The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

The inquiry was prompted by the killing of Loughlin Maginn, on 25 August 1989. He was shot by the UDA as he sat in his home watching television. The UDA announced that he had been a Provo, but his family claimed, correctly, that he had been the innocent victim of a sectarian assassination. Stung, the UDA attempted to prove their case by publishing a leaked, top-secret security file. It was but the first of a flood of such documents which the UDA unleashed. All had clearly been supplied either by sources within the RUC or by one of the various British intelligence agencies milling around in the north’s murky underworld. Some in fact came from the army. The documents massively reinforced the claims of Catholic spokesmen who averred that the RUC were supplying information to Loyalist paramilitaries to enable them to kill Catholics. Dublin, understanding full well the implications of this disclosure, communicated its extreme displeasure to London, using the growing leverage provided by the intergovernment conference set up by the Anglo-Irish Agreement. But the UDA proceeded to rub salt into the wounds by circulating still more files and photographs to the media. Pictures of alleged IRA men given to the UDA by the army, the RUC and British intelligence were openly displayed in Loyalist Belfast.

Nelson in fact wanted a more specific focus on known IRA men than the random assassination of innocent Catholics which the UDA were carrying out with the army’s connivance. In the course of their investigations the Stevens team were told by British officers that the UDA was used as surrogate killers.

A Provisional spokesman has been quoted as saying: We were had. We knew we had fallen for it. It was very much in the mould of the MRF operations, clever, well planned and brilliantly executed. The IRA knew and found it difficult to admit that British military intelligence was brilliant. They almost destroyed us. They created paranoia in the ranks and left us severely damaged.

One can certainly argue that all’s fair in love and war and that the Provisionals’ fire had to be met with fire. No one can excuse IRA atrocities such as the Enniskillen bombing of November 1987, which killed eleven innocent civilians and injured sixty-three more; the wiping-out of the entire Hanna family, all Protestants, in July 1988, by a bomb-blast; the planting of a bomb in a Shankill Road fish shop in October 1993, which killed ten shoppers and one of the bombers and injured scores of other people. But there is another side to the coin. The British, after all, had one power denied to the IRA, the UDA, the Unionists, the SDLP and the Dublin Government: the power of initiative. In the event, they chose to exert this, not with a view to seeking a political solution, but with an eye on the Unionist MPs’ effect on the parliamentary balance at Westminster. From the fall of the power-sharing executive of 1974 until the IRA ceasefire of 1994, Britain presided over a political vacuum that spawned a violent degeneracy not seen elsewhere in western Europe since the ending of World War II.

the names of those said to be responsible for the bombings gradually came to be generally known in informed circles. Fred Holroyd attempted without success to widen the circle in 1987. On 6 December of that year the Sunday World published a written statement from him. For fear of libel the paper suppressed the names he supplied, but printed his allegations. He said flatly that a Sergeant X of the RUC Special Branch controlled a number of key activists in the UDA/UVF. He gave details of Loyalist paramilitary operations planned by Captain Nairac when on secondment to the SAS. He also said that the weapons used in the Miami Showband atrocity (see p. 226) had come from a cache whose presence he had disclosed to Sergeant X. Holroyd said: ‘On one occasion while on duty with Sergt. X during a surveillance operation, he confided in me that the Portadown UDA/UVF were responsible for the car bombs that detonated in Dublin.’

The material, coupled with the testimony of former British intelligence agents who also appeared on the programme, included the names of the Loyalists whom I had previously been told were implicated in the bombing. By then those mentioned were all dead, most of them either killed in Loyalist feuds or by the IRA. The programme also included the names of two dead British officers who were alleged to have prepared the bombs: Julian (also sometimes known as Tony) Ball, who died in a car crash in Oman in 1988; and Robert Nairac, killed by the IRA in 1977. At the time of the bombings, Ball and Nairac were a captain and a lieutenant respectively in an intelligence unit based at Castledillon House near Co. Armagh, known as the ‘Fourth Field Survey Troop’. The contributions made by the British agents who appeared on the programme included statements that the UVF, at the time of the bombings, was controlled by British intelligence and that the Loyalist paramilitary organisation did not have the expertise necessary to make the bombs used.

