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When
the Byzantine historian Procopius’ court chronicle
“A Secret History” appeared, its scandalous
and even salacious portrayals of Justinian and Theodora
shocked and titillated the public. Similarly, although
nothing matches the depiction given to the former
circus dancer turned empress taking on five lovers
at once, Ed Moloney’s Secret History reveals
heretofore only rumoured accounts of court life around
the republican palace. A contradiction in terms: a
purportedly socialist entity masking the new boss
same as the old boss. In both renderings, a powerful
and popular leader receives damaging testimony from
a highly placed observer who has gained access to
witnesses to court machinations. Whether or not the
emperor deigns to listen to his unsettled subjects
remains to be seen.
What’s
to be shocked about? Less than the publicity machine
might let on. The shameful story of Jean McConville
had already received much press, and the space given
to its retelling here occupies no more than few pages.
The allegations that Gerry Adams had long plotted
his scheme to render arms “beyond use” and
to jerry-rig the ballot-box in the IRA Conventions
in favor of his cronies seems no more surprising than
watching the rise of Prince Hal on Shakespeare’s
stage. Readers of The Blanket know the ending
of that plot. So, what does our court chronicler provide
us that merits our attention? Especially those of
us who may have tales of our own as courtiers fallen
from favour.
Moloney’s
strength lies in his ability to synthesise for a beginning
reader the complications involved in military and
ideological shifts over the past three decades and
more. He achieves this while never oversimplifying
the account for the more experienced in his audience.
As J. Bowyer Bell always acknowledges in his prefaces,
so must Moloney: we simply will never be able to “prove”
what any historian or journalist must rely upon for
much of the anecdotal evidence from anonymous or --unique
to Moloney’s effort-- Dr McIntyre’s “embargoed”
source files. But the weight of the gathered testimony
witnesses to discontent and betrayal of the rank-and-file
by the current IRA and Sinn Fein leadership. What
The Blanket has insisted upon and what has
previously been discounted by mainstream media and
republican supporters with Moloney’s revelations
can no longer be dismissed as the rantings of the
rabble or the mutterings of the ousted old guard.
Many
reviews of this book have given you thoughtful overviews.
In my version, I will note particular insights that
to my knowledge have not received sustained notice
at least in other books on the IRA and the Troubles.
Moloney opens with the capture of the Eksund and the
collapse of the Libyan arms connection. Here Moloney
corrects Martin Dillon’s assumption that earlier
meetings between IRA and UDA members in Tripoli had
been done at the urging of one “Mister Eddie,”
rather than Qaddafi’s own wish to forge an anti-imperialist
front against the British. In his account of the 1969-70
split, Moloney succinctly connects DeValera’s
pragmatism with Adams’ elasticity. From Dev’s
1938 Constitution, Moloney extrapolates the IRA’s
aim not to oust the imposters from the Dail, but the
British from the North. This presages the IRA’s
eventual recognition of the Southern state and its
wish to enter Leinster House-well before the acceptance
of the Stormont and (soon to come) Westminster assemblies.
Such
tracking of the long war strategy and its calibration
--a bit to the left here, then a move to the center,
back again to the far left, correction to the middle--
at the eye of Adams provide Moloney’s trajectory.
What kept me reading? How nimbly -- and at times clumsily,
in light of the disastrous operations often carried
out by an increasingly Adams-dominated Northern Command
at odds with an often “detached” public
persona of Adams -- this came about makes for dramatic
tale-telling.
A
helpful comparison sets the secular against the sectarian
vision of republicanism in the context of the late
18th-century Defender movement. Defense, especially
in the North, would supplant political ideas for the
next two centuries. Set against a wider Irish tendency
to integrate idealism into the cause, this division
emerged again in the Ruiari O Bradaigh/Daithi O Conaill
leadership and their Eire Nua policy and its Northern-led
opposition post-1970. Early on, Adams manipulated
the spin to weaken Kevin Street after the 1974-5 ceasefire,
claiming that the leaders were to blame when in fact
Adams knew the game all along. Similarly, Moloney
covers the rise of the Second Belfast Battalion from
Ballymurphy and the Lower Falls to show how Billy
McKee’s power became undermined by the Adams
faction. In two instances, Adams convinced the local
Provos to hold back from armed defense, in order to
radicalise the people themselves. This long-term strategy
may be credited to Adams’ own leftist leanings;
in hindsight it also served to strengthen Adams’
hold upon his base of power and help aid his own takeover.
“Active
abstentionism” exemplifies Adams’ mastery
of political doctoring; by the time you wonder what
he means, it’s too late to ask. The mutual exclusivity
of the local armed struggle and the wish to bring
the Provos into a swing vote to effect the balance
of the Dail contradicts itself, Moloney stresses,
and the “long war” could not sustain itself
under this tension: Danny Morrison had to put down
his armalite to hold on to the ballot box. You cannot
shoot straight with one hand.
Ivor
Bell’s role in the Belfast leadership has been
shrouded in previous IRA studies. Here, Moloney clarifies
Bell’s wish to imitate Qaddafi in a variety of
ways: a Revolutionary Council and People’s Committees;
a curb upon the Army Council’s domination of
the IRA in favour of a more anarchist/socialist broad-based
appeal; a “Green Book” to instruct the masses.
