The Long MarchThe Political Strategy of

Sinn Féin, 1981–2007

Martyn Frampton

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The Long March

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The Long March

The Political Strategy ofSinn Féin, 1981–2007

Martyn FramptonPeterhouseUniversity of Cambridge, UK

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© Martyn Frampton 2009

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

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First published 2009 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

1 Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’,1981–5 20Introduction 20The community-based, campaigning party 26Left-wing radicalism meets ethnic nationalism 32The contradictions of a ‘broad-church’ party 38Conclusion 43

2 Pan-Nationalism, Peace and the PoliticalMainstream, 1985–90 47Introduction 47Pan-nationalism 52The ‘peace strategy’ 58Political development: working towards the ‘mainstream’ 65Conclusion 71

3 Towards Negotiation and the ‘Tactical Use ofArmed Struggle’, 1990–7 74Introduction 74Ending the armed struggle 79Pan-nationalism revisited 88Negotiations 94Conclusion 98

4 Confronting Unionism, Negotiation and Agreement,1997–2001 102Introduction 102Negotiations and agreement: the challenge 107Winning the debate: dissent versus dictatorship? 115Negotiations and agreement: the opportunity 121Conclusion 131

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vi Contents

5 Sinn Féin Centre Stage: The Search for PoliticalGrowth, 2001–4 133Introduction 133Political development anew 135The ‘party of government’ versus the ‘party of protest’ 143The ‘instrumentalization’ of the peace process 150Conclusion 155

6 Reversal, Recovery and Divergence, 2004–7 157Introduction 157On the back foot 158Regaining the initiative 165St Andrews and the final lap: triumph and despair 173Conclusion 179

Conclusion 183

Appendix I: The Leadership of the Republican Movement duringthe Peace Process 193

Appendix II: The Geographical Base of the Republican Leadership 194

Notes 195

Bibliography 240

Index 248

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Acknowledgements

In writing this book I was fortunate to benefit from the wisdom and goodadvice of many people. Foremost among them is Dr Brendan Simms, whosereadiness to read over innumerable drafts of the text, offer astute commentsand much-needed direction, proved indispensable. Not only has Brendanbeen a defining intellectual influence on me, but also someone who hasbecome a good friend. Alongside him, I owe a huge debt of gratitude toProfessor Paul Bew, whose own intellectual radiance and generosity is ofinestimable benefit to all who are lucky enough to encounter it. Similartribute must also go to Sean O’Callaghan. He has become a close friend; some-one whose insight and advice I value enormously. I also owe a tremendousamount to the incomparable Dr Dean Godson – his passion for perfectionis a genuine inspiration. Another whose contribution I must acknowledgewith great thanks is Dr Anthony McIntyre. His keen observations and under-standing of the way in which the republican movement operates have beeninvaluable. I could go on almost without end, so for the sake of brevity I mustask the indulgence of the following, to whom I must simply confine myselfto saying ‘thank you very much’: Henry Robinson, Ruth Dudley Edwards,Professor Henry Patterson, Dr Richard Bourke, Jim Cusack, Dr Adam Tooze,Dr Eugenio Biagini, Dr Agnès Maillot, Professor Jon Tonge, Cyril, Elizabethand Stephanie Campbell, Laura Twiss, Marjorie Hawkins and Allan Leonard.And of course, the most heartfelt thanks to Dr John Bew – a great friend andan intellectual giant, whom I am privileged to know and work with.

Thanks must also go to the numerous people who have offered assistancein a variety of ways and without whom this book would never have beencompleted: to Ross Moore and the staff of the Linenhall Library in Belfast,whose application and expertise continue to be deeply appreciated by allengaged in research on Northern Ireland; to the late Denis Donaldson, whogave me my first introduction to the republican movement; to all those whoagreed to be interviewed in the course of my research, with special mentionfor Jim Gibney, Danny Morrison and Eoin O’Broin, who were kind enoughto provide multiple interviews and answer innumerable queries; to Charliefor the countless emails he sent; and to Gerry Gregg, Jim Brick and friendsfor a great tour of Dublin. I do not doubt that I have forgotten someoneimportant and for that I can only apologise. To all who have lent me theirhelp and advice, I offer my sincerest thanks. Any errors that remain withinthe text are entirely my own.

In addition to these people, I must also express my gratitude to the Artsand Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for its provision of funding forthe duration of my doctoral thesis; so, too, to Jesus College, Cambridge, for

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viii Acknowledgements

affording me the most magnificent environment in which to live and work –and latterly to Peterhouse, Cambridge, for giving me the opportunity to takeforward the doctoral thesis and re-work it into this book. Thanks also toGemma D’Arcy Hughes and the people at Palgrave Macmillan for agreeing topublish this work; and also to Keith Povey, whose professionalism and skillas copy-editor it was a privilege to witness first hand.

Above all, the greatest thanks must go to those closest to me. I am luckyto be blessed with truly wonderful friends and family. Not only have theytolerated my obsession with Northern Ireland, but their encouragement andassistance made this book possible. I am grateful to Tess for her unwaveringsupport and kindness while much of the book was being written. Also, I mustmention my parents, Dennis and Ros, and my sister, Emma; for their collec-tive supportiveness and forbearance, I cannot say thank you enough. Morethan anything this book is for them and for all the years of work they put in,to get where I am today. Last, but in no way least, I must thank Emily – forbeing the person she is, for putting up with me and for making life infinitelymore fun in the process. Thank you.

Cambridge MARTYN FRAMPTON

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Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations

ANC African National Congress – South African political (formerly military)group

AP/RN An Phoblacht/Republican News – Sinn Féin’s weekly newspaperArd chomhairle National executive of an Irish political party, especially

Sinn FéinArd fheis Annual conference of an Irish political party, especially Sinn FéinASU Active Service Unit – IRA ‘cell’, consisting of eight membersCOCAD Coalition of Communities Against Drugs – Committees set up by

local communities, primarily in inner-city Dublin, in the 1990s, to combatheroin dealing and drug abuse

Comhairle ceantair ‘District executive’ of Sinn Féin. Equivalent to Countyelectoral area

‘Continuity’ IRA Dissident republican paramilitary organization in Ireland,created in 1986 by republicans unhappy with (Provisional) Sinn Féin’sdecision to abandon abstentionism. It only became active after the 1994‘Provisional’ IRA ceasefire

CPAD Concerned Parents Against Drugs – Committees set up by local com-munities, primarily in inner-city Dublin, in the 1980s, to combat heroindealing and abuse

Cúige ‘Regional executive’ of Sinn Féin. Equivalent to EU electoral con-stituency

Cumann Branch – smallest unit of party organization within Sinn Féin(plural, cumainn)

DAAD Direct Action Against Drugs – Cover-name for the IRADáil (Éireann) Lower house of the Irish ParliamentDUP Democratic Unionist Party – Unionist party in Northern Ireland, led

until May 2008 by the Reverend Ian PaisleyETA Euskadi ta Askatasuna (‘Basque Homeland and Freedom’), Basque

paramilitary organization, fighting for an independent Basque countryFARC ‘Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia’ – paramilitary organizationFianna Fáil Largest political party in the Republic of IrelandFine Gael Political party in the Republic of IrelandGardai The Irish PoliceH-Blocks Term for the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, site of the 1980 and

1981 hunger strikesIICD Independent International Commission on Decommissioning – body

set up under General John de Chastelain to monitor the decommissioningof paramilitary weapons in Northern Ireland

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x Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations

IMC International Monitoring Commission – body set up following theBritish and Irish governments’ ‘Joint Declaration’ of 2003, to monitorparamilitary activity

IRA Irish Republican Army (Provisional). Republican paramilitary organi-zation in Ireland, created 1969–70, out of a split within republicanism.Linked to (Provisional) Sinn Féin

LRR Left Republican Review – Left-wing republican magazine, producedintermittently from 2000 onwards

MEP Member of the European ParliamentMLA Member of the Legislative Assembly (Northern Ireland)MP Member of Parliament (Westminster)National H-Block/Armagh Committee Broad-based committee that cam-

paigned in support of the hunger strikers’ demands in 1980–1Nationalist Someone opposed to Northern Ireland remaining within the

United Kingdom; favours Irish unityNORAID Irish Northern Aid Committee – Republican support group based

in the United States of America‘Official’ IRA Republican paramilitary organization in Ireland, created in

1969–70, out of a split within republicanism. Part of the ‘Official’republican movement

Óglaigh na hÉireann Name claimed by the IRA. Literally translates as‘Volunteers of Ireland’ (also used by the Irish Defence Forces)

Oireachtas The Irish Parliament – the upper and lower houses together withthe President

PLO Palestinian Liberation Organization – umbrella group for Palestiniangroups, campaigning for a Palestinian state

PSNI Police Service of Northern Ireland – successor to the RUC‘Real’ IRA Dissident republican paramilitary organization in Ireland, cre-

ated in 1997, by republicans unhappy with Sinn Féin’s acceptance of theMitchell Principles on non-violence

Republican Sinn Féin Dissident republican political party, led by Ruairi ÓBrádaigh. Created in 1986, by republicans unhappy with (Provisional)Sinn Féin’s decision to abandon abstentionism

RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary – Northern Irish police force, succeeded in2001 by the PSNI

Sandinistas Marxist revolutionary group in NicaraguaSAS Special Air Service. British army unit specializing in covert operationsSDLP Social Democratic and Labour Party – ‘Constitutional nationalist’,

Northern Irish political party, previously led by John HumeSeanad (Éireann) Upper house of the Irish ParliamentSinn Féin Republican Political Party (Provisional), led by Gerry Adams.

Created 1969–70, out of split within republicanism. Linked to the‘Provisional’ IRA

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Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations xi

SWAPO South West African People’s Organization – 1980s paramilitarygroup

Taoiseach Irish Prime MinisterTD Teachta Dáila – Member of the Irish Parliament32 County Sovereignty Movement Political wing of ‘Real’ IRA, created in

1997 by republicans unhappy with Sinn Féin’s acceptance of the MitchellPrinciples on non-violence

TUAS ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ – title of the 1994 republican documentthat outlined the rationale for the first IRA ceasefire

UDA Ulster Defence Association – Loyalist paramilitary organization inNorthern Ireland

UFF Ulster Freedom Fighters – Loyalist paramilitary organization in NorthernIreland (linked to the UDA)

Unionist Someone who favours Northern Ireland remaining within theUnited Kingdom; opposed to Irish unity

UUP Ulster Unionist Party – Mainstream Unionist Party in Northern Ireland,previously led by David Trimble

UVF Ulster Volunteer Force – Loyalist paramilitary organization in NorthernIreland

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Introduction

In October 1982, the modern-day Sinn Féin party contested its first electionunder a stark and uncompromising banner: ‘Break the British connection!Smash Stormont!’ Stormont had been the home of the Northern Irish Parlia-ment for half a century between 1920 and 1972, until that institution wasdissolved as the province was engulfed by conflict. Republicans had longdeclared their antipathy to the body – and to any effort to resuscitate it.As Sinn Féin’s 1982 manifesto proclaimed, proposals then on the table for anew Northern Ireland Assembly (the body for which the elections were beingheld) were simply ‘an attempt to reconstitute Stormont’. The rejoinder of theparty was straightforward: ‘Sinn Féin candidates will never attend the newStormont.’1 Among Sinn Féin’s political opponents at that election was thehard-line Democratic Unionist Party of the Reverend Ian Paisley. Two yearslater, Paisley’s party would stand in elections under the slogan, ‘Smash SinnFéin’.

Twenty-five years later, the President of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, appearedin front of a press conference alongside Paisley, at Stormont in Belfast. Thetwo men announced that a new Northern Ireland Executive was to be formedon 8 May 2007 under the joint aegis of Paisley and Sinn Féin’s MartinMcGuinness, as First Minister and Deputy First Minister respectively. Thesetwo episodes, separated by a quarter a century, offer a snapshot of the trans-formation that Sinn Féin has undergone over the intervening period. It hasgrown from a pariah party on the fringe of the political spectrum to being apolitical force on both sides of the Irish border.

Over the same period, the internal dynamics of mainstream Irish repub-licanism have been altered out of all recognition. Once, that republicanismwas defined almost entirely by the violent ‘armed struggle’ of the Irish Repub-lican Army (IRA). Yet, in 2005, the IRA had announced a formal end to itsarmed campaign and completed the handover of its arsenal of weaponry.2

In so doing, it had effectively brought to a conclusion the ‘Armalite and theballot box’ strategy of the ‘Provisional’ Irish republican movement.3 In 1981,the impromptu rhetorical flourish of a senior republican, Danny Morrison,

1

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2 The Long March

when speaking to Sinn Féin’s annual ard fheis (party conference), had coinedthe phrase that best articulated the dual nature of the republican movementthereafter.4 The ‘Armalite and the ballot box’ had neatly encapsulated repub-licanism’s fusion of Sinn Féin’s political activity and IRA violence. Viewedagainst this background, the events of 2005 appeared to show a republicanmovement that was definitively setting aside such dualism. In place of ‘theArmalite and the ballot box’ strategy there was to be something resemblinga ‘ballot box alone’ approach. Sinn Féin was henceforth to be freed from theIRA’s shadow and allowed to emerge as the principal (if not only) vehicle ofmainstream Irish republicanism.

The purpose of the present study, in the first instance, is to analyse theway in which this political transformation took place. It is a transformationthat saw Sinn Féin develop from being a ‘minor player’ on both sides ofthe Irish border (on the brink of extinction in the Republic of Ireland) to asituation where it is both the leading nationalist party in Northern Ireland(with one of its members serving as co-Premier of Northern Ireland) and,simultaneously, a political force in the Irish Republic. Faced with so dramatican evolution in character, it seems only natural to ask how it was achieved;to examine the various stages in the creation of the modern ‘Sinn Féin’ party.The objective here, though, is to provide more than a simple narrative of therise of Sinn Féin. For one thing, this is because such accounts already exist.More importantly, it is because the aim is to answer the question of ‘why’,rather than merely ‘how’.

In so seeking, a key contention is that Sinn Féin, as a party, was some-what distinct from other, ‘normal’, political parties throughout the periodin question. That this should have been so was a function of its existencewithin a broader republican movement. The parallel, and for much of thetime more dominant, branch was that of the IRA. The truth of this could begauged from an internal republican ‘Staff Report’, seized by the Irish Gardai(police) in 1977, which left little doubt as to the relative authority of the twoorganizations. Sinn Féin, it stated simply, ‘should come under Army [IRA]organizers at all levels’.5 Thereafter, there seems little doubt that the report’sinstruction was carried out, with individuals, from the top to the bottom ofthe party, holding duel Sinn Féin-IRA membership. Hence, the Irish DefenceMinister, Willie O’Dea, stated in February 2005 that the Irish governmentwas, ‘no longer prepared to accept the farce that Sinn Féin and the IRA areseparate. They are indivisible.’6

For this reason, it is useful to recall the oft-quoted remark made, in 1928,by the future Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Sean Lemass, with regard toFianna Fáil. That party was, according to Lemass, a ‘slightly constitutional’one.7 Such a description, it would seem, could just as equally be applied toSinn Féin across the period under consideration here. Recognizing this is notnecessarily to view the history of Sinn Féin as little more than an addendumto that of the IRA (as has frequently been the case). Nor is it to claim that

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Introduction 3

every member of Sinn Féin was also an IRA activist. It is, however, to notethat while Sinn Féin should be seen as an entity in its own right, the IRAcannot be simply erased from the picture; its presence was what made SinnFéin unique.

Furthermore, the reality of the interconnecting relationship between SinnFéin and the IRA highlights the fact that the party has been driven by acentral ‘ideological objective’ that has been foregrounded in the minds ofits members. Sinn Féin’s close association with an organization engaged inarmed activity has ensured that party members are more cognizant of republi-canism’s ultimate ‘ideological objective’ than they might be otherwise. Thatobjective, defined as a desire to achieve ‘a 32-County democratic socialistrepublic and the end of British rule in Ireland’, permeates Sinn Féin in a waythat marks it out as exceptional.8 Thus, while all members of political par-ties, to some degree, act in pursuit of ‘ideological objectives’, such objectivesresonate within Sinn Féin in a much more immediate fashion. The truth ofthis can be seen in the assertions of one Sinn Féin elected representative, whodeclared in all seriousness in interview, ‘When I get up in the morning I’mvery conscious that I’m trying to free Ireland.’9 It is hard to imagine anotherpolitical party, in either Ireland or Britain, whose members could similarlymake such statements in earnest, even among those other parties that definethemselves as being ‘Irish republican’, such as Fianna Fáil. For the latter,the goal of Irish unity is viewed in more intangible, aspirational terms, asopposed to being something that a party could actively try to achieve in thehere-and-now. For Sinn Féin, by contrast, the reverse has been and is true; itis a party in which the primacy of the ‘ideological objective’ has remainedexplicit.

Moreover, it is for precisely this reason that the ‘why’ of Sinn Féin’s develop-ment is important. The argument of this study is that the political evolutionof Sinn Féin can only be properly understood when placed in the context ofthe party’s ‘ideological objective’ and the effort to achieve it. On this basis,an examination of Sinn Féin’s ‘political strategy’ becomes valuable; for ‘strat-egy’ is the bridge that connects otherwise remote objectives with ‘everyday’politics. Ultimate ideological objectives define immediate strategic objectives,which, in turn, circumscribe politics on the ground. Given the centrality ofSinn Féin’s ideological objectives, the party can only be properly compre-hended if its actions are considered on a strategic level; it is this that thepresent work seeks to do.

In so seeking, this study goes beyond those existing accounts that havemerely narrated the development of the modern Sinn Féin party, often withinthe context of the wider history of republicanism. A classic example in thisregard is the work of Brian Feeney, which provides an analysis of ‘a hundredturbulent years’ of Sinn Féin. There are obvious benefits to Feeney’s approach;it allows, for instance, for straightforward comparisons between the variousincarnations of Sinn Féin.10 Yet, with the emphasis on the comparative

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4 The Long March

context, Feeney’s account of the latest manifestation of the party moves lit-tle beyond the realm of the descriptive. Furthermore, it is also distorted,as much writing on Sinn Féin has been, by its underlying ‘peace process’-oriented perspective.11 In other words, it tends to view changes within theparty entirely through the prism of the 1990s’ Northern Irish peace process.It thereby creates a teleology by which all developments within republican-ism are seen against the backdrop of an almost inexorable shift from ‘armedstruggle’ to ‘constitutional politics’.

This tendency towards a teleological reading of recent republican historyis even more pronounced in Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA. Onthe one hand, it should be noted, Moloney’s study is perhaps the fore-most empirical account of modern republicanism available at the currenttime.12 Its numerous insights into what remains a highly secretive organiza-tion offer an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of the republicanmovement, as well as hitherto unknown details of its evolution. For thisreason, it can scarcely be overlooked in any attempt to cast fresh light onthe history of Sinn Féin. On the other hand, as shall be shown, Moloney’sinterpretive framework is, at root, highly problematic. Not only does he suf-fer from a desire to see everything through the lens of the ‘peace process’,but also this is coupled with a need to understand almost all develop-ments within republicanism as stemming from the assumed machinations ofGerry Adams.

Without doubt, the centrality of Adams to any effort to examine the repub-lican movement is beyond dispute. However, the portrayal of the Sinn FéinPresident offered by Moloney attributes seemingly impossible levels of fore-sight and manipulative ability to the man. And the contention that Adamswas, from as early as 1982, secretly working behind the backs of his colleaguesto bring an end to the IRA’s armed struggle is extremely difficult to sustain.Certainly, as shall hopefully be demonstrated here, it requires the reader, atvarious points, to reject other more plausible explanations for the actionsof Adams and his party. In addition, it would seem to discount the roleundoubtedly played by contingent events and the ‘accidents of history’. Itmight further be added that the length of time it allegedly took Adams tomanoeuvre republicans into a position where they ended the IRA campaign(twelve years by Moloney’s reckoning) would appear to contradict the imageof a man well skilled in the arts of manipulation, which is so integral to thecogency of Moloney’s own argument. Consequently, while the present workoften utilizes, or seeks to build upon, revelations contained within Moloney’swork, it does so from an outlook that is not constrained by Moloney’smeta-narrative.

Another reason for this is the fact that, unlike either Moloney or Feeney,this study is not an attempt to explain the genesis and outworking of thepeace process on the republican side. This is not to say, of course, that thepeace process is not a vital part of the story; indeed, as will be seen, Sinn Féin’s

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Introduction 5

transformation over this period could scarcely be understood without it. Yet,the contention here is that the peace process should not be seen as the wholestory. It is not sufficient, in and of itself, to explain an evolution that beganlong before the idea of the peace process emerged. Instead, it is necessary toexamine the development of Sinn Féin as an autonomous political entity inits own right. There are elements of this in both Feeney and Moloney, but amore thorough-going attempt to do this was made by Henry Patterson in hisseminal The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA.

Patterson’s analysis of what he terms ‘social republicanism’ and the repub-lican movement in the years since Irish partition, concentrates attentionon the nature of republican ‘politics’ beyond the armed struggle. In par-ticular, his examination of the ideas put forward by Gerry Adams and hissupporters in the mid-1970s, highlights the extent to which they were draw-ing on themes latent within republican ideology and history. He thus drawsout the extent to which republicans must be regarded as ‘political’ beings.13

In so doing, there are clear similarities between Patterson’s account andRichard Bourke’s later contribution to the subject. Bourke also emphasizesthat republicans should be viewed as rational actors, pursuing avowedly polit-ical objectives. He shows how republicans, believing themselves to be the true‘democrats’ in Ireland, are best characterized as political ideologues.14

Bourke, however, does not go beyond this insight to examine, in detail,how the ‘big’ political ideas of republicans translated into the specific pol-icy positions of Sinn Féin; or how the strategic thinking of the republicanleadership shifted over time. Similarly, although there is some considerationof this policy aspect in Patterson, it is not done on any systematic basis. Inaddition, Patterson’s account is limited temporally by simple virtue of thefact that most of the research for his work was conducted during the 1980s(though a second edition did come out later, this merely added an extrachapter explaining the origins of the peace process). The literature, there-fore, is lacking an investigation of Sinn Féin’s political development duringthe 1990s, a time when, according to at least one Sinn Féin member, thisadvanced exponentially.15

The recent books by Agnès Maillot, on the one hand, and Gerard Murrayand Jonathan Tonge, on the other, do, to a degree, fill the gaps left byPatterson in terms of the evolution of Sinn Féin’s political personality into the1990s and beyond.16 Nonetheless, neither work fully, or adequately, explainsthe phenomenon that is Sinn Féin. Hence, while Murray and Tonge effec-tively elucidate many of the policy changes that Sinn Féin undertook in thisera, they do so from the perspective of that party’s rivalry with the SocialDemocratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland. Viewed in thisway, Sinn Féin’s evolution becomes part of the wider story of the develop-ment of ‘northern’ Irish nationalism. For Murray and Tonge, Sinn Féin andthe SDLP should be seen as representative of the divergent and conflictingforces that emerged within northern nationalism in response to the outbreak

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6 The Long March

of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969–70. Whereas the latter is assumed to personify adesire to reconstitute Northern Ireland’s government on the basis of equalityand the active involvement of the minority nationalist community (throughinstitutionalized power-sharing), the former is taken to be the embodimentof a wholesale rejection of the state and the drive to bring its destruction.

Seen in such a light, the subsequent history of the ‘Troubles’ (and thatof Sinn Féin) is understood as essentially a battle for supremacy within thenationalist community, between two conflicting ideologies. Moreover, it isa battle in which it is assumed that the SDLP was triumphant. As Murrayand Tonge repeatedly emphasize, the central principles of the Good FridayAgreement in 1998 had essentially been at the heart of the SDLP’s politicalvision since its inception in 1970. Sinn Féin’s acceptance of the Agreement,therefore, can be construed as a tacit acknowledgement of republicanism’sideological defeat. Therein, however, lies the central problem with the argu-ment put forward by Murray and Tonge. Their supposition that Sinn Féin andthe wider republican movement have, to all intents and purposes, accepteddefeat, runs, as this study will show, contrary to the evidence. Indeed, the‘defeat hypothesis’ rests on an understanding of what the Good Friday Agree-ment represents to the republican movement, which is almost wholly atvariance with the way Sinn Féin has acted since 1998.

That Murray and Tonge nonetheless arrive at such a conclusion is, to asignificant degree, a function of their almost exclusive focus on Sinn Féin asa ‘northern’ entity. In this they are hardly alone. Rather, the overwhelmingmajority of the literature that has considered Sinn Féin’s development upto this point has done so from the standpoint of the ‘Troubles’ (be that interms of its relationship with the IRA, the conflict, or more recently the peaceprocess). The central difficulty with such an approach, though, is that it againfails to appraise the republican movement on its own terms. Sinn Féin hasalways considered itself to exist across the whole island. This belief sits at theheart of what the party’s republicanism entails. Its members see themselvesas belonging to a ‘32-county’ party, promoting the cause of a ‘32-county’Irish state. Still, for too long, the party’s failure to build a support-base in theRepublic of Ireland has obscured the extent to which Sinn Féin has pursuedwhat Patterson (in this regard, a notable exception to the rest of the literature)has termed a ‘southern strategy’.17 Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say thatthis ‘southern strategy’ has been utterly central to Sinn Féin’s project over thelast two and a half decades; a fact indicated as early as 1977, when a seniorrepublican, Jimmy Drumm, delivered a speech (written by Gerry Adams andDanny Morrison) that signalled as much.18 In the course of that address,Drumm pointedly rejected ‘the reformist notion that “Ulster” is the issue’and claimed that ‘a successful war of liberation cannot be fought exclusivelyon the backs of the oppressed in the Six Counties’. What republicans neededto achieve instead, Drumm stated, was ‘a positive tie-in with the mass of theIrish people’; the majority of whom, of course, resided in the southern Irish

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Introduction 7

state. In the years after Drumm’s speech, as will be shown, this focus on thesouth remained an enduring part of Sinn Féin’s political mission; so much sothat an understanding of the party’s development over the last twenty-fiveyears is simply not possible without full consideration of its position andaspirations in the Republic of Ireland.

This is something that Agnès Maillot’s book does seek to address, as it exam-ines Sinn Féin as a political ‘party’, both north and south. The party’s variouspolicy positions are explored in some depth and, in so doing, a very realdearth of material on this topic is partially remedied. Nevertheless, Maillotoffers little in the way of a holistic framework for viewing modern Sinn Féin’sdevelopment over the whole period of its existence. Through its focus on theparty’s policies as they were constituted in 2005, her account does little toimpart a sense of the shifts that occurred during the previous two and a halfdecades. Furthermore, to some extent, Maillot falls into the trap of treatingSinn Féin as a ‘normal’ political party, with all the problems that this creates.In particular, there is no significant attempt to tie the evolution of Sinn Féin’spolicies to the strategic objectives of the wider republican movement. Recog-nition of these core objectives and the way they have interplayed with thepolitics of the party at any given moment, as this book shall demonstrate,is indispensable if a fuller understanding of the currents driving Sinn Féin’spolitical transformation is to be achieved.

With this in mind, several other works within the present corpus of liter-ature on Sinn Féin should be mentioned. First Mike Smith’s analysis of the‘military strategy of the Irish Republican Movement’ is suggestive of howconsiderations of strategy should be applied to the study of republicanism.19

His account, however, while excellent in identifying the various strategicgoals of the IRA and the way in which it sought to realize them, is less usefulwhen considering the rise of Sinn Féin. The latter is noted, as are the poten-tial strategic benefits for the republican movement, but the mechanics andcharacter of the rise of the political party are not fully explored. In addition,the strategic goals that underscore the politics of the peace process for SinnFéin are largely ignored by Smith in favour of a straightforward dichotomybetween armed struggle and political activity. Malachi O’Doherty, by con-trast, in The Trouble with Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA,is more willing to contemplate the strategic thinking of Sinn Féin, thoughhis focus is (as the title of his book suggests) almost entirely on the party’srelationship with the IRA.20 O’Doherty provides almost no assessment of the‘politics’ of the party as they have developed in either the north or the south.Indeed, Sinn Féin’s aims and development in the Republic of Ireland are stu-diously ignored by both Smith and O’Doherty, each of whom adopts a purely‘Troubles-based’ approach to the party’s history.

The same cannot be said of Kevin Rafter, whose volume, Sinn Féin 1905–2005: In the Shadow of Gunmen, does focus attention on both the electoralhistory and future prospects of the party in the Republic of Ireland. As the

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8 The Long March

title of his work suggests, Rafter also charts some of the key moments inthe evolution of Sinn Féin and the party’s relationship with the IRA. Andhis central argument is one that accords with the conclusions offered withinthe present work; namely, that under Gerry Adams and his colleagues, SinnFéin has experienced an ‘era of pragmatism’ in which the flexibility of therepublican leadership has been paramount.21

A similar view is imparted through the work of Richard English, thoughthere, this is simultaneously allied to a greater emphasis on the continuitiesthat tie the recent republican movement to previous manifestations of thephenomenon. English’s extensive treatment of this subject in Armed Struggle:A History of the IRA and Irish Freedom: A History of Irish Nationalism in Irelandprovides the essential context for the emergence of modern-day republican-ism. While the former volume sets that republicanism into the history of thetradition dating back to 1916, the latter locates it within the longue durée ofIrish nationalism broadly conceived. In both instances, attention is focusedon the political ideas and concepts that have underpinned Irish republican-ism. At the same time, this is combined with an implicit recognition that, formuch of its existence, republicanism has been an ideology of failure. Thus,even as he acknowledges the ‘political’ character of successive incarnations ofthe IRA, English also recognizes that the organization has not endowed Ire-land with a happy legacy.22 This sense, as to the destructiveness and essentialfutility of much of what has been done in the name of Irish republicanism,is also conveyed by Rogelio Alonso’s The IRA and Armed Struggle. Alonso’sbook contains a wealth of interview data with former republican prisoners,many of whom now question their past actions; and its ultimate message iscaptured in the words of one such prisoner, who admits, ‘I don’t think it wasworth it.’23

What all of the above underlines, however, is the extent to which noexisting account offers a comprehensive picture of Sinn Féin’s political evo-lution in the last two and a half decades. There is nothing that examinesthat party as a discrete entity in its own right, operating within a specificcontext and in a particular manner. Snapshots there are, but nothing thatconveys the multifaceted and complex nature of Sinn Féin: the fact that itis a single political party, yet part of a wider movement; the way in which itis rooted in Northern Ireland and the conflict there, yet also fundamentallyoriented towards the Republic of Ireland; or the fact that it is involved, at anincreasing number of levels, in ‘normal’ politics, yet simultaneously contin-ues to pursue higher, strategic goals. It is this gap that the present study seeksto fill.

In attempting to place the political evolution of Sinn Féin in its broaderstrategic context, an inevitable consequence has been a focus on the thoughtsand statements of the republican leadership. That this should have been sois a function of the fact that it is the people who comprise the leadershipwho define the strategy of the wider movement. They, themselves, act in the

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Introduction 9

manner of a bridge, linking the ‘daily politics’ of Sinn Féin with the ultimateideological objective of the movement. As one of their number, Jim Gibney,puts it, ‘their responsibility is to nationally develop the struggle and to makethe big decisions . . . strategic decisions’.24 Furthermore, at such times as theparty has altered its politics, or shifted strategic direction altogether, it is theleadership that has been faced with the task of persuading ‘ordinary’ partymembers of the merits of any new approach (usually by arguing that thelatter would better aid the realization of the party’s core objectives).

Where possible, therefore, the views of leadership figures have been soughtretrospectively, via a series of interviews the author held with various seniorrepublicans (as well as more rank-and-file members), several of whom havenot been interviewed before and at least one of whom will not be inter-viewed again. With regard to the latter, the author talked at length withDenis Donaldson, prior to his exposure as a British ‘spy’ and subsequentmurder, in 2005–6. Alongside such interviews, the author made recourse toa variety of written sources. Of particular interest, for example, were theproceedings of internal party conferences and internal party strategy doc-uments. The discussions and ideas held therein, perhaps not intended forpublic consumption, provided important insights into the party leadership’scollective political thinking. Extensive use was also made of the numerousspeeches, statements and articles produced by republican leadership figures.Beyond this focus on the republican leadership, meanwhile, this work con-siders the ‘daily politics’ of Sinn Féin as they evolved in practical terms overthe period in question. Such policy papers as exist (which for the earlier partof the period is not many) were looked at in this regard. In addition, sig-nificant analysis of the Sinn Féin newspaper, An Phoblacht/Republican News,was carried out. As the weekly record of the ‘living’ party, this proved to bean invaluable resource for determining party behaviour on the ground andmeasuring any gap that might exist between rhetoric and reality.

Building upon the foregoing intellectual and methodological foundations,this book takes as its chronological start point 1981 – the year that DannyMorrison first articulated the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’ concept. Moresignificantly, this was also the year that saw the current-day republican move-ment engage with electoral politics for the first time. The impact of the 1981hunger strike, the election of the lead hunger striker, Bobby Sands, as a Mem-ber of Parliament (MP) for Westminster and his subsequent death are widelyregarded as decisive moments in the history of republicanism. The details ofthese events have been dealt with at length elsewhere, but suffice to say herethat they provided the catalyst for the transformative process, out of whichthe modern Sinn Féin party emerged.25 This verdict is captured in the wordsof Jim Gibney, a senior republican figure, who maintains that, ‘for a lot ofrepublicans that election result changed the world’.26

This is not to say, it should be emphasized, that 1981 can be taken assome kind of immutable ‘year zero’ for republican ‘politics’. The movement

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was not simply an atavistic, apolitical ‘throw-back’ prior to that point. Onthe contrary, as Bourke and Patterson have underlined, republicans werealways ‘political’ beings with ‘political’ objectives, even when engaged solelyin armed struggle.27 The centrality of the latter for the early members of the‘Provisional’ movement represented not the complete absence of ‘politics’,but rather ‘politics’ of a different type. While their goals may have beenutopian and their methods violent and extreme, this should not mask theextent to which they were rational actors with a coherent political ideology.Obviously, such an assertion may not hold true for all who declared them-selves to be ‘republican’ (particularly in the early 1970s), but, crucially, itdoes for those who formed and subsequently led the ‘Provisional’ republicanmovement.

What 1981 heralded for these ‘Provisionals’, therefore, was not a conver-sion to ‘politics’, but a shift in the manner in which their ‘politics’ wereexpressed. Following Smith, the ‘mono-military approach’ with its focussolely on the IRA, was now replaced with an ‘integrated strategy’ that com-bined continued military action with more recognizable political activity.28

Even then, however, it would be a mistake to assume that the change of direc-tion within the republican movement occurred overnight with the events ofthe hunger strike. On the contrary, as has been demonstrated in detail else-where, there had been internal arguments in favour of a new approach topolitics, at least as far back as 1975.29 Such arguments had, from the start,been identified with a group of ‘young Turks’, at the centre of which sat GerryAdams (albeit initially in the guise of the writer ‘Brownie’).30 It was this samegroup that led the transformation of the republican movement after 1981.

In light of the difficulties that republicans had encountered in the mid- tolate 1970s, Adams and his supporters had, from that point, begun calling forthe restructuring of the republican movement, so as to enable it to prosecutea ‘long war’ against the British.31 In line with this, they had urged, on theone hand, the reorganization of the IRA (along more ‘cellular’ lines), to allowit to better prosecute a terrorist campaign. On the other, they had pushed forthe reinvigoration of Sinn Féin. Their impulse with the latter was to end whatthey later referred to as the ‘spectator politics’ of the republican movement.32

What they sought was a situation in which the continuing armed struggle ofthe IRA would be complemented by a new form of political pressure, gener-ated by a resurgent Sinn Féin. As ‘Brownie’ noted in 1976, what was requiredwas ‘the complete fusing of military and political thinking’.33

In this way, the ideas articulated by the ‘young Turks’ from the mid-1970sserved as the progenitors of what became the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’approach. The former effectively paved the way for the semi-formal adoptionof the latter. An acknowledgement of this perhaps raises the question of why1981 should be appropriate as a chronological parameter for the present work,as opposed to, say, the IRA’s 1975 ceasefire, or Jimmy Drumm’s 1977 Boden-stown speech. The answer to this, however, lies in the fact that, while the

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Introduction 11

‘Brownie’ era undoubtedly contained the intellectual antecedents for post-hunger strike republicanism, it was only in the aftermath of the hunger strikethat the movement began to view ‘politics’ as a serious project.

Moreover, the character of ‘republican politics’ that emerged from thehunger strike period was fundamentally different from that originally envis-aged by ‘Brownie’. For the election of Bobby Sands as an MP for Westminstergave the republican movement not just a taste for political activity, but, moreimportantly, a taste for electoral political activity. The distinction may appeara minor one, but it was crucial in determining the kind of Sinn Féin that devel-oped thereafter. Adams and his supporters had previously argued earnestlythat the republican movement should engage afresh with ‘everyday politics’.Yet, there had been little or no suggestion that this should entail republicancandidates standing in elections. Prior to 1981, there was a pervasive notionwithin the movement that the latter led inexorably to the world of ‘normal’politics, ‘reformism’ and ‘corruption’ (in the sense of the abandonment of‘pure’ republican ideals). In the wake of Sands’ success, though, such fearswere quickly put to one side. As Jim Gibney has stated, before 1981, ‘it wasvery, very difficult . . . to argue internally that the way forward, or one of theways forward, was through standing Sinn Féin in elections’.34 It was onlysubsequent to the events of that year, Gibney maintains, that it became fareasier to make such arguments.

That this should have been so was not merely a function of the changingrepublican outlook on ‘politics’, but also a consequence of the shift in theinternal balance of power in the republican movement, which the hungerstrike facilitated. At one level, this came as a result of the significant increasein support for republicanism, which brought new people, with fresh perspec-tives, into the movement. As Daisy Mules, a long-time Sinn Féin activist fromDerry, has noted, the hunger strike brought, ‘a big influx of people into SinnFéin with a purely political agenda, as opposed to aligning themselves withand supporting the armed struggle’.35

Yet, not only was the overall composition of the movement altered, butalso control of republicanism passed into new hands as well at this time. Previ-ously, the ‘Provisionals’ had remained under the command of those men whohad founded the movement; chief among whom were two southern repub-licans, Ruairi Ó Brádaigh and Daithi O’Conaill. Now, however, the hungerstrike initiated a decisive internal power shift away from the Ó Brádaigh–O’Conaill leadership and towards their younger, predominantly northern,‘young Turk’ rivals. And though there had been some signs of a gradual shiftin favour of the ‘young Turks’ prior to 1981, it was the events of that yearthat provided a critical ‘tipping point’ in this process.36 The result was avisible ‘changing of the guard’ within the upper echelons of the republi-can movement. Hence, Adams’ close ally, Danny Morrison, replaced SeanÓ Brádaigh (the brother of Ruairi), as Sinn Féin’s director of publicity; JimGibney became the party’s national organizer; Tom Hartley, another close

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12 The Long March

supporter of Adams, continued to head up the influential Prisoner of WarDepartment that the party had created during the hunger strike; and GerryAdams himself was eventually installed as Sinn Féin president, in place ofthe resigning Ruairi Ó Brádaigh, in 1983.37 The tangible success of the meth-ods they had championed empowered Adams and his supporters and set thestage for their subsequent leadership of the republican movement. The hall-mark of that leadership was to be the combined politico-military approach,to which both the ideas of ‘Brownie’ and the events of 1981 had pointed.

With 1981 thus established as the start point for this study, it is worthaffirming that 2007, as already intimated, provides the other chronologicalparameter. The events of that year, with, on the one hand, the party triumph-ing in Northern Ireland, where Martin McGuinness becoming Deputy FirstMinister, even as it suffered a serious electoral reverse in the Irish Republic,suggested that a distinct phase in the history of Sinn Féin had ended. Theevents of two years earlier, with the official end of the IRA’s armed campaignand the decommissioning of its weaponry, merely confirmed this. The periodthereby enclosed was one in which the evolution of Sinn Féin was set againstthe backdrop of an IRA that was active, whether in practice, or more nomi-nally (as was the case when it moved into ‘ceasefire mode’ from August 1994to February 1996, and again from July 1997 onwards). As a consequence, theera 1981–2007 was one in which republicans can be said to have pursued anintegrated ‘Armalite and ballot box’ approach.

Furthermore, this period can also be considered a single unit in the presentcontext, because of its association with a distinct leadership of the republicanmovement. Within that leadership, as has already been indicated, the ‘stand-out’ figure was Gerry Adams. The most prominent of the ‘young Turks’ of themid- to late 1970s, Adams became the single most influential republican ofhis generation. With this in mind, it is somewhat inevitable that Adamswill loom large within the current work. That said, it would be wrong toreduce any examination of Sinn Féin’s development between 1981 and 2007to little more than an extension of Gerry Adams’ biography. For, as gifted apolitician as he undoubtedly is, he did not act alone. Rather, as he himselfadmits, he was part of a ‘small cadre of leadership activists’ that took a ‘col-lective approach to problem-solving and developing strategy and tactics’.38

The exact size and composition of that leadership appears to have fluctuated(as might be expected), over the course of the two and a half decades underexamination. Nevertheless, there have been strong elements of continuity.Little analysis of the republican leadership, as a group, has been made else-where; for this reason, it is perhaps useful to briefly consider it here and toattempt to construct a short, semi-sociological profile of those who controlledthe movement.

According to one enduring leadership figure, Jim Gibney, the ‘nationalleadership’ of the republican movement has tended to comprise a group ofaround fifty people.39 It is clear, however, that different people have played

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Introduction 13

roles of varying importance at different times. Furthermore, it is apparentthat among so large a group of people there are some who are ‘more equalthan others’. Indeed, Gerry Adams has suggested as much, by identifying a‘small core group’ that, from an early stage, handled the sort of issues thatwould later be bound up with the peace process.40 Focused around the personof Adams himself, this group has been described by more than one writer ashis ‘think tank’ of advisers.41 Though informal and set apart from the officialstructures of Sinn Féin, it was this group of what might be termed ‘core strat-egy personnel’ that determined the overall strategic direction of Sinn Féinand the broader republican movement. As Appendix I illustrates, membersof the group have included (in addition to the Sinn Féin President), MartinMcGuinness, Martin Ferris, Ted Howell, Brian Keenan, Mitchel McLaughlin,Pat Doherty, Gerry Kelly, Declan Kearney, Jim Gibney and Tom Hartley.

Beyond this ‘core group’ were others who, at one time or another, seemedclose (on occasion, very close) to the republican leadership, but whose pres-ence, or stature, was essentially limited in nature. Among these more ‘fringe’leadership figures were various former prisoners (men such as Seanna Walsh,Leo Green, Padraig Wilson, Brendan McFarlane, Martina Anderson and Lau-rence McKeown), whose collective commitment to the republican cause wasconsidered to be beyond reproach. The support of such people often provedvital to the leadership during the years of the peace process, when it came topersuading the republican grassroots of the merits of that process, especiallyat ‘painful’ points that required republican concessions.

At the same time, the leadership ‘fringe’ also contained those individu-als whose status within the movement was based largely, or indeed solely,upon political work within Sinn Féin. Their republicanism was not definedprimarily by a ‘military record’. People such as Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, SeanCrowe, Arthur Morgan, Bairbre de Brun, Alex Maskey, Conor Murphy and,latterly, Mary-Lou McDonald, could all be categorized as such. Though Mor-gan, Maskey and Murphy had spent time in jail, they were generally betterknown as political figures, rather than military men.

A final category that cannot be ignored in any attempt to separate outthe various strands that comprise the overall republican leadership is that ofthe ‘behind-the-scenes’ figures. On the one hand, this included people whomight, in another context, be labelled ‘apparatchiks’. Such people were littleknown outside the movement, but often played a crucial role, acting as theconduit by which the decisions of the ‘core group’ were transmitted to thewider republican base. Among them were people such as Denis Donaldson(until his exposure as a British spy in 2005), Aidan McAteer, Richard McAuley,Siobhan O’Hanlon (until her death in 2006), Chrissie McAuley and RitaO’Hare. On the other hand, ‘behind-the-scenes’ figures would also haveto include those purely IRA figures who were concerned almost exclusivelywith the military organization. Recognition of their place within the repub-lican leadership, though of less immediate importance here, again serves to

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re-emphasize the fact that Sinn Féin was, throughout this period, part of abroader republican movement, of which the IRA was very much a part.

This attempt to subdivide the republican leadership into easily definablecategories should not, it must be stressed, be applied too rigidly. As hasalready been noted, it is likely that an individual’s position and importancewithin the leadership varied over time, in response to both events and howthat individual performed. For this reason, Appendix I should be viewed as acharacterization of the republican leadership as it stood in the latter phasesof the peace process, rather than across the entire period. Its main purpose isto illustrate the spread and diversity of that leadership. That said, however,one category that remained relatively stable was that of ‘core strategy person-nel’. This ‘core group’ was largely unchanged from the late 1970s onwards;the notable exception being that of Danny Morrison, who was a key figureuntil he left the movement in the aftermath of his arrest and imprisonmentin 1990.

A consequence of this continuity of leadership at the highest level is thefact that the actions of the Irish republican movement can be interpretedas having possessed a certain coherence. In the absence of internal powerstruggles of the sort that produce policy inconsistencies, contradictions andu-turns, the movement instead operated in a relatively logical, linear manner.This is not to say that there were no ambiguities to ‘Provisional’ republican-ism. On the contrary, there most certainly were many. Yet, such ambiguitieswere largely the deliberate creation of a leadership that was only too awareof them. For the most part they were not the product of a situation whereinthe ‘left hand’ did not know (or could not stop), what the ‘right hand’ wasdoing. Thus, the movement tended to speak with only ‘one voice’, even ifthat voice varied depending on the audience to which it was speaking.

That this was so was a function of the essential unity of the leadership; aunity forged, in the words of Jim Gibney, in, ‘the crucible of conflict . . . inthe heat of the battle’.42 A fellow former member of the leadership, DannyMorrison, agrees with this assessment, remarking that, ‘the struggle itselfand what happened – burying comrades, organizing the struggle, witness-ing the hunger strike – all acted as a powerful, powerful cement upon thesepeople’.43 The shared memory and experience of this ‘struggle’ served toweld the republican leadership together to the point where they were unlikeany other political leadership in Ireland. Their ‘closeness’ could almost bedescribed as that of a ‘kin-kith’ group, for as Jim Gibney explains:

When you’re with people in very difficult situations, you depend on themfor your life. And when you depend on somebody for your life, a bond – atrust – comes out of that . . . The leadership that is there today – both thepublic and the not-so-public leadership – [consists of] people who havebeen through the mill together, so to speak. There’s a closeness arising outof that.44

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Introduction 15

Within the broader milieu of the ‘struggle’, one aspect appeared to beespecially influential in creating such bonds: the prison experience. DannyMorrison thus observes that, ‘most of the people who are in [the] Belfast[leadership] have been in jail several times, including internment’.45 AsAppendices I and II demonstrate, the same could be said of their counterpartsfrom Derry and, indeed, across the entire leadership. The importance of this,as Morrison affirms, is that republicans commonly believed that a stretchin prison, ‘underlined . . . and strengthened [a person’s] commitment’.46 Anindividual’s prison record served as a badge of credibility within the repub-lican movement; credibility born of the fact that prisoners were deemed tohave shown their loyalty to the ‘cause’ by sacrificing their personal freedomto it. Apart from those who were killed, it was argued that no one had givenup as much for the ‘struggle’ as republican prisoners.47 The words of thewriter Frank O’Connor seem quite apposite here. O’Connor once remarkedthat for an Irishman to say ‘He and I were in gaol together’ was rather likean Englishman saying ‘He and I were in Eton together’, but considerablymore classy; within the ranks of republicanism, this formulation seems allthe more true.48 Following such logic, prisoners and ex-prisoners were alwaysafforded a special place within the wider republican movement. The simplefact of a republican having spent time in prison served as a kind of ‘degree’on his/her ‘CV’ and cemented their position within the republican ‘family’.In this latter regard, in particular, it is striking that Danny Morrison’s memoirquotes approvingly from the opening pages of David Beresford’s book on thehunger strike. In so doing, Morrison records the words of one prisoner, whostated simply, ‘We were more than blanketmen: we were brothers.’49

Flowing from this, it would seem that the fact that so many members ofthe Adams–McGuinness leadership were themselves previously incarceratedand heavily involved in the conflict endowed them with quasi-familial ties.More broadly, meanwhile, it is clear that these personal histories bestowedthem with a certain level of moral authority within the movement. In thewords of Gerry Kelly (himself a former long-term prisoner), ‘The fact that Ihave been in jail, while it might be detrimental to you in any other soci-ety or country, means I’m looked upon here as someone who was preparedto put their livelihood, life, whatever, on the line . . . it gives you “streetcred”.’50 That ‘street cred’ was something that proved invaluable for theAdams–McGuinness leadership as it oversaw the wholesale transformationof the republican movement between 1981 and 2007; it gave the leadership,what Kelly described as, a ‘credibility factor’.51

It is this that may begin to explain why it was that the Adams–McGuinnessleadership proved so successful at maintaining the internal cohesion ofthe republican movement.52 Republicanism has had, to say the least, afissiparous history; a fact recognized by Sinn Féin presidents and playwrightsalike.53 Despite this, however, and more importantly, despite the deep-seated changes that the ‘Provisional’ republican movement underwent, the

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leadership managed to hold on to a critical mass of its supporters. Con-sequently, though there were splits (most prominently those that createdthe ‘Continuity’ IRA/Republican Sinn Féin and the ‘Real’ IRA/32 CountySovereignty Movement factions in 1986 and 1997 respectively), these didnot threaten the ‘Provisionals’ position as the majority shareholders withinrepublicanism. As to why this should have been the case, the fact that mostmembers of the republican movement trusted their leaders was crucial. Itwas this trust that made it possible for the latter to advocate major changesin republican strategy, even including an end to the IRA’s armed struggle,without the vast majority of republicans believing they were being sold out.What is more, this also ensured that the leadership itself did not believe itwas engaged in a ‘sell out’ process. The internal ‘bonds of trust’ within theleadership meant that it was prepared to endorse and advocate momentouschanges in strategic direction, without the fear that its ultimate ideologi-cal objective was being compromised. There was a collective belief withinthe leadership that, though their ‘means’ might have altered radically, the‘ends’ they pursued remained constant. On the back of this, the leadershipof ‘Provisional’ republicanism maintained the unity of the wider movementand that movement continued to be the dominant expression of republicanopposition to the ‘British presence’ in Ireland.

As Anthony McIntyre has pointed out, this continuing dominance wasalso founded upon the ‘Provisional’ republican movement’s control of theurban centres of Northern Ireland.54 This is not to deny that certain ruralareas, particularly East Tyrone and South Armagh, were also important, butit is to recognize that the principal loci of the movement were Belfast andDerry. It was in these two cities that the conflagration of the ‘Troubles’ wasfirst ignited and subsequently sustained. Control of Belfast and Derry was,thus, critical for the ‘Provisionals’ credibility as the foremost manifestationof republicanism. At the same time, such control was facilitated by the verycentrality of the two cities to the events of the ‘Troubles’; for this meant theyprovided the movement with a steady supply of both ‘foot soldiers’ and ‘gen-erals’. With regards to the latter, as Appendix II reflects, the overwhelmingmajority of those already identified as leadership figures within the repub-lican movement hailed from one of these two urban centres. On this basis,the leadership has tended to be dubbed the ‘Adams–McGuinness leadership’(as it will be henceforward here). Not only does such a label attest to theimportance of the Belfast–Derry nexus, but also it highlights the two mostpre-eminent figures of that leadership: Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.Deaglán de Bréadún has elegantly captured the essence of the relationshipbetween these two men, stating, ‘Adams is the strategist . . . McGuinness is theman with the power on the ground. Adams is the architect, McGuinness is theengineer.’55 Whatever the precise dynamic, there is no doubting that it wasthese two men together, representative of Belfast and Derry, who guided therepublican movement on its evolutionary journey between 1981 and 2007.

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Introduction 17

In attempting to illuminate the picture of Sinn Féin’s strategic evolutionacross this era, then, the succeeding analysis of the party breaks down thehistory of the period, between 1981 and 2007, into six broad phases. Eachof these is taken to have heralded a significant shift in strategy. During theinitial phase of politicization following the hunger strike, the aim was simplyto create a party with a definable political personality. What emerged was aparty that combined a radical, left-leaning edge with an appeal based on ‘eth-nic nationalism’, that drew on the party’s identification with the interests ofthe northern nationalist community. Through this mixed political identity,coupled with strong levels of community activism, republicans sought to ini-tiate a process of ‘republicanization’, whereby increasing numbers of people(both north and south) would come to accept the republican analysis andsupport the IRA’s armed struggle against British rule.

By 1985, however, the failure of this ‘republicanization’ project hadbecome clear. The halting of Sinn Féin’s political growth in Northern Ireland,allied to the continued failure of the party south of the Irish border, ensuredthat the Adams–McGuinness leadership felt a new approach was necessary.Consequently, Sinn Féin now sought to pursue a cross-party, pan-nationalistalliance with the other parties of Irish nationalism. By forging a connectionwith the SDLP in Northern Ireland and Fianna Fáil in the Republic, the partysought to end its isolation and head off the possibility of an ‘internal deal’to solve the Northern Irish conflict. Alongside this, Sinn Féin also attemptedto recast itself as both a ‘mainstream’ political party and a ‘force for peace’in Ireland. While the leadership still believed that the military campaign wasnecessary, it realized that it was, to a degree, inhibiting Sinn Féin’s growth; forthis reason, the ‘peace strategy’ of the party was seen as a potential antidoteto the political problems arising out of the IRA’s campaign.

By the early 1990s, however, it had become clear that the republican projecthad once again stalled. In response to various stimuli (the IRA’s decliningmilitary position, the changing international environment and Sinn Féin’scontinued political failure across Ireland), the republican leadership there-fore began to talk of a ‘new realism’ and looked for a way out of the armedconflict. In this context, the pan-nationalist alliance of the earlier period wasre-imagined as a potential alternative method of ‘struggle’ for republicans.The ‘long war’ was now to be converted into the ‘long negotiation’, dur-ing which republicans would seek to maximize the strength of a ‘nationalistconsensus’, to extract concessions from the British government. This wasthe essence of the ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ (TUAS) document of 1994,which provided the strategic underpinning for the new approach and pavedthe way for the IRA’s ceasefires and the peace process.

In the period that followed, republicans sought to maintain and increaseboth the ‘nationalist consensus’ and the political support they had wonthrough their involvement in the peace process. In so doing, they were facedwith the major challenge of having to sign a peace agreement that fell a

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18 The Long March

long way short of republican goals. At the same time, though, the repub-lican leadership also recognized that the Good Friday Agreement presentedSinn Féin with very real opportunities. In particular, by keeping Unionismoff-balance, while simultaneously allowing the party to present itself as theforemost defender of both the peace process and the interests of northernnationalists, the Agreement facilitated significant political growth for theparty. The result was that in 2001, Sinn Féin achieved a major strategic goal,when it established itself as the largest nationalist party in the north. Inlight of the British and Irish governments’ commitment to inclusive, power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin’s position as the majorityshareholder within northern nationalism effectively gave it a ‘veto’ over thefuture of the province.

With this objective achieved, the party’s strategic outlook shifted oncemore thereafter, so as to refocus the republican movement’s attention southof the Irish border. The lesson of the previous seven years there had been thatSinn Féin’s role in the peace process could fuel the party’s expansion in theRepublic. The process afforded Sinn Féin regular publicity, profile and an airof respectability. Building on this, the party had also sought to enhance animage of itself as a mainstream political party that simultaneously maintaineda radical, anti-establishment edge to its policies. By so doing, the republicanleadership appeared to seek the role of ‘effective’ opposition for Sinn Féin inthe Republic of Ireland. The benefits of this approach had been demonstratedin 2002, when Sinn Féin made significant electoral breakthroughs, claimingfive seats in the Dáil and just missing out on several others. The sense ofpolitical growth was then maintained through European and local electionsin 2004. The result was that, by the end of that year, the party could point toan electoral share approaching 10 per cent and the likelihood of further seatgains in the Irish Parliament.

And yet, even as the party seemed to be on the cusp of major politi-cal success, its project appeared to falter, as republicans were damaged byaccusations of continuing IRA paramilitarism and criminality. The falloutfrom the December 2004 Northern Bank robbery and the January 2005 mur-der of Robert McCartney in Belfast ended Sinn Féin’s previously dynamicexpansion. It was these twin shocks that forced the Adams–McGuinnessleadership to officially abandon the IRA, with the announcement of theformal end to the latter’s campaign and the completion of weapons decom-missioning. In this way, the period of the overt ‘Armalite and ballot box’approach was brought to a close and a ‘ballot box alone’ approach was sought.This approach succeeded in returning Sinn Féin to government in NorthernIreland. By early 2007, the party’s dominance of northern nationalism wasconfirmed and Martin McGuinness was able to take his place alongside IanPaisley as the new Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. But it was notclear whether Sinn Féin could recover the political momentum it had lostsouth of the border. The Irish general election in June 2007 proved to be a

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Introduction 19

sobering experience for the party and raised new questions as to the futuredirection of Sinn Féin.

On this basis, the chapters that follow are divided according to the chrono-logical subsections outlined above: 1981–5; 1985–90; 1990–7; 1997–2001;2001–4; and 2004–7. Such periodization in itself, it should be noted, furtherhelps mark out the present work as offering a fresh perspective as compared tothe existing literature. Yet, these divisions are not intended to be rigid. Theyare instead meant merely to convey the sense of strategic shift, as it occurredfrom one era to another. Taking the period as a whole, the overall picture thatemerges is one in which the evolution of Sinn Féin from a primitive, politicalappendage of the IRA into a sophisticated, modern political party in its ownright can clearly be seen; an evolution in which, despite all the changes thathave been wrought, the primacy of the republican movement’s ‘ideologicalobjective’ has remained intact.

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1Building the Political Party and‘Republicanization’, 1981–5

‘The development of an open, popular and relevant political party,which transcends partition and is based in all 32 counties, is asimportant as the continued resistance of the IRA.’

Gerry Adams1

Introduction

The election of Bobby Sands as the MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone inMay 1981 ushered in a new era for Sinn Féin and the broader republi-can movement. It marked the point at which republicans embraced a new,electoral-driven approach to politics. This reality was confirmed by theannouncement, following the death of Sands, that his election agent, OwenCarron, would stand for the again vacant seat. Given that republicans hadpreviously claimed that Sands’ intervention represented a once-only ‘bor-rowing’ of the seat for the prisoners’ cause, Carron’s candidacy indicatedthat republican involvement in politics would be more enduring than firstimagined; all the more so, as Kevin Rafter has noted, because Carron declared,when subsequently elected (as he was in August 1981, on the same ‘NationalH-Block/Armagh’ ticket as Sands), that he would stay on beyond the end ofthe hunger strike, but now as a Sinn Féin MP.2 In becoming the modern SinnFéin party’s first elected representative at national level, Carron (despite thefact he was displaced at the subsequent 1983 British general election), set thestage for the 1981 Sinn Féin ard fheis, at which Danny Morrison made hisproclamation of the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’ strategy.3

Furthermore, Carron’s victory was swiftly followed by others. In 1982, SinnFéin secured over 10 per cent of the vote in elections to Secretary of StateJames Prior’s ‘rolling devolution’ Assembly for Northern Ireland. Not onlydid this represent a 2 per cent increase on the figure achieved by the ‘NationalH-Block/Armagh’ candidates a year earlier, but the party also won five seats.4

Then, at the 1983 General Election, while the party suffered the loss of Owen

20

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 21

Carron’s seat, it saw Gerry Adams elected as MP for West Belfast for the firsttime. More broadly, in that poll Sinn Féin’s overall vote again climbed (reach-ing some 13.4 per cent of the votes cast in Northern Ireland) and the party’scandidate for Mid-Ulster, Danny Morrison, could consider himself unluckyto have missed out on being elected by a mere 78 votes.5 There was, therefore,little doubting Sinn Féin’s arrival as a permanent political force in NorthernIreland.

This string of successes helped guarantee the ‘electoral’ focus of the newpolitical departure that Sinn Féin pursued in the years after 1981. At a strategiclevel, this ‘electoralism’ was now fused with the notion of ‘republicanization’that ‘Brownie’ had first explored and Gerry Adams later articulated.6 Sim-ply put, this held that the movement ought to use political involvement tospread a ‘republican’ analysis of the Northern Irish conflict, and, in this way,build ever-increasing levels of support for the republican cause. As Adamsexplained in a 1985 interview, a central aim was to create opportunities bywhich republicans could, ‘put our views on the national question across andthen on the British presence and [thereby] republicanise the community’.7

The tangible expression of this ‘republicanization’ process, it was imagined,would be a Sinn Féin that was growing in strength and influence on eitherside of the Irish border; an outcome that was, it was assumed, likely to benefitthe republican movement in various ways.

‘Republicanization’, for example, was imagined to be an effective antidoteto the twin threats of criminalization and marginalization. By demonstrat-ing that republicans had the support of a significant section of the electorate,the movement could more easily refute the accusation (frequently levelledby their opponents), that they were little better than gangsters, or crimi-nals. Flowing from this, greater levels of sympathy and understanding forthe republican cause could be expected to serve as an alternative source ofpolitical pressure behind republican goals. To use the military analogy (asrepublicans often did), a process of ‘republicanization’ raised the prospect ofa ‘second front’ being opened against the British.

The importance that republicans attached to this political ‘second front’was a product of the vulnerability that they felt in relation to British ini-tiatives designed to end the conflict. Such initiatives generally rested on aneffort to reconstitute institutions of local government in Northern Irelandon a ‘power-sharing’ basis. Recognizing that there could be no return tothe majority-rule governments of the old Stormont parliament, the Britishwished to establish arrangements for a mandatory governing coalition inthe province between the ‘moderates’ from each community; a settlementattempted with the failed ‘Sunningdale’ Agreement of 1973–4, and at vari-ous points thereafter. The hope of successive British governments was that,in return for institutionalized power-sharing (usually allied to some form ofcross-border ‘Irish dimension’), a growing section of the Catholic/nationalistcommunity of Northern Ireland would give their consent to the province

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22 The Long March

remaining within the United Kingdom, for as long as the Unionist demo-graphic majority existed. This, it was imagined, would undermine support forthe republican movement and eventually force the IRA to end its campaign.

For their part, republicans saw the dangers they were likely to face in theevent that an ‘internal deal’ of this nature was achieved in Northern Ireland.To some extent, the IRA’s campaign itself was believed to offer some defenceagainst the realization of such a deal, because it kept Northern Ireland unsta-ble and forced the British to, ‘govern in a direct colonial way’.8 Nevertheless,republicans also acknowledged that this ‘military veto’ could well prove insuf-ficient in the event that a power-sharing agreement was reached that included‘a party which appears to represent the nationalist population’.9 Indeed,Sean O’Callaghan records the words of one senior republican, who admit-ted frankly, ‘if they get an assembly in place in Northern Ireland with SDLPinvolvement, we’re finished’.10

Against this background, a key objective for Sinn Féin was the attainmentof a ‘republican veto’ on political progress, as described by Gerry Adamsin 1983. In an interview that year with Magill magazine, Adams outlinedhow such a veto could be constructed, by Sinn Féin closing the gap betweenitself and the SDLP and thereby reducing the latter’s ‘freedom to manoeuvre’.Eventually it was hoped that Sinn Féin might even catch up and then surpassthe SDLP, so as to become, ‘the majority nationalist party’; an objective thathad seemed more than plausible following the surge of support for repub-licans in the wake of the 1981 hunger strike.11 The vista imagined by theAdams–McGuinness leadership at this time was one in which Sinn Féin’s tri-umph over their constitutional rivals would force the British to ‘re-orientatetheir policies’, as they were ‘faced with the fact that the nationalist popu-lation of the North doesn’t want an “internal settlement”’.12 As Sinn Féin’s1983 General Election literature stated, it was thought that the creation of a‘Republican electoral veto’ in this manner would undercut, ‘British and FreeState attempts to stabilise the 6 Counties [and] curtail the collaborationistSDLP’.13

What was being sought was a Sinn Féin ‘political’ veto, to supplement the‘military’ version provided by the IRA. Together, it was imagined that thesecould act to narrow the range of policy options facing the British government,to the point where ‘their only option would be one of withdrawal’.14 In thisway, the concept of the republican ‘political’ veto was wholly in keepingwith the desire of the Adams–McGuinness leadership to fully integrate therepublican movement’s political and military efforts. By ‘fusing’ these strandstogether, as ‘Brownie’ had described, the leadership looked to an interlockingapproach, whereby the growth of Sinn Féin would prevent a political solu-tion, even as the ongoing violent campaign of the IRA would, in the wordsof Martin McGuinness, ‘sicken’ the British into withdrawing from Ireland.15

Of considerable importance here was the fact that political developmentcontinued to be viewed as no substitute to the military campaign. On the

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 23

contrary, it was assumed that the latter would itself profit from the hoped-forprocess of ‘republicanization’, with greater support for the republican causeallowing the IRA to prosecute its armed struggle more effectively. Unquestion-ably, it was this armed struggle that still held pride of place within republicanstrategy during this period. What is more, no one in the Adams–McGuinnessleadership was arguing otherwise. This was true even among those within themovement’s leadership who were foremost in advocating the new ‘political’approach. Thus, Danny Morrison, one of the chief adherents of republican‘politics’, could still declare in an article in Magill magazine, ‘one thing I haveto emphasise, that all republicans are united in, is that electoral politics willnot remove the British from Ireland. Only armed struggle will do that.’16 Else-where, Morrison (writing under a pseudonym), was equally adamant that,‘there is no parliamentary road to a united Ireland’ and as a result, there wasno question of politics being allowed to, ‘either prejudice the future or theprimacy [emphasis added] of armed struggle’.17

With that said, what should be recognized, is the fact that the Adams–McGuinness leadership’s conception of precisely how it was that armedstruggle would achieve British withdrawal, was significantly different fromthat which had prevailed within the republican movement during the earlyyears of the ‘Troubles’. In this regard, the shift to the concept of a ‘longwar’ in the late 1970s was critical. Whereas previously, republicans had spo-ken of ‘Victory in ’72’ and thought success to be imminent, now it wasno longer imagined that the British Army would one day simply pack upand leave Ireland.18 Instead, the Adams–McGuinness leadership looked to amore drawn-out process; a process, crucially, that would inevitably have toinvolve negotiations between the IRA and the British government. As SeanO’Callaghan recalls from his time in the IRA in the early 1980s, ‘From thestart, Adams and those guys knew that they would have to negotiate withthe British . . . that at some stage there would have to be negotiations.’19

Yet, while the republican leadership had perhaps concluded that some formof negotiating process would ultimately have to occur, this should not beconfused with a belief that the IRA’s campaign would have to be halted tofacilitate this. On the contrary, their attitude was, as presented in an articlein Sinn Féin’s newspaper, An Phoblacht/Republican News, in the mid-1980s, ‘ifand when the situation presents itself, for negotiating a settlement – at somestage – the IRA’s attitude will be that it will talk and fight at the same time’.20

Sustaining this conviction was, on the one hand, a distinct analysis of therepublican movement’s history going all the way back to the 1919–21 periodand the experience of the original IRA. According to O’Callaghan:

There had long been this belief in republican circles that the big mis-take that was made in 1921 was that they stopped the war during thetalks . . . that they should have carried on fighting throughout. And so, therepublican leadership was very adamant that the IRA had to continue its

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24 The Long March

campaign, until withdrawal had been secured, even if this meant fightingand negotiating at the same time.21

It might also be said that the more immediate experience of the 1975 trucedoubtless served to reinforce this ‘lesson’ of history. On that occasion too,republicans had halted the armed campaign for what seemed in retrospectlike little reward. In so doing, the then leadership was thought to havebrought the movement to the brink of defeat; something of which the ‘youngTurks’ in the Adams–McGuinness leadership had been fiercely critical.22

In addition to this historical perspective, though, Adams and McGuinnessappear to have been heavily influenced by contemporary, internationalevents as well. In this regard, the example of Vietnam appears to have car-ried particular resonance for the republican leadership; for that conflict, andespecially its denouement, seemed to forcibly demonstrate the potency of astrategy involving both ‘fighting and talking’. After all, as one of the foremostanalysts of the Vietnam war, Robert Thompson, has noted, what the ParisPeace talks (which ended US involvement in Vietnam) had shown was that:

When it came down to ‘fighting while negotiating’ the advantage wouldlie with the side which knew exactly what its objectives were and whichwas still prepared to fight for them ‘unremittingly’ rather than with theside which was uncertain about its objectives and was, therefore, lessinclined to continue fighting.23

O’Callaghan maintains that this ‘lesson’ of the Vietnam War was somethingof which the Adams–McGuinness leadership was only too aware. For thisreason, ‘the Paris Peace talks were definitely being mentioned and discussedby Adams and those around him’.24 The aim of the republican leadership wasto initiate their own process of ‘fighting while negotiating’, by which theymight subject the British to their own ‘Vietnam moment’ and force themto finally leave Northern Ireland, just as the Americans had been forced toabandon South-east Asia in the 1970s.

On the basis of such logic, therefore, it would seem incontrovertible thatthe Adams–McGuinness leadership viewed the IRA’s violent campaign as anindispensable part of the wider republican ‘struggle’ in this period. The prac-tical effect of this was that the IRA continued to put itself at the forefrontof that ‘struggle’, with various high-profile operations. While the ‘war’ con-tinued in Northern Ireland, bombs at Harrods and Hyde Park in London in1982 and 1983, and the attempt to blow up the entire British Cabinet atBrighton in 1984, were indicative of the republican determination to strikeat the perceived heart of the British ‘establishment’.25 Through the mainte-nance and sporadic escalation of its campaign, the IRA sought to make itself,in the words of Gerry Adams, the ‘vital cutting edge’ that would force Britishwithdrawal from Ireland.26

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 25

Underpinning this effort lay an unreconstructed republican ideology thatposited the British as the root source of Ireland’s problems. As Adams tes-tified, the relationship between Britain and Ireland was deemed to be ‘acolonial one’.27 The British were thought to have maintained this rela-tionship through the creation and fostering of ‘bitter divisions’ and theinstitution of partition.28 With regards to the latter, this was said to be ‘themain means by which equality is denied us and the principal method bywhich self-determination is withheld from us’.29 As a result, it was parti-tion that republicans sought to remove, through direct engagement withits British ‘sponsor’, via armed struggle. According to such a view, Union-ists were believed to be fundamentally ‘Irish’, albeit Irish people deludedby a false sense of their own ‘British-ness’. ‘Unionism’ and ‘loyalism’ wereassumed to be the product solely of the ‘artificial’ union with Britain. Ascreeds they were said to lack any significant political content of their ownand be defined only by their ‘complete hollowness’.30 Indeed, republicansargued that, ‘the only tradition which has distinguished loyalism is one ofreligious bigotry and sectarianism’.31 Furthermore, such bigotry was allegedto have been engendered deliberately by the British and by the ‘prop whichcauses the sectarianism’; namely, the Union.32 For this reason, the argumentran, it behoved republicans to work directly to ‘break the British connec-tion’, because, ‘only breaking the political will of the British to remain inIreland . . . will affect the loyalist community’.33 Doing this, it was assumed,would force the ‘ “pro-British” national minority’ to, ‘face up to the reality ofthe situation’ and embrace a new future as part of a united Ireland.34

This kind of thinking also helps explain why it was that the Adams–McGuinness leadership was so quick to abandon the Eire Nua policy of theprevious Ó Brádaigh–O’Conaill leadership. Not only were its formulaic pro-nouncements of what a ‘Sinn Féin government’ would do in the event ofvictory judged to be irrelevant to ‘daily politics’, but also its federal provi-sions (which included plans for a regional parliament of Ulster, Dáil Uladh,within a united Ireland), were considered by the ‘young Turks’ of the newleadership to be a ‘sop to unionism’.35 As Danny Morrison put it simply inan article in 1985, the Adams–McGuinness leadership opposed

making compromises with loyalism . . . [because] I don’t think there isanything we can do – short of surrender – that is going to convince thosepresently tied to the philosophy of loyalism that we mean them well in aunited Ireland. There is nothing we can do to convince them and I thinkit is pointless to waste energy trying.36

For Morrison and his colleagues in the leadership, the only possible solutionto the ‘loyalist problem’ was to force British withdrawal.

In the context of that withdrawal being attained, meanwhile, Morrisonargued that Unionism/loyalism would split: ‘One side will adopt a pragmatic

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26 The Long March

approach and break from loyalism . . . The other side will fight, pushing for acivil war, or some kind of repartition.’37 As to which faction was larger andas to the possible extent of any ensuing violence, it was assumed that thesewould be determined by the strength of the republican movement in thepost-withdrawal environment. Hence, Gerry Adams declared elsewhere that,even though a British withdrawal could trigger conflict,

loyalists, already destabilised by the effects of such a withdrawal, are morelikely to come more quickly to terms with their new position if faced withan honest, principled opposition than they would if ‘opposed’ only by abunch of compromised parties and minority republican groups.38

Adams’ words thus reveal an additional key rationale for the developmentof Sinn Féin as a political force; namely, the central role envisaged for theparty in the effort to construct a settlement for a ‘Brit-less’ Ireland. To thisend, it was considered vital that Sinn Féin’s growing political support notbe confined to Northern Ireland. For the Adams–McGuinness leadership, thepossibility of a confrontation with ‘loyalism’, in the aftermath of British with-drawal, demanded that Sinn Féin construct a support base on both sides ofthe Irish border.

The building of this support base, then, was the central focus for SinnFéin in this period. The attainment of this base, it was imagined, would ful-fil several objectives of the republican movement: increased support for theIRA; the hindering of British efforts to create an ‘internal deal’ for NorthernIreland; the fostering of additional political pressure on the British to with-draw; and preparation for the anticipated ‘post-withdrawal’ situation. In thisway, Sinn Féin, while remaining secondary to the IRA, was to operate in tan-dem with the armed organization, as part of a unified republican effort toachieve Irish unity.

The community-based, campaigning party

Sinn Féin’s pursuit of its objectives required the development of a tangiblepolitical ‘personality’ for the party. The Adams–McGuinness leadership rec-ognized that it was only through the creation of such a personality that therepublican movement could realistically hope to engage afresh with the Irish‘masses’. As Jimmy Drumm had outlined back in the mid-1970s, republicansneeded to take, ‘a stand on economic issues and on the everyday struggles ofthe people’, in order to achieve a ‘positive tie in’ with those people.39 Yet, inseeking to establish just such a political character for Sinn Féin, Adams andhis supporters were not working on an entirely blank canvas. This was par-ticularly so in Northern Ireland, where the party and broader movementalready enjoyed a well-established presence and role within certain localcommunities.

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 27

On one level, this ‘community role’ was a function of the de facto respon-sibility for ‘policing’, which republicans had assumed during the early yearsof the ‘Troubles’. With republican areas of Belfast and Derry turned, fora time, into ‘no go areas’ for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) andBritish Army, it had fallen to the IRA to tackle crime and, especially, anti-social behaviour. Thereafter, even after the official collapse of the ‘no goareas’ in 1972, such districts had remained difficult for the security forcesto enter and, as a consequence, republicans continued to be involved in‘community policing’ – principally, through the euphemistically termed ‘civiladministration’ department of the IRA.40

Republicans always argued that this policing role was one that was nei-ther sought, nor enjoyed. Instead, it was to be viewed as a necessary evil. Asan article for Sinn Féin’s An Phoblacht/Republican News in 1982, put it, ‘TheIRA . . . would prefer that it didn’t have to engage in such measures but theyare forced upon us by an oppressed community which can do without beingoppressed from within by those who have no interest in peace or freedomand whose only interest is personal and selfish.’41 Such explanations should,of course, be treated with some caution. After all, the IRA was hardly likelyto argue otherwise. Nevertheless, it seems probable that there was some gen-uine support for its actions within specific urban nationalist communities.Jeff Sluka’s anthropological account of life in the Divis Flats complex in WestBelfast, for instance, offers some corroborative evidence to this effect.42 Atthe same time, however, it must be acknowledged that the IRA’s involvementin ‘community policing’ carried advantages for republicans. Not least in thisregard was the significant level of social power that it bestowed on the repub-lican movement. For, through their monopoly over the use of force in their‘heartland’ communities, republicans were able to demarcate who belongedto a community and who did not. As Malachi O’Doherty has highlighted,this control over the boundaries of community identity helped to legitimizethe IRA, allowing it to act as a community’s ‘guardian of conscience’.43 Inaddition, it served to embed the republican movement within local commu-nities in precisely the way that ‘Brownie’ had previously envisaged. This, inturn, was something that could generate an increase in support for Sinn Féin.

Further examination of the republican movement’s involvement in ‘com-munity policing’ lies beyond the scope of the present study. The importanceof this role in the present context, however, lies in the fact that it served as anotable precursor to the post-1981 development of Sinn Féin; for that devel-opment was, to a considerable degree, centred upon the party’s prominentposition in local communities. Similar in this respect, was the other definingfeature of the republican movement’s political pre-history: its participationin ‘community’, or ‘street’, politics in the years after the 1975 ceasefire.

Ironically, given the criticism of it by the ‘young Turks’ around GerryAdams, one of the lasting legacies of the IRA’s mid-1970s truce was the polit-ical presence it afforded republicans in nationalist communities; a presence

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28 The Long March

made manifest by the creation of ‘Truce Incident Centres’. Established tomonitor observance of the ceasefire, these centres quickly became hubs oflocal republican activity. Moreover, while the truce itself eventually brokedown, the centres were maintained by Sinn Féin and transformed intothe party’s ‘Advice Centres’. As Jesper Hejlesen has illustrated, by 1982, therewere over thirty of these installations operating around Northern Ireland,with each, in effect, serving a dual purpose.44 On the one hand, the ‘AdviceCentre’ furnished Sinn Féin with a local community headquarters. On theother, it provided a forum through which Sinn Féin could begin to offera service to that community, acting as a primitive form of citizens’ advicebureau. In the words of long-time leadership figure, Jim Gibney, therefore,the centres were

the first public network of institutions that Sinn Féin took hold of androoted itself in. And they became the public face of Sinn Féin in a lot oflocalities . . . So they, I think, began the journey – the long, long journey –out of the backstreets, out of the shadows of the conflict, into a publicmanifestation of republican politics.45

It was upon this ‘Advice Centre’ foundation that the Adams–McGuinnessleadership sought to build, in its attempt to develop the content of republicanpolitics.

This background in ‘informal policing’ and ‘community politics’ had anenduring affect on the nature of the political character that subsequentlyemerged in Sinn Féin. Growing out of an involvement in ‘agitational’, or‘street’, politics at community level, the party maintained and carried for-ward a perception of itself as rooted in local communities. A sense of this canbe gained from the later assertion of Jim Gibney that Sinn Féin, ‘expressesthe politics of its community in the broadest sense . . . the community iden-tity that Sinn Féin has is very strong’.46 A similar view is offered by theparty’s European director (himself a former local councillor), Eoin O’Broin,who argues that Sinn Féin is ‘very much about community empowerment’.47

Rather than dismissing such claims as mere cant, it should be acknowledgedthat they constitute a vital part of what Sinn Féin believes itself to be about.Furthermore, it must be recognized that this focus on ‘community’ decisivelycoloured the character of Sinn Féin as it developed in the early 1980s; for acentral facet of Sinn Féin’s embryonic political persona was a continued com-mitment to what O’Broin refers to as, ‘community-based activism’.48 In thecontext of the new political departure encouraged by the Adams–McGuinnessleadership, the pre-existing activism of the party on this front was taken tonew levels.

Hence, much of the material contained within An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews in this period had little to do with the ‘national’ or ‘constitutional’questions per se. Instead, Sinn Féin focused on issues of immediate, material

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 29

importance to the communities in which it was based: housing shortages;unemployment; drugs problems; and crime. A typical issue of the party news-paper from the middle of 1984, for instance, offers ample evidence to thiseffect. True, the front page of the paper and space within was given overto coverage of the alleged ‘drift’ in British policy in Northern Ireland (a ref-erence to the then government’s failure to name a successor to James Prioras Secretary of State).49 On top of that, the largest article in the paper (onthe centre pages) was a historical analysis of republican strategy during theIrish civil war. In both these cases, the presence of the respective stories wasscarcely surprising.50 What is striking, though, is the fact that the majority ofthe articles that made up the remainder of that edition had almost nothingexplicitly to say about the ‘liberation struggle’. On the contrary, the readerwas informed of the ordinary problems being faced in certain local areas, oreven by individual families. From the traffic accident ‘black spot’ in the Pole-glass estate of Belfast, to the efforts of the residents of Bray in Dublin to stampout drug dealing; such was the dominant focus of the newspaper.51 It was tothese issues, typical of life in any relatively deprived urban environment, thatSinn Féin gave most attention and directed its activities.

Moreover, not only did the party seek to highlight social problems, whichin its eyes were a legacy of the failed states created by partition, but also itsought to remedy them. This was to be the practical outworking of the callmade by the Adams–McGuinness leadership for republicans to become polit-ically engaged with the ‘masses’ on a daily basis. The truth of this can be seenthrough an examination of Sinn Féin’s response to two of the socio-economicissues that received the greatest coverage in An Phoblacht/Republican News:alleged housing discrimination in Northern Ireland; and the heroin ‘epi-demic’ that swept through Dublin in the early 1980s.

