See the end of the article for a list of the books under review
When Tony Blair, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sat down for photogenic
banter in Belfast last year, the tableau suggested that old enmities had
been buried by peacemaking chairmanship, that the back story might have been
long and miserable, but at least the finale was uplifting.
The sound bite summary of last year’s endgame holds that Tony Blair “brought”
peace to Northern Ireland. Roger Cohen of the New York Times tags Blair as
“the man who gave the country peace in Northern Ireland”. It was to the same
reporter that Blair said: “Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I do think
there are lessons from Northern Ireland for the Middle East. What it
requires is an absolutely intensive focus”. Yes, but on what exactly?
Without question, there is a real success. More than 3,500 people died in the
Troubles. Political murder has stopped. The switchback, on-off talks which
went on through Blair’s decade in power required, and got, the skills of an
exceptional prime ministerial persuader. Since then, however, peace has
brought perspective, the chance for participants to open up more freely, and
a furious burst of revisionism. Focusing on three distinct but intertwined
stories, these three books allow us to see cause and effect over the years
more clearly. The accounts of Steve Bruce, Kenneth Bloomfield and Ed Moloney
imply that the true heroes of peace may not be politicians at all.
We can also now grasp some clues to the central mystery: why did the IRA
settle for so little? Paramilitary conspirators do not keep minutes of their
meetings, discourage scrutiny and use their cleverest operators to mislead.
Politicians may spin, but they do talk; for long periods Northern Ireland’s
politicians could talk to journalists and academics with no need to spend
any time with voters. So researchers tend to choose the easier and more
richly stocked subject of political negotiation. Many accounts start with
the political effects of terrorism but are rapidly engulfed in details of
process. There is nothing more dispiriting than reading the endless failures
of initiatives, round tables, forums, “talks about talks”, and conventions
that went nowhere. Who now remembers the New Ireland Forum and who now needs
to? Who could now take seriously the hype and hokum which accompanied the
insignificant Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985? Besides the IRA, the other
great gap in knowledge is within the British state. The acts and words of
successive governments are there; but what did officials think was the
underlying aim, if there was one? What we lack is the story of the civil
servants who stayed with the problem when the minister flew home for the
last time, who designed and built the policies that survived elections and
reshuffles. Some of these are the state’s secret servants – and their
writings will not be opened even by the thirty-year rule which has now
started to reveal the Cabinet documents on the very early years of the
Troubles.
The British government’s first phase of “policy” was reactive and chaotic.
Kenneth Bloomfield, at the top of the Northern Ireland Civil Service until
he retired in 1991, underscores the simple panic that drove so much in the
decade after 1968. Many decisions – such as the disastrous move to introduce
internment in 1971 – were taken without any optimism but as a last desperate
measure to avert uncontrollable fighting and civil war – and with no higher
aim. Many, but by no means all, officials and generals thought they were in
a situation parallel to the colonial departures of the 1940s and 50s.
Extrication with dignity was assumed to be the undeclared strategy: the use
of hard power in order finally to abandon that control altogether.
Two truths killed the dream of extrication. The cost of reneging on the
commitment to allow Northern Ireland’s constitutional status to be
determined by the local majority began to look very high and very dangerous.
Unionism was beginning to split. Television interviewers from London might
have thought that the Revd Ian Paisley was a weird and hilarious throwback
to the previous century, but the more perceptive officials such as
Bloomfield realized that Paisley was building a power of veto. As Steve
Bruce shows in Paisley: Religion and politics in Northern Ireland, he was
quite content for many years not to have the power to control events, as
long as he could muster the power to destroy what he opposed.
The shift in Whitehall attitudes was consolidated by messages from Dublin. The
Irish Republic signalled in private that it could not absorb Northern
Ireland and did not want to be asked to try. As Whitehall adjusted to the
grim vision of a very long haul, increasingly exotic solutions were
canvassed and dismissed. Complete integration with the UK, physical
separation of the two communities, open war on the IRA. None met the case.
From the Callaghan–Thatcher era, the Government’s strategy became both more
limited and more realistic, at least as far as its declared aims were
concerned. At this distance, the stable elements are easier to identify. The
least important was a political process: a procedure and a round table was
always available if anyone needed one. Damage limitation otherwise
dominated. Anything in Northern Ireland’s governance which could cause
international embarrassment was either taken over directly by the UK
authorities or put under Ulster men and women who could be relied on to act
like Whitehall officials. Huge sums were spent on housing, satisfying two
aims at once: never again would house allocation entail religious
discrimination, with the added bonus that the urban geography of central
Belfast could be redrawn and rebuilt. Senior Royal Ulster Constabulary
officers were sent on long courses in England.
