CHAPTER SIX
The period between 1985 and 1990 was one in which Northern Ireland appeared once again to have settled into a period of unremitting violence, a situation characterized by the Enniskillen bombing of 1987 and the deaths of three PIRA activists in Gibraltar in March 1988. Violence was firmly centre stage. Three factors account for the climate of violence that occurred after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough. The first was that the Republican movement regrouped around an agenda that included the entry of Sinn Fein into southern Irish electoral politics, but which also sanctioned a renewed commitment to battle with the British Government. A second feature of the period was that the British Cabinet, buoyed by the success of Hillsborough, stepped up its attempts to contain the PIRA. Not only did the British Army reinvigorate the military struggle, they also sought to persuade the Dublin Government to greater efforts in containing the paramilitaries, not least through the adoption of tighter extradition procedures in the Republic. A third feature of the period was that the Protestants adopted a belligerent anti-Hillsborough stance that led to an intensification of the activities of the Protestant paramilitaries. All of the above meant that after a period of initial optimism following Hillsborough, the Province lurched back into the familiar pattern of the modern conflict. Yet beneath the violence, very slowly, new trends began to emerge in Ireland. These included a greater degree of cooperation between London and Dublin over the containment of Republican paramilitaries and, towards the end of the decade, a decisive shift in Sinn Fein strategy. The latter emphasized the pursuit of political legitimacy in preference to violent rebellion. This chapter traces the evolution of those trends.
The Republicans regroup
After Hillsborough, the British Government regarded the reinforcement of links with Dublin as imperative. It feared that Sinn Fein might actually make serious inroads into electoral politics in the south that would result in a concomitant decline in Anglo-Irish affairs. In the mid-1980s this seemed a very real possibility. In particular, the emergence after 1983 of a new type of Sinn Fein leadership, typified by Gerry Adams, had been responsible for ensuring that some of the old tenants of Republicanism were relinquished. Traditionally, Sinn Fein leaders had held that the southern Irish Government, created in 1921, was illegitimate. It had, therefore, refused to contest elections in the south under the so-called ‘abstentionist’ policy. Throughout the early 1980s part of the Sinn Fein leadership had been rethinking its political strategy vis-à-vis elections, and had been pondering the chances of electoral success in the south. The decision of the party to reject ‘abstentionism’ officially was made public in 1986 when the Sinn Fein leadership agreed to field candidates in southern Irish elections. The timing of the announcement was not a coincidence, but was directly linked to the agreement at Hillsborough. The Anglo-Irish Agreement had, for Sinn Fein, made the issue of political representation in the south an urgent one. Most of the southern Irish population had welcomed the Hillsborough accord and demonstrated little inclination to agree with Sinn Fein that the Irish Government was illegitimate. The Sinn Fein leadership feared that if it did not quickly participate in the political life of the south, the Republican movement might grow increasingly isolated and remain confined to the North. Sinn Fein hoped that through contesting elections in the south, Republicanism would become a powerful electoral phenomenon throughout Ireland,1 halting Anglo-Irish collusion. Despite British fears and Sinn Fein hopes, electoral success eluded the party. It made little impact on voters in the south. In the elections in Eire during 1987, for example, Sinn Fein secured less than 2 per cent of votes cast. More critically for the leadership, the rejection of abstensionism also sparked a fierce internal battle within the nationalist movement. While Adams had managed to persuade a majority of the nationalist movement, including parts of the PIRA, to reject abstensionism, the more traditional parts of the armed wing had opposed participation in southern electoral politics. The dispute over abstensionism threatened to split the movement, much as it had in the past. Previous attempts at abolishing abstentionism in the early 1980s had failed, primarily because the Mid-Ulster and Kerry brigades of the PIRA had vehemently opposed such a move, while other parts of the PIRA, most notably the South Armagh and Dundalk brigades, had divided over the issue.2 In 1986, Adams wished to avoid a repetition of such fragmentation. In order to reassure the paramilitaries that acceptance of an electoral strategy did not and would not mean an abdication of the armed struggle,3 or lead to a constitutional sell-out, certain key terms were negotiated between Sinn Fein and the armed wing.4 These were that central positions on the army council were to be filled by hard-liners committed to the military struggle; that local units were to be given greater freedom to mount attacks and that Martin McGuinness was to hold a central role on the Northern Command of the PIRA. In addition, two hard-line paramilitaries, who had been previously expelled from the movement for opposing the leadership, were allowed to return as paramilitaries in the Belfast area.5 The immediate effect of this deal was that the PIRA became less tightly controlled, with a membership more inclined to mount individual attacks on the security forces. This posed problems for the Sinn Fein leadership as it strove to gain legitimacy through the ballot box.
The Sinn Fein strategy of electoral participation combined with violent struggle was fraught with ambiguities. Participation within the electoral framework sat uneasily with an armed struggle that was designed to usurp the very institutions in which the Republicans sought representation. Sinn Fein, for example, believed that the Hillsborough Agreement (although a fruitless endeavour in the longer term) had been forced on the British Government solely through Republican pressure. Adams claimed that it was the result of ‘the electoral advances of Sinn Fein and the successes of the Republican movement which had forced the British to negotiate with the south’.6 Sinn Fein was therefore in a strange twist of logic, claiming responsibility for reshaping the very system that the Republican paramilitaries wanted to destroy.
