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This
is the best book yet written about the Provisional
Irish Republican Army. It traces the rise of the Provos
from the angry ashes of Catholic working-class streets
incinerated by mobs of loyalists and cops in August
1969 to the enclosure of the movement's leadership
within conventional bourgeois politics through the
Good Friday Agreement of 1998. It explains why the
current hiatus in the peace process will, sooner or
later, probably sooner, be healed, for the same reason
that made agreement possible in the first place: There
is no fundamental contradiction between the politics
of the Provo leadership and of the British ruling
class.
This
is one of the key truths of the Northern Ireland conflict,
obscured by the smoke and sulfur of the past three
decades but now shimmering into focus again as the
fog of war fades. It's a truth that the Provos would
rather not face. Or at any rate, not yet. For the
moment, they prefer to present the recent period as
the penultimate episode of Ireland's ancient struggle
for freedom, in which the IRA, against all odds and
in honorable fashion, fought the might of the British
Empire to a stalemate. Now their political wing, Sinn
Fein, personified and led by the charismatic Gerry
Adams, strives against British intransigence and unionist
bigotry to preserve the integrity of the deal and
thereby keep a peaceful path clear toward the final
goal of the Republic.
Moloney
casts a colder eye. A former Irish Journalist of the
Year, successively Northern editor of the Irish
Times and the Sunday Tribune, he has reported
on the Provos for more than twenty years. It is a
measure of the solidity of his reputation that Sinn
Fein supporters began rubbishing his book months before
he delivered the final draft. According to the Irish
Echo, Sinn Fein's US representative, Rita O'Hare,
declared that Moloney couldn't possibly have anything
interesting to say, since "no one in the IRA
has talked to him for years." In fact, it's evident
from the text that he has received unprecedented cooperation
from members and ex-members of the IRA. This is a
close-up picture of one of the most secret organizations
on earth during, perhaps, the final phase of its tumultuous
existence.
The
shadow of Gerry Adams falls across almost every page.
Moloney recounts his IRA career: joined as an 18-year-old
volunteer in D Company on the Falls Road in 1966;
went with the Provisionals in 1970 when the movement
split under the impact of the assault on Belfast's
Catholics; commander in the West Belfast housing estate
of Ballymurphy in 1971 and then member of the Belfast
Brigade staff; second in command and then Belfast
commander in 1972; interned in 1973; released in 1977
and joined the ruling Army Council; briefly chief
of staff in 1977; Northern commander in 1979; and
so on and on. Adams remains a member of the Army Council
today.
Loyal
Sinn Feiners denounce all this as downright lies.
Adams insists that he was never in the IRA, that his
time in republicanism has been spent exclusively in
Sinn Fein. In his 1996 autobiography, Before the
Dawn, he provides a sometimes lyrical account
of his day-to-day political involvement from the 1960s
to the '90s without mention of even passing entanglement
in paramilitary action. He isn't fazed by the fact
that he was flown to London by the Royal Air Force
in 1972 as part of an IRA delegation meeting British
officials for truce talks. That's irrelevant, he'll
insist. He doesn't know why both the British and the
IRA chief of staff at the time, Sean MacStiofain,
had it in their minds that he was an IRA delegate.
He
isn't exactly lying. A lie is intended to deceive.
Adams knows that everybody knows that he was and is
an IRA man. Both the reverence he is in receipt of
from the republican rank and file and the hostility
directed toward him from all unionist directions derive
from the fact of his long IRA service. But it's impossible
to have a public conversation with him other than
in tacit agreement to pretend it's not so.
In
part, of course, it's just that Adams, like many another
who has come through a guerrilla phase en route to
political respectability, doesn't want the grisly
details of the operations he took part in dragged
out for public inspection. The section of the book
that sparked most intense republican rage when it
was released in Ireland concerned Adams's involvement
in the affair of the Unknowns and the Disappeared
in the early 1970s. According to Moloney, Adams, as
Belfast Brigade commander, established a number of
self-sustaining secret cells, the Unknowns, reporting
directly to himself, to handle the problem of informers
whose punishment might embarrass the movement--volunteers
from committed republican families or the likes of
Jean McConville. The Unknowns would kill the miscreants
and dispose of the bodies in secret.