It had become common practice to use beatings and threats to extract confessions. Heath’s declaration forswearing the use of the five techniques did not prevent men having their testicles kicked, beaten and squeezed; women being threatened with rape; threats that if a suspect did not talk, his family would be harmed; and, shades of Heatherington and McGrogan, the interrogation of minors without the presence of their guardians or parents. Under the Special Powers Act it was virtually impossible for a suspect to see a solicitor while in police custody, against the wishes of his, or her, interrogators. Naturally the system created a burning sense of injustice in the Nationalist community against whom it was mainly, if not exclusively, directed. The 94 per cent conviction rate obtained by the ‘conveyor belt’ system explains both the high prisoner population, and the sense of outrage amongst the population that led to the outbreak of the hunger strikes.

for a time the supergrass phenomena – or, in the malodorous euphemism used by Sir John Hermon in the RUC’s Annual Report for 1985, the ‘converted terrorist process’ – posed a serious threat to the IRA. In the report Sir John claimed that in parts of Belfast, ‘terrorist murders dropped by 73% and all terrorist crimes by 61%’.

Loyalist paramilitary motivation has always retained something of the visceral, anti-Catholic, anti-Republican response that first gave it a rebirth at the start of the Troubles in 1966. That rebirth was a direct reply to the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rising. Other reasons for becoming a Loyalist paramilitary presented themselves as the Troubles wore on: revenge for IRA atrocities; fear that a ‘doomsday’ situation was approaching in which ‘Ulster’ would be thrust out of the Union and placed at the mercy of the IRA; a sincerely held belief that it was a man’s duty to defend his heritage from a ruthless enemy; encouragement from Loyalist women for their menfolk to show the courage to ‘do what the IRA is doing’.

On his release from jail in 1982 he resumed both his killing and his racketeering. This brought him into conflict with a leading Loyalist gangster, and UDA leader, Jimmy Craig. Craig secretly passed information about Murphy’s movements to the Provisionals. On 16 November 1982, Murphy had just stopped his car outside his girlfriend’s Belfast home when a van pulled up in front of the car. Two gunmen jumped out and shot him twenty-six times.

the IRA’s no-warning car bombings were ‘maddening’ the Loyalist people. As a result, demands for tit-for-tat sectarian assassinations were mounting. I mentioned this to Daithi O’Conaill, the IRA leader who is said to have first advocated the use of car bombs. O’Conaill authorised me to tell Tyrie that the car bombing would stop in the expectation that assassinations would follow suit. Both cessations duly occurred and lasted for some time. Tyrie also figured in another creditable incident in UDA history. Early in his reign there was yet another demand from the ranks for an intensification of sectarian killing. Tyrie called a meeting and threw down a revolver and a list of names and addresses of known IRA men, telling his audience that whoever wished could pick up the gun and the list with his blessing. No one did.

This is what happened over Gibraltar. As the victims were being buried in Belfast on 16 March 1988, a Loyalist gunman, Michael Stone, made a gun and grenade attack on the mourners, killing three of them. While one of the victims, Kevin Brady, was being buried three days later in an atmosphere of extraordinary tension, two British corporals in plain clothes drove into the funeral, apparently unaware of what was going on. The soldiers, Robert Howes and Derek Wood, were dragged from their vehicle by a mob, beaten, stripped and then shot. For me the photograph of Fr Alec Reid, who had vainly tried to save the men, praying over one of the bodies subsequently became one of the most searing images of the entire Troubles.

Other incidents, like the disgraceful saga of Kincora, the boys’ home in east Belfast which MI5 used as a source of male prostitution, are at least partly known. Colin Wallace was one of the first to allege that MI5 and the army were not only fully conversant with what was happening there but encouraged it.109 He says that his complaints were ignored because Kincora was in fact an MI5 blackmail operation, designed to give the agency a hold over certain prominent people.110 Kincora was run by William McGrath, a member of Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, who also ran the Loyalist paramilitary group Tara, a specifically anti-Catholic, as opposed to merely anti-Republican, organisation. Several of Tara’s members were also in the UVF, one of the more deadly of the Loyalist paramilitary groupings. Apart from abusing the boys himself, McGrath hired them out to stag clubs. This may have been the cause of his undoing. My understanding is that two of the boys, whom he had sent to a stag club in Scotland, made a pact that they would commit suicide. While one subsequently drowned himself, the other did not, but his information set in train an RUC investigation which was aborted by British intelligence. Eventually, as a result of public disquiet, largely fuelled by some first-class investigative journalism by the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, yet another police inquiry was held, under the aegis of a British policeman, Sir George Terry, formerly Chief Constable of Sussex...