The strategy of violent action and electoral politics had at its heart a deeper and more practical problem than that of mere ambiguity. In a nutshell, this was that the violent actions of PIRA often alienated voters. Sinn Fein attempted to reconcile the two aspects of policy with a succession of claims that the PIRA only targeted ‘legitimate’ security forces, not civilians. It was hoped that this would soothe electoral fears and allow even those who disapproved of violence to vote for Sinn Fein. Such claims, however, made little impact on voters, and after 1987 Sinn Fein continued to lose electoral ground, even in the North. In the general election of that year, it lost sixteen of its council seats. While leaders such as Gerry Adams did not openly condemn paramilitary attacks, he was publicly critical of PIRA ‘mistakes’ which cost Sinn Fein votes. At the 1989 Ard Fheis, he directly addressed some of his remarks to the military wing of the party: ‘At times the fate of the struggle is in your hands. You have to be careful and careful again.’7 Yet there appeared to be little that Adams or other leaders could do in the late 1980s, or indeed at any other time, to ensure that the more hard-line members of the Provisionals did not commit ‘mistakes’. Sinn Fein leaders expressed exasperation at the timings of some of the Provisionals activities but appeared unwilling or, more critically, unable to stop them.
There was, at this point in the 1980s, a great deal of confidence within the Provisionals that they would be able to escalate the military campaign against the British Government. In particular, they hoped that the connection with Libya would be useful. Contacts between the PIRA and the Libyans dated back to 1981. Since 1985 enormous shipments of arms supplied by the Ghadaffi regime had entered Ireland.8 The sheer quantity and quality of the arms supplied by the Middle Eastern leader provided the paramilitaries with an unprecedented arsenal. The shipments included surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and over 2,000,000 rounds of ammunition.9
In addition to fostering links with sympathetic foreign regimes and building its military arsenal, the PIRA intensified its campaign against the security forces in rural areas. In particular, it targeted off-duty members of the security forces who lived in isolated areas and rural police stations in remote locations. These were both vulnerable targets. Many rural police stations were still only manned during the day, and off-duty police officers had little or no pro- tection from attacks. The PIRA also sought to make it impossible for the RUC to operate in these areas10 by targeting anybody who was involved in any way with the police. For example, even the builders who were contracted to work on bombed police stations were designated as security-related targets. In effect, the rural infrastructure of policing was under threat.
In response, both the RUC and the British Army undertook considerable efforts to counter this strategy. In May 1987 the SAS destroyed one of the PIRA's most feared units, the East Tyrone brigade, as it attacked an RUC station at Loughall in Co. Armagh.11 Eight PIRA men were killed. It was a notable victory for the security forces as it was the single biggest loss suffered by the IRA since the 1920s. Not unsurprisingly, the nature and ‘efficiency’ of the SAS operation again opened up the debate not only over whether a ‘shoot to kill’ policy operated in the Province, but also over the nature of covert operations in Northern Ireland generally. In this respect the Loughall attack was particularly interesting because the Army had, at practically every stage of the operation, excellent intelligence on the PIRA's plans. Critics of SAS behaviour during the Loughall operation asked whether or not it might have been possible to end the attack in a manner short of eight fatalities. Could another way not have been found of preventing the attack? Might it have been possible at Loughall to arrest or detain the paramilitaries?12 Loughall once more starkly raised the question of the nature of the struggle in Northern Ireland. It was claimed by the Army that the soldiers involved in the ambush had followed the ‘rules of engagement’ operated by the British Army in the Province. These were the rules of the so-called yellow card, under which soldiers had to shout specific warnings before shooting. The Army asserted that these rules had been followed at Loughall and that the ensuing deaths were therefore ‘legitimate’. Indeed, when commenting on the deaths, Gerry Adams conceded that Loughall had been a ‘fair’ engagement between PIRA combatants and the security forces. Yet, even if both sides had developed an ‘understanding’ of the risks involved in ‘military’ operations, incidents such as Loughall did little to bring a resolution of the conflict closer. Indeed, it is questionable whether it even dented the ability of the paramilitaries to operate. After the losses at Loughall, the PIRA was determined to show that it could still operate both efficiently at home and abroad. In 1987, the PIRA launched an attack on the Rheindalen base in West Germany, and on 8 November it detonated a bomb during the Remembrance Day service at Enniskillen in Co. Fermanagh. The latter detonation killed eleven people and injured over sixty others. The PIRA later expressed regret for the deaths, but argued in a rather spurious fashion that the bomb had actually been triggered by the British Army.13
The deaths at Enniskillen and the subsequent public revulsion triggered a massive security alert in both the North and the south. It is, of course, always difficult to quantify public outrage or its impact on public policy but after the bombing, security forces north and south of the border engaged in intense activities to contain further PIRA actions. This period was characterized by a marked improvement in Anglo-Irish collaboration against the paramilitaries.14 The adoption in the south of a new Extradition Act on 14 December 1987, in particular, marked a turning point. The Act made it more difficult for those members of the PIRA found guilty of terrorist offences to escape extradition to either the North or the mainland. The passing of the bill was, for Mrs Thatcher, one of the successes to come from the Hillsborough accord.15 The British Government had long sought tougher measures to prevent the south acting as a safe haven for the PIRA and had put pressure on the southern Government to harden its stance on the extradition of paramilitaries. It was a thorny issue. Extradition was a politically sensitive matter for any southern Irish leader. In recognition of this, in 1986–87 the British Government sought to soften Irish sensibilities to the process by reopening the cases of some Irish people held in British prisons on terrorist convictions. Accordingly, the British Government ordered a new police investigation into the convictions of the so-called ‘Guildford Four’ who had already served twelve years for allegedly bombing a pub in 1974, while another group, the ‘Birmingham Six’, were also given leave to appeal against their convictions for terrorist offences. However, these appeals of Irish people who had been tried in Great Britain only heightened tension in the Republic. The debate over extradition caused a political storm.