With regards to the former, one of the principal grievances for NorthernIreland’s nationalist community at the outset of the ‘Troubles’ had been theperception that public housing was allocated and maintained on a discrimi-natory basis. It was this that, for many, had come to epitomize the apparent‘inequality’ and ‘sectarianism’ of the Northern Irish state; so much so, thatthe housing issue had played a vital role in the genesis of the conflict.52 There-after, despite the reforms enacted in response to the civil rights movement,the belief remained among many nationalists that inequality of this kindremained endemic within the system. As a consequence, ‘housing’ contin-ued to be a potent subject and one that could be exploited with relative easeby the republican movement (both north and south, in light of the hous-ing shortages that afflicted much of inner-city Dublin). For this reason, SinnFéin’s internal lecture for activists on ‘social agitation’ identified ‘housing’ asone of four key issues concerning the ‘working class’, by which republicansmight bring them to ‘identify with the national liberation struggle’.53

That such counsel was acted upon can be seen from the volume of activ-ity undertaken by Sinn Féin, particularly in Northern Ireland, that targeted

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alleged housing problems. Criticism of conditions within the Divis Flatscomplex in West Belfast, for example, was a regular feature of the party’snewspaper.54 In similar vein, when Sinn Féin decided to launch a series oflocally focused news-sheets in early 1983, as a vehicle for further embeddingthe party into local communities, major emphasis was given to the problemscreated by the ‘worst housing in Europe’.55 The enduring relevance of thissubject was underlined a year later when, in the course of his campaign for aEuropean seat, Danny Morrison made much of the allegedly ‘sectarian natureof housing provisions in the North’.56

Sinn Féin’s activism on this matter, though, ran beyond simply high-lighting the deficiencies of the system. Instead, party members combinedcondemnation of the existing situation with concerted efforts to deliverimprovements. Morrison, for example, did not just attack the status quo, butalso made positive suggestions as to how things could be ameliorated, callingfor, ‘an active and massive programme of new building, the expansion of thePoleglass estate and the creation of new estates on the outskirts of the area’.57

Meanwhile, alongside such appeals, Sinn Féin members on the ground inareas with housing problems were, in the later words of Morrison, ‘dealingwith various agencies – the DoE, the DHSS, the Housing Executive – and gain-ing experience, learning how to deal with consumer problems . . . learninghow to work the system’.58 In similar vein, the Sinn Féin Assembly memberfor the Lower Falls district of Belfast, Fra McCann, recalls his own experienceof involvement in the campaign to demolish the Divis Flats complex:

we realized that it was no use pushing for the flats to come down if weweren’t going to replace it with the type of houses that people wanted tolive in. So we actually took part in consultation with the Housing Executiveto design the area that was being created.59

As the party’s local newsletters proclaimed, the impulse behind this kind ofactivity was a belief that Sinn Féin should act ‘with the people’ against thestate, to help ‘those socially and economically oppressed by the system tomake as many gains as possible’.60

A similar impulse lay behind the party’s prominent involvement in theanti-drugs campaign that developed across Dublin’s inner city in this period.In particular, the Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) committees thatsprang up in many areas were given Sinn Féin’s unreserved backing.61 This,despite the fact that several of their activities (such as the patrolling of estates,the issuing of threats to alleged ‘drug pushers’ and vandalism), appearedto border on vigilantism.62 In line with this, An Phoblacht/Republican Newsadopted a stance of unqualified support for the actions of the CPAD groups.Furthermore, while the CPAD committees were not formally run by repub-licans, it is clear that members of the movement were heavily involved andoften in a leadership capacity. An Phoblacht/Republican News claimed that such

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participation was on a ‘purely personal basis’.63 However, anecdotal evidencefrom those who were involved in the communities at the time would appearto challenge this assertion. Indeed, it is the view of one former communityworker, for instance, that, ‘the Concerned Parents may have been started bythose who were genuinely opposed to drugs, but they were quickly takenover by the Provos’.64 Assessing the truth, or otherwise, of this allegation liesbeyond the scope of the present work. Suffice to say here, however, that thefact that such accusations could plausibly be levelled is evidence in itself ofhow deeply involved republicans became with the CPAD campaign.

What can be said with certainty, meanwhile, is that from the early 1980sSinn Féin worked hard to build its profile as a leading voice in support ofthe CPAD movement. In so doing, according to Sean O’Callaghan, the partywas proceeding from the recognition that this campaign might provide theparty with a useful ‘entry point’ into the communities concerned.65 This wasparticularly useful in the south, given the absence of the kind of naturalrepublican ‘heartlands’ that existed as a result of the conflict in the north.Furthermore, once there, the nature of the campaign was such as to lenditself readily to the kind of ‘street-based’, activist politics that the party hadexperience of from Northern Ireland. Integral to this was the creation of akind of ‘crusading’ ethos, which relied much on the rousing of emotions andthe maintenance of a heightened level of agitation, through such devices aspickets, marches and even violence.

Against this backdrop, it could be that the Concerned Parents campaignwas viewed, strategically, by the Adams–McGuinness leadership, as a possiblesuccessor to the anti-H-Block campaign of a few years previously. After all,with the period of the hunger strike having brought an apparent surge insupport for republicanism, it would have been only natural for Sinn Féinto seek a repeat performance. The CPAD movement, through its focus on asensitive subject and its arousal of similar emotional responses (albeit on asmaller scale), may well have been seen by the republican leadership as theinheritor of the ‘National H-Block/Armagh’ Committee’s mantle. In as faras this was the case, Sinn Féin’s high-profile involvement in the anti-drugscampaign can thus be described in terms of the party utilizing a ‘strategy oftension’; or what O’Callaghan describes as, ‘the politics of fear’.66 Withinsuch a strategy, emphasis was placed on elevating and then sustaining thepassion of the general public. In the words of the former community workeralready quoted:

When it came down to it, the Provos in the Concerned Parents weren’tinterested in rational debate – on actually discussing the issues involved inthis drugs problem. All they really wanted was names . . . names of thoseinvolved and they would then be targeted for pickets, violence, whatever.And all the time they were getting people’s emotions up, getting themexcited.67

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In this context, it seems to have been the hope of the republican leadershipthat the inflaming of public opinion on the drugs issue would work to theparty’s advantage.

However, recognition of this, it should be stressed, is not to doubt thefact that many of those involved in the anti-drugs campaign for Sinn Féinwere genuine in their intentions; or, indeed, to deny that the campaign wasresponding to an all-too-real social problem. It is, though, to see the ‘biggerpicture’ as to the strategic benefits that the party could hope to accrue by itsvery public anti-drugs stance and activity. This activity was part of a broaderframework of republican involvement in what Sean O’Callaghan has labelled,‘soft social issues’.68 Through its campaigning on such matters as housingshortages and drugs problems, Sinn Féin looked to ‘republicanize’ a growingsection of the Irish people. Or, as an internal party document from the mid-1980s outlined, the party sought, through its role in ‘community politics’, toensure both that it remained ‘firmly entrenched in all the affairs of the localcommunity’ and that it was in position to begin the process of ‘politicising thepeople . . . in practical ways’.69 By broadening the character of their ‘struggle’in this fashion, the hope was not only that it would lead to a direct increasein the popularity of Sinn Féin, but also that by highlighting the failure of the‘partitionist’ states, it would build support for the wider ‘national struggle’and the IRA’s campaign.

Left-wing radicalism meets ethnic nationalism

As well as identifying Sinn Féin with a form of ‘community’ politics, activismon the sort of ‘social issues’ described, was also in keeping with the self-imageof a party that believed itself to be both firmly to the left of the politicalspectrum and based primarily within depressed urban ghettoes. With regardsto the latter, Sinn Féin assumed its appeal to lie chiefly with those ‘left behind’by the state on either side of the Irish border. To some extent, it had littlechoice in this. The very insularity of the republican movement, at the outsetof the effort to build Sinn Féin, guaranteed that the party would have to rely,at least initially, on this support base.

While republicans preferred to view this base as the embodiment of thetrue Irish working-class, the reality was that it might better be described ascomprising a kind of ‘under-class’. For as Fionnula O’Connor has illustrated,within Northern Ireland the unemployed accounted for over a third of thosevoting for Sinn Féin in this period (by contrast, the equivalent figure forthe SDLP was 13 per cent). In addition, the strongest levels of support for theparty were to be found in the areas of the greatest deprivation and alienationfrom the state; areas such as the Creggan and Brandywell estates in Derry, andthe Ballymurphy, New Lodge and Whiterock areas of Belfast.70 A similar storywas also in evidence in the Republic of Ireland, where as has been described,the sprawling housing estates of inner-city Dublin served as the principal

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focus for Sinn Féin’s political endeavours. The effect of this was to inclineSinn Féin instinctively towards a form of ‘oppositional’, left-wing politics.

At the same time, this political orientation was also the product of theideological self-perception of key figures within the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership. The professed ‘socialism’ of those constituting that leadership hastended to be dismissed, yet many of them have long spoken of their admira-tion for republican ‘socialists’ such as James Connolly (one of the signatoriesof the 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic and founder of both the IrishSocialist Republican Party and the Irish Labour Party) and Liam Mellows (aleading member of the anti-Treaty IRA of 1922–3). Jim Gibney, Adams’ closefriend and ally, for instance, has spoken of Mellows (and Connolly) as beinghis ‘introduction to socialism in an Irish setting’, and claimed that the workof the former was ‘among a group of books deemed “essential reading” bythose in the gaols with the responsibility for political education’.71 By thesame token, Adams’ 1986 book, The Politics of Irish Freedom, is replete withnumerous references as to the importance of Connolly and Mellows.72

Such an affinity is far from surprising, given the clear similarities betweenthe kind of ideas championed by ‘Brownie’/Adams and those of Mellows.The latter had, for instance, written that the republican struggle needed to beexpanded beyond ‘guns and men’ and argued that the ‘Republican politicaland military outlook’ needed to be ‘coordinated’.73 The congruence of thiswith the later words of ‘Brownie’ is unmistakable.74 Elsewhere, there wereobvious parallels between Mellows’ contention that Labour had to be madeto stand for the Republic, and Adams’ call (which itself echoed Connolly) forrepublicans to make ‘the cause of Labour the cause of Ireland and the causeof Ireland the cause of Labour’.75 In this way, as the Adams–McGuinnessleadership sought to chart a new ‘political departure’ within the republicanmovement, Mellows and Connolly were natural sources to draw upon. Thatthis should have been so was not just because such a use of republican historyhelped legitimate the project, but also because Adams and those around himhad, to some extent, genuinely imbibed the arguments of their republicanantecedents.

The canonical works of Irish republicanism, however, were not the onlyideological stimuli to which the Adams–McGuinness generation of republi-can leaders were exposed. Rather, they were also brought into contact (oftenthrough time spent in prison), with wider currents of radical global thought.As Jim Gibney recalls:

You had conflicts going on in Angola, in the African continent, Mozam-bique, South Africa itself. There was an international atmosphere. [The]Soviet Union was still a major power in those days. And these were thingsthat were very alive to us in internment. And we would have read a lot ofrevolutionary literature. We would have picked up on the ideas of whatMarxists [were saying] . . . In a sense it was catholic, in the universal sense

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of the word. Because you were picking up general knowledge of worldevents and, of course, you were fitting them into an Irish context.76

Gibney’s view is supported by the opinion of another close ally of GerryAdams, Tom Hartley, who has also attested to the important part played byinternational events on his own political development:

I always knew about the South African struggle. My generation alsoknew about Algeria, Vietnam, about the civil rights movement in NorthAmerica . . . It would be anti-imperialist struggles, anti-colonial strugglestaking place in Africa, and that was really, you might say, what I grew upalongside.77

Concurrent with such recollections, Richard English has shown that the IRAprisoners’ collection of books in the Maze prison was heavily slanted towardsleft-wing, revolutionary writings, with expositions from numerous socialistthinkers including Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao.78

What all of this illustrates, therefore, is the degree to which the people whomade up the Adams–McGuinness leadership had been imbued with a senseof Ireland’s place in a wider international order. Against this background, itwas no surprise that one of the hallmarks of that leadership was a far morevigorous attempt to identify Sinn Féin with ‘fraternal’ national liberationstruggles around the world.

In this regard, it should be noted, the location of the republican strugglewithin a broader, international context in itself marked nothing new. Onthe contrary, Irish republicans had always looked abroad for support in theirefforts to ‘free Ireland’ from British control. Ever since the days of Wolfe Tonein the eighteenth century and the first expositions of Irish republicanism,the movement had drawn both ideological inspiration and practical succourfrom beyond Ireland’s shores (first from France and later from the UnitedStates). This willingness to look abroad – what might be termed an ‘interna-tionalist tendency’ – had survived the republican split of the late 1960s thatsaw the creation of the ‘Provisionals’. Rather than being, as they have oftenbeen portrayed, an entirely inward-looking group, the initial leaders of thatmovement continued to draw significant support, both material and ideolog-ical, from abroad.79 Nevertheless, such connections were only taken so far.Little attempt was made to establish ‘solidarity’ links with other revolutionarygroups around the world, of the sort that would become standard fare for SinnFéin in the 1980s. These were generally seen as superfluous to requirements.Moreover, the innate anti-Marxism of men such as Ó Brádaigh, led them toview many so-called ‘progressive’ groups with a good deal of suspicion. Tooclose an association with the revolutionary left was viewed as taking the partydangerously near to the terrain of the hated ‘official’ republican movement.

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Thus, rather than viewing itself as being in some way aligned to a globalanti-imperialist continuum, Sinn Féin in the 1970s looked more to a contextthat was both historical and specifically Irish.80

By contrast, the internationalism of the Adams–McGuinness leadershipwas qualitatively different from that which preceded it and was profoundlyinfluenced by the aforementioned engagement with revolutionary ideaswhen in prison. Increasingly, republicans did not simply view the interna-tional arena as an optional and opportunistic instrument for use against theBritish, but instead saw it as an integral part of their political outlook asrepublicans. In line with such beliefs, there was a concerted effort to developthe image of Sinn Féin as a party of national liberation, in line with other rad-ical, anti-imperialist movements across the globe.81 In this period the partybecame a regular fixture at the wide variety of conferences being organized byso-called ‘revolutionary’ groups and ‘progressive’ governments from aroundthe world. It was to such entities, frequently Marxist in orientation, that SinnFéin now looked in a way that would have been unimaginable for the fer-vently anti-Marxist early leaders of the ‘Provisional’ republican movement.Efforts were made to seek out and establish links with those perceived to beengaged in similar ‘struggles’ to that of Irish republicans, with the efforts ofgroups such as the ANC in South Africa, the PLO in the Middle-East and theSandinistas in Nicaragua receiving particular attention. Through their asso-ciation with these causes, Sinn Féin not only established its place amongthe global ‘revolutionary left’, but also strengthened its interpretation of theconflict in Ireland: that it was essentially ‘colonial’ in nature and requiredthe removal of the ‘imperial’ power, Britain, if it was to be resolved.

Implicit here was what Richard Bourke identified as an integral featureof the republican worldview; namely, a belief in the essential antithesisof the forces of ‘democracy-socialism’ on the one hand and ‘capitalism-imperialism’ on the other.82 Republicans had long held themselves to be adynamic manifestation of the former. This had been the case even under theÓ Brádaigh–O’Conaill leadership, which had also talked enthusiastically ofthe need to create a ‘socialist republic’.83 Under the control of Adams and hissupporters, though, Sinn Féin’s commitment to the cause of ‘socialism’ wastaken to a new level.

On the domestic front, this shift was embodied by the new prominenceplaced on the language of ‘class’. Adams, for example, could be found argu-ing that republicans would only be successful if, ‘the struggle is led by themost radical social groups and in particular by the working class’.84 In sim-ilar vein, during a republican rally to mark May Day (itself a new departurefor republicans), the Sinn Féin President insisted on the importance of com-bining, ‘the right of the Irish people to national self-determination and theright of those who produce Irish wealth to control that wealth in the interestsof their own class – the Irish working class’.85 The clear message was that itwas with the working class, and even with those below that in society, that

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republicans stood. As Adams stated on a separate occasion, Sinn Féin believedits place was with, ‘the “have-nots” against the “haves” . . . [with] the peopleof no property’.86 Their adversaries were those ‘on the other side’, from ‘bigbusiness, to multinationalism, to gombeenism, to sectarianism and to themaintenance of a privileged class’; or to put it more simply, ‘all forms and allmanifestations of imperialism and capitalism’.87

In line with this ethos, the republican leadership placed added emphasison the supposed linkages between the national, economic and social aspectsof their ‘struggle’. These were now to be seen as ‘but different sides of the onecoin’, and the party declared that ‘labour cannot wait!’.88 Explicit attackswere made on the alleged ‘evils of a capitalist system’, and these were joinedby new suggestions as to the importance of creating a ‘planned economy’ thatwas ‘controlled by its workers’.89 Furthermore, in 1983, Sinn Féin altered itsconstitution, deleting a reference to ‘Christian principles’ and replacing thiswith ‘Irish republican socialist principles’ instead.90

Beyond such effusive rhetoric, party policy became decidedly more leftwing in orientation, with talk of wealth redistribution, major increases intaxation, heavy state intervention in the economy, the creation of workers’co-operatives and strident opposition to Ireland’s membership of the Euro-pean Economic Community (EEC).91 In addition, the party also adopted amore avowedly ‘progressive’ stance on several social issues. A clear example inthis regard, for instance, was Sinn Féin’s embrace of, what might be termed, a‘proto-feminist agenda’. In 1980, for instance, a dedicated ‘Women’s Depart-ment’ was created within the party to advance the role of women. Followingon from this, at its 1983 ard fheis, Sinn Féin approved a programme of inter-nal affirmative action, setting a quota of eight women, who had to be on theard chomhairle at all times.92 More broadly, the party also began to pay muchgreater attention than previously to such matters as the non-availability ofcontraception and the absence of divorce legislation in the Irish Republic.93

Rectifying the latter situation, it was argued, was ‘long overdue’, while therewere calls for the former to be, ‘free, safe and readily available to all throughGPs and family planning clinics’.94 The party’s stance on this issue, in partic-ular, was representative of a major shift in policy, given that Sinn Féin hadpreviously opposed the 1974 decision to legalize the sale of contraceptives inthe south.95

Despite this, however, the Adams–McGuinness leadership did not go toofar in its adoption of ‘socialist’ rhetoric and ‘left-wing’ positions. In line withthis, Pat Doherty, Sinn Féin’s vice-president, has claimed that the party hadalways sought a ‘sensible socialism’, rather than a more doctrinaire version.96

Similarly, Danny Morrison has argued that, while ‘you could roughly defineSinn Féin as being left-wing, progressive, radical . . . there was no overridingdogmatic ideology’.97 The truth of this was even acknowledged by more rad-ical members of the movement. The Derry republican feminist, Daisy Mules,for instance, admitted in 1985 that while Sinn Féin did have a ‘commitment

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to socialism’, its ‘revolutionary socialist’ character was in its ‘infancy’.98 Thereality was that this socialist character of the party continued to be temperedby the fact that it remained only one facet of a wider political personal-ity. While it was perhaps given more prominence during the early 1980s, itnever achieved complete ascendance; there continued to be other sides toSinn Féin’s character.

In this regard, Sinn Féin’s continued, and even increased, involvement incommunity politics has already been described. In addition, the party alsodrew strongly on an appeal to what might be termed ‘ethnic nationalism’.Such ethnic nationalism was based, not only on the party’s firm republicanline on the ‘national question’ (that Northern Ireland was the illegitimatecreation of the British occupier), but also on Sinn Féin’s assertive defence ofthe rights of the northern Catholic/nationalist community as a communalbloc. Hence, a 1982 election pamphlet stated that party representatives wouldboth oppose, ‘the illegal concoction of a foreign occupying power’, and pro-vide, ‘strong, fearless leadership . . . for the Nationalist people’.99 Anotherleaflet that same year asserted that, ‘A vote for Sinn Féin will show that thenationalist community is off its knees. No more begging for our rights.’100

In this way, the party appealed to nationalists qua nationalists in North-ern Ireland. It used the language of an ethnic, or communal, ‘tribalism’. Thetruth of this could be seen from the literature produced by Owen Carronin his bid for re-election in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone constituency atthe 1983 general election. Therein, Carron entreated the ‘historic Nation-alist constituency’ to keep the seat out of the hands of ‘the enemies of theNationalist community’.101 The latter was said to comprise ‘the traditionalunionist power-bloc [which is] bigoted, oppressive and unchanging in theirhostility towards you the Nationalist people’.102 Carron then finished bydeclaring, ‘I am the only candidate capable of winning for the Nationalistpeople. Together we will save this seat.’103

This strident message of ethnic nationalism was an integral part of SinnFéin’s political identity. In this way, the Adams–McGuinness leadership hadclearly recognized the potency of what might even be termed the ‘politics ofsectarianism’. Further indication of this has been offered by Des O’Hagan,who has claimed that Adams, in 1972, when discussing the ‘Official’ repub-lican movement’s strategy of attempting to achieve Protestant and Catholicunity, had stated that, ‘Youse might make some headway but six well-placedcar bombs could put years of work down the drain.’104 For O’Hagan, thefuture Sinn Féin president was not only rejecting the notion that cross-community accord could be achieved, but also was arguing that republicansshould instead look to build on ethnic loyalties. Without doubt, O’Hagan’spersonal background (as a member of the ‘Officials’) means that his testi-mony has to be treated with a great deal of caution. Unsurprisingly, Adamshimself refuses to accept that he ever made such a statement.105 What ismore, the fact is, as Anthony McIntyre (himself no friend of Adams) has

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noted, there is almost no supporting evidence to suggest that the Sinn FéinPresident was sectarian in the traditional sense.106 Nevertheless, the purposeof this anecdote in the present context is not to inveigh that Adams waspersonally sectarian, but rather to use it as a symbol of the fact that he didappreciate the power of sectarianism and was prepared to use it to build thestrength of his political party and movement. The truth of the latter wouldseem only too clear, given the nature of the political message developed inthis period. In this respect, O’Hagan’s account does offer a genuine insightinto a key aspect of the republican movement’s character. Moreover, it wasthis aspect that ensured that Sinn Féin’s ‘drift to the left’, though real, wasbalanced by the persistence of a forceful, communal nationalism.

The contradictions of a ‘broad-church’ party

In this way, it can be seen that the republican leadership, while want-ing to build a party that was decidedly left wing in outlook, did not pushthis too far. As much as the leadership itself might have been radical andinfused with a belief in socialism (whether understood in a historical, inter-national, or even specifically Irish, context), it also recognized the enduringpower of nationalism and a more traditional message. What is more, it alsounderstood that any attempt to pursue a more unreservedly radical paththreatened to open up internal fault lines between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ wingsof republicanism.

Sinn Féin had long been, in the words of one member, a ‘broad–church’organization, and the Adams–McGuinness leadership was determined to pre-serve this facet of the party’s nature.107 In so being, it is likely the leadershipwas only too aware that any effort to alter the socio-economic stance of theparty was potentially problematic, because it raised the issue of the republicanmovement’s relationship with the Catholic Church; for while Sinn Féin was,in the words of one activist, a ‘secular organization’, it was also still evolvingfrom a position where it was, ‘very much tied in with Catholicism.’108 True,the relationship between the Catholic hierarchy and the modern republi-can movement had, for the most part, been antagonistic. This had beenparticularly so during the period of the hunger strikes, when the Church’srole in opposing the strikes was bitterly attacked by republicans.109 Never-theless, the reality was that most members of the movement were Catholic –including most of the leadership. Indeed, the truth of this may actually havebeen a cause of consternation for those republicans who were more radically-minded in social terms. Sean O’Callaghan, for instance, recalls hearing theavowed Marxist republican, Brian Keenan, describe both Gerry Adams andMartin McGuinness as “two fine fucking Catholic boys”.110 More broadly, asDanny Morrison recognized, the Catholic Church had historically playeda vital role in creating a receptive audience for the ‘republican message’,especially in Northern Ireland, through its teaching of ‘nationalist’-oriented

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history.111 For this reason, an attempt to push Sinn Féin towards a moreuncompromising stance on socio-economic matters was always likely toencounter significant problems.

That the Adams–McGuinness leadership appreciated this had been madeplain by the clear limits to the aforementioned proto-feminist agenda that theparty adopted at this time. For instance, while the party moved towards being‘pro-divorce’, in the days ahead of the 1986 referendum on the subject inthe Irish Republic, Gerry Adams had said that individual republicans should‘vote with their consciences’ on the issue.112 This directive was entirely com-mensurate with the low profile that Sinn Féin had maintained throughoutthe campaign that preceded the vote; an indication of the party’s willing-ness to side-step a potentially divisive issue. Similarly, Sinn Féin’s positionon the question of abortion, while evolving to a degree, remained some-thing of a ‘fudge’ throughout this period. During the 1983 referendum in theRepublic of Ireland that prohibited the legalization of abortion, for instance,Sinn Féin assiduously avoided taking a firm position in the debate. By thesame token, the party’s 1986 policy document reflected its ambiguity on thesubject. On the one hand, this stated Sinn Féin’s basic objection to the prac-tice, declaring the party to be ‘opposed to the attitudes and forces in societythat compel women to have an abortion’.113 At the same time, though, itwent on to say that the party accepted the necessity of abortion in situationswhere, ‘the woman’s life is at risk or in grave danger’. Even more confus-ingly, that section of the document then concluded with the statement, ‘werecognize that women have the right to choose’ – which appeared to indi-cate a far more wide-ranging acceptance of the practice.114 Certainly, thisfinal statement, the result of an addendum passed at the previous year’s ardfheis, sat somewhat uneasily with the sentiments that preceded it.115 It alsoraised the prospect of division within the republican movement, betweensocial radicals and social conservatives. Consequently, at the ard fheis atthe end of 1986, the ard chomhairle secured the passage of a motion thatdeleted the previous year’s addendum and, in the course of the debate, seniorparty figures such as Mairtin O’Muilleor, Francie Molloy and even GerryAdams himself all lined up to speak in favour of the deletion of the pro-choice wording. The republican leadership had perhaps recognized that, onthis issue, things had been allowed to go too far and, as a result, reversedcourse.116

Beyond such concerns as to the possible offence that might be caused toCatholic or ‘traditional’ republican sensibilities, there was another, perhapsmore pressing, reason for the Adams–McGuinness leadership to avoid drift-ing too far to the left on policy matters of this kind: the prospect of beinglabelled ‘Stickies’. This term, which was used to refer to members of the ‘Offi-cial’ republican movement – as distinct from the ‘Provies’/‘Provos’ in the‘Provisional’ movement – was one to which Adams, in particular, was verysensitive. An example of this can be seen from Eamon Collins’ account of life

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40 The Long March

inside the IRA, in which he refers to an incident where he accused the SinnFéin President of speaking like a ‘Stick’. In Collins’ words:

[Adams] looked shocked. I had hit him with the accusation that his com-petitors within the Provisional republican movement had been levellingat him since he first became the movement’s most charismatic figuresince Padraig Pearse and Michael Collins. There was no greater insult thatone Provo could level at another than to accuse him of following in thefootsteps of the Official IRA.117

By Collins’ estimation he had certainly ‘touched a very raw nerve’.118 Adams’sensitivity on this matter stemmed in part from the fact that one of thegrievances given for the original ‘Official–Provisional’ split was the claimby the latter that, ‘an extreme form of socialism was being pushed on theMovement’, by those who wanted a ‘totalitarian dictatorship of the Left’.119

As a result, the provenance of Sinn Féin’s new socialism was seen as an issue ofsome significance, with Adams strongly denying accusations of any Marxistlink: ‘There is no Marxist influence within Sinn Féin, it simply isn’t a Marxistorganisation. I know of no-one in Sinn Féin who is a Marxist or who would beinfluenced by Marxism.’120 Likewise, he spoke elsewhere, both of the dangersof ‘ultra-leftism’ and of the fact that it was perfectly possible to be a ‘non-socialist republican’.121

What Adams termed his own ‘socialist republicanism’ he sought to rootfirmly in Irish history. As the Sinn Féin President stated in 1979:

I believe personally that to be a Republican in the true sense that you haveto base it on the 1916 declaration which in itself is a radical document. Ittalks about the wealth of Ireland belonging to the people of Ireland. Alsoas radical was the democratic programme of the First Dáil. If we are to betrue Republicans we have to adhere to what it says in those documents.Our form of Republicanism is radical Republicanism.122

Alongside such expositions, Adams’ readiness to invoke Connolly, one ofthe leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, has already been noted. Care was alsotaken, though, to call upon the alternative face of that rising, Padraig Pearse,and his more mystical, Gaelicized, quasi-religious ideology of republicanism.Thus, Adams balanced overt calls for socialism with talk of, ‘an Ireland, free,united, socialist and Gaelic’.123 By so doing, republican history was used asa tool of validation for the Adams–McGuinness leadership, to ‘prove’ thatthe movement was neither ‘going Sticky’, nor abandoning its more ‘Pearse-ian’ heritage. This, in turn, allowed the leadership to try and maintain the‘eclectic’ nature of the wider movement, so that in the words of one SinnFéin representative, it remained a party comprised of ‘different people withdifferent views’.124

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 41

Allusions to the 1916 Easter Rising were also important for the Adams–McGuinness leadership in the context of its efforts to persuade the republicanmovement that there was no fundamental conflict between an involvementin ‘normal’ politics and a commitment to revolution. On one level, per-ceptions as to the existence of just such a conflict were manifested in the‘reform versus revolution’ debate within the movement. The genesis of thislay in the near-Manichaean worldview of traditional republicanism, whichtended to posit everyone as either a republican, or a supporter of the sta-tus quo. Consequently, when Sinn Féin began to involve itself in what wasadmitted to be ‘the superficially reformist area of advice clinics and elections’,uncomfortable questions were raised.125 After all, the party was essentiallycreating something of a paradox for itself on two counts, especially withinNorthern Ireland. In the first instance, this was a function of the fact that,according to classic ‘insurgency theory’, the aim of an insurgent group’spolitical movement should have been to build support for the armed strug-gle by highlighting the oppressive and corrupt nature of the state, withoutseeking to rectify it. Doing the latter risked undermining support for theinsurgents, or, to use Mao Tse Tung’s analogy (of which republicans wereclearly aware), it risked diluting the ‘water’ in which the fish of the guerrillaarmy swam.126 Second, this possible dilution was particularly difficult for arepublican movement, which had always claimed that Northern Ireland wasan, ‘irreformably sectarian state’.127 The attainment of positive change withinNorthern Ireland could only but seem to prove the lie of such assertions of‘irreformability’. Or, as Sinn Féin’s General Secretary, Mitchel McLaughlin,later admitted, it was always likely to cause people to lose their ‘old certainty’over the ‘bad mindedness’ of the Northern Irish state.128

What McLaughlin’s comments reflected was the fact that the republicanleadership was only too aware of these contradictions and the difficultiesthey raised. Further evidence to this effect could also be seen in a 1984edition of the internal republican magazine, Iris, which carried an inter-view with the then chairperson of Sinn Féin’s housing department in WestBelfast, Sean Keenan. Therein, Keenan acknowledged that the party’s growinginvolvement in housing agitation had been controversial, because, ‘hous-ing is basically a reformist issue in the sense that it’s about obtaining betterconditions [emphasis in original]’.129 Nevertheless, Keenan endorsed SinnFéin being active on the issue, because, he claimed, the party brought a‘revolutionary perspective’ to the subject that helped ‘politicise the peo-ple’ and build ‘national resistance’.130 Similar arguments were advanced onother occasions in which the dangers of reformism were taken into account,often allied to the contention that republicans had to deal with the factthat they were ‘revolutionaries’, working in a ‘pre-revolutionary situation’.131

That being the case, it was said that republicans needed to engage in mat-ters of ‘immediate concern’ to ‘ordinary people’ in order to increase their‘consciousness’ of the republican cause.132 As an internal republican lecture

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argued, republicans had to operate ‘within the framework of the existingcorrupt system’, because of the conditions they faced. This would not, itwas maintained, lead to the movement being ‘sucked into the treadmillof petty social reform’ because it remained ‘by definition, a revolutionaryorganisation’.133

This question of reformism versus revolution tapped into a far deeper andmore portentous debate within republican circles at this time: the possi-ble conflict between armed struggle and political activity. As Gerry Adamshimself admitted in 1983, there were real concerns within the movementfrom the beginning, over the decision to embrace ‘politics’; concerns that,he accepted were ‘understandable given the history of Republican politics’.134

Again, here, the example of the ‘Officials’ seemed particularly ominous formany within the ‘Provisional’ movement. The former’s abandonment ofarmed struggle under the leadership of Cathal Goulding had been intimatelyrelated to a desire to become more ‘political’. Many wondered if the ‘Provi-sionals’ were now treading the same path. Without doubt, the need to proveotherwise undoubtedly gave added vehemence to the declarations made insupport of the armed struggle by the Adams–McGuinness leadership in thisperiod.

Despite such declarations, though, reservations over the allegedly detri-mental effect of political activity on the ‘war’ continued to exist within themovement. Indeed, it was the dispute over this issue that led to the ‘coup’attempt by Adams’ former friend, Ivor Bell, in 1985. Although this episodehas often been underplayed in the literature, this was, in the words of oneformer member of the republican leadership, ‘incredibly serious . . . [and]probably the most serious challenge to their authority’ that the Adams–McGuinness leadership ever faced.135 Its genesis lay in the genuine discontentwithin sections of the republican movement, particularly in Belfast, overthe perceived ‘running down’ of the armed struggle in favour of politics.Although it was faced down, the ‘coup’ thus served as a stark reminder toAdams and McGuinness that a careful balance between the ‘Armalite’ on theone hand and ‘the ballot box’ on the other had to be maintained; failure todo so risked either splitting the republican movement or engendering furtherleadership challenges.

Again, this is not to suggest, it should be emphasized, that in this period therepublican leadership was seeking to end the IRA’s armed struggle. As has beendescribed, Adams and his allies undoubtedly still believed it was necessaryat this time, even if it did entail negative consequences for Sinn Féin. Thisoutlook was encapsulated by Danny Morrison’s 1984 admission that ‘perhapsit’s not entirely possible to totally harmonise the relationship between armedstruggle and electoral politics . . . [But] I think we just have to live with the factthat there’s always going to be this apparent contradiction.’136 For the Adams–McGuinness leadership, the contradictions generated by the ‘Armalite andballot box’ approach were deemed an acceptable price to pay, in the effort to

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 43

develop the political personality of Sinn Féin, even as the IRA maintained itscampaign of violence.

Conclusion

The development of Sinn Féin as an active party, with a definable politicalpersonality, held out clear strategic benefits for the republican leadership.One such potential benefit, for instance, was the impact that this could beexpected to have on Sinn Féin’s fortunes in the Republic of Ireland, in light ofthe situation there. During the early 1980s, the southern Irish economy waslocked into a serious recession and, in an attempt to stimulate recovery, theFine Gael–Labour coalition government that had won the November 1982Irish general election had pursued ‘supply-side’ cuts in taxation and publicexpenditure. The effect of this in the short term, though, had been merely toexacerbate the economic misery that many people faced and, by 1983, therate of unemployment in the Irish Republic reached 16 per cent, a figure thataccounted for more than 200,000 people.137 More generally, there was a senseof malaise and discontent within the southern state, a state still witnessingsignificant levels of emigration, as it had done since its establishment somesix decades previously.138 It was this wellspring of dissatisfaction, then, thatSinn Féin might plausibly have hoped to tap into, through its adoption ofmore strident left-wing, ‘alternative’ politics.

Coupled with this, Sinn Féin’s embrace of an explicitly radical political per-sona raised the possibility that the party might be able to form alliances withgroups of a similar character. The outworking of the ‘prison struggle’, withthe formation of the broad-based ‘National H-Block/Armagh’ committees,had previously demonstrated the benefits that flowed from a willingness towork with others. Now, in the early 1980s, as republicans sought to end theirisolation, a new emphasis on ‘socialism’ appeared to bring fresh opportunitiesfor political alliances. The effect of this in the international arena has alreadybeen discussed, with Sinn Féin positioning itself as part of a global ‘anti-imperialist’, ‘anti-capitalist’ axis, enjoying links of ‘solidarity’ with groupssuch as the PLO, the ANC and the Sandinistas.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the party also sought an association with theBritish Labour Party. With the UK in this period suffering economic prob-lems akin to those faced in the Republic of Ireland, the Labour Party therehad drifted increasingly to the left, diverging ever more starkly from theincumbent Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. This trajectoryhad appeared to open up potentially interesting opportunities for repub-licans. Watching Labour’s leftwards development from Ireland, it seemedconceivable that a more explicitly left-leaning Sinn Féin might establish someform of mutual understanding, or commonality of purpose, with the BritishLabour Party; doubly so, given that the 1981 Labour Party Conference com-mitted the party to supporting Irish unity, albeit with Unionist consent.

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This move was noted with interest by republicans, who, while seeing thelimitations of the policy, also concluded that it was a ‘very important’ devel-opment that offered ‘hopeful signs’ for the future.139 Elsewhere, there werealso suggestions at this time that republicans might be able to win over asignificant number of Labour MPs, who could lobby on their behalf. In linewith this, special attention was paid to the outspoken criticism of British gov-ernment policy in Northern Ireland by the prominent left-wing Labour MPTony Benn in 1980–1. Not only were Benn’s words, in themselves, welcomed,but also Benn’s position was said to have ‘significant backing within the Par-liamentary Labour Party’.140 On this basis, Sinn Féin stated that it might bepossible, through people like Benn, to increase ‘the long-term pressure onthe Labour Party to break from the sterile bipartisan policy [of supportingthe government] and to begin to look at new options of Irish unity’.141

Consequently, the republican leadership did attempt to establish connec-tions with people of Benn’s ilk (though Benn himself was, at this time,unresponsive to any such approach from Sinn Féin). Overtures, for instance,were made to the then leader of the Greater London Council, Ken Living-stone; overtures that bore fruit in December 1982, when Livingstone invitedGerry Adams and Danny Morrison to London. In the event, that meeting hadto be cancelled when the two republicans were served with an exclusion orderfrom the mainland under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Subsequently,however, meetings were held, with Livingstone travelling to Belfast for a two-day visit in February 1983, and Adams finally making it to London in July1983.142 The expectation of the republican leadership, it would seem, wasthat a relationship with Livingstone would serve as a bridgehead to otherswithin the British Labour Party.

Ultimately, though, the actions of the IRA impeded, and ultimately pre-vented, a vibrant connection being established. The organization’s bombingof the Harrods store in London in December 1983, for example, reinforcedthe reluctance of many Labour MPs to talk to the republican movement. Bythe same token, the following year, after Sinn Féin had actually been ableto initiate a dialogue with Labour MP Clive Soley, this was abruptly termi-nated by the Brighton bombing of October 1984.143 Indeed, that latter attack,directly targeting the British government, effectively ended any hope SinnFéin might have had of some form of alliance with the Labour Party. This wasthen confirmed by the rise of Neil Kinnock and the new weight he placed onthe ‘consent’ part of his party’s ‘unity by consent’ Irish policy.144

As it was regarding the attempt to form an alliance with the British LabourParty, so too regarding the wider strategic picture for Sinn Féin; reality didnot match up to the hopes and expectations of the Adams–McGuinnessleadership. True, much had been done, as has been shown, to build theparty as an active organization. Given that only a few years previously, ‘SinnFéin’ had been little more than an appendage to the IRA, this was no meanachievement. Despite the various ambiguities and contradictions that had

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Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5 45

been thrown up, Sinn Féin had established itself as an entity rooted in localcommunities, with a strong emphasis on agitational ‘street’ politics. Allied tothis, on the one hand, was a broader ‘left-wing’ ethos that placed the partyin line with other anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist groups around the globe.At the same time, Sinn Féin had shown itself able to speak the language ofan ethnic nationalism that drew on the tribal instincts of Northern Ireland’sCatholic/nationalist community. On the back of this diverse appeal, the partygained some notable electoral successes (at Assembly and Westminster elec-tions in Northern Ireland) and these confirmed it as a significant player onthe Northern Irish political stage.

And yet, by 1985, there were unmistakable signs that the early momentumthe party had generated in the aftermath of the hunger strikes was dissipat-ing. The previous year’s European election in Northern Ireland, for example,had seen the stabilization of the SDLP, with its leader John Hume comprehen-sively defeating Sinn Féin’s candidate, Danny Morrison, in the competitionfor the Catholic/nationalist vote.145 Morrison secured some 37 per cent ofthat vote, a figure significantly down on the 43 per cent high watermarkachieved by Sinn Féin at the 1983 British general election.146 Although thisresult was far from disastrous for the party, and could, to some degree, beexplained away as a huge personal vote for Hume (the incumbent MEP), itwas only marginally improved upon in the 1985 local elections, which sawSinn Féin win 39 per cent of the nationalist vote.147 Taken together, whatthese figures indicated was that, while Sinn Féin had certainly carved out adefinite niche for itself among Northern Ireland’s electorate, the initial periodof dynamic electoral growth had ended.

This, in turn, raised questions over the ability of Sinn Féin, as it was thenconstituted, to achieve a ‘political veto’ in Northern Ireland. For, as GerryAdams had described in 1983, the notion that republicans could attain sucha veto was predicated on the existence of an advancing Sinn Féin, catchingup and then overtaking the SDLP. Now, though, this scenario seemed less andless likely to be realized. Perhaps for this reason, the Sinn Féin President couldbe found stating that it might not be such a bad thing after all, if Sinn Féindid not overtake the SDLP as the, ‘catch-all party for [northern] Catholics’.The danger, he claimed, was that this might lead to a diminution of theparty’s social radicalism.148 In similar vein, Danny Morrison now admittedto having ‘made a mistake’ when he had talked of defeating Hume in theEuropean election, while An Phoblacht/Republican News declared that, ‘earlyhopes of outpolling the SDLP by 1985 had been overambitious’.149 What allsuch comments represented was the recognition of the Adams–McGuinnessleadership both that it had been premature in its previous assessments andthat a republican ‘political’ veto in Northern Ireland remained a distant goal.

In the Republic of Ireland, meanwhile, the failure of Sinn Féin to real-ize its aims (and achieve a definite political breakthrough) was even morestark. Despite the apparently helpful conditions for a party purporting to

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offer an anti-establishment, left-wing alternative, the party remained iso-lated from the overwhelming majority of the southern electorate. The truthof this was underscored by the February 1982 general election there, whenSinn Féin secured a mere 1 per cent of the vote.150 Thereafter, there was littleindication that the party could achieve any major improvement. As Adamsacknowledged at the time, Sinn Féin continued to be viewed as an essentially‘northern’ political party and the reality was that, ‘you can’t get support inBallymun because of doors being kicked in by the Brits in Ballymurphy’.151

On both sides of the Irish border, then, the republican movement was wit-nessing a failure of its project for ‘republicanization’. In the south, Sinn Féincontinued to be viewed by most people as an irrelevance, while in the north itcould still only claim the allegiance of a minority of northern nationalists andits spectacular growth-spurt appeared to have ended. As a result, the threatof marginalization and eventual defeat remained only too real and, for thisreason, the Adams–McGuinness leadership again set about modifying thenature of the party to try and deal with such dangers.

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2Pan-Nationalism, Peace and thePolitical Mainstream, 1985–90

‘We reviewed our strategy at that time [1986] and actually decidedthat we were going to take the word “peace” back, because “peace”had become, as a word, fashioned into a counter-insurgencyweapon . . . So, in 1987, and this was the start of the peace process,we introduced the phrase, “Freedom, Justice and Peace”.’

Mitchel McLaughlin1

Introduction

In the aftermath of the 1985 local government elections in Northern Ireland,the Adams–McGuinness leadership attempted to portray Sinn Féin’s per-formance as a ‘successful intervention’ that had ‘achieved its set goal . . . ofbuilding a middle leadership’.2 The reality, however, was more prosaic; forthe results had demonstrated, beyond question, both the stabilization ofSinn Féin’s vote and the fact that there was little prospect of republicanschallenging the SDLP for the leadership of northern nationalism in the imme-diate future.3 For this reason, the spectre of an ‘internal deal’ in NorthernIreland continued to haunt the republican movement in the mid-1980s. Withrepublicans unable to exert meaningful pressure on the SDLP, the possibil-ity remained that constitutional nationalism might conclude some form ofagreement with ‘moderate’ Unionism. The fear of the republican leadershipwas that such an arrangement would not only serve to ‘copper-fasten’ par-tition, but also would leave republicans themselves politically marginalizedand on the verge of defeat.

That there was the potential for just such an outcome had been madeapparent in 1984, during the ‘New Ireland Forum’ episode. The purpose ofthe Forum had been to draw together the ‘constitutional’ parties of Irelandto agree upon a common set of proposals for governing Northern Ireland. Inthe event, the Unionist parties refused to participate, thereby immediatelyreducing the likelihood that it would lead to an internal deal of the kindthat alarmed republicans. Ultimately, meanwhile, the project collapsed in

47

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fairly spectacular fashion, as the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher,unceremoniously rejected the Forum’s final recommendations.4 For a time,however, the initiative had appeared to offer some prospect for politicalprogress. What is more, it had succeeded in bringing about a unified stanceamong the parties of Irish nationalism, with the exception of Sinn Féin,which was excluded from the Forum and remained isolated (because of theongoing armed struggle of the IRA).

Thus, despite the collapse of the Forum initiative, it seemed clear thatthe republican movement was vulnerable to a venture of its type. It raisedthe likelihood that, in all probability, at some point in the future, a politicalaccommodation would be constructed to resolve the Northern Irish conflict –unless that is, republicans could act to prevent such an outcome. Conse-quently, the republican leadership began to examine new ways in whichtheir movement might establish a political veto over any possible deal, in theabsence of Sinn Féin gaining electoral ascendancy over the SDLP. The solu-tion they came up with was a straightforward one: unable to reach the SDLP,Sinn Féin would instead attempt to draw the SDLP (and Fianna Fáil) to itself.It was, therefore, in this context, that the concept of the ‘pan-nationalistalliance’ began to emerge in the discourse of the republican movement.

The essence of this was that Sinn Féin would seek common ground, or aconsensus with the other parties of Irish nationalism on issues surroundingthe ‘constitutional question’. In this way, it owed much to the New IrelandForum model; the crucial difference, of course, being that Sinn Féin wishedto place itself at the heart of any possible new alliance. The theory was that,not only would this end the party’s political isolation, but also that it wouldact as a brake on any effort by the SDLP to agree to an internal deal forNorthern Ireland. Constitutional nationalism would instead be pushed toadopt an increasingly ‘green’ (more stridently nationalist) agenda by theirrepublican allies.

The belief that the SDLP was susceptible to an alliance of this sort wasno doubt bolstered by the firm restatement of the case against partitionthat was made by the SDLP’s leader, John Hume, in the wake of Thatcher’sforthright rejection of the Forum report.5 In similar vein, Hume’s deputy,Seamus Mallon, had declared that it now seemed that the ‘very concept ofNorthern Ireland is based on alienation and on the subjugation of those ofthe Irish tradition to those of the British tradition’.6 Such pronouncementslent credence to suggestions that the SDLP felt let down and dissatisfiedwith the attitude of the British government, at least in the short term.For the republican movement, therefore, there seemed to be the possibil-ity of a ‘window of opportunity’, in which, the SDLP might be persuaded toadopt a pan-nationalist approach with republicans, as opposed to seeking anaccommodation with Unionism within Northern Ireland.

Conventionally, the republican decision to pursue such a partnershipwith their constitutional rivals has been interpreted as a response to the

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Pan-Nationalism, Peace and the Political Mainstream, 1985–90 49

Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. On such a reading, it was theboost that this Agreement gave to the SDLP and the corresponding damageit did to Sinn Féin that forced the Adams–McGuinness leadership to adoptthe new strategy. The truth, however, is that the idea for Sinn Féin–SDLPcooperation was already in circulation within the republican movement priorto the 1985 accord. Indeed, as far back as 1980, the SDLP and Sinn Féinhad held ‘secret meetings’ (attended by Danny Morrison and another Belfastrepublican, Joe Austin), to discuss ‘nationalist politics’.7 These gatherings,though, had achieved little and ended in mutual recrimination. At that time,moreover, there was almost no suggestion that the two parties might uniteto form some kind of pan-nationalist alliance. This concept developed onlylater, though again, prior to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Hence, in his memoirs, Adams has acknowledged the existence of a discus-sion paper (apparently formulated by the Redemptorist priest, Fr. Alec Reid),from as early as July 1985, which suggested a ‘nationalist front’ be formedto work for Irish self-determination.8 Even before this, meanwhile, the SinnFéin President had made his first public overtures to the SDLP on this matter,when he called on it, during a BBC radio interview in January 1985, to partic-ipate in talks with his party on ‘pan-nationalist interests’. What was needed,he claimed, was for Sinn Féin and the SDLP to agree a ‘united nationalistapproach to the whole question of British involvement in this country’.9

On this occasion, Adams’ offer was quickly rebuffed by John Hume (whowas being interviewed on the same programme), who replied that there waslittle point talking to Sinn Féin when real authority within the republicanmovement lay with the IRA.10

The republican response was to issue another invitation for talks, but thistime with the IRA Army Council. Following this, a meeting was actuallyarranged (for 23 February 1985) and briefly convened, yet it was quicklyhalted, ostensibly over the issue of whether or not it could be filmed –but more likely because Hume had second thoughts over the wisdom ofthe enterprise. Later that year, Adams again renewed his call to the SDLPleader. This time, though, Hume returned to a position of publicly refusingto cooperate with a party that condoned violence.11

Such false starts notwithstanding, there seemed to be clear indications thatthe SDLP could be positively engaged by republicans. Certainly, Adams hassince claimed that, even at that stage, things appeared far more promis-ing in private than they did in public. Indeed, the Sinn Féin President hasalleged that the two parties managed to agree on proposals that should haveseen Gerry Adams hold a formal meeting with SDLP Deputy Leader, SeamusMallon. As with previous attempts, however, the projected encounter wasabandoned; this time, by the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, whichprompted Mallon to back out of the arrangement.12

Still, what the foregoing clearly demonstrates is the fact that the republi-can urge to embrace some form of pan-nationalism pre-dated the Anglo-Irish

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Agreement. This, in turn, helps illustrate the underlying motivation for therepublican drive to achieve a degree of ‘consensus’ between the parties ofIrish nationalism: it was a response to the inability of Sinn Féin to achievea concrete political veto because of the stabilization of the party’s vote incomparison with the SDLP. The pan-nationalist alliance was envisaged as avehicle by which such a veto might be established, by other means.

The significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in this context was that itexacerbated the problems the Adams–McGuinness leadership could alreadysee developing for the republican movement. Recognition of the potentialdamage it could do was quickly evident in their reaction to the Agreement.Adams, for instance, attacked it as a device for ‘stabilising British interests’that sought to ‘isolate and draw popular support away from the republicanstruggle’.13 Similarly, Danny Morrison was forthright in his condemnation.14

Such hostility was based, in the first instance, on what Jim Gibney laterreferred to as the ‘huge security drive against republicans . . . [that] came outof Hillsborough’.15 At the time, there appears to have been genuine con-cern within the Adams–McGuinness leadership that the Agreement wouldprompt a security crackdown. Morrison’s in-depth analysis of the Agree-ment’s meaning, for example, referred to the likelihood of a major ‘repressivemove’ against the republican movement, including the possible proscriptionof Sinn Féin.16 By the same token, Martin McGuinness’s speech at the 1986Bodenstown Commemoration referred to the prospect of internment beingre-introduced, this time with SDLP support (unlike in 1971).17 Almost twoyears later, in the middle of 1987, An Phoblacht/Republican News was still dis-cussing the chances of Sinn Féin being banned – further testament to thelasting fears of a security offensive against republicans that the Agreementhad engendered.18

Beyond such security concerns, of equal (if not greater) concern for theAdams–McGuinness leadership was the damage that the Agreement threat-ened to do to the republican movement politically. On the one hand, thisstemmed from the fact that it could be portrayed (as it was), as an importantconcession to northern nationalism. It was for this reason that the republi-can movement also attempted to take some credit for the Agreement, evenas it disparaged it. Danny Morrison therefore claimed a few years later, thatit was the IRA’s campaign that was really responsible for delivering ‘politicalchange’.19 The glaring truth, though, was that the Agreement was nothingif not a victory for constitutional nationalism and, in particular, the SDLP. Itappeared as if Hume’s party had successfully delivered a real advance to thenationalist people of Northern Ireland and, as a result, electoral dividendsfollowed. At the 1986 by-elections in the wake of the Agreement (caused bythe resignation of all Unionist MPs, in protest at the accord), the SDLP’s shareof the vote increased markedly, with Seamus Mallon also picking up an extraseat for his party.20 The implication of such results cannot have been lost onthe republican leadership. On the contrary, the SDLP’s success, both in the

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1986 elections and with the Agreement as a whole, had left republicans inlittle doubt as to where real ‘power’ lay within northern nationalism at thattime. As Sean O’Callaghan, who was a member of Sinn Féin’s ard chomhairlein the months prior to the signing of the Agreement, has recalled, one of themajor lessons Adams learnt from the episode was that, ‘John Hume was amuch bigger political player than were the republicans’.21

Of even greater significance still was the fact that the Agreement also raisedanew the possibility of an internal deal for Northern Ireland that would seethe creation of a power-sharing government, between a re-invigorated SDLPand the moderate Unionist parties. This was, after all, precisely the modelof governance to which the Agreement itself looked. Hence, Article 4 of theaccord stated the desire of the two governments to achieve a devolved admin-istration, ‘on a basis which would secure widespread acceptance throughoutthe community . . . [through] the co-operation of constitutional representa-tives within Northern Ireland of both traditions there’.22 In addition, Humenow made more positive noises on the subject, claiming that the Agree-ment had created an ‘opportunity’ for ‘real reconciliation based on equality’between Unionists and nationalists. For the SDLP leader, the Agreementhad, through its alleged confrontation of the ‘Unionist veto’, made likelythe emergence of a more ‘moderate’ Unionism, with which his party couldestablish ‘power sharing devolution’.23 In this way, Hume’s comments wereindicative of the new self-confidence emanating from his party, whichseemed ready and willing to make a deal.

For these reasons, the Agreement brought home to the Adams–McGuinnessleadership the enduring vulnerability of the republican position. And as aresult, the importance of drawing the SDLP and the wider constitutionalnationalist family into some kind of pan-nationalist alliance appeared all themore pressing. The effort to achieve this key strategic objective intensified inthe Agreement’s aftermath.

At the same time, Sinn Féin also now attempted to recast itself as an increas-ingly respectable party of the political ‘mainstream’. At one level this was adirect response to the continued failure of republicans to make any progressin the south. The Adams–McGuinness leadership recognized that this fail-ure was due both to the perceived irrelevance of Sinn Féin to ‘ordinary’people in the Republic of Ireland and to the close association of the partywith the violence of the IRA. Thus, in order to remedy such problems, therepublican leadership increasingly sought to speak the language of peace andinvolve Sinn Féin more immediately in mainstream politics. By so doing, theleadership hoped to increase the party’s appeal to the southern electorate.

The pursuit of this objective, though, also intersected with the effort tobuild a pan-nationalist alliance. By making Sinn Féin a more respectable partof the political community, it could reasonably be assumed that other partieswould be more prepared to engage with it. Equally, such an engagement wasonly likely to increase the respectability with which Sinn Féin was viewed

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by the electorate, showing that the party was not ‘beyond the pale’. Further,the fact that the foundation stone of the alliance sought by the republi-can leadership was to be the allegedly shared nationalist ‘heritage’ of theparties concerned was also to Sinn Féin’s advantage; for this served to legit-imize the party’s call for the re-unification of Ireland. By highlighting thesimilarities between the republican movement’s agenda and that of other‘acceptable’ parties, the pan-nationalist alliance could serve as an instrumentfor the validation of Sinn Féin, certifying its integrity to the electorate andits constitutional rivals.

Pan-nationalism

With Sinn Féin seeking to establish a new relationship with the SDLP andFianna Fáil, based around a shared analysis of the ‘national question’, theparty’s position on this issue was now re-emphasized as the core of its politi-cal project. Gerry Adams thus affirmed in 1988, ‘The fundamental republicanaim has always been to get Britain to abandon its partition policy and adoptinstead a policy of reunifying Ireland – that is withdrawing from Ireland andhanding over sovereignty to an all-Ireland government.’24 In view of thisaim, the Sinn Féin President then urged his party to work towards estab-lishing ‘maximum Irish political unity’.25 This would only be achieved, henoted on another occasion, by republicans being prepared to ‘proceed onthe basis of the lowest common denominator and at the level of people’sunderstanding’.26 What was required, Adams claimed, was something akinto other movements for national independence, such as those of Nehru (inIndia), Kenyatta (in Kenya) and Castro (in Cuba).27 This new ‘mass anti-imperialist movement’ was to be broad-based, appealing to ‘all major sectionsof Irish society . . . capable of taking a national stand’.28

On the one hand, this vision led to the more explicit socialism of previousyears, which had helped define the party’s early political personality, beingquietly downplayed. While Gerry Adams had once declared that ‘labour can-not wait’, he was now prepared to state that, ‘I don’t think that socialism is onthe agenda at all at this stage, except for political activists on the Left . . . Youwon’t even get near socialism until you have national independence; it’s apre-requisite.’29 Alongside this, so too were condemnations of the ‘constitu-tional’ parties increasingly set aside by Sinn Féin. Hence, while the SDLP hadpreviously been attacked as being, ‘treacherous’, ‘rotten with decay’, ‘spine-less’, a party of ‘middle-class Redmondites’ and even ‘imperialist lickspittle’,the republican leadership now sought to put aside such animosity. Instead,it looked to those things that the two parties had in common.30 As GerryAdams wrote in 1986:

the emergence of Sinn Féin may have unnecessarily brought out someof the class differences between ourselves and the SDLP leadership . . . it

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might have been better in this phase of the independence struggle if therecould have been some kind of general unity, in which both parties couldagree to disagree on social and economic issues and maximise pressure onpoints of agreement.31

In similar fashion, at an internal party conference in 1988 the Sinn Féincouncillor (and ally of the leadership) Mairtin O’Muilleor declared that SinnFéin’s ideology, rather than being viewed as Marxist, was best understood asbeing ‘democratic socialist’ and based principally on a belief in ‘fair play forall’. Moreover, he claimed that when it came to ‘bins, bodies and bogs’, theparty was ‘only a few degrees to the left of the SDLP’.32

In spite of such assertions, though, it would be a mistake to argue that SinnFéin abandoned its socialist leanings altogether in this period. O’Muilleor,for instance, also went on to make reference to the ‘guiding socialist philoso-phy’, to which he felt the party should continue to adhere.33 More generally,meanwhile, most members of the republican leadership continued to believethemselves to be socialist, even if it was unclear precisely what was meant bythe term. Adams himself frequently displayed such vagueness with his talkof socialism, but socialism ‘tailored to meet Irish needs’, or ‘a distinctly Irishform of socialism’.34

Furthermore, as has been described, the politics of Sinn Féin had, from thestart, drawn on both the movement’s ‘Connolly-ite’ and ‘Pearse-ian’ heritage.This continued to be the case. While it is thus true that, in comparison withthe immediate post-hunger strike years, when the former might be said tohave been in the ascendant, the period from the mid-1980s did bring a tiltback towards Pearse, this did not mean that Connolly was simply discarded.Instead, the shift was a subtle one, discernible only through slight changes inemphasis, as, for example, in the apparent reassertion of Sinn Féin’s ‘culturalnationalist’ credentials. These had always been part of the party’s messageand republican spokespeople had previously highlighted the importance ofcultural activity, some even describing it as a ‘political weapon’ against theBritish.35 Now, though, this was stepped up and, in 1986, the party foundeda new Irish language news-sheet, Nuacht Feirste, which dealt with local polit-ical issues, as well as carrying Gaelic cultural pieces.36 In this way, NuachtFeirste marked a new phase in Sinn Féin’s language activism and commit-ment to what An Phoblacht/Republican News termed ‘the cultural reconquestof Ireland’.37 Even as such measures were taken forward, however, Adams andother republican leaders still continued to talk of the importance of Connollyand the ‘socialist republican’ tendency.38 That this should have been so wasa function, again, of their beliefs – but also those of the wider republicanmovement; for within the movement there remained much support for themore overt ‘Connolly-ite’ strain of republicanism.

Testament to this was the vigorous internal debate that took place dur-ing this period over the future ideological development of the republican

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movement. Much of this debate occurred within the pages of the internalmagazine, Iris Bheag, which gave individual republicans the opportunity tovoice their opinions (anonymously, if they so wished). Therein, some echoedsupport for the policy of placing greater emphasis on nationalism and seekingallies on this basis. One contributor, for instance, claimed that there was ‘uni-versal acceptance’ of the need to ‘broaden the struggle’ in this way.39 Others,however, were clearly not so enthused by the trajectory of the movement.In the words of one contributor, for example, the drive to make alliances withthe constitutional parties was ‘grossly mistaken’.40 Elsewhere, it was arguedthat what was required was, far from a softening of Sinn Féin’s position onsocio-economic matters, actually a move further to the left. In this vein, onewriter even called for the transformation of Sinn Féin into a ‘consciouslysocialist party’.41

The passions that this matter aroused were indicative of a wider controversyraised by the ‘Connolly versus Pearse’ debate; namely, the issue of whetherrepublicans should act, to borrow a phrase, ‘in splendid isolation’, or whetherthey should seek to ally with other forces. Again, this was a subject that wasgiven added zest, because it had played a part in the republican split of 1969–70. One of the five reasons given by the first ‘Provisionals’ for their break withthe Cathal Goulding-led ‘Officials’ was the determination of the latter toestablish a ‘National Liberation Front’ with other ‘radical groups’ that wouldcooperate to achieve ‘limited objectives’.42 The resemblance of this to whatthe Adams–McGuinness leadership now proposed was apparent. Whereas theÓ Brádaigh–O’Conaill leadership of ‘Provisionalism’ had remained faithful toa fundamentalist type of republicanism, in which the movement was seen asthe sole keeper of the flame, Adams and his supporters wished to ‘broadenthe forces’ at their disposal.43

This also entailed a shift in the concept of the ‘mass movement’ that SinnFéin hoped to establish. Previously, when the Adams–McGuinness leader-ship had talked of a ‘mass movement’ (as they occasionally had in the early1980s), it had envisaged an entity entirely under Sinn Féin control, whichwould have been ‘republicanized’. Now, however, in light of the failure of‘republicanization’, it was accepted that Sinn Féin would merely be one partof a wider ‘mass movement’, rather than itself leading, or even being, themovement. This logic was clearly in evidence in an interview that Adamsgave to the American magazine Monthly Review, in May 1989, in which hestated that republicans did not ‘have a monopoly on the struggle’.44 Thismonopoly, though, was precisely what republicans had traditionally declaredtheir movement to possess. It was, after all, for this reason that successive IRA‘Army Councils’ had claimed an ideological lineage running back to the ‘First’and ‘Second’ Dáils of 1919 and 1921. The ‘Provisionals’ had been no differentin this regard, a fact highlighted by the determination of their founders toseek out the sole surviving member of the Second Dáil, Tom Maguire, andhave him give his blessing to the new movement. In so doing, they were

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attempting to authenticate their claim to be the sole repositories of gen-uine Irish sovereignty. Even under the early Adams–McGuinness leadership,moreover, there had been little sign of a shift away from this kind of think-ing. In 1982, for instance, the IRA affirmed that it held, ‘a monopoly ontrue Irish patriotism’.45 By the same token, in his first speech to Sinn Féin asparty president, Gerry Adams stressed that republicans were, ‘the guardiansand the vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle in Ireland’.46 Such state-ments, though, were a considerable distance from the type of language thatwas increasingly used to justify the pan-nationalist alliance approach. Nowit was acknowledged that republicans could not hold a monopoly and theycould ‘not win the struggle on [their] own’.47

Seen against this background, then, it is unsurprising that the argumentover competing ‘Connolly-ite’ and ‘Pearse-ian’ visions of republicanism, asrepresentative of deeper disputes within the movement, should have causedsuch controversy. Having rumbled on for some time in the background, thisdebate came to a head at the party’s internal conference of May 1988, with thediscussion there of two contrasting position papers: Republicanising the Socialand Economic Struggle and Towards a Broader Base? The first of these lookedexplicitly to Connolly and the struggle for ‘economic sovereignty’, declaring,as Connolly had done, that it was not enough to have the British leave andsimply ‘hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle’. Instead, it urged republicansto ‘agitate around people’s social and economic needs’, in order to ‘republi-canize’ their struggles.48 By contrast, the alternative paper at the conferencecharted a new path for the movement, recommending that republicans pur-sue an alliance with the other ‘forces of Irish nationalism’. This alliance, itwas argued, would be made to work to a ‘nationalist political agenda’ andconfront the British on the ‘national question’.49

As has been made clear, it was the last set of arguments that won theday; a fact confirmed by the production of a further discussion paper onfuture strategy by the republican leadership, which looked to the creationof a broad-based, ‘movement for national self-determination which wouldinclude non-republicans and non-socialists’.50 It was this latter paper thatwas endorsed as party policy at Sinn Féin’s 1989 ard fheis and subsequentlyre-endorsed at the 1991 gathering.51 The Connolly-ite document, mean-while, was sidelined and there were allegations that those who had supportedit (notably Jim Monaghan and Rose Dugdale) were marginalized within therepublican movement. For instance, when Monaghan and Dugdale laterattempted to produce a Marxist-inclined book, entitled Questions of History,there were suggestions that this was firmly suppressed by the leadership.52

Certainly, it seems that the Adams–McGuinness leadership, having decidedon the course they wished the movement to follow, was careful to ensurethat all other options were closed off. According to Anthony McIntyre, itis this that explains why it was that Iris Bheag, the internal magazine thathad provided an outlet for expositions on ‘socialism’, was effectively closed

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down in 1990–1.53 Through such action, the way was cleared for the ‘pan-nationalist front’ strategy to be pursued with ever-increasing vigour by therepublican leadership.

In addition to the attempt to get agreement on the need for ‘real nationalunity and independence’, this pan-nationalist strategy was to include republi-can agitation on what might be termed ‘campaigning issues’, arising from ‘thedenial of self-determination’.54 As to precisely what was meant by this, oneexample was provided by the subject of alleged employment discriminationin Northern Ireland. Widespread concern over the existence of such discrim-ination had led to the launch of the MacBride Principles of Fair Employment,by the US-based Irish National Caucus in November 1984. These Principleswere intended for American companies operating in Northern Ireland, toensure that Catholics were fully represented within their labour forces.55 SinnFéin soon gave them their firm backing. On the one hand, this support waspremised on the professed belief that the Principles would help alleviate the‘disadvantage and inequality suffered by the nationalists as a result of dis-crimination in employment practices’.56 In this way, it was very much ofa piece with the enduring desire of the party to be seen as the voice of anassertive and strident ethnic nationalism in Northern Ireland; the represen-tative of a community that was, ‘refusing to go back on [its] knees’.57 Andhere, Sinn Féin’s advocacy of the Principles could be contrasted favourablywith the initial refusal of the SDLP to support them. Alongside this, Sinn Féinwas also able to exploit the campaign around the Principles to underscore itsposition on the ‘national’ question. Thus, the very fact that the Principleshad been deemed necessary was said to be a function of the ‘employmentapartheid’ that flowed from partition. According to An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews, ‘sectarianism and discrimination’ were the ‘bricks and mortar of theSix-County state’; they were alleged to be ‘synonymous’ with British rule.58

In this manner, the campaign could be used by republicans to stigmatize andfurther de-legitimize the Northern Irish state. For these reasons, therefore,the subject of employment discrimination in the north was just the sort ofcampaigning issue that could be used by Sinn Féin to highlight the denial ofIrish self-determination.

Similar in effect, was the issue of extradition in the south. Since 1984,at least, Sinn Féin had been trying to develop this as a major campaigntheme in the Republic of Ireland. The party’s ard fheis of that year had passedfive motions on the matter that called, in various ways, for republicans tobe active and ‘serious’ participants in an anti-extradition campaign.59 Yet, asMartin McGuinness was forced to admit during his 1986 Bodenstown speech,in this endeavour his party had enjoyed little success.60 Nevertheless, the rat-ification of a new extradition treaty in 1987, following the new Fianna Fáilgovernment’s volte-face on the matter (after it had opposed the measure whenin opposition) appeared to present Sinn Féin with a fresh opportunity to agi-tate on the subject.61 It created anew the possibility that the party could,

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in its own words, use extradition to highlight, ‘the 26 Counties’ collabora-tion with the British government in denying self-determination to the Irishpeople’.62

As a result, the extradition trials that were held in the Republic of Irelandin the late 1980s were given substantial coverage in An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews. Campaigning against ‘extradition to British injustice’, Sinn Féinlabelled Fianna Fáil as complicit in the ‘ultimate collaboration’ and the ‘finalabandonment of any pretence to nationalism’.63 The party lambasted the‘surrender of Irish sovereignty and the rights of Irish citizens’ and soughtto make each of the extraditees in turn (from Robert Russell in early 1988,through to Dessie Ellis in late 1990) causes célèbres in Ireland.64 The Irishgovernment, by implementing the extradition treaty, was said to be ‘doingBritain’s dirty work’ and engaging in a ‘shameful sell-out’.65 In this regard,extradition was portrayed as yet one more demonstration of Fianna Fáil’s‘kow-towing and fore-lock tugging to Mrs Thatcher’ and its refusal to make‘an end to partition . . . the foremost demand of Irish nationalism’.66

The considerable attention that Sinn Féin gave to this type of issue, then,was wholly in keeping with its effort to establish a republican-dominatedpan-nationalist alliance with the parties of constitutional nationalism. Forthe belief of the Adams–McGuinness leadership was, as Tom Hartley’s 1988internal discussion paper explained, that even if the leaderships of the otherparties proved resistant to such an alliance in the immediate term, a ‘repub-lican wedge’ could still be driven into the SDLP and Fianna Fáil.67 Therank-and-file of both these parties were assumed, by senior republicans, to begenerally more ‘green’ than their leaderships and thus susceptible to ‘repub-lican issues’.68 For this reason, it was supposed that Sinn Féin’s prominentinvolvement in ‘campaigning issues’, of the sort described, might be thevehicle for the insertion of this ‘republican wedge’.

This hypothesis, it should be noted, was certainly not implausible. Onthe contrary, there was some evidence to support it. A significant sectionof Fianna Fáil, for instance, was, from the beginning, unhappy with theparty leadership’s decision to endorse extradition. Such was the extent ofthis unhappiness that at the party’s 1990 ard fheis a motion was even passedcalling for an end to the practice; a development that was followed withobvious interest by Sinn Féin.69

More broadly, meanwhile, as Bernadette Hayes and Ian McAllister havedemonstrated, opinion polls throughout the 1970s and 1980s continued toshow that between two-thirds and three-quarters of people in the Repub-lic of Ireland favoured Irish unity (albeit as an ‘aspiration’, rather thanan immediate political goal).70 That republicans were aware of such statis-tics is something that Jim Gibney has confirmed.71 The notion that thereexisted a broader constituency, stretching across the other political parties,for what Hartley labelled ‘republican issues’, was something by which theAdams–McGuinness leadership set great store.

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This idea was closely connected to what amounted to a virtual article offaith for many within the republican leadership: the idea that Irish society, asa whole, was pervaded by an enduring, latent nationalism. As the Sinn FéinPresident proclaimed in his speech to his party’s 1991 ard fheis, it was hisbelief that a ‘hidden Ireland’ of those who had remained ‘true to the Repub-lic’ and had ‘never sold out’ had survived across the country.72 Similarly,in a 1989 interview with Playboy magazine, Adams declared, ‘the people ofIreland support us’. All that prevented them from showing it, he reasoned,was the fact that ‘the economy of the south is in terrible shape’.73 In thesame interview, Danny Morrison also maintained that the truth was that,‘Despite apprehensions, most of the people in the south do support reunifi-cation [emphasis in original].’74 Given that Sinn Féin’s actual level of supportat that time comprised less than 2 per cent of the voting population, suchclaims from Morrison and Adams seem extraordinary.75 They are testament,though, to the enduring belief of the republican leadership that the peopleof Ireland were there to be ‘won’ for their cause. It was to precisely thesepeople that Sinn Féin imagined itself speaking when it championed what itheld to be the causes of ‘nationalist Ireland’. It was on this basis, accordingto Gibney, that Sinn Féin saw its central project as being ‘primarily to moti-vate the nationalist opinion on the island for independence’ and thereby, towaken ‘the sleeping giant of Irish nationalism’.76

In the long term, the Adams–McGuinness leadership hoped to rally nation-alist Ireland to the republican banner. More immediately, meanwhile, it wasimagined that the constitutional parties could gradually be brought to adoptincreasingly ‘republican’ stances. These would, in turn, it was assumed, bothde facto strengthen the push for a pan-nationalist alliance and also, in thewords of Tom Hartley, expose the ‘soft underbelly’ of British efforts to bringstability to Northern Ireland. This ‘soft underbelly’ was presumed to be theSDLP in particular, which, despite its ‘reformist’ leadership, was thought tobe ‘vulnerable to . . . national democratic demands’.77 Sinn Féin’s vocal pro-motion of precisely this sort of ‘demand’ was, therefore, seen as a criticalavenue by which the republican movement might gain access to the nation-alist ‘front’ that it desired and, thereby, head off the threat of an internal dealfor Northern Ireland.

The ‘peace strategy’

The republican movement’s embrace of pan-nationalism was accompaniedby a broader transformation in its use of language in this period. At the heartof this change, lay the recognition by the Adams–McGuinness leadership thatit would not matter one iota what republicans said if no one was preparedto listen to them. Until that point, the ongoing IRA campaign, and SinnFéin’s close association with it, had meant that this was invariably the case.Republicans tended to be ignored outright, or simply dismissed as ‘men of

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violence’. What followed, therefore, was a determined effort to rebrand theparty, as symbolized by the launching of its ‘peace strategy’ in 1987. Priorto the British general election of that year, Sinn Féin published its A Scenariofor Peace manifesto.78 At the time, this document was largely written off asa restatement of traditional republican doctrine. In reality, however, it didmark a significant departure – if not in republican ideology, then in the wayin which that ideology was presented.

Of particular note, for instance, was the fact that the central repub-lican demand was now defined explicitly as being one of ‘national self-determination’.79 As Moloney has underscored, this flexible phrase was tobecome a staple of republican rhetoric from this point onwards.80 Replac-ing the cruder ‘Brits Out’ call for ‘national liberation’, it carried legalisticconnotations that appeared to couch the republican goal in less objection-able terms. Even as it retained the familiar ‘colonial’ analysis of British–Irishrelations, it also called to mind the language of the United Nations and ‘inter-national law’.81 As if to prove this point, A Scenario for Peace actually quotedthe UN Charter on Self-Determination and other articles of internationallaw in support of its case. Hence, while the arguments remained largelyunchanged (with reference to the illegitimacy of partition, the ‘artificialmajority’ of Unionism and the idea that the ‘Irish’ people comprised a sin-gle, territorially defined nation), they were now advanced in more articulatefashion.82

Alongside this, and of wider significance, was the fact that A Scenario forPeace also represented the beginning of a sustained attempt to repositionSinn Féin as a party that actively sought ‘peace’. Gerry Adams has assertedthat as far back as 1982, he and his associates had come to the conclusion thatrepublicans needed to ‘reclaim’ the word ‘peace’.83 In truth, the evidence isthat he had long been aware of the value of the term. After all, as early as 1976,Adams had penned a pamphlet defending an IRA Volunteer, Danny Lennon,whose out of control car had killed a mother and her three children in Belfast(after Lennon had been shot dead by the British army). The episode had ledto the creation of the Peace People movement, which for a time broughtconsiderable local pressure to bear on the IRA to halt its campaign. Adams’pamphlet, entitled Peace in Ireland: A Broad Analysis of the Present Situation,responded to that pressure by asserting that all ‘violence in Ireland is theresult of British imperialism’. Republicans, he argued, would have preferredpeace, but were forced to engage in acts of ‘resistance’, in direct response tothe British presence.84 In some ways, therefore, this short publication couldbe seen as an early precursor to A Scenario for Peace.

The latter, though, was not a response to any immediate incident, butrather was the product of a far more deliberate and thought-out process, bywhich Sinn Féin sought, in the above cited words of Mitchel McLaughlin,to ‘reclaim’ the language of ‘peace’ for itself.85 What McLaughlin refers toas a ‘peace process’, however, is better understood, at this point, as a ‘peace

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strategy’ on the part of Sinn Féin; a strategy conceived as a means by whichthe party’s wider objectives might be achieved.

With regards to the aim of increasing the electoral strength of the party,for example, it had become increasingly clear that Sinn Féin’s unequivocalsupport for the IRA’s armed struggle was inhibiting its performance. DannyMorrison has testified to this growing realization, saying:

I remember canvassing in Strabane and a woman at her front door tellingme that while she admired and liked the way we articulated the nationalquestion, she wouldn’t be voting for us. I asked her why not and shesaid simply, ‘Because of bombs’. So it was quite obvious that there wasalways going to be a ceiling to the vote . . . that there was a section of thenationalist community that had reservations about IRA activity.86

What was true for the nationalist community of Northern Ireland was evenmore so for the electorate in the south. For this reason, it made sense for SinnFéin to disassociate itself from IRA activity.

Further in keeping with this effort, it was possible for Adams, in late 1987,to speak of ‘not unambiguously’ supporting the IRA.87 Three years later, hefurther redefined his position to one of ‘critical’, as opposed to unreserved,support for the military organization.88 Such statements seemed a long wayfrom the affirmation of ‘unambivalent’ support that Sinn Féin election can-didates had previously offered to the IRA – or indeed, from Adams’ stridentdeclaration in 1983 that, ‘If at any time Sinn Féin decide to disown the armedstruggle they won’t have me as a member.’89

Not only was this shift in language designed to widen Sinn Féin’s appealto the electorates on both sides of the Irish border, it was also very much inkeeping with the effort to achieve a pan-nationalist alliance. In this context,the new vocabulary of ‘peace’ emanating from the republican movementbecame the ‘carrot’ by which other nationalist parties were enticed to engagewith Sinn Féin. For not only did it become harder for them to justify nottalking to the republican movement, if the latter appeared to be signalling adesire to end the conflict, but also there was the added allure of being ableto play the role of peacemaker. Of this, republicans were only too aware. Inparticular, Sean O’Callaghan has stated that the republican leadership knewat the time, that they could use this ‘peacemaker’ lustre to appeal ‘hugely toJohn Hume’s ego’.90

That their hopes in this regard were far from fanciful is apparent from thefact that it was in 1988, less than a year after the formal launch of SinnFéin’s ‘peace strategy’, that the party came together with the SDLP for directtalks. While those exchanges showed the clear lines of division between theparties (notably around the questions of whether Britain was a neutral, orpartisan, player in the conflict and whether armed struggle was permissible),they could plausibly be portrayed as a new beginning for intra-nationalist

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relations. Valuable in this way, the republican movement also hoped thatthey would serve as a conduit by which it might establish relations withFianna Fáil in the south as well. On this front, Adams had already made anindirect approach to the Fianna Fáil leader, Charles Haughey, prior to theSinn Féin–SDLP talks occurring – indeed it was the effort to engage Haugheythat led to the direct contact with Hume.91

Previously, republicans had attacked the ‘verbalized nationalism’ ofHaughey, labelling his republicanism a ‘myth’ and describing him as an‘unprincipled self-seeking millionaire, well-practised opportunist and con-scious collaborator’.92 Yet, now he was the man with whom the Adams–McGuinness leadership looked to build the third link in the pan-nationalistchain. That this should have been so was a function of the fact that, for alltheir criticism of him, leading republicans had continued to view Haugheyas a man with whom they might ‘do business’. Haughey’s willingness totake a tougher rhetorical stance on Northern Ireland undoubtedly helpedfoster such a view.93 The effect of this was such that Adams, writing in 1986,could describe the Fianna Fáil leader as someone who, for all his flaws, was‘a genuine nationalist’.94 For this reason, Adams was prepared to approachHaughey; an approach that, as Ed Moloney has revealed, took the formof a letter from Fr. Alec Reid, that carried Adams’ imprimatur, which wasdelivered to Haughey by the Irish Press journalist, Tim Pat Coogan, in May1987.95 A copy of the same letter was also delivered to John Hume in London-derry. It called for the construction of a ‘common nationalist policy of aimsand methods for resolving the conflict and establishing a just and lastingpeace’.96

The hope of the republican leadership was that this sort of initiative, alliedto the more peace-oriented discourse of Sinn Féin, might persuade bothFianna Fáil and the SDLP to join with it in a tripartite pan-nationalist alliance.To this end, it seems clear that republicans were prepared to suggest thatthis alliance might act as an alternative to the IRA’s campaign. After all, asAdams has admitted, the crux of the aforementioned 1985 discussion paperby Fr. Alec Reid was that a ‘nationalist front’, pursuing Irish national self-determination, could serve as an alternative vehicle for republicans to pursuetheir goals.97 It suited republicans to adopt this logic in their dealings withthe constitutional parties; for by so doing, they could again use the attrac-tion of peace to tempt those parties into the creation of the alliance they sodesired.

In this, the republican leadership clearly did enjoy some success. Haughey’sunwillingness to sanction face-to-face meetings between himself and GerryAdams – as sought by the Sinn Féin President – did not prevent him fromdelegating responsibility for such a venture to John Hume. And the FiannaFáil leader himself retained an input into the process via the presence ofMartin Mansergh, his special adviser on Northern Irish matters, in talkswith Sinn Féin. This set the stage for the 1988 talks between republicans

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and the SDLP. During those exchanges, the latter served as the de factorepresentative of constitutional nationalism, broadly conceived. And withhindsight the engagement between it and physical force republicanism wasclearly a decisive moment in the history of the conflict.98

The association of the idea for a pan-nationalist alliance, with the notionof an end to the IRA’s armed struggle, it should be noted, has been pickedup by Ed Moloney to fuel his revisionism as to the origins of the peace pro-cess. It is Moloney’s contention that this proposal surfaced soon after GerryAdams first came into contact with Father Reid in 1982 and thereafter, itbecame a major element in a ‘secret peace process’, by which the Sinn FéinPresident sought, behind the backs of his comrades, to bring an end to theIRA’s campaign.99 In line with this, Moloney has argued that the 1987 letterfrom Reid to Haughey in 1987 offers further evidence as to the existence ofjust such a process. Moloney thus points to Reid’s call for political dialoguebetween Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin and what the priest assumed would bethe effect of that dialogue: ‘once it was under way, he believed, the IRA wouldrespond and cooperate positively [emphasis added]’.100 From this, Moloneyinfers that the subtext was actually the offer of an IRA ceasefire and, as aresult, the letter was part of Adams’ effort to achieve this – behind the backsof his ‘comrades’ – from as early as 1987. Crucially, however, the person doingthe ‘believing’ in the above sentence was Reid, not Adams. In other words,the suggestion that the opening of dialogue would produce an IRA cease-fire was purely Reid’s interpretation. Nowhere was there an explicit offer ofa ceasefire from Adams. Moreover, Moloney himself even appears to admitthis, stating ‘There was one immediate problem with the Reid–Adams pro-posal. It was not entirely clear in what circumstances the IRA would declarea ceasefire.’101 Consequently, it seems difficult to sustain the notion thatthe letter signified yet another piece in the jigsaw of a secret peace process.Rather, it is surely more plausible to view it against the broader republicanpolicy of trying to initiate negotiations, while simultaneously continuing thewar. Where Moloney sees nascent ‘peace processing’, the reality was actuallythe continuation of a policy of talking while fighting. What is more, thetruth of this was recognized by those most closely involved in these tentativeefforts to begin intra-nationalist dialogue. Again, Moloney himself actuallyprovides the evidence to this effect. He thus cites the opinion of no less afigure than Martin Mansergh, a man hardly renowned for his anti-peace-process views, when analysing the reasons why the letter initiative and thesubsequent Sinn Féin–SDLP talks achieved nothing. According to Mansergh,as quoted by Moloney, this was because

Both the SDLP and Fianna Fáil formed the view separately that northernrepublicans were not then ready to end their campaign, and that the pri-mary aim of any continuing dialogue was to end their political isolationand build a broad front.102

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As a summation of republican strategic thinking at that time, Mansergh’swords could scarcely be more apposite; for they capture the truth of a policythat was, ultimately, not about peace, but about trying to establish dia-logue between Sinn Féin and its constitutional nationalist rivals, with theaim of securing a pan-nationalist alliance, even as the IRA’s armed strugglecontinued.