Adams undermined Bell, however, when it proved that
such a widening of the pyramid’s base might weaken
his own ambitions to climb to its top. Whether military
scaffolding or cellular remodeling, the structure
remained the same. The radical poses to enrage Ruari
and Dave often were briefly held by Adams and his
followers, only long enough to assure that the Dublin-based
leadership would increasingly find itself that in
name only, geographically and ideologically isolated.
Christin
ni Elias’ support for Eire Nua proves
a cautionary tale. In my own research on this policy,
she had been merely a footnote in the accounts I consulted.
Now, Moloney gives her role a full chapter, “Our
Dreyfus,” to illustrate the character assassination
the Adams camp could be skilled at to weaken their
foes within the movement. Curiously, at the same time
a harder socialist influence was imported by the British
Trotskyist “Peter Dowling,” who assumed
the Roy Johnston role fifteen years later for the
Provos, only to be discarded once Ruari and Dave had
again been cowed. Policy, despite Adams’ claims,
proved expendable. Soon the purity of the cause weakened
as seats were contested, and after the hunger strikes,
Sinn Fein having glimpsed the role it might assume
in the 26 counties, the entry into the Dail proved
as inevitable as it was for Dev’s Fianna Fail.
Truly a complete “flip-flop.” Furthered
here with details on how that Ard Fheis suddenly
doubled in size for the crucial 1986 vote. This Cage
11 agenda, Moloney analyses, however parsed by Adams,
could never repair the friction with the armed struggle.
Another
aspect little considered before, the Redemptorist
role as mediators throughout the Troubles, gains full
coverage. Moloney explains Clonard Monastery’s
links to the Adams family, and how Fr Alec Reid and
his confreres provided crucial assistance in the emerging
negotiations with the British. Like Moloney’s
knowledge of the Ballymurphy background to Adams’
rise, this local context more satisfactorily accounts
for Adams’ hold over his Belfast base of power.
Although I found much of the second half of the book
tough slogging due to an overreliance on diplomatic
exchanges covered in other accounts already, Moloney’s
inclusion for the first time of the secret British
reply to Adams’ letter to Tom King shows us why
this document marks “the philosophical fountainhead
of the peace process.” Similarly, Moloney ties
Haughey’s influence to the 1986 Provo recognition
of the Dublin government, and highlights Adams’
simultaneous emphasis on the new Libyan arms conduit
to assuage the hard men. By playing the political
off the military, Adams eased fears of demilitarision
even as he hastened the inevitability that a Sinn
Fein teachta Dála could not represent a movement
armed against the Six Counties which the Dail would
accept as the status quo.
But
this drift into respectability proved a hard sell
in Tyrone. Again, Moloney departs from the usual emphasis
by IRA journalists on South Armagh. Examining the
wake of the Loughall assault, he again connects Defenderism
with the volunteers away from Belfast, to illuminate
how informers could be more highly placed in the Adams-led
IRA structure to cause even more damage than in the
old rank system. The shadow of the grass lurks over
the rest of the book; in Derry, as well, the damage
done to the movement receives its own chapter. Moloney
here distinguishes Derry’s non-sectarian tendency
in IRA operations, and explains why the Peace and
Reconciliation Group under the Lampens effected an
earlier halt to the IRA’s activity there than
in Belfast before the first ceasefire. Speaking of
sectarianism, a helpful examination of the Army Council
and Executive’s role appears for the first time
in detail. The almost “mystical” or “spiritual”
power it possessed as the inheritor of the remnant
of the 1916 Republic given it in 1938 by the rump
of the Second pre-Treaty Dail may seem laughable to
all but the true believer in republican legitimacy
to speak for all Ireland. Yet Moloney correctly claims
that no understanding of the hold of continuity across
the dead generations to the living in republican doctrine
can be gained without this line of apostolic succession.
After the latest putsch, Gerry Adams having assumed
the throne of St. Patrick (Pearse) and with McGuinness
holding the doughty crosier, the electors in the General
Army Convention acclaim their new papa.
At
what price has the pearl of peace been gained? Dissembling,
creating a Borgesian garden of forking paths or, as
one of the masses sees it, “a wilderness of mirrors.”
Since 1982, when the taking of seats was first mooted
as merely a tactic, not a genuine acceptance of another
Irish government, ambiguity permeated the Adams lexicon.
Brits out vs. Dail (Stormont, and now offices in Westminster)
in. Many accept this as the cost of realpolitik, and
acclaim Sinn Fein for finally having given up the
gun. The two translations given of the 1980s acronym
TUAS, however, show how this acceptance has been managed.
To the hard men, the insiders, many readers of The
Blanket: fifteen years ago these faithful knew
this as “Tactical Use of Armed Struggle.”
To the infidels, the nationalist allies, those outside
St. Pearse’s: “Totally UnArmed Struggle.”
Here again, Moloney reveals the doublespeak that discredits
a movement claiming a higher moral legitimacy. In
the denouement, Moloney offers the 1996 Army Convention
in great detail, to show how skilled the Adams camp
had become at end-running around the opposition. Today,
if Frank McGuinness’ ride had delivered him to
the Convention instead of leaving him stranded not
accidentally, the whole story might have had a different
ending. Whether we would be happier than with the
“phony war” that the long Irish struggle
has brought us to now is up to you.
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