A Secret History of the IRA Read online




  A SECRET HISTORY

  OF THE IRA

  Second Edition

  A SECRET HISTORY

  OF THE IRA

  Second Edition

  Ed Moloney

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by W.W. Norton and Company Ltd 2002

  First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002

  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  Second edition published in Penguin Books 2007

  1

  Copyright © Ed Moloney, 2002, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Map on page 135 courtesy of Bob E. Hall, Center for Earth and Environmental Science, Indiana

  University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. Maps on pages 36, 76, 94, 351 reprinted from

  Provisional Irish Republicans by Robert W. White. Copyright 1993 by Robert W. White. Reproduced

  with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Conn.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90069–8

  This book is dedicated to

  all the people who lost their lives

  in the Northern Ireland Troubles.

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps

  Preface to the second edition

  Preface to the first edition

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART ONE: The Dogs of War

  One: Roots

  Two: The Defenders

  Three: “The Big Lad”

  PART TWO: Taking On the Old Guard

  Four: Cage 11

  Five: “Our Dreyfus”

  Six: A Long, Hot Summer

  PART THREE: A Secret Process

  Seven: “Behind the Scenes”

  Eight: Dealing with the Brits

  Nine: “Stepping Stones”

  Ten: “No Idle Boast”

  Eleven: Death in Tyrone

  Twelve: “The War of the Twilight”

  Thirteen: The Derry Experiment

  PART FOUR: Ending the War

  Fourteen: Seven Men in a Room

  Fifteen: Cease-Fire

  Sixteen: The Sos

  Seventeen: The Point of No Return

  Eighteen: The End Begins

  Nineteen: The Midas Touch

  Twenty: The Last Kalashnikov

  Epilogue: “Turning the Titanic in a Bathtub”

  Appendix 1 Special Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle Meeting, April 12, 1980

  Appendix 2 TUAS Document—Summer 1994

  Appendix 3 Post–1996 Convention IRA Constitution

  Appendix 4 IRA Executive Chairman Sean McGrane’s Speech at the 1997 Convention

  Appendix 5 IRA Chiefs of Staff

  Appendix 6 The Mitchell Principles

  Appendix 7 Letter from Father Alec Reid to Charles Haughey, May 11, 1987

  Appendix 8 “Concrete Proposals” and “Stepping Stones”: two undated documents by Father Alec Reid

  Appendix 9 IRA Statement Ending its Armed Campaign against Britain, July 28, 2005

  Notes

  Chronology of Events

  Dramatis Personae

  Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations

  Chart of IRA Structure

  Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF MAPS

  Ireland

  Northern Ireland

  Belfast

  IRA operational areas—Northern and Southern Command

  Derry

  History, Stephen said, is a nightmare

  from which I am trying to awake.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  Preface to the second edition

  It is to the enormous credit of Penguin Books and my editor there, Simon Winder, that I have been given the opportunity to update A Secret History of the IRA. The first edition ended just after the IRA’s first act of decommissioning in the autumn of 2001, following the September 11 attacks in the United States and the arrest of IRA personnel in Colombia a month beforehand. This edition brings the story to what I would argue is the definitive end of the Provisional IRA as an instrument of armed and revolutionary resistance to British policy in Ireland. With that event, I believe, it is now also possible to say that the Troubles have ended.

  The ending was signaled in two ways. First, by the IRA statement in July 2005 that formally announced that its armed struggle against Britain was over; and secondly by the completion of the decommissioning process the following September. Doubtless the IRA retained some weaponry to protect its leadership and key members against rivals and enemies but the destruction of its Libyan-supplied arsenal robbed the IRA of the capacity to wage war. Not only that but the act itself was replete with symbolic meaning, indicating a wish to eschew armed struggle in favour of political methods from thereon. The event was unprecedented in the history of Ireland’s struggle for independence.

  This point came after five long and often turbulent years which saw the downfall of the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, and his replacement as unionism’s leader by his party’s long-time loyalist critic and rival, Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionists and permanent Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church. Nationalist politics were refashioned in an equally radical way with the IRA’s political partner, Sinn Fein, replacing the SDLP as the dominant party and Gerry Adams displacing John Hume as nationalism’s leader.

  With that, the moderate center-ground of Northern Irish politics—in as much as it had ever existed—disappeared and potential executive power was transferred, as one acerbic critic put it, into the hands of a theocrat and an autocrat who might or might not agree to exercise it in the best interests of all the people of Northern Ireland.