Jean
McConville was a 37-year-old Protestant who had married
a Catholic, coverted to Catholicism and moved into
the Falls Road. In 1972 she was living in deep poverty
in Divis Flats with eight of her ten children. Her
husband had died the year before. In December she
disappeared. No trace has ever been found. Moloney
says she had been a low-level spy for British military
intelligence, keeping an eye on the movements of republican
neighbors. Her family maintains that her offense was
merely to comfort a British soldier wounded by a sniper
outside the door of her flat. Whatever. The Belfast
Brigade ordered her death, but decided against dumping
her body on the street. Publicity about the killing
of a widowed mother of ten might have more than offset
the value of deterrence. McConville was kidnapped
at gunpoint from her home, her children left terrified,
bewildered and alone, and taken to a beach near the
County Louth border, shot in the head and buried deep
in the sand. She had been Disappeared.
In
the mid-1990s, as the peace process gathered momentum,
McConville's children launched a campaign to recover
her body. Bill Clinton gave them public support. The
IRA acknowledged for the first time that they'd killed
her and promised to help locate her remains. A hugely
publicized search over a number of weeks made for
a bleak running story in the Irish media, but in the
end yielded nothing--except that it had catapulted
the issue of the Disappeared back into public consciousness
just at the moment when republican leaders were trying
to slough off the muck of terrorism and project themselves
as pristine peacemongers. Hence the hypersensitivity
now, a few years and further steps toward republican
merger into the mainstream, to Moloney's claim that
Adams, even if he didn't give the direct order to
disappear McConville, "must have known all about
the circumstances at the time." Hence, more generally,
the anger that he has illuminated so brightly areas
of republican activity upon which little light has
hitherto fallen. Moloney gives us a portrait crowded
with vivid detail where previously we had a rough
sketch daubed in darkness.
The
detail is sometimes daunting. Like any clandestine
armed organization hemmed in by high-tech surveillance
and surrounded by psy-ops, the IRA has worked in a
world of subterfuge, double-bluff and necessary paranoia.
In a series of meticulously reconstructed accounts,
Moloney suggests that virtually every major operational
catastrophe--the 1987 capture by French customs officials
of the steamer Eksund, which was bringing in 150 tons
of arms from Libya; the entrapment and slaughter of
frontline Tyrone units in the 1980s by a combination
of the British Special Air Service and the loyalist
Royal Ulster Constabulary; the sometimes lethal unreliability
of weapons--can be put down to betrayal at a high
level. Each incident, he implies, boosted the covert
strategy of Adams and his close associates. Perhaps.
Moloney's
narrative makes no room for romance. There is no sense
here that to die by gunshot might be the finest play
under the sun. Nobody is presented lightheartedly
carrying his or her cross for Ireland. The dominant
tone is of anger and pity at cruelty and loss. The
unsettling question the portrait poses for republicans
is whether the Good Friday Agreement--which, whatever
it might augur for the unpredictable future, leaves
Northern Ireland constitutionally within the United
Kingdom--represents an adequate return on the IRA's
investment of pain, inflicted and endured. In an interview
with the Boston reporter Jim Dee some years ago, John
Hume, leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic
and Labor Party (SDLP), mused that the crunch for
republicans would come when a deal was put before
them "and somebody stands up at the back and
asks, 'What did Jimmy die for, then?'" Hunger-striker
Bobby Sands's sister, Bernadette, says, "My brother
didn't die for cross-border bodies."
What
the IRA has killed and died for is the Republic. To
most outsiders, including outsiders in Ireland, the
Good Friday Agreement seems a major step toward this
objective--a guaranteed share of power in regional
government plus all-Ireland bodies with, arguably,
the potential to evolve into institutions wielding
executive authority across the island. This, in essence,
is the Adams analysis of what was achievable, which
Moloney suggests he had arrived at and resolved to
settle for much earlier than anyone, including his
fellow republican leaders, realized.
The
agreement doesn't represent freedom, then, but freedom
to achieve freedom. Not the promised land, but a stepping
stone toward it. The problem is that the IRA has differed
from movements that republicans have sometimes, depending
on who's within earshot, been content to compare themselves
with--the Basque ETA, the African National Congress,
the Palestine Liberation Organization--in that it
has seen the Republic not as an aspiration but as
an actually existing entity. The ideological basis
for this has to do with the proclamation of the Republic
on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin
at Easter 1916 and its endorsement in the 1918 general
election--the last all-Ireland poll before partition.
