LONDON, 21 March 2005 — You know things are tricky again in Belfast the moment you get to the airport. There in the arrivals lounge is a cab driver holding up a sign marked “NBC”. If American television news cameras are back in town, you know it can’t be good. For the best part of six years, after the Good Friday agreement, foreign media stayed away, deciding that, bar the odd glitch, Northern Ireland was done, the conflict all but resolved. The last few weeks have prompted a rethink. It began with the pre-Christmas robbery of the Northern Bank, a £26 million raid almost universally blamed on the IRA. But it was the death of Robert McCartney, a Catholic killed by IRA gangsters in a bar, which shook everything up. In their demand for justice, the dead man’s sisters and fiancée have blown the lid off what many describe as a culture of Provo intimidation and criminality, bullying Catholics into silent obedience. When the IRA issued a statement offering to shoot the guilty men, it only confirmed the picture.
The result has been more damaging to the republican movement than years of British or unionist invective. The proof came this week in Washington, as two lions of Irish America, Sen. Ted Kennedy and Congressman Peter King, turned their back on Gerry Adams. King, once a romantic admirer of the armed struggle, issued a plain demand — that the IRA be disbanded. So what’s going on here? One very senior British official admits that he doesn’t know — and speculates that nor does anyone else: “It’s been a downward spiral in which everyone’s out of control. Heads are whirling.”
After several conversations with key players, two conflicting views emerge of what might be happening inside republicanism. Start with John Kelly, 69 and proud to describe himself as a former IRA volunteer, a man who served eight years in jail — and still a republican. He is not surprised by the McCartney killing, but he is disgusted by it. He believes that such thuggery has become widespread, with Provo “warlords” ruling their fiefdoms through extortion and violence. The rackets — stealing cigarettes and whiskey and the like —- are polluting “the nobility of physical-force republicanism”, he says. “They’re doing what Thatcher couldn’t do — criminalizing the republican movement.”
The Sinn Fein leadership accepts that there are a few “thugs” who are out of line, but insists that’s all they are — a few bad apples. Kelly doesn’t buy that. He traces the blame all the way to the top, to Adams and Martin McGuinness. “They bred it, they led it — they’ve become dependent on these warlords,” he told me, sitting in the front room of his Maghera home surrounded by republican memorabilia. According to Kelly, it suited the top brass to have the hard men on the streets, cracking down on dissidents and “policing the Good Friday agreement”. In his eyes, there is no meaningful space between the suits and the boots: They are both part of a single, “seamless political cloth”.
Other republicans, also appalled by the McCartney killing and the evidence of violent criminality in Derry and elsewhere, take a different view. They do not defend the thuggery, but insist that the leaders of Sinn Fein are pitted against it in what amounts to a struggle for the soul of republicanism. One well-informed republican believes there is a faction within the IRA opposed to the peace process that is now bent on sabotaging Adams and McGuinness. He speaks of a “shadow IRA within the IRA”, centered on two dissenting members of the army council. It was this faction, he believes, that authorized the Northern Bank robbery — with no nod from Adams: “They reckon the peace process is a failed project and they want to get back to the real business.” Their hand was strengthened after Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley came tantalizingly close to an agreement last December, only to fail — with republicans taking much of the blame.
My source reckons that these same “rogue” elements were behind the disastrous IRA statement, with its offer of summary executions: “That was a couple of people knocking something out on the back of a beer mat. It was inexcusable.” He and others note both the increased frequency and deteriorating coherence of recent IRA statements — a contrast with the terse, deliberate messages of the past — as if new, less shrewd, heads are currently prevailing within the organization. That image — of a titanic struggle within republicanism pitting Adams and McGuinness against the hard men — certainly accords with the impression left by McGuinness. At Sinn Fein’s office on the Falls Road yesterday he said no such thing; not explicitly. But that’s what came through. He recalled the December breakdown, citing Paisley’s demand that the IRA be humiliated, made to wear “sackcloth and ashes” — and what he sees as London and Dublin’s subsequent siding with the DUP leader: “What effect do you think all that has on republicans? Does that make our work easier?” McGuinness implies an ongoing argument, in which political progress helps him and Adams, while setbacks help the obstructionists within the IRA.
How might the current crisis affect this battle? The optimists hope that it could, perversely, benefit the leadership. “OK, we’ve tried it your way,” Adams and McGuinness could say to the hard men, “robbing a bank and killing McCartney — and look at the result”. The loss of support, from the streets of Short Strand to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, could be just the shock the naysayers need.
On the other hand, most players agree that Sinn Fein would now need to make a very dramatic gesture to re-enter talks aimed at power sharing with unionism. The move most people have in mind is the disbandment of the IRA. But, in the words of that British official, “How do you ask the racketeers and gangsters, who drive 4x4 cars and have nice country cottages, to give up all that?” McGuinness locates the problem elsewhere. With more British troops allocated to Northern Ireland than to Iraq, the sky over South Armagh still thick with British helicopters: “Do you fancy going to (IRA) people and telling them ‘you’re the problem and if only you got out of the way, everything would be hunky dory’?”
Of course he’s wary. A republican obsession is unity: The scenario that Adams and McGuinness fear most is a split. The movement has split before, with lethal consequences. So there can be no diktat to stand down — not if there is a risk it might be disobeyed. Less sympathetic voices wonder if Adams suffers from “Arafat syndrome”, if he lacks the courage to make the final break with the past. For the moment, the British government still has faith in him — realizing the IRA is not an easy organization to dominate — and, the polls suggest, so do his own people.
But this situation cannot last for ever. Ultimately, if Adams and McGuinness are to be judged true peacemakers, their job is to deliver their hard men — not to fight a never-ending battle against them.