  That this state of affairs was brought about by the handling of IRA decommissioning is beyond dispute. It is a central thesis of the second edition of this book that the IRA could have decommissioned all its weapons much sooner, but chose instead to prevaricate and thereby to inject an even more virulent strain of sectarianism into Northern Irish politics. In such a way were Trimble and the SDLP destabilized and Sin
n Fein catapulted to political and electoral success. It is surely no coincidence that once the process of destroying Trimble and sidelining the SDLP was completed, all the IRA’s objections to final decommissioning suddenly vanished.

  The plaudits that came the way of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, in the wake of the IRA finally completing the decommissioning process are understandable. The two leaders had worked for years for this day to dawn, but any credit that they are due should, however, be balanced by the knowledge that it was they who facilitated this Sinn Fein strategy and it is they, ultimately, who bear responsibility for this triumph of the extremes in Northern Ireland.

  At the time of writing, the DUP and Sinn Fein were still squabbling about the one issue remaining in the way of their sharing government: Sinn Fein’s acceptance of the policing and criminal justice system. It remains to be seen whether their differences, which concern the practicalities rather than the principle of the matter, can be overcome but of a number of things there can be little doubt. One is that the Provisional IRA’s war is over for good. Another is that the politics of Northern Ireland have been changed forever and in a way no one could have predicted. Whether this will be for good or ill is a verdict only the passage of time can deliver, but the democratic record of Northern Ireland’s new potential political leadership gives little cause for optimism.

  Penguin’s decision to publish the second edition of this book has enabled me to tell that tortuous if significant tale in two new chapters—Nineteen and Twenty—as well as in an Epilogue which takes the story up to the Assembly election of March 2007. I have also been able to correct some errors and compensate for some omissions in the first edition and add new information about the betrayal of the gun-running ship the Eksund and the attitudes of different Army Council members, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, towards it. Fresh information has come to light about Adams’s IRA career after his release from Long Kesh in 1977 and that section of the first edition had been amended accordingly. The sad death of former Fianna Fail taoiseach Charles Haughey in June 2006 also releases me from the pledge of confidentiality I gave him while researching the first edition. Haughey played a crucial and often undervalued part in the genesis and evolution of the peace process and I believe that without him the birth of the peace process would have been much more difficult. At this point I should put on record that Haughey, who was in the early stages of the illness that claimed his life when we first spoke, did not search me out but rather was a reluctant and often grudging source. “The stage,” he once grumbled in the face of my persistence, “is already overcrowded with people attempting to claim credit.” It was I who deduced that he had played such an important role and it was I who sought him out. Only after numerous and lengthy visits to Kinsealy was I able to persuade him to tell his part in the story. I am now very happy to be able to acknowledge all this.

  One key part of his story, and in its own way an extremely valuable historical document, is the letter of May 1987 written to Haughey by Father Alec Reid, seeking a secret dialogue between him and Gerry Adams and setting out the terms for an IRA cessation that Adams would find acceptable. I was able to read and fully transcribe this letter in Kinsealy. It is compelling and extraordinary evidence that, many years before the Irish public and the bulk of IRA members and leaders learned of the peace process, the Sinn Fein president was seeking to end the IRA’s war on terms little different from those implicit in the Good Friday Agreement. I am now able to reproduce this in full along with other documents pertaining to the early part of the peace process.

  Father Reid himself has also started to acknowledge that the peace process began much earlier than any of the participants were previously prepared to admit. In a BBC Radio Four interview in November 2006 with Olivia O’Leary, the Redemptorist priest conceded that he began his discussions with Gerry Adams not long after the abduction and killing of a UDR soldier in South Armagh, an event that took place in the autumn of 1982 and was described in detail in the first edition of this book.1 This is a welcome and overdue sign that the information permafrost surrounding the peace process is beginning to melt. It is of exceptional historical importance that those who were involved in the IRA during this time also begin to put their accounts and memories on record. History should not always be written by the victors.

  By the time the second edition of A Secret History of the IRA is available on the bookstands, Gerry Adams’s prediction that there will be a united Ireland by 2016, the centenary of the Easter Rising, will be only nine years away. We will not have to wait long to discover whether that statement was the product of irrational exuberance, political expediency or an accurate assessment of constitutional possibilities.