Anything that could be represented as ‘anti-army’ was rejected. In a famous unsigned article in the New Statesman, Jonathan Dimbleby described the results: The censorship and restrictions now imposed on reporters and editors make it practically impossible for them to ask the question ‘Why?’ Why do the Catholics now laugh openly when a British soldier is shot down and killed, when a year ago they would offer the army cups of tea? Why do the Catholics refuse to condemn the bombings and the shootings? Why do they still succour the IRA? What influence today does the Civil Rights Movement have? Or the SDLP? The answers to such questions are fundamental to understanding the problem, crucial to any judgement of British policy, yet they cannot be asked by BBC employees.

It was but one of many examples that could be given of the truth of Jonathan Dimbleby’s assertion that BBC policy made it impossible for the British public to understand what was happening in the Six Counties.

Looking back at the coverage of the twenty-five years of conflict it would appear that – apart from the overall consideration of control of the news flow – there were three major concerns in the minds of the censors. Firstly, a reluctance to allow the screening of material which might tend to arouse support for the Nationalist position, in other words the policies of both the Dublin Government and the SDLP. Secondly, an extreme sensitivity to information which placed the security forces in a bad light (one of the cuts which prompted Thomas’s resignation was a shot of a tombstone which read: ‘Murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday’). Thirdly, an abhorrence of anything which depicted the IRA in situations which indicated either the possession of a degree of community support or a human face.

The public inquiry never took place, but a public outcry did. The report was leaked to the Guardian, the Sunday Times and various politicians before its official publication on 13 June. Mindful of what had gone before, Thames, and This Week, played the issue with a very straight bat. A programme was prepared containing a short clip of interviews with some of the Catholic doctors who had treated some of those interrogated. This was to be followed by interviews with Ian Paisley and a Protestant defender of the RUC. On top of this, ‘balance’ dictated that a studio discussion would ensue between Enoch Powell, the Unionist John Taylor, and a Nationalist, Patrick Duffy. However, on the day the programme was scheduled for transmission (8 June) the IBA met and banned it, sight unseen. What followed was literally black comedy. Thames proposed to replace the banned programme with a comedy show. But the company’s technicians refused to transmit it, saying the only programme they would put out was the previous year’s Inhuman and Degrading Treatment! As a result, screens went blank for half an hour in England, and on Ulster Television (UTV).

On 17 October 1979, the Panorama team received a telephone call at their Dublin hotel telling them they would see something of interest if they went to Carrickmore. The anonymous caller was telling the truth. For in the same sense that the Chinese saying, ‘May you live in interesting times’, is regarded as a curse, Carrickmore proved extremely interesting. The Panorama team discovered a hooded IRA unit manning a roadblock and carrying out inspections of driving licences in the name of the Irish Republican Army. The BBC men filmed these proceedings. As a result, ‘a wave of fury swept the Commons’.46 The fury was caused by two factors, one practical, the other ideological. On practical grounds the incident was extremely embarrassing for the security forces and the NIO. These groups had two settled lines of policy. One, that the situation on the ground was secure. The IRA were being defeated. This was why the publication of the Glover Report, in May of that year, was so unwelcome in some quarters. The second major propaganda claim, by both Unionists and British apologists, was that a root cause of the violence in the Six Counties was the lax security policies of the Republic, which allowed the IRA to strike at will across the border. In fact, as Garret FitzGerald, one of the most committed anti-IRA prime ministers in the history of the Republic, pointed out to the British, only 3 per cent of the total amount of violence committed occurred in the border region.47 But in Octobe...

On 1 October 1971, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Gerry Collins, issued a directive to RTE, under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, to refrain from broadcasting any matter… that could be calculated to promote the aims or activities of any organisation which engages in, promotes, encourages or advocates the attaining of any particular objective by violent means.

Collins told the Dail that he had acted as he did to save life by preventing RTE from becoming a recruiting ground for the IRA.70 To further this aim the new Authority issued fresh guidelines for the implementation of Section 31. Interviews with either Official or Provisional IRA members were banned. Their political colleagues in either wing of Sinn Fein could only be filmed or recorded after reference upwards.

Eventually, in 1983, after a particularly strong denunciation, Gerry Adams took up the cudgels with the Bishop and challenged him to …outline the hierarchy’s attitude to the injustices of partition. I challenged him to give us his views on British occupation; on the methods of pacification and repression deployed by the British government in our country. I called on him to stop condemning the IRA and to apply himself instead to developing solutions to the problems which faced us.

