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For
long enough RTE hitched its news wagon to Section
31 – the Republic’s Broadcasting ban. While
its main objective was to ensure that representatives
of republican bodies were neither seen nor heard,
the section acted as a pit bull patrolling pathways
and conduits where more informed accounts of the Northern
conflict might travel. Quite often the bearers of
the sharpest fangs were those RTE staff associated
with the Worker’s Party, which was the political
wing of the Official IRA. Anything other than the
‘Official’ account was snapped and snarled
at. Those journalists who did not joyously and slavishly
celebrate their own censorship were often labelled
‘Provo supporters.’ The former Northern
Editor of the Sunday Tribune, Ed Moloney, once
opined that the pervasive censorship in Southern society
prevented the conflict in the North reaching its denouement
much sooner.
Ironically,
the point at which that conflict might have ended
was among the items debated on RTE’s Summer Days
programme last Friday morning. This being the tenth
anniversary of the Provisional IRA having abandoned
its military campaign to secure a British declaration
of intent to withdraw from Ireland (when the IRA temporarily
resumed its war in 1996 its sole objective was not
to secure withdrawal but all-party talks), there has
a been a hike in media interest pertaining to Sinn
Fein’s alter ego. Appropriately, Moloney, now
residing in New York, featured on the discussion panel.
Also included was a historian of the IRA, Tim Pat
Coogan, a former advisor to three Taoisaigh, Martin
Mansergh, and Sinn Fein’s Mitchel McLaughlin.
Unlike
the type of coverage RTE restricted itself to providing
for over two decades, Friday’s discussion was
not steered away from the uncomfortable issues. Indeed,
at times the discomfort was so palpable, an audible
nervousness could be detected in the voices of both
Tim Pat Coogan and Martin Mansergh. What caused them
to display a lack of their normal surefootedness was
the awkwardness that comes with having a knowledge
others know is there and who are immovable in their
determination to make it available to the public.
Moloney, author of the hugely successful A Secret
History of the IRA, relentlessly pressed home
a central contention of his book, that the peace process
was not the outcome of John Hume having talked sense
into Gerry Adams. It had in fact long predated the
rather late-in-the-day involvement of John Hume, and
was essentially the brainchild of Gerry Adams. The
Sinn Fein president calculated that the IRA could
never secure its objectives and subsequently set about
secret negotiations with both the British and Irish
governments, sans either the knowledge or endorsement
of most, if not all of his closest IRA comrades. The
purpose of such negotiations was to bring the IRA’s
military campaign to an end in exchange for an internal
solution.
When
Moloney’s book was published two years ago, it
unnerved the Adams leadership who found its revelations
too close to the bone to allow the leadership coterie
to assume complacency. Gerry Adams, not averse to
turning a pound or two on the strength of his own
fictionalised accounts detailing his republican activism,
rather brazenly accused Moloney of writing books to
make money. Many commentators at the time seized on
the fate of Jean McConville and the alleged involvement
of Adams in her death, something the MP for West Belfast
has always strenuously refuted. While the McConville
story was the type of sensationalism that helps inflate
the sales of newspapers, it was not the main news
line in the book. Moloney sought to write an account
of the peace process that challenged the John Hume
centred dominant orthodoxy. Despite being a best seller,
in terms of displacing paradigms it was a slow burner.
Now, two years after publication, the Summer Days
discussion on RTE suggests that the book’s core
logic may be set to ignite the conceptual and interpretive
imagination of commentators, politicians, writers,
historians and analysts alike.
During
Friday’s exchange both Tim Pat Coogan and Martin
Mansergh admitted that the piecing together of the
peace process jigsaw began many years prior to the
Hume-Adams talks. Moloney asserts that Hume’s
involvement was hardly central and functioned more
as a fig leaf to conceal the role of the Haughey led
Dublin Government. When Moloney insisted that Adams
was ready to deal long before the arrival of Hume,
Mansergh admitted pre-Hume contact with the Adams
leadership. His only parry was that if Adams was ready
the Dublin government was not yet at that position.
Tim Pat Coogan, for his part, no longer denied that
he was the bearer of the letter detailing Adams' offer
of a ceasefire to Charles Haughey just after IRA volunteers
had laid the bodies of their Loughall comrades into
their final resting places to the solemn graveside
intonations of the same Gerry Adams, affirming that
the powerful would be made to pay for the IRA lives
obliterated by the firepower of the British SAS.
Mitchel
McLaughlin avoided engaging with Moloney’s assertions.
Nevertheless, his contribution cannot be devalued
if only because of his attempt to trace the origins
of an internal Republican Movement discussion on the
potential for a unarmed strategy back to British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Out Out Out’
dismissal of the 1984 Forum proposals. Previous to
that, allusions to the onset of such a debate placed
it in the immediate aftermath of the 1985 Anglo Irish
Agreement.
Friday's Summer Days debate should be measured against an earlier RTE revelation
by former British Army operative, Martin Ingram, that
when he returned to the North for a second tour of
duty in the latter half of the 1980s he was aware
of a secret peace process.
As
the arguments supporting the dominant peace process
orthodoxy are stripped away layer by layer, and the
dates for its genesis are forced back year by year,
there may be an inexorable intellectual movement towards
viewing the hunger strikes of 1981, when the IRA seemed
to be on the crest of a wave, as the point when the
foremost leader of the Republican Movement decided
that it had peaked and that he would cash in the efforts of
its volunteers for an outcome that bore no resemblance
to the motives underlying their sacrifices. Today
the only terminus awaiting the organisation which
Bobby Sands claimed the British were determined to
consign to the Knackers yard, is the very one he and
others died to ensure it would never reach.
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