The relationship between the United Kingdom and Eire over extradition had always been one of unease and controversy. The return of fugitives between the two had, before Irish independence, occurred under a system of reciprocal warrants. This was a legacy of the colonial relationship under which warrants for extradition in one country had been endorsed in the other. The practice was actively maintained after the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1921 and persisted until 1964,16 although the system had partly broken down in 1929. The breakdown of relations was a reflection of tensions between the new Republic and its neighbour in the North. Both North and south subsequently refused to endorse warrants originating in the other part of Ireland. More seriously, the practice ceased altogether when, in 1964, the House of Lords refused to endorse Irish warrants and the Irish Supreme Court ruled that the process of backing external warrants was not in tune with the spirit of the constitution. In effect, this meant that after 1964 all three areas – the south, the North and the United Kingdom itself- could act as ‘safe havens’ for paramilitaries.
As the modern conflict in the North unfolded, it became urgent for all three sides to develop a clear position on extradition processes. The first British military fatality in 1971 was quickly followed by a demand from the North for the return from the south of those suspected of committing offences in the Province. The demand opened a Pandora's box of legal and political issues which starkly exposed the differences between Dublin and Westminster over the Northern conflict. Primarily, differences centred on what constituted a ‘political offence’. The southern Irish position, in accordance with its constitution, was that a person accused of a ‘political offence’ could not be extradited.
The southern Irish judiciary held in a number of cases that suspects could not be extradited to another country if they had committed what the court deemed to be a political offence. It followed therefore that a crime committed in connection with the PIRA could be designated a political offence.17 The case of a Catholic priest, Bartholomew Burns, who was accused of handling explosives for the PIRA in Scotland, led to a direct statement of this position. The judge involved in the case expressed it thus: ‘it seems again impossible to categorise the existing situation in Northern Ireland and Britain as being otherwise than a political disturbance, part of and incidental to which is the keeping of explosives… for the IRA’.18 This did not condone the crime committed, but followed a strictly constitutional interpretation of cases. Yet, as the 1970s wore on Irish judges increasingly found themselves in difficult, not to say untenable, positions. In 1975, the Irish Minister of Justice argued that judges were in an embarrassing predicament because they were constrained by the interpretation of the ‘political offence’ to release prisoners accused of serious crimes.19 By the mid-1980s, the strain on the system began to show and Irish politicians were placed under growing pressure to initiate change in the interpretation of a political offence. Some of the momentum for reform came from a recognition that Irish law on this issue was increasingly at odds, not only with the British judiciary but also with the growing body of European law. In February 1987, after a decade of hesitation, Dublin signed the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism (ECST), removing the ‘political offence’ from the list of crimes that could not be extradited.20
As part of the price for movement on the issue of extradition, Dublin expected British movement on key Northern Irish issues. Specifically, the Irish Government maintained that Anglo-Irish relations should not be seen as a one-way street under which Ireland merely acquiesced in British wishes for the conduct of policy associated with the North. Dublin pointed out that in spite of the Hillsborough Agreement the British and Irish administrations had not agreed on key aspects of government in the Province. In particular, the Irish sought reform to the criminal justice system in the North. Garret Fitzgerald argued that a new code of conduct for the RUC and reform of the courts had been central to his agreement to the Hillsborough accord.21 Throughout 1986–87 the Irish Government pressed hard for reform in the North as the price for improved extradition proceedings in the south. These demands met with little sympathy on the British side.22 The British Government remained vexed by what it perceived as Irish vacillation over extradition and the political capital it believed that Irish politicians gained through appearing tough on British requests for cooperation over the affairs of Northern Ireland.23
Some of the British attitude ignored the realities of Irish party politics and the sensitivity of southern Irish voters to events in the North. One of the ambiguities of southern political life was that the Dublin Government itself pursued a hard line against the PIRA and Sinn Fein but was also intensely critical of British actions in the North which more or less replicated Irish restrictions operating the Republic. For example, Dublin had a long history of using ‘internment’ against paramilitaries but strongly objected to any British implementation of such a policy. Even so, no Irish politician could appear disinterested or objective on Northern Ireland. This meant that as a matter of expedience, British policy had to be vigorously scrutinized. Never mind that Sinn Fein failed at the ballot box in the south, many voters still objected to the British presence and Irish politicians had to respect this allegiance.