  Ed Moloney

  New York

  December 2006

  Preface to the first edition

  There were never any strategic considerations at stake, like those in the Middle East, for example, nor did the killing ever approach the carnage or savagery of the Balkans or Rwanda. There were no oil fields or gold mines to be captured, or any ideology to be overthrown or vindicated. But the Troubles in Northern Ireland had one quality that marked the violence there as special, and that was the sheer length of the conflict—that and the fact that no one could really see an end to it.

  By the time of the first IRA cease-fire of 1994, the Troubles had lasted for a quarter of a century, so long that the violence had become an almost permanent feature of the world’s political landscape. Other conflicts would erupt, climax, and then fade away, their names soon forgotten, but the bombing and shooting in Belfast, Derry, and South Armagh seemed to last forever.

  The Troubles were at or near the bottom of the list of significant global conflicts, a low-intensity war that occasionally exploded into spectacular bursts of violence but more often was characterized by a killing or two a week, deaths that by the end had become so routine that they scarcely merited a headline outside of Ireland. But the violence devastated a whole society, scarring two generations of Irish people, the baby boomers who came of age when the Troubles began in the late 1960s and their children, who grew up knowing only instability and bloodshed.

  More than 3,700 people were killed in the violence, an average of just over two a week for the thirty years that the conflict lasted. Almost as many people died within a couple of hours in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, but to conclude therefore that the Troubles were a petty affair would be a mistake. Had a similar conflict consumed the United States, the equivalent death toll would have been over 600,000; in Britain, 150,000. Nearly 1 in every 50 of Northern Ireland’s 1.5 million people, some 30,000, were injured in the violence. The comparable figure in the United States would be 5 million; in Britain, just over 1 million. Very few people in Northern Ireland did not personally know someone who had been killed in the Troubles, and many knew several. There are many definitions of a civil war, but that is surely one of the most compelling.

  Thousands were caught up in the Troubles in a more intimate fashion, becoming members of groups like the IRA and, on the loyalist side, the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, for whom they killed, wounded, maimed, bombed, robbed, and went to jail or early graves. Putting a figure to such numbers is by definition difficult, for these were not organizations that kept detailed personnel records. But Martin McGuinness, who has held virtually all the senior ranks in the IRA, once told the author that he reckoned 10,000 people had been through the ranks of the IRA over the years—and who could know better?—while at the height of its power the UDA could, given an hour or two of notice, put 20,000 men on the streets of Belfast. In all the important ways the Troubles pervaded Northern Ireland.

  The conflict was not confined to the geographical boundaries of the state. It regularly spilled over into the Irish Republic, injecting an unwelcome instability into the body politic there and warping the institutions of the young state almost beyond repair, the media and the legal s
ystem in particular. Its effects were also felt farther afield, wherever the Irish diaspora had scattered its unfortunate people—in the United States, Australia, and Canada—and the violence was repeatedly exported to Britain, where scores lost their lives over the years in bombings and shootings, mostly carried out by the IRA.

  The Troubles were, above all else, the latest and the most protracted phase in an Anglo-Irish conflict that had properly begun some four hundred years earlier, with the Tudor wars and plantations of the sixteenth century, although there had been resistance of some sort to the English presence ever since the Normans invaded in the twelfth century. Ireland was Britain’s first colony and one of its last. Resistance to occupation went through alternating phases of violence and politics, and each stage in the conflict brought Ireland a little nearer to complete separation from Britain. The culmination of all this was the Treaty of 1921, a settlement that paved the way for twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties first to govern themselves and then, in 1949, to declare themselves a republic while the remnant of the island in the North remained British.

  Had the architects of the 1921 settlement set out to create an inherently unstable entity, they could scarcely have done better than to design Northern Ireland in the way they did. The state contained within its boundaries the seeds of its own devastation. Packed into its narrow confines were two troubled communities. One was the uneasy majority, the Protestants whose ancestors had planted or colonized native lands so as to make Ireland a safer place for Britain. But they paid a terrible price for their service to the motherland. They and their forebears lived in constant fear of retribution from the substantial minority of Irish Catholics in their midst, the native Gaels they had supplanted and whose land they had taken, while they came to distrust the British almost as much as they feared the Irish. The Protestants knew nothing but insecurity and learned to reject anything else as a distortion of the natural order.