With that said, it should be acknowledged that one objection that couldbe raised in opposition to this reading, and in favour of Moloney’s view, isthe fact that the pan-nationalist alliance approach did later come to comprisea central plank in the republican effort to end the IRA’s campaign. As shallbe discussed, both Moloney and Henry Patterson have rightly identified thisalliance as providing the intellectual rationale for the IRA cessations whenthey were called.103 However, the fact that, by 1994, Adams and the widerrepublican leadership had come to accept that some form of pan-nationalistalliance could form an alternative to the armed struggle, does not necessar-ily mean that this had always been the case. True, the Sinn Féin Presidenthas retrospectively sought to claim that this was indeed so, maintaining thathis belief had long been that armed struggle was only necessary, ‘without analternative’; the parallel assertion being that he had wished to build just suchan alternative, in order to end the IRA’s campaign.104 That Adams should por-tray himself in such light, though, is unsurprising given that he remains anactive politician, whose more recent political success has been heavily relianton his own image as a peacemaker. As a result, he has a strong interest inplacing himself firmly amid the origins of Northern Ireland’s peace process;something that his memoir does, as it asserts (actually in agreement withMoloney) that Adams was actively trying to create, ‘a new political dispensa-tion’ to end the conflict as far back as 1982.105 Yet, it is also worth noting thatthe same memoir completely airbrushes Adams’ near-universally recognizedcareer in the upper echelons of the IRA. On this basis alone, its reliability asa statement of historical record must necessarily be questioned.

What is more, Adams’ claims on this matter must be balanced against thereality of what he and his comrades were thinking, saying and doing dur-ing the early and mid-1980s. For as has already been described, there waslittle in the way of ideological revisionism within the Adams–McGuinnessleadership in this period. The conflict continued to be viewed through acolonial frame. As Adams stated during a 1989 interview, ‘[It is] a colonialstruggle. There is a government from a neighbouring power that claims juris-diction and sovereignty over another . . . they will leave only when they areforced to leave.’106 The corollary of this, as Adams testified in his 1986 expo-sition, The Politics of Irish Freedom, was that, while republicans would, ‘prefera situation where armed struggle was unnecessary’, they remained of theview that ‘in the 6 counties armed struggle is a terrible but necessary form ofresistance’.107 The response of Martin McGuinness to the famous ‘one hun-dred days in office’ speech of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland,

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Peter Brooke, in 1989, was in a similar vein. On that occasion, Brooke hadspoken of the British being ‘imaginative’ if republicans ended their violentcampaign.108 McGuinness was swift to affirm that, while Sinn Féin was inter-ested in Brooke’s words, no one within the party believed that Irish freedomcould be won ‘only’ through politics and elections.109 For the republicanleadership, armed struggle was the only basis on which to proceed.

The written observations of Sinn Féin’s then general secretary, Tom Hartley,during an internal Sinn Féin conference in May 1988, offer a still clearerinsight into the important role that republicans continued to foresee for theIRA campaign at this time. In annotations made to his copy of the confer-ence programme (presumably in the course of speeches and debate), Hartleyrecorded that the value of the armed struggle was that it continued to ‘keepthe pot boiling’.110 In other words, the notion of IRA violence as constitutinga military ‘veto’, keeping Northern Ireland ‘ungovernable’, until the Britishrealized they had no option but to negotiate withdrawal, was still to the fore.As Hartley stated, it was by the armed struggle that republicans would ‘fighttheir way to the negotiating table’.111

What makes Hartley’s comments all the more interesting is the factthat they were made just a few months after the IRA bombed a Remem-brance Day service in the town of Enniskillen in Fermanagh in November1987. The scale of that atrocity (which took the lives of eleven people) andthe televised, extraordinarily compassionate reaction to it of Gordon Wilson,the father of one of the victims (his daughter Marie), had unleashed a waveof condemnation against the republican movement across Ireland. Subse-quently, there were again suggestions that internment was on the point ofbeing re-introduced, with Adams admitting it was, ‘now a live option’ andlikely to be on a ‘32-County basis’.112 Such an outcome was, according to SeanO’Callaghan, a ‘recurring nightmare’ for the republican leadership because‘by this time they were coming to realize that most people in the south ofIreland couldn’t have cared less if a few guys from Belfast – which is prettymuch what the IRA was now seen as – were picked up’.113 Furthermore, eventhough their fears in this regard were not realized, there was no doubting theenormous damage done to Sinn Féin by the IRA’s ‘mistake’. At the aforemen-tioned internal conference, for example, the Dublin activist, Jim Monaghan,had pointed to the ‘devastating’ impact it had had ‘in terms of votes lost’.114

Adams himself, meanwhile, acknowledged elsewhere that, ‘Our efforts tobroaden our base have most certainly been upset in all the areas we haveselected for expansion . . . Our plans for expansion have been dealt a bodyblow.’115

And yet, even after this episode, it is clear that the Adams–McGuinnessleadership remained convinced of the indispensability of armed struggle.As a result, the IRA’s campaign of violence continued unabated throughoutthis period and was given full coverage in An Phoblacht/Republican News. TheIRA, it declared, was ‘everywhere’ and the organization promised to ‘meet

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force with force’.116 Attacks, such as that which claimed the lives of ten royalmarines at an army barracks in Deal in Kent, were described as an ‘integralpart of IRA strategy’.117 Furthermore, the ultimate objective of that strategywas still being described as ‘to break the will of the British government toremain in Ireland’.118

Thus, as the above-cited, post-Enniskillen comments by Hartley andMcGuinness make clear, the logic of the IRA as a ‘cutting edge’ remainedintact, albeit with some question marks as to the bluntness of the blade. It wasonly by armed struggle that the republican leadership believed it could bringthe British to accept a deal on its terms. Viewed in this context, Sinn Féin’s‘peace strategy’ at this time must be understood for what it was: an attemptto assuage the worst aspects of the IRA campaign, without fundamentallychallenging the basis upon which that campaign was being conducted. Thenotion that the republican leadership was, in this period, of the belief that anunarmed struggle could constitute a viable alternative to the IRA’s militarycampaign seems difficult to sustain. Any such notion appears to be singu-larly absent from the thinking of Adams and those close to him. Rather,their vision remained that of a holistic republican movement that wouldsuccessfully combine the military and the political struggles.

Political development: working towards the ‘mainstream’

Sinn Féin’s adoption of the peace strategy must be set within the context of abroader effort by the party to bring itself ‘in from the cold’. To achieve this, inaddition to the pursuit of pan-nationalist unity, the party also increasinglysought to become part of the political mainstream. Only by so doing, didthe Adams–McGuinness leadership believe that the twin dangers of isolationand marginalization could be avoided, particularly in the Republic of Ireland.However, the drive to enter the political mainstream south of the borderrequired Sinn Féin to confront one of the great shibboleths of republicantheology: abstentionism.

Following Sinn Féin’s disastrous performance in the February 1982 gen-eral election in the Republic, the Adams–McGuinness leadership had quicklycome to the conclusion that the policy of ‘abstentionism’ (the party’s refusalto take seats in the Irish Parliament) could not be retained, if Sinn Féin wishedto make a genuine political breakthrough. With the party already viewedas a predominantly northern entity, preoccupied with its ‘war’ in NorthernIreland, abstentionism ensured that the vast majority of the southern elec-torate saw Sinn Féin as an irrelevance. In elections devoid of the immediateemotionalism of the hunger strike (as the February 1982 poll had been), thiswas hardly a recipe for political success, a fact undoubtedly not lost on therepublican leadership.

Hence, while Gerry Adams has since claimed that it was not until 1985that he became convinced of the case against abstentionism, it seems likely

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that the decision was made some time during 1982. Certainly, by the timeof his interview with Magill magazine in 1983, for example, he was alreadydisplaying signs of ambiguity on the issue. He therefore told this interlocutorthat, with regard to the Republic of Ireland, republicans could not afford tobe ‘burying their heads in the sand’. Instead, he called on them to devisea strategy that, ‘appreciates that most people in the 26 counties see thoseinstitutions [i.e. the Dáil] as legitimate’. This could not be done, he argued,‘without taking into account the effects of the acceptance of the State insti-tutions and the effect an abstentionist policy by Republicans is going to haveon that strategy’.119 Though he did then go on to restate Sinn Féin’s stanceand declared that ‘whilst that remains the position I will support it’, Adams’comments hardly represented the most whole-hearted of endorsements ofparty policy.120 Danny Morrison, in his own interview with Magill, in whichhe too observed that the majority of people in the south viewed the Dáilas ‘legitimate’, took a similar line. Abstentionism was, Morrison noted, a‘handicap’ for the republican movement.121

Despite such indications of a desire for change on the part of the leader-ship, though, it was not until Sinn Féin’s 1986 ard fheis that the abstentionistpolicy was dropped. That this should have been so was a reflection of thesensitivity of the issue. As Agnès Maillot has pointed out, abstentionism wasone of the twin pillars upon which the identity of ‘Provisional’ republican-ism originally rested (the other being a commitment to armed struggle).122 Ithelped define the movement vis-à-vis other republican groups; again, nonemore so than the ‘Officials’, given that the 1969–70 split in republicanismhad been fuelled by this issue.123 Added to this was the fact that the broadershadow of history loomed large over any effort to alter republican policy onthe subject. All other republican parties that had moved to take up seats inexisting parliamentary institutions were perceived to have ended up ‘betray-ing’ the ‘struggle’. As a result, abstentionism had become, for many, a sacredprinciple that symbolized the republican movement’s continuing adherenceto the ‘true’ Republic. Any attempt to remove it was, therefore, liable tobe fraught with difficulty and carried the potential of provoking division inrepublican ranks.

In recognition of this, the Adams–McGuinness leadership was clearly pre-pared to move slowly. Indeed, Danny Morrison has since acknowledged that,‘in order to minimize the size of the split, the abstention debate was stretchedout over many years. We had to convince people of the merit [of it].’124

Accordingly, even though Adams and Morrison had raised the issue in 1983and 1984, little effort was made to follow through on it at that time. Ashas been seen, their criticism of existing policy was cautious and couchedin expressions of support for that policy. Nevertheless, by simply startingthe debate they had begun the process of creating the intellectual climate inwhich it was possible to conceive of changes. Their aim, thereafter, was toensure the overwhelming bulk of the movement was brought along to accept

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those changes. For the Adams–McGuinness leadership this point was crucial.A premium was placed on maintaining the unity of the movement to thegreatest possible extent.

The precise details of the way in which the Adams–McGuinness leader-ship manoeuvred the broader republican movement towards the removal ofabstentionism have been addressed in length elsewhere.125 In the presentcontext, it is enough to say that nothing was left to chance. Above all, theleadership emphasized, time and again, that its call for a shift in policy wasdriven, ultimately, by its desire for victory, in terms of its republican objec-tives. To this end, all possible moves were to be deemed acceptable. Themessage, fundamentally, was that the ends would justify the means – or asTom Hartley stated during the ‘dress rehearsal’ debate on abstentionism atthe 1985 ard fheis, ‘there is a principle riding above all principles and that isthe principle of success’.126

That the bulk of the republican movement was persuaded of this essentialtenet can be gauged from the result of the abstentionism debate: ultimately,the party voted 429–161 in favour of the motion to abandon the policy.127

While this did prompt a walkout of ‘traditionalists’ (as in 1970, led byRuairi Ó Brádaigh and Daithi O’Conaill), who left to form ‘Republican SinnFéin’, these were few in number and predominantly middle-aged, or elderly,‘pre-’69’ southern republicans. The leadership itself remained solidly behindAdams and McGuinness, as confirmed by the fact that no member of theincumbent Sinn Féin ard chomhairle left to join ‘Republican Sinn Féin’.128

By the same token, there was almost no split on the military side of themovement, with the IRA remaining united under the ‘Provisional’ leadership.And, while a very small-scale splinter group did emerge among republicanprisoners (the ultra-leftist ‘League of Communist Republicans’ under TommyMcKearney and Pat Mullin), this made almost no impact outside the prisonsand disappeared a few years later.129

Overall, the Adams–McGuinness leadership preserved the unity of therepublican movement to a remarkable degree. Set against previous experi-ences surrounding the abstentionism issue, their success in this regard wasunprecedented. Moreover, the minor defections that did occur were, to agreat extent, actually to the benefit of the leadership, as they served to makethings easier. The removal from the movement of an extreme ‘leftist’ fringeon the one hand, and a ‘traditional’, or ‘fundamentalist’, republican oldguard on the other, opened the way for the Adams–McGuinness leadershipto pursue further changes.

In line with this, there was now an effort to accelerate Sinn Féin’s entryinto the political mainstream. Beyond the abandonment of abstention-ism, this was to involve, in the words of Gerry MacLochlainn, a long-timesupporter of the Adams–McGuinness leadership, the search for ‘more sub-stantial forces’ in political terms. Contrasting this period with the earlierphase in the party’s development, MacLochlainn has noted that, ‘During the

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early 1980s . . . we had spent time chasing after solidarity groups in Europethat were on the fringe left . . . because we really had nothing else. Nowwe were in a position to look to much more substantial forces around theworld.’130

This search was, from the beginning, not confined to purely domestic pol-itics. On the contrary, perhaps the first place the shift in emphasis becamevisible (even prior to the ending of abstentionism back in Ireland) was inthe United States of America. There, Sinn Féin commenced tentative effortsto build up the scale and quality of its operations. The signal for this shiftcame in April 1986, when delegates from the party’s US affiliate, the IrishNorthern Aid Committee (NORAID) held a two-day meeting with Sinn Féinleaders in Dublin. Until then, the American organization had focused itsenergies almost entirely on providing material assistance to the republicancause in Ireland. In the wake of the Dublin meeting, however, this beganto change. From that point, NORAID began increasingly to involve itselfin more explicitly ‘political’ work such as lobbying. In addition, it wasbrought much more closely under the control of Sinn Féin, with the lat-ter creating a Northern American Committee (comprising Gerry Adams, JoeCahill [the man effectively seen as Sinn Féin’s ‘ambassador’ in the US] andTed Howell [then the party’s director of foreign affairs]) to oversee NORAID’saffairs. Inevitably, such changes aroused opposition from ‘traditionalists’,including the group’s founder, Michael Flannery, who continued to see theprimary purpose of NORAID as being the provision of material assistance forthe IRA’s armed struggle.131 Ultimately, this provoked a split within the move-ment with the founding of a new organization, the Friends of Irish Freedom,in 1988, which was ‘devoted exclusively to raising funds for the families ofrepublican prisoners’.132

The similarity here with the domestic rupture of the republican movement,over the issue of abstentionism two years earlier, was clear. In keeping withthis, the new group unsurprisingly announced its allegiance to Ó Brádaigh’s‘Republican Sinn Féin’ (RSF). As was the case with RSF in Ireland, how-ever, support for the new organization within the Irish-American communityremained marginal – in part because Sinn Féin moved quickly and intelli-gently to crush the effectiveness of the dissidents. Thus, a series of seniorrepublicans, including Brendan Hughes, the leader of the first hunger strikein 1980, were dispatched to the US to persuade those wavering in their affil-iations to stay within NORAID.133 That such measures proved successful canbe seen from the fact that NORAID survived the split with the bulk of itsmembers staying loyal. Moreover, as within Sinn Féin proper, it may actu-ally have helped the new leadership to push its new direction further thanmight otherwise have been possible had the ‘traditionalists’ remained. In thewake of the split, men such as the new chairman, Paul Murray, and MartinGalvin set about removing NORAID’s clandestine and conspiratorial imageand involving it in mainstream political action.

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In this way, developments in the US paralleled those back in Ireland. Theywere two facets of a holistic strategy driven by the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership, which sought to recast Sinn Féin as a mainstream political party.Domestically, as has already been discussed, a key feature of that reposi-tioning was an accentuation of the party’s nationalist character, coupled toa new emphasis on the language of ‘peace’, in the context of an effort tocreate a pan-nationalist alliance. However, as Gerry Adams noted during hisBodenstown oration in 1989, the attempt to build a nationalist-inspired ‘massmovement’ constituted only part of the task that the leadership foresaw forSinn Féin. It was to be accompanied by a renewed effort to build, ‘a relevantand active campaigning party’.134

It was with this latter goal in mind that Sin Féin continued to involveitself heavily in community-based work on both sides of the Irish bor-der. It remained immersed in immediate issues affecting ‘ordinary peo-ple’, such as unemployment, housing shortages, urban petty crime anddrugs problems.135 With regards to the latter, for instance, this period wit-nessed the apogee of the Concerned Parents campaign, particularly in theyears after 1987. Once again, this was given extensive coverage within AnPhoblacht/Republican News, with republicans also playing a major role on theground.136 In the north, meanwhile, the IRA continued to play a promi-nent role in ‘community policing’, targeting what it claimed were the ‘smallminority of thugs and gangsters in nationalist areas’ who were alleged to bemaking the lives of ordinary people miserable.137 The result was a series ofactions, as reported in An Phoblacht/Republican News, in which alleged ‘drugdealers’ and ‘hoods’ received punishments, including beatings, shootingsand being ‘exiled’ from Belfast, or even Ireland.138 Such actions by the IRAwere again said to have ‘overwhelming local acceptance’ and, while republi-cans acknowledged that they were a ‘far from ideal response’, they deemedthem to be ‘regrettably sometimes necessary’.139

Republicans thus maintained their involvement in community politics, atthis most basic level, both north and south of the Irish border. Alongside this,though, there was also an attempt at this time to develop a more sophisti-cated and serious political message; to confront the fact that Sinn Féin was, inthe words of one republican, ‘isolated – cut off from the mainstream of politi-cal thinking’.140 As the veteran republican and leadership ally, Jim McAllister,explained to an internal party conference in May 1988, this isolation was per-ceived to be, to a large extent, ‘self-imposed . . . through lack of relevancy onmany issues’. Consequently, McAllister argued, Sinn Féin needed to engageanew with mainstream politics, in order to make itself a ‘realistic politicalalternative’.141 That Sinn Féin could still not be classified as such had beenmade plain by the results of the February 1987 general election in the Repub-lic of Ireland. Coming only a few months after the party had abandonedabstentionism, Gerry Adams had previously sought to moderate expecta-tions within the movement as to what could be achieved. Prior to the poll he

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had stated that the removal of abstentionism would not be, ‘a “magic wand”solution to all our problems’. It would take at least two elections, he asserted,before Sinn Féin reaped the benefits of its change in policy.142 Nonetheless,the dismal performance of the party in the 1987 contest undoubtedly cameas something of a shock, even for Adams. With the party receiving a mere1.7 per cent of the vote, the Sinn Féin President was understating thingssomewhat when he subsequently admitted that the party’s performance hadbeen ‘unsatisfactory’.143 An Phoblacht/Republican News was more candid inacknowledging the truth, declaring that, ‘Frankly, Sinn Féin was not seen bythe electorate as a credible alternative to any of the long-established partiesor to the many independents and parties of the left against whom it wascompeting for rural and urban working-class votes.’144

It was against this backdrop, then, that the aforementioned internalrepublican magazine, Iris Bheag, was created in 1987, to serve as a, ‘meansof exchanging ideas and developing Sinn Féin’s policies and strategies fordiscussion’.145 The leadership had realized that it was not enough for SinnFéin to simply object to the existing system. In the words of the Belfastcouncillor, Mairtin O’Muilleor, Sinn Féin members had to move beyondbeing ‘politicians who attack everyone else’s economic policies but havenone of their own’.146 This, of course, required that such policies begiven substance and it was this purpose that underlay the inception of IrisBheag and the broader effort to develop Sinn Féin’s position on mainstreamissues.

With regards to the question of what exactly were presumed to consti-tute mainstream political issues, the first edition of Iris Bheag offered a clearsignal. It contained ‘instructions’ that were to be sent to each Sinn Féincomhairle ceantair (district executive), on how to agitate around the issue ofthe health cuts imposed by the new Fianna Fáil government in the Republicof Ireland.147 Previously, the party had publicly attacked those cuts as indica-tive of Fianna Fáil’s descent into ‘Thatcherism’.148 Here, though, they weresaid to provide Sinn Féin with ‘a very important opportunity for work’. Byplacing ‘Fianna Fáil’s betrayal of the electorate in stark terms’, the cuts werethought to provide the party with ‘a means of politicising the people’.149 Insuch manner did the republican leadership believe that Sinn Féin could makeitself active on this issue: through the application of the party’s campaigning,grassroots approach to mainstream politics.

In addition to this, the leadership also recognized that Sinn Féin neededto construct realistic policy programmes. In keeping with this, new empha-sis was placed on developing concrete policy on subjects such as Health andEducation. With regards to the latter, for example, the 1989 ard fheis saw SinnFéin discuss and adopt five motions on the subject that were not only moredetailed than those of previous years, but which also dealt with practicalimprovements that could be made to the system.150 Similarly, the promi-nence attached to the issue of Health at Sinn Féin’s ard fheiseanna increased

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markedly in this period. The clar (agenda) for the party’s 1987 gathering,for instance, listed twenty-four motions on the topic, now subdivided into‘6 County’ and ‘26 County’ sections.151 By contrast, the 1984 ard fheis hadseen only six motions brought forward on the subject, with no effort madeto distinguish between the different systems in place, north and south.152

Moreover, by 1987, the motions passed during the debate included tangibleproposals as to how the health service could be enhanced, particularly in thesouth, of the sort that had been singularly absent a few years previously. Thischanging approach to Health and Education was representative of the widereffort to develop the character of Sinn Féin’s politics, in order to facilitate itsentry into the mainstream.

Nevertheless, it should be stressed that while leadership figures such as JimMcAllister repeated Adams’ earlier comments about the dangers of ultra-leftpolitics, they also called on the party to retain its radical edge and establish‘correct left positions’.153 In line with this, Sinn Féin continued, for example,to be vehemently opposed to the neo-liberal economic model pursued bysuccessive Dublin governments.154 It also continued to develop its ‘women’spolicy’ agenda so as to make it a more credible statement of progressive intenton such issues.155

Ultimately, the aim of the Adams–McGuinness leadership was not thatSinn Féin should abandon all radical positions in the effort to enter thepolitical mainstream; rather, the leadership wished the party to occupy aposition of serious, yet clear, opposition to the perceived political consen-sus in the Republic of Ireland. As An Phoblacht/Republican News stated inthe run-up to the 1987 election, what the party wanted, above all, was tooffer both something different from ‘the Tweedle-dum/Tweedle-dee politicsof the establishment’ and ‘real change on political, social and economicissues’.156

Conclusion

By the end of the 1980s, Sinn Féin was determinedly pursuing its goal ofentering the political mainstream, in an attempt to ward off the enduringthreat of isolation. The stabilization of the party’s vote in Northern Ireland in1984–5, the ensuing Anglo-Irish Agreement and the persistent failure of theparty in the Republic of Ireland had ensured this threat remained palpable.Sinn Féin’s response had been, on the one hand, to seek a pan-nationalistalliance with the SDLP and Fianna Fáil. On the other, it had sought to developits own image as an electable, mainstream political party, particularly in thesouth. On both counts, however, its exertions proved to be in vain.

With regards to the possible pan-nationalist front, while republicans couldherald the 1988 talks as a promising development, contacts with the SDLPstalled somewhat thereafter (though Adams did remain in personal com-munication with Hume).157 In relation to Sinn Féin’s electoral ambitions,

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meanwhile, 1989 brought decisive evidence as to the party’s enduring fail-ure. In Northern Ireland, local elections that year saw the party’s share ofthe vote drop.158 Although Adams still proclaimed the results to be ‘excel-lent’ and ‘encouraging’, others were less sanguine.159 Mitchel McLaughlin,for instance, admitted that the party’s performance was an indictment of its‘failure to attract support across the political spectrum’.160 Even more demon-strative of this truth were the results achieved by Sinn Féin in the Republicof Ireland in 1989. In the European elections held in June, the party receivedjust over 2 per cent of the vote and in no constituency came close to challeng-ing for a seat.161 The Sinn Féin President again attempted to downplay theseriousness of this defeat, claiming that it was ‘not an election which greatlyinterested our supporters’.162 To some extent this may have been true, butthe same excuse could not be applied to the general election, which was heldin the south concurrently with the European poll. In that contest, Sinn Féinactually fared even worse, with its share of the vote declining to a mere 1.2per cent (down on the 1.7 per cent achieved in 1987).163

Back in 1986, when the party had ended its abstentionist policy, Adamshad declared that the fruits of that shift would only become evident intwo elections’ time; the 1989 contest was thus meant to be the momentwhen Sinn Féin’s fortunes showed signs of improvement. Instead, the partyseemed to veer ever closer to complete electoral oblivion. This, in spite of thefact that Sinn Féin now promised to serve within the Dáil and had attemptedto engage with mainstream politics. Amplifying this failure still further wasthe fact that, in 1989, conditions were perhaps even more favourable to aparty offering a coherent electoral alternative than they had been earlier inthe decade. Fianna Fáil’s adoption of a neo-liberal economic agenda after1987, and the support it received for doing so from Fine Gael (the ‘TallaghtStrategy’ of its leader Alan Dukes), meant opportunities clearly did exist fora party that could present the electorate with a cohesive and viable political‘alternative’.164 As the elections showed, however, Sinn Féin was wholly inca-pable of grasping such chances. Yet more galling still, was the fact that it wasthe Workers’ Party (the vehicle of the former ‘Official’ republican movement)that did benefit, as it secured its best ever result and had seven candidateselected to the Dáil.165

In this context, Adams conceded that Sinn Féin had been unable, ‘topersuade any sizeable sections of the electorate of our relevancy’.166 Nev-ertheless, he also argued that the party could still rectify this by workingever harder to deal with the ‘legacy of elitism and bad organisation’, whichhe claimed was its inheritance from the abstentionist era.167 Others likewisecalled for patience, asserting that ‘Sinn Féin can be built and will get pub-lic support in time [emphasis in original].’168 Alongside this, though, thereappears to have been a growing awareness that the critical inhibitor of SinnFéin’s electoral performance was the IRA’s armed struggle. Hence, Mitchel

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McLaughlin, when discussing the party’s results in Northern Ireland’s 1989local elections, noted that

IRA operations that went wrong did have an effect because in a sense SinnFéin is held accountable at a local level for all aspects of the republicanstruggle . . . you have aspects of the war which cause problems, which posequestions, sometimes moral questions for ordinary voters.169

Up until this point, as has been shown, the Adams–McGuinness leader-ship had continued to believe in the necessity of the armed campaign. Forthis reason, the republican movement had continued to follow an updatedversion of the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’ approach. The essential compat-ibility of the two prongs of this strategy had scarcely begun to be challengedby the republican leadership. The launching of the peace strategy was theproduct of a desire to change Sinn Féin’s image, rather than originating inreservations as to the utility of armed struggle itself. The latter was still seenas a crude, but essential, form of republican veto that both exerted pressureon the British government and helped prevent a settlement of the conflict onnon-republican terms. For this reason, as Martin McGuinness had declaredin 1988, there were to be ‘no more ceasefires’; rather, ‘talk’ could take place,‘but the war will go on’.170 Similarly, the following year, an IRA spokesper-son had affirmed that the military campaign would be maintained until, ‘thewill of the British government to remain in this country [is] broken . . . therewill be no ceasefire and no truces until Britain declares its intent to withdrawand leave our people in peace’.171 Ironically, though, even as this latter state-ment was being made, the assumptions upon which it was based were finallybeginning to be reassessed by the Adams–McGuinness leadership.

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3Towards Negotiation and the‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’,1990–7

‘The republican aim in the peace process is to map a way out of armedconflict [and] to do so in the best possible political circumstances,so as to allow the united Ireland programme to emerge.’

Jim Gibney1

Introduction

As the 1980s drew to a close, the republican movement’s modus operandihad been essentially unchanged since the inauguration of the ‘long war’over a decade earlier. While there had been some modifications to its preciseworkings, the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’ approach remained intact. Suchmodifications as there had been had sought merely to refine the IRA’s armedstruggle to make it more compatible with the electoral ambitions of Sinn Féin.There had, though, been little questioning by the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership of the notion that the military campaign remained an indispensablepart of the republican armoury.

As has been intimated, accepting this contention entails a rejection of thethesis put forward by Ed Moloney, as to the origins of the republican leader-ship’s re-evaluation of armed struggle. Given the prominence of Moloney’saccount, it is perhaps worth exploring in further detail the problems with hisline of argument; for at first glance his narrative appears to be a persuasiveone. The importance that Moloney attaches to Fr. Alec Reid’s letter to CharlesHaughey in 1987 has already been discussed. Alongside this, Moloney hasalso convincingly tracked the start of the process by which the republicanmovement sought to negotiate with the British state, to the same period. Inthis regard he has uncovered another letter, sent sometime in late 1986, orearly 1987, from Adams himself to the then Secretary of State, Tom King.2

On the basis of this letter, allied to that of Reid to Haughey (and Hume),Moloney constructs his story of a decade-long ‘secret peace process’, drivenby the machinations of Gerry Adams, to end the IRA’s campaign.

74

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Unfortunately, this narrative, however appealing, is hard to square with thereality of events. For whereas Moloney would argue that Adams, by seekingcontact with King, showed weakness through his willingness to talk peace, itis more appropriate to view this as, once more, an extension of the republicanpolicy of ‘fighting while negotiating’.3 As has been described, it was throughthis dual-pronged process that republicans believed victory would be theirs,thereby replicating the Vietnam model that was held in such high esteem.Moloney’s mistake is to perceive talking and fighting as two mutually exclu-sive realms. True, this was the position of the British state (as stated in King’sresponse to Adams’ letter), and it was this view that ultimately won out. Therepublican movement was thus forced to accept that the IRA would have toend its armed struggle if it wanted negotiations to begin. During the 1980s,though, this was not how the republican leadership viewed things. Instead, itcontinued to believe that it would be possible to get into a situation where the‘war’ continued, even as dialogue proceeded. As Moloney himself notes, itwas the British realization that this was indeed the case – that when it came totalking peace in 1987, republicans ‘were spoofing’ – that ended any prospectof negotiations at that time.4 For this reason, the existence of the Adams–King letter must be seen not as another expression of a secret peace process,but again as a symptom of the republican leadership’s ‘fighting while nego-tiating’ strategy; a strategy that was abandoned, not as Moloney has argued,in the early to mid-1980s, but, instead, only at the very end of the decadeand in the first years of the 1990s.

An indication that it was not until this later period that a genuine reassess-ment began among the republican leadership is offered by Danny Morrison,who until his arrest was a central member of the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership. Morrison has stated that the first inkling he had of any changedapproach to the armed struggle was the IRA’s Christmas ceasefire of 1990.Further, regarding the question of when the re-appraisal began, which ledto even that short ceasefire, he claims that ‘it hadn’t happened, certainly, byJanuary 1990 [when Morrison was arrested]’.5 In similar vein, even one of theforemost critics of the Adams–McGuinness leadership, Anthony McIntyre,has conceded that it was only in this period that he himself began tosense that the armed struggle was subject to re-evaluation. It was this aware-ness that prompted the then imprisoned McIntyre to write a long essay(under the pseudonym of ‘Susini’), entitled ‘Armed Struggle – A StrategicalImperative’, which argued that the military campaign should be continued.6

The reality is, therefore, that it was only as the Northern Irish conflict movedinto its third decade that the republican leadership began to review this coreprecept. As the senior republican Jim Gibney has commented, whereas ‘the1980s were characterized by conflict’, it was only the ‘1990s that saw newthinking begin to take shape in the national leadership of the movement’.7

In line with this, the first public admission of a shift in outlook arrivedin 1992, when Gerry Adams began to speak of a ‘new realism’ among

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republicans.8 The context for Adams’ remark was significant: it followed theunveiling, a week earlier, of Sinn Féin’s Towards a Lasting Peace documentat that year’s ard fheis.9 As Brian Feeney has described, this marked a defini-tive watershed in the approach of the republican movement.10 It is a viewendorsed by the Sinn Féin President himself, who has since referred to it asheralding a ‘major shift’ in attitude.11 Justification for such conclusions canbe seen from a brief analysis of the fresh ground that republicans broke atthis time. For example, Towards a Lasting Peace saw the republican move-ment set aside its demand for a precise time frame for British withdrawal.This immediately marked it out as different from A Scenario for Peace, whichhad maintained that this was necessary (and recommended that the lifetimeof one British Parliament serve as a suitable period).12

Of even greater significance, was the fact that this change in attitude tothe timing of withdrawal was tied to an evolving image of how the negotia-tions leading to it might proceed. Now, the republican leadership appearedincreasingly open to the suggestion that these might follow an end to theIRA’s armed struggle. The endorsement of this idea marked a fundamentalmove away from the ‘fighting while negotiating’ template that was previouslydominant. The logic of this was underlined by Jim Gibney in his landmarkBodenstown oration of 1992, when he categorically stated:

We know and accept that the British government’s departure must bepreceded by a sustained period of peace and will arise out of negotiations.We know and accept that such negotiations will involve the differentshades of Irish nationalism, and Irish unionism engaging the British gov-ernment either together or separately to secure an all-embracing anddurable peace process [emphasis added].13

Elsewhere, meanwhile, Martin McGuinness now spoke of ‘interim arrange-ments’ that might follow an IRA ceasefire, but precede actual Britishwithdrawal.14

What such comments revealed was the slow recognition of the Adams–McGuinness leadership that republican involvement in negotiations mightonly be possible if the IRA first ended its campaign of violence. By the sametoken, there was a growing cognizance of the fact that a British declara-tion of intent to withdraw from Ireland would not come in advance of anend to the armed struggle. These twin conclusions lay at the heart of the‘new realism’.

Again, though, it is important to emphasize that the republican leader-ship’s growing awareness of the unavoidable truth of this was not the productof a rapid, or total, conversion to the cause of peace. On the contrary,it would appear that the evolution in the thinking of people like Adamsand McGuinness was halting, even tortuous. For the longest time, it seemsclear that the republican leadership continued to believe that ‘fighting and

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negotiating’ would prevail; that the IRA’s campaign would not have to beabandoned in order for talks to begin.

Hence, while it is true that from as early as 1989 there was a notice-able shift in rhetoric from republican spokespeople, as they began to callmore explicitly for ‘dialogue to end the conflict’, this was allied to the insis-tence that any such dialogue be ‘without preconditions’.15 The notion thatthe IRA campaign should halt to facilitate talks was derided as an ‘intransigentdemand’.16 Instead, according to Adams and his party, what was requiredwas ‘open-ended dialogue to discuss all the issues which create political vio-lence in Ireland and the steps necessary to bring it to an end’.17 This stancewas maintained throughout 1990 and 1991, with the republican leadershiprepeatedly calling for a ‘real peace process’ to be constructed, involving allparties ‘without preconditions’.18 Even in 1992, as the new realism was beingarticulated, a key leadership figure such as Mitchel McLaughlin could befound arguing, with reference to the international situation of the time, that

no one . . . in Ireland, Britain or elsewhere demanded a ceasefire as anabsolute precondition to the launching of the Bosnian talks . . . the logicof inclusive dialogue currently being pursued in the Middle East, in SouthAfrica and now in eastern Europe . . . should now be employed in the North[of Ireland] to break the cycle of violence.19

In the meantime, moreover, the IRA continued to prosecute its campaignwith as much vigour as it could muster. From 1989 onwards this includeda major bombing offensive against the English mainland, with IRA spokes-people declaring their determination to hit the British in, ‘the “belly of thebeast” [and] where it hurts most’.20 Such rhetoric was matched with a seriesof attacks on numerous high-profile targets: from the Carlton Club to CanaryWharf, from Downing Street to the Stock Exchange.21

What all of this reflects, then, is the extent to which the republican lead-ership remained fundamentally unaltered at an ideological level. The newrealism of republicans was not a consequence of change in this sphere.Acknowledgement of this, serves as an important corrective to the vari-ous misinterpretations that have been made in relation to the supposed‘revisionism’ of the Adams–McGuinness leadership. It has, for example, beensuggested that republicans had come to accept the argument of John Humeand the SDLP, that the British, in light of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, shouldbe seen as a ‘neutral’ presence in Ireland.22 After all, it was now possible tohear Martin McGuinness argue that, ‘In the new European and post-ColdWar situation, Britain no longer had any strategic interests in Ireland’.23 Andyet, it seems clear that comments of this nature were far from indicative of anacceptance of British ‘neutrality’. On the contrary, this continued to be firmlyrejected by the republican leadership in this period.24 An article by ‘HildaMcThomas’ (a nom de plume generally understood to represent the views of

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the Adams–McGuinness leadership) in the February 1991 edition of Fortnight,for instance, explicitly refuted the idea that the British were neutral, declar-ing that, ‘the only neutral act a colonising power can perform in relation to acolony is to leave, taking care to make full reparations and helping to demil-itarise the conflict it created’.25 In similar vein, Martin McGuinness, whenspeaking to Sinn Féin’s ard fheis two years later, in February 1993, stated baldlythat, ‘the British of course are not referees in this dispute and we repudiateany attempts to portray them as neutral’.26 On such basis, it seems entirelyappropriate to question the extent of the republican leadership’s ideologicalrevisionism on the nature of the British presence in Ireland.

Equally, the same must surely be the case with regard to the republican viewof Unionism, which is often depicted as having undergone a transformationin this period – the suggestion being that it was this that opened the waytowards the later peace agreement. Again, in support of claims to this effect, aseries of articles by Gerry Adams and Mitchel McLaughlin can be identified inwhich they appeared to discuss the ‘Unionist issue’ in newly emollient terms.For example, in a piece first carried by the internal republican magazineThe Starry Plough in late 1991 (and reprinted for external consumption thefollowing year in Fingerpost), McLaughlin called on republicans, ‘to under-stand and empathise’ with Protestants, so as to achieve a, ‘reapproachment[sic] with the Unionist community’.27 ‘The republican quarrel’, McLaughlinargued, ‘is with the British state in Ireland and the truth is that we cannot andshould not ever try to coerce the Protestant people into a united Ireland.’28

In an additional article, which also appeared in both The Starry Plough andFingerpost, McLaughlin strengthened this affirmation of good intent still fur-ther when he declared that any effort to force Irish unity upon Protestantswould be ‘a ludicrous distraction’ and that ‘In 25 years of political activism,I have yet to hear any republican make such an assertion.’29 Thus, for thefirst time since the movement had dropped the Eire Nua policy (and its fed-eralist ‘sop to Unionism’), republicans appeared to be making concessionto the notion of a distinct Unionist political identity that could not simplybe ignored. The Adams–McGuinness leadership seemed now to accept that,‘Unionist agreement is not only desirable but vital if we are to have lastingpeace and stability in Ireland.’30

Once more, however, the extent of the republican leadership’s revision-ism should not be overstated; for alongside the placatory words describedstood more conventional expressions of republican ideology. McLaughlin,for instance, also referred to Unionism as ‘an artificially created imperialbulwark’.31 Elsewhere, Gerry Adams described it as ‘narrow and divisive andsectarian and conservative’.32 With regards to the issue of ‘consent’, mean-while, McLaughlin’s 1994 article balanced its palliatives on the subject withthe traditional republican view that ‘Despite all the rhetoric about “con-sent”, the Unionist veto belongs, in reality, to the British government.’33

Against this background, the idea of deep-rooted ideological change seemsunsustainable. Even as they professed to believe Unionist ‘consent’ to

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be important, the republican leadership still talked of an unacceptableand undemocratic ‘Unionist veto’ that had to be removed by the Britishgovernment.

What the ‘revisionism’ thesis fails to take into account, therefore, is theextent to which the republican leadership was effectively attempting to dis-tinguish between Unionism and Unionists. It was to the latter, as a populationgroup with a distinct identity, that the new conciliatory face of republican-ism was turned. Unionism, though, was still seen as a creation of the British(to legitimate their presence in Ireland), which lacked any vitality of its own.Accordingly, for republicans, it remained for the British government to breakthe Unionist veto, by announcing its willingness to withdraw from Ireland.By so doing, it was imagined a process of ‘awakening’ would be generated,whereby Unionists would realize their essential ‘Irishness’ and then be pre-pared to come to an ‘accommodation’ with nationalists.34 The context forthat accommodation, though, would be de facto Irish unity; and in this con-text, the ‘best’ Unionists would be those that had abandoned their Unionism.Thus, when republicans now talked of Unionist consent, they did so froman understanding of consent as only being necessary for those arrangementsthat would flow from British withdrawal. The purpose of this was to secure the‘allegiance of Unionists’ for a settlement.35 Such Unionists, though, wouldhave effectively left their Unionism ‘at the door’ and would, it was imag-ined, acquiesce in the negotiation of new institutions for a politically unifiedisland.

This was little more than a restatement of republican doctrine as it hadalways been. The only significant change was that republicans now appearedto be expressing that doctrine through the language of their opponents, tak-ing on concepts such as consent and the need for reconciliation to articulatetheir case. What this truth, in turn, illustrates is the extent to which Union-ism, in the republican mindset, remained something to be outmanoeuvredand, ultimately, defeated. Furthermore, the view still held that the best way toachieve this was through confrontation with the alleged colonial ‘sponsors’of Unionism: the British.

In this way, the persistence of a colonial analysis within the thinking ofthe republican leadership helps explain the tentative progress of republican‘peace moves’ in the early 1990s. These moves were born not of preference,but of the slow and reluctant realization that there was little other option.The Adams–McGuinness leadership did not actively seek reassessment of thecontinued viability of the IRA campaign, but was forced into it by a mix offactors, both endogenous and exogenous to Ireland.

Ending the armed struggle

Outside of Ireland, the transformation of both the British political sphereand the wider international political arena in this period, helped create anenvironment in which the IRA’s campaign could be contemplated afresh.

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With regards to the former, the upheavals that culminated in the removal ofMargaret Thatcher as Prime Minister were crucial in encouraging the Adams–McGuinness leadership to review its options. It is difficult to believe thatrepublicans could ever have countenanced an end to the armed campaign foras long as the ‘Iron Lady’ remained in office. Thatcher’s intransigent stanceduring the hunger strikes, combined with her militant anti-IRA rhetoric andwillingness to sanction the use of the SAS, had confirmed her as the bête-noirof modern republicanism. At the time of her departure, Adams described herrole in Ireland as ‘singularly negative’, while Jim Gibney later commentedthat ‘She embittered us to a degree, which is quite difficult at times to liftyourself out of . . . she personalised it I think . . . she is despised by Republicansbecause of what she did to the prisoners in 1981.’36 It thus seems clear thatthe end of Thatcher’s premiership was an important precursor to the newfluidity that entered republican thinking thereafter.

In addition, Thatcher’s departure encouraged signals from within the Britishgovernment that there could be a new beginning in republican–British rela-tions. These signals actually pre-dated Thatcher’s resignation and, as has beendescribed, were first articulated publicly by Secretary of State for NorthernIreland, Peter Brooke, in 1989.37 The following year, Brooke had supple-mented his initial attempt to engage republicans by once again assertingBritish neutrality in the conflict, claiming that the government had ‘noselfish strategic or economic interests in Northern Ireland’.38 In so doing,he had appeared to hold out the opportunity for Sinn Féin to enter talks,provided that the IRA ended its campaign. That such inferences registeredon the radar of republicans is undeniable. Adams, for instance, subse-quently acknowledged ‘some positive aspects to these speeches’.39 In similarvein, Danny Morrison noted how they stirred debate because the language‘bemused republicans and forced us to listen carefully’.40

Alongside this, it is now known that behind-the-scenes communicationsbetween the republican movement and the British government were underway by this point. As has been explained, Moloney has provided evidencethat such contacts existed back into the mid-1980s.41 Yet, it would seem thatthey became far more active from 1990 onwards. Certainly, both sides lateridentified this as the moment when relations improved qualitatively.42 Andover the subsequent three years a ‘line of communication’ was kept openbetween the two sides and used at length. Such contacts allowed the Britishto stress to republicans that they would be willing to smooth progress intotalks – if the IRA ended its violent campaign. In this way, they were a source ofencouragement to those republicans, particularly within the leadership, whowere beginning to consider the circumstances in which the armed strugglemight be set aside.

Similarly encouraging for those within the republican leadership beginningto think in such a manner were changes in the wider global context. In thisregard, Michael Cox has highlighted the probable impact of the end of the

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Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.43 While the USSR had neverbeen a supporter of the ‘Provisional’ republican movement (instead enjoyingclose links with the ‘Officials’), the revolutionary project that it championedhad been a source of inspiration to republicans. The truth of this could beseen in the links of solidarity and support established in the early 1980sbetween Sinn Féin and groups such as the ANC, SWAPO, the PLO and theSandinistas, many of whom were in contact with the Soviet Union. For thisreason, it was only natural that the sudden collapse of the foremost patronof the global revolutionary cause would affect the republican worldview. AsDanny Morrison records in his prison journal, the effect of events in EasternEurope was to force him to ‘rethink’ his own politics and be ‘more pragmaticand realistic’.44

By the same token, the associated emergence of what Adrian Guelke hasreferred to as, ‘a zeitgeist of peace processes’ was also likely to have made animpression on republicans.45 As the Cold War came to an end, several con-flicts across the world, which had previously been described as intractable,moved towards a peaceful conclusion. Of particular significance for repub-licans was the fact that this new trend encompassed groups to which theyhad earlier looked for support, notably the PLO and the ANC. Gerry Adamshas acknowledged the impact that this had, stating: ‘Internationally . . . theclimate was moving towards a new ethos of resolving conflict.’46

This ‘new ethos’ appeared to carry both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ implicationsfor the republican leadership. On the one hand, the simple fact of otherpeace processes having taken place made it far harder for republicans to jus-tify the continuing armed struggle of the IRA. In this way, they generatedpressure on the republican movement, ‘pulling’ it towards a point where itcould consider ending its own military campaign. At the same time, as theAdams–McGuinness leadership began to arrive at such conclusions itself, itfound a ready-made source of legitimacy in such peace processes, to help jus-tify difficult decisions. The paradigm of conflict resolution elsewhere in theworld helped the leadership ‘push’ its supporters down the road, as it becameincreasingly convinced that this was an appropriate one for republicans.

In this manner, the parallels that could be drawn from the contemporaryglobal context served as useful alternatives to those that would be gleanedby adopting a more historical perspective. For set against the history of Irishrepublicanism, any move towards ending the military campaign could beportrayed as the leadership following a well-worn path, the ultimate destina-tion of which, was the abandonment of the struggle altogether. It could bedepicted in similar terms to the course taken by Michael Collins, Eamon DeValera, Sean MacBride and Cathal Goulding; a course that the ‘Provisional’republican movement had previously denounced as being a ‘sell-out’ and a‘betrayal’. By contrast, the global context of the early 1990s peace processes,and the attendant lionization of ‘peacemakers’ around the world, offered farmore attractive comparisons for the republican leadership to draw upon.

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Nowhere was this truer than in the case of South Africa and the ANC’s movetowards negotiation with the National Party government of F.W. De Klerk.Just as previously the IRA had looked to the ANC as being engaged in a‘fraternal’ struggle, so the decision of the latter to opt for peace exertedpressure on republicans to do likewise. Indeed, the ‘South African exam-ple’ came to occupy a special place in the republican psyche, with NelsonMandela, in particular, becoming established as a republican icon at thistime. An Phoblacht/Republican News thus devoted front-page coverage to bothnews of Mandela’s release from prison and his subsequent visit to Ireland in1990. On the latter occasion the headline read ‘Peacemaker’, and the arti-cle described how ‘for the umpteenth time in colonial history yesterday’s“terrorist” has become today’s statesperson’.47 Over the next few years theANC comparison was pressed at great lengths in the party newspaper and byrepublican spokespeople. There were, An Phoblacht/Republican News declared,‘many tragic parallels in the struggles for freedom of the Irish and the SouthAfrican oppressed’.48

Alongside this, developments in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were alsofollowed closely by the republican leadership; again unsurprisingly, giventhe movement’s earlier solidarity with the PLO. Consequently, as the peaceprocess developed in the Middle East, leading to the Oslo accords of 1993,republicans again derived important lessons that might be applied to theirsituation. In particular, as had been the case with Nelson Mandela, muchattention was focused on the position of Yasser Arafat and his apparentjourney from terrorist to statesman. As An Phoblacht/Republican News noted,‘Repeating countless precedents throughout modern history and in all cor-ners of the globe, the Israelis, the United States, the EC and the Westernmedia have transformed their portrayal of Yasser Arafat from “terrorist god-father” to statesperson.’49 By this stage, this was precisely the transformationthat the republican leadership envisaged for its own would-be statesmen,Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. Consequently, it was inevitable thatSinn Féin’s newspaper should argue as well that the lesson of events in theMiddle East was that, ‘discussion and inclusiveness are the way forward in allconflicts’.50 As in South Africa, events in the Middle East served to encourageand validate, both internally and to the outside world, the new thinking thatwas emerging within the Adams–McGuinness leadership.

Clearly, then, external factors played an important role in the republi-can leadership’s slow intellectual evolution towards a point where it couldimagine ending the armed struggle. Recognition of this role, though, isnot to over-state its significance. On the contrary, whereas events beyondIreland’s shores created an ‘enabling environment’ for the decision to haltthe IRA’s campaign, the direct roots of that decision were internal to theisland and, indeed, the republican movement itself. Of particular conse-quence here was the deteriorating military context, in which the IRA wasattempting to prosecute its war. Increasingly, the IRA found itself, at best,

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locked in a bloody stalemate; at worst, in a position that was declining inreal terms.

Recent revelations, such as those surrounding the exposure of ‘Stakeknife’(Freddie Scappaticci), in 2003, and Denis Donaldson in 2005, have served tohighlight the extent to which the British security services had successfullyinfiltrated the republican movement by the late 1980s. In both instances,the men exposed were ‘career agents’ who had been in place for the greaterpart of two decades.51 During the conflict, such high-level penetration pro-vided for the removal of important IRA operators and the prevention of agrowing number of operations. The account of Ian Phoenix’s life in RUCSpecial Branch provides firm evidence as to the effect this had. Therein, itis claimed that, by 1994, eight out of ten operations planned by the IRA’sBelfast brigade were being thwarted by the RUC.52 As a result, no British sol-dier died on duty at the hands of the IRA in Belfast after August 1992, whilethe last major commercial bombing in the city was in May 1993.53 It wasclear, therefore, that in Northern Ireland’s capital – which had always beenthe key crucible for the conflict – the IRA was, in essence, being brought to astandstill.

At the same time, the organization’s members were being subjected tonewly lethal pressure by the British through the growing use of the SAS.Life as an IRA Volunteer became more dangerous than ever in this period; apoint emphasized by a series of high-profile state killings. The most deadlyof these saw the destruction of an entire eight-man Active Service Unit (ASU)from the IRA’s East Tyrone brigade (renowned for its militancy), in the villageof Loughgall, in May 1987. This was followed by further significant strikes bythe SAS, with the result that, between 1987 and 1992, twenty-one IRA Vol-unteers were shot dead in such fashion (sixteen of whom were from CountyTyrone, prompting some to suggest that it was effectively ‘open season’ onthe IRA in that area).54 Not only did these attacks serve to damage the IRA’soverall ‘war-making’ capacity (by eliminating high-calibre Volunteers), butit also undermined morale within the organization.

Similar in effect, was the fact that republicans also faced a marked increasein the activity of the loyalist paramilitaries. This period saw Sinn Féin mem-bers John Davey, Thomas Casey, Padraig O’Seanachain, Thomas Donaghy,Bernard O’Hagan, Danny Cassidy, Sheena Campbell, Malachy Carey andEddie Fullerton all die at the hands of either the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)or the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF).55 Such targeted killings were accompa-nied by a rise in the wider death toll being exacted by loyalist paramilitariesin this era. As a consequence, 1991 was the first year since 1974–5 duringwhich the numbers of those dying at the hands of loyalists approached par-ity with those being killed by republicans. During 1992, the gap narrowedeven further; by 1993 and 1994, for the first time during the ‘Troubles’, loyal-ist killings actually outnumbered those of republicans.56 Gruesome as thesestatistics are, they do support the belief held by leading loyalists, such as

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Johnny Adair, that they were, in this period, ‘taking the war to the IRA . . .

[so that the] IRA were being rattled as never before’.57

The pressure that this increased loyalist capacity placed on republicans wasmore than merely physical. It also raised questions as to the whole directionand raison d’être of the IRA’s campaign. That this should have been so was afunction of the fact that loyalist killings, as Mike Smith has described, con-stituted an effective challenge to one of the central pillars of ‘Provisional’republican ideology and strategy: the IRA’s claim to be the ‘defender’ of theCatholic/nationalist population of Northern Ireland.58 This was a key foun-dation myth for an organization that believed itself, in the words of theBelfast graffiti artists, to have risen ‘out of the ashes of August ’69’.59 Yet,the reality was that there was little that the IRA could do to prevent randomloyalist attacks, other than to retaliate in similarly random fashion againstthe Protestant population. This, though, ran directly counter to the non-sectarian ideal that was assumed to lie at the heart of republican doctrine;hence, the strategic dilemma.60

Worse still, the IRA’s efforts to resolve this dilemma, through the adop-tion of a policy of ‘targeted assassination’, proved utterly disastrous when,in an effort to kill the UFF leadership with a bomb on the Shankill Road inWest Belfast, it instead killed nine ordinary Protestants in October 1993. Theseemingly cyclical quality of republican–loyalist violence (with the Shankillbombing provoking retaliatory slaughter at the village of Greysteel) mustundoubtedly have added to the reappraisal of where exactly the IRA’s cam-paign was going.61 After all, as far back as 1988, Gerry Adams had concededthat the British had been able to ‘reduce the violence to Irish people killingeach other’.62 Such an observation appeared all the more prescient during theearly years of the 1990s. With that being the case, it was only natural thatthe republican leadership began to reconsider the long-term sustainability ofthe IRA campaign.

The combined effect of loyalist and security forces’ action in this period,therefore, was to dramatically curtail the military prospects of the IRA.The republican campaign of violence was being successfully ‘contained’.Republicans themselves were being left, in the words of one former armyofficer, ‘like rats in a barrel . . . desperate to get out, not knowing who to trustand with nowhere else to go, but to end the campaign’.63

Worse still for the Adams–McGuinness leadership, this was occurring ata time when the republican movement’s political project also appeared tohave run into the sand. Sinn Féin’s already-failing ‘southern strategy’, forexample, reached a new low in the Republic of Ireland’s local governmentelections in June 1991, when the party won a mere 0.7 per cent of the voteand just six out of 883 council seats.64 An internal party conference dis-cussion paper offered a candid assessment as to the implications of suchresults: ‘Unless there is a major change Sinn Féin will not win a seat inLeinster House inside the next two General Elections . . . Twenty years into

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the struggle Sinn Féin finds itself in an isolated, marginalised position withinthe 26 Counties.’65

In Northern Ireland Sinn Féin’s prospects for the future scarcely lookedmore promising. In the British general election in April 1992, the party’sshare of the vote slipped to 10 per cent and Gerry Adams lost the WestBelfast seat he had held since 1983 to the SDLP’s Joe Hendron. The latter’sparty recorded its best ever result, capturing some 23.5 per cent of the vote.66

Initially, Sinn Féin tried to put a brave face on the results, at least in public,but a more truthful assessment followed a few months later, in the internalrepublican magazine, The Starry Plough. Therein, Jim Gibney penned an arti-cle in which he admitted that Adams’ defeat represented ‘the loss of . . . thepolitical jewel in our crown’ and this had ‘reinforced the sense that Sinn Féin’spolitical project was on hold’. Further, Gibney was frank in his acknowledge-ment that Sinn Féin’s vote in Northern Ireland had been ‘declining since1983’.67

On top of this, it was clear that the weakening of Sinn Féin’s position in thenorth, coupled with the upsurge in SDLP support, raised fresh possibilities fora moderate Unionist–nationalist internal deal for Northern Ireland. Changeswithin unionist politics had also increased the likelihood of this eventualitybeing realized. In this regard, it is worth noting that, while such a deal hadbeen theoretically available at any time since the signing of the Anglo-IrishAgreement in 1985, vehement Unionist opposition to that Agreement hadpreviously stymied any potential accommodation. The appointment of PeterBrooke as Secretary of State in 1989, however, had inaugurated a thaw inrelations between Unionism and the British government. By 1991, this thawhad advanced far enough to allow inter-party talks between the SDLP andthe Unionist parties to take place.68 With Sinn Féin excluded, because of theongoing IRA campaign, there were, therefore, renewed concerns within therepublican movement that the SDLP would be able to negotiate a power-sharing deal without having to look over its shoulder at its ‘greener’ rivals.Expression of these concerns could be seen in Sinn Féin’s response to, first the‘Brooke’, and then the ‘Mayhew’, talks, which took place during 1991 and1992. Throughout that process, even as the party disparaged the talks andderided the notion that they might be successful, the Adams–McGuinnessleadership called for republicans to be included in them.69 That this wasa genuine reflection of republican angst over a possible internal deal hasbeen attested to by Danny Morrison. In his prison memoir he recorded hisbelief that the movement had shown itself to be ‘on edge’ and ‘unsure of [its]position’ by complaining too much about the talks.70 Looking back on theepisode he has since confirmed that he felt ‘Sinn Féin was panicking’ at theprospect of a deal, which he felt was always unlikely.71 As it was, Morrison wascorrect in his analysis that no agreement would be forthcoming. Yet, whatthe republican reaction to the ‘Brooke–Mayhew talks’ exhibited (particularlywhen placed alongside disquiet over election results, north and south), was

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the general sense of anxiety in republican circles as to the ongoing viabilityof Sinn Féin’s political project.72

It was subsequent to these debates that there came, in the words of SeanO’Callaghan, a ‘gradual move to the realization that the war itself was theproblem’.73 Hence, no less a figure than Richard McAuley, Gerry Adams’personal aide-de-camp, was quoted in an article for Fortnight magazine inSeptember 1992, as having admitted that Sinn Féin was, ‘not going to realise[its] full potential as long as the war is going on in the north and as longas Sinn Féin is presented the way it is with regard to armed struggle andviolence’.74 Such a statement marked recognition of the fact that the ‘peacestrategy’ had, up to that point, failed. It had proven insufficient to disasso-ciate Sinn Féin from the excesses of an IRA campaign that, despite repeatedcalls from republican leaders, had not been ‘refined’ to the extent expected.Instead, the IRA continued to inhibit and damage Sinn Féin.

In light of this, the logical progression that the republican leadership beganto undertake was that outlined by Danny Morrison, in an article entitled‘Bitter Pill’, which was written in jail in 1992. The IRA, he asserted, simplyhad to, ‘raise the quality of its campaign’. However, if it proved incapableof doing this, he called on it to ‘consider the alternative’. He then citedthe example of the Sandinistas – the Nicaraguan liberation movement, withwhom republicans had previously identified – who had recently lost an elec-tion, but decided to go into opposition, rather than return to armed struggle.What they had realised, Morrison declared, was that

The pragmatism of the head had to take precedence over the principle ofthe heart. Some day we shall be faced with the same choice. We shouldnever allow the situation to decline to the extent that we face such adecision from the depths of an unpopular, unseemly, impossible-to-endarmed struggle or from the point of brave exhaustion – another one of the‘glorious defeats’ with which our past is littered.’75

The implication was clear: the armed struggle itself was increasingly subjectto re-examination. And in Morrison’s view, republicans needed to be pre-pared to ‘cash in’ their chips and end the violence while they could still reappolitical advantage. Sean O’Callaghan has testified that this was an analysiswith which Gerry Adams had long agreed. O’Callaghan thus recalls that a fre-quent refrain of the Sinn Fein President was the importance of republicansachieving ‘something’ from the struggle: ‘the implication of what he wassaying was that other republican campaigns had continued to the point ofself destruction, irrespective of the prevailing political reality and he wasn’tprepared to allow that to happen again’.76

In spite of this, the leadership’s preference for caution when movingtowards major shifts in policy was again clear. Morrison’s article was thusnever carried by An Phoblacht/Republican News; in his own words, because,‘the leadership felt it was too soon and that I still had a reputation and people

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would maybe mistakenly see it as a “flyer”’.77 Still, when faced with an armedstruggle that appeared to be diminishing, while also acting as an impedimentto Sinn Féin’s electoral growth, the republican leadership was arriving at theconclusion that the IRA’s conventional military campaign might have to beset aside. Herein lay the genesis of the republican ‘new realism’. As SeanO’Callaghan neatly explains, ‘Adams and McGuinness had looked down theroad and seen slow defeat staring them in the face.’78

As a consequence, the central strategic objective of the republican leader-ship in this period became the ending of the IRA’s campaign in such a fashionas to allow the broader republican ‘struggle’ to move forward by other means.In the above words of Jim Gibney, the leadership’s aim was to, ‘map a way outof armed conflict’ in the best possible political circumstances.79 The searchfor that way out would lead, in 1994, to the emergence of the TUAS docu-ment, which as Henry Patterson has rightly noted, effectively laid out thethinking behind the IRA ceasefires.80

From the moment that its existence became known outside the republi-can movement, ambiguity surrounded the meaning of the TUAS document.Some, for instance, soon concluded that the acronym stood for, ‘TotallyUnArmed Strategy’; an interpretation lent credibility by the fact that thefirst IRA ceasefire followed in its wake.81 Yet, what it actually meant, wassomething quite different: namely, the ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’.82

Central to this concept was the novel assertion (among republicans) thatthe armed struggle should itself be seen as a tactic and, as such, somethingthat could (and even should) be laid aside if a better alternative emerged, orif conditions changed and it was felt that a cessation could better furtherthe ‘strategic’ objectives of the republican movement.83 Foremost amongthese objectives, as laid out in the TUAS document, was to be the con-struction of ‘an Irish nationalist consensus with international support’. Thispan-nationalist alliance was to involve Sinn Féin, the SDLP, Fianna Fáil (asthe Dublin government) and also the Irish-American lobby in the US.84

The significance attached by the republican leadership to Irish America,and the possibility that its involvement might ‘internationalize’ any peaceprocess, is something that has only recently been examined in detail.85

Following on from the effort to re-orientate Sinn Féin’s American support net-work in the direction of ‘mainstream’ political activity, there had also beena growing attempt by Irish republicans to engage with the newly emerging‘corporate’ constituency within Irish America. The perception was that thisconstituency could lobby the US government for a change in its Irish policy,so as to make it less supportive of the British government. With Bill Clinton’saccession to the White House and his apparent willingness to embark on justsuch a course (as seemingly demonstrated by his granting of a visa waiver toGerry Adams in February 1994 – allowing the Sinn Féin President to enterthe US in defiance of British opposition), the belief was that this effort hadborn fruit. It is this that explains the reference in the TUAS document to the‘very powerful’ Irish-American lobby and the description of Clinton as ‘the

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first US President in decades to be substantially influenced by such a lobby’.86

These were to be important components of the pan-nationalist alliance nowenvisaged.

The aim of this alliance was to be the establishment of ‘a common nation-alist negotiating position’ founded on ‘basic republican principles’, which,it was argued, would serve as an alternative to the armed campaign, tak-ing forward the struggle on ‘another front’.87 That front was to be one ofnegotiations. The republican movement would no longer be ‘negotiatingand fighting’, but ‘negotiating instead of fighting’.

Here, then, were the two subsidiary objectives that dominated republicanattempts to create an environment in which the armed struggle could be set toone side: the establishment of a new pan-nationalist alliance and the creationof a viable talks process, in which that pan-nationalist alliance would hold toa common negotiating position. Crucially, neither meant that the ultimateobjective of the republican movement had changed. On the contrary, as theTUAS authors were at pains to emphasize, the movement remained intenton achieving ‘a united 32 County Democratic Socialist Republic’, albeit nowby different means. As the final lines of the document declared, ‘the struggleis not over [emphasis in original]’.88

Pan-nationalism revisited

From the period around 1991 onwards, the Adams–McGuinness leadershipapproached, with new vigour, the task of establishing some form of intra-nationalist agreement. Though Adams again made public appeals at this timefor a ‘national and international consensus’ on Irish unity, the principal con-duit for this effort was to be the good working relationship that the Sinn FéinPresident had established – behind the scenes – with John Hume.89 As hasbeen mentioned, the two men had remained in contact ever since the SinnFéin–SDLP talks of 1988. Prior to 1991, their exchanges had amounted torelatively little, but thereafter the quality of these improved significantly;notwithstanding the fact that the SDLP, as a party, was not fully aware ofwhat was going on. The truth of this latter point has been verified by JimGibney, who affirms, ‘Hume ran the project on his own and kept the SDLPleadership in the dark.’90 In spite of this, a key assumption of the republicanleadership now, as it had been in the 1980s, was that Hume could deliver notonly his own party, but also the support of both the Dublin government andIrish America for any alliance.

The probability of getting Dublin involved in a pan-nationalist venture hadappeared to diminish with the resignation of Charles Haughey as Taoiseachin early 1992. In light of Haughey’s ostensible nationalist ‘credentials’ hisremoval from the political arena was seen as a potential setback for repub-licans. Nonetheless, his successor, Albert Reynolds, quickly assuaged fearsin this regard through his desire to get involved and, according to Adams,

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this period saw the first private meetings between Sinn Féin and officialsfrom the Irish government.91 With republicans also looking positively on BillClinton’s presidency in the US, the Adams–McGuinness leadership thereforeincreasingly believed that the formation of a three-way intra-nationalist con-sensus, backed by strong outside support from the US, was a real possibility.The domestic tripartite alliance envisaged, though, was to be different incharacter to that which the party had previously sought. For this reason, thenew emphasis Sinn Féin placed on this endeavour represented not simply a‘return’ to, but also a ‘reworking’ of party policy.

This is not to say, it should be stressed, that the old rationale for the policyno longer applied. As Gerry Adams has since admitted, for example, a keyincentive for Sinn Féin was the desire to end the party’s political isolation.92

The creation of a pan-nationalist alliance again seemed to offer a vehiclefor achieving that goal by uniting the republican movement and its con-stitutional nationalist neighbours around a shared position. In addition, aspreviously, such an alliance also provided republicans with an opportunityto disrupt any efforts to achieve an internal deal for Northern Ireland thatexcluded them. As Tom Hartley has observed, it ‘disrupted the efforts ofthe British state to put in place their preferred alliance’.93 As the fate of theaforementioned Brooke–Mayhew talks of this era intimated, in this republi-cans appeared to enjoy some success. Towards the end of the 1991 sessionof talks, for instance, there were suggestions that Hume’s commitment tothe process was not all it might have been.94 Such accusations were repeatedwith greater force in relation to the talks instigated by Secretary of State forNorthern Ireland, Patrick Mayhew, from April to November 1992. Indeed,the then British prime minister, John Major, has commented that the SDLPleader seemed to show little enthusiasm for reciprocating Unionist conces-sions during those latter negotiations, and as time went by ‘appeared to loseinterest in the process’.95 Major himself put this down to the fact that, by thatstage, Hume was firmly engaged with the republican movement; indicationthat the re-activation of talks aimed at creating a pan-nationalist understand-ing did serve, as republicans hoped they would, to retard prospects for aninternal deal.

Beyond this, however, the most important and novel function that theAdams–McGuinness leadership foresaw for the pan-nationalist alliance inthis period was that it would form the core of the republican movement’sexit strategy from the armed struggle. Unlike previous efforts to achieve suchan alliance during the 1980s, it was imagined as a replacement for, ratherthan a complement to, the military campaign.

To this end, the republican leadership began to develop the argument thatthe armed struggle was itself, ‘an option of last resort’.96 This marked a subtle,yet significant, point of departure from the earlier republican argumentthat the military campaign was a ‘terrible but necessary form of resistance[emphasis added]’.97 The implication now was that armed struggle could be

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set aside if republicans were provided with alternative avenues. In the wordsof 1992’s Towards a Lasting Peace, the IRA’s ‘war’ was described as central,only because ‘there is no constitutional strategy to pursue independence’.The obvious corollary to this was that if such a constitutional strategy couldbe constructed, it might become possible for the IRA to end its campaign;hence the new claim that ‘the onus is on those who condemn the option ofarmed struggle to advance a credible alternative’.98

For the republican leadership now, it was the revised concept of the pan-nationalist alliance that was to act as this alternative, serving as a sharednegotiating platform, by which ‘nationalist Ireland’ would at last confrontthe British government and the Unionists. Thus, the republican leadershipstepped up the intensity of its dialogue with John Hume over 1992 and 1993.The result was that, by the autumn of the latter year, Adams had managedto agree joint positions with the SDLP leader on the nature of the conflictand how it might be ended; positions that were encapsulated in the so-called‘Hume–Adams’ document of 1993.

‘Hume–Adams’ has been the subject of some controversy, not least becauseit was not published at the time its existence was announced. As AnthonyMcIntyre has recalled, this led to some confusion among republicans, as theywere urged to mobilize and march in defence of the document, despite theirbeing unsure of its content.99 In light of subsequent events, critics of theAdams–McGuinness leadership, such as McIntyre, took the secrecy surround-ing ‘Hume–Adams’ to be an indication of the ideological compromises itcontained. Moreover, even now that the document has been made available(by Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick) such suspicions seem only to havebeen confirmed. At first glance, ‘Hume–Adams’ was a long way from offeringa traditional republican analysis of the conflict. With its references to ‘con-sent’ and ‘self-determination’, and its emphasis on Ireland being defined bya ‘people’, as opposed to a ‘territory’, much of the language it used tookrepublicans into unfamiliar conceptual surroundings.100

Such rhetoric notwithstanding, however, it is clear that the constructionof ‘Hume–Adams’ left the standard republican arguments intact. The final‘agreed document’ of June 1993 stated both that ‘the Irish people have theright collectively to self-determination’ and that Britain should do all it couldto ‘win the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland’ for this. Further, thedocument called on this process to be accomplished within a time frame‘to be agreed by both governments’.101 Thus, even as ‘Hume–Adams’ uti-lized a political vocabulary that was alien to republicans, this vocabulary wasemployed in such a way as to negate its original meaning. By ring-fencing thenotion of ‘consent’ with conditions that required the British to achieve suchconsent within a specified time frame, it provided for the de facto denial ofthat consent. In addition, according to ‘Hume–Adams’, only the attainmentof that consent (for Irish unity) was to be considered the realization of Irish‘national self-determination’.

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In other words, what the document effectively said was that Unionists wereto be allowed to choose, provided that they made the ‘right’ choice; an asser-tion that was entirely consistent with traditional republican ideology. As JohnMajor himself has since commented, it was precisely this facet of ‘Hume–Adams’ that made it so unacceptable to the British government and made theproduction of an alternative (the Downing Street Declaration of December1993) so essential.102 For this reason, it would seem RUC Superintendant IanPhoenix was right when he noted (with concern) in his diary that such SDLP–Sinn Féin rapprochement as was occurring at this time, was taking place,almost entirely on Sinn Féin’s terms. To his mind, it was the latter party thatwas ‘more in control of the situation’, in a ‘coming [together] of minds’.103

In keeping with this, the picture that emerges from ‘Hume–Adams’ is oncemore one of republican ideological continuity, as opposed to revisionism.

Despite this, the production of ‘Hume–Adams’ still represented a key depar-ture for republicans. That this should have been so was a function not ofwhat the document said, but rather of what it did. The process that led to‘Hume–Adams’ – by its existence – marked the point at which some formof pan-nationalist alliance began to crystallize. The dialogue between Humeand Adams (which became public knowledge in April 1993, after Adams wasseen entering the SDLP leader’s house in Derry), their joint declarations andthe document that emerged, all provided a focus around which Irish nation-alists, particularly those concerned to see an end to the ‘Troubles’, couldrally. Consequently, ‘Hume–Adams’ was genuinely popular across national-ist Ireland. The truth of this could be seen, for instance, at the Fianna Fáilard fheis in November 1993. Coming soon after the two governments had, intheir joint Brussels communiqué, effectively ruled out acceptance of ‘Hume–Adams’, this gathering saw Fianna Fáil delegates excoriate their leader (andTaoiseach), Albert Reynolds, for not doing enough to support the initiative.Numerous motions were passed expressing support for ‘Hume–Adams’.104

What this episode made plain, was the extent to which the ‘Hume–Adams’process held out the possibility that some sort of pan-nationalist alliancemight be generated. If the actual production of the document could plau-sibly be portrayed as the coming together of northern nationalism, so thereaction to it appeared to suggest that southern Irish nationalism might alsocome ‘on board’.

Nevertheless, even as the republican leadership could take satisfaction fromsuch developments, it also had to face the fact that the Irish governmentitself had not been convinced. As Henry Patterson has underlined, through-out the ‘Hume–Adams’ process a major concern for republicans had beenthe prospect of the Dublin government detaching itself from any puta-tive intra-nationalist agreement and instead pursuing an intergovernmentalapproach.105 In the event, this was precisely what appeared to happen fol-lowing the Brussels communiqué, with the drive to produce the DowningStreet Declaration by the British and Irish governments. The significance of

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this in the minds of the republican leadership can be gauged from the piv-otal role they believed Dublin had to play in any pan-nationalist alliance. AsJim Gibney has put it, ‘Nationalist unity in the north needed to be followedby the unity of all-Ireland with the Irish government, [because] without theIrish government you can’t get independence.’106

In the context of such an attitude, the signing of the Downing StreetDeclaration by the Irish government appeared to be a major blow to repub-lican aspirations. To a great extent, the Declaration did the reverse of‘Hume–Adams’: whereas the latter utilized traditional Unionist vocabularyfor nationalist/republican ends, the former, as one academic study hasobserved, ‘Superficially [conceded] the rhetoric of the Hume–Adams process. . . but, in essence, the process had been stripped of its content in a quitedramatic way.’107 Unquestionably, the Declaration ran counter to traditionalrepublican ideology. As John Major emphatically described to the House ofCommons, its emphasis was firmly on the principle of ‘Unionist consent’.108

For this reason, as Mallie and McKittrick have emphasized, the DowningStreet Declaration constituted a major challenge to republicans. They werenow faced with the reality of an Irish government (significantly, a FiannaFáil-led Irish government) having agreed to a position that intertwined con-sent and national self-determination, but with the emphasis on the former.Worse still, from a republican perspective, it had done so to great popularacclaim.109 The truth of this was soon recognized within republican circles,as evinced by the overwhelmingly negative reaction therein to the Declara-tion. The movement’s prisoners, for example, sent a message to Sinn Féin’sFebruary 1994 ard fheis in which they unreservedly attacked it as ‘flawed andnot contributing to real and lasting peace’.110

Yet, in spite of such internal opposition to the Downing Street Declara-tion, the Adams–McGuinness leadership recognized that it could not simplyreject the document outright. To have done so would have risked destroy-ing both the image of republicans as people genuinely working for peaceand any prospect of a broad nationalist alliance. This, in turn, would haveraised the possibility that the governments might seek to ‘move on’ withoutthe republican movement, leaving the latter as isolated as ever. As a result,the response of the Adams–McGuinness leadership was one that sought tomanoeuvre around the Declaration and reclaim the initiative for the repub-lican movement. Rather than rebuff the document out of hand, Sinn Féinspokespeople instead asked for ‘clarification’ of certain aspects of it and theparty posed ‘20 questions’ that it claimed needed to be answered.111 TheDeclaration, the party alleged, contained ‘several ambiguities and seemingcontradictions’ that needed to be addressed.112 The wait for clarification thenallowed a republican decision on the document to be effectively postponed.When that decision finally did arrive (some six months later at a speciallyconvened Sinn Féin conference in Letterkenny, County Donegal) and was,as anticipated, one of rejection, the intervening delay had worked to reduce

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the pressure on the republican movement.113 Such negative fallout as therewas, was swiftly overtaken by the IRA’s announcement of a ceasefire just overa month afterwards.

It has since been argued that by declaring its cessation when it did, theIRA was de facto accepting the Downing Street Declaration; for by ending thecampaign at that point, it ensured that any subsequent talks would be basedprincipally on the parameters laid out by the Declaration.114 In terms of theoverall framework for the peace process that followed, such a reading hasmuch to commend it. The ‘back-channel’ communications between republi-cans and the British Government over the preceding four years had revolvedaround the question of how talks would take place. In this ‘battle over pre-conditions’, the dispute of whether the IRA would have to permanently setaside violence had assumed central importance. The Downing Street Decla-ration represented the British government’s ‘bottom line’ for future politicalprogress. It pledged the government to uphold the ‘consent principle’ onNorthern Ireland’s future status and confirmed that those wishing to beinvolved in negotiations would have to commit themselves to ‘exclusivelypeaceful methods’.115 On this latter point, it seemed in August 1994 as ifrepublicans had been forced to concede ground.

Again, however, it is worth emphasising that the ceasefire decision cameagainst a background in which there appeared to be few other options avail-able to the Adams–McGuinness leadership – given the condition of theIRA’s armed struggle. It was not, therefore, an expression of republicanacceptance of the Downing Street Declaration and the philosophy that under-pinned it in principle. Instead, the republican leadership had simply realisedthat there was little alternative. In addition, Adams and McGuinness werequick to recognize the potential opportunities arising out of the Declaration.Crucially, for example, it guaranteed that the republican leadership neednot elucidate the details of ‘Hume–Adams’. Instead, Sinn Féin could sim-ply benefit from the process that that document had instigated – a processthat had unquestionably been carried forward by the Downing Street Dec-laration. What republicans termed the ‘Irish Peace Initiative’ had created agroundswell of optimism within nationalist Ireland that the Northern Irishconflict might soon be brought to a conclusion.116 The perception that repub-licans were intimately involved in the effort to bring peace was clearly to thebenefit of Sinn Féin. Hence, European and local elections in the Republicof Ireland in 1994 saw the party’s vote increase by a small, yet noticeable,extent.117 Such results offered an early indication of the increased popular-ity for republicans that could be generated by the fledgling peace process,something of which the Adams–McGuinness leadership was undoubtedlyaware.118

At the same time, a corollary of this popularity was a surge in supportfor the kind of pan-nationalist approach that the republican leadership sodesired. Again, this was something that had not gone unnoticed within the

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republican movement. Even as Sinn Féin rejected the Downing Street Dec-laration at its Letterkenny conference, for example, so it also noted thata ‘consensus between nationalists in the Six Counties, supported by theDublin government [has] emerged’.119 What was required subsequently, itwas claimed, was for republicans to ‘mobilise as wide a section of people aspossible behind the demand for a democratic resolution of the conflict’.120

It was, therefore, on the basis of precisely this reasoning, that the IRA finallymoved to declare a ‘complete cessation of military operations’ on 31 August1994.121 The decision was almost universally welcomed across nationalistIreland and there followed, in its wake, an outpouring of what might betermed ‘pan-nationalist unity’. This was the period of the three-way ‘historichandshake’ between Adams, Hume and Reynolds.122 It was the time whenSinn Féin could claim with apparent plausibility that the ‘the tide of historyis with nationalists’.123

But the ceasefire did not mark principled acceptance of the DowningStreet Declaration by republicans. Instead, it was an initiative based onthe strength and potential of the pan-nationalist alliance that was expectedto emerge in the absence of the IRA’s armed struggle. This alliance, theAdams–McGuinness leadership hoped, would allow for the subversion ofthe Declaration in the long term. As events would show, republicans hadnot accepted and imbibed the guiding spirit of the Declaration; rather theysought its negation by other means.

Negotiations

With the IRA ceasefire believed to have created the possibility for an authenticpan-nationalist alliance, it was imperative for the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership that actual negotiations were initiated as quickly as possible after thecessation. This, as has been described, constituted the other pillar of the TUASlogic that underpinned the ceasefire: an end to the military campaign wasmeant to inaugurate a ‘dynamic’ process of meaningful negotiations involv-ing the republican movement. Once in negotiations, it was imagined thatthe combined political strength and ‘common negotiation position’ of thepan-nationalist alliance could be brought to bear so as to deliver the bestpossible outcome for nationalists and republicans.124

Even so, in the first instance, the republican leadership perhaps realizedthat such talks were unlikely to begin in the very immediate term. It is thisthat may explain why much weight was attached to the other benefits thatrepublicans could accrue in the meantime. As Moloney has demonstrated,to this end the Adams–McGuinness leadership had drawn up a fourteen-point ‘shopping list’ of things that it wanted to see happen in the wake ofthe ceasefire. Included therein was the demand for the trilateral Reynolds,Hume and Adams meeting to cement perceptions of a pan-nationalist alliance(which led to the aforementioned handshake). Among other actions called

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for were: an end to measures ‘aimed at the isolation and marginalisation ofSinn Féin’; regular contacts between the Irish government and Sinn Féin; SinnFéin’s involvement in a Forum for Peace and Reconciliation; and the grantingof permission for Sinn Féin members to visit the US.125 Such measures wereimportant, both as goals in their own right and because they allowed therepublican leadership to show its supporters, in the words of Jim Gibney,‘the benefits of the peace process’.126

Nevertheless, to a significant extent, concessions of this nature were simplythe ‘window-dressing’ of the peace process. What mattered far more to theAdams–McGuinness leadership was the opening of substantive negotiations.As a result, An Phoblacht/Republican News called for ‘immediate inclusive dia-logue’, urged the British government to ‘seize the moment for peace’ andwarned that the ‘process could flounder if Major doesn’t move’.127 Appeals ofthis nature subsequently became the mantra of the republican leadership. Inthe course of his 1995 Bodenstown Oration, for example, Martin McGuinnessmanaged to make no less than fourteen references to the importance of nego-tiations being opened, with emphasis very much placed on the notion thatthey be ‘inclusive’, or ‘all-party’.128

The aim of such demands for inclusiveness, of course, was that republi-cans be allowed to participate in talks. It is less clear that they had embracedthis notion as a universal principle. Indeed, some have suggested that therepublican commitment to inclusiveness did not run as far as Unionistrepresentatives.129 Others have suggested that republican violence activelysought to prevent Unionists from entering talks.130 How much truth there isin this cannot be verifiably confirmed, but it can be noted that Sinn Féin’sreaction to the expulsion of the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP) from the talksin early 1998, because of continued UFF violence, scarcely reached the level ofeven mild indignation.131 As such, it was indicative of the fact that the pres-ence of Unionism in dialogue was of secondary importance to republicans.Instead, the key for the Adams–McGuinness leadership was the instigation ofnegotiations involving republicans on the one hand and the British govern-ment on the other. Such negotiations were then to be used, the republicanleadership imagined, to drive the British government away from Union-ism and towards an ‘all-Ireland’ approach. In this way, it was envisaged,republicans could manoeuvre around the Downing Street Declaration andundermine its emphasis on Unionist consent.