British politicians also, at times, appeared ignorant of the battle being fought in the Republic over the ‘modernization’ of Irish society. This battle had important ramifications for the relationship with the North. Some Irish leaders, against powerful opposition, sought to make the Republic a more modern and secular state. The drive for social transition was led, in many respects, by Garret Fitzgerald.24 But reforming a predominantly Catholic and agrarian state was not an easy matter and in June 1986 reformers suffered a major blow when the Irish electorate voted against permitting civil divorce. It was a significant defeat for social transformation in the south, and the poll on divorce provided Unionists with evidence that influence from Dublin equated to Rome Rule, making them even more determined to avoid southern Irish influence through the Hillsborough process. The cumulative effect of the bid to restructure the Republic was that Garret Fitzgerald occupied an increasingly fragile political position that was easily challenged by rivals. In the June elections of 1987 Garret Fitzgerald was replaced by Charles Haughey who not only had publicly stated his opposition to British demands for changes in Irish extradition procedures, but had also been implicated in gun-running schemes to the North. It appeared, after this turn of events, that there was little real hope of Anglo-Irish agreement over the Province, but after pressure sustained from Washington, Haughey agreed to support change and the southern Irish passed the new Extradition Act on 14 December 1987.25
The Anglo-Irish Agreement thus survived its first major challenge, and despite public wrangling over extradition, the security forces of both North and south, in the same period, initiated unprecedented coordination against the paramilitaries. On 23 November 1987, both Northern and southern security forces mounted a huge search for Libyan arms. The first big discovery of foreign arms was made in late January 1988 in North Donegal, and in the following month another haul was discovered in Dublin.26
Gibraltar
Despite increased collaboration, the issue of security and legal procedures in Northern Ireland continued to provoke unease in the conduct of Anglo-Irish relations. It seems almost unnecessary to note, after a history of the modern period, that the Irish Government continued to lack confidence in the British justice system. But events in early 1988 conspired to promote a near crisis in the relationship between London and Dublin. In January 1988, the Court of Appeal rejected the appeal of the ‘Birmingham Six’. In the very same week it was announced by the British Attorney General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, that it would not be in the national interest to prosecute those RUC officers found guilty of perverting the course of justice as a result of the Stalker/Samson inquiry.27 In February, the only British soldier to have been sentenced so far in the conflict on a manslaughter charge, one Private Thain, was released after three years. In March, one of the most sensational actions of the British security forces took place in Gibraltar in the ‘death on the rock incident’, which once more highlighted the British military role in Ireland.
Throughout the latter part of 1987, the PIRA had been planning a revenge attack for the eight deaths at Loughall and was also planning to escalate the campaign against the British forces, emboldened by the Libyan supplies. The overall campaign aimed to ‘sicken’ the British Government into a retreat from Ireland. In this particular instance, the PIRA wanted to stage a spectacular ‘hit’ against the British security forces. It chose the Royal Anglian Regiment at Ince's Hall, based in the main street of Gibraltar. O'Brien has alleged that part of the motivation for choosing this particular site was as a thank-you to Ghadaffi for supplying arms, indicating that they were to be used for good anti-British purposes.28 In preparation for the attack, the PIRA placed a ‘team’ of three active members in Gibraltar. Both the RUC and the British intelligence forces were aware of PIRA plans and on 2 March had flown a team of SAS soldiers to the rock.29 On 6 March, three Irish people were shot dead by the SAS; all were unarmed, but were well-known members of the PIRA. The subsequent controversy over the killings was intense, not least because of the confusion over whether the suspects were in fact in possession of a bomb.30 As it turned out, there was a bomb, but it was not, as some newspapers alleged, in the car of the victims – it was later discovered over the border in Marbella.
The involvement of the SAS in this operation, as well as its behaviour at Loughall, underlined the emphasis that continued to be placed on special forces. While the SAS had for over a decade been increasingly important in British Army strategy, by 1988 this trend reached full implementation. Although British soldiers continued to reinforce the notion of police primacy on the streets of the Province, an elite group of soldiers was undertaking specialist operations designed to destroy the heart of the PIRA. This development indicated that rather than trying to defeat the PIRA through broad sweeping operations such as internment, the British military was now using specialist troops to fight single operations. Reinforcing the 30,000 armed forces on the ground, which allowed the British Government to control the Province, small elite military units were used in a bid to eliminate key paramilitaries.31
The reverberations from the attack in Gibraltar were felt almost immediately in the Province when the three PIRA members were buried in Northern Ireland. At one of the funerals, which took place on 16 March in Milltown, a Loyalist gunman attacked mourners, killing three of them. Subsequently, as one of the mourners was buried, another tragedy occurred, when Robert Howes and Derek Wood, two British corporals in plain clothes, drove into the funeral crowds. Rather inexplicably they appeared unaware of what was going on. They were savagely dragged from their car, beaten and then shot.32
From these bloody events, the Governments in London and Dublin took very different lessons. To the southern Irish, the British administration still seemed more preoccupied with counter-insurgency and the defeat of the PIRA than with a programme of thorough-going reform. Indeed, from an Irish perspective the British Government did not seem to perceive the ‘negative’ effects that the deaths at Loughall and Gibraltar created. This view was compounded for the Irish during the early months of 1988 when not only was the appeal of the Birmingham Six rejected but it was followed by a similar rejection of the appeals of the Guildford Four, the MacGuires and the Winchester Three. The British perspective of the events of early 1988 was not unexpectedly different from that of the Irish. Not least, officials continued to deplore what they perceived as the unnecessary vacillation over extradition procedures in the southern Irish courts, and in 1988 Westminster embarked on a tightening of procedures in the Northern Irish courts, as well as a review of British security policy in the Province. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher lists a number of options she wanted to be considered for use in the Province after the violent events of late 1987 and early 1988. She relates that she not only considered banning Sinn Fein, introducing identity cards and reintroducing selective internment, but also considered reversing the policy of police primacy.33 Some of these proposals were indeed quickly taken up in a bid to contain the paramilitaries once more.