The seventy-three Sinn Fein MPs elected then, out
of 105 Irish seats, constituted the first and only
legitimate parliament--the First Dail--in Ireland.
The 1919-21 War of Independence was fought in defense
of the Republic and to assert the legitimacy of that
Dail. As successive leaderships--Michael Collins,
Eamon De Valera, etc.--abandoned the rocky road of
armed struggle for the primrose path of compromise
politics and partition of the country, the IRA Army
Council became the repository of the 1916 tradition
and thereby the only legitimate political authority
in the land. In this perspective, any deal that falls
short of the Republic cannot be a step forward but
has to be seen as an abandonment of position, a shaming
retreat. The most hallowed figure in the republican
pantheon, Patrick Pearse, the leader of the '16 Rising,
decreed that a man who accepts "anything less
by one iota than separation from England is guilty
of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against
the Irish nation...that it would be better for that
man (as it were certainly better for his country)
that he had not been born."
This
idea of the IRA leadership as the only source of political
legitimacy may seem fanciful, mystical, ridiculous.
But it has been this conception of its role and historical
significance that has sustained the IRA through lean
years when it could find little sustenance in the
day-to-day world around it. Just as important, it's
this view of the Republic that has provided moral
sanction for armed struggle. To end the armed struggle
now definitively, to contemplate disbandment of the
IRA, as Tony Blair, special US envoy Richard Haass
and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern are currently urging
on Adams, would be retrospectively to withdraw sanction
from those who carried on the struggle at times of
fierce condemnation from all except themselves alone.
Only the shining reality of the Republic can reflect
light on the armed struggle in such a way as to invest
it with due grandeur, render even the killing of Jean
McConville tolerable, just.
If
the struggle has been merely for power-sharing and
cross-border bodies, conditions that were on offer
at least since 1973--when the SDLP, the Ulster Unionists
and the British and Irish governments negotiated the
Sunningdale Agreement, based on power-sharing and
a cross-border Council of Ireland--then the bloodletting
and vicious intrigue described by Moloney has been
pointless, sordid and unsupportable. This is how the
small bands of republican irreconcilables in the Real
IRA and the Continuity IRA see things. Why, then--and
here we get to the heart of the matter--has Adams
settled for just such a deal, and yet retained huge
popularity among the republican rank and file, especially
in the cockpit (working-class Catholic) communities
of Belfast?
Moloney
rightly identifies Adams's 1983 election to Westminster
from West Belfast as one of the most significant plot
points in his narrative. He might with advantage have
directly quoted the new MP's exultant first words
to cheering crowds on the Falls Road: "Even De
Valera couldn't win the Falls." De Valera had
been hammered in West Belfast in the seminal election
of 1918. It was one of only two seats in all of Ireland
where constitutional nationalism defeated Sinn Fein.
This fact, of which Adams was obviously acutely aware,
might usefully be kept in mind by commentators who
lazily identify the Falls, or the Bogside in Derry,
as "traditional republican" areas. They
are not. What gave Adams's election its sharp significance
was that he was the first republican ever elected
in the area. What he meant was, even De Valera couldn't
win the Falls for the republican movement.
The
Catholic working-class anger that gave rise to the
emergence of the Provos as a major player in the early
1970s did not represent a new flowering of republican
ideas, an old, authentic, long-repressed tradition
suddenly gushing forth again through the cracks caused
by the seismic impact of the 1960s civil rights movement.
It's truer to say, as Moloney does, that the tiny
republican movement of the time, embodied in Belfast
in a few families, like the Adamses, the Hannaways,
the Prices and the MacAirts, provided an organizational
framework, a channel for expression and a readiness
to fight that matched the sudden mood of the Catholic
masses and offered a ready-made ideology to lend their
struggle seeming resonance at a time when their communities
were under siege by Protestant loyalist mobs, the
Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army.
One
of the most revered rural leaders of the IRA in the
1980s observed a few years ago that "those fellows
from Belfast were never really republicans. They were
only fighting for their streets." Fighting for
your street, of course, is not necessarily an ignoble
thing to do. In certain circumstances--Belfast 1969--it
can be no more than neighborly duty. But the impulse
to defend one's locality doesn't automatically harden
into a clear set of ideas. What had pitched whole
Catholic working-class communities outside the constitutional
arena was not mass conversion to an -ism or a particular
conception of history but immediate, material considerations.