I would remind the Bishop that the six-county state itself was established under threat of armed uprising by Unionists and has been maintained to the present day by a system of legal and extra-legal violence directed against the nationalist people, the victims of this violent Unionist state.

The horror of the faeces-smeared cells, the anguish of the families involved, faced with the prospect of the situation being worsened by a mass hunger strike, were bad enough. But there was also the tension of the ghetto areas. The fear of sectarian killings. Of a bomb, or gunfire, suddenly exploding. Of the wrecking midnight descent by troops. Of robbery, or rape perpetrated by some of the hordes of ‘hoods’ who flourished in the abnormality of the times. Of bereavement: one woman I interviewed, a widow, had one son ‘on the blanket’, and another had been shot dead by the IRA. Many of those I spoke to had lost a husband, a son, or a daughter in the Troubles.

The Republican leadership was moving steadily towards a new political vision based on three concepts. One, that as part of the ‘alternative method’, there should be a shared approach to the problem by all the Nationalist parties, north and south. This concept, as we shall see, was later to be broadened to include the Nationalist-minded of the Irish diaspora, particularly in America. Two, that whatever new Ireland might emerge from such an approach, it did not necessarily have to conform to the preferred Republican option of a thirty-two-county socialist republic, provided that it was a) democratic and b) worked out free of British dictation. The Government of Ireland Act would have to be abrogated. Three, that if and when a position was achieved wherein the Nationalists and the Unionists sat down to negotiate the new political institutions which such a new Ireland presupposed, providing a) and b) operated so that a form of genuine self-determination was possible, then Sinn Fein would accept any democratic decisions arrived at. What all this added up to was something very different from the traditional Republican approach of ‘Brits out’ and then on to a thirty-two-county republic. Adams and his colleagues were evolving away from the gun, and towards a political approach based on self-determination, for both Nationalists and Unionists. In a word, the Republicans were beginning to sue for peace. It was a turning point which demanded, and received, not only enormous moral and ...

It was not merely a matter of attempting to get Sinn Fein to disown force. If that approach had been followed Sinn Fein would probably have split and disintegrated, and the IRA would have continued without a political arm

The process of making Sinn Fein respectable proceeded at such a pace from the IRA ceasefire in the summer of 1994 to the time of writing (the following summer) that it is necessary to remind readers of the extent to which the Republicans were regarded as pariahs during the mid-eighties. The effects of the various broadcasting bans described earlier, the attempts to ‘cleanse the culture’ of Nationalist infections, all had their effect. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1916 rising was scarcely celebrated in the Republic lest it stir ancient emotions.

There was no question of approaching Fine Gael, the second biggest party in the Republic. At the time the FitzGerald administration was thought to be in discussion with the British about the possibility of introducing internment north and south.

Beginning in 1982 (the year of the Adams–Daly exchange) Sinn Fein had made common cause with two of the Six Counties’ small parties, the Irish Independent Party and the People’s Democracy, and attempted to set up a dialogue with the SDLP. The SDLP had, however, always rejected these advances. Now, very courageously, Hume agreed to meet Adams. They held a lengthy meeting on 11 January 1988. They subsequently agreed to set up a series of talks, involving delegations from both parties. On the SDLP side, Hume, Seamus Mallon, Sean Farren and Austin Currie. On that of Sinn Fein, Adams, Tom Hartley, Danny Morrison and Mitchel McLaughlin. It was agreed that they would not have a ‘military agenda’. The Hume–Adams meeting aroused great controversy. It was condemned by the Secretary of State, Tom King, Paisley and Molyneaux. Paisley called for Unionist unity in the face of this ‘new alliance’. Molyneaux claimed that the talks were ‘a fatal step for democracy’, coming so close to a ‘breakthrough’ in the Unionist talks which were then being conducted with the British Government, and which he averred might have led to talks with the SDLP.