In this context, it was no surprise that the events of early 1995 markedthe zenith for republican hopes and expectations in the early years of thepeace process. Even though substantive negotiations had not begun at thatpoint, the ‘Frameworks’ documents that were put forward by the British andIrish governments in February of that year were seen as a positive devel-opment by republicans and warmly welcomed as such by Gerry Adams.132

Offering an outline for the terms of a political settlement, ‘Frameworks’ waspotentially very ‘green’ in character. While resting on a de jure acceptance

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of the ‘consent principle’ and the creation of a Northern Irish Assembly(and thereby embodying in strict republican terms, a partitionist approach),‘Frameworks’ also envisaged extensive cross-border bodies. These were to bepotentially ‘free-standing’ and imbued with considerable power; so muchso, that the Irish Foreign Minister, when later asked to expand on what wasbeing proposed, said that he envisaged them having powers ‘not unlike agovernment’.133 They therefore appeared to hold out the prospect of thede facto abrogation of the consent principle in practice – at least, that washow republicans preferred to see them.134 And on this reasoning the Adams–McGuinness leadership viewed the ‘Frameworks’ documents as a highlyencouraging precursor to further negotiations and an important vindicationof the TUAS strategy. The leadership’s aim, thereafter, was to enter negotia-tions on the basis of Frameworks and maximize, or expand, those provisionswherever possible.

In the event, though, this was to prove a false hope and within a year of‘Frameworks’, the Adams–McGuinness leadership faced the breakdown of itsTUAS strategy. The central reason for that breakdown, which saw the IRAresume its regular armed struggle with the Canary Wharf bomb of February1996, was the continuing absence of genuine negotiations. For all the opticalbenefits that Sinn Féin had amassed from the peace process (whether in theform of American visas, or an end to Section 31), these were ultimately, oflesser importance than the commencement of talks. The opening of talks,though, had been thwarted by continued anxiety, within both the Union-ist community and the British government, as to the bona fides of the IRAceasefire. In this way, the ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ was effectivelyhoisted by its own petard. The emphasis it had placed on the conditionalityof the cessation helped to fuel British and Unionist concerns that the IRAhad not abandoned violence for good. It was the desire for reassurance onthis front that led to initial British demands for the word ‘permanent’ to beadded to the IRA’s ceasefire declaration.135 When this did not prove forthcom-ing, the prospect that some weapons might be decommissioned was raisedas an alternative means for establishing republican good faith. It was thisissue, though, that proved to be terminal to the TUAS strategy in the 1995–6period.

From the beginning, the Adams–McGuinness leadership was adamant thatthe decommissioning of IRA weaponry was simply not an option. As KirstenSchulze and Mike Smith have noted, such attitudes stemmed, in large part,from the historical and ideological heritage of the republican movement.136

For one thing, decommissioning was unprecedented in republican history.While physical force campaigns had met failure before, on those occasionsthe movement had ‘dumped’ its arms, storing them away for a future timewhen they might ‘complete the revolution’. Such had been the course ofaction followed in the wake of the Irish civil war of 1922–3 and again afterthe ill-fated ‘Border campaign’ of 1956–62. Alongside this, the theology of the

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movement decreed that the IRA, as the only legitimate armed organizationin Ireland, which existed to defend the de jure Republic of 1916 (which hadbeen subverted by partition), could not dispose of its weaponry until the‘true’ Republic was secure. To do otherwise was seen as perhaps conferringretrospective illegitimacy upon physical force republicanism.

The impact of this ideological framework was magnified, both by the cir-cumstances in which the ‘Provisional’ IRA came into being and those underwhich it had declared its cessation. With respect to the former, the creationof the ‘Provisionals’ amid the civil rights-related violence of the late 1960smade the idea of handing in weaponry problematic. The IRA’s perception ofitself as the defender of northern nationalists was difficult to reconcile withthe notion that it might become an unarmed organization. Of greater imme-diate significance, meanwhile, were the arguments deployed by Sinn Féinin the wake of the cessation of 1994. As Gerry Adams declared, during the‘impromptu’ celebrations, which greeted the ceasefire announcement, thiswas to be viewed as the action of an ‘undefeated’ army that had taken a ‘his-toric and bold and decisive initiative’ from a position of strength.137 The ideathat this ‘army’ could contemplate the ‘surrender’ of its weaponry, therefore,seemed preposterous from the republican viewpoint. Moreover, even if theAdams–McGuinness leadership had been of a mind to do this (and there isscant evidence that this was then the case), there was little prospect that itcould have convinced rank-and-file republicans to endorse such a move atthat time.

Consequently, the anti-decommissioning rhetoric was resolutely main-tained and even intensified, by republicans as the political process began torun into difficulties.138 The position of the Adams–McGuinness leadershipon this issue was accurately summed up by the terse phrase that appearedon gable walls in republican areas: ‘not a bullet, not an ounce’.139 It wasthis, in turn, that ensured that the British/Unionist insistence on a handoverof weapons prior to talks became, in the words of Martin McGuinness, an,‘absolute obstacle to political development’.140 The unfolding of the decom-missioning saga during 1995 effectively killed off any hope that negotiationswould soon begin, as desired by the republican leadership.

At the same time, the leadership was also faced with the disappearanceof the ‘favourable’ conditions identified by the TUAS authors at the timeof the ceasefire; chiefly, through the disintegration of the pan-nationalistalliance, in which so much faith had been placed. As early as November1994, this had begun to occur with the collapse of Albert Reynolds’ coalitiongovernment in the south. Not only had the Fianna Fáil-led government beenseen as a vital component of the TUAS alternative, but also the Taoiseachhimself had appeared to be a firm supporter of some form of pan-nationalistalliance. Accordingly, his removal marked an obvious setback for the Adams–McGuinness leadership. What made matters worse, though, was the fact thatthe new Fine Gael Taoiseach, John Bruton, subsequently endorsed the British

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stance on decommissioning.141 Adams thus attacked this as ‘contrary to thespirit of conflict resolution’ and raised questions about ‘Bruton’s stewardshipof the process’.142 More broadly, Sinn Féin’s antipathy to the Fine Gael leaderwas made manifest through its description of him as ‘more Unionist than(some) Unionists’.143

By late 1995, therefore, the atmosphere surrounding the peace processappeared increasingly to have turned sour for the republican movement.The pan-nationalist alliance, which was meant to serve as the alternativeto the armed campaign, lay in ruins. More significantly, the decommission-ing issue appeared to have left the political process immovably deadlocked.Against such a backdrop, the Adams–McGuinness leadership felt it had littlechoice but to abandon the TUAS strategy. Not only had it failed to deliverthe expected dividends, but also, doing otherwise would have risked a majorinternal split, or the overthrow of the leadership. The result was the bombingof Canary Wharf in London in February 1996, which marked the IRA’s returnto armed struggle.

Conclusion

That the republican movement had retained the capacity to resume its ‘war’had been made plain throughout the ceasefire. From the beginning, thatcessation had been defined as a halt to ‘military operations’, by which theIRA meant attacks on the forces of the RUC and the British Army.144 In con-trast to what the optimists in the media believed, however, this was not tobe a ‘Totally UnArmed’, or even non-violent, peace. The truth of this hadbeen made evident within months of the ceasefire announcement, when theIRA shot dead a postal worker, Frank Kerr, during an attempted robbery inNewry. While this operation was disowned by the organization’s leadership,it was entirely consonant with both the terms of the cessation and the post-cessation role envisioned for the IRA.145 It was significant, for instance, thatthe murder occurred in the context of a bungled robbery – an indication thatthe IRA would increasingly come to serve as republican fund-raiser, providingresources for the Sinn Féin political machine.146

At the same time, it was clear that the cessation had not precluded theIRA acting as an instrument of social control in republican areas. The factthat the numbers of punishment beatings actually rose in the aftermath ofthe ceasefire stood as stark testament to this reality. Indeed, in the two yearsafter the 1994 cessation, the total number of such attacks by the IRA reachedrecord levels.147 Moreover, on several occasions exercise of that social con-trol had entailed murder, with at least eleven drug dealers killed by the IRAin the years after the ceasefire (albeit under the pseudonym, ‘Direct ActionAgainst Drugs’ [DAAD]).148 Hence, while the IRA might have maintained alower profile during the ceasefire, it certainly did not disappear; a truth inad-vertently acknowledged by Gerry Adams in his oft-repeated ‘they haven’t

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gone away, you know’ remark.149 The TUAS strategy had, from the time of itsadoption, been about redefining the IRA and the balance of power within therepublican movement. It had never been about bringing an end to the IRA.

On top of this, the TUAS approach had rested, fundamentally, on con-ditionality. As the document outlining the strategy had acknowledged, thedecision to end the IRA’s campaign had amounted to a ‘risky strategy’ andone that was contingent on a set of ‘combined circumstances’ that were‘unlikely to gel again in the foreseeable future’.150 Such circumstances weresaid to include: the stature and influence of John Hume; the position ofAlbert Reynolds’ Fianna Fáil–Labour coalition government in Dublin, whichenjoyed the biggest parliamentary majority in the history of the south-ern state; and the presence of Bill Clinton in the White House.151 Thecoalescence of these otherwise disparate factors had helped persuade theAdams–McGuinness leadership that the time was right to consider an endto the armed struggle and attempt to ‘do business’ with the British. Yet,from the start, this left open the question of what would happen if cir-cumstances changed. Consequently, when the conditions upon which theTUAS approach had been premised crumbled, or failed to materialize, theAdams–McGuinness leadership turned back to violence.

Furthermore, the leadership did so, not only to ensure the internal unity ofthe republican movement, but also because it believed that a short resump-tion of the war served the wider strategic purposes of the movement. Withregards to the latter, the ending of the cessation underlined to the Britishgovernment the fact that a ceasefire had to produce negotiations. In this,there were signs that the message got through; for the return to armed strug-gle was swiftly followed by the announcement of a date for talks to begin.While Sinn Féin was to be excluded from those talks (because of the renewedIRA campaign), the impression garnered was, as Dean Godson has noted,that republicans had ‘put manners’ on the British and forced them to movethe process along.152 In this fashion, the return to violence did prove usefulfor the republican leadership and served as a dramatic restatement of theirbottom line.

Despite this, however, the Adams–McGuinness leadership clearly recog-nized that any resumption of the campaign could only be temporary innature. For this reason, senior republicans still spoke of their desire to ‘restore’the peace process and argued that a peace strategy was ‘the right strategy’.153

In this way, the Adams–McGuinness leadership gave signal that it had notturned its back on the peace process and offered hints that the door to a newcessation had been left ajar. That this should have been so was a function ofthe fact that the republican leadership’s assessment of the broader conditionsthey faced and their chances of success had not changed. For this reason, the1996–7 campaign is perhaps best understood as a ‘war over preconditions’.

The government of John Major, in an effort to resolve the decommission-ing impasse, had embraced the suggestion for an alternative path into talks,

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as put forward by US Senator George Mitchell (who had been asked to finda solution).154 This was to involve an arrangement by which those seekingto participate in negotiations would have to commit themselves to certainprinciples relating to non-violence and the use of ‘democratic and exclusivelypeaceful means’.155 Despite this apparent side-lining of the decommissioningissue in January 1996, though, the IRA had still returned to armed strug-gle. It did so because of the fundamental ideological challenge posed tophysical force republicanism by Mitchell’s principles. In this way, the Adams–McGuinness leadership – by opting for violence within weeks of Mitchell’sreport – effectively made one final attempt to determine the ‘terms of trade’in the peace process. The eighteen month campaign that followed was aneffort to alter the conditions in which talks would be held – rather thanan abandonment by republicans of the notion that the peace process wastheir best strategic option. And republican failure on even this, limited front,was reflected in the fact that the British government did not depart fromthe Mitchell Principles’ template for future negotiations. Against this back-ground, the hand of the Adams–McGuinness leadership was forced by theobjective realities of the IRA’s declining position.

In 1996, the IRA was returning to the military stalemate from which it hadpreviously extricated itself; if anything, its prospects had been worsened bythe hiatus. The truth of this was observable in the difficulties that the organi-zation now faced, with its armed struggle increasingly reduced, in the wordsof one RUC officer, to a ‘pathetic, grubby little war’.156 Not only did this newcampaign struggle to gain momentum, but also, as had happened previously,the IRA again proved that its operations could be extremely damaging to SinnFéin. The clearest example of this came in June 1996, when another bungledrobbery saw IRA Volunteers shoot dead a Garda, Jerry McCabe, in Adare,County Limerick. Having initially denied any involvement in the episode,the IRA was later forced to admit that its men were responsible for the mur-der and, as a wave of condemnation spread across the Republic of Ireland,Gerry Adams felt compelled to repudiate the killings as ‘absolutely wrong’.157

Less than a month later, meanwhile, the Sinn Féin President made a similaract of contrition following the bombing of Manchester city centre by theIRA.158 What operations of this sort underlined was the extent to which therepublican movement could no longer ride simultaneously the two horses ofa failing, full-scale armed struggle and political development. The essentiallyunaltered context and long-term viability of the IRA’s campaign meant thatthe Adams–McGuinness leadership had little choice but to seek a return to theTUAS strategy as soon as the right ‘enabling’ conditions emerged once more.

By July 1997, the environment had been created whereby TUAS had againbecome an option for the republican leadership. General elections in both theRepublic of Ireland and the UK had profoundly changed the political climatein the republican movement’s favour. May 1997 had brought the victoryof Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ Party, which had already given indication that

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Sinn Féin could be brought rapidly into talks, provided that it fulfilled theexisting preconditions. As Blair himself had written in an article for the IrishTimes just prior to the election, this meant the calling of a ‘genuine ceasefire’and Sinn Féin’s signing up to the Mitchell Principles.159 It was also madeclear privately that if these requirements were met, republican entry intonegotiations would occur within weeks, rather than months.160 A monthlater, meanwhile, Bertie Ahern led Fianna Fáil back into government in thesouth, raising the possibility that a substantial, cross-border, pan-nationalistalliance could once more be constructed.

With negotiations apparently available, in which Sinn Féin could credi-bly claim to be part of a pan-nationalist alliance, it was only natural thatthe republican leadership should have sought to embrace the TUAS strategyafresh. The fact that Adams and McGuinness had by this stage, as Ed Moloneyhas detailed, effectively outmanoeuvred and sidelined internal oppositionto a new ceasefire guaranteed that this would be so.161 On 20 July 1997,therefore, the IRA announced the ‘unequivocal restoration’ of its ceasefire.162

As previously, the purpose of the renewed TUAS strategy was not to achievethe destruction of the IRA. Ideologically, at that time, such a developmentremained out of the question for as long as what republicans called the ‘rootcauses of the conflict’ were unresolved.163 In republican terms, this, of course,meant the continued existence of partition. As a result, the notion that theIRA might disappear altogether was simply not on the agenda. Rather, theleadership again envisaged TUAS as ‘mapping a way out’ of the military con-flict, in such a way as to advance the republican cause. As Jim Gibney states,‘the war effort by that stage had been banked and what you were dealingwith then was republicans drawing off that effort and going down the roadof peace’.164 Through this process, the leadership looked to a redefinitionof the role of the IRA and its place within the wider republican movement.Reversing the traditional roles of the two organizations, it would fall to theIRA to support Sinn Féin, with the latter serving as the principal expressionof mainstream republicanism, utilizing the twin vehicles of pan-nationalismand negotiation.

In this way, the Adams–McGuinness leadership now embraced negoti-ations, which Adams once tellingly labelled ‘war by another means’.165

Although, on the occasion that he used the phrase, the Sinn Féin Pres-ident had applied it to the British government’s attitude, in truth, theexpression more aptly captures the essence of the republican leadership’sapproach. Negotiations were to be the arena by which republicans wouldseek to advance their cause. Inverting the maxim of the nineteenth centuryPrussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, politics were now to be seenas war by other means.166 The ‘long war’ had become the ‘long negotiation’,but the ultimate ideological objective of the republican movement remainedthe same.

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4Confronting Unionism, Negotiationand Agreement, 1997–2001

‘Sinn Féin strategy is wedded to the Good Friday Agreement . . . Thereis huge goodwill for the peace process and particularly for Sinn Féin’sstewardship of it.’

Gerry Adams1

Introduction

The ‘restoration’ of the IRA ceasefire in July 1997 was predicated on an under-standing that Sinn Féin would quickly be invited into peace talks. Once there,the Adams–McGuinness leadership imagined that the party would standalongside the other forces of Irish nationalism (specifically, the SDLP andFianna Fáil) to confront the British and their Unionist allies. Such was thealternative designed by the republican leadership to an IRA campaign thatwas demonstrably failing. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that,even in July 1997, Adams and McGuinness had completely ruled out a returnto armed struggle. On the contrary, it was really only in the wake of the ‘Real’IRA’s disastrous bombing of the town of Omagh in 1998 that any resump-tion of the IRA’s campaign became inconceivable in their minds; a point thenfurther underlined by the al-Qaeda attacks on America (and the fallout fromthem), of 11 September 2001. The effect of the latter, in the words of GerryMacLochlainn, a former member of Sinn Féin’s International Department,was such as to ‘make it almost impossible for groups to consider a particu-lar form of struggle that would have been acceptable a few years ago’.2 Yet,prior to those events, it seems likely that the republican leadership felt thatsome sort of renewed campaign might have been possible in the event offurther political failure. After all, therein lay the essence of the ‘tactical useof armed struggle’ strategy upon which the ceasefire was based: that the warcould be switched on or off, according to the needs of the movement. It is,therefore, unsurprising that as late as November 1997 a senior republican,Francie Molloy, was recorded telling a group of republicans that, should talksbreak down, republicans would go back to ‘what we know best’.3

102

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That notwithstanding, the role envisaged for the IRA by the republicanleadership in the wake of the 1997 cessation was very much a secondaryone. And it was to be closely tied to both the peace negotiations and thewider political fortunes of Sinn Féin. In this context, as shall be seen, itsfighting capability became something that could be traded with Unionists,or the British government, in order to win concessions. On top of this, theAdams–McGuinness leadership came to discover that the very existence of alower-profile, yet still active, IRA could be used to destabilize Unionism tothe benefit of Sinn Féin. Either way, it was now the IRA that was to expeditewhat Gerry Adams referred to as ‘the Sinn Féin project’, not vice-versa.4

As to the precise nature of Sinn Féin’s objectives in this period, these provedto be multifaceted and interlocking in nature. On the one hand, the partysought political growth on both sides of the Irish border. Its prospects in thisregard appeared brighter than at any time since the early 1980s. In NorthernIreland, the 1996 Forum elections had seen the party’s share of the voteincrease for the first time in more than a decade; this, despite their occurringat the time of the resumed IRA campaign. Similarly, at the 1997 British generalelection, Sinn Féin’s vote rose, this time to over 16 per cent, and the partysucceeded in having two MPs elected: Gerry Adams, regaining his seat inWest Belfast, and Martin McGuinness, displacing the DUP’s Willie McCrea inMid-Ulster.5 Both sets of elections therefore seemed to indicate that a risingproportion of the northern nationalist electorate had accepted Sinn Féin’sclaim that it was working for peace and rewarded the party at the polls.

The same was also true in relation to the electorate in the Republic ofIreland. There, Sinn Féin consolidated the advances it had made in the 1994European election at the 1997 Irish general election (again, during the periodof revived armed struggle). In the latter contest, the party almost doubled itsvote share in comparison with the previous such election in 1992. Whilethis still only gave it some 2.5 per cent of the national vote, in certain areasit polled particularly strongly.6 Consequently, the party succeeded in hav-ing its first TD (MP) elected in the modern era in Cavan-Monaghan, whereCaoimghin Ó Caoláin topped the poll with 19 per cent of the vote.7 Sinn Féinnarrowly missed out on additional seats: notably, Martin Ferris (who receivedalmost 16 per cent of the vote) in Kerry North; Sean Crowe in Dublin South-West; and Pat Doherty in Donegal North-East.8 Furthermore, even though itsnational vote share remained modest, Sinn Féin did have the satisfaction ofat last overtaking its bitter rivals in both the Workers’ Party and DemocraticLeft (the successor entities to the ‘Official’ republican movement).9

This (relative) success represented a vindication of the republican leader-ship’s ‘peace strategy’. Republicans were being viewed as honest ‘partners forpeace’ and, on this basis, a growing section of the electorate was prepared tovote Sinn Féin. The chances were that such rewards would only but increasein the wake of the ceasefire’s restoration. Moreover, with the election of itsfirst TD to Leinster House, Sinn Féin could plausibly hope to use this as a

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beachhead into mainstream Irish politics, from which to secure future gains.Unsurprisingly, therefore, the effort to build the political strength of the partycontinued to be uppermost amid the immediate strategic objectives of theAdams–McGuinness leadership.

The effort to increase Sinn Féin’s level of support, however, was notthe sole focus for the party at this time. Alongside it the republican lead-ership faced the prospect of entering into the negotiations that it had longsought. These began on 9 September 1997, following Sinn Féin’s pledgeof support for the Mitchell Principles (a move, which served as the directcause of the division in republican ranks that saw the creation of the ‘Real’IRA/32 County Sovereignty Movement splinter group that rejected the peaceprocess).10 In negotiations, as the TUAS document had described, the aimof the Adams–McGuinness leadership was to maintain pan-nationalist unityaround a ‘common nationalist negotiating position’.11 Their hope was thatthe foundation of this position could be an agreement on the ‘case for self-determination, for justice and freedom’.12 Obviously, though, the republicanleadership had to accept that the negotiations that had been called wereunlikely to produce a settlement that satisfied a republican understanding ofwhat these concepts entailed – at least in the immediate term. It was clearfrom the beginning that the parameters for the talks left little room for a‘republican’ outcome. Adams later acknowledged as much, stating that thoseparameters ensured that ‘Irish unity would not come out of this phase ofthe negotiations’.13 The talks were to proceed along the lines set out by firstthe Brooke–Mayhew talks and then the Downing Street Declaration. Theywere, thus, to operate along three distinct strands, looking respectively at:the internal governance of Northern Ireland; north–south issues; and broadereast–west matters.14 The underlying premise, meanwhile, was that of the‘consent principle’, against which republicans had previously fought. Thisprinciple, as has been noted, had also lain at the heart of the ‘Frameworks’documents that had been welcomed by the republican leadership in 1995.Yet, whereas the latter had at least provided for extensive north–south coop-eration and republicans had hoped to expand on this, it soon became obviousthat the 1997–8 talks were moving away from, not towards, the ‘Frameworks’proposals.

The truth of this was made manifest in the ‘Heads of Agreement’ docu-ment of January 1998, which decisively discarded many of the ‘Frameworks’structures and appeared to prioritize the Northern Irish and British Isles (east–west) dimensions of the evolving deal, as opposed to any new north–southrelationship.15 Unsurprisingly, this document was greeted unenthusiasticallyby republicans, with the IRA rejecting it outright and An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews declaring it to be a new, ‘sop to unionists’.16 Yet even then, the proposalwas considered too ‘green’ by the Ulster Unionist Party leader, David Trimble,and work went into reducing the cross-border character of the potential dealstill further.

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Against this background, it would seem only natural to question what itwas that the Adams–McGuinness leadership hoped to achieve by negotia-tions. The answer to this, though, appears to have been complex. On the onehand, the republican leadership obviously wished to advance the republicancause, in terms of the constitutional question, to the greatest possible degree.In July 1993, Gerry Adams had indicated that republicans would accept ‘jointauthority’ at this stage, as ‘part of the process towards the end of partition’.17

The Sinn Féin leader later refined this further in March 1998 in an articlefor Ireland on Sunday. Therein, he had set Sinn Féin’s constitutional objectiveas being the attainment of powerful cross-border bodies with the ability tooperate independently of any Northern Ireland assembly – what might betermed the institutions of de facto joint authority.18 Tied to this, it is clearthat the republican leadership also sought to win concessions for its ownmovement on key issues, such as that of securing prisoner releases. Simplyput, these twin motives might be taken as a sign of the republican leader-ship’s desire to deliver something tangible in the here-and-now; a reflectionof Danny Morrison’s professed belief that when the time came to negotiate,republicans had to be able to ‘show something substantial for the sacrifices’.19

Alongside this, the objectives of the Adams–McGuinness leadership inentering the negotiating process were longer term, more ambitious in natureand intimately bound up with its perceptions of both the pan-nationalistalliance and Unionism. With regards to the latter, the leadership still soughtto destabilize and eventually overcome its Unionist adversary. The republi-can peace strategy was not based on ideological revisionism in this key area.On the contrary, as An Phoblacht/Republican News stated in the wake of thefirst IRA ceasefire, the leadership’s view was that one of the great benefitsof the move had been the ‘shockwave effect of the cessation [that] scatteredunionists in all directions’.20 Soon after, the paper could be found trumpetingthe confusion and divisions that were now said to exist within Unionism.21

Viewed from the republican perspective, as shall be seen, such divisionappeared to present republicans with the opportunity to isolate Unionismpolitically, both within Ireland and, perhaps more importantly, in relationto Britain. In so doing, it became possible to conceive of a scenario in whicha politically isolated Unionism could be separated from its perceived British‘sponsor’. The assumption flowing from this was that such separation, ifachieved, would represent a terminal defeat for Unionism as a viable politicalproject.

That this should have been so was a function of the enduring republicaninterpretation of Unionism as an essentially empty ideology. For all the talkof a new and more nuanced stance on the part of republicans, their view ofUnionism remained that articulated by the then chairperson of Sinn Féin,Mitchel McLaughlin, in 1998.22 In an article that year, he claimed that itwas entirely the product of partition and, therefore, implicitly, an illegal andartificial entity. It was seen as having no validity of its own. Instead, Unionism

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was described as being ‘one-dimensional’, based solely on the Union itselfand, as a result, it was imagined that once the Union was removed, mostUnionists would come to ‘realize’ their essential ‘Irishness’.23

What McLaughlin’s piece thus demonstrated was the extent to which therecontinued to be remarkably little engagement with Unionism as a coherentpolitical creed in its own right on the part of the republican leadership. Onthis issue, their thinking remained essentially unchanged from that articu-lated by Gerry Adams in 1986, or Mitchel McLaughlin in the early 1990s.24

Such changes as had occurred existed only in the realm of style, not substance.As previously, while the republican leadership now talked of the importanceof ‘outreach’ to, or reconciliation with, Unionists (as a community), it con-tinued to perceive Unionism – as an ideology – as something to be defeatedand destroyed.25 The Adams–McGuinness leadership still sought to break theUnionist veto, albeit now through a mixture of political growth and nego-tiation, as opposed to armed struggle. The pan-nationalist alliance was toplay a central role in this, as it was imagined as the vehicle by which the keydefeat would be inflicted upon Unionism. By constituting a growing popularforce, the expectation was that pan-nationalism would be capable of exertingsufficient pressure on the British to force them to end their support for theirUnionist ‘surrogates’. With that goal achieved, it was thought that the pan-nationalist alliance could, as Adams had described in the 1980s, also serveas a coherent political bloc that would face down any remaining Unionistrejectionists and deliver Irish unity.

Flowing from this ideological fountainhead, the strategic objectives of SinnFéin ran together and complemented each other in this period. Through itsembrace and use of the peace process, the party was able to generate a ‘virtu-ous circle’ in support of its activity. For example, as the Adams–McGuinnessleadership would soon discover, the effort to strengthen the pan-nationalistalliance fed into the effort to build the party’s own strength. After all, in thecontext of negotiations it was obviously to Sinn Féin’s benefit to promotethe greatest possible consensus on ‘green’ (republican) positions among Irishnationalists. In so doing, though, it also improved its broader political out-look; for by persuading parties such as Fianna Fáil and the SDLP to endorse a‘greener’ agenda, Sinn Féin helped create a climate that was more conduciveto its own expansion. An increase in republican-sounding rhetoric from theparty’s constitutional rivals could only but further legitimize the agenda ofSinn Féin itself. In turn, a Sinn Féin that was growing in strength and confi-dence was increasingly better positioned to push forward a more republicanagenda in the first place. At the same time, the expansion of Sinn Féin merelyfuelled the discomfiture of the Unionist community with the peace process;discomfiture, which worked very much to the party’s advantage.

On top of this, the reality of Sinn Féin’s involvement in the negotiatingprocess was a major contributing factor to the unprecedented levels of politi-cal support that it now won. As has been described, a key feature of the party’s

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growing appeal, north and south, was the perception among the electoratethat Sinn Féin was a force for peace. Those growing levels of support alsoserved to increase the significance and weight of Sinn Féin’s voice in nego-tiations. Again, this raised anew the possibility of republicans achieving thepolitical veto that the Adams–McGuinness leadership had long sought. Tosome extent, this veto had already been de facto achieved with the growinginsistence of the British government that talks be inclusive (provided the IRAmaintained its ceasefire). Such a policy flowed from the conviction that onlya settlement with Sinn Féin’s imprimatur was likely to be capable of deliveringpeace. In the famous words of the Irish diplomat, Fergus Finlay, it was imag-ined that talks without Sinn Féin, would not be ‘worth a penny candle’.26

The logic of this position was clear; namely, that if Sinn Féin could be tied into an agreement, then it became far more likely that the IRA would defini-tively end its campaign. Yet, the corollary of such reasoning was the fact thatit afforded Sinn Féin greater influence than it might otherwise have merited.Moreover, the effect of this ethos was to present Sinn Féin with the opportu-nity to achieve a real political veto in Northern Ireland, as it closed the gapbetween itself and the SDLP.

It was, therefore, towards the attainment of these interconnecting objec-tives that Sinn Féin, now the primary vehicle of the mainstream republicanmovement, directed its activity in this period.

Negotiations and agreement: the challenge

As has been stated, although Sinn Féin had been a firm advocate oftheir being called, the launching of all-party talks in 1997 presented theAdams–McGuinness leadership with a huge challenge. The scale of thatchallenge only increased as the outline of what would become known asthe ‘Belfast’, or ‘Good Friday’, Agreement became clear. With the ‘Heads ofAgreement’ document of early 1998 having represented a dilution of the‘green-ness’ of the ‘Frameworks’ documents, the last weeks of negotiationsaw this watered down even further. In those final days, for instance, thenumber of ‘annexes’ detailing north–south cooperation were reduced fromthree to one, while the number of designated areas for potential cross-bordercooperation fell from forty-nine to twelve (of which only six were eventuallyenacted). This aspect of the Agreement was subsequently described by DavidTrimble’s biographer, Dean Godson, as a ‘great triumph’ for the UUP leaderand it would seem that Trimble himself may even have wondered whether thescale of his victory might not be too great – to the point where the republicanleadership might not be able to endorse the deal.27

When it was finally agreed, the Good Friday Agreement, by any reckon-ing, stood a significant way short of being a ‘republican’ solution to theNorthern Irish conflict. The IRA itself acknowledged this explicitly, stating,‘Viewed against our republican objectives . . . this document clearly falls short

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of presenting a solid basis for a lasting settlement.’28 Similarly, Gerry Adams,when reflecting on the negotiations that produced it, declared that the Agree-ment was ‘not the preferred option of any of the participants – certainly notSinn Féin’s’.29

In truth, the republican leadership could scarcely have argued otherwise.The Agreement appeared to represent the undisputed triumph of the ‘con-sent principle’. As Article 1(iii) of the document stated, those party to theAgreement accepted that it was ‘wrong to make any change in the statusof Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people’.30

Furthermore, in line with this recognition, the Republic of Ireland had agreedto alter its own constitution to remove the irredentist claim to NorthernIreland that had been implicit in articles two and three. Whereas Sinn Féinhad previously inveighed against such a move (during the Brooke talks of1991, for example), saying it would be tantamount to agreeing ‘that partitionis legitimate’, it now seemed prepared to accept the change as part of the widerdeal.31

The quid pro quo for the acceptance by Irish republicans and nationalistsof such measures was only to be the creation of institutions of mandatorypower-sharing in Northern Ireland, alongside an ‘Irish dimension’ involv-ing north–south cooperation.32 While this meant that Sinn Féin was to begiven a seat in government, there was little escaping the fact that this was tobe in a provincial government based at Stormont, within the United King-dom, rather than in a newly united Ireland. This despite the assertions ofthe republican leadership as late as 1996 that people could ‘be sure of this –Sinn Féin will be no part of a return to Stormont’.33 Now it seemed, as oneof their members acknowledged, that Sinn Féin was ready to ‘administerBritish rule in Ireland for the foreseeable future’.34 Moreover, it was doing soin a context in which the combined forces of Irish nationalism – north andsouth – appeared to have accepted, in the words of Paul Bew, the ‘democraticlegitimacy’ of partition.35

Given that republicans had long objected to such an outcome – seeingpartition as instead rooted in the illegitimate unionist veto – the Agreementthus seemed to indicate that a process of major ideological revisionism hadoccurred within republicanism. Indeed if, as Jonathan Tonge and GerardMurray suggest, the history of the ‘Troubles’ is best understood as an intra-nationalist ‘debate’ over the way forward for the nationalist communityin Northern Ireland, the Agreement appeared to mark a categorical SDLPvictory.36 The model of cross-community power-sharing, coupled to limitedcross-border institutions, was one that the SDLP had effectively been pur-suing, in the teeth of republican opposition, since at least the Sunningdaleaccord of 1973–4. By assenting to the Good Friday Agreement, therefore, SinnFéin appeared to have reconciled itself to that which it had once despised.It had made legitimate that which had long been considered inherentlyillegitimate.

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As a result, the Agreement obviously had the potential to cause seriousinternal problems for the republican leadership; all the more so when it isremembered that the shadow of republican history loomed over it. As hasbeen described, the apparent lesson of that history was plain: those whohad moved away from military action had always, in the end, abandonedthe republican struggle altogether. The definitive example of this was heldto be the decision of Michael Collins to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921,which founded the southern Irish state but split the IRA and provoked civilwar. Thereafter, ‘traditional’ republicans had viewed Collins as the ultimateJudas, who had both betrayed his comrades and subverted the true Republic.For the Adams–McGuinness leadership, the danger was that the Agreementwould be their Treaty. Unsurprisingly, this line of argument was seizedupon by ‘dissident’ republican organizations and individuals opposed to theAdams–McGuinness leadership, who argued that mainstream republicanismhad indeed ‘sold out’.37

For this reason, the republican leadership was quick to announce that it wasthe ordinary Sinn Féin membership that would ultimately decide the party’sattitude to the Agreement, by virtue of a special ard fheis to be held in May1998.38 There was to be no question of the Adams–McGuinness leadershipunilaterally signing up to an Agreement, prior to their having persuaded thewider republican movement of its merits. As Gerry Adams has pointed out,the leadership wanted to be sure that republican acceptance of the Agree-ment did not come simply as the result of a diktat from on high. Instead, theleadership sought to ‘give people ownership’ of the changes that the partywould have to make in order to accommodate itself to the new political envi-ronment (such as ending abstentionism from Stormont).39 Or, viewed morecynically, it might be said that the leadership was keen to attain ‘collectiveendorsement’ for its decisions and thereby ensure ‘collective blame’ shouldthings go wrong.

The obvious problem of allowing ordinary republicans to decide, though,was the danger that they might make an ‘incorrect’ decision in the eyes ofa republican leadership that had already come to the conclusion that theaccord should be approved. Consequently, persuading the movement’s grass-roots of the deal’s qualities was one of the most significant challenges theAdams–McGuinness leadership faced in this period. Having first negotiatedthe Agreement, the republican leadership then had to negotiate with its ownsupporters. The seriousness with which this task was viewed can be gaugedfrom the assertion of Conor Murphy, a senior Sinn Féin Member of NorthernIreland’s Legislative Assembly (MLA) that ‘the most important negotiationthat you face is the one with your own base’.40 Such a sentiment was verymuch in keeping with the view of the wider republican leadership. As Adamshas since acknowledged, for him, it was essential that republicans, ‘maintaininternal unity and cohesion’.41 Sinn Féin’s support for the Good Friday Agree-ment represented another moment in the history of modern republicanism

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where the leadership fought hard to avoid a potentially terminal schism.Indicative of this at the time, An Phoblacht/Republican News urged that unitybe ‘the watchword’ of republicans.42 In addition, in the week prior to thespecial Sinn Féin ard fheis on the Agreement, the front page of the party news-paper declared ‘United we stand’, while the accompanying editorial talkedof republicans taking the struggle ‘forward in unity’.43 The message for thereader was clear: the integrity of the republican movement should be a centralconsideration in the debate and its aftermath.

In seeking to maintain republican unity, the Adams–McGuinness leader-ship was undoubtedly aided by the fact that, in some senses, ‘the split’ hadalready occurred, with the departure of those who were later labelled ‘mili-tarists’ to form the ‘Real’ IRA in autumn 1997.44 Despite this, though, it wasclear that the republican leadership still felt it had to work hard to sell theAgreement to its rank-and-file supporters. Jim Gibney has thus spoken ofthe leadership’s desire to, ‘bring people with us, through the huge changeswe’ve had to make in recent years’.45

In this context, a vital sweetener that the leadership could present to therepublican grassroots was the fact that the Agreement provided for the releaseof IRA prisoners. The significance of this can be judged from the fact thataccounts of the talks that led to the Agreement reveal Sinn Féin’s negotiatorsfocusing more of their attention on this issue, than on the constitutionalquestions that underlay the actual conflict.46 As to why this should have beenthe case, the most plausible explanation is that the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership, recognizing the fundamental (pro-Unionist consent) character of thedeal that was emerging, quickly realized the importance of obtaining concretebenefits for republicans in other areas. They grasped that it was crucial that inthe aftermath of the Agreement, An Phoblacht/Republican News should be ableto carry front-page headlines, such as the one that announced triumphantly,‘Our Prisoners Come Home’.47 Given the special place that republican pris-oners held within the movement, the fact that the Agreement appeared towork to their advantage was a powerful argument in its favour among grass-roots republicans. Indeed, as Moloney has detailed, the prisoners’ supportfor the Agreement was decisive during the Sinn Féin ard fheis that voted onthe deal in May 1998.48 The appearance on the platform of the BalcombeStreet gang (or the Balcombe Street ‘heroes’, as An Phoblacht/Republican Newspreferred to call them) – men arrested twenty-three years previously for aspate of bombings in and around London – provided the emotional entice-ment for rank-and-file party members to endorse the Agreement.49 The gang,and over twenty other republican prisoners (including Padraig Wilson, theOfficer Commanding [OC] the IRA in the Maze), had been granted one day’sparole specifically to attend the conference. Not only did several speak at theproceedings to recommend acceptance of the Agreement, but the audiencewould have been only too aware that rejection of the deal would have con-signed the men to a return to jail, with little hope of early release. Against

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this sort of background, it was no surprise that when the time came, the ardfheis voted almost 95 per cent in favour of the accord.50

The promise that republican prisoners would be released, however, was notthe only device that the Adams–McGuinness leadership used to persuade themovement to endorse the Good Friday Agreement. Rather, the leadershipdeveloped a series of interlocking arguments, or what Todd Hartman calls‘frames’, by which the Agreement was to be viewed and presented these tothe republican base.51 In this way, the Adams–McGuinness leadership soughtto give people the ‘ownership′ of the Agreement that Adams had talked about,but ownership based on an understanding of the Agreement that was whollyin tune with the way in which the leadership wished it to be seen.

In this regard, it was noticeable from the beginning that theAdams–McGuinness leadership was careful not to ‘over-sell’ the Agreement.There was, as has been described, a clear critique that could be made of theAgreement on traditional republican lines. As part of the effort to countersuch criticism, therefore, leadership figures were quick to concede the short-comings of the accord. They themselves did not exaggerate how far it went.Hence, in his Bodenstown speech of that year, Gerry Adams stated baldlythat, ‘we do not yet have a peace settlement. The talks process has not set-tled centuries of British interference in Irish affairs.’52 The IRA had likewisealready hinted at this when it had spoken of the Agreement as ‘falling short’of republican objectives.

The deal was instead to be seen as ‘the essential compromise for this phaseof the peace process’.53 Or, as an article in An Phoblacht/Republican News inApril 1998 put it (in language redolent of Michael Collins’ description ofthe 1921 Treaty as ‘not the ultimate freedom . . . but the freedom to achieveit’), the Agreement was to be viewed as ‘not a solution, but the potential fora solution’.54 Flowing from this notion was an idea of central importancefor the republican leadership: that the Agreement should be viewed as hav-ing inaugurated a process of transition. In line with this, references to thecreation of a transitional period, or intermediary phase (leading to eventualvictory), soon become a regular feature of republican discourse on the accord.It was on this basis, for instance, that the Agreement was sold to ordinaryrepublicans, prior to their ratification of the deal in May 1998.55 Thereafter,Sinn Féin’s newspaper confidently claimed that the party would approachthe Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive as ‘transitional’ entities.56

Similarly, in his 2003 memoir, Adams referred to the Agreement as a vehi-cle ‘for fundamental, political and constitutional change’ and stressed its‘transitional’ qualities.57

Interestingly, though, it would appear that there was some initial hesitationwithin the leadership about using even this notion of a transition, lest ittoo contribute to an over-selling of the Agreement. According to AnthonyMcIntyre, for example, grassroots republicans (himself included) wereinitially briefed that the deal was to be viewed as creating ‘a transition to

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a transition’, as opposed to simply a ‘transition’. The use of this seem-ingly bizarre terminology he attributed to the leadership’s fear of overstat-ing what was in the Agreement and, thereby, creating a basis for futuredisappointment.58 After all, according to the criteria by which any dealmight be considered transitional, as laid out by Gerry Adams himself priorto the accord, the Agreement could not be labelled as such.59 Despite suchconcerns, however, the republican leadership did ultimately embrace theconcept and within weeks of the party having endorsed the Agreement, AnPhoblacht/Republican News was describing it as ‘part of a transitional processto a national democracy’.60

By accepting and using the transition ‘frame’, the republican leadershiphad to confront the fact that it would inevitably lead to comparisons beingdrawn between its actions and those of Michael Collins in 1921–2. In thisregard, as has been suggested, the rhetorical similarities were only too clear.Prior to his death in 1922, Collins had maintained that he did not view theTreaty as a lasting settlement of the ‘Irish question’. Instead, he referred to itas the best deal available at that time and a possible ‘stepping stone’ to fullIrish freedom; in such fashion did he too talk the language of transition.61

Yet, given the subsequent history of the 1921 Treaty, the founding of theIrish Free State and the Irish Civil War, the ‘transition’ concept had becomeindelibly tarnished in republican minds. For many, it had come to standas a by-word for the surrender of principles. Thus, in order to combat thenegative connotations of the decision of the Adams–McGuinness leadershipto embrace its own transitional process, the period from the mid-1990s alsosaw the rehabilitation, to some extent, of Michael Collins’ reputation withinrepublican circles.

A simple, yet obvious, indication of this rehabilitation was the fact thata poster of Neil Jordan’s 1996 film on Michael Collins (which portrayedits subject in positive light) was displayed prominently in the Sinn Féinoffice in Parliament buildings at Stormont after 1998.62 While this couldjust be dismissed as an irrelevant triviality, it is hard to believe that eventhis minor appropriation of Collins’ image could have been possible only adecade previously. Moreover, it seems to have been very much symptomaticof a wider re-evaluation of the figure of Collins within ‘Provisional’ repub-licanism, which had been in evidence ever since the Adams–McGuinnessleadership had begun to reassess the continued viability of the modern IRA’sarmed campaign. In 1990, for instance, An Phoblacht/Republican News car-ried an approving review of Tim Pat Coogan’s biography of Michael Collins,which emphasized the idea that Collins ‘saw partition as the central problem’and would have used the Treaty as a ‘stepping stone’.63 Meanwhile, the verytitle of the article, ‘Was Michael Collins a Provo?’, served notice as to thepossibility of Collins’ reputation being restored.64 By the same token, whenJordan’s film later came out, the reviewer in Sinn Féin’s newspaper described itas ‘one of the most significant films ever made on an Irish historical theme’.

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The article also focused attention once more on the notion that Collins’acceptance of the Treaty did not mark a betrayal of his republican beliefs:‘Collins was undoubtedly trying to play a double game. He believed he couldset up the stepping-stone Free State, help the IRA in the North and destroythe Treaty by degrees.’65 Such logic was in evidence in a further article in AnPhoblacht/Republican News – this time in October 1999 – which again rejectedthe ‘received wisdom’ of Collins having sold out the cause. Instead, it arguedthat his attitude to partition was ‘much more Fenian’ and claimed that hehad ‘intended to do something on the North and that “something” was to beof a military nature’. These plans were understood to have been thwarted byhis untimely death, which unleashed a ‘carnival of reaction’ across Ireland.66

The conclusion of the article was even more resonant for the modern repub-lican reader: ‘Everyone in this movement should remember Collins. Collins’strategy in the Six Counties after partition amounted to nothing less thanthe tactical use of armed struggle.’67

Needless to say, by this stage the implied parallel between Collins andthe Adams–McGuinness leadership was only too obvious. For this reason,Collins, it would seem, was no longer to be viewed as the proverbial ‘badguy’ of republican history, but rather the progenitor of a new brand of repub-licanism, to which Gerry Adams and his supporters were the rightful heirs.In neither case was the decision to end the IRA’s campaign to be viewed asa betrayal of belief. Instead, Adams and McGuinness with the Agreement,just as Collins before them with the Treaty, were to be understood as havingprovided a stepping stone to full Irish freedom. Unlike Collins, though, themessage was that the modern leadership would deliver final victory.

It was not just to a modified version of Irish history, however, that therepublican leadership appealed, as it sought to justify support for the GoodFriday Agreement. Rather, as was the case regarding their earlier reassessmentof the IRA’s armed struggle, comparisons from the wider international arenawere also used by the leadership to push their supporters towards acceptanceof the accord. In this context, links with the ANC in South Africa provedhighly useful once more, particularly during the republican discussions thatimmediately followed the Agreement. Indeed, the republican leadershipactively sought the ANC’s help in the task of persuading ordinary republi-cans of the value of the deal. At Sinn Féin’s annual ard fheis in April 1998,for instance, held only a week after the Agreement negotiations had beenconcluded, the Deputy Secretary-General of the ANC, Thenjiwe Mtintso,spoke to delegates and urged them to support the deal.68 Similarly, priorto the reconvention of the ard fheis three weeks later, to take the critical voteon whether or not to endorse the Good Friday Agreement, a South Africandelegation went into the Maze prison and spent time there convincing repub-lican prisoners of the benefits the Agreement would bring. This delegationwas led by the ANC’s Cyril Ramophosa, a former Secretary-General of theorganization, and ‘Mac’ Maharaj, a man previously involved in the ANC

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underground.69 While it would be wrong to exaggerate the importance of theANC in producing the subsequent republican ‘yes’ vote for the Good FridayAgreement, it would seem likely that their efforts did play a part at some level.

The obvious attraction of the ANC model for republicans was the fact thatthe South African organization had entered a peace deal, which had paved theway towards its eventual triumph, with the achievement of black majorityrule in South Africa. It thus corresponded entirely with the interpretation ofthe Agreement being suggested by the Adams–McGuinness leadership. Theessence of the leadership’s use of the language of transition was the ideathat not only did the republican movement’s ideological objectives remainachievable, but also they were being advanced by an endorsement of theGood Friday Agreement. As Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness,declared, when speaking to the 1998 ard fheis that took place within days ofthe Agreement:

The union has undoubtedly been weakened as a result of the inclusionof a clause linking the life of the union to the will of a majority in theNorthern state. It is a bit like a partner in a relationship saying that therelationship is over, but that s/he is willing to wait until the children havegrown up.70

On this basis, he claimed the Agreement was undoubtedly a ‘basis foradvancement’; a line echoed by the IRA, when it described it as ‘a significantdevelopment’.71

Implicit too within McGuinness’s reasoning was a new emphasis on thedemographic factor as one that was likely to work to republican advantage.Such a line of argument was similarly observable in Gerry Adams’ assertionthat Northern Ireland’s status within the United Kingdom had been reducedto ‘one hinge’, while a 1998 article by Mitchel McLaughlin also pointed tothe assumed inevitability of Irish unity on this basis.72 With the national-ist population believed to be increasing relative to its Unionist counterpart,there were suggestions that a pro-Irish unity majority could soon emergewithin Northern Ireland. This majority, it was supposed, would then be in aposition to achieve such unity by popular plebiscite, as provided for in theAgreement. It was with this in mind that republicans looked eagerly towardsthe 2001 census of the province’s population.73 Their disappointment whenit failed to deliver the surge in nationalist numbers that they had hoped forwas tangible, as Sinn Féin attempted to cast doubt on the validity of theresults – an indication that some store had indeed been set on the idea thatthe Agreement had opened up a ‘demographic’ path to a united Ireland.74

Besides that, the prospects for the attainment of Irish unity were furthersaid to have been improved by the Agreement on account of the all-Irelandstructures that it provided for. By pushing the accord to its ‘outer limits’,the Adams–McGuinness leadership argued that these structures could play a

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key role in the development of an organic, de facto Irish unity. At the veryleast, they were seen as making republican involvement in a new NorthernIreland Assembly to some extent more palatable. Thus, as the Agreement laterran into problems over the question of IRA decommissioning, Sinn Féin’sdemands for the formation of the Executive were frequently accompanied bycalls for the creation of the North–South Ministerial Council.75 Then, whenthis body was finally established in December 1999, Sinn Féin asserted thata ‘new era of hope’ had been inaugurated – one in which the reunificationof the island had been brought closer.76

Overall, then, this process of framing the Good Friday Agreement througha series of familiar and interweaving positive lenses played a vital role in theability of the Adams–McGuinness leadership to deliver the republican move-ment’s support for the accord. The language used repeatedly took the formof a political ‘call to arms’, by which the leadership could refute accusationsthat it had sold out, or betrayed the struggle by signing the Agreement. Theaim was to reassure potentially disaffected members that this was emphat-ically not the case. The message above all else was that the Agreement wasnot to be seen as the end of the republican struggle, but rather its trans-ference to a new arena. As the front page of An Phoblacht/Republican Newsproclaimed, in the wake of the party’s decision to approve the deal, ‘Thestruggle continues’.77 Sinn Féin, it stated, would ‘now take the struggle intothe new political structures’ in what was the ‘next phase of struggle’.78 Simi-larly, when it came to the moment when the party actually broke the tabooand took its seats in the new Northern Irish Assembly, it claimed to be enter-ing ‘a new arena of struggle’.79 Meaningful change, it was contended, wouldin due course be brought about, by virtue of Sinn Féin remaining ‘absolutelycommitted to [its] Irish republican objectives’.80

Winning the debate: dissent versus dictatorship?

The determination of the Adams–McGuinness leadership to ensure thatrepublican debate on the Agreement was essentially conducted on its terms –and produced the ‘right’ result – has raised certain questions as to thedemocratic nature of Sinn Féin. After all, the approach of the leadership tosuch matters appeared to have been succinctly captured in an extraordinarystatement by Danny Morrison back in 1991, when he wrote, ‘A debate is amajor mistake if it’s in the absence of the leadership having made up its ownmind.’81 In the case of the Agreement it would appear that the leadershiphad very much made up its own mind (that it would support the accord) andthat the ‘debate’ that followed was more an exercise in bringing the republi-can base to support this decision. The extent to which arguments opposed tothose of the leadership were given a fair and equal hearing was far from clear.

This in turn, fuelled the arguments of many of the party’s dissenting repub-lican critics, for whom a central complaint against Sinn Féin was (and is) a

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perceived absence of internal discussion. One of the most fervent of these crit-ics, Anthony McIntyre, has argued that the peace process and, particularly,the move to accept the Agreement, accentuated the centralizing tendenciesof the republican leadership. Having emerged from prison and re-entered themovement in the early 1990s, for example, McIntyre claims that

it soon became clear that the bearers of dissent were to be identified asprime candidates for the persona non grata award. Furious party appa-ratchiks would froth at the mouth at the slightest sign of a hand they didnot control going up at a meeting.82

As a result, he argues, the movement became increasingly dominated by ‘oneunchallenged grand narrative’, overseen by a ‘totalising, violent, repressive,Sinn Féin regime of truth’.83 Internal dissent, McIntyre alleges, was stifledto the point where it no longer existed within Sinn Féin or, indeed, withinthe wider republican community. To this effect, he has highlighted what hebelieves to have been the forced closure of a republican forum, the ‘BobbySands Discussion Group’, in early 1995, soon after it hosted a public meetingin Derry in which awkward questions were asked of the Adams–McGuinnessleadership.84 In addition, McIntyre has pointed to his own experience (andthat of others) of intimidation, flowing from a determination to speak outagainst the official party line.85

Such arguments have only been reinforced by the testimonies of those wholeft Sinn Féin in the post-1998 period. One of the most high profile of thesepeople was, without doubt, John Kelly, who had been there at the formationof the ‘Provisionals’ and acquired fame for his indictment (and then acquittal)in the 1970 ‘Arms Trial’ in the Republic of Ireland.86 In early 2004, Kellystepped down from Sinn Féin and subsequently claimed it was because ofthe controlling and increasingly ‘totalitarian’ ethos within the party. Therank-and-file, he maintained,

were not encouraged to have, or were even discouraged from having, viewsthat were not the views of the leadership . . . there was no doubt that itbecame pretty much like an East Berlin, Ceaucescu, or Maoist kind oforganization, where you had thought police going round wondering whowas saying what, and if they were deviating from the Adams–McGuinnessline then they tended to be marginalized.87

Like McIntyre, Kelly identified the emergence of the ‘apparatchik concept’,by which he meant the development of a group of people close to the lead-ership, whose role was to police internal dissent.88 This ‘control mechanism’included Denis Donaldson, the senior republican who, in late 2005, wasrevealed as a British agent within the movement, but who, prior to thatpoint, was known only for his unswerving loyalty to the Adams–McGuinness

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leadership. As the details of Donaldson’s career came to light following hisexposure (and later murder), it became clear that he had been somethingof an internal ‘ambassador’ for the leadership, policing dissent wherever itarose, whether in the Rathenraw estate in Antrim, South Armagh, or theUnited States.89 Thus, whatever his activities as an agent, Donaldson’s ser-vice within the republican movement appeared to confirm the notion thatthe leadership’s forbearance in the face of dissent was slight. The evidence ofMartin Cunningham, a former Sinn Féin councillor from South Down, whofollowed John Kelly out of the party in 2004, tells a similar story. Accordingto Cunningham, Sinn Féin had, by the time he left it, increasingly come torepresent, ‘Dictatorship, just dictatorship . . . Anybody who disagrees with theparty is sent on their way – quite a few republicans have gone and what havethey been replaced with? It is not a democratic party.’90

Interestingly, even those who remained loyal party members have appearedwilling to acknowledge that, at least in relation to the peace process, SinnFéin operated along strictly vertical lines of control. Jim Gibney, for instance,himself part of the Adams–McGuinness leadership, has admitted that SinnFéin’s ‘very powerful and dominant leadership’ led the way on issues of ‘fun-damental’ importance during the peace process.91 Similarly, Eoin O’Broin,currently director of the party’s European affairs, has even conceded that,because of its background in the conflict, ‘the party is centralized . . . probablya little bit more centralized than it needs to be at this point’.92

As to why the republican leadership would feel it necessary to institute suchrigid control of internal debate, John Kelly firmly believes that the answerlies partly in ‘insecurity’, arising from ‘the transition from physical force toconstitutional politics’.93 This possibility, in itself, points to an interestingparadox; namely, that the process of ending the IRA’s campaign of violencehas necessitated a militarization of Sinn Féin’s internal party culture, withincreased emphasis being laid on strict party discipline. There is, however, acertain logic to this, when Sinn Féin’s various changes of direction are con-sidered. After all, An Phoblacht/Republican News was understating the pointsomewhat when it claimed that the peace process had required republicans toenter, ‘dangerous and uncharted waters’.94 From the moment of the first IRAceasefire, through the apparent acceptance of the consent principle and anAssembly for Northern Ireland, to the recognition that the IRA would haveto decommission its weapons, the republican movement had to adjust and,at times abandon, once-cherished values. In the words of senior leadershipfigure, Jim Gibney, the leadership was, on each occasion, dealing with andrevising the ‘fundamental tenets of republicanism’.95

In so doing, a certain level of ambiguity developed within the movement’sposition on key issues, often as a result of the apparent disjuncture betweenrepublican rhetoric and republican action. This too, though, was welcomedto some extent by the party leadership. Writing for the Sinn Féin newspaper,for example, Jim Gibney has stated,

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If there is one big lesson coming out of the peace process over the last tenyears, it is [that] words like ‘certainty’ and ‘clarity’ are not part of the cre-ative lexicon that conflict resolution requires if it is to be successful . . . Giveme the language of ambiguity. It has served the people of this country wellover the last ten years. It has oiled the engine of the peace process. Longmay it continue to do so.96

A consequence of such ambiguity, however, was the fact that the leadershipleft itself ever more vulnerable to the kind of traditional republican critique,as espoused by former prisoners such as Anthony McIntyre, Brendan Hughes,Tommy Gorman and others. Whereas the Adams–McGuinness leadershipbelieved itself to be displaying tactical flexibility in the pursuit of its objec-tives, its detractors saw only an attempt ‘to rhetorically mask the slaughterof . . . sacred cows’.97

This, in turn, perhaps explains the reigning in of internal dissent withinSinn Féin. By threatening to diminish rank-and-file trust in the leadership, orworse still to fracture the movement, internal opposition was the one thingthat the Adams–McGuinness leadership could least afford during the peaceprocess. A central concern of the leadership was the idea that it should, asmuch as possible, carry the movement with it. The greater the volume ofinternal dissent, the less likely this was to have been the case; for this reason,such dissent was to be minimized, if not eradicated altogether.

Interestingly, such reasoning may also explain why it was that the repub-lican leadership appeared so vulnerable to revelations as to the existenceof British spies and agents within its ranks. In this regard, the 2003 expo-sure of Freddie Scappaticci as ‘Stakeknife’ and the 2005 uncovering of DenisDonaldson’s covert activities proved especially damaging.98 The disclosureof their true affiliations raised new questions over the path chosen bythe Adams–McGuinness leadership. Following the above formulation ofAnthony McIntyre, many now wondered if the wrong ‘cows’ had, in fact,been led to the slaughterhouse. In this way, the episodes proved corrosive ofthe trust that was so crucial to the republican leadership. Allied to allegationsthat dissent was being stifled within the republican movement, they doubt-less prompted some to question the agenda upon which this was purportedlythe case.

With that said, it does not necessarily follow that the rise of a tightlydisciplined party culture and the attendant decline in internal debate cannecessarily be taken as evidence of a sell-out by the republican leadership(whether under the control of the British security services or not). A propen-sity towards greater central control of the republican movement in no waynegates the idea that the leadership continued, for the most part, to be com-prised of genuine republicans (notwithstanding the apparent inevitabilitythat other, further ‘spies’ will be uncovered). Nor does it, in itself, precludethe possibility that the leadership continued to act in pursuit of republican

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goals, albeit by novel means. In this context, such means clearly includeda willingness to indulge a degree of ambiguity over republican intentionsin the peace process, while also being prepared to carefully manage themessage delivered to rank-and-file republicans. Yet, this was far from beingindicative of any deep-seated ideological revisionism, or treachery. On thecontrary, the positive language used by Sinn Féin’s leaders in relation to theGood Friday Agreement can be understood to have constituted somethingmore than a rhetorical veneer, by which they sought to sell a ‘bad’ deal tothe grassroots. Rather, it seems that the Adams–McGuinness leadership gen-uinely felt that the Agreement could be used to further their self-proclaimed‘revolutionary project’.99 For the leadership, the war was not being broughtto an end, but merely being displaced to another realm.

That this should have been so may again help explain the growing strand of‘authoritarianism’ within republican political culture; for a vision of politicsthat interprets it explicitly through the lens of ‘revolution’ or ‘war’ makes thetolerance of internal party dissent far more problematic. It was, after all, MaoTse Tung who perhaps most forcefully spoke of the importance of disciplinewithin a would-be revolutionary organization.100 This is not to suggest thatthe republican leadership in any way sought to directly emulate the ChineseCommunist Party, but rather that its vision for Sinn Féin shared certain char-acteristics with that party (and those of the former Soviet bloc); characteristicsthat have been labelled ‘democratic centralist’.101 Chief among these was anemphasis on the subordination of the individual to the needs and wishes ofthe organization. Or put another way, there was to be little room for dissentand criticism against the leadership. As such, it would seem that it is possi-ble to detect some kind of common mindset that tends to inhabit those forwhom politics and conflict are intricately woven fields. For those holdingto such an outlook, to permit widespread internal dissent and criticism is togive succour to one’s enemies and to reduce the effectiveness of one’s ownefforts. Given the apparent internalization of an image of themselves as unre-constructed ‘revolutionaries’, it could even be said that it would have beensurprising had republican leaders not, to some extent, sought to constrainfree, democratic debate within the movement.

With all this said, however, it must also be stressed that the authoritar-ian tendencies of the republican leadership should not be exaggerated. Aseven one of their most trenchant critics has recognized, the position of theAdams–McGuinness leadership had always rested on a potent mixture ofcoercion and consent, and this continued to be the case.102 Moreover, theleadership could point to different forums for internal debate that did exist.There were, for example, various outlets for the written expression of dissentand discussion over the years. The most recent incarnation, Left RepublicanReview (edited by Eoin O’Broin), followed in the train of other publications,such as Iris Bheag and The Starry Plough, which allegedly sought to encour-age debate over the future direction of the movement. Thus, according to

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O’Broin, the purpose of Left Republican Review (LRR) was to facilitate, ‘strategicdebate in the public arena’.103

Furthermore, contrary to what might be expected, the articles containedwithin LLR were often far from obsequious. As O’Broin was quick to high-light, a sample of articles from LRR’s first few editions included a piece fromEoin Rooney that criticized Sinn Féin for the failings of its supposed ‘socialist’character.104 Elsewhere, there was an article from a former member of therepublican movement, Geraldine Cusak, who had defected to one of the ‘dis-sident’ organizations because of what she saw as the ‘leadership-led culture’of Sinn Féin.105 On the basis of articles such as these, O’Broin felt confident inhis assertion that, ‘whilst [republicans] have a centralised political culture –which I think is a good thing – we also have, both internally and externally,spaces and places for debate’.106 It is a view with which Jim Gibney would def-initely concur. In his opinion, the Adams–McGuinness leadership had alwaysbeen ‘well aware of the importance of democratic discussion and democraticdebate, and the importance of bringing as many minds to bear on particularissues as possible . . . Gerry Adams is very much a great believer in consensus –internal consensus’.107

There is an obvious temptation simply to disregard the views of peoplesuch as Gibney and O’Broin on this issue, on the grounds that, as relativelyhigh-ranking party members, they are perhaps bound to defend it. All thesame, there is some evidence to support what they are saying. The party’sard fheis, for instance, does follow seemingly democratic procedures. More-over, there were clear instances of ordinary party members forcing throughmotions in defiance of the stated wishes of the leadership. At the 2004 ardfheis, for example, delegates voted that party representatives should attendthe more radical World Social Forum, rather than the mainstream World Eco-nomic Forum that was favoured by the leadership.108 By the same token, theparty’s official policy on the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a US/UK-led coalitionof forces, was one of perhaps more strident opposition than the leadershipfelt comfortable with.109

What can be said, however, is that such examples of dissent from the lead-ership line, tended to be confined to matters of socio-economic or foreignpolicy. Even then, there were clear limits to the acceptable level of dis-sent from the party line. The truth of this was observable in the experienceof Francie Molloy, a long-standing Sinn Féin representative, who was sus-pended from the party in late 2005 for voicing his opposition to the regional‘super-councils’ proposed by the Northern Ireland Review of Public Adminis-tration at that time (a proposition welcomed by the Sinn Féin leadership).110

Although Molloy was reinstated to the party several months later, this cameon the proviso that he now accepted and supported the leadership’s positionon local government policy.111

On issues relating to the peace process, meanwhile, the parametersof internal debate were constrained still further and decisions over the

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party’s approach to it were firmly concentrated in the hands of theAdams–McGuinness leadership. For Gibney, though, this was a matter ofexigency, rather than a predilection towards authoritarianism. It was essen-tial, he believed, that, ‘given the difficulties that the peace process has beenin and given the big decisions that had to be taken, a lot of them had to beleadership led’.112

This reality, it should be stated, was not necessarily to the chagrin of themajority of grassroots republicans. There can be little doubt that the move-ment’s leadership, as a group, was hugely respected and many republicanactivists believed ardently in its ability to deliver on republican goals. In theaforementioned words of leadership member Gerry Kelly, the movement’sgrassroots viewed the leadership as having a high degree of ‘credibility’.113

Such credibility meant that ordinary republicans, perhaps uncomfortablewith some of the ‘big decisions’ being made, were nonetheless willing to trusttheir leaders to take whatever action they deemed necessary. Consequently,while it seems indisputable that Sinn Féin did operate on a relatively strictform of ‘democratic centralism’, especially in relation to the peace process, itdid so, by and large, with the acquiescence of the overwhelming majority ofits members. Hence, even someone such as Eoin O’Broin, who could perhapsbe regarded as one of the more radical and open members of the party (andsomeone who had argued internally for greater decentralization and a more‘grassroots approach’), declared himself categorically ‘a firm believer in partydiscipline’.114

Negotiations and agreement: the opportunity

The discipline and unity of the republican movement proved to be one of thedefining features of the peace process; for it enabled the Adams–McGuinnessleadership to embrace whole-heartedly the Good Friday Agreement – thatmost ‘un-republican’ of documents. As to why the leadership itself shouldhave wanted to do so, the answer lay in Adams’ and McGuinness’ recog-nition that, as well as constituting a huge challenge, the Agreement alsopresented Sinn Féin with a major opportunity. That this should have beenso was a function of the near-unanimous welcome that greeted the accordfrom within nationalist Ireland. The twin referendums held on the Agree-ment saw a 94 per cent ‘yes’ vote in the Republic of Ireland, while over 96per cent of northern nationalists similarly voted positively.115 On the onehand, such levels of support increased the pressure on republicans, raisingthe prospect of renewed isolation had they rejected the Agreement. At thesame time, against a backdrop of overwhelming Irish nationalist backingfor the accord, it was clear that if Sinn Féin could identify itself with theAgreement, then there were clear political benefits to be had for the party.An unmistakably ‘pro-Agreement Sinn Féin’ was likely to be rewarded at thepolls by the electorate.

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In addition, the Agreement immediately offered a basis upon which thepan-nationalist consensus – of such importance to the republican leadership –could be maintained and even strengthened. This united nationalist frontcould, from the beginning, be juxtaposed to a Unionism that felt obviousunease with the accord. After all, even in the referendum that approvedthe Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, only about 53 per centof Unionists voted in favour of it.116 Thereafter, the delays surrounding theimplementation of the Agreement were, to a considerable degree, a func-tion of the Unionist community’s unhappiness with certain aspects of thedeal. As David Trimble’s biographers make clear, this perceived unhappinesshamstrung his ability to deliver the support of the Ulster Unionist Party (theUUP – the largest Unionist party at that time) for the Agreement.117 This, inturn, as shall be seen, was something that Sinn Féin was able to exploit to itsadvantage with great success.

In this way, the Good Friday Agreement became central to both theparty’s own political appeal and its attempt to maintain a high level of pan-nationalist unity. Indeed, it is not implausible to suggest that Gerry Adams’greatest achievement in this period was the sleight-of-hand he performedin April 1998, when in the hours and days after the Agreement was set-tled, he claimed ownership of it for the republican movement. It is this thatexplains why the Adams–McGuinness leadership went to the lengths alreadydescribed to win its party’s support for the Agreement. In so doing, the lead-ership ensured it could be forthright and explicit in its endorsement of theaccord and thereby derive the maximum possible political advantage.

Subsequently, therefore, Sinn Féin established itself as the leading voicein favour of the Agreement. Within months of its ratification by referen-dum, the party newspaper, An Phoblacht/Republican News, began employ-ing what would become a familiar refrain: ‘the Agreement must now beimplemented’.118 Moreover, as problems developed over the issues of decom-missioning and the creation of the Agreement’s institutions, this exhortationgathered vehemence and was used ever more regularly. At each so-called crisisin the peace process, Sinn Féin was vociferous in demanding that the Britishand Irish governments ensure ‘the full implementation of the Agreement’.119

At the same time, republican zeal in favour of the Agreement was repeatedlycounterpoised to the seemingly niggardly attitude of the Unionist parties.The latter were lambasted for their ‘intransigence’ and their alleged efforts to‘renegotiate’, ‘rewrite’, or ‘unpick the Agreement’.120 For David Trimble andhis UUP (and indeed for the wider unionist community), the most troublingaspect of the Agreement was the apparently weak link between ‘guns and gov-ernment’. Consequently, much of the negotiation that occurred after April1998 centred on Unionist efforts to try and make these issues mutually depen-dent. They wanted Sinn Féin’s place in government to be conditional on thedecommissioning of IRA weaponry. For Sinn Féin, though, this focus ondecommissioning was simply ‘resurrected as an obstacle to political progress’

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and as part of an effort to ‘sabotage the Agreement’.121 Above all, it was por-trayed as a ‘red herring’, designed to thwart the operation of the institutionscreated by the Agreement.

Republican explanation as to why Unionists should be behaving in such afashion tended to vary. On the one hand, the argument advanced was thatDavid Trimble and his party, while supporting it, had failed to sell the Agree-ment to their own community. In the words of Sinn Féin councillor, EoinO’Broin, for example, the problem was that, ‘we never had a Unionist partythat was willing to engage in that kind of constructive and creative sale ofthe Agreement to their own constituency and own party organization . . . wehaven’t had effective partners within Unionism to sell the deal’.122 The rea-son for this failure on the part of Unionism was said to be that Unionistswere simply ‘afraid of the changes’ being delivered by the Agreement.123

Alongside this, though, other darker motivations were suggested toaccount for Unionist actions. Foremost among these was the notion thatthe Unionist parties had not fully reconciled themselves to power-sharing;that they remained, in the words of An Phoblacht/Republican News, ‘wedded toa failed and unworkable status quo’ and were reluctant to ‘share power withrepublicans or nationalists’.124 Or, as it was put more crudely on a differentoccasion, it was purely because they didn’t want ‘a Catholic or a Fenian aboutthe place’.125 This in turn, was said to be indicative of the inherently sectariannature of Unionism. Throughout this period and beyond, allegations as tothe sectarian character of Unionism regularly filled the pages of Sinn Féin’snewspaper. For example, when the Holy Cross school disturbance erupted inNorth Belfast in 2002, An Phoblacht/Republican News reported at length on thealleged hypocrisy of Unionism. Their columnist, Laura Friel, referred to the‘doublespeak’ of Unionists, who were criticized for demanding the exclusionof Sinn Féin ministers from the Northern Ireland Executive, even as loyal-ist attacks on Catholic homes continued. Friel also went on to imply thatmainstream Unionist politicians themselves had a kind of ‘sneaking regard’for the activities of the loyalist paramilitaries. Such logic was further devel-oped in an editorial in August 2002, in which it was claimed that there was‘blood on Trimble’s hands’ and it was said that he had deliberately ‘surren-der[ed] the leadership of unionism’ to the ‘thuggish political dregs’ of thecommunity.126

The underlying tone was that Unionism was, to a significant degree, a big-oted and reactionary ideology. In this vein, there also appears to have been adeliberate effort to erode the distinction traditionally made between Union-ism, on the one hand, and loyalism, on the other. While the former labelhas generally been used to denote mainstream political parties, unconnectedwith violence, the term ‘loyalism’ has typically been ascribed to the paramil-itaries and, therefore, carries sectarian connotations. From the end of 2002,though, references to ‘unionist paramilitaries’ began to enter the republicanlexicon and, in the following year, these became entrenched.127 The message

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for the reader, or listener, was clear: Unionism and loyalism were to be seenas merely two heads of the same sectarian beast.

In expressing such thoughts, there is little doubt that Sinn Féin was, on onelevel, merely voicing genuinely held concerns within the northern national-ist community, as to the extent and character of ongoing loyalist violence, aswell as the level of Unionism’s commitment to power-sharing arrangements.The point here, however, is to emphasize the extent to which such rhetoricand action also served the strategy of the party at this time. Attacks on thecharacter of Unionism were used to de-legitimize the concerns that Unionistpoliticians had with the peace process. Rather than being treated as reason-able and understandable grievances, such concerns were dismissed as theproduct of base, sectarian instincts. Thus, attempts by the UUP leader to getsatisfaction over the ‘guns and government’ issue, were routinely described ashis ‘pandering to rejectionist unionism’, through the adoption of a ‘wreckers’charter’.128 What was labelled ‘rejectionist Unionism’ was said to be impla-cably opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, even as the Agreement wassupported unequivocally by nationalist Ireland, whose leading ‘champion’was Sinn Féin.

It can be seen, therefore, that it was not only the Agreement itself thatproved so valuable to the republican leadership in this period, but also theongoing instability and negotiating process that accompanied the Agreement.The seemingly interminable rounds of negotiations provided Sinn Féin withthe perfect forum in which the dichotomy described above could best bemanifested: dark Unionist intransigence versus the apparent light of repub-lican generosity and conciliation. In this regard, the protracted saga of IRAdecommissioning was highly instructive.

Doubtless again, this was an issue of internal republican sensitivity, becauseof the connotations of surrender that the issue aroused – and the leadershiphad, to some degree, to move slowly in order to mollify the ‘not a bullet, notan ounce’ element of its grassroots constituency. The process that transpired,however, was also carefully managed to generate movement at key momentsin the wider peace process. The reality of this became clear as the likelihoodof a return to armed struggle by the IRA receded in the years after the Omaghbombing of 1998. On the one hand, it is true that, from that point, there was amarked shift in republican rhetoric. It was, for instance, in September of thatyear that Adams first declared (in what became a well-used formulation) that,‘the violence we have seen must be for all of us now a thing of the past, over,done with and gone’.129 And yet, even as the rhetoric became more peaceable,republican action on decommissioning, in terms of delivering what becameknown as ‘product’ (the actual handover of weaponry), continued to be bothpiecemeal and halting.

From the first negotiations explicitly focused on the issue in 1999, throughthe institution of the so-called ‘modalities’ of decommissioning in 2001, tothe four tranches of actual decommissioning that took place between 2001

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and 2005, the same basic pattern held true.130 Republicans moved forward,only in stages, only in the context of negotiation and only in such a way asto enhance the impression of a ‘progressive’ republican movement, pushingthe limits of what it could achieve, set against a Unionist culture that wantedto, in the words of Gerry Adams, ‘impose a veto over political change’.131

Each step in the process saw the IRA offer the smallest possible incrementaladvance – offers which invariably proved satisfactory to the two govern-ments, but insufficient for the republican movement’s Unionist interlocutors.This discrepancy was then used by republicans to illustrate the supposeddisparity between republican benevolence and Unionist recalcitrance.

In July 1999, for instance, negotiations led to Sinn Féin releasing a state-ment in which the party apparently acknowledged, for the first time, theimportance of decommissioning.132 As Dean Godson has shown, however,even as the British and Irish governments felt that this statement provided abasis upon which to resolve the then crisis, David Trimble rejected the widerproposals of which it was a part, on the grounds that the republican state-ment used words such as ‘can’ and ‘could’, instead of ‘must’ and ‘will’.133

The UUP leader considered that it did not offer him the firm confirmationhe required of an explicit IRA commitment to decommissioning. As a result,he simply felt unable to conclude an agreement on that basis. Republicans,though, claimed Trimble’s actions were the product of his desire to thwartthe Agreement. The negotiations were said to have ‘foundered on the rockof unionist intransigence’ and Sinn Féin called on the British governmentto move ahead without the Unionists.134 The republican leadership, it wasasserted, had ‘offered to stretch the republican position to the limit’, only forthis to be ‘spurned’ by Unionists. The latter, it was argued, remained intenton ‘blocking . . . the implementation of the Agreement’.135

On other occasions too, even when the IRA’s actions did meet the require-ments of Unionists, the suspicion remained that the Adams–McGuinnessleadership had moved only as far as was judged necessary given the politicalpressures of the time. The sense of a deeper commitment to decommissioningand the use of ‘exclusively peaceful means’, as principle, was not forthcoming.Instead, it might be said that the republican leadership proved itself a skilfulexponent of the ‘tactical decommissioning’ that one former IRA prisoner hadspoken of in October 1999.136 By this process, republicans were able to inducethe British and Irish governments, as well as the Ulster Unionist Party, toeffectively ‘buy the same horse’, again and again from republicans – thougheach time for a different price. The result was that Sinn Féin was able tomake significant political gains, both as a result of the concessions apparentlyyielded by repeated rounds of negotiation and also because of the favourableimpression of republicans that the process created within nationalist Ireland.

In the Republic of Ireland such an image became integral to the positiveprofile that Sinn Féin built for itself during this period. As the party’s directorof publicity, Dawn Doyle, has admitted, the outworking of the peace process

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proved ‘very popular’ and made an ‘absolutely critical’ contribution to SinnFéin’s growing electoral appeal.137 The idea that republicans were engagedin a genuine effort to achieve peace, but were being repeatedly frustrated intheir endeavours by recalcitrant Unionism resonated among the southernIrish electorate. On the one hand, it ensured that the republican movementwent a long way towards achieving the goal articulated previously by MitchelMcLaughlin when he had talked of taking ‘the word “peace” back’.138 At thesame time, it afforded Sinn Féin the opportunity to have the republican viewof Irish history writ large for nationalist Ireland on the current political stage,in the form of a morality play. Therein, the imagery was straightforward:republicans, good; the British/Unionists, bad.

Among Northern Ireland’s nationalist community, meanwhile, a similardynamic was in operation. As has been noted, that community had alreadyshown itself willing to reward Sinn Féin for its ‘good intentions’ when theparty’s vote increased at the 1996 Forum and 1997 general elections. Thesubsequent development of a peace process that appeared to pit republicanconcessions against ever more unreasonable Unionist demands merely con-tributed further to this trend. On top of that, Sinn Féin was also able to usethe protracted peace process to show itself as the best defender of nation-alist interests in Northern Ireland. In so doing, the party demonstrated theenduring power of a message based on ‘ethnic’, or ‘tribal’, nationalism. Ashas already been described, such nationalism had been a key ingredientin the political personality of Sinn Féin since the creation of the modernparty in the early 1980s.139 Furthermore, the continuing importance that theAdams–McGuinness leadership attached to this aspect of the party’s charac-ter had been demonstrated by the prominent involvement of the republicanmovement in the disputes over Orange Order parades that emerged inNorthern Ireland from the mid-1990s.140

Again, it should be acknowledged, such involvement was undoubtedly,in part, a product of the genuine resentment that many republicans andnationalists felt against Orange Order parades. Nevertheless, the significanceof the issue in the present context is that, beyond such motives, it is alsopossible to identify clear political and strategic benefits that the republicanmovement could seek to gain by its actions. For one thing, the ‘parades’ con-troversy provided Sinn Féin with yet another opportunity to demonstrateits ‘can-do’ political personality, based on emotion-laden, street activism. Ofgreater import was the fact that the issue could easily be used to show SinnFéin as the strident voice of the northern nationalist community, standingin the face of apparent Unionist aggression. Orange Order parades could bedepicted, as they were by An Phoblacht/Republican News, as being, ‘the front-line for triumphant loyalism’, ‘carnival[s] of hate’ and indicative of the ‘rootsof unionist sectarianism’.141 As recent scholarship has demonstrated, suchportrayals can scarcely be said to constitute a fair and accurate reading of‘Orangeism’ all-told; rather they belong to the realm of caricature. The Order

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is a complex, context-determined and far-from-monolithic entity – and inthis respect, mirrors Unionism more generally.142 Yet republican interpreta-tions attributed only the most dishonourable motives to Orangemen, evenas nationalist opposition to the Order was cast in a purely positive light. Theessence of the famous ‘Drumcree’ dispute near Portadown, for example, wassaid to be the desire and right of nationalists to live free from the ‘sectarianharassment’ of the Orange Order, in ‘an area where nationalists have alwaysbeen treated as second-class citizens’.143 Their refusal to give in was takento be indicative of the ‘sense of empowerment which the peace process hasgiven to nationalists’.144

Not only did such representations allow republicans to present themselvesas the foremost champions of northern nationalism, but they could alsobe used to deepen the wedge between ‘nationalism’ and ‘Unionism’ morebroadly, with Sinn Féin once more appealing to nationalists as nationalists. AsRuth Dudley Edwards has described, criticism of the Orange Order was liableto gain purchase with even the most moderate nationalist, north or south,given that the parades issue was one that generated little empathy, or under-standing, for the Unionist argument, in nationalist Ireland.145 The truth ofthis could be seen particularly clearly, in reactions to the Drumcree dispute.For instance, in the wake of the loyalist protests and violence that attended‘Drumcree II’ in 1996 (when the parade, having initially been banned, waslater forced down the Garvaghy Road by the RUC) the SDLP withdrew, as aprotest, from the Northern Ireland Forum.146 The Fine Gael Taoiseach, JohnBruton (who had previously signalled his disregard for pan-nationalism byrefusing to meet with Hume and Adams in October 1995) also felt movedto condemn the actions of the RUC and criticized Unionist behaviour dur-ing the stand-off.147 In both instances, the constitutional rivals of Sinn Féinfelt compelled to accept a more republican narrative of events. In such fash-ion did the parades issue, by engaging the ‘tribal’/communal instincts ofIrish nationalism, broadly conceived, work to the strategic advantage of therepublican movement.

By the same token, these tribal instincts within Irish nationalism couldbe equally engaged by Sinn Féin in the context of a peace process that wasincreasingly reduced to a series of apparently unending negotiations. Againstthis background, Sinn Féin repeatedly pointed to the self-professed capabili-ties of its representatives as ‘the most effective negotiators’ for the nationalistcommunity.148 In this way, it effectively played the game of ‘inter-ethniccompetition’, seeking to demonstrate its superior ability to win concessionsfor its ‘tribe’. As Henry Patterson has highlighted, an important element ofthe republican movement’s approach to this game was its attempt to ‘hijackthe equality agenda’.149 By portraying the enactment of human rights’ provi-sions and reforms in Northern Ireland (connected to the Agreement) as gainsfor the northern nationalist community, the party claimed ownership of suchmeasures and declared them to be the product of its successful negotiating

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strategy.150 In the ‘zero-sum’ world of Northern Irish politics, such devel-opments could plausibly be depicted as examples of Unionist ‘defeats’ andnationalist ‘victories’.