Most who joined or came to support the IRA did so
not out of a sacred duty to "free Ireland"
or in pursuit of a historic mission to vindicate the
Republic but because they wanted the bigot's boot
off their necks and the British Army off their backs.
If these grievances could be remedied short of the
achievement of the Republic, then there was the basis
of a settlement within existing constitutional structures.
Moloney's
central thesis is that Adams and a small group around
him were on to this sooner than anybody has previously
suggested and have long been working to a nonrepublican
agenda. His most controversial claim is that Adams,
behind the back of the Army Council and with IRA volunteers
kept in the dark, opened lines of communication with
the British as early as 1986 with a view to eventual
negotiation of an "internal" settlement.
What is certainly true is that Adams and his close
confidants embarked on a project to hollow out the
ideology that the movement they inherited had been
built around. It was no longer to be republican at
its core in any sense in which Pearse would have understood
the word. Instead, it was to become, or to accept
that it already was, a militant nationalist mass movement,
reflecting not what some may have believed Belfast
Catholics ought to think but what they actually, "naturally,"
thought. Moloney accurately identifies the difference
as that between the United Irishmen of the 1790s,
inspired by the American and French revolutions and
out to overthrow the existing order, and the Defenders,
a peasant militia established to protect Catholic
land rights.
Put
more positively, it might be said that Adams, contrary
to the conventional account of him leading a people
half addicted to violence toward peace, has merely
contrived a realignment of republican ideology so
as to bring it more closely into kilter with the people
in whose name it was purporting to act, offering no
challenge to their consciousness. The reason the Adams
leadership has been able to retain the support of
the republican base while ditching core republican
ideas is, on this analysis, that the base was never
republican in the first place, that they were only
fighting for their streets. This is an unwelcome conclusion
to those who have held hard to the legacy of Pearse,
and who rage against Adams as the latest in a litany
of shame stretching back to Michael Collins and partition.
But it's the obvious conclusion to emerge from Moloney's
magisterial work, though he doesn't himself draw it
out as explicitly as this.
The
unsentimental pragmatism underlying Adams's approach
is to be seen, too, in the fact that when he veered
off the path of armed struggle he veered to the right
and not to the left. Having ditched the ideas that
underpinned armed struggle, discarding any notion
of wanting to turn the world, or even the constitutional
status quo, upside down, Adams and the group around
him set out to recruit the most powerful allies potentially
available--the Catholic hierarchy, the Dublin government,
corporate Irish-America, the White House. This has
meant resiling from positions that might alienate
persuadable interests. Thus, although still generally
presenting itself as an anti-imperialist party, Sinn
Fein has been careful in recent times not to mobilize
against the planned oil war on Iraq. The party's campaign
for the release of three men recently arrested leaving
FARC-held territory in Colombia has been built on
a soft-liberal basis, concentrating on the unlikelihood
of the three receiving a fair trial, eschewing any
defense of association with the left-wing guerrilla
organization.
Most
telling of all, the interparty fractiousness that
led to the collapse in early October of the institutions
established under the Good Friday Agreement concealed
a remarkable convergence around center-right economics.
In their time in office, all the executive parties--Sinn
Fein, the SDLP, Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists
and David Trimble's Ulster Unionists--committed themselves
to maintaining, if not increasing, direct grants to
multinationals and to a reduction in corporate and
other taxes on business so as to make Northern Ireland
more alluring to outside investment. All advocate
fiscal rectitude. All have enthusiastically pursued
policies of privatization, flogging off public services
to fat-cat entrepreneurs. The general aim has been
to refashion still-partitioned Northern Ireland as
a viable fragment of the global market by insuring
that it is competitively attractive in capitalist
terms. It hardly justifies 3,500 dead. It's hardly
worth Jean McConville.
Small
wonder that Bush's point man, Richard Haass, has no
ideological complaint against Sinn Fein. He just wishes
it would move more speedily toward completion of what
he calls its "necessary transition." As
a matter of fact, it's almost there. Ed Moloney's
book is the best and necessary account of the long
trek across dangerous terrain that brought Sinn Fein
to this point, and of the role of Gerry Adams, the
political genius who, with guile and daring, has led
the way.
This
article was first published in The Nation and is carried
with permission from the author.
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