Peace did not come easily. The ‘discussions’ between Sinn Fein and SDLP delegations began in the New Year of 1988 and continued until the autumn. The last meeting was held on 30 August 1988. During this time several papers were exchanged between the two sides and much constructive thinking followed. The basic positions of the two sides were as follows: Hume argued that the Anglo-Irish Agreement had made violence redundant. On the basis of his Westminster soundings, he advanced the opinion that Britain, through the Agreement, was sending a powerful signal that she was adopting a neutral position in matters Irish. He told Adams that London no longer had any interest in Ireland and that her only concern was to foster agreement amongst the inhabitants of the island of Ireland. Hume was mistrustful of the Sinn Fein demand that Britain should make a declaration of intent to withdraw. He argued that a declaration to withdraw was in effect the same thing as a decision to withdraw: The political vacuum is immediately created… This route is the route of maximum risk and it is a risk which we believe no one has the right to take unless they do so with the full authority of the Irish people… we would have a Cyprus/Lebanon style formula for permanent division and bloodshed. What would the 12, 000 armed members of the RUC do? What would the 8, 000 armed members of the UDR do?… Is the risk involved in such a policy not an awesome one and likely to ensure that the peace and unity of Irela...

On 19 March, the British sent Sinn Fein a position paper which contained their basis for entering into talks. Paragraph seven said: The British Government does not have, and will not adopt, any prior objective of ‘ending of partition’. The British Government cannot enter a talks process, or expect others to do so, with the purpose of achieving a pre-determined outcome, whether the ‘ending of partition’ or anything else. It has accepted that the eventual outcome of such a process could be a united Ireland, but this can only be on the basis of the consent of the people of Northern Ireland… unless the people of Northern Ireland come to express such a view, the British Government will continue to uphold the union…

There was evidence of new thinking in the McGuinness address. It did not call for a British withdrawal. In fact it could have been taken as indicating that Sinn Fein was moving towards compromise. McGuinness said: We would approach any serious talks accepting that we haven’t got all the answers but we most certainly believe we have some of them… we are quite prepared to be open and flexible to serious proposals which can lead to realistic agreement… He also spoke of the need for …new and radical thinking to the predicament Unionists find themselves in. The plight of Unionists is requiring particular consideration to guarantee and protect their interests which will be needed to resolve the conflict.

The British contact explained that the British Government realised that no solution which did not involve Sinn Fein could work. Nor could a settlement be envisaged which did not include all of the people, north and south. The official said that this solution would have to be one that ‘…won’t frighten Unionists. The final solution is union. It is going to happen anyway. The historical train – Europe – determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change… The island will be as one.’

Major, having inherited a Conservative Party fissured over Europe, had to soldier on with a complement of what he himself on a famous occasion termed ‘bastards’. The ‘bastards’, the right wing of the party, who regard Europe, the Irish, the unions, as part of the sub-species who conned them out of an empire that most of them will still not fully acknowledge has disappeared, would prove a retarding factor in the days that lay ahead.

the Ulster Unionist Party: Union with Great Britain is a union in the hearts and minds of the Unionist People and something which we cannot change even if we wanted to. This feeling of Britishness is so deeply engrained as to be almost genetically encoded… for Unionists their basic political heritage is their Britishness. Failure to recognise this is a fundamental and enduring mistake of Irish nationalism… While the rest of the Irish people choose a Gaelic, nationalist and independent Ireland, Unionists show a clear preference for continued membership of a modern, pluralist and liberal democracy… Britishness in its best form seeks to manifest a tolerance and respect for different cultures: pluralistic and exhibiting a common decency, it does not seek to interfere with the faith, creed or aspiration of any group… Unionists have the right to say yes to a 32-county state but they also have the right to say no. The so-called guarantee to Unionists by Westminster is simply an acceptance of reality… to countenance an independent 32-county Irish Republic is for Unionists, by definition, impossible.

The Democratic Unionist Party position was spelled out by Ian Paisley, who attacked Dublin because it: poses the problem in terms of the very existence of Northern Ireland and not as a problem of governing Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.44 On Articles 2 and 3 Paisley said: There can be no peace between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic until this illegal, criminal and immoral claim is given up. Unilaterally made, it must be unilaterally withdrawn. Dublin must recognise Ulster’s right to self-determination. It must be prepared to spell out Northern Ireland’s status as an integral part of the UK both de facto and de jure… Let me make it perfectly clear that these talks are not and cannot be about any re-negotiation of the union. While Nationalist assent to these propositions would understandably not be forthcoming, they do not nevertheless add up to an unreasonable political position. The ‘Canute factor’ emerges subsequently in the DUP submission: Continuous bleating that communities cannot express their identities and aspirations and that institutions must be created to allow ‘accommodation’ has led to such folly as the Anglo-Irish Agreement… The truth is that as political philosophies, Ulster Unionism and Irish nationalism are irreconcilable. Unionists cannot have their cake and let the Irish Republic eat it. The Irish Republic received its share of the cake in 1921–22 and confirmed its acceptance, legally, formally and internationally, in 1925. Thus Pais...

