Politics
Will they dance to Trimble's tune?
Published 09 April 1999
Sinn Fein-IRA have been outflanked by the unionists they loathe. Now they must decide if they will take the peace process to its endgame. ByJohn Lloyd
The men who lead the Irish Republican Army are warriors of honour. They have an ideal of the kind we were all once taught to prize. Their cause has enjoyed notable victories against the British Empire and then the British state; 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland were liberated from British rule, and only six remain unfree. Looked at the way they look at it (a perspective once shared by many on the left, and still by a few), the IRA lit a beacon for those yearning to breathe free from British imperialism.
That their volunteers have slaughtered, assassinated, tortured, terrorised, stolen and lied in pursuit of the ideal merely makes it the more precious in their sight. Most of them - including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the public faces of the Sinn Fein- IRA leadership, but also such men as Brian Keenan, regarded as the IRA's chief strategist and possibly its chief of staff - are men in middle age. These men have known each other for two or three decades; their friendships are close and personal, familial. They have had to face, as do all who pass out of youth, the prospect of mortality as something real rather than theoretical. Like nearly all public figures, they have asked themselves what they can claim to have achieved at life's end.
Now they face the hardest decisions of their public lives. It was straightforward to fight the unionists and the British army; it was written into the codes they inherited and by which they lived. But since the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement a little over a year ago, the IRA and Sinn Fein have been in new territory: a wholly political struggle of the kind they have not conducted before. In the past month, they have been losing to people for whom they had nothing but contempt - the Ulster Unionists.
The IRA must decide in a few days how to respond to the declaration, made on 1 April by the British and Irish governments, that decommissioning weapons was "an obligation" under the Good Friday Agreement. That declaration was a masterpiece of presentational chutzpah. Efforts to appoint a government for Northern Ireland, and to induce the IRA to commit itself to decommissioning, had failed. Yet Tony Blair hailed the situation as "a significant milestone" while Bertie Ahern, the Irish premier, called it a success "in overcoming the last difficult hurdles".
Thus, an ersatz victory was plucked from the jaws of a real defeat. Ian Paisley called the outcome "an April fool's charter". "Spin maketh the man," snorted Robert McCartney, the clever barrister who heads the UK Unionist Party and who, like Paisley, opposes the Good Friday Agreement as a sell-out. But though they were right about the spin, it was largely sour grapes. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, still the largest fraction of the riven unionist clan, had scored a large success. The British and Irish governments had underwritten the political strategy he had adopted over the past few months: to turn the tables on Sinn Fein by demanding that the IRA at least begins to hand over its stocks of weapons. Until it does so, he has said, he will not consent to Sinn Fein ministers in any cabinet he will lead as First Minister.
As Sinn Fein has endlessly said, the Good Friday Agreement does not support Trimble's position. It became an agreement, indeed, precisely because it was vague on this, as on other issues. It lays down that decommissioning must have happened by May next year; but that is not linked to the formation of an executive. Trimble was deeply unhappy about this when his hand was being held to the fire to sign the agreement last year; he finally did so, he says, because Blair wrote him a note (which the Ulster Unionist leader instantly made public) assuring him that his understanding of the agreement was that decommissioning should be taking place by the time it came to form an executive.
Blair has been proven as good as his word; the trust that Trimble placed in him, not without many reservations, has held. Sinn Fein thought that Blair, desperate for the agreement to work, would buckle if they were obdurate. So far, they have been proved wrong.
Much more extraordinary, Blair has been backed by the Irish government. In arguments during the all night-meeting of 31 March-1 April, Sinn Fein told Ahern that the IRA would never hand over weapons to a British force. But the Irish premier, according to his own account, repeatedly brought Sinn Fein leaders face to face with the "obligation" to disarm and the need for political leadership to bring that home to the republican rank and file.
