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Although
Gerry Adams is taking legal advice on claims by Ed
Moloney that he was deeply implicated in the killing
and 'disappearing' of Jean McConville and others accused
of betraying IRA operations to the British, Moloney's
portrayal of Adams' role in the peace process is by
far the most fulsome that has been produced so far.
On one of his media appearances to promote the book
the author referred to Adams' 'strategic genius' and
advised Unionists to reassess their instinctively
hostile attitude to the man who is portrayed as having
worked out the basic framework of the deal signed
on Good Friday 1998 as early as 1982. In the preface
as well as suggesting that Adams should have shared
the Nobel prize along with John Hume and David Trimble,
he describes Adams as a figure of comparable historical
significance as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.
This
book is by far the most detailed and convincing account
of Adams' truly machiavellian achievement in bringing
the bulk of the IRA to accepting in the Good Friday
Agreement what amounted to broadly the same sort of
deal that was on offer at the Sunningdale conference
in 1973 which was rejected contemptuously by republicans
at the time. It revises radically the chronology of
the peace process whose origins are seen not in the
late 1980s but in discussions between Adams and his
long time confidant, the Redemptorist priest, Alec
Reid which began in 1982. Thus by the time of the
Anglo-Irish Agreement, which other accounts have treated
as a crucial catalytic event in the development of
republican strategy, Moloney claims the peace process
was three years old. Rather than the Malley/McKittrck
account which portrays the initial republican outreach
as being to Charles Haughey Moloney shows that Adams
approached the British state, in the person of Secretary
of State for Northern Ireland Tom King, first in 1986/87.
The
author's unparalleled access to IRA sources for this
period and the early 1990s provides the most comprehensive
and subtle account of the interweaving of feelers
to the British , Haughey and the SDLP alongside the
attempt by the 'soldiers' in the leadership of the
IRA to use Libyan-provided hardwire to launch an Irish
'Tet Offensive' to break the British will to stay.
The analysis of the increasing degree to which Adams
and his supporters attempted to control IRA violence
in order to minimise threats to the pan-nationalist
alliance with Dublin and the SDLP, along with his
account of the Loughgall ambush and the decimation
of the potentially dissident East Tyrone IRA provides
the most insightful account of a crucial period of
Provo 'armed struggle' that I have read.
There
are numerous references to the widespread suspicions
in republican circles, particularly in Tyrone, that
crucial operations were betrayed by one or more high-level
informers. However, Moloney provides no evidence to
link the existence of such spies to Mr Adams and in
the case of Loughgall admits that 'glaring mistakes'
in the planning of the operation may well have alerted
the security to forces. However he does emphasis the
degree to which such botched or betrayed operations
greatly assisted the progress of Adams' pursuit of
his 'secret peace process' with the London and Dublin
governments.
By
emphasising the degree to which the peace process
was a 'pre-cooked dinner' concocted by Reid and Adams
in the early 1980s and based on the acceptance of
the principle of Unionist consent as essential to
any settlement, Moloney has certainly produced a provocative
thesis, which, if true, would be the basis for the
overturning of the dominant discourses, academic and
political, on the peace process. It is not sufficient
as some of the more robotic Sinn Fein spin doctors
may allege to try and hang the 'dissident' placard
around the author's neck. It is true that a very high
proportion of the references which back up the central
arguments of the book are to unspecified former IRA
members and confidential interviews with peace process
participants and senior clerics. But Moloney's reputation
as an expert reporter with more than two decades of
experience of covering Northern Ireland, and until
the early 1990s at least, extremely good access to
the inner circles of Mr Adams should make any reader
hesitant before dismissing the book's central arguments.
The
problem lies not in the reliability of the sources
but in Moloney's interpretation of them and the fact
that on the crucial issue of the consent principle
the evidence is at best thin. That Adams was responsible
for a fundamental reworking of republican military
and political strategy is not seriously contestable.
What is is the argument that he was, since the mid-1980s,
surreptitiously guiding a largely recalcitrant movement
towards acceptance of Sunningdale Mark 2. He may well
have concluded by 1982 that armed struggle would not
force a British withdrawal and that the continuation
of violence would put a firm limit of the electoral
progress of Sinn Fein. He may also have realised,
however belatedly, that the major obstacle to republican
objectives was the Unionists not the British. But
Moloney's evidence that he had accepted the principle
of consent is not convincing.
The
six questions which Adams is claimed to have posed
in a letter to Tom King in 1986/87 (250) included
requests for the British to play the role of 'persuaders'
for unity and a public statement of an intention to
withdraw from Ireland by a specified date. As this
was part of Adams 'secret diplomacy' with the British
it is hard to square with Moloney's thesis of his
already having the Good Friday Agreement on ice. In
documents which Alec Reid presented to Haughey in
1987 the idea of Unionist consent was included. However
as Moloney point out these documents were drawn up
by Reid who melded together ideas that had come from
the British and Irish as well as Adams and himself.
The 'Stepping Stones' document did prefigure the Downing
Street Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement but
Moloney does not convincingly establish that it reflected
Adams position at the time.
Adams'
'genius' lay not in anticipating the need for an historic
compromise between Unionism and Nationalism/Republicanism.
How could it while he, like Moloney in his unimpressive
traditionalist account of the origins of the Troubles
treats Unionism as an essentially reactionary philosophy
which needs to be weakened and marginalised not accommodated?
Rather, it lay in an acute awareness of how to exploit
contradictions between Unionists and the British state
and intra-unionists divisions to try and produce a
settlement that would have been much more like joint
authority than that which was agreed at Stormont in
1998.
Moloney raises but does not answer the question of
how Adams was able to sell radical reversals of policy
on ceasefires and participation in Stormont to his
reluctant base. Perhaps the answer is simple: faithfulness
to republican theology was ultimately less important
than an ability to exploit the more neuralgic reflexes
of unionism to persuade his followers that what was
agreed in 1998 would ultimately prove to be a far
more effective way of ending partition than armed
struggle.
Henry
Patterson is Professor of Politics at the University
of Ulster. His book Ireland Since 1939 will
be published by OUP on 24th October
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