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Ten
years ago as August drew its last breath a buzz of
excitement swept through West Belfast. The Provisional
IRA had just declared its first major ceasefire in
19 years. Later in the day Provisional leaders Gerry
Adams and Martin McGuinness would be feted with flowers
at Connolly House. The Falls was awash with anticipation,
the Shankill subdued by suspicion. The mood in both
communities would have been vastly different had anyone
suggested on that day that a full decade later the
British would still be here, having shown not the
slightest inclination to leave; that the consent principle,
which republican volunteers had fought, killed and
died to usurp, would reign supreme; that IRA weaponry
would be decommissioned; that the Provisional Sinn
Fein leadership would be worshiping at Temple Stormont;
that it would be openly stating as its objective the
reform of the RUC and the disbandment of the IRA.
As one time republican prisoners we had spent decades
inside dreading such an outcome, seeing in it only
defeat. Yet hardly a word of protest from within Provisional
ranks: David Aaronovitch of the Independent,
apparently hitting the bulls-eye when he later wrote:
‘it has taken 3,500 deaths and 30 years for republicans
to understand that John Hume was right all along.’
Sometime
in the afternoon of that ‘historic’ day,
I was with one of those former republican prisoners,
Tommy Gorman, when he phoned Bernadette McAliskey
to endorse her BBC Talkback comments that ‘the
war is over and the good guys lost.’ As we made
no attempt to conceal our affirmation of her view
the leadership thought police soon came to learn of
it. They were not enamoured towards us. What did they
expect? Because they were fluent in gibberish and
had the most amazing capacity to absorb nonsense that
everyone else should be the same? Days earlier, when
a senior IRA member had ‘briefed’ me that
there would be a ceasefire, my first comment was ‘the
leadership might have surrendered but we haven’t.’
The vacant look on his stunned face was so bottomless,
revealing a cerebral nothingness, I wonder if the
realisation has sunk in even today.
After
his call to Bernadette, Tommy Gorman and myself walked
down a sun-caressed Whiterock Road. We had not covered
any great distance before being approached by an excitable
but solid local Sinn Fein member who invited us to
join him on the party cavalcade that would shortly
wind its way through West Belfast. My response, ‘turkeys
celebrating Christmas’, seemed to offend him.
He genuinely believed that something was coming. We
sensed we were about to be shafted. And we were.
At
the time, the defeat of the Provisional IRA was hushed
up by all sides. It suited. If fudge and ambiguity
allowed the leadership to deceive its grassroots about
the enormity of the climb-down it was preparing to
make, then London, Dublin and the other main players
would provide cover. Only now, when all but the recalcitrant
few believe the IRA can't go back to an armed campaign,
are observers prepared to acknowledge that the IRA
lost the war. Before he died Joe Cahill was openly
likened to Comical Ali for being sufficiently immune
to public common sense to have been able to say the
Provisional IRA had won the war and now it was time
to win the peace. Few thought to ask if the war was
truly won why so much difficulty in announcing that
it was over?
After
our initial forays into that dangerous realm of independent
thought, it soon became clear that the bearers of
dissent were to be identified as prime candidates
for the persona non grata award. Furious party apparatchiks
would froth at the mouth at the slightest sign of
a hand they did not control going up at a meeting.
‘At the end of the day, Gerry is right’,
the tautological mantra. As the years have passed
and everything that was not supposed to happen has
happened, it is now clear why the leadership was determined
that its strategy would not be questioned. It was
based on an utter falsehood. The struggle to achieve
‘national liberation’ was being abandoned
– traded in for an internal solution. In order
to protect this falsehood our leaders ruthlessly pursued
a policy of organised lying, methodical lying. It
took the endeavour of Ed Moloney via his discerning
tome A Secret History Of The IRA to bring it
home to greater numbers.
Before
the Provisional IRA was founded the Unionist Prime
Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill,
pompously stated that if the unionist community would
only treat Catholics well and allow them some prosperity,
they would stop having seventeen children and come
to live like Protestants. His day has come.
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