What is more, these victories could then be claimed by Sinn Féin asevidence of what An Phoblacht/Republican News pointed to as the ‘growingconfidence within the nationalist community’.151 The peace process was saidto have created a community ‘on the march’, which would no longer acceptthe status of second-class citizens.152 Such nationalist assertiveness, it wasargued, was a direct result of the self-confident and assured attitude of SinnFéin – an attitude contrasted with, what it termed, the ‘SDLP brand of fearful,heads-down, mouths-shut nationalism’.153 The growing political strength ofSinn Féin was thus alleged to be a consequence of the fact that increasingnumbers of nationalist voters were ‘making it clear that they do not want tolower their horizons, to settle for less’.154

An issue of particular significance in this regard for Sinn Féin was that ofpolice reform in Northern Ireland. The party had always staked out a tougherline on this matter than the SDLP. When the question was passed to thePatten Commission in 1998, for instance, Sinn Féin had continued to putforward its claim that only the complete disbandment of the RUC wouldsuffice.155 The SDLP, by contrast, adopted a more explicitly reformist positionfrom the outset and, for this reason, was broadly supportive of the PattenCommission’s recommendations when they emerged.156 Subsequently, whileSinn Féin too became more supportive of ‘Patten’, it did so only after the SDLPhad taken the decision to endorse the changes that were made to the policeservice in 2001 (when, following the Weston Park negotiations, the SDLPagreed to take its place on the new Policing Board and local District PolicingPartnerships [DPPs]).157 Thereafter, Sinn Féin became increasingly strident inits defence of ‘Patten’, declaring that the acronym of the new SDLP-supportedPolice Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, better stood for ‘Patten Still NotImplemented’.158 The SDLP was said to have ‘jumped too soon’ and accepted‘half a loaf’ on policing.159 In so doing, republicans argued, the party had,‘lost the hearts and minds argument within the nationalist community onthis issue’ and ‘settled for too little too early’.160

Once again, this is not to say, it should be stressed, that the issue of policingwas not one of some magnitude for republicans. Indeed, Gerry Kelly, SinnFéin’s spokesperson on the subject, has described it as a ‘touchstone’ issueand talked of his belief that there needed to be what he termed a ‘properbeginning to policing’.161 Moreover, across the wider republican movement,there were indications of a deeply held conviction that policing reform hadnot gone far enough in Northern Ireland. In a 2003 academic survey, forexample, 81 per cent of those who identified themselves as Sinn Féin sup-porters claimed that this was the case. Interestingly, the comparative figureamong SDLP supporters was only 38 per cent – a sign of the greater depthof feeling on the subject that clearly existed among republicans.162 This was

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perhaps unsurprising, given that the question of policing raised importantideological issues for Sinn Féin. After all, for republicans, acceptance of thePSNI was heralded to signify yet greater acceptance of the Northern Irishstate. It is noticeable that, even in 2005 (at a time when there were growingsuggestions that Sinn Féin might be close to endorsing the policing arrange-ments), motions were put forward to the party’s ard fheis calling on SinnFéin not to join ‘any [emphasis added] Six County Police Force’, either untilthere was a ‘united, free and independent Ireland’ or at least until the Britishgave ‘a declaration of intent to withdraw from Ireland’.163 While both themotions in question were defeated, their very presence on the agenda wasindicative of the real strength of unease that continued to exist within therepublican movement over the entire notion of Sinn Féin giving its supportto a Northern Irish police force. And it was perhaps for this reason that theAdams–McGuinness leadership sought to delay formal acceptance of the PSNIfor as long as was possible – with the matter only resolved in early 2007.164

In addition to such genuine reservations and concerns, however, it mustalso be noted that the policing issue did carry strategic benefits for Sinn Féin.The tougher line that the party adopted on the matter, in comparison withthe SDLP, allowed Sinn Féin to keep distance between itself and its rival. Fur-thermore, the republican refusal to support policing arrangements in 2001allowed Sinn Féin to take the credit for such changes as were made subse-quent to that point. Such logic was, for example, deployed by the partyin the run-up to the 2003 Assembly election in Northern Ireland, when itmaintained that its defiant stance had ‘delivered substantial improvementson policing’, and that Sinn Féin therefore constituted the ‘best guarantee ofpolicing progress’.165

In this way, the party’s approach to policing was entirely in keeping withthe image it sought to cultivate for itself as the most effective expression ofthe northern nationalist community. And while there were obviously otheraspects to Sinn Féin’s appeal, evidence as to the real importance of this mes-sage was offered by the aforementioned academic survey, which was doneimmediately after the 2003 Assembly election, in which the party compre-hensively defeated the SDLP. Respondents to a questionnaire were asked tostate their voter affiliation and then identify which party best representedtheir community. Unsurprisingly, 95 per cent of Sinn Féin voters felt SinnFéin best represented nationalist interests. Astonishingly, however, 51 percent of self-proclaimed SDLP voters thought so as well.166 Thus, it can beseen that Sinn Féin’s use of the peace process to enhance a vision of itselfas the strongest advocate for northern nationalism undoubtedly contributedsignificantly to the political growth of the party in Northern Ireland.

Finally, in addition to all of this, the outworking of the peace process alsohad a significant positive impact on the Adams–McGuinness leadership’sstrategic objectives in relation to Unionism. In the first instance, this wasbecause the process showed the possibility that serious division might be

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engendered within the Unionist community. The traumas of David Trimbleand the UUP were testament enough to the truth of this and were dulyacknowledged as such by republicans. An Phoblacht/Republican News, forinstance, noted and celebrated ‘Unionist disunity’ over the Agreement, whileMitchel McLaughlin could be found admitting (in a moment of indiscretion)that one of the benefits of the peace process was ‘the degree of uncertainty andthe lack of confidence in the unionist community’.167 In the context of therepublican leadership’s vista for the ‘endgame’ in Northern Ireland, the exis-tence of an un-confident, demoralized Unionism was a welcome prospect.168

What is more, the unfolding of the peace process and the way in which itallowed republicans to portray Unionism as the unreasonable, truculent part-ner in negotiations helped create the possibility that Unionism might actuallybe isolated, politically, within Ireland, and even, perhaps, from Britain.

This notion, that the British government could be detached from support-ing Unionism, was undoubtedly strengthened by the language used by TonyBlair’s government in relation to Northern Ireland and the Agreement. Thistended to foreground the unprecedented and ‘historic’ nature of the peaceprocess and Blair’s personal desire for a solution. It was Blair himself, afterall, who had memorably stated at the time of the Agreement that, while itwas not ‘a day for sound-bites’ he could ‘feel the hand of history’ on hisshoulder.169 This and other utterances tended to convey the sense that Blairviewed the Agreement as very much part of his legacy. Certainly, the amountof time that the Prime Minister was willing to devote to the Northern Irelandpeace process was indicative of the great lengths he was prepared to go to totry and make it succeed. For example, only a fortnight prior to the beginningof the 2003 invasion of Iraq, involving UK troops, Blair gave up over threedays of his time to working with the Irish government on the matter.170

Furthermore, it was clear that the British were determined to put a devolvedadministration in place in Belfast and, to this end, were prepared to investrepublican moves with great significance; arguably with greater significance,on occasion, than they deserved. Hence, as has been described, during theJuly 1999 negotiations on the Way Forward initiative, British governmentspokespeople (and the Prime Minister himself) were prepared to talk up whatwas on offer from the republican movement. There were references to a‘seismic shift’ from republicans, despite it remaining largely unclear whatexactly was on offer from the IRA at that time.171 As it turned out, whatwas on offer was not enough for the UUP and, consequently, David Trim-ble rejected the proposals. On this occasion, the UUP leader was eventuallybacked by the government, but it cannot have escaped the attention of theAdams–McGuinness leadership that, in its quest for a solution to the North-ern Ireland problem, the British government was prepared to strain, and evendamage, its relationship with Unionism. With regards to moderate Union-ism, this was ultimately what happened in 2003, when the governmentacquiesced in an Assembly election, in the absence of the decommissioning

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guarantees from the IRA that Trimble and his party had sought. The resultwas the UUP’s defeat at the hands of the DUP.

For the republican leadership, then, the hope was that the British govern-ment might be persuaded to break, not just with one or more of the Unionistparties, but also with Unionism as a whole. It was this logic that informedSinn Féin’s frequent and strident calls, from the moment that the Agree-ment first began to run into trouble, for the British government to ‘break theunionist veto’, or dispose of the ‘Orange Card’.172 By increasing the pressureon the British to break with first Trimble and later Paisley over the ‘guns andgovernment’ issue, Sinn Féin envisaged a situation in which the two gov-ernments would then work together to impose a solution over the heads ofUnionists; all the more so, if the latter appeared divided, as seemed to bethe case during the peace process. That there existed such a possibility wasjudged to be one of the great lessons of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. After all,despite their criticism of the accord, Sean O’Callaghan has observed that ithad also shown republicans that ‘the British government would ignore thewishes of unionists if it suited them’.173 Flowing from this was a belief thatthe British government might be induced to behave similarly again; thistime, though, for more ‘republican’ ends.174 As a starting point, it seemsclear that it was imagined that this would involve the establishment of theall-Ireland aspects of the Agreement, even as the Northern Ireland Assemblyand Executive remained in abeyance.

Evidence to this effect can be seen in Sinn Féin’s repeated calls, during sus-pension, for exactly such a solution. This was to be the ‘plan B’ that theyintermittently called on the governments to adopt.175 Had such a course ofaction been followed, it would have represented a notable victory for SinnFéin – for whom, as party members frequently pointed out, the Assemblywas the least desirable aspect of the Agreement.176 The Adams–McGuinnessleadership looked instead to the accord’s cross-border institutions as creat-ing the possibility for the de facto introduction of ‘joint authority’. It wasthis, after all, which Adams had defined as Sinn Fein’s objective at the outsetof the peace process.177 Republicans looked to a scenario in which a Britishgovernment would at last ‘break’ with Unionism, leaving the latter com-pletely isolated politically. Thereafter, as Gerry Adams had first outlined sometwo decades earlier, it was imagined that a demoralized Unionist communitywould further fragment, with a section accommodating itself to the project ofIrish unity being driven by a vibrant Sinn Féin, growing in political strengthon both sides of the Irish border.178

Conclusion

In 2001, the Adams–McGuinness leadership realized a significant and long-standing strategic goal when Sinn Féin overtook the SDLP as the majorityparty among Northern Ireland’s nationalist population. With the republican

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party taking four seats to the SDLP’s three and winning some 51 per cent ofthe nationalist vote, that year’s British general election reflected the powershift that had taken place within the nationalist community.179 Almost twodecades after Gerry Adams had publicly articulated the concept, the republi-can movement could now claim to hold a ‘political veto’ regarding the futureof Northern Ireland. The truth of this was noted by the former senior republi-can, Danny Morrison, when he remarked approvingly, ‘Sinn Féin is now in aposition where it can call the shots. Nothing can move without it. Tony Blairmight like to move without it, but he can’t.’180 This point was underlined fur-ther as Sinn Féin consolidated its triumph, moving from marginal victor in2001, to undisputed master of northern nationalism in 2003. The Assemblyelection that year saw the party now capture 58 per cent of the nationalistvote, as opposed to the SDLP’s 42 per cent share. In terms of the numberof seats held in the putative assembly, Sinn Féin claimed twenty-four to theSDLP’s eighteen; an exact mirror-image of the first Assembly election resultof five years previously.181

Even as republicans welcomed this success, however, it increasingly forcedthe Adams–McGuinness leadership to confront the fact that there was notmuch further the party could go, electorally, within Northern Ireland. As JimGibney, a senior leadership figure, has explained, ‘We’ve reached a stage inthe north here where, there’s not a ceiling on the Sinn Féin vote, but in thenature of things . . . the Unionists, voting tactically, have the ability to imposerestrictions on Sinn Féin’s electoral growth.’182 It was for this reason, then,that the years after 2001 saw Sinn Féin shift the focus of its energies south-wards. With the republican political veto de facto established in NorthernIreland, the most pressing task facing Sinn Féin was the development of polit-ical strength in the Republic of Ireland. It was the effort to attain this objectivethat Sinn Féin now primarily addressed itself in the years after 2001.

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5Sinn Féin Centre Stage: The Searchfor Political Growth, 2001–4

‘We’re keen to build now in the south . . . It’s probably our numberone priority at this point.’

Jim Gibney1

Introduction

With the republican political veto effectively in place in Northern Irelandfrom 2001, the attention of Sinn Féin switched increasingly south of theborder. This is not to suggest that Northern Ireland was abandoned. On thecontrary, the party sought to consolidate its lead over the SDLP – somethingit did with considerable success, as the results of the 2003 Assembly and2004 European elections showed.2 Moreover, as shall be demonstrated, theNorthern Irish peace process continued to be a crucial vehicle for Sinn Féin,by which the party could advance its agenda and present itself in a positivelight in the Republic of Ireland. Nevertheless, the effort to achieve significantpolitical expansion in the south was now given new urgency by republicans.Indeed, in the words of Jim Gibney, it became ‘the number one priority’ forthe party in this period.3

In placing new emphasis on the south, Sinn Féin sought to build on thetentative foothold it had established there in the 1997 Irish general elec-tion. On that occasion, as has been described, the party succeeded in havingits first TD elected and secured some 2.5 per cent of the national vote. Inaddition, local elections in 1999, when the party had tripled the numberof seats it held (to the still small overall total of twenty-one), had offeredfurther evidence that Sinn Féin might construct a base from which it couldachieve major political success. Such success was seen, from the republicanperspective, as fundamental to the process of ‘reclaiming the 26 counties forrepublicanism’.4

As has been noted, Sinn Féin’s southern strategy was an integral part ofthe broader endgame envisaged by the Adams–McGuinness leadership in

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relation to the conflict. It was imagined that the political potency of republi-canism there would be a key determinant of whether a united Ireland couldbe achieved – not only because it was thought that republican strength inthe south would place greater pressure on the British, but also because it wasenvisaged that, in the aftermath of British withdrawal, the existence of avibrant all-island republican movement would impress upon Unionists theinevitability of Irish unity.5 Even in the meantime, the growth of Sinn Féinas a political force in the Republic of Ireland raised the prospect that it mightenter government there; most likely as coalition partner to its ‘distant cousin’,Fianna Fáil. When placed alongside the party’s permanent position in gov-ernment in the north (at least in theory under a functioning Agreement), itsentrance into government in the south could be portrayed as a major sym-bolic victory for the republican movement. Holding power on either side ofthe Irish border, the party itself could contribute to the ‘psychological repar-titioning’ of the island. Unity in the make-up of the two governments, northand south, could convincingly be depicted as the prelude to greater unity forthe two states involved.

On top of this, Sinn Féin’s place in government was likely to be ‘bought’ bythe party at the price of Fianna Fáil agreeing to adopt ‘greener’ positions in thenegotiations of the peace process. And even prior to entering government, anexpansionist Sinn Féin could plausibly hope to force Fianna Fáil to embracesuch positions through the pressure it placed on its larger rival to uphold itsrepublican credentials. As Jim Gibney has explained, the growth of Sinn Féin‘strengthens our all-Ireland agenda, and it gives us added political musclewhen we’re dealing with the British government and the Irish government,to push them further in terms of the all-Ireland element to the Good FridayAgreement’.6

That all-Ireland element of the Agreement was important to Sinn Féin as‘the most practical strand of the plan for a united Ireland’, which was steadily‘making the border irrelevant’.7 The republican leadership thus sought to uti-lize those aspects of the Agreement that could be used to push forward thede facto evolution of Irish unity, in advance of the party being in a posi-tion to achieve de jure unity. Consequently, in the period after 2001, thisactivity was stepped up with Sinn Féin both looking to expand the role ofthe new North–South Ministerial Council wherever possible, and also seek-ing to identify other areas where an agenda for a kind of ‘creeping unity’could be advanced. With regards to the latter, there were calls, for instance,for MPs from Northern Ireland to be given access to the Dáil.8 There werealso suggestions that representatives from Northern Ireland might be admit-ted to the upper house in the Republic of Ireland, the Seanad.9 Elsewhere,‘Ógra Shinn Féin’, the republican movement’s ‘youth wing’, led a campaignin favour of allowing Northern Irish citizens the right to vote in Presiden-tial elections in the Republic, while, by 2005, Sinn Féin itself had beguncalling on the Irish government both to produce a Green Paper on Irish

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unity and to create an all-party Oireachtas Committee to plan for suchunity.10

When arguing for the implementation of this type of measure, the elec-toral expansion of Sinn Féin obviously lent extra weight to the party’s case.At the same time, the republican leadership clearly felt that the party’s high-profile commitment to such issues was an important factor in helping togenerate that expansion in the first place. According to Eoin O’Broin, a cen-tral facet of Sinn Féin’s appeal at this time was the fact that it was thoughtto be ‘strong on the national question’.11 By so being, it can be said that theparty continued to look to the ‘hidden Ireland’ to which Gerry Adams hadreferred back in 1991 – a ‘hidden Ireland’ that was imagined to be stronglynationalist, if not overtly republican, in outlook.12 In the absence of theIRA’s military campaign, the republican leadership felt even more stronglythat Sinn Féin could capitalize on this dormant constituency. In the words ofone of the party’s Northern Irish Assembly members, Barry McElduff, it wasimagined that the ceasefire had ‘liberated Irish nationalist opinion to get inbehind Sinn Féin’.13

Even as such views gained currency within the republican movement, how-ever, it was also recognized that while it was important for Sinn Féin to retainits republican credentials, this in itself was not sufficient to generate sus-tained political growth in the Republic of Ireland. On the contrary, it wasaccepted that the party needed to develop policy positions across a rangeof issues – a point that had been made forcibly to the leadership during itsfirst foray into southern politics back in 1982. Then, Sinn Féin had won aderisory 1 per cent of the vote.14 The Sinn Féin President of the time, Ruairi ÓBrádaigh, had recognized that this was essentially a function of the fact thatSinn Féin was seen by the electorate as a predominantly northern party, withlittle to say on broader social and economic issues in the Republic.15 As hasalready been examined, the Adams–McGuinness leadership had thereaftersought to combat such perceptions through the building of an identifiablyleft-wing Sinn Féin with a coherent political personality. Now, as republicanssought to place increased focus on the southern arena in the years after 2001,this effort to develop and refine Sinn Féin’s political character was taken toan entirely new level.

Political development anew

Central to the effort to make Sinn Féin a genuine political force in theRepublic of Ireland in this period was the maintenance of the party’s imageas a radical, left-wing force. In line with this, the party developed a platformthat was unreservedly opposed to discrimination in Irish society – whetherrelated to lifestyle, gender, sexuality, or race.16 This anti-discrimination, pro-equality platform was encapsulated in the slogan, ‘An Ireland of Equals’.17

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First used in 2002, this convenient phrase was repeated almost ad nauseam byrepublican spokespeople from that point onwards, as a signal of the party’ssocially progressive intent. On this basis, Sinn Féin aimed to make itself thechampion of those whose rights were being infringed within modern Irishsociety. Closely tied to this was the fact that the party also continued to lookprimarily to those constituencies that contained the more underprivilegedsectors of the population. Sinn Féin portrayed itself as standing outside thetraditional political system, representing what Gerry Adams referred to as,a ‘coalition of the dispossessed’.18 Such a coalition was said to consist ofthose people who faced social discrimination, as well as all those for whomthe Celtic Tiger had proven illusory. As Eoin O’Broin has described, theywere the ‘large sections of society’ who had been ‘left behind’, even as othersprospered.19

In practical terms, this translated on the one hand, into the maintenance ofthe kind of activity in which Sinn Féin had long been involved. Since the timeof its first involvement in the drugs issue, for example, Sinn Féin had con-tinued to engage with the matter and this remained the case. As in the 1980sand 1990s, this engagement rested on strong support for the efforts of localcommunities to deal with drugs-related problems. Again, the very existenceof such problems was held to signify ‘the state’s failed legacy’; all the more so,when set against the context of the Celtic Tiger.20 As An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews noted scathingly, ‘Across the inner-city [of Dublin], communities areforced to live with the scourge of drugs and unemployment while the gov-ernment boasts of the benefits from Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy.’21 Theparty declared that, having been apparently abandoned by middle-class andofficial Ireland, working-class communities with drugs problems were fullyentitled to establish their own institutions in response. Thus, just as with theConcerned Parents Against Drugs groups, Sinn Féin members actively encour-aged, and became involved in, newer organizations that emerged during the1990s, such as the Coalition of Communities Against Drugs (COCAD).22 Theparty’s support for this type of group remained steadfast, even though it occa-sionally threatened to damage Sinn Féin’s wider image – particularly overfresh accusations of vigilantism (such as those laid against the party’s candi-date for North Kerry, Martin Ferris, in the run-up to the 2002 Irish generalelection).23

Alongside this activism on the ‘drugs’ problem, Sinn Féin also sought tomaintain a high profile on various other issues. Much attention, for exam-ple, was paid to ‘Dublin’s housing crisis’, which was said to largely affectthe poorest in society and be a product of the government’s failure ‘to pro-vide suitable and adequate accommodation for those on the waiting list’.24

By the same token, Sinn Féin took on the cause of opposing refuse chargeswhen they were introduced by the Irish government from 2000. These weresaid to be another ‘assault on the low-paid’ and ‘another unacceptable fea-ture of McCreevynomics’ (a reference to the Fianna Fáil Finance Minister,

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Charlie McCreevy, who had introduced the charges).25 Elsewhere, fromRyanair baggage handlers, to Dublin bus-workers, to the nurses of the healthsystem, Sinn Féin publicized and backed the demands of workers against boththeir bosses and the establishment.26 As An Phoblacht/Republican News com-mented, industrial disputes of this nature were to be viewed within a widerframework that highlighted ‘the major inequalities which exist in the muchvaunted “Celtic Tiger” economy . . . [and] the squalid reality of the CelticTiger’. The problem was said to be that ‘those who are producing the newwealth in this still rapidly growing economy are not sharing in its benefitsand [as a result] are being screwed to the wall.’27

In line with this, Sinn Féin’s position was still one of firm opposition tothe neo-liberal model of economic growth that had been pursued by suc-cessive Irish governments since the 1980s. The essence of that model (asaccepted by the other main Irish political parties) had been to ‘roll back’the state by privatizing industry, while simultaneously seeking to foster eco-nomic growth by attracting significant levels of foreign direct investment intoIreland, through a low-tax regime and the creation of incentive structures.For Sinn Féin, such measures belonged only to ‘a profiteer’s charter, doomedto failure’.28 With regards to privatization, for instance, as the issue gainednew salience with the proposed break-up and sale of the state-controlled air-line, Aer Rianta, from 2003, and the suggestion that Dublin’s bus servicesmight be privatized as well, Sinn Féin placed itself definitively among thosewho were against such proposals.29

Similarly, the party was a consistent opponent of one of the consequencesof privatization: investment in Ireland by multinational companies. Thiskind of investment was deemed by Sinn Féin to be exploitative and, ulti-mately, unreliable as a source of economic growth. To this end, the partyregularly highlighted those cases in which multinational companies hadcome to Ireland, but later decided to scale-back or withdraw their operations.Whether this involved Apple computers in Cork, or the Fruit of the Loomclothing factories in Derry and Donegal, An Phoblacht/Republican News drewattention to the closure of plants and the job losses that these entailed. Bothwere said to be ‘a damning indictment of successive Dublin governments’.30

By the same token, the fact that Ireland’s offshore oil and gas resources werebeing explored by multinational companies was described by the Sinn FéinTD, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, as the ‘scandalous’ product of ‘successive Irishgovernments [having] effectively sold off our natural resources’.31 On thebasis of this logic, the party became an active participant in the campaignlaunched in 2005 against Shell Oil and its plans to construct an upstreamhigh-pressure pipeline to bring gas from the Corrib oilfield (off the Irishcoast), to an inland refinery at Rossport in County Mayo.32 When severalfarmers were jailed during the campaign for taking their protests too far,Sinn Féin declared its ‘outrage and disgust’, as well as its full support for the‘Rossport Five’.33

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What these and other episodes reflected was the enduring self-image ofSinn Féin as a ‘party of protest’, representing the working, and even the under,classes. It saw itself as a party standing with the Irish ‘people’ (as defined byrepublicans), against a political, social and economic ‘establishment’ that hadlet those same people down. This inherently anti-establishment character wascentral to the party’s identity and was tied to the belief of many republicanactivists that they themselves embodied a more honest, conviction-basedbrand of politics, as distinct from other political parties in the Republic ofIreland. As Gerry Adams declared during an interview with the Irish Times in2002, republicans believed themselves to have retained ‘the idealism and thesense of public service that some others had, but which they have lost’.34

This aspect of the party’s image was undoubtedly given a boost by theshadow of corruption that enveloped both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil from thelate 1990s. As the political establishment succumbed to a series of inquiriesinvestigating alleged financial irregularities, bribery and embezzlement, SinnFéin was on-hand to criticize the dishonesty of a ‘political class’, to whichit clearly felt it did not belong.35 Hence, the report of the McCracken tri-bunal (which examined cash payments from the Dunne business family tosenior politicians, including the former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey) wassaid by the recently elected Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin to be ‘an indictmentnot only of the individual politicians named in the report but of theirparties’.36 An Phoblacht/Republican News, meanwhile, condemned the ‘liarsand swindlers . . . of the two major political parties in the 26 Counties’, andasserted that ‘an alternative to the politics of privilege and graft must becreated’.37

With the subsequent emergence of the Moriarty and Flood tribunals (look-ing, respectively, at payments to politicians and the link between politicians’planning decisions and financial donations from businessmen), this was toprove a line of argument from which Sinn Féin could realistically hope tobenefit.

By January 1999, as further corruption revelations even threatened theintegrity of Bertie Ahern’s government (and the Taoiseach himself was forcedto appear before the Moriarty tribunal), the party was pointing to a ‘crisisacross the political divide’.38 Elsewhere, it claimed that the Flood tribunalhad given people ‘a glimpse of the seamier side of political life in Ireland’ andshown ‘just how political decisions are taken and how democratic structuresare subverted’.39 That such a message could resonate with the wider publiccould be seen from the results of an opinion poll published in the Irish EveningHerald in September 2000. This showed that some 56 per cent of peoplebelieved that Bertie Ahern had not been honest in his statements to both theMoriarty tribunal and the Dáil, regarding his knowledge of various politicaldonations. By contrast, the same survey also revealed that Gerry Adams,enjoying 57 per cent personal approval ratings, was regarded as the mostpopular party leader in the Republic.40 Of course, such polls are far from

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infallible, but these results would appear to indicate that this aspect of SinnFéin’s appeal did carry some purchase among the southern Irish electorate.For this reason, Sinn Féin unsurprisingly took every opportunity it could tocast itself as the bearer of an honest, anti-establishment ethos, juxtaposed tothe allegedly ‘corrupt elite’ of Irish society.41

Through a focus on the alleged corruption of its rivals, Sinn Féin sought topresent itself to the electorate as a realistic and viable political alternative. Inso doing, the republican leadership appeared to hope that Sinn Féin mighteven establish itself as the effective political opposition of the day. After all, asfar back as May 1998, when news first emerged of a possible merger betweenthe Democratic Left and Labour parties, Sinn Féin was optimistically assessingthe potential for just such an outcome.42 When the merger of the two partiesdid indeed take place later that year, Sinn Féin confidently declared that ithad created a ‘growing space for a party to the left of Labour with a strongrepublican position and with a network of activists on the ground throughoutthe capital and throughout the 26 Counties. Sinn Féin is that party.’43

The growing political strength of Sinn Féin, particularly after it becamethe fourth largest party in the Republic at the 2002 general election (taking6.5 per cent of the total vote), merely reinforced this confidence. Although,on that occasion, the party still only won five seats (out of 166), it did comeexceptionally close to victory in at least another five. Notable ‘near misses’were provided by Dessie Ellis (Dublin North-West), Nicky Kehoe (DublinCentral), Larry O’Toole (Dublin North-East), Sean MacManus (Sligo-Leitrim)and Joe O’Reilly (Meath). These performances contributed to an overall per-ception of Sinn Féin success, with the party more than doubling its nationalshare of the vote, as compared to the previous general election.44

Increasingly, therefore, the party began to claim that what was occur-ring was a ‘realignment of Irish politics’, which would allow Sinn Féin towork with other ‘progressives’ to ‘provide a principled opposition’.45 Thatsome sort of realignment did begin to affect the Irish political system in thisperiod seems undeniable. After all, as Michael Laver and Michael Marsh havedemonstrated, an underlying trend since the 1980s had been the declining‘base-line vote’ of the two largest parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – from aposition where they captured 85 per cent of the vote in 1982, to one wherethey took 67 per cent of the vote in 1997.46 As the aforementioned electionresults imply, it was the smaller parties such as Sinn Féin, that moved intothe space they vacated.

Besides these electoral accomplishments, Sinn Féin also found otheropportunities to play a leading role in what might loosely be termed an anti-establishment opposition bloc. A case in point, for instance, came when theRepublic of Ireland voted on whether or not to endorse the Nice Treaty in areferendum in 2001. With the three largest political parties lined up in sup-port of the treaty, it fell to Sinn Féin (alongside the Greens, the Socialistsand various pressure groups), to oppose the treaty on the grounds that it

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infringed Irish neutrality and sovereignty.47 The humiliating defeat that theopposition inflicted on the government (with 54 per cent of people voting‘no’, on only a 35 per cent turnout) served to boost Sinn Féin’s profile and cre-dentials as the voice of an ‘alternative’ Ireland.48 As An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews declared, the result (which was later reversed on a second referendum)was seen by republicans as evidence of both the ‘changed political landscape’in the south and the fact that ‘Sinn Féin and the Greens are the effective anddynamic opposition in 26 County political life’.49

In other ways too, the notion that Sinn Féin might be considered the effec-tive opposition was lent added credence by the actions of its opponents.The increasingly virulent attacks on the party by the Irish Justice Minister,Michael McDowell, for example, could be seen to have worked in this fash-ion. From early 2004, McDowell repeatedly criticized the unitary nature ofthe republican movement, arguing that there were ‘no Chinese walls betweenIRA money and Sinn Féin money’.50 Not only did he claim that the IRAand Sinn Féin were inextricably intertwined, but he also identified leadingSinn Féin politicians (Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris) asmembers of the IRA’s Army Council.51 On another occasion he even likenedthe relationship between Sinn Féin and the IRA to that of the Nazi party andthe Brown-shirts in 1930s Germany.52

Despite the apparently damaging nature of these accusations, it seems pos-sible that Sinn Féin, at least initially, was not overly unhappy with attacks ofthis kind from someone like McDowell. For one thing, this was because theparty was, for much of the period, shielded from the full force of McDowell’sattacks by its role in the peace process and (theoretical) presence in govern-ment in Northern Ireland. These undoubtedly increased the respectability ofthe party. At the same time, the fact that McDowell was widely viewed asvery much a right-wing establishment figure meant that his hostility couldplausibly be interpreted, as it was (and not just by republicans), as evidence ofthe apprehension with which the main political parties viewed the growth ofSinn Féin.53 Furthermore, McDowell’s position as a front-line Cabinet min-ister ensured that his regular attacks on the party gained much publicity andthereby served to elevate Sinn Féin’s status and importance beyond the levelperhaps merited. In this way, McDowell may actually have helped the partytowards fulfilling its goal of becoming the effective political opposition tothe government in the Republic.

Further in line with this goal, it is also clear that the Adams–McGuinnessleadership recognized the importance of modernizing Sinn Féin’s policyagenda. While the party’s self-image continued to be an essentially radicalone, the leadership realized that, in order to be considered a genuine alterna-tive, fit for government, Sinn Féin had to offer a more sophisticated politicalmessage. Reflecting this, the way in which party policy was made changedsignificantly towards the end of the 1990s. Whereas, previously, many ofSinn Féin’s positions had developed semi-organically, with policy originating

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from individual Cumainn (branches), a more professional approach was nowtaken. Thus, not only was a Policy Development and Review Department cre-ated within Sinn Féin, but ‘experts’ on any given subject, even from outsidethe party, were afforded a far more prominent role in the procedure.54 DawnDoyle, the Sinn Féin director of publicity, describes the process of Sinn Féinpolicy formulation in this era as follows:

Now you have somebody commissioned to write a [policy] document . . .

It’s done in consultation with people within the party who would haveexpertise on it and people outside the party who would be willing to helpus. Then you would run a number of conferences – some at regional level,some at national level – to discuss it. And there people can put amend-ments and changes to it. Then normally, in the first instance, it would goas a consultation document to the ard fheis and then hopefully at the nextard fheis it will be passed.55

As a result of this process, Sinn Féin found itself increasingly able to producefar more erudite and detailed statements of policy, on all major politicalissues, than had previously been the case.

Moreover, the actual content of that policy moved ever more towards themainstream political agenda. Evidence to this effect could be seen from thegreater attention paid to questions of economics. From the time it gained itsfirst Dáil seat, Sinn Féin began to take a more active role in discussing thegovernment’s budgetary policy. For the most part, the party’s stance on thisissue continued to be imbued with a left-wing radicalism that reproached thegovernment’s alleged preference for a ‘budget for the rich’ or a ‘charter forthe wealthy’.56 Yet, accompanying such straightforward rhetoric, Sinn Féinalso began producing its own pre-budget submissions and used CaoimhghínÓ Caoláin’s position as TD to publicize them.57 In 2002, for instance, theparty called for the creation of a ‘fair and just tax regime’, which wouldinclude a 50 per cent ‘super-tax’ on earnings over a100,000, as well as anincrease in capital gains tax and a freeze on reductions in corporation tax.58

Such suggestions were reiterated in the following years.59 Beyond this, SinnFéin attempted to develop a fully coherent economic policy agenda that laidout, in clearer terms, what republicans wished to see happen in Ireland. Theparty’s production of substantial documents, such as Building a Just Economyin 2002, No Right Turn in 2003 and Eliminating Poverty – A 21st Century Goalin 2004, stood as testament to this effort.60

There were even signs that the Adams–McGuinness leadership was increas-ingly prepared to move Sinn Féin away from its more controversial policiesin this area. Thus, even as the party continued to criticize the neo-liberal eco-nomic model and called for a ‘radical socialist republican alternative’, it alsodisplayed a desire to avoid alienating the business sector.61 In February 1998,for instance, Gerry Adams had addressed the Northern Ireland Chamber

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of Commerce and spoken of widespread ‘misunderstandings’ of Sinn Féin’seconomic policy. The Sinn Féin President then went on to state his beliefthat businesses, including ‘the multinational corporation’ should ‘facilitateinvestment and economic development’ – a position seemingly at oddswith his party’s avowed hostility to foreign direct investment, as expressedelsewhere.62 Similarly, when addressing the Dublin Chamber of Commercein 2004, Adams stated that while Sinn Féin was ‘not in principle opposed tohigher taxes . . . we have no plans to increase them [emphasis added]’.63 This,despite the party’s manifesto commitment to raising both capital gains taxand corporation tax and to imposing a new 50 per cent super-tax. Finally,in January 2006, the party leadership actually announced a rethink of itseconomic policy in light of the ‘different world’ that was now said to exist.64

Doubtless such reassessment was driven, to a significant degree, by com-ments of the sort made by people like the Irish entrepreneur, Denis O’Brien,and Kevin Rollins, chief executive of the computer company, Dell. In late2005, O’Brien described the possibility of Sinn Féin coming to power, on itsexisting economic platform, as a ‘frightening vista’.65 Rollins, meanwhile,suggested that a rise in Irish corporation tax (as previously favoured by SinnFéin) might cause Dell to remove its operations from Ireland.66 Given that, by2006, the latter company employed over 4,000 people in Dublin and Limerickand alone accounted for over 5 per cent of Irish exports, the impetus for SinnFéin to change course was clear.67 To do otherwise meant preserving a pol-icy that was likely to cause job losses, serious economic pain and be deeplyunpopular with potential voters. In this way, the underlying trend in theevolution of the party’s economic policy reflected the desire of the Adams–McGuinness leadership for an ever-greater engagement with mainstreampolitical life, with the aim of making Sinn Féin a viable and successful politicalalternative.

Of even greater significance in this regard was the experience the partygained in government (albeit only for a short period) in Northern Ireland. Thepotential value of this experience was recognized by the Adams–McGuinnessleadership at the time that the Northern Irish Executive was formed. As theSinn Féin MP and MLA, Conor Murphy, has explained, the party opted totake control of the big-spending Health and Education departments – despiteHealth apparently being considered a ‘poisoned chalice’ – precisely because itgave the party ‘the power to impact as wide as possible across the community’.In so doing, it helped to ‘show the party’s capabilities’.68 The result, accordingto Murphy, was that whereas

both governments and some of the other political parties thought, ‘SinnFéin is OK for “street politics”, but take them out of the streets and putthem into an institution and they’ll flounder’ . . . actually our ability to actwas equal to and probably surpassed the capabilities of any other politicalparty here.69

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The expectation of the republican leadership was that the southern Irishelectorate would not have failed to notice this lesson as well; namely, thatSinn Féin was capable of handling mainstream political issues and could,therefore, be considered a genuine ‘party of government’ south of the borderas well.

The ‘party of government’ versus the ‘party of protest’

The development of the ‘governmental’ aspect of Sinn Féin’s character wasnot a purely straightforward task for the Adams–McGuinness leadership. Onthe contrary, it proved itself to be something of a double-edged sword. Along-side the improved status and respectability it brought, it also threatened tothrow up serious internal difficulties. Foremost among these was the fact thatit risked diluting, or even destroying, the more radical ethos that was integralto both Sinn Féin’s political message and the party’s sense of identity. Thus,the party’s director of publicity, Dawn Doyle has described how her

ultimate fear is that [Sinn Féin] will end up as an electoral party, or asa purely elected-representative party, where people don’t have a role toplay. That would obviously be the death-knell of the party . . . Keeping thesame kind of revolutionary ethos that we’ve had for thirty years has to becentral to what we do from now on.70

Without doubt, Sinn Féin’s entry into government and the searchfor ever-greater political expansion threatened to undermine the kind of‘revolutionary ethos’ that Doyle wished to see preserved. A simple exampleto this effect was provided by the aforementioned issue of ‘refuse charges’.While the party’s official position on this matter was one of outright oppo-sition to the charges, it found it expedient, when in power on Sligo Countycouncil in November 2000, to introduce them.71 On that occasion, the justifi-cation offered was that it was better for Sinn Féin to compromise its principlesand hold on to power (on a council where Sean MacManus had recently beenelected the modern party’s first mayor in the Republic of Ireland), than toremain in principled isolation, out of power.72

A more high-profile illustration of the tensions raised by this clash of prin-ciples and power was provided by the question of private funding for publicservices in Northern Ireland (as encapsulated in the British government’sPrivate Finance Initiative [PFI] and Private-Public Partnership [PPP] schemesfor Health and Education). As the Ministers for Education and Health respec-tively, both Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Brun had to countenancethe implementation of proposals of this nature. In so doing, they acteddirectly contrary to Sinn Féin’s commitment to comprehensive public ser-vices funded from general taxation alone.73 According to the party’s Assembly

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leader, Conor Murphy, the decision to override principle for the sake of powerwas again justifiable on the grounds of short-term expediency:

People often throw up the issue of Public-Private Partnerships and howMartin and Bairbre operated those . . . the difficulty, firstly, was the policyof the Executive here was to use those and Martin and Bairbre as Ministersin the Executive were bound to abide by Executive policy. Secondly, therewere a whole range of schemes already in train, that had they said, ‘Well, Ihave an ideological objection to Public-Private Partnerships’, would havestopped . . . you know, hospitals being built or schools being built. Now,that’s not an argument not to do it.74

Nevertheless, this issue clearly caused unrest within the party. In the wordsof Jim Gibney, it was ‘not a straightforward matter internally’.75 Indicativeof this, John Kelly, the Sinn Féin MLA who left the party in early 2004, hassince claimed that the implementation of PFI and PPP was something that‘no self-respecting radical republican ought to support’.76 That it took placehe ascribed to a view within the republican leadership that ‘McGuinnessneeded PFI to get a school built, so he could be seen cutting a ribbon. Thesame applied to Bairbre de Brun as Minister for Health . . . they felt that it wasmore important to be seen to be giving £40 million to a hospital, whereverthat money came from’.77 For Kelly, this represented the ‘dumping of radicalpolitics’.78 And while such criticism should obviously be treated cautiously(given Kelly’s acrimonious departure from Sinn Féin), when taken togetherwith the fact that the party’s ard fheis passed a motion stating its explicitopposition to PFI/PPP, it would seem to accurately reflect the unease thatmany within the republican movement felt over the matter.79

The existence of that unease may well have contributed to the discussionover the future direction of Sinn Féin that took place in this period. It was adebate galvanized, to some degree, by the possibility that Sinn Féin (followingits 2002 electoral success) might soon have the opportunity to enter coali-tion government in the Republic of Ireland – an issue on which entrenchedlines of division clearly existed within the republican movement. On the oneside were those such as the MLA Barry McElduff who stated, ‘I don’t thinkit will be very long before Sinn Féin is ready to say, “We’re ready for gov-ernment in Dublin”.’80 By contrast, others, such as Dawn Doyle, claimedthey would be ‘very uncomfortable going into coalition with any right-wingparty’, by which she meant either of the two main parties in the Republic.81

Likewise, Eoin O’Broin argued that for Sinn Féin to enter government withFianna Fáil would be ‘disastrous’, as it would ‘destroy the potential for a left-green-republican alliance’ involving Sinn Féin, Labour, the Green Party andIndependents, which O’Broin felt was a better option for his party.82

Such differences were indicative of wider conflicts of opinion amongrepublicans over the future development of Sinn Féin. At the heart of these

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divisions, as has been intimated, lay the debate between those who feltthe greater priority should be attached to achieving political expansion andpower, and those who wished to maintain ideological principle. Reflectingthis, An Phoblacht/Republican News carried a series of articles in the sum-mer of 2003 in which various contributors outlined their respective visionsfor party development in the short-to-medium term. Broadly speaking, thepieces could be divided between those calling for the pursuit of a ‘left republi-can alternative’, or a ‘left turn’ to avoid a ‘middle-class cul-de-sac’, as againstthose arguing that the priority should be building ‘political strength’ andmobilizing ‘the greater number of Irish people, North and South, in supportof Sinn Féin’.83 While those in the second category did not argue for a nakedlyopportunistic approach, their collective conviction was, as one contributorstated, that ‘Obsession with ideological purity and the following of dogmasthat don’t suit objective conditions is a recipe for disaster.’84

As has been repeatedly demonstrated, this latter analysis was far more inkeeping with the attitude of the Adams–McGuinness leadership and, for thisreason, the balance between principle and power continued to be tilted firmlytowards the latter at this time. This is not to say that the republican leadershipwas entirely devoid of principle. Rather, it is to note that their principleswere tempered by a deep-rooted pragmatism, expressed neatly by the long-time leadership member and Sinn Féin vice-president, Pat Doherty, when hedeclared, ‘A good idea is only a good idea if it works. You can have all thesetheoretical positions . . . but if they don’t work, then all they are is words onpaper . . . At the end of the day, there is no substitute for political strength.’85

Nevertheless, in seeking to achieve such political strength, it is clear thatthe Adams–McGuinness leadership had to be ever mindful of the fact thatmany within the movement would perhaps have preferred a greater prioriti-zation of principle, as opposed to power. Internally, the leadership was forcedto maintain a delicate balancing act: principle versus power, radicalism versusrespectability.

As had previously been the case, the foreign policy trajectory that SinnFéin pursued in this period, reflected the interaction between these conflict-ing pressures. On the one hand, the party continued both to position itselfvery much to the left of the global political spectrum and to cultivate theinternational associations that flowed from this. Republicans, for instance,continued to champion the Palestinian cause, which was frequently juxta-posed to an Israeli state that was cast in negative light. At the time of theJenin refugee camp invasion by the Israeli Defence Forces in 2002, for exam-ple, An Phoblacht/Republican News decried the, ‘butchery of the Palestinianpeople by the Israeli Army and Ariel Sharon’.86 By the same token, when PLOleader, Yasser Arafat, died, Sinn Féin’s newspaper pronounced, ‘The people’sleader – Yasser Arafat dies’.87 Not only did Gerry Adams then sign the bookof condolence at Dublin’s Mansion House, but also he publicly laid a wreathat Arafat’s tomb when he visited Palestine in 2006.88 The fact that, by the

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time of his death, Arafat had largely been isolated and marginalized by theinternational community as a corrupt autocrat, primarily responsible for theSecond Intifada that began in 2001, was overlooked entirely.

In this regard, Sinn Féin still viewed itself as belonging firmly to therevolutionary left. Its condemnation of Israel fed into a wider critique of‘imperialism’, as embodied by the United States. This was particularly so fol-lowing the election of President George W. Bush as US president in 2000. Atthe outset of Bush’s presidency, for instance, An Phoblacht/Republican Newsclaimed that his election was indicative of ‘how America learned to stopthinking and love the bomb’.89 At the time of his 2004 visit to Ireland,meanwhile, Bush was said to represent ‘the dark, venal and incurably vio-lent side of the American character’.90 More broadly, Sinn Féin displayeda recurring willingness to adopt positions antithetical to those of the USadministration. With regards to Central and Southern America, republicanscontinued to show reverence for revolutionary icons, such as Fidel Castroin Cuba. The party thus lauded the ‘wonderful spirit of the Cuban revolu-tion’, and claimed that this had created ‘the most egalitarian society in theThird World’.91 In December 2001, Gerry Adams even visited Havana and metwith Castro – a trip made in the face of opposition from many of Sinn Féin’sAmerican allies.92 Elsewhere, Sinn Féin evinced sympathy for the Venezuelanand Bolivian presidents, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, and their ‘Bolivarian’revolutions, which were staunchly opposed to neo-liberalist globalization asfavoured by the US.93

And yet, even as much of Sinn Féin’s international activity displayed a rad-ical posture of this kind, so other tendencies were also increasingly visible. Ofparticular significance, for example, was the emphasis put on what were heldto be the ‘lessons’ of the Northern Irish peace process. Hence, while repub-lican sympathies clearly lay with the Palestinians, as opposed to the Israelis,the manner in which such sympathy was expressed was now rooted firmly inthe context of the ‘peace process’ narrative. For that reason, the party’s publicposition in relation to the Second Intifada, while implicitly pro-Palestinian,also emphasized the importance of both sides getting back to peace talks.Thus, Joan O’ Connor, the then head of Sinn Féin’s International Depart-ment, expressed the party’s ‘concern at the deteriorating situation’ in late2000 and stressed ‘the need for dialogue to achieve conflict resolution’.94

A similar story was in evidence in relation to Sinn Féin’s reaction to eventsin the Basque country. There, the party maintained a tradition of close tiesto the Basque ‘independence movement’ of ETA and its political wing, HerriBatasuna. Now, though, such ties were articulated via a new discourse asto the possibility that there might be a Basque peace process, similar tothat which had occurred in Ireland. In 1998, when the Lizarra Agreementappeared to open the way for just such a development in the Basque coun-try, Sinn Féin declared itself firmly in favour of the initiative; all the more sowhen it led to an ETA ceasefire.95 Subsequently, reports on the state of the

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Basque peace process became a regular feature on the foreign pages of theparty’s newspaper.96 And while that ETA ceasefire collapsed in 1999, backingwas given to further Basque peace initiatives in 2003 and 2004.97

In this way, Sinn Féin’s foreign policy continued to mirror the domesticevolution of the republican movement. The party did not renounce its radi-cal allies, but it did reinterpret the meaning of such alliances. Now they werejudged less in the context of shared armed struggles for national liberationand more according to an allegedly universal model of conflict resolution. Inkeeping with this approach, Sinn Féin sought to establish itself as an inter-national symbol of the transition from violence to peace. Whereas once ithad been an ambassador for the virtues of the Armalite, now it sought to beso for the Agreement.

To this end, the party increasingly distanced itself from those who contin-ued to engage explicitly in ‘terrorism’ in this period. Thus, in the wake ofthe al-Qaeda attacks on America on 11 September 2001, Gerry Adams wasquick to declare his opposition to what he termed ‘ethically indefensible’terrorism.98 In the years that followed, other terrorist attacks – the 2004Madrid train bombings, the Beslan school massacre of the same year andthe London attacks of July 2005 – were all met with statements of condem-nation from Sinn Féin spokespeople.99 It was also no coincidence that thefirst act of IRA decommissioning followed barely a month after al-Qaeda’s9/11 attacks. The republican leadership had recognized that these had cre-ated a new dividing line in the realm of international affairs: in the wordsof President Bush, ‘You’re either with us or against us in the fight againstterror.’100 In this context, the Adams–McGuinness leadership was keen toensure that republicans did not end up on the wrong side of the divide.

This distinction between republicans and terrorists was deemed to be vitalif Sinn Féin was to take forward its objective of being seen as a mainstreampolitical party, both domestically and internationally – and particularly inthe United States. The importance of the latter had only been strengthenedby the growing scale of financial assistance that the party received from itssupporters in the US. By December 2000, for instance, the Friends of SinnFéin organization claimed to have raised $4.5 million since its inception in1995.101 Yet, in the wake of the 11 September attacks, donations to the partyslumped markedly. During the second half of 2001, the organization reportedproceeds amounting to only £12,000, as compared to £381,000 in the pre-vious six months.102 Clearly, therefore, if the republican movement wishedto continue to draw significant financial support from the United States, asthe Adams–McGuinness leadership most certainly did, Sinn Féin needed todistance itself ever more obviously from political violence and terrorism.

Even prior to 9/11, the necessity of doing just that had been made plain bythe events of August 2001, when three Irish republicans had been arrestedin Bogota, Columbia, accused of aiding the Marxist guerrillas of the FARC(Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia). This organization had been

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involved in a violent campaign against the Columbian government, draw-ing much of its finances from drug trafficking. It was this latter characteristicthat gave it particular salience in relation to Sinn Féin’s political project inthe US; for, to many Americans, the FARC was seen as the group primarilyresponsible for the cocaine problem on the country’s streets. As a result, theestablishing of a link between them and the republican movement had thepotential to seriously tarnish Sinn Féin in American eyes. With this in mind,the party’s initial response to the Columbian arrests was one of disavowaland denial.103 Subsequently, as the republican identities of the arrested menwere confirmed, Sinn Féin shifted to describing their presence in Columbiaas having been unsanctioned and purely personal.104 That this strategy wasnot entirely successful either, can be gauged from the obvious unease that theColumbia Three episode generated among Sinn Féin’s corporate allies in IrishAmerica. Bill Flynn, for instance, one of the founders of the highly influen-tial, Americans for a New Irish Agenda group that had played a prominentrole in the early years of the Irish peace process, issued a statement describ-ing the Columbian revelations as, ‘the greatest puzzle that I have seen in theentire 10 or 15 years that I have been involved in the north of Ireland’.105

The sense of uncertainty and suspicion that Flynn articulated was typical ofmany Irish Americans who had previously given vital support to Sinn Féin.As Jim Gibney has admitted:

there’s no doubt Columbia was very damaging to Sinn Féin in the US. Anddamaging because it caused confusion . . . people couldn’t understand it . . .

And a lot of work has been done by Sinn Féin representatives in the US, totry and deal with the fallout from that . . . but it’s not been a good situationfor republicans to be in.106

Thus, the Columbian affair had already demonstrated the difficulties causedfor Sinn Féin by continued links between republicans and international ter-rorism. The al-Qaeda attacks on America less than one month later merelygave added emphasis to this reality and forced the party to go further still inits efforts to dissociate itself from such relationships.

However, not only did the post-9/11 environment make it imperative thatSinn Féin divorce itself from political violence, but also it made its associationwith the wider radical project more problematic. Squaring the circle betweenthis radicalism and the importance that the party still attached to US involve-ment in the Irish peace process became increasingly difficult. Evidence ofthis tension could be seen, for example, in the party’s response to what wasperhaps the seminal issue of the early twenty-first century: the US/UK-ledinvasion of Iraq.

As the diplomatic build-up to that invasion reached its conclusion in March2003, An Phoblacht/Republican News described what was going on as, ‘Count-down to slaughter’ and lamented the ‘suffering that will be inflicted on

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the innocent civilian population of Iraq’, as a result of the ‘unjust war’.107

Following on from this, Sinn Féin urged the Irish government not to allowUS warplanes to utilize Shannon airport en route to the Middle East. Afterthe war, the party became a firm advocate of the need for an immediate endto, what it called, the ‘illegal occupation of Iraq’.108 Sinn Féin, it should bestressed, did not go so far as to actively support the insurgency against theUS presence in Iraq; this was left to the dissident republican organizations.109

Still, the party’s opposition to American policy on this issue was clear.Nevertheless, alongside this rhetorical opposition, only two weeks before

the invasion of Iraq began, Gerry Adams led his party’s annual delegation tothe St Patrick’s Day celebrations in the White House. Adams’ participationflew in the face of demands being made in the Irish Dáil at the time (bythe Socialist Party deputy, Joe Higgins) that ‘the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern,[and] other Irish politicians’ boycott the celebrations, in protest at ‘the BushAdministration’s expressed intention to start an unjustified, illegal and inhu-mane war against Iraq’.110 Further, the whole St Patrick’s Day event, normallyheld on St Patrick’s Day itself (17 March), had been moved forward four daysto 13 March 2003, so as to accommodate better the timetable for war inIraq. In spite of all this, Adams and his team had visited the White House asintended and been prepared to shake hands with the American President.111

Moreover, a few weeks later, on 8 April 2003, with the war well under way,Adams headed another delegation from his party to Hillsborough Castle, theofficial residence of Northern Ireland’s Secretary of State, to attend the so-called ‘war summit’ between the American President and the British PrimeMinister. On that occasion, Adams did hand President Bush a letter detailinghis party’s opposition to the Iraq war.112 This opposition, however, did notprevent the republican leadership from doing business with President Bush;a fact that on this occasion proved too much even for many republicans. Theresult was that the then Sinn Féin chairman, Mitchel McLaughlin, was booedand heckled when be subsequently tried to address an anti-war rally outsideHillsborough that included Sinn Féin activists.113

Sinn Féin’s approach to the Bush administration and the Iraq war, then,was, in many ways, representative of the difficulties that the party faced inits foreign policy, as it sought to reconcile a radical global personality withmainstream diplomatic activity, particularly in relation to the United States.This, in turn, proved emblematic of the contradictions that confronted theparty domestically as it sought expansion. The impulse for power of SinnFéin the ‘party of government’, had always to be balanced with recognitionof the more principled positions of Sinn Féin the ‘party of protest’. Plottinga path between these two poles was not always a straightforward task for theAdams–McGuinness leadership. A careful course had to be steered. In this,the republican leadership was certainly helped by the electoral success thatSinn Féin enjoyed, as the party both consolidated its hegemony over thenationalist community in Northern Ireland and made substantial political

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inroads in the Republic. Moreover, the ongoing peace process, by virtue of therole it played in generating that success, provided a vital unifying theme andproject for the party, which eased the friction of the power versus principleconflict.

The ‘instrumentalization’ of the peace process

That the peace process continued to be of critical importance to Sinn Féin inthe period after 2001 is undeniable. Indeed, in the words of one republicanactivist, the party ‘sailed the wind of the popularity of the Peace Process’.114

As it had previously, Sinn Féin successfully used the faltering nature of thatprocess, coupled with its professed commitment to the Good Friday Agree-ment, as key ingredients in the political mix it presented to the electorate onboth sides of the Irish border. Once again, the principal target audience for theparty was nationalist Ireland, which was deemed susceptible to the particularrepublican narrative.

Within that narrative, the central theme was that of Sinn Féin as theembodiment of an assertive and dynamic Irish nationalism, facing up to anintransigent Unionism and its allies in the British state. Foremost among thelatter were said to be the ‘securocrats’, on whom Sinn Féin blamed any adversedevelopment in the peace process. Whether in the form of the Castlereaghbreak-in of 2002, the exposure of a spy-ring at Stormont later that sameyear, or the introduction and then reports of the International Monitor-ing Commission (IMC) that scrutinized paramilitary activity, any incidentthat carried potentially negative consequences for the republican movementwas dismissed variously as the product of ‘black propaganda’, a ‘securocrat’conspiracy, or the work of those committed to a ‘politico-military agenda’.115

In addition to such claims, which became commonplace during this period,the party also made extensive use of various rhetorical devices to deflectcriticism of itself. A prominent example, in this regard, was what CardinalCahal Daly once defined as ‘whataboutery’.116 With regards to Sinn Féin, thisentailed the turning of any accusations made against the republican move-ment back against the accuser, in order to weaken the force of the originalaccusations. Hence, when the British government decided to postpone indef-initely the scheduled Northern Ireland Assembly election in 2003, becauseof the failure of the IRA to deliver ‘acts of completion’, the party said ofthe British, ‘How dare you lecture us about democracy . . . [you] who havemarginalised and disempowered whole communities’.117 Similarly, follow-ing the US/British-led invasion of Iraq, An Phoblacht/Republican News arguedthat the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had been ‘thoroughly morallycompromised’ by the affair and continued that ‘Never again will he be in aposition to preach to others about democracy and the use of force and neitherwill anyone have to listen when he does.’118

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By using language in this fashion, Sinn Féin sought to forestall any attemptto attribute blame to republicans for problems in the peace process. Instead,all such problems were depicted as being the work of those seeking to help‘anti-Agreement Unionists’. For example, at the time of the October 2002suspension of the Agreement’s institutions (on the back of allegations thatthere was a republican spy-ring at Stormont), An Phoblacht/Republican Newsdeclared the crisis to be merely a ‘smokescreen’, giving ‘sufficient politicalcover for rejectionist unionism to walk away from the Agreement withouttaking the blame’.119 As to why Unionists, including David Trimble and theUUP, should be seeking to dispense with the Agreement, this was once moreattributed to ‘a sectarian agenda that harked back to the Orange state andthe old Stormont regime’.120 As in the earlier phase of the peace process,this intransigent and sectarian Unionism was contrasted with a benevo-lent and flexible republicanism. To this end, familiar rhetorical tools weredeployed. In October 2003, for example, in the build-up to yet anotherround of negotiations, Sinn Féin’s newspaper maintained that republicanswere ready to ‘stretch beyond ourselves and beyond our commitments underthe Agreement’. Unionists, by contrast, were said to be trying to ‘jeopardiseprogress’.121

The IRA was again carefully used by the Adams–McGuinness leadership todemonstrate republican commitment to the peace process. Time and again,it was claimed that only republican initiatives had served to unlock the ‘log-jam’ that otherwise existed. The somewhat bizarre inversion of logic thatthis involved was captured by a statement from the organization in Septem-ber 2002, which declared, ‘There is no threat to the peace process fromthe IRA . . . There would be no peace process but for IRA initiatives.’122 Thereverse possibility that, but for the IRA and its actions, the need for, andduration of, an actual peace process would have been dramatically curtailed,was ignored. Indeed, the argument was subsequently extended further. By2004, it had become commonplace for republican spokespeople to assert, asAn Phoblacht/Republican News did, that that year marked ‘the tenth anniver-sary of the IRA cessation’ and that ‘Throughout those ten years, republicanshave been the driving force of the Peace Process.’123 Not only did this buildon the kind of distorted logic already described, but it also required an ‘air-brushing’ of history. The collapse of the ceasefire in February 1996 and thereturn to full-scale armed struggle between then and July 1997, were conve-niently removed from this narrative. In this way, the ‘Tactical Use of ArmedStruggle’, increasingly became the ‘Tactical Use of the IRA’, with the Adams–McGuinness leadership achieving, in the words of one former member ofthe republican movement, a ‘subtle but brilliant use of the IRA’.124 On thoseoccasions when the peace process appeared to run into difficulty, a gestureof movement from the IRA confirmed republican faith – especially when somany of their acts were self-labelled ‘historic’ and ‘ground-breaking’ and setagainst an apparently ungenerous Unionist response.

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Sometimes, the party sought to use this dynamic to appeal to nationalistIreland – even over the heads of the Irish government. At moments of crisis inthe peace process, for instance, the alleged failure of the Dublin governmentto play its proper part was often said to be the cause of the problem. Thus,following the breakdown of negotiations in October 2003, Sinn Féin labelledBertie Ahern the ‘weakness in [the] peace process’ and accused the Irish gov-ernment of ‘breaking the nationalist consensus’ by failing to ‘defend theAgreement’.125 By the same token, such charges were repeated, with addedvehemence, when the Irish government agreed to the establishment of theIMC.126 Not only did this rhetoric reflect genuine republican unhappinesswith the role of the Dublin government, but also it again raised the possi-bility that Sinn Féin might, in the earlier words of Tom Hartley, succeed indriving a ‘republican wedge’ into Fianna Fáil.127

However, Sinn Féin was not always at loggerheads with the Irish gov-ernment over issues relating to the peace process. On the contrary, theAdams–McGuinness leadership discovered that the party could also benefitfrom finding common ground with those in power in Dublin. An example inthis regard came when Sinn Féin found its opposition to the postponementof the 2003 Assembly election, to some extent, endorsed by the Irish govern-ment. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern himself, stated that postponement wasa course of action he ‘opposed and continue[d] to oppose’.128 Furthermore,the Irish government was joined in this stance by several US Congressmenand even the US Special Envoy, Richard Haas. The latter voiced uneasewith the decision to postpone the election and called on the British gov-ernment to hold the poll as soon as possible.129 By effectively re-affirmingSinn Féin’s argument, the Irish government (and different echelons of theUS political establishment) lent added credence to the republican analy-sis of the situation. That analysis, as articulated by Sinn Féin, was thatthe British had acted in the manner of a ‘tin-pot dictatorship’ and therebyshown the ‘undemocratic’ nature of partition.130 Flowing from this stance,the party launched a ‘democracy denied’ campaign, which included callsfor an, ‘island-wide day of action’ in protest at the British government’sbehaviour.131 And while such calls went largely unheeded, the fact that othermajor participants in the peace process had offered similar criticism to thatof Sinn Féin, merely increased the legitimacy of the latter’s view.

In this way, then, there were clear strategic benefits to be had by Sinn Féinplacing an emphasis on those issues that would resonate most strongly withinnationalist Ireland, broadly conceived. A further example here was the issueof ‘collusion’ arising out of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. The allegation thatmembers of the British security forces had been involved in murder – eitherpassively or even actively – during the conflict, was a subject that could beexploited with relative ease, to show republicans as the victims of British‘dirty tricks’. As a result, it was perhaps for this reason, that during the insti-tutional hiatus over the summer of 2003, Sinn Féin sought to mobilize its

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support base on precisely this matter. The result was a well-attended rally inBelfast that called for the ‘truth on collusion’.132 Later, the party gave promi-nent coverage to the report by the retired Canadian judge, Peter Cory, whichurged the British government to initiate a series of public inquiries into inci-dents of alleged collusion.133 When Cory was subsequently critical of theBritish decision to delay an inquiry into the killing of the Belfast lawyer, PatFinucane, this too was highlighted by Sinn Féin.134 In this, the party againfound itself on the same side as the Irish government, which also expresseddisappointment at the British response to Judge Cory’s report.135

As with other matters, this is not to say, it should be emphasized, thatthe subject of collusion was not highly important to republicans themselves.In many cases, after all, it was members of the republican movement whowere the alleged victims of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, the purpose hereis again to highlight the potential strategic advantage that Sinn Féin couldhope to accrue by focusing attention on the issue. As one with which themajority of Irish nationalists could find common ground – but commonground far removed from the British/Unionist position – a focus on this mat-ter served to improve the political environment in which Sinn Féin operated,making it more conducive to a republican outlook. In this fashion, it wasmerely one more avenue by which the Adams–McGuinness leadership couldhope to achieve cultural hegemony for the republican narrative and ideology,particularly in the Republic of Ireland.

Sinn Féin’s success in this regard, in creating a political climate thatwas broadly inclined to view events from a republican perspective, can beseen from a brief analysis of the abortive ‘comprehensive deal’ betweenSinn Féin and the DUP in late 2004. Unsurprisingly, Sinn Féin had placedeven greater emphasis on the notion of a bigoted, reactionary Unionism,following the triumph of Ian Paisley’s DUP over the UUP in the Assemblyelection of 2003 (a message that was all the more persuasive, given Paisley’spersonal political history). Writing soon after that triumph in December2003, An Phoblacht/Republican News’s Laura Friel noted that ‘mob violencehas been the hallmark of Paisley’s political rhetoric, unionist paramilitaryviolence has also been its bedrock . . . that man, like his party, presentsa heady mixture of reactionary politics, religious intolerance and racistattitudes’.136

In order to emphasize the gap between Sinn Féin and the DUP, republicansonce more portrayed themselves as solely interested in advancing the peaceprocess, with frequent calls for direct dialogue with Paisley’s party. Such callswere made safe in the knowledge that they would never be answered in thepositive; a point made emphatically by Paisley himself at the 2003 electioncount, when he grabbed the journalist Ivan Little by the lapels and bellowedat the man, ‘My party’s not for talking to Sinn Féin. And anyone who does willbe put out of my party.’137 The contrast between the apparently ‘moderate’Sinn Féin and the intractable DUP was emphasized, scarcely accidentally, by

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Adams, just over a month after the Paisley–Little altercation, when the SinnFéin President declared:

Let me reiterate Sinn Féin’s attitude to the DUP. Sinn Féin sets no pre-conditions whatsoever on talking to the DUP. Neither are we againstsharing power with them . . . Our record shows clearly that we are forthe peace process, the political process and the wider process of conflictresolution.138

Such themes were, of course, maintained as Sinn Féin and the DUP werepushed towards a ‘deal of deals’ by the two governments in late 2004. The ideabehind this concept was that all outstanding issues, from the precise oper-ation of the institutions (at that point suspended since October 2002), tothe question of ongoing paramilitarism, would be resolved in the contextof one all-encompassing set of negotiations. Thereafter, the governmentshoped to see the institutions restored and Sinn Féin and the DUP enter anew power-sharing administration for Northern Ireland.

In the run-up to the talks designed to achieve this goal, as might havebeen expected, Sinn Féin was quick to claim that the DUP was seeking to‘undermine’ the Good Friday Agreement, while republicans were ‘leavingno stone unturned’ in an effort to get a breakthrough.139 That they wouldargue as they did – that Paisley was the real obstacle to progress – was hardlysurprising, given the way in which Sinn Féin had used the peace processpreviously to advance its narrative of events. Remarkable, however, was thefact that the majority of the Irish media and political class were preparedto accept this explanatory framework. After the unsuccessful round of talksat Leeds Castle in September, for instance, the Irish Independent stated cate-gorically, ‘Provos ready to go the full distance for a peace deal’.140 In similarvein, the Irish Times noted that the IRA was ‘willing to disarm by the endof the year’; while an Irish Examiner editorial claimed that continued diffi-culties stemmed from the fact that the DUP kept moving ‘the goalposts’.141

The Sunday Business Post was even more forthright, asserting ‘DUP scuppersNorth deal’.142

Such impressions were further strengthened by the reaction from both gov-ernments to the Leeds Castle talks. A joint statement, written in familiarlanguage, declared that, ‘The governments believe that what is on offer now[from the IRA] is reasonable in its substance and historic in meaning.’143

Bertie Ahern, meanwhile, was heard to declare that the issue of paramili-tarism had effectively been dealt with and all that remained to be resolvedwere questions of an institutional nature.144 When the talks process even-tually did collapse in December, then, there was general agreement withinthe Irish media, as evinced by the reporting of the Sunday Business Post andRTE, among others, that this was a product of the DUP’s desire to ‘humiliate’republicans – a desire supposedly verified by Paisley’s demand for a ‘Kodak

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moment’ (photographs of decommissioning) and his call for the IRA to ‘wearsack-cloth and ashes’.145

Media acceptance of the notion that it was the DUP that was largely, if notentirely, to blame for the collapse of the 2004 talks was, in turn, reflected inthe attitudes of the wider public. Opinion polls at this time showed that GerryAdams’ personal satisfaction ratings continued to ride at over 50 per cent.This figure was only slightly down on that of the Taoiseach himself and onethat was indicative of Adams’ status as one of the two most popular partyleaders in southern Irish politics.146 Indications were, that Sinn Féin’s widerpopularity had in no way been dented by the talks’ failure and that the party’soverall share of the vote would continue to expand. With regards to the latter,there were even suggestions, not wholly unrealistic, by the end of 2004, thatthe party might come to hold the balance of power in the Dáil after the nextIrish general election.147

What the foregoing indicates, therefore, is the extent to which Sinn Féinhad successfully ‘instrumentalized’ the peace process in support of its broaderpolitical project. The party’s use of that process had assisted the creation of aclimate in which a growing number of people seemed predisposed to accept arepublican analysis of events. Indeed, it might be said that the peace processhad opened up the possibility that Sinn Féin might finally be able to achievethe kind of ‘republicanization’ of the southern Irish electorate that GerryAdams had first spoken of some two decades previously.

Conclusion

As 2004 drew to a close, then, Sinn Féin appeared to have found a particularlysuccessful formula for achieving significant political expansion in the Repub-lic of Ireland. Within this formula, the rolling peace process had become adecisive element, providing the party with a steady stream of good public-ity. Not only had this guaranteed Sinn Féin’s representatives a higher mediaprofile than might otherwise have been expected (for what remained a smallparty), but also it had allowed republicans to strengthen the persuasivenessof their narrative among a broader section of nationalist Ireland. The processhad, thus, created a political hinterland for Sinn Féin, which the party couldplausibly hope to mobilize in pursuit of its objectives.

At the same time, Sinn Féin was evolving rapidly in this period and makingitself ever more credible as a mainstream political party. The growing sophis-tication of its policy agenda, coupled with the respectability it had gainedfrom its role in the peace process (and in the Northern Irish Executive),had ensured that the party could no longer be dismissed as being politi-cally lightweight. On the contrary, it had, not altogether fanciful, designson establishing itself as the effective opposition in southern Irish politics andentering government there at some point in the not-too-distant future. Evenso, Sinn Féin’s developing countenance as a potential ‘party of government’

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continued to be balanced by its self-image as a ‘party of protest’. With regardsto the latter, an integral facet of the party’s identity continued to be thenotion that it offered something different to the other major political partiesin the Republic of Ireland.

The success of this Janus-faced political appeal, when operating in thefavourable environment created by the peace process, was such that in the2004 European elections, Sinn Féin captured over 11 per cent of the vote inthe Republic of Ireland. This, for a party that only seven years previously hadwon less than 3 per cent of the national vote, was no mean achievement.In addition, the same electoral contest saw Mary Lou McDonald elected asSinn Féin’s first MEP in the Republic.148 Simultaneously, Bairbre de Brunwon the party’s first ever European seat in Northern Ireland.149 The sym-bolism of this dual victory, in the only elections to be held concurrently inboth jurisdictions, was undoubtedly not lost on the republican leadership;for it appeared to signify the ever-upward trajectory of both Sinn Féin and itspolitical project.

Such an analysis was only strengthened further by the results of the 2004local government elections in the Republic, which saw the party claim theallegiance of over 8 per cent of the southern Irish electorate. Again, a clearadvance on what it had achieved at the 1999 local and 2002 general elections.Now, Sinn Féin increased its representation to fifty-four seats (as compared tothe twenty-one it had won in 1999), with gains made largely at the expenseof Fianna Fáil.150 While this meant the party still remained ‘small’, with itspresence confined to certain areas (notably Dublin and the Border Counties),there were nevertheless signs that Sinn Féin was building the foundationsupon which it might achieve yet greater success at national level.151 This wasparticularly so in light of the ability of the party to attract a greater proportionof younger, as opposed to older, voters.152 Such factors, combined with thepreviously described ‘near misses’ in the 2002 general election, suggested thatSinn Féin could expect to at least double its representation in Leinster Houseat the next general election, sending its number of TDs into double figures.Indeed, it was not wholly far-fetched at that point to believe that the partycould be ‘king-makers’ in the subsequent Irish Parliament.

And yet, the electoral results of 2004 proved to be the high watermark ofSinn Féin’s performance in the Irish Republic during this era. That this shouldhave been so was a function of the fact that a series of events coalesced tomake 2005, the year earmarked for the party’s one-hundred-year anniversarycelebrations, more like its annus horribilis.

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6Reversal, Recovery and Divergence,2004–7

‘The events of December 2004–March 2005 gave our political oppo-nents a stick to beat Sinn Féin with and they certainly took it. Itcreated a hysteria against the party in the media, which just goes toshow that the old dictum that “all publicity is good publicity” isn’tnecessarily so.’1

Jim Gibney

Introduction

Despite the collapse of peace process negotiations in late 2004, republicanscould look forward with confidence to the year ahead. The party’s centenarycelebrations had been scheduled to take place in 2005, with a rolling series ofevents to mark the Céad Blain of Sinn Féin.2 The purpose of such events, asGerry Adams declared at the official launch of the programme, was to ‘repop-ularize’ the republican struggle; it was to emphasize the republican ‘centuryof struggle’ as a way of expanding Sinn Féin’s electoral support base. In lightof his party’s recent success, Adams noted, ‘Sinn Féin is now politically andorganizationally stronger than at any time since the 1920s.’3

Few could doubt that the Sinn Féin President had a point. Until then,Adams’ party had experienced a decade of uninterrupted, and on occasionspectacular, political growth. This had allowed Sinn Féin to establish itselfas unquestionably both the largest party within northern nationalism and,as Gerry Adams cheerfully underlined, ‘the largest pro Agreement party’ ofany hue in Northern Ireland.4 At the same time, Sinn Féin had success-fully generated a sense of political momentum in the Republic of Ireland,which appeared to point the way towards it holding a significant presencein the Dáil. Thus, the possibility that Sinn Féin might, in the not-too-distantfuture, enter government on both sides of the Irish border seemed all too real.According to its leader, therefore, the challenge for the party was for it to capi-talize on this progress, for Sinn Féin to use its ‘present mandate as a launchingpad to grow an island wide, a nation wide mass Sinn Féin movement’.5

157

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In the event, however, such optimistic vistas had to be placed to one side as2005 became the most challenging year Sinn Féin had faced since the incep-tion of the peace process. Rather than being able to build on past success,the party increasingly found itself subject to sustained criticism. Rather thanbeing able to push forward as Gerry Adams had forecast, republicans insteadfound themselves ‘on the back foot’. Consequently, much of the period thatfollowed was to be dominated by the efforts of the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership to restore their party’s position and forwards trajectory. And onceagain, events in Northern Ireland took centre stage.

A succession of crises in the peace process brought the republican move-ment to a ‘watershed’ moment with regards to the future activity of the IRA.The outcome was a formal end to that organization’s armed campaign andthe completion of the weapons decommissioning process. Sinn Féin alsosubsequently committed itself to supporting the Police Service of NorthernIreland (PSNI). These moves paved the way for Sinn Féin’s return to gov-ernment, with Martin McGuinness elevated to the position of Deputy FirstMinister of Northern Ireland – alongside DUP leader, Ian Paisley, who becameFirst Minister – in May 2007.

On the back foot

In its 2005 New Year statement, the IRA claimed that the previous month’stalks had failed because of an ‘unachievable demand for humiliation’. Therepublican movement, it was argued, had once again demonstrated its ‘com-mitment to the Peace Process’ through the IRA’s offer to move into a ‘newmode’. Yet this was said to have foundered, because the two governmentswere once more pandering to the ‘rejectionist demands of a unionist leader’.6

The statement thus contained all the familiar elements of the republicanmovement’s response to the negotiations of the peace process. In equal mea-sure, republican generosity was lauded, even as Unionist intransigence wascondemned. Reading the declaration out of context, one would be forgivenfor thinking that, at that time, little had changed within the peace process.Yet, the reality was that this was far from the truth. And indeed, the IRA’sJanuary 2005 statement also contained a hint of the crisis that had begun toenvelop the republican movement; for it hinted darkly at ‘recent attempts tocriminalise our Volunteers’.7

These words constituted an oblique reference to the growing criticism ofthe republican movement that followed the huge robbery that took place atthe Northern Bank’s Belfast headquarters on 20 December 2004. Some £26.5million had been stolen in the heist, making it the largest bank robbery inBritish history and the finger of blame was soon pointed at the IRA.8 By earlyJanuary 2005, the Chief Constable of the PSNI, Hugh Orde, publicly statedhis belief that the IRA was behind the crime.9

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Crucially, both the British and Irish governments accepted Orde’s verdictand this served as a springboard for them to adopt a tougher line againstrepublicans. In particular, the Irish Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, cameto the fore in this period with his criticism of the IRA. That organization, heclaimed in the aftermath of Orde’s statement, had ‘engaged for many, manyyears in very high-profile criminality’. He rejected the notion that the robberycould have been the work of ‘rogue’ IRA members; the IRA was, he insisted, a‘unified movement’, with a leadership that included Gerry Adams and MartinMcGuinness. On this last reasoning, he declared that those two men were‘not committed to peace’.10

In response, Martin McGuinness vociferously questioned Orde’s assess-ment of IRA culpability, suggesting that the Chief Constable may well havebeen manipulated by ‘elements within the British system and unionismintent on wrecking the Peace Process and on using the robbery in Belfastas a pretext for this’.11 It was a line echoed by Sinn Féin’s Chairman, MitchelMcLaughlin, who said Orde had acted under the influence of securocrats whowished to undermine the peace process.12 Elsewhere, Gerry Adams accusedthe British government as a whole of being intent on returning to a ‘failedpolicy of discrimination against Sinn Féin’.13 Rather than being cowed bythe Sinn Féin stance, though, the view of the governments seemed only toharden. In the middle of January 2005, the Northern Ireland Secretary ofState, Paul Murphy, and the Irish Foreign Minister, Dermot Ahern, issued astatement saying they were both 100 per cent convinced that the IRA wasresponsible for the bank heist.14

Increasingly too, the issue became focused on the broader involvementof republicans in criminality. Michael McDowell again led the way in thisregard. Towards the end of January he publicly highlighted a new form ofpunishment beating allegedly being employed by the IRA: the ‘Padre Pio’attack that involved the victim being shot through both hands.15 Once more,however, McDowell was joined by his cabinet colleagues. Speaking on RadioRTE, for instance, the Tanaiste (Deputy Prime Minister), Mary Harney, saidthat there would need to be a complete end to Provisional IRA criminality ifthe peace process was to move forward.16

Despite Gerry Adams’ protestations, therefore, that ‘the root cause ofthe difficulties in the Peace Process stems from the unwillingness of anti-republican elements in the South and within the British system to acceptSinn Féin’s electoral mandate across the island’, there was little doubt thatongoing IRA criminality had risen to the top of the political agenda.17 Aftera meeting between the two prime ministers in early February, both BertieAhern and Tony Blair emphasized that it was this issue that was now theprincipal impediment to progress. As Blair declared, ‘The obstacle now to alasting and durable settlement in Northern Ireland is the continuing paramil-itary activity and criminal activity of the IRA’. Such activity, he insisted, hadto ‘stop and stop in its entirety’.18

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The Prime Minister’s words prompted a terse statement from the IRA on 2February 2005. This announced that the organization was withdrawing theoffer it had made the previous December, to complete the decommissioningprocess and go into a new mode. It was acting, it stated, because republi-can initiatives had been ‘attacked, devalued and dismissed by pro-unionistand anti-republican elements . . . Commitments have been broken or with-drawn.’ In a context in which ‘there is an ongoing political impasse’, theIRA averred that it would not ‘remain quiescent within this unacceptableand unstable situation’.19 To emphasize this last point, the original lengthystatement was also followed by a far shorter missive, which emphasized ‘theseriousness of the situation’.20 Placed alongside each other, the two pro-nouncements were widely interpreted as a threat that the IRA’s ceasefire couldbe in jeopardy, and as such, were condemned in many quarters.21 Moreover,they simply served to bolster the governments’ shared belief that they neededa firm commitment from republicans that all criminality would now end.This belief was strengthened still further when a report from the Indepen-dent Monitoring Commission (IMC) also identified the IRA as responsiblefor the Northern Bank robbery; and, in the wake of that report, the Britishgovernment announced that it would halt the payment of Westminsterparliamentary allowances to Sinn Féin (amounting to some half a millionpounds), until republicans verifiably distanced themselves from criminalactivities.22

The subsequent exposure of a major cross-border money-laundering oper-ation did little to ease government reservations. Raids by police in Cork andelsewhere in the Irish Republic in mid-February 2005 appeared to uncovertens of thousands of pounds, which were directly linked to both the NorthernBank heist and republicans. Not only did this provide significant new evi-dence of an IRA link to the original robbery, but also it raised fresh concernsabout the scale of that organization’s criminal enterprises.

It was against this backdrop of the ongoing fallout from the Northern Bankrobbery that republicans were hit by a second crisis. On 30 January 2005, ayoung man from the Short Strand area of east Belfast, Robert McCartney, wasbeaten and stabbed to death after an altercation in a city centre pub. Initially,little national media attention was paid to the murder.23 But by the secondweek in February, the crime had grown in prominence, as suspicions grewthat it too had involved IRA members.24 Reports of unrest over the killingwithin the Short Strand – normally held to be a solidly republican commu-nity – raised new questions about the extent to which the governments, inturning a blind eye to ongoing IRA activity, had allowed the organizationto establish de facto control over certain localities.25 Furthermore, the sav-agery of the crime was thrown into stark relief by the dignified response ofthe dead man’s family, who led a high-profile campaign in pursuit of justice.As a result, the McCartney murder came increasingly to displace the bankrobbery as the principal focus for criticism of the republican movement.

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In an effort to counter this, Sinn Féin, having initially ignored the case,attempted to place itself alongside the McCartney family and to foster theimpression that it was a partner, rather than an obstacle, in their search forjustice. This effort to ‘capture’ and thereby neutralize the McCartney cam-paign saw the dead man’s sisters and fiancée invited to the Sinn Féin ard fheisin early March 2005. There, Gerry Adams proclaimed ‘we are on their side’and declared that he was personally ‘committed to justice for the McCartneyfamily’. The Sinn Féin President also said that, ‘Those responsible . . . for thebrutal killing of Robert McCartney should admit to what they did in a courtof law. Those with any information should come forward.’26

Adams’ words, however, were somewhat overshadowed by an IRA state-ment two days later, in which the organization offered to shoot fourpeople it believed to be connected with the McCartney murder. This propo-sition, rejected by the McCartneys, brought renewed condemnation ofrepublicans.27 And although Martin McGuinness, who proclaimed himself‘surprised’ by the offer, tried to put a positive gloss on the IRA statement(claiming it at least showed that the organization ‘would not cover up for orprotect the perpetrators of the murder’), there was little doubt that yet furtherdamage had been done to the republican image.28 The fact that McGuinnesshimself subsequently warned the McCartney family to ‘be careful’ that theydid not cross the line ‘into the world of party politics’ seemed to confirm theimpression of a republican movement that had lost its way.29

Taken together, this succession of incidents – the Northern Bank robbery,the exposure of the cross-border money-laundering operation and the RobertMcCartney murder – proved to be highly damaging for Sinn Féin. Their com-bined effect was to give new and unprecedented weight to the charge thatrepublicanism was mired in ‘gangsterism’ and criminality.

