its campaign.
That was the version that the Army Council signed
on for, a peace process that was consistent with
the long-standing goal of Irish republicanism, which
was independence and unity. But the peace process
that the Irish and British governments had signed
up for, as long before as the mid-1980s, was one
which was to be something very different indeed.
Far from the British naming a date for withdrawal,
the end would be Sinn Fein accepting the principle
of consent and accepting involvement in a political
settlement on terms somewhat less ambitious than
Sunningdale. This was the message that Fr Reid brought
from Gerry Adams. The pay off for that would be
political respectability and electoral success for
Sinn Fein. The attraction for both governments,
of course, was that this was the endgame that would
bring the IRA’s violence to a definitive end
and create the conditions for stability in relations
between and within these two islands.
Although
the smoke signals were billowing indicating that
a series of moves between the British and republicans
were in train, the bulk of the membership refused
to believe anything other than that the leadership
was on the right track. There would be no end to
the war without a clear declaration of intent to
withdraw from the British. Nor would there be an
internal solution. Ceasefires and Sunningdales would
never be repeated.
But Moloney alleges:
Adams
kept his diplomacy a tightly guarded secret from
all in the IRA leadership save those whom he could
trust. There was never a chance that Adams could
have gone to an Army Council upon which figures
like Slab Murphy, Kevin McKenna or Michael McKevitt
sat and say, ‘Listen lads I have an idea; how
about we recognise Northern Ireland and agree that
we won’t get Irish unity until the Prods say
so, well cut a deal with the Unionists to share
power, Martin here can become a minister - and Barbara
- meanwhile you guys will call a permanent ceasefire,
give up all those Libyan guns, recognise a new re-named
police force and eventually we’ll wind down
the IRA and disband it. If we do that, then Sinn
Fein, under my leadership of course, will become
the new SDLP and Fianna Fails of Ireland.’
Despite
the gainsaying, in 1994 the IRA engaged in its first
official ceasefire since 1975. Adams claimed to
have constructed a nationalist alliance between
republicans, the SDLP and the Dublin government.
Reinforced by a strong Irish American lobby, this
alliance could force the British to become persuaders
for Irish unity. Before the ceasefire kicked in,
Martin McGuinness in January 1994 told the Sunday
Business Post that the movement would accept
a seven-year delay between the conclusion of negotiations
and eventual British withdrawal. The guff that Moloney
pointed out was being spoon fed to the army council
had now become the main meal for the rank and file
as well.
As
part of the tight centralised control exercised
under Adam’s leadership IRA volunteers were
briefed about the ceasefire but were denied any
input into the decision to go for it. This was in
spite of repeated promises over the years that only
a general army convention of the IRA would be in
a position to call one. Unlike the Provisional Movement
in its earlier years the degree of centralisation
and control exercised over the movement by the leadership
was now considerable.
In
a series of moves from the Downing Street Declaration
in 1993, The Framework Document of 1995, the Heads
of Agreement Document in 1998 and the Good Friday
Agreement of the same year it was becoming clear
that out of the two protagonists the British alone
had not lost sight of their strategic objectives
outlined as far back as 1972. Unlike then, they
decided to go for the defeat of Provisional republicanism
by including republicans but excluding republicanism.
For that reason the longstanding Provisional demands
were never serious runners for all party talks.
And none of them appeared in the Good Friday Agreement.
The
Provisionals have accepted the partition of Ireland,
the return of the northern parliament, a reformed
police service, and the consent principle. Republican
Forum stress the point:
It
is worth pausing for one moment to reflect upon
the many political characteristics that are common
to both Sunningdale and the subsequent 1998 Belfast
Agreement. Both Agreements were founded upon the
unionist veto and both sought to establish power
sharing executives within the six-county state which
were designed to co-exist alongside minimalist cross-border
institutions
All
of this leads to a conclusion that Republicanism
under Gerry Adams was the only thing that was defeated.
While it is difficult not to marvel at his organisational
skill and sense of strategic direction, nor breathe
a sense of relief that he brought the war to an
end, Adams has merely brought his movement full
circle to the point from which it made its departure
from the Official Republican Movement 35 years ago.
