Politics
Still fighting after all these years. The IRA will never disband. But it may simply fade away once its historic mission is complete. Peter Taylor on the continuing war for a united Irish republic
Published 13 January 2003
A Secret History of the IRA
Ed Moloney Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 600pp, £20
ISBN 071399665X
It is not surprising that many people are perplexed by what the IRA is up to at the moment. Although its army council has steadfastly refused to issue the historic statement that the "war" is over, the IRA has been on its latest "cessation" for almost five and a half years. So what were the three Provisionals currently on trial in Colombia doing associating with Farc guerrillas? What was the break-in last year at the Castlereagh intelligence centre all about? Was the IRA spying on the secretary of state's office at Stormont? Were republicans compiling target lists of prison officers? If so, why?
Ed Moloney, who has reported on the IRA from both sides of the border with distinction over the past three decades, helps answer these question by illuminating the inbuilt contradictions of the IRA's peace project. Many of its deeply suspicious foot soldiers could only be led down the road to peace if the prospect of a return to the "war" remained around the corner should the project fail. Despite Sinn Fein's dramatic rise - it now stands on the brink of replacing the SDLP as the largest nationalist party in the North - the IRA remains the guardian of the republican holy grail: a united Ireland and the right to achieve it through force of arms. The IRA has to show its still nervous volunteers that it is still in business, however lower and less bloody the key.
The journey the IRA has made from "war" to peace is an astonishing story that Moloney chronicles in impressive detail. But it is a selective secret history, not a comprehensive one. There are many notable omissions. "Bloody Sunday", which Moloney rightly describes as "a watershed in Irish history", is dispensed with in barely a page. The 1981 hunger strike, and the momentous election of Bobby Sands to Westminster, merit barely more. The secret meeting of the IRA's delegation, including the young Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, with the then secretary of state, Willie Whitelaw, in Cheyne Walk in 1972 gets little more than a fleeting mention. Nor is there any mention of the "Real" IRA's Omagh bomb that massacred 29 men, women and children in 1998. This is surprising, given that the culmination of Moloney's story is the final split in the IRA that led to the walkout of the dissidents in 1997 to form the "Real" IRA. They believed that the Adams/McGuinness leadership had sold out.
Moloney's critics within the republican movement - and there are plenty of them - would probably argue that the omission was no accident, as they allege that most of the sources that enabled him to write the book were themselves dissidents. They believe that the book is a calculated hatchet job on Adams designed to undermine him in the eyes of the faithful. This is because it portrays him as the traitor who set the IRA on the road to compromise and sell-out through his secret dialogue with Father Alec Reid, a Redemptorist priest at the Clonard Monastery in west Belfast.
According to Moloney, the dialogue began in the early 1980s and continued for many years in secrecy and without the knowledge of the army council. Crucially, Moloney alleges that what came to underpin this dialogue between the priest and his parishioner was the principle that Northern Ireland's Protestant majority would have to give their consent to any final agreement - in effect recognising the unionist veto that the IRA was fighting and dying to destroy. This is precisely what happened on Good Friday 1998.
Although there is no doubt that Adams eventually came to recognise the historic compromises that had to be made, he did not do so in isolation, and probably not as soon as the early 1980s. The leadership of the republican movement is collegiate; it is simplistic to state that Adams was acting entirely alone. The key to his success in getting the IRA to accept compromises that would once have been tantamount to a capital offence was bringing the IRA along with him, and the prerequisite of that was his relationship with Martin McGuinness. This political-military axis was, if anything, the foundation stone of the Provisionals' peace project, not secret dialogue in chill monastery rooms. The depiction of Gerry Adams as the Machiavellian peacemaker who single-handedly hoodwinked his IRA comrades and led them blinking into the conference chamber is the fundamental weakness of the book's analysis.
However one-sided many of Moloney's sources may have been, the picture he paints of IRA conventions, in particular the dramatic showdowns of 1986 and 1998, when the dissidents were confronted by the Adams leadership and thwarted, provides a rare insight into these most secret of conclaves. Seldom also has there been such an accessible account of the IRA's complex structures and the interaction and tensions between its constituent parts - army convention, executive, GHQ and army council. Further, Moloney's narrative is animated by pen portraits of the shadowy individuals who have long been part of the IRA's contemporary history, from the reclusive Kevin McKenna to the pivotal figure of Brian Keenan, whose support for Adams has been critical in delivering the Provisionals' peace project.
What is clear from this account, although it comes as no surprise, is that the IRA leadership has long been adept at saying one thing and doing another, the result of the inherent contradictions of the peace project itself. Shortly after the Good Friday Agreement, I remember a senior IRA figure telling me that the IRA would never decommission in a million years - and that, he stressed, was in the short term. So it is no surprise that when Tony Blair demands the disbandment of the IRA, the IRA gives a defiant response. That is not to say it will never happen. As a senior member of Adams's "kitchen cabinet" once told me, the organisation will never disband. "It will simply fade away when its final goal is achieved." As Gerry Adams memorably said of the IRA, "It hasn't gone away, you know." And it shows no sign of doing so. That's what Colombia, Castlereagh and spying on the Northern Ireland Office are probably all about.
Peter Taylor is the author of Provos, Loyalists and Brits (all published by Bloomsbury)
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