Sinn Féin spokespeople did little to ease such concerns when pressed fortheir views on what constituted crime and what did not. Most striking, inthis regard, were the words of the party’s chairman, Mitchel McLaughlin.On 17 January 2005, McLaughlin had been interviewed on RTE, where hewas asked if he considered the IRA’s 1972 murder of a Belfast mother of ten,Jean McConville, to be a crime. Though he had earlier said the action waswrong, McLaughlin’s response to the specific question of whether he thoughtit was a crime – ‘No, I do not’ – caused immediate uproar; all the more so,when his sentiments were echoed by other Sinn Féin members.30 Though lessimmediately sensational, Gerry Adams’ thoughts on this issue – as relayed inhis presidential address to his party’s 2005 ard fheis – did little to alleviateconcern on this matter. Though this speech did form the context for hisabove-mentioned statement of support for the McCartney family, the SinnFéin President also said:

There is no place in republicanism for anyone involved in criminality. Ourdetractors will say we have a particular view of what criminality is. We have

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not. We know what a crime is both in the moral and legal sense, and ourview is the same as the majority of people. We know that breaking the lawis a crime. But we refuse to criminalise those who break the law in pursuit oflegitimate political objectives. [emphasis added]31

Such a definition obviously left open the question of exactly what could bejustified ‘in pursuit of legitimate political objectives’.

More broadly, the republican movement’s response to the crises of Decem-ber 2004–March 2005 was initially characterized by stubborn defiance. Therewas little acknowledgement that there existed a problem that needed to beaddressed relating to criminality. As has been described, the IRA’s pronounce-ments reflected this ethos; so too did the stance of Sinn Féin. In mid-February,the party declared that it was ‘up for the fight’ and announced a series ofDemocratic Resistance rallies to oppose efforts to criminalize republicans.32

Speaking at one such event, Gerry Adams proclaimed that many of thoseattacking his party were ‘back in the place where they are most comfort-able’. Their motivation for doing so, he asserted, was their fear of Sinn Féin’selectoral expansion:

At all costs, they want to stop the growth of Sinn Féin and halt the radicalpolitical alternative to the forces of conservatism in Ireland . . . in orderto achieve this and to distract attention from all other matters, they aretrying once again to smear republicans with the criminalisation slur.

Sinn Féin would, according to its president, ‘weather this political storm’ andnot succumb to the ‘trial by media’ that it faced.33

Nonetheless, the reality for Sinn Féin was, in the words of Jim Gibney, thatthe events of December 2004–March 2005, had given

our political opponents a stick to beat Sinn Féin with and they certainlytook it. It created a hysteria against the party in the media, which justgoes to show that the old dictum that ‘all publicity is good publicity’ isn’tnecessarily so.34

The Irish Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, thus, took the opportunityto reassert his belief that the leadership of Sinn Féin was intertwined withthat of the IRA, alleging again that Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness andMartin Ferris were all members of the IRA’s Army Council.35 Of course, suchaccusations had been made against leading republicans in the past and were,themselves, nothing new.36 What was novel in this instance, however, wasthe impact they made. In the first instance, this impact manifested itselfin opinion poll evidence from the time reflecting the fact that McDowell’sallegations and the wider concerns over IRA criminality now gained far more

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purchase among the Irish electorate. One such survey in March 2005, forinstance, showed that 67 per cent of people now felt that Sinn Féin shoulddecisively split from the IRA.37 The same poll also revealed that 56 per centof those questioned viewed Sinn Féin as an unacceptable coalition optionfor government in the Republic of Ireland – a rise of some 17 percentagepoints on the previous occasion the question had been asked.38 Finally, anadditional survey at this time showed Gerry Adams’ personal satisfactionratings to have plummeted to 31 per cent (compared to 51 per cent only fourmonths previously).39 While the accuracy of such polls should obviously notbe overstated, they do appear to have been indicative of a broad drop in SinnFéin’s popularity on the back of the criminality controversy.

The truth of this appeared to be confirmed by a by-election in CountyMeath a little over a month after the McCartney murder. There, the party’scandidate, Joe O’Reilly, took some 12 per cent of the vote – a result declaredto be a solid and creditable performance by Sinn Féin.40 The reality, though,was that O’Reilly had made almost no improvement on the vote the partyhad achieved at the European election of a year earlier. This, despite thefact that An Phoblacht/Republican News had previously talked of the likeli-hood of Sinn Féin wining almost 15 per cent of the vote – a figure thatwas itself reckoned to be a ‘conservative estimate’.41 What is more, evenon the day of the election, senior republicans could still be found stat-ing their expectation that O’Reilly would secure around 15 per cent.42 Setagainst such a background, the actual result in Meath was undoubtedlysomething of a disappointment for the party, a fact perhaps reflected inthe low-key coverage subsequently accorded to it by An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews.43 In this way, events in Meath offered stark evidence to the effectthat Sinn Féin had been damaged by the criminality allegations. Whilethe core vote of the party had held, the dramatic electoral expansion ofthe previous eight years in the Republic of Ireland appeared to have beenhalted.

On top of this apparent stalling of Sinn Féin’s political project, the partyalso had to contend with the fact that its leaders were no longer beingtreated with the same deference and respect they once had been. McDowell’srenewed attack on senior members of the republican leadership has alreadybeen noted; as a long-standing opponent and critic of Sinn Féin and the IRA,McDowell’s words were scarcely surprising. Yet, he was now joined in express-ing such views by fellow cabinet colleagues. The Irish Defence Minister, WillieO’Dea, for instance, argued that

We are no longer prepared to accept the farce that Sinn Féin and the IRAare separate. They are indivisible. The two governments will not indulgein the pretence of treating Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA as two sep-arate organisations, while trying to inch their way forward towards acomprehensive settlement.44

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Elsewhere, the Taoiseach himself, Bertie Ahern, publicly rebuked Sinn Féin’sleaders, arguing that they had known of plans for the bank robbery, evenas they were engaged in talks aimed at achieving a political settlement inNorthern Ireland.45

Of equal significance, meanwhile, was the decision of the Bush adminis-tration not to invite Sinn Féin (or any other Northern Irish political party) toits annual St Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House. The McCartneysisters were asked to attend instead. Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy, pre-viously a regular sponsor of Gerry Adams’ visits to the US during the peaceprocess, also refused to meet the Sinn Féin President – the McCartneys beinghis preferred guests as well. Where once Gerry Adams and Martin McGuin-ness had been hailed as peacemakers and statesmen they now found criticismbeing directed at the republican movement, alongside fresh demands that theIRA ‘disband’.46

The events of late 2004–early 2005, then, had made the issue of contin-ued republican paramilitarism an albatross around the neck of Sinn Féin.Ironically, previous governmental indulgence of IRA activity may well havehelped bring such a situation about; for the murder of Robert McCartney wasnot the first to be linked to the IRA in the post-ceasefire years. On the con-trary, between 1998 and 2005, some thirty people were killed in incidents inwhich the IRA was named as chief suspect.47 Despite this, neither governmentappeared to consider seriously penalizing Sinn Féin during this period. Thatthis should have been so was, to a great extent, a product of the enduring con-cern as to the possible resumption of a violent republican campaign – whetherunder the auspices of either the existing IRA or a new splinter group emerg-ing out of that organization. With regards to the possibility that there mightbe a split within republicanism, recent research has exposed the extent towhich the Adams–McGuinness leadership used the spectre of internal repub-lican unrest as a key strategy during negotiations.48 Fear of this outcome,it has been suggested, led the British and Irish governments (as well as theAmerican government at key points) to prioritize the needs of the republi-can leadership over and above those of Unionists. The former Secretary ofState for Northern Ireland, Peter Mandelson, has publicly attested as to thereality of this tendency. In a major interview with the Guardian, Mandel-son observed that under Tony Blair, government policy on Northern Irelandhad reached a point where, ‘the process is the policy’ and there was a fearthat ‘if it stops you will roll back into disaster and God alone knows what’.49

To avoid such a scenario, Mandelson acknowledged that the Prime Ministerhad, on occasion, been guilty of ‘conceding and capitulating’ to Sinn Féin.In the same series of interviews, the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler,also admitted that, ‘There was a lot to be said for paying a price to keep thebicycle moving. The issue is whether Tony Blair paid too big a price.’50

In this respect, therefore, the two governments had arguably failed to recog-nize both the unlikelihood of renewed republican armed struggle in a context

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defined by the Real IRA’s Omagh bomb and al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks – a pointof which the republican leadership itself was only too aware.51 In addition,as has been discussed, the governments’ reluctance to punish Sinn Féin mayalso have stemmed from a desire for a historical ‘legacy’ on the part of bothTony Blair and Bertie Ahern. The drive for such a legacy naturally reducedthe motivation of either man to reprimand republicans and thereby risk col-lapsing the peace process. Ultimately, whatever its origins, the effect of thisdisinclination to highlight republican infractions was the engendering of acertain level of hubris within the republican movement. The belief that theIRA was to some degree ‘untouchable’ and could act with a degree of impunityhelped create the environment in which the Northern Bank robbery and theMcCartney murder could occur. These events, though, proved the undoingof republicans, as they provoked a concerted public backlash that causedserious damage to Sinn Féin’s overall political project.

Regaining the initiative

It was this backlash that formed the immediate setting for Gerry Adams’appeal to the IRA on 6 April 2005, for it to ‘fully accept and embrace’ purelypeaceful and democratic activity.52 In that address, Adams acknowledged thatin the past he had ‘defended the right of the IRA to engage in armed struggle’.Yet he claimed to have done so only because there was ‘no alternative’. Thatalternative was now said to exist: ‘The way forward is by building politicalsupport for republican and democratic objectives across Ireland and by win-ning support for these goals internationally.’53 As An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews recorded, Adams’ words were aimed at ‘seizing the initiative’ and theIRA soon released a statement saying it would respond to Adams ‘in duecourse’.54 The clear hope of the republican leadership was that by refocus-ing attention on the peace process – and the positive part being played init by republicans – other matters might be sidelined. In line with this, theappeal to the IRA was followed by the reassertion of demands that the govern-ments ‘live up to their commitments under the Good Friday Agreement’.55

Meanwhile, republican spokespeople emphasized the magnitude of what wasapparently being discussed by the IRA. As Jim Gibney wrote in the Irish News,‘Gerry Adams is asking the IRA to unilaterally consider leaving the scene. Onthe republican Richter scale his speech is mark 10.’56

The wider response to Adams’ speech, however, was more cautious – a factregistered by republicans.57 Various commentators noted that words wouldhave to be followed by actions – a line that echoed the position of the twogovernments.58 And if doubts had persisted within the republican leadershipthat this was indeed the case, the results of the local and general elections inNorthern Ireland in May 2005 can only have dispelled these. Those resultsemphasized the damage that had been done to republicans over the previousfour–five month period. Thus, while Sinn Féin consolidated its position as the

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largest party within northern nationalism – with five MPs now to the SDLP’sthree – the very survival of the latter party was telling. This was particularly soin John Hume’s old constituency of Foyle. There, Sinn Féin had at one timeconfidently predicted victory for its candidate, Mitchel McLaughlin, overthe SDLP leader Mark Durkan. In the event, those expectations went unful-filled as Durkan secured a resounding victory.59 More generally, the electionseemed to confirm that, just as had occurred in the Irish Republic with theMeath by-election, so Sinn Féin’s previously dynamic political growth hadalso ended in Northern Ireland.60

The Adams–McGuinness leadership’s awareness of this can be gauged froman internal party conference that was held in early 2006. The public messagederived from that conference was a ‘positive’ one, in which the leadershipurged their supporters to take great ‘heart and encouragement’ out of ‘theachievements of the past’.61 Behind closed doors, however, it would seemthat a far more sober appraisal of the party’s position was being made. Forexample, in his speech to the conference, the party’s director of electionsstated:

despite the fact it was anticipated that the Adams initiative to the IRAmade in advance of the election would help galvanise our vote, this did nothappen because of the hostile political climate relating to the bank robberyand the McCartney murder. The initiative’s real potential most definitelywas not fully realised and in actual fact the Party’s overall performancedipped in both elections when compared with the European election of2004.62

It is against this background, therefore, that the events of summer 2005 mustbe understood. On 28 July, the IRA released a visually recorded statement,via DVD, which announced:

The leadership of Óglaigh na hÉireann has formally ordered an end tothe armed campaign. This will take effect from 4pm this afternoon. AllIRA units have been ordered to dump arms. All Volunteers have beeninstructed to assist the development of purely political and democraticprogrammes through exclusively peaceful means. Volunteers must notengage in any other activities whatsoever.63

The language of the statement was emotive and references to the ‘dump-ing of arms’ carried echoes of earlier incarnations of the IRA, particularlythat of 1923; for at the end of the Irish Civil War, the defeated IRA hadsimilarly ordered its members to ‘dump arms’.64 The imagery surroundingthe announcement was also significant – particularly the choice of SeannaWalsh as the man to articulate the IRA’s words, after thirty years of anony-mous IRA statements that had simply been signed, ‘P. O’Neill’. Walsh was

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a senior ‘behind-the-scenes’ member of the republican leadership, who hadpreviously served twenty-one years in jail for IRA activities. During that timehe had not only been a cellmate and friend of Bobby Sands – the doyen ofmodern republicanism – but also a leading figure within the prison-basedIRA leadership in the 1980s.65 The statement was thus framed with the moralauthority of the hunger strike era and the IRA prisoner constituency, as wellas with the memory of past republican generations.

Moreover, on this occasion, words were indeed followed by actions. Justunder two months later, on 26 September 2005, the Independent Interna-tional Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) confirmed that the processof IRA weapons decommissioning had been completed. Speaking to a pressconference, the head of the IICD, General John de Chastelain, revealed that,‘We have observed and verified events to put beyond use very large quanti-ties of arms which we believe include all the arms in the IRA’s possession . . .

the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.’66 Ashe spoke, two witnesses who had been present during the final round ofdecommissioning sat alongside de Chastelain and confirmed his words. Themen selected for the task were members of the clergy drawn from each sideof Northern Ireland’s communal divide: the Redemptorist priest, Fr. AlecReid; and the Methodist Minister, Rev. Harold Goode. Both gave testimonythat, having seen what had happened, with their ‘own eyes, on a minute-to-minute basis’, they were able to confirm that ‘beyond any shadow of doubt,the arms of the IRA have now been decommissioned’.67

Through these striking gestures, then, the Adams–McGuinness leadershipclearly hoped to draw a line under the events of the first half of 2005. Withthe IRA now removed ‘as an excuse’ (to paraphrase the earlier words of GerryAdams), the aim was to restore momentum both to the peace process and tothe political expansion of Sinn Féin.68 On this basis, the statement formallyending the IRA’s armed struggle was followed by calls for renewed progresspolitically. Once more, familiar rhetorical themes were deployed in supportof such appeals. The IRA initiative was said to be merely the latest exampleof ‘11 years of IRA support for [the peace] process’.69 Martin McGuinnessspoke of the ‘inescapable responsibility on the British and Irish governmentsto push urgently ahead with the implementation of the Agreement’, whilethe ‘leadership of unionism’ was pressed to ‘finally accept the principles ofpower sharing, equality and human rights’.70 By the same token, withindays of the decommissioning announcement, Gerry Adams was insistingthat the governments ‘move speedily’ to fulfil their commitments and inject‘momentum’ into the political process.71

In this regard, the republican leadership must have been encouraged byinitial governmental reaction. Both Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern warmlywelcomed the July statement: Blair describing it as ‘a step of unparalleledmagnitude in the recent history of Northern Ireland’, Ahern as an ‘unprece-dented’ step that opened the way to a ‘new era for all of the people of the

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island of Ireland’.72 Similar language followed the events of September.73

And the overall impression conveyed was that, as far as the governmentswere concerned, republicans had met their obligations. Such a perceptionwas strengthened by the British government’s announcement that it wouldimplement the demilitarization plans contained within the 2003 Joint Dec-laration of the British and Irish governments – a long-standing demand ofrepublicans.74 Also, in early October 2005, following a positive report onthe IRA’s intentions from the IMC, the British indicated that they would takesteps to restore Sinn Féin’s expenses allowances (after these had been removedfollowing the Northern Bank robbery).75

More broadly, the governments appeared to signal that they believed theway was open to the restoration of the devolved institutions for NorthernIreland. Peter Hain thus announced that the ‘period of political paralysis’ inNorthern Ireland had to end and ‘sooner rather than later’.76 Bertie Ahernmade the same point when he told the Dáil that, while there were, ‘thosewho remain unconvinced about recent developments’, this was ‘not a timefor pessimism and undue delay’.77

The governments’ optimism, however, was not shared by Unionist politi-cians. Both the DUP and the UUP reacted with anger to the unfolding ofevents. Ian Paisley, for instance, lambasted the ‘dishonest and dangerousapproach of the [British] government’, which was said to have concludeda ‘bilateral agreement’ with republicans.78 This interpretation, which wasshared by Unionists of various hues, had only been strengthened by the‘re-release’ from jail of a republican prisoner, Sean Kelly, the day before theIRA’s July announcement. Kelly, the man responsible for the Shankill bomb-ing of October 1993, had originally been released from prison on licence,under the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement. However, he had beenre-arrested in June 2005 for allegedly becoming re-involved in terrorism.79

That decision had been bitterly criticized by Sinn Féin and the party hadlaunched a campaign for his release.80 When this release duly came – imme-diately prior to the IRA’s July statement – Unionists denounced the move as a‘capitulation’ and a sign that the government was, as they feared, once more‘grovelling to republicans’.81 The government’s decision to push ahead with‘demilitarization’ was seen in similar light.

Recognition of this Unionist disquiet did not escape Sinn Féin’s attention;rather, it was again used as part of the rationalization for republican actions.An Phoblacht-Republican News thus described how

A week ago the DUP had been confident in its relationship with theBritish Government. Republicans had endured months of vilification bythe British at the behest of rejectionist unionism. But last Thursday thepolitical landscape had been changed and changed utterly by the coura-geous unilateral decision of the IRA to end its armed campaign and dumpits arms. Suddenly the old sureties no longer seemed so secure.82

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The extent to which what had occurred constituted a political triumph forrepublicans was clearly flagged up. On the issue of ‘demilitarization’, forexample, the paper stated that ‘Apparently no one told the DUP . . . suddenlythe British Government was neither seeking their opinion nor eliciting theirsupport’. The result of this was said to be that the DUP – which had pledgedto end ‘pushover unionism’ – had been left to represent ‘leftover unionism’.83

As an articulation of republican strategic thinking in relation to the peaceprocess – and the central dynamic that Sinn Féin had hoped to generatethrough its engagement with that process – the article was particularly strik-ing. Once more, the IRA had delivered progress and republicans seemed tohave secured some form of recompense in return. At the same time, the IRA’sact of completion had failed to engender real Unionist confidence in thepeace process – even as it had been hailed by the two governments.

The same phenomenon was in evidence following the September 2005decommissioning announcement. On that occasion, DUP leader Ian Paisleyattacked the ‘duplicity and dishonesty of the two governments and the IRA’;while elsewhere, the UUP leader, Sir Reg Empey, spoke in less sensational, butsincere terms to observe that, ‘this development has failed to maximise pub-lic confidence’.84 The truth of Empey’s words lay in the fact that republicanshad again acted with an apparent lack of concern for the needs of Unionism.The IRA had side-stepped DUP demands that there be visual proof of decom-missioning – the ‘kodak moment’ – that would leave no one in any doubtas to what occurred. There were to be no videos or photos of weapons beingdestroyed. Equally, suggestions that the IICD release a detailed inventory ofthe arms involved were firmly rebuffed by republicans.

Moreover, the choice of the men who acted as witnesses to the final actof decommissioning was itself not made with a view to securing the max-imum possible level of Unionist trust. This was particularly the case whereFr. Alec Reid was concerned. It was widely known that the priest had been aclose confidante of Gerry Adams and, as has been described, helped facilitateback-channel contacts between Sinn Féin and the Irish government duringthe 1980s.85 In addition, Reid had gone on record to state that he believedthe IRA’s denials of its involvement in the Northern Bank robbery – on thegrounds that the organization ‘always told the truth’.86 Such a history wasunlikely to commend Reid to the Unionist community as a reliable witness.This was compounded by the fact that, several months later, he publiclylikened the period of Unionist dominance in Northern Ireland to Nazi ruleover Germany.87

Even leaving aside such indiscretions from Reid, the fact was that thedecommissioning observers had been chosen by the IRA – rather than Union-ists. More broadly, republicans had, to all intents and purposes, ‘turned theclock back’ to November–December 2004. During the talks of that period,the proposals put forward by the republican negotiators had provided fordecommissioning, to be overseen by two independent witnesses.88 It was this

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suggestion that the DUP had rejected as inimical to the building of Unionistconfidence; a rejection that paved the way for the talks’ collapse, as Pais-ley continued to insist that the weapons process be filmed or photographed.Now, in September 2005, republicans had conducted the process accordingto their own original template – and done so to general acclaim. Indeed,in many ways, it was as if the events of the intervening nine months hadnot occurred. In the process, the Adams–McGuinness leadership effectivelycircumnavigated Unionism and consigned the DUP, and Unionist anxietiesmore generally, to a position of secondary importance.

In response, the only sanction available to the DUP and Unionism – otherthan an abandonment of the political process altogether – was delay. Unableto alter the overall political trajectory, the DUP could at least determine howmuch momentum existed within the peace process. And given the party’srepeated public demands for a de facto ‘decontamination’ period – to assessrepublican bona fides – the effect of this was to make progress glacial post-decommissioning. Consequently, there was little movement from the DUPprior to the end of 2005 and various indications that no deal to restore theAgreement’s institutions would be forthcoming in 2006 either. Certainly thiswas the conclusion of one informed observer in late December 2005.89 Asfar as the republican leadership was concerned, however, this was simply anecessary trade-off from the decision to adopt a unilateral approach to thearms issue. Nor was it entirely unwelcome.

On the contrary, some period of deferral suited the Adams–McGuinnessleadership, for whom a key concern, as ever, was the position of Sinn Féinsouth of the Irish border. There, an Irish general election was scheduled tobe held by 2007 at the latest and the republican leadership was more thanhappy to postpone any new push for a Northern Irish settlement to as closeto that election as possible. Not only did this create the possibility that SinnFéin would benefit from heightened levels of positive publicity immediatelyprior to such a poll, but also it afforded the party the opportunity to banishthe memories of early 2005. As the March 2005 by-election in Meath haddemonstrated, the stream of negative coverage surrounding republicans hadmanifestly damaged Sinn Féin. The party now had the chance to reassertfamiliar arguments about the nature of the peace process and Sinn Féin’srole within it. Republicans could once more be cast as peacemakers and theprocess used to re-acquire the movement’s lost respectability – in a repriseof the dynamic that had served Sinn Féin well from the early 1990s downto 2004.

The party was therefore soon calling on the governments to ‘face down’the DUP in order to end ‘the current political impasse’.90 The DUP wassaid to be seeking to ‘subvert the Agreement’, while efforts to restore thedevolved institutions were said to be floundering ‘on the rock of negative,rejectionist unionism’.91 Once again now, too, Sinn Féin positioned itself asthe only guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement. Only republicans, it was

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claimed, stood fully behind the Agreement as a whole. The party was thuscritical of the ‘shadow assembly’ that emerged in May 2006. As the frontpage of An Phoblacht-Republican News announced, this was viewed by theAdams–McGuinness leadership as little more than a ‘powerless talkingshop’.92 And though it did not boycott the assembly outright, Sinn Féin didrefuse to engage in any business not directly concerned with setting up a newExecutive. At the same time, it sternly criticized the SDLP’s decision to par-ticipate in full, declaring that the party was providing a, ‘comfort blanket forthe DUP’.93 Calls from the party for the British government to ‘end this farce’encapsulated Sinn Féin’s attitude.94 Nothing less than the full implementa-tion of the Agreement was to be deemed acceptable, which meant getting a‘fully functioning Assembly and Executive put in place’, as opposed to a ‘talk-ing shop Assembly with no real power’ – which was said to be the DUP’s aim.95

Indeed, the DUP was portrayed as the ultimate obstacle to political progress –an obstacle that the two governments were refusing to tackle. ‘Time to putit up to Paisley’ declared the front-page headline of the party’s newspaperin September 2006, while an article inside noted: ‘the DUP appears intenton breaching the deadline and avoiding taking the political decisions nec-essary to see the return of power-sharing government in the North . . . DUPintransigence seems set to continue’.96

While attacking the DUP at a political level, Sinn Féin was also quick totie it to sectarian violence at the local level. In March 2006, for instance, apiece in An Phoblacht/Republican News, following a sectarian attack in Belfast,proclaimed, ‘Murder attempt: DUP contributing to loyalist violence’. Theauthor of the article asserted that the, ‘political vacuum has now been filledby unionist paramilitary violence’ and made a direct connection between theattack and the DUP’s ‘continuing failure to engage’.97 Similarly, in May 2006after the murder of a fifteen-year-old boy, Michael McIlveen, in Ballymena,the front page of the party’s newspaper declared: ‘Sectarian murder in DUPheartland.’ The accompanying analysis stated that, ‘The citadel of sectarian-ism that is Ballymena is the political heartland of the DUP and that partyand its leader have been closely associated with virulent sectarianism inthe area for decades’, while, Sinn Féin’s representative for the area, PhilipMcGuigan, noted that Paisley had effectively helped ‘provide justification’for the murder.98

Alongside the disparagement of the DUP, Sinn Féin was also anxious tobuild up its own credentials as a party of peacemakers. Again here, the party’sforeign policy proved to be a useful instrument, allowing Sinn Féin repre-sentatives to portray themselves as peaceable statesmen on the world stage.2006 therefore brought a renewed drive to establish republicans as the fore-most exponents of international ‘peace processing’. In March of that year,there were reports of Sinn Féin involvement in the decision of the Basquegroup, ETA, to announce a ‘permanent’ ceasefire.99 Certainly, the move waswarmly welcomed by Gerry Adams and in June 2006 he visited the Basque

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country – a move reported by An Phoblacht/Republican News as ‘Adams inpush for Basque peace’.100 The Sinn Féin President was quick to empha-size the alleged ‘lessons’ of the Northern Ireland experience, stating: ‘TheETA cessation creates an unprecedented opportunity for a lasting and demo-cratic resolution to a conflict that has affected the region for decades . . .

there should be no delay in the commencement of all party talks in theBasque Country.’101 The same language was evident when the Sinn Féin Pres-ident visited Palestine later the same year, with the front-page headline of AnPhoblacht/Republican News declaring ‘Adams in Middle East Peace Mission’.102

Again, Adams’ message to those he met when in Palestine was a familiar one:

We are always willing to learn and to share our experience with othersseeking to build peaceful alternatives to conflict . . . In the Irish Peace Pro-cess the US played a positive and encouraging role, recognising all of thedemocratic mandates of the participants, supporting dialogue, and deal-ing with everyone on the basis of equality. I would strongly urge a similarapproach in respect of any efforts to rebuild the peace process here. Whatis clearly required is a comprehensive and inclusive settlement.103

In a trip that also saw the Sinn Féin President lay a wreath at the grave of YasserArafat, Adams appealed ‘to all political leaders to make a fresh effort to rebuildthe peace process’. In this context he met with various delegations, includ-ing one from Hamas, and claimed to have delivered the following advice:‘dialogue is the only way forward, all violence should end, all democraticmandates should be respected’.104

Adams was not alone in engaging in such international expeditions. MartinMcGuinness, too, worked to impart the benefits of the Northern Irish experi-ence. In both January and July 2006, McGuinness went to Sri Lanka to advisethose involved in the conflict there on how they might move forward.105 Inwords that carried strong echoes of Adams, he stated on the latter occasionthat ‘Our message was simple and direct. Just as in Ireland, a military victorywas not achievable by either side in Sri Lanka and a political process, based onequality, inclusion and respect was the only alterative to perpetual conflictand suffering.’106

The combination of these foreign policy excursions, together with renewedrepublican commitment to the peace process at home, did much to restoreSinn Féin’s reputation. Already, by late 2005, the British and Irish govern-ments were prepared to countenance the return of a devolved administrationin Northern Ireland in which Sinn Féin would play a leading role. Unsurpris-ingly, therefore, 2006 brought renewed efforts to achieve such a settlement.To this end, talks were held during February and March of that year in aneffort to create some forward movement.107 Yet, as has been described, pro-posals to ‘kick-start’ the process with the creation of a ‘shadow assembly’ inNorthern Ireland, prior to the return of the full institutions, were derailed by

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Sinn Féin opposition.108 The party was vehement in its insistence that therecould be no ‘two-tier’ approach to the Agreement; and that the Agreementhad to be implemented in full.109

After a brief hiatus (and in spite of the Donaldson murder), the two govern-ments returned in early April 2006 with a blueprint for restoring devolutionin Northern Ireland, in what was described as one final effort to achieve a set-tlement. Under the proposals, the Assembly was to be recalled in May 2006,with talks effectively running from that moment through to November thesame year. At that point, in the typically effusive words of Tony Blair, ‘weclose the chapter or close the book’.110 Failure to reach an accord, it wassaid, would lead to the salaries of Assembly members being stopped, whilethe British and Irish governments would work together to implement theAgreement through ‘British–Irish partnership arrangements’.111

St Andrews and the final lap: triumph and despair

Sinn Féin was quick to signal its approval of the governments’ April 2006proposals and Gerry Adams made an ‘appeal to unionism to seize thisopportunity’.112 By contrast, as might have been expected, the reaction ofthe DUP was less than enthusiastic. Ian Paisley declared, ‘there is no evidencethat Sinn Féin/IRA will be any further advanced in giving up criminality inNovember’ and, consequently, ‘there will be no executive formed for theforeseeable future’.113 Paisley had had his reluctance to conclude a settlementstrengthened by enduring concerns about IRA activity over the previous sixmonths. In October 2005, a series of high-profile police raids in Manchester,England, had brought sensational headlines and fresh anxieties over the pos-sible existence of an IRA ‘property empire’.114 Similarly, in January 2006,another major police investigation, this time by Gardai in the Irish Republic,had uncovered an additional real estate portfolio – this time centred on theGreater Dublin area – that was alleged to be in republican hands.115 And alittle over a month later, a further massive security operation by police forceson both sides of the Irish border targeted the man widely reckoned to be theIRA’s chief of staff in raids that were reported to have recovered over a200,000in cash.116

Of equal significance, a report from the IMC at the end of January 2006 haddescribed how the IRA continued to engage in a range of activities, includingintelligence gathering and criminality.117 In response, Sinn Féin had calledfor the disbandment of the IMC, which Martin McGuinness labelled a ‘proxyfor political policing’.118 Yet, there was no doubt that the IMC’s assessmentdid cast a pall over republican efforts to improve their image and gave afurther boost to DUP obduracy. Ian Paisley thus declared that the IMC’s reportshowed how little progress republicans had made and – picking up on theIMC’s estimation that some weapons had been retained by the IRA – the DUPleader called for the re-opening of the decommissioning issue.119

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In light of such rhetoric, few commentators judged any deal involvingthe DUP and Sinn Féin to be possible. By the autumn of 2006, however, thetwo governments did appear to have secured a concrete timetable for therestoration of the devolved institutions. After three days of intensive talks atSt Andrews in Scotland, a new Agreement was unveiled. This provided for thenomination of a new First Minister and Deputy Minister of Northern Irelandon 24 November 2006, with the moment of actual devolution pushed backto 26 March 2007.120

At the heart of this new St Andrews Agreement was a new focus on thequestion of whether Sinn Féin would support the Police Service of NorthernIreland (PSNI). Against the background of the previous two years’ focus onthe IRA’s involvement in criminality, this now emerged as the key litmus testof republican intentions. The governments’ efforts to reach an accord at StAndrews had been made easier by new security reports suggesting that theIRA was adhering to its commitments. In October 2006, for instance, theIMC had reported that the IRA had changed radically, dismantled some ofits most important structures and no longer wished to return to violence.121

Nevertheless, it was clear that this alone was not enough to satisfy the needsof the DUP and Unionism more generally. Instead, a republican commitmentto support the PSNI had become the sine qua non of any future settlement.For this reason, the St Andrews Agreement looked to ‘essential elements ofsupport for law and order’, which all the parties to that Agreement had toendorse, if devolved institutions of government were to return to NorthernIreland. These elements included:

endorsing fully the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the crimi-nal justice system, actively encouraging everyone in the community toco-operate fully with the PSNI, tackling crime in all areas and activelysupporting all the policing and criminal justice institutions, including thePolicing Board.122

This marked a significant shift in position when compared with previousnegotiations involving Sinn Féin and both the UUP and the DUP, in 2003and 2004 respectively. In each of those instances, the policing issue hadeffectively been bypassed – at least in a direct sense. Eventual republicansupport for the PSNI had been envisaged, but in neither case was this heldto be a precondition for Sinn Féin’s entry into government.123 As a result,it is certainly plausible that the republican leadership may have believed itpossible to delay the moment at which Sinn Féin would give its supportto the police indefinitely; just as it may once have believed that the partycould enter and remain in government in Northern Ireland without any IRAweapons decommissioning.124 Obviously such a suggestion remains specula-tive, though it is certainly not inconceivable. And at the very least, what canbe said is that before St Andrews Sinn Féin had held to a position that there

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could be no question of republicans giving their backing to the PSNI, in theabsence of devolved institutions. Though the party’s policy on policing inNorthern Ireland had evolved over the previous few years, this had becomeestablished as the party’s bottom line on the issue. As a motion passed atSinn Féin’s 2006 ard fheis stated, only ‘in the event of a transfer of polic-ing powers to a democratically elected institution in the North’, would theSinn Féin President propose the calling of, ‘a special Ard Fheis so that themembership could discuss and vote, “to decide Sinn Féin’s position on newpolicing arrangements”’.125 The envisaged sequence was one that would seethe devolution of policing and justice powers first, to be followed by Sinn Féinendorsement of the PSNI – not vice versa. As late as September 2006, lessthan a month prior to the St Andrews accord, the party’s spokesperson onpolicing, Gerry Kelly, continued to assert the importance of that chronologi-cal progression. In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph he maintained that‘a decision by Sinn Féin to participate in policing could come within weeksof a timeframe being agreed for the transfer of powers to democratic politicalinstitutions’.126 While Kelly’s words were portrayed as a concession – in thatthey apparently offered rapid movement from republicans – the fact was thatthe anticipated order of events remained the same.127

In advance of the St Andrews negotiations, however, the two governmentshad given signal that this was no longer an option for Sinn Féin. The IRA’s2004–5 transgressions had ensured that any return of devolved governmentto Northern Ireland with Sinn Féin involvement was now made conditionalon prior republican endorsement of the PSNI. Interestingly, this new positionwas one that the US government had perhaps been quicker to articulate thanits British and Irish counterparts. And financial pressure had been placedon Sinn Féin with regards to its American support base. In the wake of theMcCartney murder in early 2005, republican fund-raising visas to the US hadbeen suspended; their restoration was effectively made dependent on SinnFéin giving its support to the police.128 Alongside this, the Bush administra-tion’s Special Envoy to Northern Ireland during this period, Mitchell Reiss,explicitly called on republicans to give their backing to the police. As farback as March 2004, Reiss had been openly critical of Sinn Féin for pur-veying what he labelled ‘massive untruths’ about the Northern Irish policeand called on the party to ‘reconsider’ its position.129 In similar vein, in late2005, the US Special Envoy had written that, ‘Sinn Féin has a responsibil-ity to tell its constituents they should co-operate with the police – withoutfear of retribution.’130 On that latter occasion, Reiss’s comments brought asharp rebuke from Gerry Adams, who described them as ‘untrue and offen-sive’. The American had, according to Adams, acted in ‘an unhelpful andpartisan manner’.131 The war of words between the two men was rejoinedin the middle of 2006, after Reiss had again insisted, during a US Congres-sional hearing, that a central cause of the ‘impasse’ in the peace process wasthe republican refusal to endorse the PSNI.132 This was followed by a de facto

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public row between Reiss and Adams that occurred mainly through the pagesof the Irish Times. In May 2006, the Sinn Féin President used an interviewin that newspaper with the journalist, Frank Millar, to suggest that peopleshould ‘not heed what Mitchell Reiss has said’ on the grounds that ‘MitchellReiss will not be sorting these matters out’.133 A month later, Reiss retortedvia the same medium that, while Adams was technically correct, he and theUS government did have ‘a fair amount of influence’ and it was up to themhow they decided to ‘use and leverage that influence’.134 Going on to sum-marize his position on policing, Reiss then declared, in what amounted to anunmistakable rebuke of Adams, ‘this really isn’t about fundraising at all. It’sall about giving the decent, law-abiding people in republican and nationalistcommunities the type of police service they deserve . . . It’s about policing,it’s about normality.’135

One reading of the St Andrews negotiations, therefore, would be thatthey saw the British and Irish governments adopt a stance akin to thatof the Americans – perhaps in recognition of the fact that formal repub-lican endorsement of the police stood as the DUP’s central preconditionfor entry into government with Sinn Féin. As that party’s deputy leader,Peter Robinson, stated, ‘Before devolution can be restored, republicans mustdeliver an end to all paramilitary and criminal activity and signal, in bothword and deed, support for the rule of law.’136 Faced with a new consensuson this matter, encompassing all three governments and the principal repre-sentatives of Unionism, Sinn Féin was forced to shift position. It is possiblethat, immediately prior to the St Andrews talks, the republican leadership hadrealized that such a move would be required. On the eve of those talks, GerryAdams gave a major speech in Belfast in which he appeared to signal a soft-ening of his party’s line. During the course of that address, he had declared:

Republicans are for policing. Republicans are for the rule of law . . . Our sup-port for policing and law and order is not a response to unionist demands.Neither is it a tradable commodity to be retained or given away as part of adeal . . . Sinn Féin wants acceptable civic policing, which is democraticallyaccountable and free from partisan political control.137

Though much of the language was familiar, there was no reference to thetransfer of policing and justice powers. As St Andrews approached thatdemand appeared to have slipped off Sinn Féin’s agenda. In this way, Adams’speech gave indication to the republican grassroots that the party mightat last have to confront the policing issue head on. The outcome of StAndrews guaranteed that this would indeed be the case. Even now, however,republican delivery proved halting.

On 19 October 2006, the party announced that it would begin a consul-tation process lasting several weeks with its members over the St Andrewsproposals.138 Such a process was said to be a necessary preliminary step to

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the calling of a ‘special ard fheis’, at which the party might endorse thePSNI – as required by the Agreement. An obvious corollary of this, though,was that it immediately cast doubt over the timetable laid out by the twogovernments. Thus, by early November, even though Sinn Féin’s nationalexecutive was willing to confirm its support for the St Andrews Agreement,as a package, no arrangements had been made to hold the necessary partyconference.139

In seeking to explain Sinn Féin’s apparently unhurried exertions on thepolicing issue, it should be noted that the party was faced with a sustainedrepublican critique of its actions. Groups of dissidents operating under thebanner of ‘Concerned Republicans’ came together at this time to hold publicmeetings around the notion of ‘Policing – A bridge too far?’ One such eventwas held at Conway Mill in west Belfast, another in the village of Toome inAntrim – and it was subsequently reported that both drew sizeable crowds.140

At these gatherings, the position adopted by critics of Sinn Féin was one basedon traditional republican logic. This held that support for any police forcewithin Northern Ireland was unacceptable. Endorsement of the police wasseen as the ultimate acknowledgement of the British state’s right to exert amonopoly of legitimate force within the province – to finally accept the rightof Northern Ireland to exist – and something to be rejected at all costs.141

For this reason, the hesitancy of the Adams–McGuinness leadership tofinally commit Sinn Féin to support the PSNI, could have been a functionof their concern about republican disquiet over such a move. At the sametime, however, there were grounds to suggest that such disquiet was moreimagined than real – at least within the mainstream republican movement.Accordingly, opponents of the party’s stance on policing tended to comefrom the varied ranks of dissident republicans. By contrast, there was littlesign that the leadership would face serious internal opposition to a new policyof support for the police. The truth of this was made manifest by what actu-ally happened when the long-awaited ‘special ard fheis’ on policing was heldin January 2007. There, the motion put forward by the Adams–McGuinnessleadership received over 90 per cent support; a result that made a mockery ofsuggestions that the republican movement had suffered major divisions overthe move.142

It may be, therefore, that Sinn Féin’s slow progress on the policing ques-tion was the product of other motives. In particular, it could be that the partysought to test the governments’ collective resolve one final time – and to testwhether the DUP might yet be pressured into forsaking its principal precon-dition on sharing power with Sinn Féin. If this was indeed the aim, then itultimately proved to be unsuccessful. True, the deadline was, to all intentsand purposes, allowed to lapse by the two governments. The St AndrewsAgreement had required the DUP and Sinn Féin to nominate representativesto the Northern Irish Executive by 24 November 2006; Peter Hain had subse-quently modified this so that the parties needed only to ‘indicate’ that they

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would complete nominations in the future.143 In neither respect were theseconditions met. Yet, in spite of this, Peter Hain declared that new Assem-bly elections would go ahead – as laid out in the St Andrews proposals.144

Nevertheless, while the governments had shifted position once again, it wasclear that Ian Paisley had not. In this final game of brinkmanship, the DUPleader had proven inflexible and it was only the British government’s willing-ness to improvise that had allowed the process to continue. The republicanleadership perhaps now realized that such improvisation could not easily berepeated – and a failure by Sinn Féin to deliver on policing would not onlyprevent the institutions being re-established, but would ensure that republi-cans were seen as the party in default (an outcome that was deemed likelyto impair the party’s electoral prospects south of the border). As a result, thenecessary arrangements were put in place and, on 28 January 2007, SinnFéin’s membership voted overwhelmingly to endorse the party leadership’s(supportive) position on the PSNI.

Sinn Féin’s commitment to back the police confirmed that new Assemblyelections would be held in Northern Ireland. Going into that contest, therewas some speculation that the party might now be challenged by an avowedlyrepublican alternative. As already described, such an alternative had begunto coalesce over the policing question and there was some expectation thiscould gain the support of disaffected republican voters. In addition, manycommentators supposed that the SDLP might build on the surprising electoralresilience that it had demonstrated in 2005. This possibility seemed all themore plausible in light of the clear opportunities for the party to attack theirrepublican counterparts. These included the seemingly inconsistent positionadopted by Sinn Féin in relation to proposed legislation dealing with ‘on therun’ paramilitaries in late 2005. There was also the suggestion that Sinn Féinhad actually acceded to increased MI5 involvement in Northern Ireland, bydint of their acceptance of the St Andrews Agreement.145

As it turned out, however, the March 2007 election brought no such SDLPrevival and the expected challenge from the republican dissidents failed tomaterialise. Instead, Sinn Féin appeared to regain the political momentumit had lost over the previous two years. The party secured its best ever resultin a Northern Ireland election, winning twenty-eight seats (and securing 26per cent of the overall vote), as compared to the SDLP’s sixteen seats (and 15per cent share of the vote).146 This result was mirrored on the Unionist sideof the communal divide, where the DUP consolidated its hegemony over theUUP.147 And it was this, in turn, that paved the way for the public accordbetween Sinn Féin and the DUP that was announced on 26 March 2007,under which the two parties agreed to share power. The final act came on 8May 2007, when the institutions created by the Good Friday Agreement werefinally restored in full, with Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness now installed asDeputy First Minister, alongside the DUP leader, Ian Paisley, as NorthernIreland’s new First Minister.

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Conclusion

In the wake of its northern successes, Sinn Féin looked with confidence tomatters south of the Irish border, where an Irish general election was alsodue for 2007. With a view to its performance in that contest, Sinn Féin had,over the previous two years, continued to present a recognizable set of mes-sages to the southern Irish electorate. These had been neatly summed up ina ‘key planning meeting’ that the party held in September 2006, in which itidentified the three key issues that it wished to focus on: the crisis that wassaid to exist in Irish health-care provision; the peace process and the drivefor Irish unity; and Sinn Féin’s policies for building an Irish economy thatwas simultaneously strong and more equal.148

As regards the first of these, it is clear that much republican attention hadbeen focused on health issues. In April 2006, the party had launched anextensive new policy document on this theme and in May of the same year,a ‘Health for all – National day of action’ had been declared.149 The essenceof Sinn Féin’s position was its total opposition to ‘the grossly unequal, two-tier system’ that was said to be favoured by the Irish government.150 Oncemore, the party was determined to portray itself as the upholder of the rightsof ordinary Irish people against a failing political establishment. Moreover,that establishment was again held to be fundamentally corrupt, as Sinn Féincontinued to cast itself as different – a fresh challenge to the supposedly tiredmainstream parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Indeed, its efforts in this latter regard themselves caused a political storm,as suggestions emerged that republicans were trying to ‘create’ scandal andcorruption around their rivals where none had previously existed. Thus, theformation of the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI) in 2005, proved highly con-troversial. Under the control of Frank Connolly (brother of Niall, one ofthe republican ‘Columbia Three’), the CPI was officially modelled on theAmerican Centre for Public Integrity, which sought to promote transparencyand tackle corruption in public affairs. Not only was Judge Feargus Flood (pre-viously of the Flood tribunal) recruited as CPI chairman, but the organizationalso secured a four-year funding contract of $4 million from Atlantic Philan-thropies, the company of prominent Irish-American, Bill ‘Chuck’ Feeney.151

Despite its apparently altruistic motives, accusations were soon levelled thatthe CPI was working to a political agenda closely related to that of SinnFéin. Its opponents noted, for instance, that its reports seemed to be tar-geted towards those areas where Sinn Féin stood to gain electorally.152 Viewedfrom this perspective, the CPI appeared to be a sophisticated attempt todiscredit the political opponents of Sinn Féin; all the more so, given thedirect links between Frank Connolly and the republican movement. In theend, it was these links that proved fatal to the organization. The allegationthat Connolly had himself travelled to Columbia on a false passport, witha known IRA leader in 2001, led Feeney to withdraw his funding and the

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CPI to collapse shortly after.153 Ultimately, it should be emphasized, theexistence of a direct relationship between the CPI and Sinn Féin remainsunproven. Nevertheless, what can be said with certainty is that the activitiesof the former organization did correspond to the anti-corruption messagebeing propagated by the latter in this period. Furthermore, this was a mes-sage that Sinn Féin felt was vital to its rising political appeal in the south ofIreland.

Alongside this message, as the September 2006 meeting had identified,Sinn Féin continued to emphasize its ‘nationalist’ credentials in the contextof an ongoing peace process. The year 2006 brought the ninetieth anniver-sary of the Easter Rising and the party had, unsurprisingly, planned majorcommemorative events. Their efforts to capture this terrain and use it as anelectoral springboard, however, suffered a setback when it was announcedthat the Irish government would itself host an official ceremony to commem-orate the Rising. In response, Sinn Féin still held its own rallies and accusedboth the Fianna Fáil-led government and Fine Gael of ‘avoiding the politicalmessage of the Rising and the Proclamation and its relevance for today’.154

But the fact was that the Sinn Féin rallies were dwarfed by the government-approved gatherings – so while in Sinn Féin’s estimation some 1,500 peopleattended its 1916 commemoration in Dublin, this was as nothing comparedto the 100,000 who turned out for the military parade by the Irish DefenceForces.155 Thus, the efforts of Sinn Féin to take possession of the narrativeof 1916 and use it to boost its own political prospects met with only limitedsuccess.

By comparison, Sinn Féin was far less susceptible to challenge over its holdon the historical legacy from the 1981 hunger strike. The year 2006 alsomarked the twenty-fifth anniversary of that episode and, as might have beenexpected, Sinn Féin was anxious to highlight the occasion; for as Jim Gibneyput it, ‘The dead hunger strikers are our generation’s 1916.’156 For this reason,An Phoblacht/Republican News carried sustained coverage of the anniversarythroughout the year, with a long-running ‘Remembering 1981’ series. Thisincluded, among other things, reminiscences from former prisoners and SinnFéin members, such as Bik McFarlane and Sean Crowe, as well as interviewswith surviving family members of the dead hunger strikers.157 Meanwhile, avariety of events, many of them at local level, were organized by Sinn Féinto celebrate the quarter-century that had passed since the hunger strike.158

These were allied to larger set-piece affairs, such as the major rally that washeld in Belfast in August 2006.159 During his address to that rally, GerryAdams proclaimed that he was looking forward to ‘freedom in our lifetime’and said republicans needed ‘to continue to build a mass organization, tostay united and to continue to be strategic’. Sinn Féin was, he declared, ‘ina transitional phase of struggle on the road to a national republic’. The nextstep on that road, in the minds of the Adams–McGuinness leadership, wasmeant to be a major political advance in the Irish Republic.

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With the date for the general election finally set for June 2007, Sinn Féinlooked eagerly towards the poll. Party representatives spoke of their expecta-tion that Sinn Féin would be the ‘story of the election’.160 Martin McGuinnesshad previously spoken of the ‘realistic expectation’ that Sinn Féin would ‘dra-matically increase its representation’; and McGuinness even acknowledgedthe speculation that Sinn Féin might be ‘king-makers’ in the Dáil, statingthat ‘Sinn Féin could be in a position to decide the formation of the nextgovernment.’161

Such confidence, however, was to prove ill judged. Despite the boost ofthe recently completed deal with the DUP, Sinn Féin did not experience thepolitical leap forward that it had sought. Most commentators had predictedthat Sinn Féin would gain seats in several constituencies, taking its totalnumber held into double figures. There was even talk that if the party hada ‘good day’ it might secure upwards of fifteen seats. In the event, Sinn Féinactually saw its presence in Leinster House reduced – from five TDs to four. Itfailed to take any of its target seats, the most prominent of which was MaryLou McDonald’s effort to get elected in Dublin. In the wake of her success atthe 2004 European elections, McDonald had been brought in as Sinn Féin’scandidate for Dublin Central, in place of the veteran republican activist NickyKehoe. In 2002, Kehoe had himself come very close to gaining a seat, onlymissing out by a few hundred votes. There was thus an expectation thatMcDonald would succeed where he had fallen short.162 As it was, the SinnFéin vote in Dublin Central fell back by almost 2,000 votes and McDonaldwas comprehensively defeated.163 It was a familiar picture across the countryfor Sinn Féin and, in Dublin South-West, Sean Crowe lost the seat that hehad won five years earlier.

In the aftermath of the election there was widespread discussion of the rea-sons behind Sinn Féin’s failure – not least among republicans themselves. Theargument of the republican leadership was that the party had been squeezedby voters returning to the two largest parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.On such a reading, the results were unfortunate, but not a cause for toomuch concern – a temporary blip, which might be corrected at the nextelection. Others, though, were less sanguine. Several commentators, mostnotably Eoghan Harris, declared that Sinn Féin had effectively been ‘put outof business’ in the south and even predicted the final collapse of the party’sremaining seats at the next general election.164

The question of whether or not the critics are right lies beyond the scopeof this work. Suffice to say, though, that the 2007 Irish general electionmarked an unhappy end to a distinct phase in the peace process and, indeed,Sinn Féin’s broader political evolution. Over the preceding two years, thehand of the Adams–McGuinness leadership had been forced by the falloutfrom the Northern Bank robbery and the killing of Robert McCartney, whichbrought renewed focus on republican criminality and opened up republicansto sustained criticism for the first time during the peace process. Clearly, the

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setbacks suffered in late 2004 and early 2005 did do serious damage to thepolitical prospects of Sinn Féin – and in response, the republican leadershipwas forced to set aside the dualism of the past. The ‘Armalite and the bal-lot box’ strategy was now replaced by something approaching a ‘ballot boxalone’ approach.

Subsequently, this proved sufficient to allow the party to entrench its posi-tion as the dominant force within northern nationalism. As a result, MartinMcGuinness became the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland in aco-premiership with the DUP’s Ian Paisley. The immediate consequences inthe south of Sinn Féin’s shift to a ‘ballot box alone’ approach, however, wereless clear-cut and, in truth, only time will establish the effectiveness (or oth-erwise) of this strategy. Worryingly for the republican leadership, the June2007 general election did seem to confirm that Sinn Féin’s previous electoralexpansion in the Republic of Ireland had halted. More disturbing still, theresults of that contest may have pointed the way towards a new divergencein the political fortunes of the party across the two jurisdictions of NorthernIreland and the Republic of Ireland. Thus, even as Sinn Féin has consol-idated its hegemony over the northern nationalist electoral arena, it mayhave reached a point, beyond which it cannot expand south of the border. Itwould be a bitter irony, indeed, if the party’s long march into politics – andon the allegedly inexorable path towards a united Ireland – ended only withthe de facto partition of Sinn Féin itself.

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Conclusion

In 2002, Declan Kearney, a leading Belfast republican, gave a speech in whichhe spoke of the need for republicans to show ‘flexibility with tactics’ as theysought to travel the ‘Road Map to the Republic’. The republican struggle,Kearney claimed, ‘needed to be strategically driven at all times’ and ‘basedon the reality of the existing situation’.1 In such fashion, Kearney succinctlycaptured the underlying attitude of the Adams–McGuinness leadership ofthe republican movement, as expressed over the previous two and a halfdecades. Repeatedly, that leadership had demonstrated a willingness and abil-ity to modify its strategy, in order to meet the demands of what Gerry Adamslabelled ‘objective realities’.2 Consequently, this was a period in which thecharacter of the republican movement was transformed utterly.

In 1981, Sinn Féin had existed as little more than a support organiza-tion for the IRA. The latter served as the principal vehicle of mainstreamrepublicanism and sought the reunification of Ireland by its engagementin an armed struggle against the British state. Throughout the 1980s, thisremained the central modus operandi of the republican movement. The IRA’scampaign was seen as the ‘vital cutting edge’ of the republican struggle. TheAdams–McGuinness leadership believed that the IRA, by keeping NorthernIreland unstable and forcing the British to govern in direct ‘colonial’ manner,could eventually ‘sicken’ the British into withdrawal. While it was acceptedthat this would come through a process of negotiation (as opposed to asingle, grand departure) the republican leadership believed that such negoti-ations should only be conducted alongside a continued military struggle. Inthis, they drew heavily on what might be termed a ‘Vietnam model’, whichstressed the advantages of talking and fighting simultaneously. The sugges-tion that the IRA’s campaign of violence might be ended prior to a negotiatingprocess was simply not entertained at this time; instead, this was to come onlywhen the British finally declared their intent to withdraw from Ireland.

While continuing to adhere to the importance of the military campaign,however, the Adams–McGuinness leadership also believed that republicansneeded to broaden the struggle beyond this – a belief that was given freshimpetus by events surrounding the 1981 hunger strike. Thereafter, therepublican leadership sought the development of a fully fledged republicanpolitical party on both sides of the Irish border. In Northern Ireland, it wasimagined that this would provide for a republican ‘political veto’. This wouldinterdict British efforts to establish an internal deal to end the conflict thatincluded the representatives of moderate Unionism and nationalism in someform of power-sharing arrangement. The hope of the Adams–McGuinnessleadership was that a dynamic and growing Sinn Féin would prevent the

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SDLP from fulfilling its allotted role in such an arrangement. In the Republicof Ireland, meanwhile, republicans also sought political expansion. Not onlywas this judged crucial in the immediate term (in opening up a new ‘front’ bywhich the movement could push for British withdrawal), but also republicanpolitical strength in the south was seen as an indispensable ingredient in theeffort to secure a ‘republican’ solution in Ireland.

In pursuit of these goals, Sinn Féin was resuscitated as a political partywith a decidedly left-wing disposition that mixed radical politics with astrong record of involvement in local communities. Alongside this, the partyalso articulated a strident form of ‘ethnic nationalism’ that drew on its sup-port base in the Catholic/nationalist ghettos of Northern Ireland. Throughthis combination of messages and appeal, it was imagined that a newlyvibrant Sinn Féin would generate a process of ‘republicanization’ on bothsides of the Irish border, bringing growing numbers of people to support therepublican cause.

By 1985, however, the failure of the republicanization project had becomeclear – even prior to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement that year. In thesouth, Sinn Féin was still a fringe political entity; in the north, the halting ofits political growth meant that the possibility of an internal deal for North-ern Ireland continued to loom large. For this reason, the party adopted anew strategic objective: the formation of a pan-nationalist alliance by whichit would attempt to draw the SDLP to itself and thereby head off an accommo-dation in Northern Ireland. Alongside this, Sinn Féin also sought to improveits own image, both by dropping the once-hallowed stance of abstentionism(the party’s refusal to take parliamentary seats) in the Republic of Ireland,and by adopting a ‘peace strategy’. The purpose of the latter was to amplifythe appeal of Sinn Féin’s message by remedying the worst effects of the IRA’sarmed struggle. It was at this time that language itself first became a weaponfor the republican movement, to be divorced from actual actions and inten-tions. Thus, even as Sinn Féin spokespeople began to use the vocabulary ofpeace, there was, at that stage, little sign that the leadership had come tothe conclusion that the IRA’s campaign would have to be ended. Instead,talking and fighting remained the bottom line of the Adams–McGuinnessleadership’s approach.

Contrary to what some have argued, it was only in the early 1990s thatany shift in this outlook began to take place, and even then it occurred grad-ually, as the republican leadership was slowly forced to confront both theIRA’s mounting difficulties and a rapidly changing environment. Eventually,through the coalescence of various factors, the leadership had to accept thatif it wanted to talk, then the fighting would have to cease. The decision to endthe armed struggle, when it came however, did not mark the renunciation ofrepublican objectives by the Adams–McGuinness leadership. The TUAS doc-ument, upon which the first IRA ceasefire was based, made this much clear.Consequently, rather than marking an end to the war, politics now becamethe continuation of that war by other means.

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In this context, the creation of a pan-nationalist alliance, to be drawn onduring negotiations, was viewed as the key alternative to armed struggle.Even then, though, it was unclear how fully the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership had truly turned its back on violence. The ultimate testament to thiscame with the short resumption of the IRA campaign between February 1996and July 1997. It was only in the wake of events at Omagh in 1998, and thenNew York and Washington in September 2001, that this option was closedoff completely. With that said, though, the second IRA ceasefire did markthe point at which Sinn Féin displaced the IRA as the principal expressionof the republican movement. From that point onwards, to paraphrase GerryAdams, the political party was never again relegated to the ‘passenger seat’by the military organization.3 Instead, after 1997, the peace process came toconstitute the central strategic context in which the republican movementoperated. Therein, the key republican objectives were: to push forward thepolitical growth of Sinn Féin, north and south; to advance the cause of Irishunity through negotiations; to divide, unbalance and isolate Unionism; andto maintain and strengthen the pan-nationalist alliance as a vehicle by whichthe movement’s other objectives could be achieved. The success of this strat-egy could be gauged from the fact that, by 2001, Sinn Féin had achieved thepolitical veto it had previously sought in vain in Northern Ireland. In addi-tion, at that same point, the party was also in the midst of major politicalexpansion south of the Irish border. The extent of this was such as to raisethe possibility, by late 2004, that the party might even soon be in a positionto enter coalition government in the Republic of Ireland.

Integral to this success was the peace process and, especially, the GoodFriday Agreement. Despite being a most ‘un-republican’ document, SinnFéin’s endorsement of the latter was central to the image that developed,of republicans as the most ardently ‘pro-peace’ actors in the process. Thisimage was carefully fostered and enhanced by repeated interventions bythe IRA (particularly in relation to decommissioning) that supposedly ver-ified republican good intentions. For seven years after the Agreement, thisdynamic delivered striking political growth to Sinn Féin.

In 2005, however, the prodigious expansion of Sinn Féin ended. The fall-out from the Northern Bank robbery in late 2004, the murder of RobertMcCartney in January 2005 and wider concerns about republican crimi-nality combined to damage the party’s prospects. The Adams–McGuinnessleadership was now forced to finally abandon the dualistic ‘Armalite andballot box’ approach, with the announcement of a formal end to theIRA’s campaign and the completion of decommissioning. Ultimately, thisproved sufficient to allow Sinn Féin back into government in NorthernIreland, though only after the party had committed itself to supportingthe Northern Irish police service. In 2007, Martin McGuinness becamethe Deputy First Minister of the province – symbolically completing thetransition from ‘terrorist’ to ‘statesman’ and confirming his party’s domi-nance within northern nationalism. Such success, however, has not been

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replicated south of the Irish border. There, at the 2007 general election, SinnFéin failed to achieve the leap forward it had sought and actually saw itsrepresentation in the Irish Parliament reduced. Whether or not this her-alds a new decline in the party’s fortunes or a temporary setback remainsto be seen.

Nevertheless, irrespective of recent results in the Irish Republic, there waslittle doubting the fact that, by 2007, Sinn Féin was virtually unrecognizablefrom the entity of a quarter-century earlier. Whereas, in its earlier incar-nation, the party had spoken the language of unreconstructed, hard-linemilitarism, the later version spoke only of ‘peace in Ireland’ and its desire tosee an ‘Ireland of equals’. By the same token, whereas, in 1981, Sinn Féinhad been very much ‘itself alone’, by 2007, it had abandoned abstentionismon both sides of the border (and sat in government in the north), embracednotions of pan-nationalism and was prepared to seek alliances wherever pos-sible. Above all, whereas, at the start of this period, Sinn Féin had beena minor entity, overshadowed by its military counterpart, by the end of2007, the political party now stood as the dominant vehicle for mainstreamrepublicanism.

In its management of this transformation, it verges on the banal to statethat the Adams–McGuinness leadership, to some extent, embraced ‘change’itself as a guiding principle. In the words of long-time leadership member,Tom Hartley, Sinn Féin was, throughout the period, a ‘party of change . . .

[which] survived on the basis of having highly manoeuvrable politics, whichdon’t allow the movement to be cornered’.4 Inspiring this attitude was adetermination to actually deliver on republican objectives. As the Sinn FéinMLA, Francie Molloy, noted, ‘we want to live in the Republic, we don’t justwant it as a plaque on the wall!’5 To this end, all principles, aside from thecommitment to Irish unity, were considered open to change. As Pat Dohertydeclared: ‘Tactics are there to be adapted and changed when the need arises . . .

principles are there to be achieved.’6 Flowing from this attitude, a partythat was once defined by a commitment to parliamentary abstentionism andarmed struggle now took its seats in Stormont, Leinster House and Brussels,while simultaneously being one of the central players in the Northern Irishpeace process. By the same token, republicans increasingly adopted the lan-guage of their opponents, even to the extent of endorsing an Agreement thatwas founded in the language of Unionist consent and appeared to legitimizethe Northern Irish state.

Without doubt, the scale of these changes created major ambiguities andinternal difficulties for the republican leadership at various points. Neverthe-less, for the most part, the leadership was able to avoid potentially seriousdivisions and maintain the overall unity of the movement. On the one hand,this success was a product of both the generally high esteem in which theleadership was held and the leadership’s self-declared willingness to negotiatewith its own people. Alongside this, however, some doubt has been cast on

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the quality of the internal republican negotiating process – especially giventhe apparent centralization of mainstream republicanism over the period cov-ered. In this regard, it seems undeniable that the years of the peace process,in particular, witnessed a growing authoritarianism within the republicanmovement. Moreover, internal negotiations on major issues tended to beapproached in noticeably similar fashion by the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership – the aim being to minimize the potential for significant unrest ormass defections. Whether in the case of the abandonment of abstentionism,the ending of the IRA’s campaign, or Sinn Féin’s endorsement of the GoodFriday Agreement, the leadership was careful to observe Danny Morrison’smaxim: a debate was only conducted once the leadership itself had made upits mind. That being the case, the debates, or negotiations, tended to be moreakin to exercises in persuasion, by which the Adams–McGuinness leadershipattempted to convince ordinary republicans of the merits of actions it hadalready decided upon.

In the 1990s, as the peace process developed momentum, this reality meantthat the republican leadership was, to some extent, charting a course allof its own. At every step it faced twin negotiations: externally with theBritish government and the Unionists; internally with the republican grass-roots. Through the conduct of such Janus-faced negotiations, however, theAdams–McGuinness leadership was able to bring the wider republicanmovement to accept the enormous changes it believed necessary.

The extent of these changes was such as to convince many that the leader-ship had, in truth, sold out and abandoned the republican cause. Ratherthan accept such an assertion, however, the argument here is that theAdams-McGuinness leadership continues to pursue the ultimate republicanideological objective of Irish unity. Such changes as have occurred should,therefore, be understood to have taken place in the realm of tactics and short-to medium-term strategic objectives. The truth of this can be seen from exam-ining the degree of ideological revisionism, or rather the lack thereof, of therepublican leadership, on the key subjects that lay at the heart of the North-ern Ireland conflict. As has been demonstrated, for example, regarding thequestion of Unionism, the republican position remained that which it alwayshad been; namely, that even as republicans appeared to extend the hand offriendship to Unionists, Unionism, as an ideology, continued to be seen assomething to be out-manoeuvred and defeated. In similar vein, republicanattitudes to the Northern Irish state, the legitimacy of partition and the roleof the British government in Ireland were little altered. As one regular con-tributor to An Phoblacht/Republican News put it in May 2003, in the contextof calls for ‘acts of completion’ from republicans:

Tony Blair talks of ‘acts of completion’, as if, when the Agreement is imple-mented the problem of the North will be solved, the process of politicaltransformation over. For republicans, the ‘only act of completion’ will be

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the departure of the last British soldier from Ireland, on the same plane asthe last British minister ever to meddle in the affairs of our country.7

Specifically rejected here was the idea that the Agreement could ever consti-tute a ‘settlement’ for Northern Ireland. Instead, the message was plain: theAgreement, and the peace process of which it was a part, were to be viewedonly as vehicles for the attainment of the unchanged republican objective ofIrish unity.

Seen from such a perspective, the impression gained of theAdams–McGuinness leadership is one that emphasizes what might be termedthe ‘ultra-pragmatism’ of those involved. The label of ‘pragmatism’ is one thathas been often attached to people such as Gerry Adams and his supporters;yet, equally as often, it is a label that has been misunderstood. For therehas been a tendency to equate pragmatism with both ideological modera-tion and a readiness to compromise. In reality, they are altogether differenttraits. The pragmatism of the Adams–McGuinness leadership stems from acapacity to: make realistic appraisal of the situation facing the republicanmovement; evaluate the movement’s ability to achieve its objectives on thatbasis; and act accordingly. Where those objectives have appeared unobtain-able, the leadership has altered course and embraced a new approach. At eachstage, it has responded to pressure placed upon, or inducements offered to,the republican movement, by measuring the costs and benefits of its actions.The leadership’s pragmatism, therefore, does not reflect any eagerness todiscard its underlying commitment to the key republican objective of Irishunity. On the contrary, on that fundamental issue the central figures of theleadership are avowed ideologues. In the words of one former senior repub-lican, the people at the heart of the movement remain ‘utterly relentless . . .

[and] prepared to do whatever it takes to succeed’.8

As has been shown, this ‘whatever it takes’ attitude included a willingnessto adopt positions that ran counter to traditional republican ideology. Hence,it was possible for the Adams–McGuinness leadership to end abstentionismin the Republic of Ireland, end the IRA’s armed struggle and even endorse theGood Friday Agreement. In each instance, the impetus for the leadership’sactions was provided by tactical consideration, not ideological revisionism.With regards to the latter, for instance, at the time of the Agreement it wasclear that Unionists de facto had a veto, as afforded them by the British govern-ment’s insistence that the consent principle be applied to Northern Ireland’sfuture status. Thirty years of IRA violence had failed to alter this simple fact.Flowing from this, the reality was that Northern Ireland existed and wasunlikely to disappear in the immediate future. In response to these objec-tive realities, therefore, it made sense that, if the republican leadership feltthe movement would benefit from appearing to endorse the Agreement (aswas the case), it made sense to do so. This, however, did not represent anacceptance of either the Unionist veto or Northern Ireland’s right to exist.

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The republican movement’s subversive intent in relation to both remainedintact. At root, the change was one of form, not substance.

Such an interpretation was very much the one that those within the repub-lican leadership themselves ascribed to their actions. The truth of this couldbe seen, for instance, from the way in which Sinn Féin chose to commemoratethe twentieth anniversary of the 1983 mass breakout from the Maze prison.Not only did the party hold a dinner dance to mark the occasion, but also AnPhoblacht/Republican News carried a highly instructive piece eulogizing therepublican ‘Great Escape’. As the article noted, the prison breakout was ahighly significant episode within the collective memory of modern republi-canism. Coming at a time when there were suggestions that the republicanstruggle in the prisons had been defeated, following the collapse of the 1981hunger strike, the 1983 escape was seen by republicans as an act of defiancethat proved the lie of their defeat. As to whether this is a fair analysis of theincident is not the issue here; rather, the significance of the episode is thatthis was how Sinn Féin remembered it. It was, thus, described as, ‘one ofthe most humiliating defeats ever inflicted on the British war machine byrepublicans’.9 Of even greater note, meanwhile, was the fact that this victorywas judged to have been achieved by republican prisoners being preparedto work the system in the short term, despite their misgivings, in order tosecure victory in the long term. In the words of An Phoblacht/Republican News,this had meant that the ‘bitter pill’ of cooperation with the authorities had,nonetheless, been ‘swallowed on trust’ by prisoners. The effect was to ‘lullthe screws into a false sense of security . . . and from that platform the escapewas launched’.10

The implicit message to the republican audience was unmistakable: some-times unusual, or apparently contradictory, measures were necessary in orderto defeat the enemy. Such moves were not, however, to be interpreted as sur-render, or the renunciation of objectives. So it was with the 1983 prisonescape; so too, the leadership wished its supporters to understand the repub-lican movement’s endorsement of the Good Friday Agreement. It too wasa bitter pill for republicans to swallow, but it too was to be seen as part ofthe effort by which republicans might yet inflict a terminal defeat on theirideological opponents.

What emerges, then, is an image of the Adams–McGuinness leadershipas engaged in a ‘long game’. Remarking on this characteristic, one Union-ist politician has placed it in stark contrast with the perceived attitude ofUnionism: ‘Whereas Unionism tends to want everything done yesterday,Sinn Féin is very happy to wait ten, twenty, thirty years to fulfil the strategythey have in mind.’11 The truth of this was confirmed by the aforementionedspeech delivered by Declan Kearney on the occasion of the John Joe McGirlcommemoration in 2002. Therein, Kearney stated plainly, ‘Sinn Féin faces aprocess of slow, laborious, long-term activism, with a potential 15–20 yeartrajectory.’12 In similar vein, the report of the Cuige chairman to Sinn Féin’s

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2006 internal conference at Gulladuff spoke of the need for activists to placethemselves on a ‘ten year trajectory’.13

What such comments again reveal is the relentless commitment of theAdams–McGuinness leadership. Consequently, while the republican move-ment’s ‘long war’ may have ended, this has been translated into a ‘longnegotiation’, or perhaps even more appropriately a ‘Cold War’. In line withthis, it is noticeable that the republican leadership still speaks the languageof conflict: waging ‘war by another means’; building political ‘beachheads’;and operating in different ‘sites of struggle’.14 Thus, while the violence of the‘Troubles’ may have ended, the ideological conflict most certainly has not.

To recognize this, however, is not to argue that the strategy of the repub-lican leadership is likely to succeed. Indeed, such an assessment lies beyondthe scope of this work. It might be noted, though, that for years, republicanslaboured under the belief that they could bomb the Northern Irish state outof existence and IRA violence could achieve Irish unity. The lesson of expe-rience suggests that such a belief was fundamentally misguided. In light ofthis, it might be asked, ‘Is the modern-day strategy of the Adams–McGuinnessleadership necessarily any less mistaken? Is the “ballot box alone” approachof that leadership any less delusional than the “Armalite and ballot box”strategy that preceded it?’ Questions of this nature are only made more com-pelling when it is considered that potential weak-points in that strategy mayalready be becoming visible. It is possible to query, for example, the extent towhich the predominantly northern-based republican leadership really under-stands politics in the Republic of Ireland. After all, much of the leadership’srhetoric on the subject draws on relatively simplistic attacks on what arereferred to as ‘gombeen politics’.15 That being the case, there must surely bedoubts as to whether Sinn Féin, as currently constituted, could ever become atruly major force in southern Irish politics. And in this regard it is noticeablethat the 2007 Irish general election prompted re-evaluation in some repub-lican quarters, from those who did not share their leadership’s optimismthat the results achieved were merely a blip. There was concern too that theleadership itself might have been at least partly responsible for Sinn Féin’spoor showing during the election. Gerry Adams, in particular, now came infor some criticism for his faltering performances during the campaign, whendiscussing detailed matters of policy. This was especially so in relation to ques-tions of economics, with internal critics expressing dissatisfaction at whatthey saw as the leadership’s impromptu departure from established partypositions.

By the same token, the events of 2005 had appeared to show the vulnerabil-ity of Sinn Féin’s peace strategy. On the one hand, the negative publicity andthen electoral reverses of that year seemed to illustrate the extent to which therepublican political project remained highly dependent on the continuationof the peace process. At the same time, the exposure of Denis Donaldson’scovert activities as a British spy revealed the internal damage that might be

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done to Sinn Féin in the future, as the truth of Northern Ireland’s ‘dirty war’emerges. The ability of the Adams–McGuinness leadership to proceed reliesmuch on its success in holding together the republican movement. This, inturn, rests, to a significant degree, on the trust that the leadership inspiresin its followers. Yet, revelations such as those surrounding Donaldson (andbefore him, Freddie Scappaticci) are highly corrosive of precisely that trust.For this reason, it may be that further disclosures of this nature will proveterminal to the republican leadership’s overall strategy.

More broadly, in the years after 2005 it was possible to detect a more vol-uble level of criticism of the Adams–McGuinness leadership. The unfoldingof the peace process prompted new questions as to the leadership’s stew-ardship of that process, from a republican perspective, from those who hadpreviously been loyal lieutenants. Signs of dissent became visible during late2006 and early 2007, in the run-up to the accommodation that was reachedwith the DUP. Thus, there were, at this time, significant departures from therepublican ranks. In September 2006, for instance, it was reported that a long-time senior republican, Bernard Fox, had resigned from the movement.16 Foxlater became involved with the Dublin-based ‘Eirigi’ group that declared itselfloyal to traditional republican principles.17 Another to quit the movementin this period was Laurence O’Neill, a former hunger striker from Belfast,who had once been considered very close to the Adams–McGuinness lead-ership. Not only did O’Neill attack the party’s shift in policing policy, butalso he was pointed in his criticism of what he felt was the leadership’sconstant desire for control.18 Where Fox and O’Neill led, others followed –especially after the conclusion of the deal with the DUP in early 2007. Oneof Sinn Féin’s sitting MLA’s at Stormont, Gerry McHugh, resigned from theparty in December 2007 (while deciding to stay on within the assembly),claiming to have been ‘increasingly disillusioned with the totally undemo-cratic nature of the party and the wholly top-down dictation within it’.19

McHugh also offered a stinging critique of Sinn Féin’s performance withinthe new Northern Irish Executive and attacked the party’s new position onpolicing.

With regards to the latter, it is clear that Sinn Féin’s stance on policinghas the potential to continue to cause the party serious problems. Otherdefections have occurred, with the defectors frequently citing this as the prin-cipal source of their discontent. To give but one example, a local Sinn Féincouncillor in Fermanagh, Bernice Swift, left the party in October 2007, afterattacking the decision to join the PSNI’s District Policing Partnership Boards(DPPBs). These boards, she argued, were constructed so that ‘meaningfulcontrol and accountability by the community is impossible’.20 ‘At best’, sheclaimed, they would be ‘meaningless talking shops’.21 Though Swift’s com-ments could be dismissed as an isolated case, they do seem to be indicativeof genuine republican unease, often manifested locally, with the party’s newpolicing policy.22

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At one level, this unease might make it difficult for the party to actuallyfulfil its policing commitments in some areas. In Strabane in late 2007, forexample, Sinn Féin was simply unable to find candidates from within its rankswho were willing to join the local DPPB.23 Were this failure to be replicatedmore widely then it could carry serious consequences for the sustainability ofthe devolved institutions. Elsewhere, meanwhile, such developments, along-side the aforementioned resignations and mobilization of the ‘ConcernedRepublicans’ opposition to Sinn Féin’s endorsement of the PSNI seems to sug-gest that a republican opposition to Sinn Féin could coalesce within NorthernIreland. Only time will tell, of course, whether this is indeed the case.

For the moment, though, such considerations remain within the realm ofconjecture. Instead, what can be said with certainty is that the pragmatismof the Adams–McGuinness leadership over the last quarter of a century hasbrought a remarkable evolution in the nature of the republican movement.Underpinning all the changes has been a leadership that remains unswerv-ing in its dedication to its principal ideological objective and continues tothink strategically as to how best it might achieve that objective. It is, there-fore, perhaps time to take the republican movement at its word, when itdeclares that the Northern Ireland ‘issue’ is not yet settled. For Sinn Féin andthe broader republican movement, the struggle – their self-proclaimed longmarch towards Irish unity – does indeed go on.

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Appendix I: The Leadership ofthe Republican Movementduring the Peace Process

(p) denotes former republican prisoner

Core strategy personnel

Gerry Adams (p)Martin McGuinness (p)

Ted Howell (p)Pat Doherty

Martin Ferris (p)Gerry Kelly (p)

Mitchel McLaughlinDeclan Kearney (p)

Tom Hartley (p)Jim Gibney (p)

Brian Keenan (p)

Other leading members of SinnFéin

Conor Murphy (p)Mary-Lou McDonald

Alex Maskey (p)Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin

Arthur Morgan (p)Sean Crowe (p)

Michelle GildernewAengus O Snodaigh

Bairbre de Brun

Influential ex-prisoners

Seanna Walsh (p)Padraig Wilson (p)

Leo Green (p)Bernard Fox (p) (until 2006)

Brendan McFarlane (p)Raymond McCartney (p)Laurence McKeown (p)

Ella O’Dwyer (p)Martina Anderson (p)

Behind-the-scenes IRA figures

Behind-the-scenes Sinn Féinfigures

Aidan McAteer (p)Richard McAuley (p)

Chrissie McAuleySiobhan O’Hanlon

Dawn DoyleRita O’Hare

Denis Donaldson (until 2005) (p)Lucilita BreathnachDodie McGuinness

193

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Appendix II: The Geographical Baseof the Republican Leadership

BELFAST DERRY DUBLIN OTHER

Gerry AdamsTed HowellGerry Kelly

Declan KearneyTom HartleyJim Gibney

Seanna WalshPadraig Wilson

Leo GreenBernard Fox

Brendan McFarlaneLaurence McKeown

Alex MaskeyDenis DonaldsonChrissie McAuleyRichard McAuleyAidan McAteer

Siobhan O’HanlonBrian Keenan

Martin McGuinnessMitchel McLaughlin

Raymond McCartneyMartina AndersonDodie McGuinness

Mary-Lou McDonaldSean Crowe

Aengus O SnodaighDawn Doyle

Lucilita BreathnachRita O’HareElla O’Dwyer

Pat Doherty (Donegal)Martin Ferris (Kerry)

Conor Murphy (South Armagh)Arthur Morgan (Louth)

Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Monaghan)Michelle Gildernew (Fermanagh)

194

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Notes

Introduction

1. Sinn Féin Northern Ireland Assembly Election Leaflet, Vote Sinn Féin, Vote Nation-alist: Vote Carron and Molloy 1 and 2 (1982) (Linenhall Library Political Collection –henceforth LLPC).

2. ‘IRA leads the way – IRA statement’, An Phoblacht/Republican News (hereafter,AP/RN), 28 July 2005; ‘IRA “has destroyed all its arms”’, BBC News Online,26 September 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4282188.stm>, last accessed 26 October 2006.

3. The ‘Provisionals’ are held to be the mainstream IRA and Sinn Féin throughout,and as such the moniker is not always used. Rival claimants to the title deeds ofthose organizations, such as the ‘Official’ or ‘Real’ IRA, are identified as such whereappropriate.

4. Morrison, cited in ‘By Ballot and Bullet’, AP/RN, front page, 5 November 1981.5. Cited in T. P. Coogan, The IRA (London, 2000), p. 467.6. Cited in D. Lister, ‘Adams is a top leader in IRA, Irish minister says’, The Times, 21

February 2005.7. Lemass, cited in R. Dunphy, The Making of Fianna Fáil Power in Ireland 1923–1948

(Oxford, 1995), p. 139.8. ‘Introduction to Sinn Féin’, Sinn Féin website, available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/

introduction>, last accessed 26 October 2006.9. Barry McElduff, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 August 2003.

10. B. Feeney, Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years (Dublin, 2002).11. In this regard, see, for example, P. Taylor, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Féin (London,

1997); B. O’Brien, The Long War: The IRA and Sinn Féin, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1999);M.L.R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish RepublicanMovement, 2nd edn (London, 1997).

12. E. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London, 2002).13. H. Patterson, The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA, 2nd edn (London,

1997).14. R. Bourke, Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (London, 2003), pp. 173, 177–8.15. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 January 2004.16. A. Maillot, New Sinn Féin: Irish Republicanism in the Twenty-First Century

(Abbingdon, 2005); G. Murray and J. Tonge, Sinn Féin and the SDLP: From Alienationto Participation (London, 2005).

17. Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, p. 190.18. ‘Annual Commemoration of Wolfe Tone, Bodenstown Oration, given by Jimmy

Drumm’, Republican News, 18 June 1977. Ed Moloney has convincingly explainedthat it was Adams and Morrison who actually composed the speech andthen chose Drumm to read it. See Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA,pp. 150–1.

19. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?.20. M. O’Doherty, The Trouble with Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA

(Belfast, 1998).21. K. Rafter, Sinn Féin 1905–2005: In the Shadow of Gunmen (Dublin, 2005), p. 3.

195

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 196

196 Notes

22. See R. English, Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA (London, 2003) and R. English,Irish Freedom: A History of Nationalism in Ireland (London, 2007).

23. R. Alonso, The IRA and Armed Struggle (London, 2006), p. 194.24. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.25. For more on the 1981 hunger strike, see, for instance: L. Clarke, Broadening the

Battlefied: The H-Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Féin (Dublin, 1987); D. Beresford, TenMen Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, 2nd edn (London, 1994); andfor a more revisionist view, R. O’Rawe, Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-BlockHunger Strike (Dublin, 2005).

26. Gibney, cited in Feeney, Sinn Féin, p. 291.27. Bourke, Peace in Ireland, pp. 43–180; Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, pp. 186–7.28. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, p. 154.29. See, for example, Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, pp. 180–94; Bourke, Peace in

Ireland, pp. 165–72.30. It is generally accepted that ‘Brownie’ was Gerry Adams; republicans themselves

have admitted as much in the past. In an article for An Phoblacht/Republican Newsin 1987, for example, Martin McGuinness confirmed that the pen name ‘Brownie’applied to Adams (see M. McGuinness, ‘A Comradeship of Suffering’, AP/RN, 23July 1987). However, in March 2004, Adams’ close aide, Richard McAuley, wrotea letter to the Belfast Telegraph in which he claimed to have co-authored severalof the ‘Brownie’ articles, including one in which the author admitted to beingan IRA member. For more on this, see C. Thornton, ‘Adams’ IRA sham’, BelfastTelegraph, 19 March 2004.