Direct rule went from temporary to permanent. Relations with a relieved Irish
Republic were thawed. Margaret Thatcher held a “teapot summit” with Charles
Haughey. As the years went on, these “green” touches were enhanced with
joint staffs, more summits and cross-border cooperation on everything except
what really mattered. Because what really mattered was penetrating and
disrupting the Provisionals; in that specific and secret area, the ambition
was anything but limited. A past Director of MI5, Sir Stephen Lander, told
an academic audience some years ago that it had taken governments a very
long time, a decade or so after violence began, to grasp that defeating the
Provisional IRA would require the slow cultivation of deep-penetration
agents whose handling was MI5’s unique skill.
Overwhelming military superiority was useless unless you could see inside what
Republican euphemism specialists called the “physical force wing”. In the
late 1970s, the messy improvisations which regulated rivalries between
police, military and civilian intelligence agencies were decisively
overhauled.
Turning the IRA transparent and then against itself took time, but all the
accumulating evidence says that it worked. Even in the original edition of
his path-breaking book about the Provisionals, Ed Moloney came to this
conclusion about their losses in the late 1980s: “. . . these events pointed
to the existence of agents or leaks at leadership, Northern Command,
European Department, Tyrone Brigade, Belfast and security department levels.
It was difficult to see how the IRA could have been more thoroughly
compromised”. That judgement alone made Moloney’s original edition in 2002
the closest to a definitive explanation that we have, despite his
unavoidable reliance on nameless sources. Now he can put the disclosures of
the past few years into context. The head of the IRA’s justly feared
“security department”, Freddie Scappaticci, was being run by the
British. He was known by the grimly appropriate codename “Steaknife”.
Scappaticci was one of only a few people with wide knowledge of the IRA’s
people, strengths and weaknesses. Even better, he was in a perfect position
to deflect any risks of his treachery being exposed and likewise to plant
accusations of treachery by others. The running of such a delicate and
productive agent must have required a sizeable effort. We know little about
who managed it except that both the present MI5 Director, Jonathan Evans,
and his predecessor, Eliza Manningham-Buller, worked on Ulster before
reaching the top of the Security Service.
By 1987, when Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were already in secret,
deniable communication with London, the securocrats were well enough
informed to nudge matters along. Adams’s interest in turning the Provos into
a political force was longstanding: he first mentioned it in 1979. But his
withdrawal from the pretence that killing could push Britain out of Northern
Ireland had to be very gradual. A grim kind of balance between armed force
and elections had been achieved with the “ballot box and Armalite” strategy.
As Provisional Sinn Féin started to experiment politically in the late
1980s, the IRA also started to rearm. But Adams knew that the Armalite half
of the equation was not working: the hit rate might occasionally rise but
the failure rate was rising faster. The British knew that Adams knew. For
besides Scappaticci, for twenty years they were running one of Adams’s inner
circle, Denis Donaldson. Those two were only the stars among a network of
spies that must have gone wider.
The more relaxed atmosphere of today allows new names to emerge every so often
– one of the chauffeurs who drove Adams and McGuinness was unmasked as an
informer recently – and Irish internet sites trade excited speculation about
the next big name to be exposed.
Adams was meeting internal opposition on both political and paramilitary
fronts. One of the most intriguing puzzles to be solved by his biographers
is this: when and to what extent was Adams aware that the havoc being
wreaked by spies in the IRA was helping his cause? At any rate the British
government was in a position to post a devastating warning to his opponents.
Nowhere was the opposition inside the IRA likely to be tougher than in
Tyrone. In 1987, at Loughgall in East Tyrone, the SAS ambushed and killed an
eight-man IRA unit attempting to demolish a police station, killing more
“volunteers” in a single incident than at any time since 1921. Up to the
year 2000, the IRA in Tyrone had lost fifty-three people; but twenty-eight
of those died between 1987 and 1992.
In other words, after Loughgall, they were being killed five times faster.
This acceleration could be a coincidence, but that hardly seems possible.
Despite appalling headline atrocities, the numbers revealed that the
Provisionals were nearly finished everywhere they operated. In the summer of
1988, they killed soldiers at twice their average rate. In 1989, they killed
twenty-four; the total halved in each of the next two years.
This sequence of events is important for an understanding of the long last act
of the drama. Many accounts of the “peace process” suggest that Adams turned
the IRA towards elections; many leave his exact motives for this switch
mysterious. Somehow the hard man softened. By the early 1990s of course, the
climate made violence less appealing: a healthier economy gave more people
more stake in a peaceful life (not least in the Republic), Catholics learned
that the logic of “armed struggle” looked better in theory than practice,
and 9/11 dealt a fatal blow to help and money from the US. Adams may well
have been inclined towards politics; but he had no choice. There was no
fallback to force if politics failed; force was over. The IRA still had guns
and Semtex, but betrayal and mistrust trapped its members in what a poetic
spycatcher once called a “wilderness of mirrors”.