The justice system and media bans
One initiative from Mrs Thatcher's list which was activated in the Province was the withdrawal of what was termed ‘the right of silence’ for those under arrest. This issue had been debated at length since the beginning of the Northern Irish conflict, but its implementation had been rejected in both 1972 and 1984. The idea behind its introduction was that a court would be able to draw inferences from the fact that a person had remained silent when questioned by the RUC. In particular, this innovation was provoked not only by the upswing in paramilitary activity but more directly from the cases of three Irish people convicted of plotting to kill Tom King.34 They had, under questioning, elected to remain silent. From 1988, although suspects could still remain silent, the failure to cooperate could later be used as evidence against them in court.35
Other measures taken to make the activities of the PIRA more difficult included the imposition of a series of bans in the media on Sinn Fein activity. The British Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, implemented a broadcasting ban on 19 October 1988. It required broadcasters to ‘refrain from broadcasting direct statements’ by representatives of Sinn Fein, Republican Sinn Fein and the Ulster Defence Association.36 It was claimed that the ban was in response to the upsurge in paramilitary activity during the earlier part of the year, in particular the PIRA bombing of a coach at Ballygawley in Co. Tyrone in which eight British soldiers died as they arrived back in the Province after leave.37 With this attack, the PIRA had actually killed more British soldiers in the first eight months of 1988 than in any comparable period during the decade. The News Letter stated that the PIRA had, through its actions, challenged Mrs Thatcher to respond and if she did not many more would die.38
In addition to media bans, a requirement was placed in the Elected Authorities Act of 1989 that all councillors in Northern Ireland take an oath repudiating the use of violence. The British Government also introduced measures to prevent funds reaching the PIRA.39 The broadcasting ban in particular was intended to ‘silence’ Sinn Fein and prevent it from entering the mainstream of Irish politics. It was invoked despite the fact that Sinn Fein had actually been losing popularity since the early 1980s. It might be argued that there was little need to protect the public from Sinn Fein as the electorate had shown little inclination to place the party at the centre of political life in the Province. Yet, for many, if not for the British Government, Sinn Fein held the key to the activities of the PIRA. Any prospect of peace necessarily had to include the armed wing of the Republican struggle. It was the recognition that any real political progress had to include Sinn Fein that encouraged the SDLP to hold out the prospects of talks with its leadership in 1988.
Sinn Fein responded positively to this development. This was partly because of its drive towards electoral legitimacy but also because of the new media restrictions. The increased collaboration between London and Dublin, the renewed vigour of the British approach towards the Province and its failure at the ballot box caused anxiety in the Sinn Fein leadership. The notion that in the years immediately after Hillsborough the Anglo-Irish alliance was lining up against them pushed Sinn Fein into a reconsideration of how it could break out of growing political isolation. Sinn Fein had already established a common framework with two of the smallest parties in the Province, the Irish Independent Party and the People's Democracy, but these could not provide the real political clout that Gerry Adams sought. Sinn Fein therefore sought a formal dialogue with the SDLP. On 11 January 1988 John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, met with Gerry Adams and afterwards set up a series of talks between the parties to try to establish a dialogue with the political wing of the PIRA.40 Hume had as his prime motivation the desire to end PIRA activities. In particular, Hume argued that paramilitary activity only hardened the resolve of the British Government to remain in Ireland, whereas the Anglo-Irish Agreement had, the SDLP argued, showed a British willingness to withdraw.41
Out of these talks there emerged a better understanding between the two groups but also clear differences, not only on how to put forward the nationalist position, but what in fact the nationalist position was. In particular, the SDLP deplored the use of paramilitary violence to achieve nationalist ends. For example, on 17 March Hume argued that the IRA campaign was actually doing damage to the people whom it claimed to be protecting, and that it was too simplistic to claim that the cause of all violence was the British presence in Ireland. Rather, Hume stressed that the British position was not the source of all trouble in Northern Ireland, but pointed instead to the intra-ethnic nature of the struggle in Ireland. The SDLP leader also argued that it was impossible to think that the British Army could withdraw either immediately or easily. Not least, he pointed out that such a withdrawal would leave 20,000 armed members of the RUC and the UDR in the Province, without the ‘neutral’ presence of British troops.42 Not surprisingly, Adams did not agree with this view of a neutral British presence, nor indeed with Hume's interpretation of an island divided between Irish peoples. Nevertheless, Adams sought a common front with the SDLP which would bring the Sinn Fein party into the mainstream of political activity both in the North and the south. He calculated that Dublin would find it difficult to avoid reinforcing a united nationalist position.43 The SDLP/Sinn Fein talks ended on 5 September 1988. Each group restated its position. Both agreed that self-determination was the key to the future and that the ‘Irish people’ should be defined as all the people living on the island of Ireland. However, both sides continued to disagree as to how Unionist disagreement could be countered.