…we must reassess our historical attitude to those almost one million people who are of British origin and have lived on this island for several hundred years. They have carried their sense of Britishness with them during this time and while at one level it was a source of conflict at another level they have contributed to what constitutes the Irish nation today… nationalists must rediscover those positive aspects of Britishness of a sizeable section of the Irish people. The same is true of those who display Britishness. They too must examine their past and rediscover their Irishness… Obviously it would be in the Unionists’ interests to actively engage with this kind of thinking. But there is still a hankering after the old days, a refusal to recognise that a basic component of Unionism is gone for ever – supremacy. A second problem for Unionism is the unacknowledged fact that, for all their talk of British heritage, a majority of the British on the ‘UK mainland’ would cheerfully vote them out of the Union if they ever got the opportunity do so by way of referendum.

Protestants are happier and safer when they feel they are in a majority.’46 That mind set has led to a Protestant migration to the east, which has left the Catholics with almost 60 per cent of the statelet’s land mass. And the migration does not stop at the seashore. The middle class, whose children should be providing the Protestant elite of the future, are increasingly sending their children to be educated in English universities and, ipso facto, to mainland English society. The result is that the Catholic enrolment at Queen’s University, Belfast, is nearing the 65 per cent mark.

Meanwhile, on the ground in working-class areas, as Protestants move out or lose heart, as many have done since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, great swathes of Protestant heartland become an educational desert. For example, the Church of Ireland Bishop Dr Samuel Poyntz has said that ‘only 4% passed the Eleven-Plus in 1987. Only ten children passed in 1988… There’s only one secondary school for the whole area, while in the Falls there are plenty. The Shankill is not getting educated, but the Catholics have a good set-up.’47 Nothing in the core values expressed above by the two major Unionist parties is even remotely tailored to addressing the reality of the education vacuum. There is a leadership deficit on the Unionist and Loyalist side.

The Catholic political future is vibrant, active, with a dynamic civil society – they have, for example, a profusion of community groups. The Protestant community, by comparison, is apolitical. Outside the public life of the churches, civil society barely exists.

Evidence of a yearning for peace was not easy to come by, as at this stage the Loyalist paramilitaries’ response to the fears of ‘a pan-Nationalist front’ was taking the form of assassinating Catholics practically every day. The Provisional IRA, in a botched attempt at killing the leaders held to be responsible for the slaughter, detonated a bomb in a fish shop in the Shankill Road, which on 23 October claimed ten innocent lives and injured fifty-eight people. The controversy over this atrocity was heightened when Gerry Adams helped carry the coffin of an IRA bomber, Thomas Begley, who died in the attack. Before the month ended, Protestant gunmen had killed twelve people in response, seven of them in a gun attack on a bar in Greysteel, Co. Derry. Overall, the violence during that October, 1993, was the worst for seventeen years.

During the visit of President Kennedy to Ireland in 1963, I had stood beside him as he planted a sapling in the garden of the Aras, in the shade of a gigantic oak which Queen Victoria had planted. Victoria’s visit had taken place during the potato famine which had driven Kennedy’s ancestor from tiny Dunganstown in Co. Wexford to America, and the Kennedy dynasty. One would have had to be utterly deficient in a sense of history not to have felt the significance of that little tree-planting ceremony – or not to have experienced an eerie sensation at the symbolism of the fact that the sapling later died. Was it killed by the shade of Victoria’s oak, or did a wind blow from Dallas?

Actually, Clinton did more than that. He also set a precedent, for which he was heavily criticised in some quarters, by allowing the Sinn Fein leader into the US without first being subjected to the so-called Arafat test – a renunciation of violence. Adams actually only got a forty-eight-hour visa, but he reckons that the impact his visit made and the events it set in train moved the peace process forward by about a year. His visit to New York (beginning on 31 January 1994) produced one of the largest, if not the largest, harvests of media attention ever recorded in a two-day spell. Emerging from a wilderness of obscurity and broadcasting bans into a blaze of mainstream publicity Adams dominated every major media outlet, from the front page of the New York Times to The Larry King Show. Hitherto, and not without reason, publicity had tended to be evaluated on the basis of the equation: one horse dead in London equals ten Paddys in Ireland. Even the dullest IRA volunteer could see the benefit of this new development.