Ahern runs a country with less and less of a stake in the integrity of the quarrel between northern Catholics and Protestants; whether or not it is, as some Irish commentators have suggested, "post-Catholic" and "post-nationalist", it is certainly post-caring about it very much. As Ahern's chief adviser, Martin Mansergh, has made clear in speeches and articles, the Good Friday Agreement - which was an international treaty between two sovereign states - is now the text on which policy is based.
The Americans have moved the same way: Bill Clinton spoke at least once to Adams during the negotiations, to rub home the message of the "obligation". So David Trimble found himself in a strange position for a unionist leader. His allies were a British Labour government, traditionally regarded by unionists as a dubious friend at best; a US Democrat president whom they had been schooled to see as a spokesman for an Irish republican lobby; and a Dublin administration that had been regarded as the provider of terrorist havens.
Sinn Fein and the IRA Army Council, which had insisted on the involvement of the Irish and US governments in the settlement of the war, were left without a political hiding place. In the coming days, they must think of something that Trimble will accept as a surrender of weapons. Otherwise, they must contemplate the breakdown of the agreement, and a possible return to war.
The central figure - Adams and McGuinness apart - is Brian Keenan. He was given an 18-year sentence in 1980 for conspiracy in bombings which had killed nine and injured 113. He was so important to the IRA that a four-man team was detailed to lift him from Brixton exercise yard before he went to trial (the project was discovered and the men arrested). In a speech last weekend in south Armagh - the hardest of the hard IRA areas, which has sought to cleanse Protestants with some success - Keenan explicitly rejected the "obligation" to surrender weapons. Using unionist rhetoric, he said there would be "no surrender"; the letter of the agreement must be honoured, or it would fall.
Keenan, because of his military success and his long imprisonment, is a hero within the ranks of republican volunteers. But the many thousands of Ulster voters who have chosen to support Sinn Fein rather than the moderate nationalism of the Social Democratic and Labour Party would not know who he is. These voters are the constituency of Gerry Adams and to a lesser extent Martin McGuinness; they are popular because they are seen as men who can deliver peace, not continue the war.
The closeness of friendships forged in decades of battle, imprisonment and common struggle is of a quality usually denied to those who lead peaceful lives. These men have known traitors, and have had many shot for treachery, or a suspicion of it. They have lived, since youth, with constant movement, watchfulness, suspicion and calculation of the most basic kind - the calculation of this or that being worth a life, another's or one's own. So far as we know, Keenan backs Adams's strategy of political accommodation to the Good Friday Agreement and does not regard the Sinn Fein president as another potential traitor to the cause.
Yet as the prize of a devolved administration comes closer, it is clear that leading members of Sinn Fein will soon have different interests, including pecuniary interests, from the IRA commanders. People who hold Assembly seats, such as Mitchell McLaughlin, Bairbre de Bruin and Francie Molloy, draw salaries and could soon have careers as ministers. Molloy, in an interview with an Irish paper last week, even went so far as to say: "We [Sinn Fein] are really prepared to administer British rule in Ireland for the foreseeable future."
It is just possible that Sinn Fein, with a substantial electoral base, may cease to be the political front for the IRA. In this sense, the frequent protestations by Adams and his colleagues that Sinn Fein cannot make the IRA hand in weapons may be true. They may, for all we know, have tried and failed - but it is a flaw in Sinn Fein's constant reiteration that it is a democratic party that nobody knows its exact policy on a matter of such central importance as the continuation of the armed struggle.
Adams and McGuinness may, in the next few days, prevail over the hard men; they may get enough of a concession from the Army Council to allow Trimble to carry on, and carry enough of the suspicious unionist community with him. If they do, the price will be high. They will demand a substantial demilitarisation - the withdrawal of as many as 3,000 British troops has been mooted. They have already been promised a "collective act of reconciliation" when weapons are handed in, which would honour both republican and unionist dead. Indeed, it is already inaccurate to say that weapons will be "handed in" - the term in the 1 April declaration is "put beyond use", which could be a very different matter.
There has been, in Northern Ireland, no such thing as a settlement, only a process. It keeps proceeding in relative peace - so far.
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