31. ‘IRA Geared To A Long War’, Republican News, 9 December 1978.32. G. Adams, ‘Presidential Address: Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 17 November 1983.33. ‘Brownie’, ‘Active Republicanism’, Republican News, 1 May 1976.34. Gibney, cited in Frontline Online, ‘The IRA and Sinn Féin: Interviews: Jim Gibney’,

PBS, available at <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/inside/gibney.html>, last accessed 28 October 2006.

35. Irish Interest Group, ‘Sinn Féin and the Educative Process: An Interviewwith Daisy Mules’, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, April 1996, avail-able at <http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/test/mule/mules_fulltext.html>, lastaccessed at 28 October 2006.

36. The pre-1981 drift of power away from Ó Brádaigh and O’Conaill and towardsthe ‘young Turks’ had been made evident by the shift in control of Sinn Féin’snewspaper, which led to the emergence of an overhauled An Phoblacht/RepublicanNews (merging the previously separate newspapers of An Phoblacht and RepublicanNews) under the editorship of Danny Morrison in 1979. See Moloney, A SecretHistory of the IRA, pp. 178–80.

37. Clarke, Broadening the Battlefield, pp. 206–8.38. G. Adams, Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland (Dingle, 2003), pp. 31, 79.39. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.40. Adams, Hope and History, p. 27.41. See, for example, O’Brien, The Long War, p. 122; Moloney, A Secret History of the

IRA, p. 401.42. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.43. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, London, 12 March 2005.44. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.45. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, London, 12 March 2005.46. Ibid.

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Notes 197

47. Denis Donaldson, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 January 2004.48. F. O’Connor, Only Child (London, 1961).49. D. Morrison, Then the Walls Came Down: A Prison Journal (Dublin, 1999), p. 93.50. Gerry Kelly, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 March 2004.51. Ibid.52. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.53. Ruairi Ó Brádaigh, speaking to Sinn Féin’s November 1983 ard fheis, remarked that

the history of republicanism was one of ‘splits, splits, splits’; cited in D. Sharrockand M. Devenport, Man of War, Man of Peace: The Unauthorised Biography ofGerry Adams (London, 1997), p. 213. Similarly, the republican-turned-playwright,Brendan Behan, was famously said to have remarked that the first item on theagenda, when any new movement met in Ireland, was ‘the split’.

54. A. McIntyre, ‘Modern Irish Republicanism: The Product of British State Strategies’,Irish Political Studies, 10 (1995), pp. 97–121.

55. De Bréadún, cited in ‘Martin McGuinness’, BBC 1, 30 October 2002.

1 Building the Political Party and ‘Republicanization’, 1981–5

1. G. Adams, ‘Bobby Sands, republicanism and the freedom struggle’, Iris: Therepublican magazine, 10 July 1985, p. 18.

2. Rafter, Sinn Féin 1905–2005, p. 113.3. ‘By Ballot and Bullet’, AP/RN, front page, 5 November 1981.4. Figures taken from ‘Northern Ireland Assembly Elections 1982’, ARK Northern

Ireland: Social and Political Archive, available at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fa82.htm>, last accessed 1 November 2006.

5. Figures taken from ‘Westminster election, 11 June 1983’, ARK Northern Ireland:Social and Political Archive, available at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fw83.htm>, last accessed 1 November 2006. See also Feeney, Sinn Féin, p. 318.

6. ‘Republicanization’, as described by Adams, encapsulates the message put acrossby ‘Brownie’ in his numerous articles. See, for example, ‘Brownie’, ‘Agitate, Edu-cate, Liberate’, Republican News, 22 May 1976; G. Adams, The Politics of IrishFreedom (Dingle, 1986), pp. 86–7.

7. M. Kelly, ‘The world according to Gerry Adams – Michael Kelly Interview’, InDublin, 22 August 1985.

8. ‘Interview with IRA spokesperson’, Magill, July 1983, p. 9.9. ‘“We have now established a sort of Republican veto”: Michael Farrell interviews

Gerry Adams MP, vice-president of Sinn Féin’, Magill, July 1983, p. 13.10. S. O’Callaghan, The Informer (London, 1999), p. 425.11. ‘“We have now established a sort of Republican veto”: Michael Farrell interviews

Gerry Adams MP, vice-president of Sinn Féin’, Magill, July 1983.12. Sinn Féin European Election Leaflet, Vote Sinn Féin No. 1: One Ireland, One People –

The Only Alternative (1984) (LLPC).13. Sinn Féin General Election (UK) Leaflet, Vote Sinn Féin: Gerry Adams (1983)

(LLPC).14. Ibid.15. McGuinness, cited in O’Brien, The Long War, p. 152.16. Morrison, cited in G. Kerrigan, “ ‘The IRA has to do what the IRA has to do”:

Interview with Danny Morrison’, Magill, September 1984, p. 12.17. P. Arnlis, ‘The war will go on’, AP/RN, 16 September 1982.

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198 Notes

18. 1972 was described as the ‘Year of Victory’, while Sinn Féin later declared that1974 would bring ‘Victory to the IRA’. See ‘Year of Victory’, Republican News,front page, 2 January 1972; ‘Victory to the IRA 1974’, An Phoblacht, front page,4 January 1974.

19. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 12 September 2006.20. K. McCool, ‘Valuable lesson in British duplicity’, AP/RN, 6 August 1987.21. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 12 September 2006.22. For the Adams-McGuinness leadership’s critique of the 1975 truce, see Moloney,

A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 141–5.23. Thompson, cited in P. Dixon, ‘Counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland and the

Crisis of the British State’, in P. Rich (ed.), The Counter-insurgent State: GuerrillaWarfare and State-building in the Twentieth Century (London, 1997), p. 196.

24. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 12 September 2006.25. ‘IRA rocks enemy morale’, AP/RN, front page, 22 July 1982; ‘IRA Blitz Brits’,

AP/RN, front page, 18 October 1984; ‘100lbs that Shook the Establishment’,AP/RN, 18 October 1984.

26. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 64.27. Ibid., p. 3.28. Ibid., p. 88.29. Ibid., p. 23.30. Sinn Féin, Republican Lecture Series No. 9: Loyalism (1984) (LLPC).31. Ibid.32. ‘“We have now established a sort of Republican veto”: Michael Farrell interviews

Gerry Adams MP, vice-president of Sinn Féin’, Magill, July 1983, p. 14.33. D. Morrison, ‘Danny Morrison’, in M. Collins (ed.), Ireland after Britain (London,

1985), p. 92.34. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 89.35. ‘Federalism rejected, positive electoral policy adopted’, AP/RN, 5 November 1981.36. Morrison, ‘Danny Morrison’, pp. 87 and 92.37. Ibid., p. 92.38. G. Adams, ‘Scenario for a Socialist Republic speech: Article first printed in An

Phoblacht/Republican News April 1980’, in Signposts to Independence and Socialism:Recent Papers by Gerry Adams (Dublin, 1988), p. 31.

39. ‘Annual Commemoration of Wolfe Tone, Bodenstown Oration, given by JimmyDrumm’, Republican News, 18 June 1977.

40. The IRA informer, Freddie Scappaticci, confirmed that this was the term usedby republicans when he was interviewed by a team from a TV programme, TheCook Report. Cited in M. Ingram and G. Harkin, Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agentsin Ireland (Dublin, 2004), p. 80.

41. ‘IRA on crime: Exclusive Interview with Irish Republican Army spokesperson’,AP/RN, 27 September 1984.

42. See, for example, J. Sluka, Hearts and Minds, Water and Fish: Support for the IRAand INLA in a Northern Irish Ghetto (London, 1989), p. 131.

43. O’Doherty, The Trouble with Guns, pp. 151–4.44. J. Hejlesen, ‘“. . . And a Ballot Paper in this Hand . . .”: A Review of the Political

Strategy and Policies of Sinn Féin in the 1980s’, unpublished PhD dissertation,University of Odense, 1994, p. 54.

45. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.46. Ibid.47. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 January 2004.

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 199

Notes 199

48. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 June 2004.49. ‘Storm Clouds Gather’, AP/RN, front page, 26 July 1984; P. Arnlis, ‘Next Please!’,

AP/RN, 26 July 1984.50. J. Madden, ‘Why the war was lost: An appraisal of republican strategy in 1922’,

AP/RN, 26 July 1984.51. ‘Poleglass blackspot’, AP/RN, 26 July 1984; S. O’Malley, ‘Bray takes drug action’,

AP/RN, 26 July 1984.52. The roots of Northern Ireland’s Civil Rights Movement lay in the mid-1960s’

efforts of groups such as the Homeless Citizens League and the Campaign forSocial Justice, to bring an end to discrimination in precisely this area. For moreon this see Bourke, Peace in Ireland, pp. 53–63.

53. Sinn Féin, Republican Lecture Series No.7: Social Agitation (1985) (LLPC).54. See, for example, M. Armstrong, ‘Divis Desperation’, AP/RN, 12 January 1984.55. See, for instance, West Belfast Bulletin, 1(1), March 1983, or Lagan Valley Bulletin,

1(1), May 1983, both of which carried articles entitled, ‘Housing: Worst inEurope’.

56. ‘Morrison in Poleglass and Twinbrook: Vote SF: Morrison’, Lagan Valley Bulletin,3, June 1984.

57. Ibid.58. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 August 2003.59. Fra McCann, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 March 2004.60. ‘Broadening the struggle’, West Belfast Bulletin, 1(1), March 1983.61. See, for example, S. O’Malley, ‘A push against the pushers’, AP/RN, 7 July 1983;

B. Kerr, ‘Ballymun takes on pushers’, AP/RN, 26 January 1984; K. Burke, ‘DrugsCarnage – 7 dead in a week’, AP/RN, 28 June 1984; S. O’Malley, ‘Bray takes drugaction’, AP/RN, 26 July 1984; M. MacDiarmada, ‘Attempt to Smash ConcernedParents Campaign’, AP/RN, 31 October 1985.

62. S. O’Malley, ‘A push against the pushers’, AP/RN, 7 July 1983.63. M. de Barra, ‘Gardai target anti-drugs groups’, AP/RN, 22 March 1984.64. Anonymous (confidential interview with former community worker), Dublin,

20 July 2006.65. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 12 September 2006.66. Ibid.67. Anonymous (confidential interview with former community worker), Dublin,

20 July 2006.68. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, 22 November 2005.69. J. Noonan, ‘Education Department Background Reading Document’, Iris Bheag,

3, October 1987, p. 19.70. F. O’Connor, In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1993), p. 18.71. Gibney, cited in ‘Adams highlights importance of republished Greaves clas-

sic’, The Irish Democrat, available at <http://www.irishdemocrat.co.uk/features/mellows/>, last accessed 31 October 2006.

72. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, pp. 6, 8, 37–8, 47, 128 and 132–6.73. Mellows, cited in C.D. Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (London,

1971), pp. 363–4.74. ‘Brownie’, as cited on pp. 16–17 above.75. Mellows, cited in Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution, p. 364; G. Adams,

‘Labour Cannot Wait!: Speech to Annual Republican May Day Rally in Derry,1985’, in Signposts to Independence and Socialism, p. 22.

76. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 27 March 2003.

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200 Notes

77. Tom Hartley, interview with the author, Belfast, 27 March 2003.78. English, Armed Struggle, p. 232.79. For more on this see M. Frampton, ‘“Squaring the Circle”: The Foreign Pol-

icy of Sinn Féin, 1983–1989’, Irish Political Studies, 19(2) (Winter 2004),pp. 47–9.

80. See, for instance, D. Breatnach, ‘Celtic Origin’, AP/RN, 2 May 1981. Ó Brádaighwas a keen advocate of a Celtic Federation, and made frequent trips to the Basquecountry in pursuit of this proposed alliance.

81. For more on this, see M. Frampton, ‘“Squaring the Circle”: the Foreign Pol-icy of Sinn Féin, 1983–2001’, unpublished MPhil dissertation, University ofCambridge, 2003, pp. 23–47.

82. Bourke, Peace in Ireland, pp. 25–6.83. Cited in ‘IRA condemn NLF lying statements’, An Phoblacht, October 1972. See

also, ‘The Provos are the force in Ireland today’, An Phoblacht, March 1972; ‘EireNua’, An Phoblacht, August 1972.

84. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 132.85. Adams, ‘Labour cannot wait!’, in Signposts to Independence and Socialism, p. 20.86. Adams, ‘Not just a “Brits Out” Movement’, in Signposts to Independence and

Socialism, p. 25.87. Ibid.88. Adams, ‘Labour cannot wait!’, in Signposts to Independence and Socialism, p. 20.89. Ibid.; G. Adams, ‘Presidential Address: Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 17 November

1983.90. K. Burke, ‘A party on the move’, AP/RN, 17 November 1983.91. Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin Policy Document (Dublin, 1986) (LLPC), pp. 2–6.92. R. O’Hare, ‘Special Focus: Women and the Republican Struggle’, Iris: The

republican magazine, 8, August 1984.93. For example, during the 1984 Ard Fheis, the section on ‘women’s affairs’ saw

nineteen motions submitted by the various cumainn (branches of Sinn Féin) fordiscussion, as compared to just two during the 1981 Ard Fheis. See, Sinn Féin,Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 1984 (Dublin, 1984) (LLPC), pp. 18–22; Sinn Féin, ArdFheis Clar agus Ruin 1981 (Dublin, 1981) (LLPC), p. 8.

94. Sinn Féin, Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 1984 (Dublin, 1984) (LLPC); Sinn Féin, SinnFéin Policy Document (Dublin, 1986) (LLPC), p. 18.

95. Danny Morrison himself noted the scale of this shift in his 1984 Magill interview.Morrison, cited in G. Kerrigan, ‘“The IRA has to do what the IRA has to do”.Interview with Danny Morrison’, Magill, September 1984, p. 13.

96. Pat Doherty, interview with the author, Belfast, 23 August 2003.97. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 August 2003.98. Brighton Troops Out Movement, Discussions and Questions with Daisy Mules in

May 1985 (Brighton, 1986) (LLPC).99. Sinn Féin Northern Ireland Assembly Election Leaflet, Vote Sinn Féin, Vote

Nationalist: Vote Carron and Molloy 1 and 2 (1982) (LLPC).100. Sinn Féin Northern Ireland Assembly Election Leaflet, Break the British connection!

Smash Stormont! Vote Sinn Féin (1982) (LLPC).101. Sinn Féin General Election (UK) Leaflet, Vote Sinn Féin, Vote Nationalist: Save the

Seat, Vote Carron (1983) (LLPC).102. Ibid.103. Ibid.104. O’Hagan, cited in Sharrock and Davenport, Man of War, Man of Peace, p. 96.

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Notes 201

105. Adams, cited in A. McIntyre, ‘Calling A Spade a Shovel’, The Blanket, 28 Novem-ber 2001, available at <http://lark.phoblacht.net/spade.html>, last accessed 31October 2006.

106. Ibid.107. Gerry MacLochlainn, interview with the author, Derry, 14 April 2003.108. Brighton Troops Out Movement, Discussions and Questions with Daisy Mules in

May 1985.109. The statement ending the hunger strike, for instance, criticized the ‘treacherous’

part played by the Church and claimed its stance had been ‘extremely immoraland misleading’. See ‘Why we ended the hunger-strike’, AP/RN, 10 October 1981.

110. O’Callaghan, The Informer, p. 352.111. Morrison, cited in ‘Ireland’s Intractable Crisis: Exclusive interviews with the UDA

and Provisionals’, Marxism Today, December 1981, p. 32.112. Adams, cited in ‘ “Shun Paisley” warning from Adams’, Irish News, 27 June 1986.113. Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin Policy Document (Dublin, 1986) (LLPC), p. 19.114. Ibid.115. ‘Women’s issues hotly debated’, AP/RN, 7 November 1985.116. Sinn Féin, The Politics of Revolution: The Main Speeches and Debates from the 1986

Sinn Féin Ard Fheis (Dublin, 1986) (LLPC), pp. 41–2.117. E. Collins, Killing Rage (London, 1997), pp. 222–6.118. Ibid., pp. 231–2.119. Sinn Féin, Republican Lecture Series No.1a: Where Sinn Féin Stands (1979) (LLPC),

p. 3.120. E. Moloney, ‘Adams denies “Marxist” Tag’, Hibernia, 25 October 1979, p. 6.121. Adams, ‘Presidential Address: Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 17 November 1983;

Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 132.122. E. Moloney, ‘Adams denies “Marxist” Tag’, Hibernia, 25 October 1979, p. 6123. Adams, ‘Not just a “Brits Out” Movement’, in Signposts to Independence and

Socialism, p. 25.124. Gerry MacLochlainn, interview with the author, Derry, 14 April 2003.125. P. Bolger, ‘Which way forward in the Free State?’, Iris: The republican magazine,

7, November 1983, p. 7. Paddy Bolger was a southern republican who was,nonetheless, a close ally of the Adams-McGuinness leadership.

126. M. Tse-Tung, ‘On Guerrilla Warfare’, available at <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/ch06.htm>, last accessed30 November 2006. Gerry Adams himself explicitly referred to Mao’s theory;see Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 58.

127. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 34.128. McLaughlin, cited in O’Connor, In Search of a State, p. 40.129. S. Delaney, ‘Building Community Confidence: Sinn Féin and Housing in Belfast:

Interview with Sean Keenan’, Iris: The republican magazine, 9, December 1984,p. 47.

130. Ibid, p. 50.131. Sinn Féin, Republican Lecture Series No.7: Social Agitation (1985) (LLPC).132. Ibid.133. M. O’Flannagain, Practical Steps Towards a Socialist Republic: Sinn Féin Internal

Lecture (Dublin, 1980) (LLPC).134. ‘ “We have now established a sort of Republican veto”: Michael Farrell interviews

Gerry Adams MP, vice-president of Sinn Féin’, Magill, July 1983, p. 17.135. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, 22 November 2005.

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 202

202 Notes

136. Morrison, cited in G. Kerrigan, ‘ “The IRA has to do what the IRA has to do”.Interview with Danny Morrison’, Magill, September 1984, p. 12.

137. P. Bew, E. Hazelkorn and H. Patterson, The Dynamics of Irish Politics (London,1989), p. 121; see also T. Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–2002(London, 2004), pp. 316–20.

138. Brown, Ireland, pp. 316–20.139. H. Stevens, ‘An issue at last’, AP/RN, 26 September 1981; ‘Increasing interest

and hopeful signs: British Labour Party Conference debates Ireland’, AP/RN, 3October 1981.

140. S. Delaney, ‘Benn’s Challenge’, AP/RN, 30 May 1981. See also E. McCrory, ‘Hurtfultruths from Benn’, AP/RN, 16 May 1981.

141. Ibid.142. See ‘Visiting Belfast’, AP/RN, front page, 3 March 1983; ‘Sinn Féin in London’,

AP/RN, front page, 28 July 1983.143. Morrison referred to these talks in his 1984 interview with Magill: G. Kerrigan,

‘ “The IRA has to do what the IRA has to do”. Interview with Danny Morrison’,Magill, September 1984, p. 13.

144. The shift in the Labour Party’s approach to Northern Ireland that Kinnock over-saw, was noted at the time by the journalist, Kevin Toolis, in an article for theIrish Times. See K. Toolis, ‘British Labour rejects bigger NI role for Dublin’, IrishTimes, 1 February 1985.

145. In the 1984 European Elections, Danny Morrison secured 13 per cent of thevote, compared to John Hume’s 22 per cent. Figures taken from ‘The 1984European Elections’, ARK Northern Ireland: Social and Political Archive, availableat <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fe84.htm>, last accessed 1 November 2006.

146. Figures taken from Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 240.147. Ibid.148. Adams on Brass Tacks, BBC Radio 2, July 1984, cited in P. Bew and H. Patterson,

The British State and the Ulster Crisis: From Wilson to Thatcher (London, 1985),p. 125.

149. Morrison, cited in G. Kerrigan, ‘“The IRA has to do what the IRA has to do”.Interview with Danny Morrison’, Magill, September 1984, p. 11; H. MacThomas,‘Elections strategy outlined’, AP/RN, 2 May 1985.

150. Figure taken from Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 291.151. ‘“We have now established a sort of Republican veto”: Michael Farrell interviews

Gerry Adams MP, vice-president of Sinn Féin’, Magill, July 1983, p. 17.

2 Pan-Nationalism, Peace and the Political Mainstream,1985–90

1. McLaughlin, cited in P. Shirlow and M. McGovern, ‘Language, discourse and dia-logue: Sinn Féin and the Irish peace process’, Political Geography, 17(2) (February1998), p. 180.

2. D. Morrison, ‘Successful Intervention: Electoral goal achieved’, Iris: The republicanmagazine, 10, July 1985, pp. 10–11.

3. In the 1985 Northern Ireland local government elections, Sinn Féin took 11 percent of the vote, to the SDLP’s 18 per cent. Figures taken from ‘The 1985 LocalGovernment Elections’, ARK Northern Ireland: Social and Political Archive, avail-able at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/flg85.htm>, last accessed 1 November2006.

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Notes 203

4. For further detail on the New Ireland Forum, see Murray and Tonge, Sinn Féinand the SDLP, pp. 118–36.

5. Hume, cited in E. Staunton, The Nationalists of Northern Ireland, 1918–1973(Dublin, 2001), p. 279.

6. Mallon, cited in G. Murray, John Hume and the SDLP: Impact and Survival inNorthern Ireland (Dublin, 1998), p. 139.

7. ‘Thatcher boosts IRA: SDLP hypocrisy exposed as secret meetings revealed’,AP/RN, 26 September 1981.

8. Adams, Hope and History, p. 36.9. Adams, cited in Interview Transcription of Gerry Adams and John Hume on Behind

the Headlines, BBC Radio (1985) (LLPC).10. Ibid.11. For fuller details of these exchanges, see Murray, John Hume and the SDLP,

pp. 161–4.12. Adams, Hope and History, p. 37.13. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 105.14. Sinn Féin, The Hillsborough Agreement: Text of Bobby Sands Commemorative Lecture

given by Danny Morrison, Twinbrook, Belfast, 4 May 1986 (Belfast, 1986) (LLPC),pp. 9–10.

15. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 2006.16. Sinn Féin, The Hillsborough Agreement: Text of Bobby Sands Commemorative Lecture

given by Danny Morrison, Twinbrook, Belfast, 4 May 1986 (Belfast, 1986) (LLPC),pp. 14–15.

17. Sinn Féin, Annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown, 22 June 1986, Speechof Martin McGuinness (1986) (LLPC), p. 3. The SDLP had opposed the introduc-tion of internment in 1971 and, indeed, it was their opposition to this measurethat helped prompt the collapse of the Stormont assembly. See Feeney, Sinn Féin,pp. 270–1.

18. ‘Sinn Féin ban?’, AP/RN, front page, 23 July 1987.19. Morrison, cited in M. Strong, ‘Playboys: Making war not love. Playboy Inter-

view: The IRA’, Magill, March 1989, p. 32 (this article originally appeared inPlayboy).

20. Murray and Tonge, Sinn Féin and the SDLP, p. 156.21. O’Callaghan, The Informer, p. 285.22. ‘Anglo-Irish Agreement 1985 between The Government of Ireland and The

Government of the United Kingdom’, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Inter-net), available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/aia/aiadoc.htm>, last accessed31 October 2006.

23. Murray, John Hume and the SDLP, pp. 152–4.24. G. Adams, ‘Freedom – much more than the right to vote?: Speech given during

a speaking tour of the 26 Counties, April 1988’, in Signposts to Independence andSocialism, p. 5.

25. Ibid., p. 7.26. G. Adams, ‘A Bus Ride to Independence and Socialism: Speech given to Sinn Féin

Internal Conference, 1986’, in Signposts to Independence and Socialism, p. 16.27. Ibid., p. 15.28. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 135.29. Adams, ‘Labour cannot wait!’, in Signposts to Independence and Socialism; Adams,

cited in ‘“What’s on the agenda now is an end to partition”: Interview with GerryAdams’, Irish Times, 10 December 1986.

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204 Notes

30. ‘SDLP fear polls’, AP/RN, front page, 3 October 1981; P. Dowling, ‘Many monthsof manoeuvres successfully negotiated’, AP/RN, 10 October 1981; ‘Why we endedthe hunger strike’, AP/RN, 10 October 1981.

31. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 154.32. M. O’Muilleor, ‘Real Politics – An Urban View’ (speech given to Sinn Féin Internal

Six County Conference, Belfast, 25 June 1988) (LLPC).33. Ibid.34. Adams, cited in M. Strong, ‘Playboys: Making war not love. Playboy Interview:

The IRA’, Magill, March 1989, p. 33; Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 135.35. A. Nic Mùrcàdà, ‘Aine Nic Mùrcàdà’, in M. Collins (ed.), Ireland after Britain

(London, 1985), p. 95.36. See, for instance, Nuacht Feirste, 2(13), 18 May 1987.37. D. O Dufaigh, ‘The Cultural Reconquest of Ireland’, AP/RN, 19 February 1987.38. See, for instance, Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, pp. 132–6.39. S. Hick, ‘Towards a Mass Movement’, Iris Bheag, 18, February 1989.40. ‘Armstrong’, ‘Broad Front Bullshit’, Iris Bheag, 18, February 1989.41. ‘Morrigan’, ‘The Dual Task: Internal Politicisation, External Mass Mobilisation’,

Iris Bheag, 2, 1987, p. 5.42. Sinn Féin, Republican Lecture Series No.1a: Where Sinn Féin Stands (1979) (LLPC),

p. 3.43. Adams, cited in B. Fletcher Jnr, ‘Interview with Sinn Féin President, Gerry Adams’,

Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, May 1989, p. 22.44. Ibid.45. ‘Ballots and Bombs: Electoral tactics complement armed struggle’, AP/RN, 18

February 1982.46. G. Adams, ‘Presidential Address: Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 17 November 1983.47. ‘Why a broad front?’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference on 26 Counties, Dublin,

18/19 May 1991) (LLPC).48. J. Monaghan, ‘Republicanising the Social and Economic Struggle’ (Sinn Féin

Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8 May 1988) (LLPC).49. T. Hartley, ‘Towards a Broader Base?’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8

May 1988) (LLPC).50. ‘Towards a Mass Movement’, Iris Bheag, 17, January 1989, p. 5.51. ‘Towards a Mass Movement’, AP/RN, 2 February 1989; ‘Broad Front Strategy

Re-Affirmed’, AP/RN, 7 February 1991.52. P. Ferguson, ‘Behind the Betrayal’, The Blanket, 22 May 2005, available at

<http://www.phoblacht.net/pf2205053g.html>, last accessed 1 November 2006.53. Anthony McIntyre, interview with the author, Belfast, 6 January 2004.54. Adams, ‘A Bus Ride to Independence and Socialism’, in Signposts to Indepen-

dence and Socialism, p. 13; ‘Towards a Mass Movement’, Iris Bheag, 17, January1989, p. 6.

55. For more on the MacBride Principles, see A. Wilson, Irish America and the UlsterConflict 1968–1995 (Belfast, 1995), pp. 268–77.

56. Sinn Féin, Statement by Gerry Adams on the MacBride Principles (n.d., mid-1980s)(LLPC).

57. ‘Refusing to go back on their knees’, AP/RN, 12 October 1989.58. ‘Principles or empty promises?’, AP/RN, 7 May 1987. See also J. Plunkett, ‘Job

Discrimination – No Change’, AP/RN, 19 March 1987.59. Sinn Féin, Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 1984 (Dublin, 1984) (LLPC), Motions 83–7,

p. 17.

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 205

Notes 205

60. Sinn Féin, Annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown, 22 June 1986, Speechof Martin McGuinness (1986) (LLPC), p. 3.

61. For more on Fianna Fáil’s handling of the extradition issue, see S. Collins, ThePower Game: Ireland under Fianna Fáil (Dublin, 2001), pp. 183–4.

62. ‘Towards a Mass Movement’, Iris Bheag, 17, January 1989, p. 6.63. ‘No Extradition to British Injustice’, AP/RN, front page, 4 February 1988;

‘Extradition: Time is Running Out’, AP/RN, 30 July 1987.64. ‘Doing Britain’s dirty work’, AP/RN, front page, 26 November 1987. See also,

‘A Judgement against us all’, AP/RN, front page, 21 January 1988; ‘Don’t handthem over’, AP/RN, front page, 9 June 1988; ‘Mobilise: Free Robert Russell,Smash Extradition’, AP/RN, front page, 18 August 1988; ‘Thatcher Hopping Mad:Anti-Extradition Victory’, AP/RN, front page, 15 March 1990; ‘Third Victory forAnti-Extradition Campaign’, AP/RN, front page, 12 April 1990; ‘Dessie Ellis –political hostage’, AP/RN, front page, 19 July 1990; ‘Hunger Strike’, AP/RN,front page, 11 October 1990; ‘Act now – before it’s too late’, AP/RN, front page,18 October 1990; ‘Let Dessie Ellis live’, AP/RN, 1 November 1990; ‘Haughey’sShame’, AP/RN, front page, 15 November 1990.

65. ‘Doing Britain’s dirty work’, AP/RN, front page, 26 November 1987; ‘Mobilise:Free Robert Russell, Smash Extradition’, AP/RN, front page, 18 August1988.

66. Adams, speaking to the 1989 Sean Sabhat Commemoration, cited in ‘Heroismand Hypocrisy: Adams slams FF at Sabhat Commemoration’, AP/RN, 12 January1989.

67. T. Hartley, ‘Towards a Broader Base?’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8May 1988) (LLPC).

68. Ibid.69. T. O’Dwyer, ‘Handling hot potatoes’, AP/RN, 12 April 1990.70. B. Hayes and I. McAllister, ‘British and Irish public opinion towards the Northern

Ireland problem’, Irish Political Studies, 11 (1996), pp. 76–9.71. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 2006. What the republi-

can leadership appeared to ignore was the fact that the majority desire for Irishunity was, for the most part, expressed only as an aspiration.

72. ‘Our vision sees past partition and poverty – our struggle remains intact: GerryAdams Presidential Address, 86th Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 7 February1991.

73. Adams, cited in M. Strong, ‘Playboys: Making war not love. Playboy Interview:The IRA’, Magill, March 1989, p. 33.

74. Morrison, cited in M. Strong, ‘Playboys: Making war not love. Playboy Interview:The IRA’, Magill, March 1989, p. 34.

75. At the previous general election in the Republic of Ireland (in February 1987),the party had won a mere 1.7 per cent of the vote. Figure taken from Feeney,Sinn Féin, p. 336.

76. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 2006.77. T. Hartley, ‘Towards a Broader Base?’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8

May 1988) (LLPC).78. ‘A Scenario for Peace: A Discussion Paper’, AP/RN, 7 May 1987.79. Ibid.80. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 298.81. With regards to the UN and international law, specific reference was made to:

the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant

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206 Notes

on Economic Social and Cultural Rights; the Declaration on Principles of InternationalLaw Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance withthe Charter of the United Nations; and the Declaration on the Granting of Indepen-dence to Colonial Countries. See ‘A Scenario for Peace: A Discussion Paper’, AP/RN,7 May 1987.

82. Ibid.83. Adams, Hope and History, p. 15.84. G. Adams, Peace in Ireland: A Broad Analysis of the Present Situation (1976) (LLPC);

Adams later reiterated his arguments in relation to Danny Lennon in his 1986work, The Politics of Irish Freedom. See Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom,pp. 60–1.

85. McLaughlin, cited in P. Shirlow and M. McGovern, ‘Language, discourse and dia-logue: Sinn Féin and the Irish peace process,’ Political Geography, 17(2) (February1998), p. 180. See above, p. 47.

86. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 August 2003.87. Adams, cited in Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, p. 180.88. Adams, cited in Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 343.89. ‘Come off it Haughey!’, AP/RN, 4 November 1982; G. Adams, ‘Presidential

Address: Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 17 November 1983.90. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 22 November 2005.91. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 277–9.92. ‘Easter Statement 1981’, AP/RN, 25 April 1981; P. Dowling, ‘The despicable role

of Charles Haughey’, AP/RN, 13 June 1981.93. Most famously, for example, Haughey described Northern Ireland as a ‘failed

entity’. Cited in Brown, Ireland, p. 325.94. Adams, cited in Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 268.95. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 269.96. A full copy of the letter can be found in the appendices to the revised edition

of Ed Moloney’s book. See Letter from Father Alec Reid to Charles Haughey 11May 2007, available in E. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, 2nd edn (London,2007), pp. 615–630.

97. Adams, Hope and History, p. 36.98. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 277–9.99. Ibid., pp. 224–6, 238–40, 245.

100. Ibid., p. 270.101. Ibid., p. 273.102. Ibid., p. 280.103. Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, p. 255; Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA,

p. 423.104. Adams, Hope and History, p. 32.105. Ibid.106. Adams, cited in M. Strong, ‘Playboys: Making war not love. Playboy Interview:

The IRA’, Magill, March 1989, pp. 32 and 42.107. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, pp. 65–6.108. Brooke, cited in E. Mallie and D. McKittrick, The Fight for Peace: Secret Story Behind

the Irish Peace Process (London, 1997), p. 99.109. McGuinness, cited in ibid., p. 101.110. See ‘Sinn Féin Internal Conference on 26 Counties, Dublin, 18/19 May 1991’

(LLPC). This comment can be found at the back of the document among variousnotes made by Hartley while at the conference.

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Notes 207

111. See ‘Sinn Féin Internal Conference on 26 Counties, Dublin, 18/19 May 1991’(LLPC). This comment can be found at the back of the document among variousnotes made by Hartley while at the conference.

112. ‘After Enniskillen: Interview with Gerry Adams’, AP/RN, 19 November 1987.113. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 22 November 2005.114. J. Monaghan, ‘Republicanising the Social and Economic Struggle’ (Sinn Féin

Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8 May 1988) (LLPC).115. ‘After Enniskillen: Interview with Gerry Adams’, AP/RN, 19 November 1987.116. ‘“The IRA – They’re Everywhere”’, AP/RN, front page, 5 May 1988; ‘“We will

meet force with force” – IRA’, AP/RN, front page, 5 January 1989. See also ‘TakeCover!’, AP/RN, front page, 19 March 1987; ‘IRA Blitz’, AP/RN, front page, 26March 1987; ‘IRA blasts Paras’, AP/RN, front page, 23 February 1989; ‘IRA bombsMarines’, AP/RN, front page, 28 September 1989.

117. ‘Deal Attack: An integral part of IRA strategy’, AP/RN, 28 September 1989.118. Ibid.119. ‘“We have now established a sort of Republican veto”: Michael Farrell interviews

Gerry Adams MP, vice-president of Sinn Féin’, Magill, July 1983, p. 17.120. Ibid.121. Morrison, cited in G. Kerrigan, ‘“The IRA has to do what the IRA has to do”.

Interview with Danny Morrison’, Magill, September 1984, p. 14.122. Maillot, New Sinn Féin, pp. 17–18.123. Sinn Féin, Republican Lecture Series No.1a: Where Sinn Féin Stands (1979) (LLPC),

p. 2.124. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, London, 12 March 2005.125. See B. Lynn, ‘Tactic or Principle? The evolution of republican thinking on absten-

tionism in Ireland, 1970–1998’, Irish Political Studies, 17(2) (2002), pp. 74–94;Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 287–97.

126. Hartley, cited in ‘Electoral Strategy’, AP/RN, 7 November 1985.127. Sinn Féin, The Politics of Revolution: The Main Speeches and Debates from the 1986

Sinn Féin Ard Fheis (Dublin, 1986) (LLPC).128. R. White, Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretive History (Westport,

1993), p. 160.129. L. O’Ruairc, The League of Communist Republicans, 2001, available at <http://

www.fourthwrite.ie/lcr.pdf>, last accessed 2 November 2006.130. Gerry MacLochlainn, interview with the author, Derry, 14 April 2003.131. For more on this, see P. Farrelly, ‘An Upheaval in NORAID’, Irish America, January

1990.132. Wilson, Irish America and the Ulster Conflict 1968–1995, p. 280.133. Others included Sean Adams and Siobhan O’Hanlon. See P. Farrelly, ‘An Upheaval

in NORAID’, Irish America, January 1990.134. G. Adams, ‘“Britain will not beat us” thousands pledge at Bodenstown: Annual

Wolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown’, AP/RN, 29 June 1989.135. See, for instance, the Sinn Féin-produced, localized news-sheets, Lagan Valley

Bulletin and Iris Dhoire: The Alternative Voice, which offer an insight into theparty’s work on issues such as: the availability of social security benefits (LaganValley Bulletin, April 1988); local job creation (Lagan Valley Bulletin, April 1989);and unemployment (Iris Dhoire: The Alternative Voice, 2, September 1990).

136. See, for instance, ‘CPAD successes’, AP/RN, 30 July 1987; ‘Challenge to Push-ers and Government’, AP/RN, 24 September 1987; ‘The Price of Protest’, AP/RN,6 April 1989; ‘Renewed campaign against pushers’, AP/RN, 7 September 1989;

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 208

208 Notes

‘Anti-drugs champions vindicated’, AP/RN, 1 February 1990; ‘The ResurgentDrugs Menace – Where do we go from here?’, AP/RN, 16 May 1991; ‘Free theConcerned Parents’, AP/RN, 1 June 1989.

137. Sinn Féin, Twinbrook Sinn Féin Information Leaflet (n.d.) (LLPC).138. See, for instance, ‘No-go areas for “hoods”’, AP/RN, 19 January 1989; S. Delaney,

‘The “Hoods” and the RUC’, AP/RN, 16 November 1989; ‘Drug dealers targetyoung nationalists’, AP/RN, 10 October 1991.

139. S. Delaney, ‘The “Hoods” and the RUC’, AP/RN, 16 November 1989; ‘Defendingthe community: IRA interview’, AP/RN, 19 December 1991.

140. ‘Tonto’, ‘The Internal Conference – Some Reflections’, Iris Bheag, 1, 1987, p. 5.141. J. McAllister, ‘Mainstream Politics’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8

May 1988) (LLPC).142. G. Adams, ‘The Politics of Revolution: Presidential Address to the 1986 Ard Fheis’,

AP/RN, 6 November 1986.143. Figure taken from Feeney, Sinn Féin, p. 336; Adams, cited in ‘Hard work ahead:

Interview with Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams’, AP/RN, 26 February 1987.144. ‘No Short Cuts’, AP/RN, front page, 19 February 1987.145. ‘Iris Bheag’, Iris Bheag, 1, 1987.146. M. O’Muilleor, ‘Real Politics – An Urban View’ (speech given to Sinn Féin Internal

Six County Conference, Belfast, 25 June 1988) (LLPC).147. ‘Health Cuts: This is [sic] the instructions sent out to the Comhairle Ceantair’,

Iris Bheag, 1, 1987, p. 3.148. ‘Fianna Fáil Thatcherism: Unemployment, Emigration, Cutbacks’, AP/RN, front

page, 15 October 1987.149. ‘Health Cuts: This is [sic] the instructions sent out to the Comhairle Ceantair’,

Iris Bheag, 1, 1987, p. 3.150. Sinn Féin, 84th Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 1989 (Dublin, 1989) (LLPC), Motions

85–9, pp. 83–7.151. Sinn Féin, 83rd Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 1987 (Dublin, 1987) (LLPC), Motions

7–30, pp. 17–33.152. Sinn Féin, Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 1984 (Dublin, 1984) (LLPC), Motions 192–7,

pp. 40–1.153. J. McAllister, ‘Mainstream Politics’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8

May 1988) (LLPC).154. See, for instance, ‘Multinational Scrap-heap’, AP/RN, front page, 11 June 1987;

‘Fight the Cuts’, AP/RN, front page, 25 June 1987; ‘Haughey’s Thatcherism’,AP/RN, front page, 20 July 1989.

155. The ongoing evolution of policy in this area led, in 1992, to the production ofa comprehensive policy document on the subject: Sinn Féin, Women in Ireland(Dublin, 1992) (LLPC).

156. ‘The real world’, AP/RN, front page, 5 February 1987.157. Adams, Hope and History, pp. 80 and 93–4.158. The party won 11.2 per cent of the vote, a slight decline on the 11.4 per cent won

at the 1987 British general election and the 11.8 per cent won at the previouslocal government elections in 1985. Figures taken from ARK Northern Ireland:Social and Political Archive, available at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/>, lastaccessed 1 November 2006.

159. G. Adams, ‘“Britain will not beat us” thousands pledge at Bodenstown: AnnualWolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown’, AP/RN, 29 June 1989.

160. ‘How Sinn Féin really performed’, AP/RN, 25 May 1989.

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Notes 209

161. Figure taken from ‘Toghchan Eorpach 15/06/1989’, Guthanphobail.net, avail-able at <http://www.guthanphobail.net/eoraip-19890615.htm>, last accessed 2November 2006.

162. G. Adams, ‘“Britain will not beat us” thousands pledge at Bodenstown: AnnualWolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown’, AP/RN, 29 June 1989.

163. Figure taken from ‘Olltoghchan don 26u Dáil 15/06/1989’, Guthanphobail.net,available at <http://www.guthanphobail.net/dail-19890615.htm>, last accessed2 November 2006.

164. For more on the ‘Tallaght Strategy’ of Fine Gael, see Collins, The Power Game,pp. 178–9.

165. The Workers’ Party won 4.2 per cent of the vote and seven seats at the1989 Irish general election. See ‘Olltoghchan don 26u Dáil 15/06/1989’,Guthanphobail.net, available at <http://www.guthanphobail.net/dail-19890615.htm>, last accessed 2 November 2006.

166. G. Adams, ‘“Britain will not beat us” thousands pledge at Bodenstown: AnnualWolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown’, AP/RN, 29 June 1989.

167. Ibid.168. ‘Putting back the clock – A reply’, Iris Bheag, 22, September 1989, p. 5.169. ‘How Sinn Féin really performed’, AP/RN, 25 May 1989.170. McGuinness, cited in L. Clarke and K. Johnston, Martin McGuinness: From Guns

to Government (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 175.171. ‘“We will break Britain’s will” – IRA’, AP/RN, 17 August 1989.

3 Towards Negotiation and the ‘Tactical Useof Armed Struggle’, 1990–7

1. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.2. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 246–54.3. Ibid., p. 249.4. Ibid., p. 256.5. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, London, 12 March 2005.6. ‘Susini’, ‘Armed Struggle – A Strategical Imperative’ (unpublished work, 1990–1)

(LLPC); Anthony McIntyre, interview with the author, Belfast, 6 January 2004.7. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.8. G. Adams, ‘Our struggle and our party have never faltered’, AP/RN, 27 February

1992.9. ‘Sinn Féin maps road to peace’, AP/RN, 20 February 1992.

10. Feeney, Sinn Féin, pp. 377–80.11. Adams, Hope and History, p. 108.12. Sinn Féin, Towards a Lasting Peace (1992), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/

pdf/TowardsLastingPeace.pdf>, last accessed 2 November 2006.13. Sinn Féin, Annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown, 21 June 1992, Speech of

Jim Gibney (1992), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/gaelic/peace/speech/9>,last accessed 2 November 2006.

14. Sinn Féin, Annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration, Bodenstown, 20 June 1993,Address by Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness (1993), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Speech_Bodenstown93.pdf>, last accessed 30 November 2006.

15. ‘Britain holds key to peace’, AP/RN, 9 November 1989; ‘Sinn Féin presses peaceproposal’, AP/RN, 23 November 1989.

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210 Notes

16. ‘No cease-fires: No preconditions for talks’, AP/RN, 22 February 1990.17. ‘ “We are totally committed to a real peace process”: Gerry Adams Interview, Part

Two’, AP/RN, 12 September 1991.18. Ibid. See also ‘ “Start real talks now” Adams’, AP/RN, front page, 4 July 1991;

H. MacThomas, ‘Call for a new peace process’, AP/RN, 29 August 1991; ‘A ballotpaper in one hand and a solution in the other’, AP/RN, 2 April 1992; ‘ “TheRepublican Struggle is the Force for Change”: Interview with Sinn Féin PresidentGerry Adams’, AP/RN, 15 October 1992.

19. M. McLaughlin, ‘Ceasefire should not be precondition for talks’, AP/RN, 10September 1992.

20. ‘ “We will win and are set firmly to the task of achieving victory” – IRA: Interviewwith GHQ spokesperson, Óglaigh na hÉireann’, AP/RN, 28 June 1990.

21. See ‘War-Lord pays the price’, AP/RN, front page, 20 September 1990, whichprovides a list of IRA attacks on the mainland that year. See also, ‘ “End yourfutile war” – IRA tells British’, AP/RN, front page, 2 August 1990; ‘IRA bombs WarCabinet’, AP/RN, 14 February 1991; ‘London bombs put Ireland on to electionagenda’, AP/RN, 5 March 1992.

22. For an example of the argument that republicans have engaged in ideologicalrevisionism, see M. Ryan, War and Peace in Ireland: Britain and the IRA in the NewWorld Order (London, 1994).

23. Martin McGuinness, cited in M. Cox, ‘The IRA ceasefire and the end of the ColdWar’, International Affairs, 73(4) (1997), p. 685.

24. See, for instance, H. McThomas, ‘Neutral wins few converts’, Fortnight, 29(2)(February 1991); U. Gillespie, ‘The Political Realities and the Republican Analy-sis’, The Starry Plough, 1(1) (July 1991); H. McThomas, ‘What are the British doingin Ireland? An attempt at an answer’, The Starry Plough, 2(1) (February 1992).

25. H. McThomas, ‘Neutral wins few converts’, Fortnight, 29(2) (February 1991),p. 17.

26. Sinn Féin, ‘Speech by Sinn Féin Ard Chomhairle member, Martin McGuinness,to Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, 20 February 1993’, in Setting the Record Straight (Dublin,1994) (LLPC).

27. M. McLaughlin, ‘Protestantism, Unionism and Loyalism’, The Starry Plough,1(2) (November 1991), p. 16. The article was also published as M. McLaughlin,‘Protestantism, Unionism and Loyalism’, Fingerpost, 5(3) (Spring/Summer 1992).

28. Ibid.29. M. McLaughlin, ‘Unionist “Consent” in an agreed Ireland’, Fingerpost, 8 (1)

(May 1994), p. 6. The article was also published as, M. McLaughlin, ‘Unionist“Consent” in an agreed Ireland’, The Starry Plough (February 1994) 4 (1).

30. M. McLaughlin, ‘Unionist “Consent” in an agreed Ireland’, Fingerpost, 8 (1) (May1994), p. 8.

31. M. McLaughlin, ‘Protestantism, Unionism and Loyalism’, The Starry Plough, 1(2)(November 1991), p. 14.

32. G. Adams, ‘Our struggle and our party have never faltered’, AP/RN, 27 February1992.

33. M. McLaughlin, ‘Unionist “Consent” in an agreed Ireland’, Fingerpost, 8(1) (May1994), p. 8.

34. U. Gillespie, ‘The Political Realities and the Republican Analysis’, The StarryPlough, 1(1) (July 1991), p. 3.

35. Sinn Féin, Annual Bodenstown Speech 1995, Address by Sinn Féin’s MartinMcGuinness, 18 June 1995 (1995), available at <http://sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Speech_Bodenstown95.pdf>, last accessed 2 November 2006.

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Notes 211

36. G. Adams, ‘Our vision sees past partition and poverty – our struggle remainsintact: Gerry Adams Presidential Address to 86th Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN,7 February 1991; Gibney, cited in Frontline Online, ‘The IRA and SinnFéin: Interviews: Jim Gibney’, PBS, available at <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/inside/gibney.html>, last accessed 28 October 2006.

37. See above, p. 64.38. Brooke, cited in T. Hennessey, The Northern Ireland Peace Process: Ending the

Troubles? (Dublin, 2000), p. 69.39. G. Adams, ‘Our vision sees past partition and poverty – our struggle remains

intact: Gerry Adams Presidential Address to 86th Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 7February 1991.

40. Morrison, Then the Walls Came Down, p. 235.41. See above, pp. 74–5.42. On the British side, the then prime minister, John Major, has testified to this

in his autobiography. See J. Major, The Autobiography (London, 2000), p. 436.On the republican side, meanwhile, Sinn Féin has claimed that a new period of‘protracted contact and dialogue’ began in 1990. See Sinn Féin, Setting the RecordStraight (Dublin, 1994) (LLPC).

43. See, for example, M. Cox, ‘Northern Ireland after the Cold War’, in M. Cox, A.Guelke and F. Stephen (eds), A Farewell to Arms? From ‘Long War’ to Long Peace inNorthern Ireland (Manchester, 2000), pp. 249–62.

44. Morrison, Then the Walls Came Down, p. 91.45. A. Guelke, ‘ “Comparatively Peaceful”: South Africa, the Middle East and

Northern Ireland’, in Cox, Guelke and Stephen (eds), A Farewell to Arms?,p. 227.

46. G. Adams, Selected Writings (Dingle, 1997), p. 278.47. ‘Peacemaker’, AP/RN, front page, 5 July 1990.48. ‘Blaming the Oppressed’, AP/RN, front page, 10 September 1992. See also, for

example, ‘In Ireland and South Africa – Struggle is the Key’, AP/RN, 28 April1994; N. Forde, ‘Path to a just peace in Ireland and South Africa’, AP/RN, 18August 1994; ‘Parallels drawn between South Africa and Ireland’, AP/RN, 15 June1995; ‘Post-Apartheid South Africa – Lessons for Ireland?’, AP/RN, 19 October1995.

49. ‘Yesterday’s “Terrorist” . . . ’, AP/RN, 16 September 1993.50. Ibid.51. For further details on these cases see N. Mackay, ‘Why this man is

Stakeknife’, Sunday Herald, 18 May 2003; R. Cowan, ‘Ex-spy handler fearsfor Stakeknife’s life’, Guardian, 19 May 2003; ‘Sinn Féin man admits he wasan agent’, BBC News Online, 16 December 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4536826.stm>, last accessed 31 October 2006;‘Obituary: Denis Donaldson’, Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2006.

52. J. Holland and S. Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows: The Secret War AgainstTerrorism in Northern Ireland (London, 1996), p. 391.

53. Ibid., p. 393.54. Information and figures gathered from ‘Chronological List of Deaths’, CAIN

(Conflict Archive on the Internet), available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/chron/index.html>, last accessed 2 November 2006. See also Moloney, A SecretHistory of the IRA, pp. 318–19.

55. Information gathered from the CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet), availableat <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/chron/index.html>, last accessed 2 November2006.

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212 Notes

56. C. Crawford, Inside the UDA: Volunteers and Violence (London, 2003), p. 35.57. Adair, cited in Crawford, Inside the UDA, p. 167.58. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, pp. 117–23.59. Cited in D. Morrison, ‘Taylor-made “Provos”’, AP/RN, 25 September 1997.60. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, pp. 117–19.61. For further detail on the Shankill Road and Greysteel atrocities, see E. Mallie and

D. McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland (London, 2001), pp. 141–6.62. Adams, cited in Hennessey, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, p. 39.63. Anonymous (confidential interview with former army officer), Belfast, 22 July

2006.64. Figures taken from Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 340.65. ‘Sinn Féin in the 26 Counties’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference on 26 Counties,

Dublin, 18/19 May 1991) (LLPC), p. 5.66. Figures taken from ‘Westminster election, 9 April 1992’, ARK Northern Ireland:

Social and Political Archive, available at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fw92.htm>, last accessed 1 November 2006.

67. J. Gibney, ‘Sinn Féin – A slightly electoral party!’, The Starry Plough, 2(2) (1992),p. 13.

68. For further details on this see D. Bloomfield, Political Dialogue in Northern Ireland:The Brooke Initiative, 1989–92 (London, 1998), pp. 11–63.

69. Such nervousness can be seen in the extended coverage given to the Brooketalks process in An Phoblacht/Republican News, much of which called for SinnFéin to be included in the talks, even as the paper disparaged their being held.See, for instance, H. McThomas, ‘Talks? What talks? Talks about what?’, AP/RN,7 February 1991; H. McThomas, ‘British Ultimatum whips parties in to line’,AP/RN, 25 March 1991; H. McThomas, ‘The Brooke talks – whose guns under thetable?’, AP/RN, 25 April 1991; ‘Unionists dictate agenda . . . Nationalists lockedout’, AP/RN, front page, 9 May 1991.

70. Morrison, Then the Walls Came Down, p. 239.71. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, London, 12 March 2005.72. See, for example, the debate within the prisoner-run journal, An Glor Gafa/Captive

Voice, in 1991, which discussed the republican movement’s political problems atlength: ‘Ten Years On’, An Glor Gafa/Captive Voice, 3(2), Summer 1991; M. OTreasaigh, ‘Organise for changing times – A reply to “Ten Years On”’, An GlorGafa/Captive Voice, 3(3), Winter 1991.

73. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 22 November 2005.74. McAuley, cited in R. Wilson, ‘Time for magnanimity’, Fortnight, September 1992,

p. 5.75. The article was eventually printed in Morrison’s prison memoir: Morrison, Then

the Walls Came Down, pp. 288–92.76. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 12 September 2006.77. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, London, 12 March 2005.78. O’Callaghan, The Informer, p. 337.79. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005. See above, p. 74.80. Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, p. 253.81. See, for example, Mallie and McKittrick, The Fight for Peace, p. 295; R. MacGinty

and J. Darby, Guns and Government: The Management of the Northern Ireland PeaceProcess (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 23.

82. Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, p. 253; Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA,p. 423.

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Notes 213

83. ‘TUAS Document’ (1994), provided in Mallie and McKittrick, The Fight for Peace,pp. 421–4.

84. Ibid.85. See, for instance, A. Wilson, ‘From the Beltway to Belfast: The Clinton Adminis-

tration, Sinn Féin and the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, New Hibernia Review,1(3) (1997); C. O’Clery, The Greening of the White House (Dublin, 1996); andM. Frampton, ‘ “Squaring the Circle”: The Foreign Policy of Sinn Féin, 1983–2001(unpublished MPhil dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2003).

86. TUAS Document.87. Ibid.88. Ibid.89. Adams made a public appeal of this kind in his Presidential Speech to the 1991

Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. See G. Adams, ‘Tone’s demand and ours – Liberty, Equality,Fraternity’, AP/RN, 27 June 1991.

90. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 2006.91. Adams, Hope and History, p. 116.92. Ibid., p. 110.93. Tom Hartley, interview with the author, Belfast, 27 March 2003.94. See Bloomfield, Political Dialogue in Northern Ireland, p. 168.95. Major, The Autobiography, pp. 438–9.96. Sinn Féin, Towards a Lasting Peace (1992) (LLPC).97. Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom, p. 66.98. Sinn Féin, Towards a Lasting Peace (1992) (LLPC).99. Anthony McIntyre, interview with the author, Belfast, 6 January 2004.

100. The text of ‘Hume–Adams’ (and the various drafts leading to the creation of thefinal agreed document) can be found in Appendix I of Mallie and McKittrick, TheFight for Peace, pp. 411–20.

101. The June 1993 document is ‘Draft 11’ in Mallie and McKittrick, The Fight forPeace, p. 420.

102. Major, The Autobiography, pp. 449–50.103. Phoenix, cited in Holland and Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows,

pp. 297–8.104. Mallie and McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland, p. 149.105. Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, p. 249.106. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 2006.107. P. Bew, P. Gibbon and H. Patterson, Northern Ireland 1921–2001: Political Forces

and Social Classes (London, 2002), p. 221.108. Major, cited in Mallie and McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland, p. 166.109. Mallie and McKittrick, The Fight for Peace, pp. 271–2.110. ‘Prisoners’ Address to Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, An Glor Gafa/Captive Voice, 6(1),

Summer 1994, p. 10.111. See, for instance, Sinn Féin, Speech by Martin McGuinness to the 1994 Sinn Féin Ard

Fheis (1994) (LLPC); ‘Sinn Féin’s 20 questions’, AP/RN, 26 May 1994.112. C. McAuley, ‘The Evolution of Sinn Féin’s Peace Strategy’, The Starry Plough

(February 1994), p. 24.113. Sinn Féin, Report on National Internal Delegate Conference 24 July 1994: Ard

Chomhairle Motions (1994) (LLPC).114. Anthony McIntyre, interview with the author, Belfast, 6 January 2004.115. ‘Joint Declaration on Peace: The Downing Street Declaration, Wednesday

(15 December 1993)’, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet), available

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214 Notes

at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/dsd151293.htm>, last accessed 6January 2007.

116. For use of this phrase, see, for instance, ‘Peace Process will continue’, AP/RN, 28July 1994.

117. In the European election, for instance, the party won 2.4 per cent of the vote.Figure taken, ‘Toghchan Eorpach 09/06/1994’, Guthanphobail.net, available at<http://guthanphobail.net/eoraip-19940609.htm>, last accessed 2 November2006.

118. See, for example, ‘Sinn Féin makes advances in all-Ireland poll’, AP/RN, 16 June1994; A. MacEoin, ‘Significant advances in the 26 Counties’, AP/RN, 16 June1994.

119. Sinn Féin, ‘Motion 2’, Report on National Internal Delegate Conference 24 July 1994:Ard Chomhairle Motions (1994) (LLPC).

120. ‘Peace Process will continue’, AP/RN, 28 July 1994.121. ‘Seize the Moment for Peace: Historic announcement from Óglaigh na hÉireann’,

AP/RN, front page, 1 September 1994.122. ‘Historic handshake’, AP/RN, front page, 8 September 1994.123. ‘Tide of History with nationalists’, AP/RN, front page, 27 October 1994.124. ‘TUAS Document’.125. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 424–5.126. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.127. L. O Coileain, ‘Adams calls for immediate dialogue’, AP/RN, 8 September 1994;

‘Seize the Moment for Peace: Historic announcement from Óglaigh na hÉireann’,AP/RN, front page, 1 September 1994; ‘Process could flounder if Major doesn’tmove’, AP/RN, front page, 6 October 1994.

128. Sinn Féin, Annual Bodenstown Speech 1995, Address by Sinn Féin’s MartinMcGuinness, 18 June 1995 (1995), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Speech_Bodenstown95.pdf>, last accessed 2 November 2006.

129. See, for example, O’Doherty, The Trouble with Guns, p. 192.130. Jeffrey Donaldson, cited in Hennessey, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, p. 110.131. While Sinn Féin had previously argued that the UDP should not be expelled from

the talks (see, for instance, L. McKeown, ‘Scorn the Orange Card’, AP/RN, 22January 1998), when this occurred (on 26 January 1998), the subsequent issueof An Phoblacht/Republican News carried little in the way of opposition to themove. Instead, it focused on the murders perpetrated by loyalist paramilitaries.See, for instance, ‘Sectarian Slaughter’, AP/RN, front page, 29 January 1998 andnumerous other articles in that edition.

132. See, for example, G. Adams, ‘Peace means justice – justice demands freedom’,AP/RN, 2 March 1995.

133. Irish Foreign Minister, David Andrews, cited in ‘Andrews apologises but gulfremains’, Irish Independent, 2 December 1997.

134. For a more prosaic assessment of the Frameworks documents, see P. Bew andG. Gillespie, The Northern Ireland Peace Process 1993–1996: A Chronology (London,1996), pp. 87–8.

135. See, for instance, the concern of John Major on this issue, as cited in Mallie andMcKittrick, Endgame in Ireland, p. 202.

136. K. Schulze and M.L.R. Smith, Dilemmas of Decommissioning (London, 1999),pp. 20–22.

137. Adams, cited in Sharrock and Devenport, Man of War, Man of Peace,pp. 343–4.

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Notes 215

138. See, for instance, ‘Republican community is unstoppable: Bobby Sands MemorialLecture 1995 by Gerry Kelly’, AP/RN, 18 May 1995.

139. See, for example, ‘Graffiti: “Not a bullet, not an ounce – IRA”: Mural 236,Album 7’, Dr Jonathan McCormack’s Mural Directory, CAIN (Conflict Archiveon the Internet), available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/album7.htm>,last accessed 30 November 2006.

140. Sinn Féin, Annual Bodenstown Speech 1995, Address by Sinn Féin’s MartinMcGuinness, 18 June 1995 (1995), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Speech_Bodenstown95.pdf>, last accessed 2 November 2006.

141. Patterson, The Politics of Illusion, p. 258.142. M. MacDonncha, ‘Many Challenges Ahead: Gerry Adams Interviewed’, AP/RN,

14 December 1995.143. H. McThomas, ‘More Unionist than (some) Unionists’, AP/RN, 25 August 1994.

See also, ‘Bruton’s Unionist agenda’, AP/RN, front page, 14 March 1996.144. ‘Seize the Moment for Peace: Historic announcement from Óglaigh na hÉireann’,

AP/RN, front page, 1 September 1994.145. For further detail on the Kerr murder, see Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA,

pp. 433–4.146. For more on this issue, see Rafter, Sinn Féin, 1905–2005, pp. 188–218.147. R. Monaghan, ‘ “An Imperfect Peace”: Paramilitary “Punishments” in Northern

Ireland’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16(3) (Autumn 2004), pp. 450–4.148. Ibid., p. 452.149. Adams, cited in ‘ “They haven’t gone away, you know . . .” ’, AP/RN, 17 August

1995.150. ‘TUAS Document’.151. Ibid.152. See D. Godson, Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism (London,

2004), p. 203.153. ‘ “Sinn Féin peace strategy is the right strategy” – Adams: Interview with Gerry

Adams’, AP/RN, 22 February 1996.154. For more on this, see Hennessey, The Northern Ireland Peace Process,

pp. 100–1.155. ‘Report of the International Body on Arms Decommissioning, 22 January 1996’,

CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet), available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/gm24196.htm>, last accessed 12 January 2007.

156. Cited in E. Moloney, ‘War and Peace’, Irish Times, 5 February 2005.157. ‘Sinn Féin repudiates killing of Garda’, AP/RN, 13 June 1996. For more on

the murder of Garda McCabe, see Mallie and McKittrick, The Fight for Peace,pp. 373–4.

158. Adams expressed ‘regret and sympathy’ at the Manchester bombing, cited inR. Donnolly, ‘ “Revulsion for all that the bombers stand for” pervades Irishcommunity’, Irish Times, 17 June 1996.

159. T. Blair, ‘Labour committed to finding settlement for North’, Irish Times, 28 April1997.

160. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 461–2.161. Ibid., pp. 468–79.162. ‘New chance must be seized’, AP/RN, front page, 24 July 1997; ‘IRA calls complete

cessation’, AP/RN, 24 July 1997.163. See, for example, Martin McGuinness, cited in Sinn Féin, Annual Bodenstown

Speech 1995, Address by Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, 18 June 1995 (1995),

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216 Notes

available at <http://sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Speech_Bodenstown95.pdf>, last accessed2 November 2006.

164. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 1996.165. Adams, cited in Mallie and McKittrick, The Fight for Peace, p. 353.166. Clausewitz famously wrote that ‘War is merely the continuation of policy by

other means’. See C. von Clausewitz, On War (ed. and trans. by M. Howard andP. Paret) (London, 1973), p. 99.

4 Confronting Unionism, Negotiation and Agreement,1997–2001

1. Adams, cited in ‘Republicans want Agreement implemented: Gerry AdamsInterviewed’, AP/RN, 8 July 1999.

2. Gerry MacLochlainn, interview with the author, Derry, 14 April 2003.3. Molloy, cited in T. Harnden, ‘Talks under threat as IRA is primed’, Daily Telegraph,

17 November 1997.4. Adams, cited in G. Moriarty, ‘The Sinn Féin project – to be top dog in Northern

politics by 2006’, Irish Times, 6 June 2001.5. Figure and results for 1997 election taken from ‘The 1997 Westminster elections

in Northern Ireland’, ARK Northern Ireland: Social and Political Archive, avail-able at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fw97.htm>, last accessed 1 November2006.

6. Figure taken from ‘Olltoghchan don 28u Dáil 17/06/1997’, Guthanphobail.net,available at <http://guthanphobail.net/dail-19970606.htm>, last accessed 2November 2006.

7. ‘One TD and Two MPs’, AP/RN, front page, 13 June 1997.8. ‘Ferris hits the post’, AP/RN, 13 June 1997; N. Forde, ‘Voters’ verdict cannot be

ignored’, AP/RN, 13 June 1997.9. Democratic Left won 2.4 per cent of the vote nationally, while the Workers’

Party won only 0.4 per cent. Figures taken from ‘Olltoghchan don 28u Dáil17/06/1997’, Guthanphobail.net, available at <http://guthanphobail.net/dail-19970606.htm>, last accessed 2 November 2006.

10. For further detail on the split that led to the creation of the ‘Real’ IRA/32 CountySovereignty Movement faction, see Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 473–9; J. Mooney and M. O’Toole, Black Operations: The Secret War Against the Real IRA(Ashbourne, 2003), pp. 21–42.

11. ‘TUAS Document’.12. ‘Everyone is involved in negotiations’, AP/RN, 11 September 1997.13. Adams, Hope and History, pp. 367–8.14. Hennessey, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, p. 55.15. J. Ruane and J. Todd, ‘The Belfast Agreement: Context, Content, Consequences’,

in J. Ruane and J. Todd, After the Good Friday Agreement: Analysing Political Changein Northern Ireland (Dublin, 1999), p. 11.

16. ‘IRA blames Blair for Crisis’, AP/RN, front page, 22 January 1998; M. MacRuairi,‘A sop to unionists’, AP/RN, 15 January 1998.

17. Bew and Gillespie, The Northern Ireland Peace Process 1993–1996, p. 12.18. P. Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), p. 549.19. Morrison, Then the Walls Came Down, pp. 96–7.20. H. McThomas, ‘Objectives of the unarmed struggle’, AP/RN, 8 September 1994.21. H. McThomas, ‘Divided forces of Unionism’, AP/RN, 20 October 1994.

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Notes 217

22. M. McLaughlin, ‘The Irish Republican Ideal’, in N. Porter (ed.), The RepublicanIdeal: Current Perspectives (Belfast, 1998), pp. 78–9.

23. Ibid.24. See above. pp. 78–9.25. An example of the new language of ‘outreach’ to Unionists was provided by

Alex Maskey, who became the first Sinn Féin mayor of Belfast in 2002. See, forexample, Sinn Féin, The Memory of the Dead: Seeking Common Ground! Speech byAlex Maskey, Mayor of Belfast, 26 June 2002 (2002) (LLPC).

26. Finlay, cited in Mallie and McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland, p. 237.27. Godson, Himself Alone, pp. 326–34, 347.28. ‘The IRA’s response’, AP/RN, front page, 30 April 1998.29. G. Adams, ‘Having to seek equality in grief’, AP/RN, 28 January 1999.30. ‘The Agreement: Agreement reached in the multi-party negotiations (10

April 1998)’, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet), available at<http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/agreement.htm>, last accessed 31October 2006.

31. G. Adams, ‘Our vision sees past partition and poverty – our struggle remainsintact: Gerry Adams Presidential Address, 86th Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 7February 1991.

32. ‘The Agreement: Agreement reached in the multi-party negotiations (10April 1998)’, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet), available at<http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/agreement.htm>, last accessed 31October 2006.

33. Sinn Féin, Speech by Pat Doherty, Sinn Féin Vice-President, for 80th Anniversaryof 1916 Rising, Belfast, 7 April 1996 (1996) (LLPC). See also, ‘“No return toStormont” – IRA: Easter Message from Óglaigh na hÉireann’, AP/RN, front page, 4April 1996; G. Kelly, ‘There can be no return to Stormont’, AP/RN, 16 May 1996.

34. Francie Molloy, cited in L. Clarke and M. Jones, ‘Trimble shows more flexibilityover IRA arms’, Sunday Times, 28 March 1999.

35. Bew, Ireland, p. 550.36. Murray and Tonge, Sinn Féin and the SDLP, pp. 198–201.37. See, for example, Anthony McIntyre, as cited in English, Armed Struggle, p. 319;

Bernadette Sands-McKevitt, as cited in English, Armed Struggle, p. 317.38. ‘SF membership to decide’, AP/RN, front page, 16 April 1998.39. Adams, Hope and History, p. 371.40. Conor Murphy, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 March 2004.41. Adams, Hope and History, p. 369.42. M. MacDonncha, ‘Untried paths – strange vistas’, AP/RN, 16 April 1998.43. ‘United we stand’, AP/RN, front page, 7 May 1998; ‘Forward in unity’, AP/RN, 7

May 1998.44. See, for instance, ‘The futile path of militarism: Sabotage against Irish republi-

canism’, AP/RN, 20 August 1998.45. J. Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.46. See, for instance, Hennessey, The Northern Ireland Peace Process, pp. 145–9, 153;

Murray and Tonge, Sinn Féin and the SDLP, pp. 199, 213.47. ‘Our prisoners come home’, AP/RN, front page, 17 December 1998.48. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 480–3.49. P. Whelan, ‘Unbowed . . . Unbroken’, AP/RN, 14 May 1998.50. 331 delegates, out of a total of 350 at the ard fheis, voted in favour of the

Agreement. See N. Kelly, ‘Focused and imaginative debate’, AP/RN, 14 May 1998.

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218 Notes

51. T. Hartman, ‘Talking the Gun out of Irish Politics: Framing the Peace Process’,unpublished MA dissertation, San Francisco State University, 2003.

52. Sinn Féin, Annual Bodenstown Speech 1998, Address by Sinn Féin President GerryAdams, 21 June 1998 (1998), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Speech_Bodenstown98.pdf>, last accessed 2 November 2006.

53. G. Adams, ‘Having to seek equality in grief’, AP/RN, 28 January 1999.54. Collins, cited in T. P. Coogan, Michael Collins: A Biography (London, 1990),

p. 301; B. Campbell, ‘Not a solution, but the potential for a solution’, AP/RN,9 April 1998.

55. J. Cusack, ‘Support for deal is growing among IRA rank and file’, Irish Times, 25April 1998.

56. ‘A new arena of struggle’, AP/RN, front page, 17 September 1998.57. Adams, Hope and History, p. 367.58. Anthony McIntyre, interview with the author, Belfast, 6 January 2004.59. See, for example, G. Adams, ‘Change needed for North’s transition’, Irish Times,

13 March 1998.60. ‘Ready for Government’, AP/RN, front page, 18 June 1998.61. For more on Collins’ view of the Treaty, see English, Armed Struggle, p.31; Coogan,

Michael Collins, p. 319.62. This poster was observed by the author when at Parliament Buildings, Stormont,

in July and August 2002.63. C. Carney, ‘Was Michael Collins a Provo?’, AP/RN, 29 November 1990.64. Ibid.65. M. MacDonncha, ‘To hell and back: Jordan’s Collins makes big impact’, AP/RN,

31 October 1996.66. M. Derrig, ‘Michael Collins’ Unfinished Revolution’, AP/RN, 21 October 1999.67. Ibid.68. ‘The South African lesson: Be vigilant, debate and stay united’, AP/RN, 23 April

1998.69. Cited in A. Guelke, ‘Ireland and South Africa: A Very Special Relationship’, Irish

Studies in International Affairs, 11 (2000), p. 139.70. M. McGuinness, ‘Negotiating an Agenda for Change: Keynote address on

Negotiations and Agreement to Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 23 April 1998.71. Ibid.; ‘The IRA’s response’, AP/RN, front page, 30 April 1998.72. ‘Tomorrow we start to build the future: Address by Sinn Féin President Gerry

Adams at Sunday’s Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 14 May 1998; McLaughlin, ‘The IrishRepublican Ideal’ in Porter (ed.), The Republican Ideal, pp. 75–7.

73. See, for instance, McLaughlin, ‘The Irish Republican Ideal’, in Porter (ed.), TheRepublican Ideal, p. 75. The same line of reasoning was present in anotherMcLaughlin article, this time for the Irish Times: M. McLaughlin, ‘Debate mustaccept united Ireland question’, Irish Times, 31 October 1997.

74. L. Friel, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t: The unionist majority, the census andthe electoral register’, AP/RN, 16 January 2003.

75. See, for example, ‘SF’s bold initiative: Way clear for Executive and All-Ireland bod-ies’, AP/RN, front page, 3 September 1998; G. Adams, ‘The Agreement says: Nowform the Executive and All-Ireland Council’, AP/RN, 14 January 1999; ‘Marchdeadline must be met’, AP/RN, front page, 25 February 1999.

76. ‘New Era of Hope’, AP/RN, front page, 16 December 1999.77. ‘The struggle continues’, AP/RN, front page, 14 May 1998.78. Ibid.; ‘Prepare for the next phase of struggle’, AP/RN, 14 May 1998.

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Notes 219

79. ‘A New Arena of Struggle’, AP/RN, front page, 17 September 1998.80. B. Campbell, ‘Not a solution, but the potential for a solution’, AP/RN, 9 April

1998.81. Morrison, Then the Walls Came Down, p. 239.82. A. McIntyre, ‘The Imperfect Peace: Terence O’Neill’s Day Has Come’, The Blanket,

19 August 2004, available at <http://www.phoblacht.net/imperfectpeacebeltel.html>, last accessed 6 November 2006.

83. A. McIntyre, ‘The Enforcers’, The Blanket, 27 February 2004, available at<http://www.phoblacht.net/enforcers.html>, last accessed 6 November 2006.

84. A. McIntyre, ‘Sinn Féin has no alternative to British rule’, The Sunday Tribune,14 November 1999.

85. Anthony McIntyre, interview with the author, Belfast, 6 January 2004.86. For Kelly’s role in the birth of the Provisional IRA and then the ‘Arms Trial’, see

Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 70–3, 265–6.87. John Kelly, interview with the author, Belfast, 8 July 2004.88. Ibid.89. For more on Donaldson’s role in this regard see, ‘Obituary: Denis

Donaldson’, Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2006; A. McIntyre, ‘Intimidationcontinues in Rathenraw’, The Blanket, 15 October 2004, available at<http://www.phoblacht.net/gooseam15102g.html>, last accessed 6 November2006.

90. Cunningham, cited in A. McIntyre, ‘Sinn Féin, A Dictatorship: Martin Cunning-ham Interviewed. Part Three in a Series’, The Blanket, 21 March 2004, available at<http://www.phoblacht.net/mcinterviewam3.html>, last accessed 6 November2006.

91. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.92. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 September 2003.93. John Kelly, interview with the author, Belfast, 8 July 2004.94. ‘Prepare for the next phase of struggle’, AP/RN, 14 May 1998.95. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.96. J. Gibney, ‘Ambiguity: Oiling Wheels of Progress’, AP/RN, 17 April 2003.97. A. McIntyre, ‘The Police Process’, The Blanket, 30 June 2004, available at

<http://www.phoblacht.net/policeprocessam.html>, last accessed 6 November2006.

98. See above, p. 83.99. ‘Furthering the revolutionary project’, AP/RN, 2 July 1998.

100. Mao, for instance, argued that the maintenance of discipline within a revolu-tionary party required that ‘(1) the individual is subordinate to the organization’and ‘(2) the minority is subordinate to the majority’. See M. Tse-Tung, ‘The roleof the Chinese Communist Party in the National War’, in M. Tse-Tung, SelectedWorks, vol. II (1983), pp. 203–4.

101. For a definition of this term, see ‘Democratic Centralism’, Britannica OnlineEncyclopedia, available at <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/691998/democratic-centralism#>, last accessed 30 November 2006.

102. A. McIntyre, ‘Liam Kenendy and West Belfast’, The Blanket, 2 May 2005, availableat <http://www.phoblacht.net/am0205051g.html>, last accessed 6 November2006.

103. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 September 2003.104. E. Rooney, ‘Sinn Féin and Socialism’, Left Republican Review, 3 (March 2001),

pp. 10–11.

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220 Notes

105. G. Cusak, ‘Dialogue: A casualty of this imperfect peace?’, Left Republican Review,3 (March 2001), pp. 18–9.

106. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 September 2003.107. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.108. Sinn Féin, Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 2004 (Dublin, 2004) (LLPC), Motions 130–1,

p. 12. Motion 130 calling for the party to attend the World Social Forum waspassed. Motion 129, which called for a boycott of the World Economic Forum,was also passed and an attempted amendment to it from the party ard chomhairlewas defeated. See also ‘An alternative globalisation is possible’, AP/RN, 4 March2004.

109. For more on this, see below, pp. 148–9.110. ‘Sinn Féin suspends veteran member’, BBC News Online, 23 November 2005,

available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4460636.stm>, lastaccessed 6 November 2006.

111. ‘Molloy allowed to re-join Sinn Féin’, Irish Independent, 13 January 2006.112. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.113. Gerry Kelly, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 March 2004; see above,

p. 15.114. E. O’Broin, ‘Changing Times’, Left Republican Review, 1 (July 2000). In this article,

O’Broin argued that the movement needed to evolve away from the tight lead-ership control that had been necessary in the past. The latter quote, by contrast,was taken from a personal interview: Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author,Belfast, 5 September 2003.

115. For aggregate results of the referendums in the Republic and Northern Ire-land respectively, see ‘The 1998 Referendums’, ARK Northern Ireland: Socialand Political Archive, available at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fref98.htm>,last accessed 1 November 2006. For estimates of the breakdown of the results,according to community, see ‘Results of the Referenda in Northern Ireland andRepublic of Ireland, Friday 22 May 1998’, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Inter-net), available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/election/ref1998.htm>,last accessed 1 November 2006.

116. Ibid.117. Godson, Himself Alone, pp. 371–803; F. Millar, David Trimble: The Price of Peace

(Dublin, 2004), pp. 65–81, 156–8.118. ‘Agreement must now be implemented’, AP/RN, 3 September 1998.119. See, for instance, ‘Keep your word: SF push for full implementation of Agree-

ment’, AP/RN, front page, 1 October 1998; ‘Crisis Deepens’, AP/RN, front page,15 October 1998; ‘Executive must be formed’, AP/RN, front page, 3 Decem-ber 1998; ‘Implement the Agreement’, AP/RN, 7 January 1999; ‘Interview withGerry Adams: Republicans want Agreement implemented’, AP/RN, 8 July 1999;‘Implement the Agreement’, AP/RN, front page, 24 February 2000.

120. See C. Ó Caoláin, ‘British indulge unionist intransigence’, AP/RN, 10 February2000; S. Brady, ‘The Agreement cannot be renegotiated’, AP/RN, 8 April 1999;M. McGuinness, ‘Trimble cannot rewrite Agreement: Republican constituencycan go no further’, AP/RN, 29 October 1998; G. Adams, ‘Unionists continue tounpick the Agreement’, AP/RN, 10 December 1998.

121. S. Brady, ‘Decommissioning row an attempt to sabotage Agreement’, AP/RN, 24September 1998.

122. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 January 2004.123. Ibid.

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 221

Notes 221

124. M. McGuinness, ‘Trimble cannot rewrite Agreement: Republican constituencycan go no further’, AP/RN, 29 October 1998; ‘Blair must break Unionist Veto’,AP/RN, front page, 29 July 1999.

125. McGuinness, cited in M. Pierse, ‘RUC Proposals fall short’, AP/RN, 20 January2000.

126. ‘Blood on Trimble’s Hands’, AP/RN, 15 August 2002.127. See, for instance, L. Friel, ‘Stand by me’, AP/RN, 14 November 2002. Throughout

2003 and beyond this language became ever more pervasive among republicanspokespeople. See ‘Are unionists “victims” of their own myth making?’, AP/RN,23 January 2003; ‘Unionists attack Sinn Féin candidate’s home’, AP/RN, 29 May2003; ‘Unionist paramilitary feud in Derry’, AP/RN, 21 August 2003; ‘Upsurge inUnionist violence on St Patrick’s Day’, AP/RN, 25 March 2004; ‘Unionist paramil-itaries intensify attacks’, AP/RN, 18 September 2003; ‘Unionist paramilitaries stirup sectarian tensions in Derry’, AP/RN, 14 October 2004; ‘Unionist paramili-taries attack Travellers’, AP/RN, 24 February 2005; ‘Unionist paramilitary feudescalates’, AP/RN, 28 July 2005.

128. ‘Trimble adopts wreckers’ charter’, AP/RN, 3 October 2002.129. Adams, cited in ‘SF’s bold initiative: Way clear for Executive and All-Ireland

bodies’, AP/RN, front page, 3 September 1998.130. For a narrative of these events, see ‘IRA Statements 1998–2003’, BBC News

Online, 25 February 2003, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/1144568.stm>, last accessed 10 November 2006; and ‘IRA “hasdestroyed all its arms”’, BBC News Online, 26 September 2005, available at<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4282188.stm>, last accessed 26October 2006.

131. Adams, cited in S. Brady, ‘Peace Process faces major crisis’, AP/RN, 15 October1998.

132. ‘Breaking the Impasse – A Sinn Féin Declaration’, AP/RN, 1 July 1999.133. Godson, Himself Alone, p. 452.134. ‘Governments must act’, AP/RN, 1 July 1999.135. ‘Unionists reject Agreement’, AP/RN, front page, 1 July 1999.136. Mickey McMullan, cited in H. McDonald, ‘Former IRA terrorist tells Provos to

disarm’, Observer, 10 October 1999.137. Dawn Doyle, interview with the author, Dublin, 8 September 2003.138. McLaughlin, cited in P. Shirlow and M. McGovern, ‘Language, discourse and dia-

logue: Sinn Féin and the Irish peace process’, Political Geography, 17(2) (February1998), p. 180.

139. See above, pp. 37–8.140. For full details on the background to, and progression of, the Orange Order

parades disputes in this period, see R. Dudley Edwards, The Faithful Tribe: AnIntimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions (London, 2000), pp. 350–544.

141. ‘Front line Loyalism’, AP/RN, front page, 27 June 1996; ‘A Carnival of Hate’,AP/RN, 4 July 1996; ‘The roots of unionist sectarianism’, AP/RN, 1 August 1996.

142. For more on the Orange Order and Unionism more generally, see H. Pattersonand E. Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945: TheDecline of the Loyal Family (Manchester, 2007); E. Kaufmann, The Orange Order:A Contemporary Northern Irish History (Oxford, 2007); D. Bryan, Orange Parades:The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control (London, 2000); J. Bew, ‘Introduction’,in D. W. Miller, Queen’s Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective, 2nd edn(Dublin, 2007).

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 222

222 Notes

143. ‘200 days under siege’, AP/RN, front page, 21 January 1999.144. B. Campbell, ‘Time for Change’, AP/RN, 2 July 1998.145. Dudley Edwards, The Faithful Tribe, pp. 351–2, 357–9, 402–8.146. Godson, Himself Alone, p. 239.147. For Bruton’s refusal to meet Adams and Hume, see Mallie and McKittrick, The

Fight for Peace, p. 360; for his criticism of the RUC and Unionists, see Godson,Himself Alone, p. 238.

148. M. McGuinness, cited in ‘Sinn Féin Campaign Officially Launched – MartinMcGuinness speaks to An Phoblacht’, AP/RN, 13 November 2003. See also,Adams, cited in N. McAdam, ‘Adams and Durkan Clash’, Belfast Telegraph, 2May 2005.