Sinn Fein were visibly edging into the spotlight: there was the Adams handshake with Mary Robinson, the growing American dimension symbolised by the visa triumph, and Reynolds’ relaxation of the broadcasting ban, so that Sinn Fein spokespersons such as Adams and Martin McGuinness could be heard and seen over the airwaves in pre-recorded interviews.

The political leadership of Sinn Fein could see the pluses, but the minuses were evident too, particularly to the fighters, men and women, in the IRA. Was it for this that twenty-five years of bloodshed had been endured?

We were really speaking a different language coming from here [New York] in trying to understand where they were coming from. These were men (and women) who had lived in a situation for 25 years where every day could be their last. They were coming from a place where, whatever demonisation had occurred, they had survived everything. They had survived the second most powerful army in the world throwing everything at them. They had survived total indifference and disdain from Dublin. They had survived large sections of their support being eaten away by the SDLP. They had survived death squads and punishment shootings. Everything… They were people whom you knew had experienced something, something very deep and a truly revolutionary thing. Their camaraderie was impressive. Of course there were times when you became aware that they were also dangerous people…

The man who had been one of the first to become involved in the conflict, the Loyalists’ folk hero, Gusty Spence, was also the man chosen to bring it to a close. He read the ceasefire declaration, a document which also contained some surprisingly noble-sounding sentiments: After a widespread consultative process initiated by representations from the Ulster Democratic and Progressive Unionist Parties [fringe Unionist parties representing the UDA and the UVF] and having received confirmation and guarantees in relation to Northern Ireland’s constitutional position within the United Kingdom, as well as other assurances, and in the belief that the democratically expressed wishes of the greater number of people in Northern Ireland will be respected and upheld, the CLMC will universally cease all operational hostilities from 12 midnight, on Thursday, October 13th, 1994. After praising the Loyalist fighters, in and out of prison, pledging continued support to their families, and warning that if the IRA resumed their campaign, violence would recommence, the statement went on to say, at Gusty Spence’s insistence: In all sincerity we offer the loved ones of all innocent victims over the past twenty-five years abject and true remorse. No words of ours will compensate for the intolerable suffering they have undergone during the conflict. Let us firmly resolve to respect our differing views of freedom, culture and aspiration and never again permit our political circumstances to degenera...

Paisley and two of his henchmen (Peter Robinson and William McCrea) were angrily ordered out of Downing Street by John Major after the ceasefire for refusing to accept his word that no deal had been done with the IRA. The three then locked themselves in a lavatory to compose a press statement before leaving Downing Street, causing themselves to be nicknamed the ‘Pee Musketeers’.

Ethel Kennedy had also demonstrated her interest in the Irish situation in a very personal way. Her son-in-law, Paul Hill, who is married to her daughter, Courtney, was one of the wrongfully convicted Guildford Four. He had been released in 1989 after serving fifteen years, but his life had been on hold since then because there was also a conviction alleging involvement in the murder of a British soldier dating back to the time of his conviction. Ethel, her son Joe, a congressman, and a phalanx of Kennedy relations descended on Belfast for the hearing of Hill’s appeal, staying in a guest house run by the Redemptorists! Whether the Kennedy clan’s presence had anything to do with the result I cannot say, but Hill was acquitted.

Moreover Clinton was becoming acutely conscious of two things. First, the fact that Ireland was his major, in fact his only, foreign policy success. Secondly, that the Irish-American lobby was growing in strength. For once he had a white ethnic group on his side! Adams’ repeated visits were having the effect of involving more and more people of Irish background in the Irish issue. The consciousness of being Irish was being heightened.

Friday 9 December, Martin McGuinness led a Sinn Fein delegation to Stormont, to meet openly with officials. Unlike Albert Reynolds’ full-frontal performance in Dublin with John Hume and Gerry Adams, there were no politicians present. Sinn Fein was not mainstreamed but tributarised. It was a milestone event and the publicity surrounding it obscured the significance of the British niggling over the economic conference. Subsequently, when the chamber where the meeting took place burned down, it was averred that the blaze was caused, not by a wiring fault, but by the sparks generated by Carson’s statue in the grounds revolving on its plinth.