He now promotes unity only by consent – the
central demand the British made of the Provisionals;
he has brought back the northern parliament, and
calls for a reformed police service and the ultimate
dissolution of the IRA.
Small
wonder that the author Tim Pat Coogan could comment:
The
reality is that, just as we in the Republic did
over Articles 2 and 3, so did the IRA make historic
compromise: It agreed to partition, the British
presence and the continuation, in effect, of the
unionist veto. As a historian of the physical force
movement, I never thought I would live to see the
like.
In
some respects the role of Adams has not differed
greatly from others in similar conflict situations.
Former Fatah Leader in the Hebron region, Ahmad
Dudin, referred to ‘the Palestinian Authority
has always been a one-man operation.’ Moreover,
the result of this autocracy was, according to one
Palestinian human rights activist, ‘a police
state without a state.’ Consequently, in order
to suppress dissent the Provisional leadership has
resorted to threats, intimidation, marginalisation,
and on occasion murder.
Today
the Provisional Republican Movement under the leadership
of Adams inhabits an ideological vacuum. It’s
strategic compass goes only where power lies. Left
or right does not matter. Expansionism is the only
show in town. Adams is not to be criticised for
bringing to a conclusion the futile campaign of
the IRA. In some respects it can be said that he
faced up to the reality that the Provisional movement
had articulated impossibilist and totalising demands
onto a struggle that was much more limited in terms
of what was needed to bring it to a conclusion.
Coogan, while, somewhat open to the charge of revisionism,
nevertheless has a point in claiming that
the struggle by Nationalists in Northern Ireland
over the last 30 years, and continuing today, was
not about territory or flags or even driving the
British out of Northern Ireland. What motivated
most people was human rights. It still does.
But observers will feel justified in pondering the
purpose in waging a long war which in essence only
achieved what was on offer prior to the long war
being initiated. Moreover, the lurching of the Provisionals
to the right, their attempts to become a catch all
party, their dalliance with the White House and
their attendance at the World Economic Forums in
contrast to their absence from World Social Forums
all point towards the existence of a hegemonic force
devoid of any principles and characterised by unalloyed
opportunism which has completely deideologised Provisional
republicanism in its pursuit of power. A force still
prepared to use violence to further its own sectional
objectives without wider regard for the society
it is meant to bring peace to.
Ultimately
the question of whether Gerry Adams is a man of
war or a man of peace, is best answered by concluding
that he is a man of neither but is ultimately someone
who is prepared to use war or peace in pursuit of
enhanced influence and prestige. A man of power
is perhaps a more apt description.
Perhaps
the sheer absence of an ideological core to the
Adams strategy was summed up when at a meeting of
the elite of the Irish business world, according
to last Saturday’s Irish Times, Adams's
background message was that his party understands
the need for pragmatism.
Asked
about public-private partnerships, he acknowledged
that Martin McGuinness had reluctantly accepted
the need for private investment while in power in
Northern Ireland. "Well, we are against them,"
he said. "Having said that, Martin McGuinness,
as education minister, faced with the reality that
he would either have no schools or an involvement
in a qualified way with private finance, went for
it. So I suppose you could argue that that is the
emergence of pragmatic politics." Equally,
Sinn Féin's acceptance of service charges
in Sligo was justified by Adams, despite all of
the party's railings nationally against such bills.
"Sinn Féin councillors in Sligo, rather
than seeing the service go entirely over to privatisation,
and seeing the aged, or people on low incomes, suffering,
then went for a more pragmatic approach. The same
thing has happened in Monaghan. Our position is
against it. But in terms of the actual practicalities
of working out these matters, as part of local government,
the party made compromises on it," he told
the gathering. On taxation, Adams offered soothing
words that meant little: "I am reluctant to
say that we would do A or we would do B. We are
not in principle against tax increases, but we have
no plans to introduce them. We just think that there
should be a far, far better way of doing business."
In
reading this I recall what a friend, Tommy Gorman,
often says to me. Why vote – sure the government
always gets in?
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