149. H. Patterson, ‘Sinn Féin and the peace process: the end of the Republicanproject?’, unpublished seminar given to the Cambridge University, Irish StudiesGroup, 13 May 2003.

150. Ibid.151. ‘The Fun isn’t Over’, AP/RN, front page, 6 August 1998.152. B. Campbell, ‘Time for Change’, AP/RN, 2 July 1998.153. F. Lane, ‘A party slowly becoming irrelevant’, AP/RN, 6 March 2003.154. Ibid.155. ‘RUC must be disbanded’, AP/RN, 4 June 1998.156. ‘Policy Paper: Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland’, SDLP

website, available at <http://www.sdlp.ie/policy/documents/pdpolicing.shtm>,last accessed 6 November 2006; ‘SDLP Response to Patten, 6/12/99’, SDLPwebsite, available at <http://www.sdlp.ie/media/pressarchive/archivejusteq/prpattenresp.shtm>, last accessed 6 November 2006.

157. ‘SF is the best guarantee of policing progress’, AP/RN, 20 November 2003.158. See, for example, ‘“Patten Still Not Implemented”: Mural 1681, Album 48’,

Dr Jonathan McCormack’s Mural Directory, CAIN (Conflict Archive on theInternet), available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/album48.htm>, lastaccessed 30 November 2006.

159. Denis Donaldson, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 January 2004; M.McLaughlin, cited in M. Pierse, ‘Stooping to pressure on policing’, AP/RN, 23August 2001. See also ‘Policing Plan is Unacceptable’, AP/RN, front page, 23August 2001.

160. ‘Maskey rubbishes Durkan’s policing stance’, AP/RN, 28 February 2002; ‘Themany faces of the SDLP’, AP/RN, 20 February 2003.

161. Gerry Kelly, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 March 2004.162. P. Mitchel, G. Evans and B. O’Leary, ‘Party Competition and Public Opinion at the

Northern Ireland Assembly Elections of 2003’, unpublished paper for Conferenceat Queen’s University, Belfast, 22 September 2004, p. 44.

163. Sinn Féin, Ard Fheis Clar agus Ruin 2005 (Dublin, 2005) (LLPC), Motions 317 and318, p. 55.

164. See below, pp. 174–8.165. ‘Sinn Féin is the best guarantee of policing progress’, AP/RN, 20 November 2003.166. Mitchel, Evans and O’Leary, ‘Party Competition and Public Opinion’,

p. 19.167. ‘Unionist disunity’, AP/RN, 16 April 1998; B. Campbell, ‘Watching the Unionists’,

AP/RN, 16 April 1998; McLaughlin, cited in N. Emerson, ‘Hain failed nationalists’,Irish News, 28 May 2006.

168. See above, pp. 25–6.

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Notes 223

169. Blair, cited in ‘In quotes: Blair’s leadership’, BBC News Online, availableat <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3750847.stm>, last accessed 7November 2006.

170. Between 3 and 5 March 2003, Blair and the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern,co-hosted talks between Northern Ireland’s political parties at Hillsborough castlein Northern Ireland. The invasion of Iraq began on 19 March. See ‘North-ern Ireland chronology: 2003’, BBC News Online, 9 April 2003, available at<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/2933951.stm>, last accessed 30November 2006.

171. Godson, Himself Alone, p. 444.172. See, for instance, S. Brady, ‘Peace Process faces major crisis’, AP/RN, 15 October

1998; ‘Governments must back Agreement’, AP/RN, front page, 11 February 1999;‘Blair’s Blunder’, AP/RN, front page, 15 July 1999; ‘Blair must break Unionist veto’,AP/RN, front page, 29 July 1999; ‘Unionist veto may destroy Agreement’, AP/RN,front page, 10 February 2000; ‘Implement the Agreement: We’re sick of Britishrule and Unionist vetoes’, AP/RN, front page, 24 February 2000.

173. O’Callaghan, The Informer, p. 285.174. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 22 November 2005.175. See, for instance, W. Graham, ‘Good Friday Agreement is “as good as it gets” –

Adams’, Irish News, 25 July 2003; P. Rabbitte, ‘Sinn Féin’s Plan B for North uncon-stitutional’, Irish Times, 15 November 2004; ‘SF: “Govts must spell out Plan B”’,UTV online, available at <http://www.u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?pt=n&id=74098>, last accessed 30 November 2006.

176. Denis Donaldson, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 January 2004.177. See above, p. 105.178. See above, pp. 25–6.179. Figure and results taken from ‘The 2001 Westminster elections in Northern

Ireland’, ARK Northern Ireland: Social and Political Archive, available at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fw01.htm>, last accessed 1 November 2006. See alsoMitchel, Evans and O’Leary, ‘Party Competition and Public Opinion’, p. 11.

180. Danny Morrison, interview with the author, London, 12 March 2005.181. Figures taken from Mitchel, Evans and O’Leary, ‘Party Competition and Public

Opinion’, pp. 6, 11.182. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.

5 Sinn Féin Centre Stage: The Search for Political Growth,2001–4

1. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.2. In the 2004 European election in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin’s Bairbre de Brun

won 26 per cent of the vote, compared to 16 per cent won by the SDLP’s MartinMorgan. Figure taken from P. Hainsworth and G. McCann, ‘Change at last: The2004 European Election in Northern Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 19(2) (Winter2004), p. 105.

3. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.4. P. O’Connor, ‘Insisting on our democratic rights’, AP/RN, 8 May 2003.5. See above, pp. 25–6.6. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 May 2005.7. J. Corcoran, ‘Working the all-Ireland bodies’, AP/RN, 5 December 2002.

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224 Notes

8. ‘Time for the right to vote: Six-County Representation in the Oireachtas’, AP/RN,13 August 1998; ‘Call for Six-County representation in the Oireachtas’, AP/RN, 1April 1999; ‘Ó Caolàin welcomes Dáil access for Northern MPs’, AP/RN, 28 March2002.

9. ‘All citizens and emigrants should elect Seanad – Sinn Féin’, AP/RN, 9 October2003.

10. R. de Rosa, ‘A President for All Campaign Launched’, AP/RN, 22 January2004; ‘Campaign launched for a Green Paper on Irish Unity’, AP/RN, 3 March2005.

11. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 September 2003.12. G. Adams, ‘Our vision sees past partition and poverty – our struggle remains

intact: Gerry Adams Presidential Address, 86th Sinn Féin Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 7February 1991. See above, p. 58.

13. Barry McElduff, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 August 2003.14. Figure taken from Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 291.15. On this reasoning, Ó Brádaigh had advised against participating in the election

in the first place. See Feeney, Sinn Féin. p. 305.16. During this period, for example, Sinn Féin was a vocal defender of the rights of

travellers, women, homosexuals and immigrants. See, for instance, ‘New anti-Traveller law passed’, AP/RN, 28 March 2002; Sinn Féin, Women in an Irelandof Equals (2002), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/policies/document/153>,last accessed 7 November 2006; Sinn Féin, Moving On: A Policy for Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual Equality (1996), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Policies_LGB.pdf>, last accessed 7 November 2006; ‘Sinn Féin signs anti-racism pledge’,AP/RN, 14 March 2002; ‘Sinn Féin launches Charter on Racism’, AP/RN, 17 July2003.

17. This was the slogan for the party’s campaign in the 2002 Irish general election.See ‘Vote for an Ireland of Equals’, AP/RN, 16 May 2002.

18. Adams, cited in Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams Presidential Address to Sinn Féin Ard Fheis2000 (2000), available at <http://www.sinnfein.ie/pdf/Speech_ArdFheis00.pdf>,last accessed 30 November 2006.

19. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 September 2003.20. M. Pierse, ‘Drugs: the state’s failed legacy’, AP/RN, 24 September 1998.21. ‘Celtic Tiger ignores homeless’, AP/RN, 13 November 1997.22. For Sinn Féin’s involvement with the COCAD groups stretching back into the

1990s, see, for example, ‘Heroin Street’, AP/RN, front page, 22 August 1996;‘Empowering communities – a Sinn Féin response to the drugs epidemic’, AP/RN,17 October 1996; M. Pierse, ‘Drug debate must look at all issues’, AP/RN, 6 August1998; ‘Upsurge in drug problem’, AP/RN, 18 September 2003; J. Corcoran, ‘Moredie from drugs than on roads’, AP/RN, 18 December 2003.

23. Maillot, New Sinn Féin, pp. 92–3.24. R. de Rossa, ‘No ground floor access’, AP/RN, 13 August 1998. See also, ‘Proper

Housing Demanded’, AP/RN, 13 August 1998; ‘Sinn Féin launches radical housingplan’, AP/RN, 25 April 2002; ‘Fianna Fáil back in bed with the builders’, AP/RN,12 December 2002; ‘Cronyism adds to housing crisis’, AP/RN, 13 February 2003;‘Homelessness rise shames Coalition’, AP/RN, 27 May 2004.

25. ‘Dublin Sinn Féin against bin charges’, AP/RN, 15 February 2001; ‘No incinera-tion – No service charges’, AP/RN, 3 July 2003; ‘Dubliners face 30% bin chargeshike’, AP/RN, 12 December 2003; ‘Sinn Féin support for local residents on bincharges’, 11 September 2003.

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 225

Notes 225

26. ‘Ryanair sackings’, AP/RN, 26 March 1998; R. MacGabhann, ‘Dublin Bus workers“will not be defeated”’, AP/RN, 30 March 2000; ‘Huge support for nurses’, AP/RN,front page, 21 October 1999.

27. ‘Huge support for nurses’, AP/RN, front page, 21 October 1999.28. P. O’Connor, ‘Off the rails’, AP/RN, 24 July 2003.29. See, for instance, R. Smyth, ‘Crowe calls for rethink on Aer Rianta’, AP/RN, 25

September 2003; ‘Aer Rianta and the fantasy land of free market economics’,AP/RN, 15 January 2004; ‘Brennan steers buses on wrong route’, AP/RN, 31 July2005.

30. ‘Fruit of the Loom’, AP/RN, 10 December 1998. See also, R. de Rossa, ‘Takingthe Apple out of Cork’, AP/RN, 30 July 1998; ‘Fruit of the Loom’s Bitter Harvest’,AP/RN, 3 September 1998; ‘Rotten Apple: Apple sells out Irish workers’, AP/RN,4 February 1999.

31. Ó Caoláin, cited in ‘Dublin Government spurns gas millions’, AP/RN, 22 October1998. See also S. ac Coistealbha, ‘The great oil and gas rip-off’, AP/RN, 14 March2002.

32. T. Clancy, ‘Shell’s assault on Erris’, AP/RN, 26 May 2005.33. R. de Rosa, ‘Outrage as Corrib protestors are jailed’, AP/RN, front page, 30 June

2005. See also, ‘Protests to Release Rossport 5 Grow’, AP/RN, 14 July 2005; R. deRosa, ‘Rossport Campaign Grows’, AP/RN, 21 July 2005.

34. Adams, cited in M. Hennessey, ‘Promoting “a political idealism the others havelost”’, Irish Times, 1 April 2002.

35. ‘Ó Caoláin slams “dealings of political class”’, AP/RN, 18 September 1997. Formore on the nature and conduct of the various tribunals see E. O’Halpin, ‘“Ah,they’ve given us a good bit of stuff . . .”: Tribunals and Irish Political Life at theTurn of the Century’, Irish Political Studies, 15 (2000).

36. Ó Caoláin, cited in ‘Ó Caoláin slams “dealings of political class”’, AP/RN, 18September 1997.

37. ‘Liars and Swindlers’, AP/RN, front page, 28 August 1997.38. ‘Crisis across the political divide’, AP/RN, 28 January 1999.39. N. Forde, ‘Three men and a brown paper bag’, AP/RN, 18 March 1999.40. ‘We don’t trust you, Bertie’, Evening Herald, 20 September 2000.41. ‘Ansbacher exposes corrupt elite’, AP/RN, 11 July 2002. See also ‘Contemptu-

ous, complacent, corrupt’, AP/RN, 3 October 2002; ‘Mahon exposes collectivecorruption of politics’, AP/RN, 12 February 2004.

42. M. MacDonncha, ‘Not a wedding but a funeral’, AP/RN, 28 May 1998.43. M. MacDonncha, ‘Demise of DL opens new door to Sinn Féin’, AP/RN, 3

December 1998.44. M. Gallagher, ‘Stability and Turmoil: Analysis of the results’, in M. Gallagher,

M. Marsh and P. Mitchell (eds), How Ireland Voted 2002 (Basingstoke, 2003),pp. 92, 100–2.

45. ‘A realignment of Irish politics’, AP/RN, 23 May 2002.46. M. Laver and M. Marsh, ‘Parties and voters’, in J. Coakley and M. Gallagher (eds),

Politics in the Republic of Ireland, 3rd edn (London, 1999), p. 169.47. ‘No to Nice’, AP/RN, 7 June 2001.48. Figures taken from ‘Referendum of 7 June 2001, 24th Amendment, Treaty

of Nice I’, ElectionsIreland.org, available at <http://www.electionsireland.org/results/referendum/refresult.cfm?ref=200124R>, last accessed 10 November2006.

49. R. MacGabhann, ‘Nice – the real winners were?’, AP/RN, 24 October 2002.

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226 Notes

50. McDowell, cited in ‘Anger over Minister’s attack on SF funding’, UTVInternet, 22 January 2004, available at <http://www.u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?id=41711&pt=n>, last accessed 10 November 2006.

51. See, for instance, J. Cusack and A. Murray, ‘Adams, Ferris and McGuinness “onIRA Council”’, Sunday Independent, 14 March 2004; T. Brady and S. Molony,‘McDowell: These men are leaders of the IRA’, Irish Independent, 21 February2005.

52. McDowell, cited in G. McKenna, ‘McDowell in call not to elect “Nazi SinnFéin/IRA”’, Irish Independent, 8 March 2004.

53. See, for example, J. Murphy, ‘McDowell’s criticisms reflect middle Ireland’s truefears’, Sunday Independent, 3 March 2002.

54. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 January 2004.55. Dawn Doyle, interview with the author, Dublin, 8 September 2003.56. M. MacDonncha, ‘Six Months in Leinster House’, AP/RN, 18 December 1997;

R. Smyth, ‘McCreevy’s Charter for the Wealthy’, AP/RN, 12 February 2004. Seealso, R. MacGabhann, ‘McCreevy’s Cake and Crumbs’, AP/RN, 2 December 1999;R. MacGabhann, ‘Scrooge McCreevy robs the people’, AP/RN, front page, 5December 2002; R. Smyth, ‘McCreevy’s smokescreen’, AP/RN, 11 December 2003.

57. See, for example, ‘Time to share prosperity: Sinn Féin pre-Budget submission’,AP/RN, 26 November 1998; ‘Share the wealth in Budget 2001’, AP/RN, 24 Novem-ber 2000; ‘Bosses banish Budget blues with 50% pay rise – Sinn Féin calls onFinance Minister to tackle corporate greed’, AP/RN, 27 November 2003; ‘Putchildren first in Budget 2005’, AP/RN, 18 November 2004.

58. ‘Budget for an Ireland of Equals’, AP/RN, 21 November 2002.59. See ‘Bosses banish budget blues with 50% pay rise – Sinn Féin calls on Finance

Minister to tackle corporate greed’, 27 November 2003; R. Smyth, ‘McCreevy’sCharter for the Wealthy’, AP/RN, 12 February 2004.

60. Sinn Féin, Building a Just Economy (2002), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/policies/document/146>; Sinn Féin, No Right Turn (2003), available athttp://www.sinnFéin.ie/policies/document/174; Sinn Féin, Eliminating Poverty –A 21st Century Goal (2004), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/pdf/SFArdFheis04Poverty.pdf>. All last accessed 10 November 2006.

61. ‘Budget for an Ireland of Equals’, AP/RN, 21 November 2002.62. Sinn Féin, ‘Sinn Féin, The Irish Economy and the Role of Business – Charting a Course

for the Future’: Speech by Gerry Adams to the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce,20 February 1998, Wellington Park Hotel, Belfast (1998) (LLPC).

63. Adams, cited in R. Smyth, ‘Delivering a better economy for all – Adams addressesDublin Chamber of Commerce’, AP/RN, 22 April 2004.

64. Mitchel McLaughlin, cited in B. Dowling, ‘Sinn Féin’s Economic U-Turn’, IrishIndependent, 13 January 2006.

65. O’Brien, cited in M. Coleman, ‘Racism threat to economy – O’Brien’, Irish Times,26 October 2005.

66. Rollins, cited in I. Kehoe, ‘Dell will “reassess” operations if Irish corporation taxrises’, Sunday Business Post, 20 November 2005.

67. Ibid.; ‘Comment: The Driverless Car Syndrome – The Celtic Tiger roars on for nowbut significant reform is not on agenda’, Finfacts Ireland, available at <http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/article_10006099.shtml>, lastaccessed 28 November 2006.

68. Conor Murphy, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 March 2004.69. Ibid.

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Notes 227

70. Dawn Doyle, interview with the author, Dublin, 8 September 2003.71. For the party’s opposition to refuse charges as a ‘double tax’, see Sinn Féin, No

Right Turn (2003) available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/policies/document/174>,last accessed 10 November 2006. The party’s justification for supporting theintroduction of the charges in Sligo can be found in R. MacGabhann, ‘Budgetcould end service charges divisions: Mixed results on estimate votes’, AP/RN, 30November 2000.

72. Ibid.; see also ‘Sinn Féin celebrate council successes: Victory for politics ofinclusiveness’, AP/RN, 6 July 2000.

73. Sinn Féin, Educate that you may be free (2003), available at <http://www.sinnFéin.ie/policies/document/128>; Sinn Féin, Health for all (2001), available at<http://www.sinnFéin.ie/pdf/Policies_Health.pdf>. Both last accessed 10November 2006.

74. Conor Murphy, interview with the author, Belfast, 2 March 2004.75. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 1 September 2003.76. John Kelly, interview with the author, Belfast, 8 July 2004.77. Ibid.78. Ibid.79. ‘Creeping Privatisation Rejected’, AP/RN, 3 April 2003. The 2003 ard

fheis also passed a policy document outlining the party’s oppositionto PFI/PPP. See Sinn Féin, Private Finance Initiative (2003), available at<http://www.sinnFéin.ie/ policies/document/151>, last accessed 10 November2006.

80. Barry McElduff, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 August 2003.81. Dawn Doyle, interview with the author, Dublin, 8 September 2003.82. Eoin O’Broin, interview with the author, Belfast, 5 September 2003.83. With regards to the former, see J. Moran, ‘Left turn needed’, AP/RN, 19 June

2003 and E. O’Broin, ‘Building the Left Republican alternative’, AP/RN, 17 July2003. For the latter, see D. O’Cobhthaigh, ‘Building political strength’, AP/RN, 31July 2003 and D. Kearney, ‘Strategic momentum and popular support’, AP/RN,3 July 2003.

84. S. MacBradaigh, ‘Having a vision while living in the real world’, AP/RN, 24 July2003.

85. Pat Doherty, interview with the author, Belfast, 23 August 2003.86. ‘Horror in Jenin’, AP/RN, front page, 18 April 2002.87. J. Corcoran, ‘The people’s leader – Yasser Arafat dies’, AP/RN, 18 November 2004.88. Ibid.; ‘Adams in Middle East Peace Mission’, AP/RN, 7 September 2006.89. B. Hogan, ‘Dr Dubya (Or How America learned to stop thinking and love the

bomb)’, AP/RN, 22 February 2001.90. J. Moran, ‘We’re not anti-American, just pro-humanity’, AP/RN, 24 June 2004.91. B. Campbell, ‘The wonderful spirit of the Cuban revolution’, AP/RN, 9 October

1997.92. G. Adams, ‘Cuba and Ireland: Solidarity in Struggle’, AP/RN, 20 December 2001.93. ‘Chavez victorious’, AP/RN, 19 August 2004. See also, ‘Backing Chavez’s vision’,

AP/RN, 21 April 2005; ‘Bolivia – Another Brick in the Wall’, AP/RN, 5 January2006.

94. O’Connor, cited in ‘Israelis move deadline as Palestine suffers’, AP/RN, 12 October2000.

95. See, for example, ‘The Cry is Independencia!’, AP/RN, 8 October 1998; ‘PossibleETA ceasefire: Irish Peace Process points the way for Basque conflict’, AP/RN, 17

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228 Notes

September 1998; S. Galiana, ‘“The Republican Movement has taught us the way”,Interview with Basque leader’, AP/RN, 24 September 1998.

96. See, for instance, T. Toda, ‘Madrid cracks down on Basque independence’, AP/RN,18 March 1999; E. O’Broin, ‘Six Months On’, AP/RN, 15 April 1999; ‘Victoriesfor Basque independence movement’, AP/RN, 17 June 1999; ‘Maskey at historicBasque Councillors Congress’, AP/RN, 23 September 1999.

97. See, for example, ‘Basques launch broad front initiative’, AP/RN, 6 November2003; ‘ETA ready to negotiate’, AP/RN, 25 March 2004; ‘Ó Caoláin urges Basque–Spanish peace process’, AP/RN, 8 April 2004; ‘Basques still seek peace process’,AP/RN, 26 August 2004.

98. G. Adams, ‘Freedom’s fight can be won, if we all stand as one: Presidential Addressto 2001 Ard Fheis’, AP/RN, 4 October 2001.

99. ‘Adams condemns Madrid attacks’, AP/RN, 18 March 2004; ‘Horror in Beslan’,AP/RN, 9 September 2004; ‘Adams offers sympathy following London attacks’,AP/RN, 14 July 2005.

100. Bush, cited in ‘You are either with us or against us’, CNN online, 6 Novem-ber 2001, available at <http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/>, last accessed 31 October 2006.

101. Figure taken from J. Cusack, ‘SF thrives on major funding from abroad’, IrishTimes, 9 December 2000.

102. Figures taken from ‘Sinn Féin US Cash Bonanza’, The Belfast Telegraph, 24 January2003.

103. Gerry Adams, cited in A. MacEoin, ‘Columbia spook set-up: Concern expressedfor Bogota Three’, AP/RN, 30 August 2001.

104. Sinn Féin, Press Release: Gerry Adams on Columbia Arrests (22 August 2001) (LLPC).105. Flynn, cited in Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 490.106. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 27 March 2003.107. ‘Countdown to Slaughter’, AP/RN, front page, 20 March 2003; M. McLaughlin

‘This unjust war’, AP/RN, 20 March 2003.108. See, for instance, ‘Shannon airport must be demilitarised’, AP/RN, 4 November

2004; ‘Close Shannon to warmongers’, AP/RN, front page, 3 August 2006; BairbreDe Brun, cited in ‘EU must do more to resolve Iraq crisis’, AP/RN, 25 March 2004.

109. See, for example, ‘Falling Victim to the Big Lie’, Sovereign Nation, October/December 2004.

110. Higgins, cited in J. Meehan, ‘Sinn Féin @ the Bush Party’, The Blanket, 17 March2003, available at <http://www.phoblacht.net/bushparty.html>, last accessed 11November 2006.

111. ‘Tough talks ahead: Substantive gap remains’, AP/RN, front page, 13 March 2003.112. ‘Crunch week for the process’, AP/RN, front page, 10 April 2003.113. A. McIntyre, ‘Bush and Blair summon the Irish Contras’, The Blanket, 10

April 2003, available at <http://www.phoblacht.net/bushandblair.html>, lastaccessed 11 November 2006.

114. D. O’Cobhthaigh, ‘Looking Beyond the Road Map – The Discussion Continues’,AP/RN, 12 September 2002.

115. F. Lane, ‘Castlereagh arrests black propaganda’, AP/RN, 4 April 2002; J. Gibney,‘“Stinging” the peace process’, AP/RN, 10 October 2002; D. Kearney, ‘Putting thepeace process between hammer and anvil’, AP/RN, 29 April 2004.

116. Daly, cited in D. Casciani, ‘Eyewitness: Bomb Blast at school’, BBC News Online,5 September 2001, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/1527010.stm>, last accessed 11 November 2006.

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Notes 229

117. P. O’Connor, ‘How dare you lecture us about democracy’, AP/RN, 17 April2003.

118. ‘We have questions too’, AP/RN, 1 May 2003.119. ‘Stormtroopers trample Agreement’, AP/RN, front page, 10 October 2002.120. L. Friel, ‘A very British coup’, AP/RN, 10 October 2002.121. ‘Unionists jeopardise progress’, AP/RN, front page, 9 October 2003.122. ‘Exclusive IRA interview’, AP/RN, 12 September 2002.123. ‘Governments must deliver’, AP/RN, front page, 12 August 2004.124. A. McIntyre, ‘A Subtle but Brilliant Use of the IRA’, The Blanket, 11 January

2004, available at <http://www.phoblacht.net/subtleuseira.html>, last accessed11 November 2006.

125. M. MacDonncha, ‘Ahern’s leadership is a weakness in peace process’, AP/RN, 30October 2003.

126. J. Corcoran, ‘Betrayed by Dublin – Republicans furious over IMC report’, AP/RN,front page, 22 April 2004.

127. T. Hartley, ‘Towards a Broader Base?’ (Sinn Féin Internal Conference, Dublin, 7/8May 1988) (LLPC). See above, p. 57.

128. Ahern, cited in M. MacDonncha, ‘Still no election despite all-party call in Dáil’,AP/RN, 9 October 2003. See also ‘Dáil Debate – 7 October 2003’, Houses ofthe Oireachtas: Dáil Eireann Debates, available at <http://www.irlgov.ie/debates-03/7Oct/Sect1.htm>, last accessed 11 November 2006.

129. ‘Congressmen call for date for Six County elections’, AP/RN, 24 July 2003; Haas,cited in ‘Haas calls for election “soon”’, BBC News Online, 19 May 2003, availableat <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3040365.stm>, last accessed11 November 2006.

130. J. Gibney, ‘They cancel elections and kill “their own” citizens’, AP/RN, 22 May2006.

131. ‘Demand the right to vote’, AP/RN, front page, 22 May 2003.132. ‘Thousands call for truth on collusion’, AP/RN, front page, 14 August 2003.133. See, for instance: L. Friel, ‘Cory demands collusion inquiries – British Govern-

ment snubbed by Canadian judge’, AP/RN, front page, 15 January 2004; ‘Timefor truth on collusion’, AP/RN, front page, 22 January 2004.

134. J.Corcoran, ‘Anger as public inquiries are denied’, AP/RN, front page, 8 April2004.

135. ‘Cory reports: what was said’, BBC News Online, 1 April 2004, available at<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3590335.stm>, last accessed 5November 2006.

136. L. Friel, ‘The DUP exposed’, AP/RN, 18 December 2003.137. Paisley, cited in B. McCaffrey and A. Madden, ‘The rise of the DUP’, Irish News,

29 November 2003.138. Adams, cited in ‘Gerry Adams: Paisleyites cannot stop change’, Independent, 16

January 2004.139. Gerry Kelly, cited in D. Keenan, ‘SF says DUP out to undermine accord’, Irish

Times, 21 September 2004. See also ‘DUP must get real’, AP/RN, front page, 21October 2004.

140. G. McKenna and B. Purcell, ‘Provos ready to go the full distance for a peace deal’,Irish Independent, front page, 18 September 2004.

141. G. Moriarty and F. Millar, ‘IRA now “willing to disarm” by end of the year’, IrishTimes, front page, 20 September 2004; ‘Peace Process – DUP insists on changinggoalposts’, Irish Examiner, 20 September 2004.

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230 Notes

142. S. MacCarthaigh, ‘DUP scuppers North deal’, Sunday Business Post, 19 September2004.

143. H. Patterson, ‘A Conspiracy of Agreement’, Parliamentary Brief, 9(5), October2004, p. 5.

144. ‘NI talks end without deal’, BBC News Online, 18 September 2004, available at<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3667642.stm>, last accessed 11November 2006.

145. Paisley, cited in P. Colgan, ‘Blair and Ahern dance to Paisley’s tune’, Sunday Busi-ness Post, 12 December 2004. See also T. Harding, ‘Blair refuses to give up onUlster deal’, Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2004.

146. Sunday Independent/Millward Brown IMS Opinion Poll, cited in J. Corcoran, ‘SinnFéin will hold balance in ’07 election’, Sunday Independent, 21 November 2004.

147. Ibid.148. A. Quinlivan and E. Schon-Quinlivan, ‘The 2004 European Parliament Elec-

tion in the Republic of Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 19(2) (Winter 2004),pp. 91–3. See also, ‘Toghchan Eorpach 11/06/2004’, Guthanphobail.net, avail-able at <http://www.guthanphobail.net/eoraip-20040611.htm>, last accessed 10November 2006.

149. Hainsworth and McCann, ‘Change at last: The 2004 European Election inNorthern Ireland’, p. 105.

150. Figures taken from A. Kavanagh, ‘The 2004 Local Elections in the Republic ofIreland’, Irish Political Studies, 19(2) (Winter 2004), pp. 71–2.

151. Ibid., pp. 77–9.152. Exit poll analysis from the 2002 Irish general election revealed Sinn Féin win-

ning the support of more first-time voters than the rest of the main parties puttogether. See ‘Support of rookie voters key to SF triumph’, Irish Independent, 20May 2002.

6 Reversal, Recovery and Divergence, 2004–7

1. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 2006.2. ‘Sinn Fein centenary “a major recruitment drive”’, Irish Independent, 29 December

2004.3. ‘Speech by Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Féin, at the national launch of

Céad Bliain/Sinn Féin 100 event, in the Round Room at the Mansion House,Dublin, 14 January 2005’, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet), available at<http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/sf/ga140105.htm>, last accessed 25February 2008.

4. Ibid.5. Ibid.6. ‘IRA: pandering to rejectionist Unionists unacceptable’, AP/RN, 6 January 2005.7. Ibid.8. For further detail on these events see ‘“Professional gang” behind raid’, BBC

News Online, 22 December 2004, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4118673.stm>, last accessed 10 November 2006; T. Harding,‘Detectives suspect IRA link in £30 m bank raid’, Daily Telegraph, 23 December2004; O. Bowcott, ‘Provisional IRA denies role in £22 m bank theft’, Guardian, 24December 2004; L. Clarke, ‘Bank Raid “was work of the IRA”’, Sunday Times,

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Notes 231

26 December 2004; D. Lister, ‘Proceeds of £40 m bank theft could pay IRA“pensions”’, The Times, 29 December 2004.

9. Orde, cited in ‘Police say IRA behind bank raid’, BBC News Online,7 January 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4154657.stm>, last accessed 10 November 2006.

10. B. Heffernan, ‘Adams, McGuinness are not committed to peace, says McDowell’,Irish Independent, 8 January 2005.

11. M. McGuinness, ‘Accusations and Agendas’, AP/RN, 13 January 2005.12. McLaughlin, cited in, ‘McLaughlin: “SF won’t be deflected”’, UTV Online,

8 January 2005, available at <http://www.u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?pt=n&id=55076>, last accessed 12 February 2008.

13. Adams, cited in ‘Sinn Fein will resist discrimination by governments’, AP/RN,front page, 13 January 2005.

14. ‘Bank raid was IRA say ministers’, BBC News Online, 17 January 2005, availableat <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4180363.stm>, last accessed3 March 2008.

15. McDowell, cited in S. Smyth, ‘Cult of the Shinners lays down its own lawsthrough “Padre Pio” punishment’, Irish Independent, 26 January 2005.

16. Harney, cited in A. Beesley and M. Hennessy, The Irish Times, 24 January 2005.17. Adams, cited in ‘Would you trust Michael McDowell with the Peace Process’,

AP/RN, front page, 27 January 2005.18. Blair, cited in F. Millar, ‘Ahern and Blair say IRA is only obstacle to settlement’,

The Irish Times, 2 February 2005.19. ‘IRA Offer Withdrawn’, AP/RN, front page, 3 February 2005.20. ‘IRA warns of “serious situation”’, BBC News Online, 4 February 2005, available

at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4234475.stm>, last accessed3 March 2008.

21. See, for example, the comments of Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte, cited in, ‘Govtsplaying down statement says IRA’, RTE News Online, 3 February 2005, available at<http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/0203/northpolitics.html>, last accessed 3 March2008. See also, T. Brady and G. McKenna, ‘Now Provos put a gun to our heads’,Irish Independent, 4 February 2005.

22. G. Moriarty and M. Brennock, ‘SF anger as IMC implicates leaders in bank raid’,The Irish Times, 11 February 2005; T. Harding and G. Jones, ‘£500,000 penalty onSinn Fein over bank theft “is not enough”’, Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2005.

23. An examination of the online newspaper archive ‘Newshound’ shows that in thedays following the killing, the story scarcely registered. It was only several dayslater that it began to rise up the news agenda.

24. See, for example, H. McDonald, ‘Grieving sisters square up to IRA’, Observer, 13February 2005.

25. See, for instance, A. McIntyre, ‘Burdens Unbearable’, The Blanket, 4 February2005, available at <http://lark.phoblacht.net/am0402058g.html>, last accessed4 March 2008; A. Chrisafis, ‘Brutal killing turns republicans against IRA’,Guardian, 9 February 2005; and S. Breen, ‘They’ll never vote Sinn Féin again’,Sunday Tribune, 13 February 2005.

26. G. Adams, ‘The most important thing we can do is rebuild the Peace Process –Gerry Adams Presidential Address’, AP/RN, 10 March 2005.

27. See, for example, ‘Politicians react angrily to IRA statement’, RTE Online, 8 March2005, available at <http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/0308/irareax.html>; ‘The mad-ness of the IRA’, Irish Independent, editorial, 9 March 2005; ‘Now only Blair

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232 Notes

ignores the truth about Sinn Fein’, Daily Telegraph, editorial, 9 March 2005; ‘IRAstatement – a blatant disregard for democracy’, Irish Examiner, editorial, 10 March2005.

28. McGuinness, cited in ‘Republicans want justice for McCartneys’, AP/RN, 10March 2005.

29. McGuinness, cited in ‘Party politics warning to sisters’, BBC News Online,14 March 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4349183.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008. See also ‘What the papers say’,BBC News Online, 16 March 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4353129.stm> last accessed 4 March 2008.

30. McLaughlin, cited in ‘Riveting TV watching Sinn Fein’s mask slip’, Irish Indepen-dent, 19 January 2005.

31. G. Adams, ‘The most important thing we can do is rebuild the Peace Process –Gerry Adams Presidential Address’, AP/RN, 10 March 2005.

32. ‘Sinn Fein is up for the fight’, AP/RN, front page, 10 February 2005; ‘We will notbe criminalised’, AP/RN, front page, 24 February 2005.

33. Adams, cited in, ‘Sinn Fein will weather this storm’, AP/RN, 24 February 2005.34. Jim Gibney, interview with the author, Belfast, 21 July 2006.35. McDowell, cited in T. Brady and S. Molony, ‘McDowell: These men are leaders of

the IRA’, Irish Independent, 21 February 2005.36. See, for instance, J. Cusack and A. Murray, ‘Adams, Ferris and McGuinness “on

IRA Council”’, Sunday Independent, front page, 14 March 2004.37. Irish Times/TNS MRBI Opinion Poll, cited in M. Brennock, ‘Two-thirds of vot-

ers believe Sinn Féin must split from IRA’, Irish Times, front page, 5 March2005.

38. Ibid.39. Irish Independent/Millward Brown IMS Opinion Poll, cited in J. Cusack and

J. O’Malley, ‘McCartney/heist backlash rocks SF despite core vote’, SundayIndependent, front page, 27 February 2005.

40. J. Moran, ‘Reilly increases vote’, AP/RN, 17 March 2005.41. J. Corcoran, ‘Meath polls positive for Reilly’, AP/RN, 10 March 2005.42. Senior republican in private conversation with the author.43. Whereas Sinn Féin’s electoral triumphs were almost always given front-page cov-

erage in the party newspaper, the results of the Meath by-election were relegatedto the inside pages: J. Moran, ‘Reilly increases vote’, AP/RN, 17 March 2005.

44. W. O’Dea, ‘Now is the time for “the truth, justice and freedom from fear”’, SundayIndependent, 20 February 2005.

45. Ahern, cited in ‘Sinn Fein “knew of robbery plans”’, BBC News Online,2 February 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4227973.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

46. C. O’Clery, ‘Politicians harden demands on IRA to disband’, Irish Times, frontpage, 17 March 2005.

47. Figure based on information collated from ‘Conflict-related Deaths in North-ern Ireland since the 1994 Ceasefires’, British Irish Rights Watch, available at<http://www.birw.org/Deaths%20since%20ceasefire/deaths%20since%201994.html>, last accessed 10 November 2006.

48. M. Clancy, ‘The United States and post-Agreement Northern Ireland, 2001–2006’,Irish Studies in International Affairs, 18 (2007), p. 165.

49. Mandelson, cited in N. Watt, P. Wintour and O. Bowcott, ‘Blair guilty of capitulat-ing to Sinn Fein – Mandelson’, Guardian, front page, 13 March 2007 and N. Watt,

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P. Wintour and O. Bowcott, ‘Ten years of delicate deals and hard bargaining’,Guardian, 13 March 2007.

50. Lord Butler, cited in ibid.51. See, for instance, the words of Gerry MacLochlainn above, p. 102.52. ‘Gerry Adams addresses the IRA’, AP/RN, 7 April 2005.53. Ibid.54. ‘Seizing the Initiative’, AP/RN editorial, 7 April 2005; ‘IRA will respond “in due

course”, AP/RN, 14 April 2005.55. ‘Governments face significant challenges’, front page, AP/RN, 14 April 2005.56. J. Gibney, ‘Historic speech offers peaceful alternative’, Irish News, 15 April 2005.57. L. Friel, ‘The stuff of history’, AP/RN, 14 April 2005.58. See, for example, ‘Let us judge their deeds’, Irish Independent, editorial, 7 April

2005; ‘No guns, no deal’, Daily Telegraph, editorial, 7 April 2005; D. Keenan, ‘SinnFein president calls on IRA to abandon violence’, Irish Times, front page, 7 April2005; ‘Actions not words’, Guardian, editorial, 8 April 2005; ‘Can IRA rise to thechallenge?’, Belfast Telegraph, editorial, 8 April 2005.

59. ‘Durkan win imposes smirking ban on Sinn Fein’, Irish Independent, 7 May 2005.60. In results very similar to those returned by the 2003 Assembly election, Sinn Féin

took 24 per cent of the vote to the SDLP’s 18 per cent. Figures taken from ‘The2005 Westminster elections in Northern Ireland’, ARK Northern Ireland: Socialand Political Archive, available at <http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fw05.htm>,last accessed 11 November 2006.

61. J. Cusack, ‘Are Sinn Féin at tipping point?’, Belfast Telegraph, 8 June 2006.62. ‘Director of Elections Report to the Cuige AGM February 2006’ (Sinn Féin Cuige

Na Se Chondae AGM, 11 February 2006, Gulladuff) (author’s personal copy).63. ‘IRA leads the way’, AP/RN, front page, 28 July 2005.64. Coogan, The IRA, p. 35.65. For biographical details of Walsh, see ‘Historic statement read by Séanna

Walsh’, AP/RN, 28 July 2005 and ‘Séanna Walsh addresses West TyroneYouth Forum on 1981’, Ógra Shinn Fein, 13 December 2007, avail-able at <http://ograshinnfein.blogspot.com/2007/12/seanna-walsh-addresses-west-tyrone.html>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

66. De Chastelain, cited in ‘IRA “has destroyed all its arms”’, BBC News Online,26 September 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4283444.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

67. Goode and Reid, cited in ibid.68. Adams first used this phrase in the build-up to the 2004 negotiations with the

DUP, when he had suggested that republicans might have to be ‘prepared toremove the IRA as an excuse’ for Unionists to block ‘political progress’. Adams,cited in ‘Adams: Remove IRA as an “excuse”’, BBC News Online, 5 August 2004,available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3539872.stm>, lastaccessed 4 March 2008.

69. R. Smyth, ‘11 years of IRA support for process’, AP/RN, 28 July 2005.70. McGuinness, cited in ‘McGuinness welcomes IRA statement’, AP/RN, 4 August

2005.71. Adams, cited in ‘Adams urges devolution progress’, BBC News Online, 30

September 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4296538.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

72. ‘PM’s statement on the IRA’, 10 Downing Street Website, 28 July 2005, avail-able at <http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page8018.asp>, last accessed

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234 Notes

4 March 2008; ‘Statement on the commitment by the IRA to end its armedcampaign’, Department of the Taoiseach Online, 28 July 2005, available at<http://chiefwhip.net/eng/index.asp?locID=470&docID=2099>, last accessed4 March 2008. For the Sinn Fein response, see, ‘Renewed calls for implementationof Agreement’, AP/RN, 4 August 2005.

73. ‘Joint Statement on Decommissioning by the Taoiseach and the Prime Min-ister’, Northern Ireland Office Media Centre, 26 September 2005, availableat <http://www.nio.gov.uk/media-detail.htm?newsID=12291>, last accessed4 March 2008.

74. ‘Demilitarisation moves announced’, BBC News Online, 1 August 2005, availableat <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4733363.stm>, last accessed4 March 2008.

75. ‘Anger after Hain restores SF Assembly allowances’, UTV Online, 19 October2005, available at <http://www.u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?pt=n&id=66213>,last accessed 4 March 2008. See also, M. White, ‘Sinn Fein MPs’ £1/2 m expensesrestored’, Guardian, 9 February 2006.

76. Hain, cited in ‘IRA “delivering on peace promise”’, BBC News Online, 2 October2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4302190.stm>,last accessed 4 March 2008.

77. Ahern, cited in ‘Ahern calls for renewal of talks on North institutions’, Irish Times,front page, 29 September 2005.

78. Paisley, cited in ‘Royal Irish units to be disbanded’, BBC News Online, 2 August2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4737395.stm>,last accessed 4 March 2008. See also, ‘Statement by Ian Paisley, then leader of theDemocratic Unionist Party (DUP), on the British Government’s Plans for Secu-rity Normalisation in Northern Ireland (1 August 2005)’, CAIN (Conflict Archiveon the Internet), available at <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/dup/ip010805.htm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

79. ‘Sean Kelly returned to prison’, NIO Media Centre, 18 June 2005, available at<http://www.nio.gov.uk/media-detail.htm?newsID=11689.

80. ‘Adams anger as bomber rearrested’, BBC News Online, 19 June 2005, availableat <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4108070.stm>, last accessed4 March 2008; S. Brady, ‘British sop to DUP as Orange Mobs Rampage’, AP/RN,front page, 23 June 2005; L. Friel, ‘Kelly jailing stupid – Adams’, AP/RN, 30 June2005; ‘Release Sean Kelly’, AP/RN, front page, 21 July 2005; ‘Sean Kelly released’,AP/RN, 28 July 2005.

81. T. Peterkin, ‘Anger as Shankill bomber is released’, Daily Telegraph, 28 July2005.

82. L. Friel, ‘Pushover or leftover unionism?’, AP/RN, 4 August 2005.83. Ibid.84. Paisley, cited in ‘IRA “has destroyed all its arms”’, BBC News Online, 26

September 2005, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4283444.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008; ‘Statement by Reg Empey, then leaderof the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), on the Decommissioning of Weapons by theIRA (26 September 2005)’, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet), availableat <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/uup/re260905.htm>, last accessed4 March 2008.

85. See above, pp. 61–2.86. Reid, cited in O. Barcelona, ‘SF not to blame for raid, priest claims’, Irish

Independent, 8 March 2005.

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Notes 235

87. ‘Unionist anger over Nazi remarks’, BBC News Online, 13 October 2005, availableat <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4337068.stm>, last accessed4 March 2008.

88. Proposals by the British and Irish Governments for a Comprehensive Agreement,Northern Ireland Office, 8 December 2004, available at <http://www.nio.gov.uk/proposals_by_the_british_and_irish_governments_for_a_comprehensive_agreement.pdf>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

89. P. Bew, ‘Shadowy alliance haunts Stormontgate’, Yorkshire Post, 22 December2005.

90. ‘Political Impasse: Governments need to face down DUP – Gerry Adams outlinesstrategy to end impasse’, AP/RN, 9 March 2006.

91. ‘Stakes high as DUP seek to subvert Agreement’, AP/RN, 25 May 2006.92. ‘Gerry Adams slams powerless talking shop’, AP/RN, 18 May 2006.93. Ibid.94. ‘End this Farce – Martin McGuinness’, AP/RN, front page, 29 June 2006.95. ‘Review of Hain Assembly: Sinn Fein will not participate in farce’, AP/RN, 29 June

2006.96. ‘Time to put it up to Paisley’, AP/RN, front page, 21 September 2006; A. Foley,

‘Peace Process: DUP appears intent on breaching deadline’, AP/RN, 21 September2006.

97. ‘Murder attempt: DUP contributing to loyalist violence’, AP/RN, 9 March2006.

98. ‘Sectarian murder in DUP heartland’, AP/RN, front page, 11 May 2006.99. ‘Sinn Fein “involved in ETA move”’, BBC News Online, 24 March 2006,

available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4840000/4840514.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

100. ‘Adams in push for Basque peace’, AP/RN, front page, 8 June 2006.101. Adams, cited in ‘Basque visit: Sinn Fein President meets range of political leaders’,

AP/RN, 8 June 2006. See also E. O’Broin, ‘Adams in Spain and Basque Country:A desire and a will to achieve peace’, AP/RN, 15 June 2006.

102. ‘Adams in Middle East Peace Mission’, AP/RN, front page, 7 September 2006.103. ‘Adams in Palestine: Respect for democratic mandates urged’, AP/RN, 7 September

2006.104. ‘Adams in Palestine: Dialogue the way forward’, AP/RN, 14 September 2006.105. ‘McGuinness begins Sri Lankan meetings’, AP/RN, 19 January 2006; ‘McGuinness

meets Tamil Tigers’, AP/RN, 6 July 2006.106. McGuinness, cited in ‘International: Republicans’ unique credibility with oppos-

ing sides’, AP/RN, 13 July 2006.107. ‘Row as NI talks session collapses’, BBC News Online, 20 February 2006, available

at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4733606.stm>, last accessed4 March 2008.

108. M. Brennock and F. Millar, ‘Ahern and Blair forced to delay NI initiative’, IrishTimes, 4 March 2006.

109. ‘Adams – Objective of talks must be to restore the political institutionswithin a short time-frame’, Sinn Fein, 4 February 2006 (Speech given byGerry Adams to the National Conference of Ógra Shinn Fein, available at<http://www.sinnfein.ie/gaelic/news/detail/12936>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

110. ‘PM’s Statement on Irish power-sharing’, 10 Downing Street, 6 April 2006, avail-able at <http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page9289.asp>, last accessed4 March 2008.

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111. ‘Joint Statement with the Taoiseach’, 10 Downing Street, 6 April 2006, availableat <http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page9290.asp,> last accessed 4 March2008.

112. Adams, cited in ‘Reaction to NI devolution plan’, BBC News Online, 6 April2006, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4884338.stm>, last accessed4 March 2008.

113. Paisley, cited in ibid.114. See, for example, T. Peterkin and N. Bunyan, ‘Raids over £30 m property empire

“linked to IRA”’, Daily Telegraph, 7 October 2005; D. Ottewell, ‘Tycoons in “£30mIRA paper trail”’, Manchester Evening News, 8 October 2005; A. Chrisafis, ‘Docu-ments sifted in IRA assets inquiry’, Guardian, 8 October 2005; J. Cusack, ‘Provos’property empire is just the tip of the iceberg’, Sunday Independent, 9 October 2005;L. Clarke and M. Chittenden, ‘IRA chief’s £35m crime empire crumbles’, SundayTimes, 9 October 2005.

115. ‘“IRA link” in Irish money probe’, BBC News Online, 1 February 2006, availableat <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4668946.stm>, last accessed4 March 2008.

116. For more on this see, for instance, C. Lally and G. Moriarty, ‘Border raids uncovermajor oil laundering operations’, Irish Times, 10 March 2006; ‘Laptop seizedin hayshed “holds secrets of IRA cash”’, Irish Independent, 10 March 2006; O.Bowcott, ‘Cross-border raid targets alleged IRA chief of staff’, Guardian, 10 March2006.

117. Eighth Report of the Independent Monitoring Commission (January 2006), availableat <http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/special/2006/imcfeb1/index.pdf>.

118. McGuinness, cited in ‘The IMC has no place in the political process –McGuinness’, AP/RN, 2 February 2006.

119. Paisley, cited in ‘Paisley calls for re-opening of issue’, RTE News Online, 1February 2006, available at <http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/0201/northpolitics2.html>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

120. Agreement at St Andrews (October 2006), available at <http://www.nio.gov.uk/st_andrews_agreement.pdf>.

121. Twelfth Report of the Independent Monitoring Commission (October 2006), availableat <http://www.independentmonitoringcommission.org/documents/uploads/IMC%2012th%20Report%20pdf.pdf>.

122. Agreement at St Andrews (October 2006), available at <http://www.nio.gov.uk/st_andrews_agreement.pdf>.

123. See, for instance, Proposals by the British and Irish Governments for a Com-prehensive Agreement, Northern Ireland Office, 8 December 2004, available at<http://www.nio.gov.uk/proposals_by_the_british_and_irish_governments_for_a_comprehensive_agreement.pdf>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

124. For more on this, see Godson, Himself Alone, pp. 522–3.125. ‘Sinn Fein Ard Fheis 2006 – Policing: Going on the offensive on policing issue’,

AP/RN, 23 February 2006.126. Kelly, cited in ‘Policing decision could come “within weeks” of timeframe for

transfer of powers – Kelly’, AP/RN, 21 September 2006.127. Ibid.128. P. Sherwell, ‘I’ll never deal with Adams again, says Bush’, Sunday Telegraph, 13

March 2005. See also M. Evans and H. Rumbelow, ‘US calls halt to Sinn Feinfundraising in IRA backlash’, The Times, 14 March 2005.

129. Reiss, cited in ‘Sinn Fein “untruthful on policing”’, BBC News Online, 21 March2004, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3551691.stm>,

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 237

Notes 237

last accessed 4 March 2008. Reiss had been responding to an advertisement thatSinn Féin had taken out in the New York Times, which presented the party’scriticisms of the PSNI.

130. Reiss, cited in ‘Reiss’s peace: Bush’s envoy issues “report card” on North’, IrishEcho Online, 21–7 December 2005, available at <http://www.irishecho.com/archives/archivestory.cfm?newspaperid=17605&issueid=446>, last accessed4 March 2008.

131. Adams, cited in ‘Gerry Adams challenges Mitchell Reiss attack on SinnFéin policing position’, Sinn Féin Online, 1 January 2006, available at<http://www.sinnfein.ie/news/detail/12473>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

132. Reiss, cited in ‘The Northern Ireland Peace Process: A Status Report – The Hon-orable Mitchell B. Reiss, Special Envoy of the President and Secretary of Statefor the Northern Ireland Peace Process Testimony Before the House Interna-tional Relations Committee Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights andInternational Operations ’, US Department of State, 15 March 2006, available at<http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/65817.htm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

133. Adams, cited in F. Millar, ‘Issue of policing is capable of being resolved, saysAdams’, Irish Times, 11 May 2006.

134. Reiss, cited in F. Millar, ‘Bush’s envoy sees policing as key issue for Sinn Fein’,Irish Times, 10 June 2006.

135. Ibid.136. Robinson, cited in S. Dempster, ‘SF “must back police before sharing power”’,

News Letter, 20 October 2006.137. G. Adams, ‘Peace talks – Sinn Féin determined to make progress’, AP/RN, 12

October 2006.138. ‘St Andrews proposals – consultation group to report back to Ard Chomhairle’,

AP/RN, 26 October 2006.139. ‘Sinn Fein Consultation – Sixty meetings held across Ireland: St Andrews pro-

posals have potential to move process forward’, AP/RN, front page, 9 November2006. See also G. McKenna, ‘Sinn Féin gives go ahead for St. Andrews talks thoughpolicing remains “core” issue’, Irish Independent, 7 November 2006.

140. For an account of the Conway Mill debate, see A. McIntyre, ‘Conway MillDebate’, The Blanket, 29 November 2006, available at <http://lark.phoblacht.net/AM011206g.html>, last accessed 4 March 2008. Similarly, for the Toome debate,see A. McIntyre, ‘Toome Debate’, The Blanket, 21 December 2006, available at<http://www.phoblacht.net/AM1020107.html>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

141. For an articulation of this view see, for example, A. McIntyre, ‘Delusions’, TheBlanket, 1 October 2006, available at <http://www.phoblacht.net/AM0210066g.html>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

142. ‘Extraordinary Ard Fheis – Political Pressure falls on Paisley: Adams hails “trulyhistoric decision”’, AP/RN, front page, 1 February 2007; C. Ni Dhonnabhain,‘Extraordinary Ard Fheis – Afternoon Session 2: Motion passed by huge majority’,AP/RN, 1 February 2007.

143. ‘Hain warns on party nominations’, BBC News Online, 22 November 2006,available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6174352.stm>, lastaccessed 4 March 2008.

144. Hain, cited in ‘Stormont attack devices defused’, BBC News Online, 24 Novem-ber 2006, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6179792.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

145. For more on this, see P. Bew, The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement(Dublin, 2007), pp. 137–40.

9780230_202177_12_notes.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 238

238 Notes

146. Figures taken from, ‘Northern Ireland election overview’, BBC News Online, 13March 2007, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2007/nielection/html/main.stm>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

147. Ibid.148. ‘Howth Meeting – Planning for negotiations and elections’, AP/RN, 14 September

2006.149. ‘Health Crisis – Sinn Fein Alternative’, AP/RN, 27 April 2006; ‘Health policy –

Alternative to two-tier system launched’, AP/RN, 4 May 2006; ‘Health for All –National Day of Action’, AP/RN, 18 May 2006.

150. ‘Health policy – Alternative to two-tier system launched’, AP/RN, 4 May2006.

151. ‘About The Centre for Public Inquiry’, Centre for Public Inquiry website, availableat <http://www.publicinquiry.ie/about.php>, last accessed 10 November 2006.See also, J. Cusack, ‘US political group rejects Connolly link’, Sunday Independent,12 June 2005.

152. See, for example, C. Murphy, ‘Independent Newspapers and the Centre for PublicInquiry’, Village Magazine, 15 December 2005.

153. See for instance, P. Cullen, ‘Inquiry centre to meet as a4 m funding withdrawn’,Irish Times, 8 December 2005.

154. M. MacDonncha, ‘1916–2006: State avoids political message of proclamation’,AP/RN, 20 April 2006.

155. ‘1916–2006 Easter Commemorations’, AP/RN, 20 April 2006; S. Collins, ‘EasterRising attracts 100,000 and wins political approval’, Irish Times, 17 April2006.

156. J. Gibney, ‘Hunger Strike Anniversary: H-Block men inspired new generation’,AP/RN, 2 March 2006.

157. ‘“The Hunger Strike will never, ever leave me”’, AP/RN, 11 May 2006; ‘Remem-bering 1981: Sean Crowe TD’, AP/RN, 10 August 2006; ‘Interview: Joe McElwee,brother of Hunger Striker Thomas’, AP/RN, 10 August 2006; ‘Interview: GerardLynch, brother of Hunger Striker Kevin Lynch’, AP/RN, 10 August 2006.

158. ‘Hunger Strikers remembered in Derrygonnelly’, AP/RN, 24 August 2006; ‘HungerStrike 25th Anniversary Concert: Fitting finale to year of remembrance’, AP/RN,7 December 2006.

159. ‘Huge Crowds Pay Tribute to Hunger Strikers’, AP/RN, front page, 17 August 2006;‘Huge crowds turn out to honour the Hunger Strikers’, AP/RN, 17 August 2006.

160. E. Moloney, ‘SF leaders too slick for the party’s own good’, Irish Times, 31 May2007.

161. ‘Feature Interview: Sinn Féin Chief Negotiator Martin McGuinness’, AP/RN, 14September 2006.

162. Figures taken from ‘Dublin Central: General Election 17 May 2002’, ElectionsIreland, available at <http://electionsireland.org/result.cfm?election=2002&cons=85>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

163. Figures taken from ‘Dublin Central: General Election 24 May 2007’, ElectionsIreland, available at <http://electionsireland.org/result.cfm?election=2007&cons=85>, last accessed 4 March 2008.

164. Harris, cited in L. Clarke, ‘Harris promises campaign to redefine republicanism’,Sunday Times, 12 August 2007. Harris was speaking to the ‘West Belfast Talks Back’Forum at the annual West Belfast Festival. During the course of his remarks, Harrisalso offered one member of the audience a £100 bet at odds of 10:1 that SinnFéin would indeed be left without TDs after the next Dáil election.

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Notes 239

Conclusion

1. D. Kearney, ‘Beyond the road map – Preparing for Power: John Joe McGirlCommemorative Address’, AP/RN, 29 August 2002.

2. G. Adams, ‘Looking to the future’, AP/RN, 25 October 2001.3. Adams, Hope and History, p. 238.4. Tom Hartley, interview with the author, Belfast, 27 March 2003.5. Francie Molloy, interview with the author, Belfast, 12 August 2003.6. Doherty, cited in ‘Debating the path to freedom’, AP/RN, 14 May 1998.7. P. O’Connor, ‘Insisting on our democratic rights’, AP/RN, 8 May 2003.8. Sean O’Callaghan, interview with the author, London, 22 November 2005.9. ‘A triumph of the spirit – 20 years after the H7 Breakout’, AP/RN, 25 September

2003.10. Ibid.11. David McClarty, interview with the author, Belfast, 14 July 2004.12. D. Kearney, ‘Beyond the road map – Preparing for Power: John Joe McGirl

Commemorative Address’, AP/RN, 29 August 2002.13. ‘Chair’s Report to the Cuige AGM February 2006’ (Sinn Féin Cuige Na Se Chondae

AGM, 11 February 2006, Gulladuff) (author’s personal copy).14. Adams, cited in Mallie and McKittrick, The Fight for Peace, p. 353; D. Kearney,

‘Beyond the road map – Preparing for Power: John Joe McGirl Commemora-tive Address’, AP/RN, 29 August 2002; ‘Director of Elections Report to the CuigeAGM February 2006’ (Sinn Féin Cuige Na Se Chondae AGM, 11 February 2006,Gulladuff) (author’s personal copy).

15. D. Kearney, ‘Beyond the road map – Preparing for Power: John Joe McGirlCommemorative Address’, AP/RN, 29 August 2002.

16. See, for example, S. Breen, ‘Veteran IRA man resigns from Army Council’, SundayTribune, 24 September 2006.

17. ‘Thomas Ashe commemoration’, Eirigi: For a Socialist Republic (Online), 22September 2007, available at <http://www.eirigi.org/latest/latest220907.html>,last accessed 5 March 2008.

18. O’Neill, cited in A. McIntyre, ‘Toome Debate’, The Blanket, 21 December2006, available at <http://www.phoblacht.net/AM1020107.html>, last accessed4 March 2008.

19. McHugh, cited in ‘SF “undemocratic” says resigned MLA’, Belfast Telegraph, 4December 2007. See also, M. Canning, ‘McHugh quits SF over party politics’, IrishNews, 4 December 2007.

20. Swift, cited in ‘Sinn Féin split over joining policing body’, The Impartial Reporter,4 October 2007.

21. Ibid.22. For an example of further resignations from the party, see also ‘Parties

hit by more resignations’, BBC News Online, 1 March 2007, available at<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6406185.stm>, last accessed 5March 2008.

23. ‘Sinn Féin forfeits two places on Strabane DPP’, Northern Ireland News: 4NI.co.uk,5 December 2007, available at <http://www.4ni.co.uk/northern_ireland_news.asp?id=69395>, last accessed 5 March 2008.

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Anonymous (confidential interview with former community worker), Dublin, 20July 2006

Martin Cunningham (former Sinn Féin local councillor), Newcastle, Co. Down, 14July 2004

Pat Doherty (Sinn Féin MLA and former vice-president), Belfast, 23 August 2003Denis Donaldson (former head of Sinn Féin’s administration, Stormont) (1), Belfast,

10 April 2003Denis Donaldson (2), Belfast, 2 January 2004Dawn Doyle (Sinn Féin director of publicity), Dublin, 8 September 2003Jim Gibney (former Sinn Féin national organizer and ard chomhairle member) (1),

Belfast, 27 March 2003Jim Gibney (2), Belfast, 1 September 2003Jim Gibney (3), Belfast, 12 May 2005Jim Gibney (4), Belfast, 21 July 2006Tom Hartley (Sinn Féin local government councillor and member of ard chomhairle),

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in Great Britain), Derry, 14 April 2003Fra McCann (Sinn Féin MLA), Belfast, 2 March 2004David McClarty (Ulster Unionist Party MLA), Belfast, 14 July 2004Barry McElduff (Sinn Féin MLA), Belfast, 12 August 2003Anthony McIntyre (former IRA volunteer and republican prisoner, now journalist and

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Belfast, 11 August 2003Francie Molloy (Sinn Féin MLA), Belfast, 12 August 2003Danny Morrison (former Sinn Féin director of publicity) (1), Belfast, 21

August 2003Danny Morrison (2), London, 12 March 2005Conor Murphy (Sinn Féin MLA, now MP), Belfast, 2 March 2004Mary Nelis (Sinn Féin MLA), Belfast, 12 August 2003Eoin O’Broin (Sinn Féin local government councillor, now Sinn Féin director of

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IRA and member of Sinn Féin ard chomhairle in early 1980s) (1), London, 22November 2005

Sean O’Callaghan (2), London, 12 September 2006

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Ryan, M., War and Peace in Ireland: Britain and the IRA in the New World Order (London,1994)

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9780230_202177_14_ind.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 248

Index

abstentionism debate, 65–7Adair, Johnny, 84Adams, Gerry

addresses Dublin Chamber ofCommerce (2004), 142

addresses Northern Ireland Chamberof Commerce (1998), 141–2

appeal to the IRA (2005), 165approach to Haughey, 61–2, 74approach to King, 74–5approaches to Hume and the SDLP,

49, 61, 71, 88, 90as ‘Brownie’, 10–11, 21becomes party president, 12central republican leadership figure,

4, 12criticism of internally, 190defeated at 1992 British general

election, 85identified as senior IRA member, 140,

159, 162member of Northern American

Committee, 68objectives in negotiations, 104, 105on abstentionism, 65–6, 69–70on Bruton, 98on competition with the SDLP, 45,

52–3on divorce policy, 39on international peace processes, 81on the IRA’s campaign, 24, 42, 60, 63,

84, 100on the IRA’s ceasefire, 97, 98on nature of Sinn Féin, 138, 157, 185on need for pan-nationalist approach,

52, 54on need for peace strategy, 59on need to develop Sinn Féin, 20, 69,

180on policing, 176on problems with the ‘southern

strategy’, 46, 69–70, 72on ‘republicanization’, 21on socialism, 33, 36, 40, 53, 136on southern Irish nationalism, 58, 135on Thatcher, 80on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, 50on the Good Friday Agreement, 102,

109, 111, 167

on the ‘lessons’ of Northern Ireland,172

on Towards a Lasting Peace, 76on Unionism, 25–6, 78, 125, 154, 173popularity in Republic of Ireland, 138,

155, 163press conference with Ian Paisley, 1reaction to 9/11 attacks, 147reaction to Enniskillen, 64re-elected MP, 103relations with the George W. Bush

administration, 149, 164, 175–6response to IRA criminality

accusations, 159, 161–2response to Peter Brooke’s speeches, 80

Adams–McGuinness leadership, seerepublican leadership

advice centres, 28African National Congrees (ANC), see

South African analogyAhern, Bertie, 101, 138, 152, 154, 159,

164, 165, 167–8Ahern, Dermot, 159Alonso, Rogelio, 8al-Qaeda, 102, 147, 165Anderson, Martina, 13Anglo–Irish Agreement, 48–50anti-Americanism, 146‘anti-establishment politics’, 18, 71,

138–40, 179see also ‘radical’/left-wing politics

‘Armalite and the ballot box’ strategy,1–2, 10, 12, 182, 185

Austin, Joe, 49

Balcombe Street gang, 110Basque Country contacts, 146–7, 171–2Belfast Agreement, see Good Friday

AgreementBell, Ivor, 42Benn, Tony, 44Beresford, David, 15Bew, Paul, 108Blair, Tony, 100–1, 130, 150, 159, 164,

165, 167, 173Bobby Sands Discussion Group, 116Bourke, Richard, 5, 10, 35Brooke, Peter, 64, 80Brooke–Mayhew talks, 85, 89, 104

248

9780230_202177_14_ind.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 249

Index 249

Bruton, John, 97–8, 127Bush, George W., 146Butler, Lord, 164

Cahill, Joe, 68Campbell, Sheena, 83Carey, Malachy, 83Carron, Owen, 20, 37Casey, Thomas, 83Cassidy, Danny, 83Castlereagh break-in (2002), 150Catholic Church, Sinn Féin relations

with the, 38–9Céad Blain celebrations, 157Centre for Public Inquiry, 179–80Coalition of Communities Against

Drugs (COCAD), 136Collins, Eamon, 39–40Collins, Michael, 109, 111, 112–13collusion, Sinn Féin use of, 152–3‘Columbia Three’ episode, 147–8‘community politics’, 17, 26–32, 69, 184‘Comprehensive Agreement’

negotiations (2004), 153–5, 158Concerned Parents Against Drugs

(CPAD), 30–2, 69‘Concerned Republicans’, 177, 192Connolly, Frank, 179Connolly, James, 33, 53–5‘Connolly versus Pearse’ debate, 53–5‘Continuity’ IRA, 16Coogan, Tim Pat, 61, 112Cory, Peter, 153Cox, Michael, 80Crowe, Sean, 13, 103, 180, 181Cunningham, Martin, 117

Davey, John, 83De Bréadún, Deaglan, 16de Brun, Bairbre, 13, 143–4, 156de Chastelain, John, 167decommissioning controversy, 96–8,

99–101, 122–3, 124–5, 147, 167‘dissent’ versus ‘dictatorship’

controversy, 115–21, 186–7, 191Doherty, Pat, 13, 36, 103, 145, 186Donaghy, Thomas, 83Donaldson, Denis, 9, 13, 83, 116–17,

118, 190–1Downing Street Declaration, 91–4, 104Doyle, Dawn, 125–6, 141, 143, 144Dugdale, Rosie, 55Durkan, Mark, 166drugs, activism against, 29, 30–2, 69, 136Drumm, Jimmy, 6, 26

Dudley Edwards, Ruth, 127Dukes, Alan, 72

Eire Nua, 25, 78Eirigi, 191elections

1981 British by-election, 201982 Irish general election (February),

46, 1351982 Irish general election

(November), 431982 Northern Ireland Assembly

election, 201983 British general election, 20, 371984 European election, 451985 Northern Ireland local election,

45, 471986 British by-elections, 50–11987 Irish general election, 69–701989 European election, 721989 Irish general election, 721989 Northern Ireland local election,

721991 Irish local election, 841992 British general election, 851994 European election, 931994 Irish local election, 931996 Northern Ireland Forum

election, 1031997 British general election, 1031997 Irish general election, 103, 1331999 Irish local election, 1332001 British general election, 131–22002 Irish general election, 1392003 Northern Ireland Assembly

election, 132, 133, 152, 1532004 European election, 18, 133, 1562004 Irish local election, 18, 1562005 British general election, 165–62005 British local election, 1652005 Irish by-election, 1632007 Irish general election, 18, 181,

1862007 Northern Ireland Assembly

election, 178electoral failure for Sinn Féin, 17, 45–6,

69–70, 71–3, 84–5, 181, 184, 186electoral success for Sinn Féin, 103, 126,

156, 157, 178, 185electoralism, origins, 9–11, 21Ellis, Dessie, 57, 139Empey, Sir Reg, 169English, Richard, 8, 34ETA, see Basque Country contacts

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250 Index

‘ethnic nationalism’, Sinn Féin use of,17, 37–8, 56, 126–9, 184

extradition, Sinn Fein campaign against,56–7

FARC, see ‘Columbia Three’ episodeFeeney, Bill ‘Chuck’, 179–80Feeney, Brian, 3–4, 5, 76Ferris, Martin, 13, 103, 136, 140, 162‘fighting while negotiating’ strategy,

23–4, 63–5, 75, 77, 88, 183, 184Finlay, Fergus, 107Flannery, Michael, 68Flood, Feargus, 179Flood Tribunal, 138Flynn, Bill, 148Fox, Bernard, 191‘Frameworks’ Documents, 95–6, 104Fullerton, Eddie, 83

Galvin, Martin, 68Gibney, Jim

focus on internal republican unity,110

focus on southern politics, 132, 133member of the republican leadership,

13on 1992 election defeat, 85on Adams’ appeal to the IRA (2005),

165on ‘Columbia Three’ episode, 148on damage done by criminality

accusations, 157, 162on Hume–Adams contacts, 88on impact of 1981 hunger strike, 9,

11, 180on importance of southern

nationalism, 57, 92on internal republican debate, 117,

120–1, 144on international outlook of

republicans, 33–4on nature of the republican

leadership, 9, 12, 14on peace process objectives, 74, 87,

95, 101, 134on Sinn Féin advice centres, 28on socialism, 33on Thatcher, 80on the Anglo–Irish Agreement, 50on the ‘new realism’, 75on use of ambiguity, 117–18reassessing the IRA’s campaign, 76Sinn Féin national organiser, 11

Godson, Dean, 99, 107, 125

Goode, Rev. Harold, 167Good Friday Agreement, 18, 107–115,

121–2, 185see also republican leadership,

portrayal of the Good FridayAgreement

Gorman, Tommy, 118Green, Leo, 13Guelke, Adrian, 81

Haas, Richard, 152Hain, Peter, 168, 177–8Harney, Mary, 159Harris, Eoghan, 181Hartley, Tom

contribution to abstentionism debate,67

head of Sinn Féin ‘Prisoner of War’department, 11–12

member of republican leadership, 13on flexibility, 186on international outlook of

republicans, 34on the IRA’s military campaign, 64on the ‘republican wedge’, 57

Haughey, Charles, 61–2, 88‘Heads of Agreement’ document, 104Hejlesen, Jesper, 28Holy Cross school dispute, 123housing activism, 29–30, 136Howell, Ted, 13, 68Hughes, Brendan, 68, 118Hume, John, 45, 48, 51, 60–1, 89Hume–Adams document, 90–2hunger strike (1981), impact of, 9, 11, 20

ideology, see republican leadership:ideology

Independent International Commissionon Decommissioning (IICD), 167

Independent Monitoring Commission(IMC), 150, 160, 168, 173, 174

‘internal deal’ in Northern Ireland, SinnFéin fear of, 17, 21–2, 47–8, 51, 58,85–6, 89, 183–4

internationalism (of Sinn Féin), 33–5,43, 80–2, 145–7, 171–2

Iraq war, opposition to, 120, 148–9, 150Iris Bheag, 54, 55, 70, 119Irish America and Sinn Féin, 68, 87–8,

89, 147–8, 164Irish constitution, 108Irish Northern Aid Committee

(NORAID), see Irish America andSinn Féin

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Index 251

Irish Republican Army (‘Provisional’IRA),

1975 truce, 27–81994 ceasefire, 941997 ceasefire, 101‘community policing’, 27, 69criminality accusations, 18, 158–61,

182, 185failing military campaign, 17formal end to military campaign, 1,

18, 166–7, 185issues threats (2005), 160operations: Brighton bomb (1994), 24,

44; Canary Wharf bomb (1990), 77;Canary Wharf bomb (1996), 96, 98;Carlton Club attack (1990), 77; Dealbarracks bomb (1989), 65; DirectAction Against Drugs (DAAD)murders, 98; Downing Street mortarattack (1991), 77; Enniskillen bomb(1987), 64–5; Frank Kerr murder(1994), 98; Harrods bomb (1983),24, 44; Hyde Park bomb (1983), 24;Jerry McCabe murder (1996), 100;Loughgall (1987); Manchesterbombing (1996), 100;money-laundering (2005), 160;Northern Bank Robbery (2004), 18,158–60, 185; post-1994‘punishment’ attacks, 98; post-1998‘punishment’ attacks, 159, 164;Shankill road bombing (1993), 84;Stock Exchange, London attack(1990), 77

property ‘empire’, 173relationship with Sinn Féin, 2–3, 183,

185view of the Good Friday Agreement,

107–8, 114Israeli–Palestinian conflict analogy, 35,

82, 145–6, 172

Joint Declaration of the British and IrishGovernments (2003), 168

Jordan, Neil, 112

Kearney, Declan, 13, 183, 189Keenan, Brian, 13, 38Keenan, Sean, 41Kehoe, Nicky, 139, 181Kelly, Gerry, 13, 15, 121, 128, 175Kelly, John, 116, 117, 144Kelly, Sean, 168King Tom, 74–5Kinnock, Neil, 44

Labour Party (UK), 43–4Laver, Michael, 139League of Communist Republicans, 67Left Republican Review, 119–20Lemass, Sean, 2Lennon, Danny, 59Livingstone, Ken, 44‘Long War’ strategy, 10, 23

MacBride Principles, 56MacLochlainn, Gerry, 67–8, 102MacManus, Sean, 139, 143Maguire, Tom, 54Maharaj, ‘Mac’ Sathyandranath

Ragunanan, 113Maillot, Agnès, 5, 7, 66‘mainstream politics’, Sinn Féin

involvement in, 17, 51, 68, 70–1,141–3, 155–6, 184

Major, John, 89, 91, 92, 100–1Mallie, Eamonn, 90, 92Mallon, Seamus, 48Mandelson, Peter, 164Mansergh, Martin, 61–2Mao, Tse Tung, 41, 119Marsh, Michael, 139Maskey, Alex, 13Maze prison escape (1983), 189McAllister, Jim, 69, 71McAteer, Aidan, 13McAuley, Chrissie, 13McAuley, Richard, 13, 86McCann, Fra, 30McCartney, Robert, 18, 160, 185McCracken Tribunal, 138McCreevy, Charlie, 136–7McDonald, Mary-Lou, 13, 156, 181McDowell, Michael, 140, 159, 162McElduff, Barry, 135, 144McFarlane, Brendan, 13, 180McGuigan, Philip, 171McGuinness, Martin

calls for dialogue, 95Deputy First Minister of Northern

Ireland, 1, 18, 158, 178, 182, 185Education Minister, 143elected MP, 103identified as senior IRA member, 140,

159, 162in Sri Lanka, 172member of the republican leadership,

13on British withdrawal, 22on decommissioning, 97on IMC, 173

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252 Index

McGuinness, Martin – continuedon possible internment, 50on prospects for 2007 Irish general

election, 181on question of British ‘neutrality’,

77–8on the Good Friday Agreement, 114on the IRA campaign, 64, 73reassessing the IRA’s campaign, 76response to Peter Brooke (1989),

63–4response to IRA criminality

accusations, 159, 161McHugh, Gerry, 191McIlveen, Michael, 171McIntyre, Anthony

on Adams, 37–8on Hume–Adams, 90on nature of the republican

leadership, 16on origins of the peace process, 75on suppression of internal republican

debate, 55–6, 116on the Good Friday Agreement,

111–12, 118, 167on the peace process, 151

McKearney, Tommy, 67McKeown, Laurence, 13McKittrick, David, 90, 92McLaughlin, Mitchel

calls for dialogue, 77defeat in 2005 British general election,

166heckled by anti-war movement, 149member of the republican leadership,

13on demographics in Northern Ireland,

114on Jean McConville murder, 161on the political failures of Sinn Féin,

72–3on the Sinn Féin ‘peace strategy’, 47,

59on reformism, 41on Unionism, 78, 105–6, 130response to IRA criminality

accusations, 159Mellows, Liam, 33Millar, Frank, 176Mitchell Principles, 99–101, 104Molloy, Francie, 39, 102, 120, 186Moloney, Ed, 4, 61–2, 63, 74–5, 94, 101Monaghan, Jim, 55, 64Morgan, Arthur, 13Moriarty Tribunal, 138

Morrison, Dannyand the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’

strategy, 1–2Director of publicity, 11meetings with the SDLP, 49member of the republican leadership,

14objectives in negotiations, 105on abstentionism, 66on Brooke–Mayhew talks, 85on competition with the SDLP, 45on impact of end of the Cold War, 81on internal republican debate, 115,

187on IRA campaign, 23, 42, 50, 60, 75,

86on nature of the republican

leadership, 14–15on Peter Brooke’s speeches, 80on Sinn Féin housing activism, 30on socialism, 36on southern Irish nationalism, 58on the Anglo–Irish Agreement, 50on the Catholic Church, 38on the republican veto, 132on Unionism, 25–6

Mtintso, Thenjiwe, 113Mules, Daisy, 11, 36Mullin, Pat, 67Murphy, Conor, 13, 109, 142, 144Murphy, Paul, 159Murray, Gerard, 5–6, 108

negotiationsapproach of Sinn Féin, 104, 124–5,

127–9, 153–5, 164, 169, 170–1, 185debate over preconditions, 93, 99–101importance to Sinn Féin, 94–6, 101

New Ireland Forum, 47–8‘new realism’, 17, 75–6Nice Treaty, 139–40North–South Ministerial Council, 115,

134Nuacht Feirste, 53

Ó Brádaigh, Ruairi, 11, 12, 25, 34, 35,67, 135

Ó Brádaigh, Sean, 11O’Brien, Denis, 142O’Broin, Eoin

on internal republican debate, 117,119–20, 121

on nationalist credentials of Sinn Féin,135

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Index 253

on Sinn Féin community politics, 28,136

on Unionism, 123opposition to coalition government in

the south, 144O’Callaghan, Sean

on Adams and McGuinness, 38on fear of internment, 64on ‘fighting while negotiating

strategy’, 23–4on reassessing the IRA’s campaign, 86,

87on republican fear of an ‘internal

deal’, 22on Sinn Féin’s anti-drugs activism, 31,

32on Sinn Féin’s appeal to Hume, 60on the Anglo–Irish Agreement, 51, 131

Ó Caoláin, Caoimhghín, 13, 103, 137,138, 141

O’Conaill, Daithi, 11, 25, 35, 67O’Connor, Fionnula, 32O’Connor, Frank, 15O’Connor, Joan, 146O’Dea, Willie, 2, 163O’Doherty, Malachi, 7, 27‘Official’ republican movement, 34,

39–40, 54, 66Ógra Shinn Féin, 134O’Hagan, Brendan, 83O’Hagan, Des, 37O’Hanlon, Siobhan, 13O’Hare, Rita, 13O’Muilleor, Mairtin, 39, 53, 70O’Neill, Laurence, 191Orange Order, 126–7Orde, Hugh, 158O’Reilly, Joe, 139, 163O’Seanachchain, Padraig, 83O’Toole, Larry, 139

Paisley, Ian, 1, 153–4, 158, 168, 169,171, 173, 178, 182

Palestinian Liberation Organisation(PLO), see Israeli–Palestinian conflictanalogy

‘pan-nationalist alliance’, 17, 48–50,51–2, 52–8, 60–3, 87, 88–94, 97–8,101, 102, 104, 106–7, 184, 185

parades disputes, see Orange Order‘party of protest’ versus ‘party of

government’ controversy, 143–50Patterson, Henry, 5, 6, 10, 63, 91, 127peace process, Sinn Féin narrative of,

122–31, 150–5, 158, 167–73, 185

peace strategy, 17, 47, 51, 58–65, 103,184, 190–1

Phoenix, Ian, 83, 91Police Service of Northern Ireland

(PSNI), Sinn Féin policy, 128–9,174–8, 190–1

policing policy, see Police Service ofNorthern Ireland

policy development (1990s), 140–3

‘radical’/left-wing politics, 17, 18, 35–7,135–8, 145–6, 184

Rafter, Kevin, 7–8, 20Ramophosa, Cyril, 113‘Real’ IRA, 16, 102, 104, 110, 165reformism debate (internal), 41–2refuse charges, opposition to, 136, 143Reid, Father Alec, 49, 61–2, 74, 167, 169Reiss, Mitchell, 175–6‘republican veto’, 18, 22–3, 45, 107, 132,

183–4, 185‘republican wedge’ strategy, 57republican leadership

composition of, 11–14, 16dissident criticism of, 118, 177, 191–2focus on internal unity, 67, 109–10,

118 , 145, 186–7, 191ideological objectives, 3, 16, 21–3, 24,

48, 51–2, 87–8, 93–4, 115, 129–32,166, 183–6, 187–90, 192

in negotiations, 104, 105portrayal of the Good Friday

Agreement, 110–15, 122–4, 185,188

pragmatism, 8, 36–7, 145, 183, 186,188–90, 192

shared prison experience, 15view of IRA’s military campaign, 22–3,

42–3, 63–5, 73, 75–7, 82–8, 99–100,101, 102, 183, 184

view of post-ceasefire IRA, 103view of southern Irish nationalism,

58, 91–2view of the British state, 25, 77–9, 183view of Unionism, 25, 78–9, 105–6,

123–5, 129–31, 187‘republicanization’, 17, 21–3, 46, 184Reynolds, Albert, 88, 91, 94, 97Robinson, Peter, 176Rollins, Kevin, 142

Sandinista analogy, 35Sands, Bobby, 9, 11, 20Scappaticci, Freddie, 83, 118, 191Scenario for Peace, A 59

9780230_202177_14_ind.tex 10/10/2008 20: 4 Page 254

254 Index

Schulze, Kirsten, 96secret talks with British government, 80Sluka, Jeff, 27Smith, Mike, 7, 10, 84, 96Social Democratic and Labour Party

(SDLP)alliance with Sinn Fein, see

‘pan-nationalist alliance’and the Anglo–Irish Agreement, 50–1competition with Sinn Féin, 22, 45,

85, 127–9, 131–2, 178ideological differences/similarities

with Sinn Féin, 5–6, 52–3, 91talks with Sinn Féin, 60–2, 88

socio-economic policy, 36, 39, 70–1,135–9, 141–2, 143–5, 179–80

Soley, Clive, 44South African analogy, 35, 82, 113–14southern strategy, 6–7, 18, 26, 45–6,

84–5, 133–5, 170, 179–80Special Air Service (SAS), 83St Andrews Agreement, 174–8Stormont spy-ring (2002), 150support base, 32Swift, Bernice, 191

‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ (TUAS),17, 87, 96, 97–8, 99, 100–1, 102,104, 151

Thatcher, Margaret, 80Tonge, Jonathan, 5–6, 108Towards a Lasting Peace, 76, 90Trimble, David, 104, 107, 122, 123, 125,

130, 151

Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), 95Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), 83Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), 83Unionism

Sinn Féin approach to, 18, 122–5,129–31, 150, 153–5, 168–71, 185

see also republican leadership, view ofUnionism

von Clausewitz, Carl, 101

Walsh, Seanna, 13, 166–7Way Forward initiative (1999), 125, 130Wilson, Padraig, 13, 110World Social Forum, 120