While little came immediately from the talks (certainly there was no evidence that a framework had been agreed), the basis for future peace talks had been laid in that Sinn Fein was now openly debating the nationalist position in Ireland. Significantly, however, Sinn Fein did not concede that the use of violence was illegitimate or counter-productive in the struggle to achieve Irish unity.44 There was no indication that Sinn Fein could be persuaded to harness, if possible, the activities of the PIRA, thus frustrating one of John Hume's primary objectives in talking to Sinn Fein. The talks between Sinn Fein and the SDLP provoked immense controversy among politicians in the Province. The Unionists declared that they would refuse to talk to Sinn Fein while Hume continued his dialogue with Adams.45 For many Unionists, the period after Hillsborough, culminating in these talks, represented a severe weakening of their position vis-à-vis the Government on the mainland.
Protestant grievances
For Protestants, the Hillsborough Agreement contained unambiguous signs that Westminster was finally and publicly ceding control of the Province to the south. In particular, the establishment of a joint ministerial conference of British and Irish ministers, which would be set up at Maryfield in Northern Ireland and would monitor the political, security and legal issues of concern to the minority population, sounded warning bells for the Protestant community. Despite the fact that the mainland Government reserved the right to the final say on all issues, the Protestants believed that this represented a seachange in British attitudes towards the Province.46
Protestant responses took various forms. There was, as has been noted in Chapter Five, a violent reflex reaction from the paramilitaries and a more considered political response in the boycotting of various political institutions by representatives of the Protestant community. It is the actions of the various Unionists paramilitary organizations that have excited most comment from those interested in Ulster Unionism.47 Indeed, Unionist paramilitary violence first came publicly to the attention of the British population in general when the first Unionist paramilitary killing was shown on television. This was the incident at Milltown cemetery when a UDA man, Michael Stone, was responsible for killing some of the mourners at the funeral of a PIRA member.48 In the investigation into the case of Stone, a rather curious picture emerged of the manner in which the Protestant paramilitaries operated. The picture was one of disorganization and random attacks, many of which were orchestrated by a few die-hards without an overall strategy. In many ways this was hardly surprising. While the PIRA had a coherent target, to destroy British rule in Ireland and unite the Irish peoples, the Unionists had only a negative ambition, that was to hold the Union together. It was widely recognized that paramilitary activity could jeopardize, not strengthen the link with the mainland. Those loyal to the Union could fulfil their ambition of securing the Union through a number of avenues. It was possible, in support of the Union, to become a member of the RUC or the UDR, thus ‘legally’ reinforcing the state and countering the ambitions of the PIRA and the INLA. A word of warning is necessary, however: it is accurate to suggest that Unionists have and do support the RUC, yet throughout the conflict there have been periods of intense dissatisfaction with the force and the way in which the Province has been policed. Chapter Five noted the violence that characterized Protestant neighbourhoods after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and there continued to be a level of protest against the RUC both for ‘enforcing’ the accord and for a perceived collusion in selling out the Protestant community.49 Despite this dissatisfaction, the possibilty of joining the RUC and the UDR have necessarily meant that the base from which Unionist paramilitary organizations draw their support is circumscribed and relatively small. In particular, analysts have noted that the middle classes are almost entirely absent from Unionist paramilitary groups, but are well represented in the RUC.50 It has even been argued that it is the least ‘competent’ members of society who opt to join Unionist paramilitary organizations, for example those who have been rejected by the RUC, the UDR and other parts of the British Army. All of this means that Protestant paramilitaries have a smaller military base than that of the PIRA from which to recruit. In addition, there are other structural problems that Protestant paramilitaries have to contend with, not least that as they come from the same community as the majority of the UDR and the RUC, they are far more liable to be arrested or ‘caught’ for terrorist offences. In 1982, for example, when conviction rates for members of nationalist and Unionist paramilitary organizations charged with murder were compared, the conviction rate for Republicans was between 50 and 60 per cent, but that for Loyalist murders was between 90 and 100 per cent.51
Despite these disadvantages, the Protestant paramilitaries also operated with certain advantages, not least because of the relationship with the security forces. In many regimes, relations between state forces and pro-state paramilitary groups can be close. Indeed, in some cases, the state may actually accept, either tacitly or not, the claims of unofficial groups to act on its behalf and even fund or sanction extra-legal behaviour. It is difficult to comment on how far this has actually been the case in Northern Ireland. By its very nature, this question is sensitive. Republican sources claim that direct links exist between certain sections of the British military, the RUC and Protestant paramilitaries. This is a claim vehemently denied by military sources. During the mid-1980s, however, serious allegations were made by Fred Holroyd, a former intelligence liaison member, who had seen duty in border areas of the Province in the previous decade. He alleged that certain members of the intelligence services, most notably one Robert Nairac, had been involved in collusion with Protestant paramilitaries to assassinate leading Republicans.52 These claims have provoked a vigorous debate among journalists and academics who are divided over the ‘truth’ of these types of allegation.53 It is difficult to draw any concrete conclusions over whether there was in fact an ongoing conspiracy between the British military and Protestant paramilitaries, although towards the end of the 1980s, some evidence emerged of collusion between the UDR and the UDA/UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters).