The endless talks over agreed documents, declarations and decommissioning in
the Major and Blair years could not have had the faintest chance of success
without that crucial foundation. Intelligence officers kept insisting to
over-optimistic ministers and Prime Ministers that covert or overt talks are
pointless until and unless terrorists are ready to deal. The secret
documents being traded between safe houses and government offices in the
late 1980s contained many subtle variations on what might happen if Britain
did such-and-such, what might happen if the IRA declared a ceasefire. But
one element was common to them all: the Republican leadership was no longer
demanding British withdrawal.
That did not mean that Adams and McGuinness were no longer bargaining for
other things: the haggling went on for fifteen more years. Adams had traded
what was left of the IRA’s capacity to murder for a place at the table, the
best outcome he could get. “Violence never pays? Cant”, Kenneth Bloomfield
snaps at one point. His book is measured to the point of pomposity but its
author, retired by the time the IRA came in from the cold, is an angry man.
He had survived an assassination attempt himself.
The defeat of an organization dedicated to political murder comes at a
colossal price; governments are naturally not keen to stress just how high
that can be. From the mid-1990s onwards, London was single-mindedly
committed to ensuring that the IRA went out of the murder business. As they
inched towards the finish line, John Major and Tony Blair could take risks
with the deadlines and the small print of the arms decommissioning timetable
because they were intimately well informed about what was going on inside
the IRA and Sinn Féin. They could afford concessions because they knew for
sure from the inside that the long-term trend was in their favour.
But that crawl to decommissioning accelerated the flight to the extremes. With
its new status, Sinn Féin eclipsed the Catholic Social Democratic and Labour
Party. Decommissioning delay and doubletalk made Unionists queasy and
resentful, eroding the once-dominant Ulster Unionist Party and demolishing
its brilliant but beleaguered leader, David Trimble. The Unionist leader
allowed himself to be pushed into the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 against
his better judgement. He surrendered too much too early. Unionists who had
long dithered between the genteel, pragmatic UUP and the very much less
genteel but more determined Democratic Unionist Party of Ian Paisley swung
decisively to Paisley as the better guarantor of their safety in a nervous
“peace”.
When his 2005 election victory was announced, little wonder that the
seventy-nine-year-old Paisley sang “Praise God from Whom All Blessings
Flow”. He could finally celebrate a mandate from Ulster’s Protestants. But
it had taken him almost fifty years. Steve Bruce, who has followed the
Paisley phenomenon for a few decades himself, is heavily preoccupied with
the interplay of religion and politics. But the story he tells is above all
one of extraordinary personal and political stamina. Paisley has trimmed and
altered party positions here and there over the years, but he has maintained
his basic contempts unaltered from the start. His relentlessly repeated
claim that Protestants are being sold down the river, whatever its merits,
compels respect. His denunciations are raw, repulsive and occasionally
surreal. But they have won over the only constituency Paisley cares about,
God’s Chosen in Ulster.
Paisley’s personal faith and the Free Presbyterian Church he founded do lie at
the root of this. Bruce argues persuasively that something special and
outside the successful politician’s usual equipment is required to fail as
often as Paisley failed, to be immune to the hatred he has provoked and yet
to keep going to the end and to outlast your opponents. That something is an
unusual faith. It has not taken over among Protestants, but forms a solid
core to Paisley’s wider political constituency. Ulster’s Unionists, whether
of Paisley’s variety or other, are oddly uninterested in exercising
political power. What they mind about is stopping other people from
exercising their power against Unionist interests.
As a resistance movement, Paisley’s party and Church have not done badly.
Irish unification is not even much of an aspiration any more. The IRA, once
glamorized as a Hibernian version of the Vietcong, is on its way to becoming
an association running old-comrades’ reunions. Paisley is at the top of the
greasy pole and now preparing to retire. Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin are in
devolved government in the North but in the electoral doldrums in the South.
Did Adams, reinventing himself as a politician with the look of a liberal
arts professor, harbour dreams that he might run for President in the
Republic? Some think so, but Sinn Féin’s miserable results there in the 2007
general election have probably cancelled any hope of that. In 1996, an Irish
imitation of Hello! magazine profiled Adams at his home in Belfast. His
words, spoken apparently without irony, ran right across the cover: “Those
of us who’ve come through 30 years and are still standing have a lot to be
thankful for”.
If there are lessons from counter-terrorism in Ulster, they seem to be this.
Recruit very good spies; then hire some more. Then give it time to work. The
murders, the long wait and the compromises of the exit strategy may well
grind the moderates to dust. Then wait some more. After that, the
politicians can make their entrance.
George Brock is Editor of the Saturday edition of The Times. He has
reported from Northern Ireland for The Times and The Observer.
Books under review
Kenneth Bloomfield
A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS
The government and misgovernment of Northern Ireland
288pp. Liverpool University Press. £25 (US $45).
978 1 84631 064 5
Steve Bruce
PAISLEY
Religion and politics in Northern Ireland
293pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $45).
978 0 19 928102 2
Ed Moloney
A SECRET HISTORY OF THE IRA
Second edition
768pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99.
978 0 14 102876 7