In August 1989, a Catholic man, Loughlin Maginn, was killed by UDA/UFF gunmen. In an attempt to justify their actions, Protestant paramilitaries claimed that they knew from looking at police files that Maginn was an IRA man. Within a month of the Maginn murder, posters appeared on walls all over Belfast, containing the names of paramilitary ‘suspects’ taken from confidential police files. The Chief Constable of the RUC appointed a British police officer, John Stevens, to look into the issue of how classified documents had gone ‘missing’.54 Two soldiers from the UDR were later charged with the murder of Maginn and were given life sentences for passing on information that led to his death.55 The Stevens Report, which set out eighty-three recommendations, was published in May 1990. Fifty-nine people were afterwards charged or reported to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Thiry-two of those arrested were members of Loyalist organizations. Almost entirely, the defendants were charged with the ‘mishandling’ of intelligence documents or for unlawfully possessing documents. Not one was charged with murder, except for Brian Nelson, whose case later became a major embarrassment because of his links with security forces.56 The Stevens Report was criticized by those who believed that its remit had not been broad enough to allow a thorough investigation of the issue of collusion between security forces and members of paramilitary organizations. In particular, critics argued that it did not name those members of the security forces who had been responsible for passing confidential information on to the UDA/ UFF. A report commissioned by Amnesty International, to look into the behaviour of security forces in the Province, suggested that the Stevens Report, in order to be really effective, should have examined the wider dimensions of the role of British security forces and illegal Protestant organizations. In particular, it argued that the Report should have focused on the possibility that ‘a community of interest’ existed between the security forces and Protestant paramilitaries, which in turn might lead to joint’ operations against Republican paramilitaries.57
In many ways, however, this suggestion missed the point. There was, and had been from the beginning of the century, an obvious ‘community of interest’ between the British security services and the Unionist paramilitaries. In short, it was to defeat the PIRA and other Republican paramilitary groups, while maintaining the connection with the mainland. What was important was whether the British Army behaved illegally in either encouraging or tolerating Protestant paramilitary attacks on Republicans. This is an almost impossible question to answer while the Irish conflict continues. The British Army has been and remains reluctant to participate in any such inquiry, claiming that such an investigation could damage their operations in the Province. Indeed, while the British Army continued to rely on the SAS to implement its policies against the PIRA, whether it be at Loughall or in Gibraltar, there was little hope that the British Government would allow its serving forces to be investigated. Mark Urban, in his work on the SAS in Ireland, argues that the Army's clandestine activities could always be justified in ‘military’ terms. Urban points out that British Government ministers did admit that misinformation had been used over Irish affairs but, in the words of Tom King, only for ‘absolutely honourable reasons’.58 This type of justification did little to reassure the minority in the Province that they could have confidence either in the British Government or its security forces. Yet, such were the complex twists of the Northern Irish story that nationalist suspicions of the security services could operate in many, sometimes contradictory, ways. Although almost universally opposed to the use of the SAS, some nationalists at times expressed a preference for British troops patrolling the Province, rather than the indigenous forces of the UDR and the RUC. As John Hume pointed out in 1988, how many nationalists would relish the prospect of a complete and rapid withdrawal of British forces, leaving the heavily armed UDR and RUC in place as the only arbiters of law and order? Policing a divided Province had no simple answers.
By 1990, Protestant fears of a British sell-out had not materialized. The Hillsborough Agreement, although now part of the Anglo-Irish dialogue, had not amounted to anything approaching an abdication of political responsibility by Westminster. The combination of intense paramilitary activity and a hard-line British military response meant that although in 1985 Dublin and Westminster had tried to implement limited ‘reform’, they had failed to alter the pattern of military confrontation in the Province. Indeed, both Governments had, after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, invoked cumulatively repressive measures that effectively ended any real hope for sustained change short of the military defeat of the PIRA. Yet, in this very same period the British Government accepted that complete defeat was not likely.59 Violence and the instruments of violence had therefore become thoroughly institutionalized. Underneath this grim ending to the decade, however, there were shifts in the pattern of local politics in Northern Ireland. Most notably Sinn Fein had shifted its ground to one of political dialogue, and promised to deliver at some point in the future a profound change in the attitude of the nationalist movement. It was through this change that, twenty years after the beginning of the violence, the peace process of the 1990s began to take shape.
1 See, for example, Gerry Adams, Falls Memoirs (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1982), and Free Ireland: Towards a Lasting Peace (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1995).
2 Brendan O'Brien, The Long War: The IRA and Sinn Fan 1985 to Today (Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1993), p. 130.
3 The Times (26 September 1986).
4 Joe Austin, quoted in Workers Press (13 September 1986), cited in Mark Ryan, War and Peace in Ireland: Britain and the IRA in the New World Order (London: Pluto, 1994), p. 68.
5 O'Brien, op. cit., p. 131.
6 Sinn Fein Document, Dublin Provisional Sinn Fein (PSF), 1987, p. 14, in M.L.R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland: The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement (London: Routledge, 1995).
7 Gerry Adams, Presidential Address, 84 Ard Fheis, Dublin PSF, 1989, p. 4, quoted in Smith, op. cit., p. 176.
8 O'Brien, op. cit., p. 129.
9 Ibid., p. 129.
10 The Irish Times (11 May 1987).
11 Smith, op. cit., p. 188.
12 Mark Urban, Big Boys' Rules: The SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 234.
13 IRA statement, 9 November 1987, quoted in O'Brien, op. cit., p. 142. O'Brien points out that the PIRA claimed in its statement that in the past some landmines had been triggered by British Army high scanning equipment.
14 On the British response to Irish extradition proceedings, see Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 406–7.
15 Ibid., pp. 406–7. See also, The Irish Times (15 August 1987).
16 Paul O'Higgins, ‘The Irish Extradition Act, 1965’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 15. 2 (9 April 1966), p. 30, quoted in Bruce Warner, ‘Extradition Law and Practice in the Crucible of Ulster, Ireland and Great Britain: A Metamorphosis?’, Conflict Quarterly 7 (1987), pp. 57–92.
17 Ibid., pp. 57–92.
18 Ibid., pp. 57–92.
19 Ibid., pp. 57–92.
20 See Arwel Ellis Owen, The Anglo-Irish Agreement: The First Three Years (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), pp. 166–7.
21 Garret Fitzgerald, All in a Life (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989), pp. 542–3. See also, The Economist (3 October 1987).
22 See Tom King's comments on this issue in the Irish Times (22 October 1987).
23 See, for example, The Independent (22 March 1988).
24 Fitzgerald, op. cit., pp. 542–55.
25 News Letter (7 December 1987). See also The Irish Times (7 December 1987).
26 O'Brien, op. cit., pp. 143–4.
27 House of Commons Debate (hereafter HC), vol. 126, col. 465, 28 January 1988.
28 O'Brien, op. cit., p. 151.
29 See Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace (London: Hutchinson, 1995), p. 290.
30 There was also an intense debate after the shootings as to whether the SAS had fired without warning. See Windlesham on the Thames Television investigation entitled ‘Death on the Rock’ in which Thames alleged several inaccuracies in the official version of the Gibraltar killings. Quoted in W. Harvey Cox, ‘From Hillsborough to Downing Street – and After’ in Peter Catterall and Sean MacDougall, The Northern Ireland Question in British Politics (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 193.
31 Urban, op. cit., p. 247.
32 For an assessment of the killings, see HC, vol. 130, cols 194, 496, 502, 21–31 March 1987–88.
33 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 408.
34 See Ellis Owen, op. cit., p. 249.
35 The Irish Times (28 October 1988).
36 Douglas Hurd, HC, vol. 138, col. 893, 19 October 1988.
37 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 411. The Guardian (22 August 1988). See also Douglas Hurd's view that the Enniskillen bombing had contributed to the necessity for a broadcasting ban. Douglas Hurd, HC, vol. 138, col. 896, 19 October 1988.
38 News Letter (22 August 1988).
39 The Guardian (27 August 1988).
40 See Coogan, op. cit., pp. 334–5.
41 News Letter (15 June 1988).
42 Ibid.
43 Sinn Fein-SDLP, January-September 1989, quoted in Coogan, op. cit., p. 335.
44 The Times (6 September 1988).
45 According to Coogan, op. cit., p. 335, the Unionists did in fact meet with SDLP representatives at secret talks held in Germany on 14–15 October 1988.
46 W.D. Flackes and S. Elliott, Northern Ireland: A Political Directory, 1968–88 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1989), pp. 67–8.
47 See Colin Coulter, ‘The Character of Unionism’ in Irish Political Studies 9 (1994), pp. 1–24.
48 Stone actually appears to have been a maverick member of the UDA, involved with a small group within the Mid-Ulster UDA who used him as a ‘freelance’ gunman. On this issue see Steve Bruce, The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 258–9.
49 The Times (19 September 1988). On this issue, see Ronald Weitzer, Policing Under Fire: Ethnic Conflict and Police-Community Relations in Northern Ireland (New York: State University of New York, 1995), pp. 114–15.
50 See Bruce, op. cit., pp. 270–1.
51 Ed Maloney, The Irish Times (20 November 1982).
52 See Urban, op. cit., p. 53.
53 See, for example, Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London: Arrow, 1995).
54 See Amnesty International, Political Killings in Northern Ireland (London: Amnesty International British Section, 1994).
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 See Urban, op. cit., p. 78.
59 See Peter Brooke's comment that the PIRA could be contained but not defeated. Quoted in Coogan, op. cit., p. 337.