Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland 0192894765, 9780192894762

Table of contents :
Cover
Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
Detailed Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Negotiating Political Violence
Local Escalation, National Settlement
Negotiated Relationships
Agency and Strategy in the Transition from Violence
Context and Emotion
The Exceptional Case of Northern Ireland
Research and Secrecy
From Escalation to Settlement
1: Escalation: Their War Got Out of Hand and Ours Got Out of Hand Too’
Negotiating Civil Rights
Talking to Militants
Negotiating with the British Army
West Belfast
Pressures against Compromise
Breakdown
The Pen and the Gun
2: Negotiation: ‘Dogmatic and Impossible Demands’
Provisional Politics
Theorizing Negotiation
Negotiating Positions
Preparing for Engagement
Truce’
Cheyne Walk
Breakdown
Violence, Politics, and Negotiation
3: The Intermediary: ‘A Vessel To Be Used’
Covert Diplomacy
Coffeeman
The Making of an Intermediary
Phase One
Information and Power
The Intermediary as Mediator
4: Contact: ‘Climbing a Mountain without Ropes’
Phase Two
Kidnap
A First Message
Currency
Modalities of Engagement
Authority, Trust, and Secrecy
Other Channels Are Closed
5: 1975 Ceasefire: ‘Everyone Trying’
Interpreting the Ceasefire
British Policy
Republican Strategy
Everyone Trying’
The Breaking of the Truce’
Final Efforts
Understanding a Failed Negotiation
6: Long War and a Policy Vacuum: ‘Passing the Time Decently’
Long War
A Final Push for British Engagement with the IRA
Filling the Policy Vacuum
The Escalating Prison Dispute
7: The Hunger Strikes: ‘Playing Their Last Card’?
The Hunger Strike as Protest Tactic
Negotiating to a Deadline
Time Pressure in the 1980 Hunger Strike
A Few Lousy Hours’: Negotiating the 1980 Hunger Strike
Utmost Haste’: Negotiating the 1981 Hunger Strike
Body and Clock
Compromise Deferred
8: British Policy and IRA Strategy: ‘A Difficult Hand To Play’
The Provos Need a Victory’
British Choices
An End To All Acts of War’: Strategic Action by the Republican Leadership
The Wrong Project’
9: Back To the Back-channel: ‘They Should Tell Us Privately’
Nationalist Back-channels
Imaginative Remarks
They Should Tell Us Privately’
No Selfish Strategic or Economic Interest’
Reopening the Channel
The Man with Three Names
Encouraging the Doves
Together in the Middle
10: Peace Process: ‘All Their Cards on the Table Including the Deeds of Their House’
The Nine Paragraphs
Fresh Flowers and a New Tie
The Crucial Move’
All Their Cards on the Table’
The Irish Government and John Hume
The Downing Street Declaration
Edging Towards Peace
Towards a New Relationship
Conclusion: Negotiation, Transformation, and Strategic Action
A Mutually Hurting Stalemate
Intra-party Struggles and Central Control
Strategic Dilemmas
Transforming Relationships
The Power of Secrecy
Epilogue: Diaries of a Long-Distance Runner
Bibliography
Interviews
Public events
Archives
Television Documentaries
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

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Deniable Contact

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Deniable Contact Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland NIALL Ó DOCHARTAIGH

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Niall Ó Dochartaigh 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951612 ISBN 978–0–19–289476–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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An intricate minuet . . . so delicately arranged that both sides could always maintain that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative, so elliptical that existing relationships on both sides were not jeopardized. Henry Kissinger on his back-channel contacts with China in 1971 (Kissinger, 1979: 187) If [the British government] think there is something to be lost by stating publicly how flexible they would be, or how imaginative, we are saying they should tell us privately . . . there is an avenue which they are aware of whereby they can make what imaginative steps they are thinking about known to the Republican movement. Martin McGuinness publicly inviting the British government in February 1990 to reopen a back-channel used during previous phases of contact with republicans (An Phoblacht/Republican News, 22 February 1990) If the implication . . . is that we should sit down and talk with Mr. Adams and the Provisional IRA, I can say only that that would turn my stomach and those of most hon. Members; we will not do it. Prime Minister John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, 1 November 1993, shortly before secret backchannel contacts with the IRA were revealed (Hansard, HC Deb, vol. 231 col. 35, 1 November 1993) Were we making statements which were not strictly true, in terms of responding to the House of Commons? I certainly believed, in the context of the conduit which existed, that we could continue to say that we were not in direct contact.

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Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1989–92) who endorsed the reopening of a secret back-channel to the IRA in 1991, on denying they were in contact (Mallie and McKittrick 1996: 106) We were all dancing on the head of a pin as to what negotiations meant. John Chilcot, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office (1990–97) on the exposure of the back-channel in 1993 (interview with the author, 25 May 2020).

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Acknowledgements In researching, writing, and thinking about back-channel negotiation over the past decade and a half I have enjoyed the support, encouragement, and advice of exceptional colleagues, collaborators, and friends, many of whom read draft chapters or gave feedback on talks. I owe special thanks to Ian McBride, Brendan O’Leary, Jennifer Todd, Lorenzo Bosi, Richard English, Katy Hayward, Siniša Malešević, Isak Svensson, Tim Wilson, Roger MacGinty, Danny Sokatch, Kieran McEvoy, Patrick Griffin, Aogán Mulcahy, Niall Ó Murchú, and Stefan Malthaner. I am especially grateful to Breandán Mac Suibhne, who read the entire manuscript and made valuable suggestions for changes. Many thanks to colleagues working in related areas, and to friends, for sharing knowledge, for offering feedback on work in progress, and for thought-provoking conversations over the years: I have learned much from Peter McLoughlin, Huw Bennett, Cathy Gormley-Heenan, Hastings Donnan, Patricia Sleeman, Kate Kenny, Anna Bryson, Adrian Guelke, Margaret O’Callaghan, John Coakley, Donatella della Porta, Frank O’Connor, Eamonn O’Kane, Sanjin Uležic, Paul Dixon, Paul Mitchell, Kevin Bean, Brian Hanley, Brendan Browne, Maria Power, Lior Lehrs, Sandra Buchanan, Eamonn McCann, Eoghan McTigue, Paul Arthur, Marc Mulholland, Paul Dixon, Dawn Walsh, David Mitchell, Etain Tannam, Dominic Bryan, Kevin Clements, Karen Brounéus, Stephen Winter, Dana Reinhardt, Daphne Winland, Saša Božič, Simone Kuti, Neil Jarman, Cera Murtagh, Rob Savage, Jutta Bakonyi, Sarah Covington, Hugh Logue, José Henríquez, Andrew Forde, Máirín Ní Ghadhra, Laurence McKeown, Peter Taylor, Carole Holohan, Rosie Lavan, Rachel Kowalski, Adam Brodie, Luis de la Calle, Dieter Reinisch, Leah David, and Robert White. I am grateful to Tom Hennessey, John Bew, Geoffrey Warner, Simon Prince, and Tony Craig for generously sharing their knowledge of the relevant archival sources and to Kristine Höglund for sending me a copy of her book. A special word of thanks to Colin Kidd for suggesting I include an account of how I came to write the book. I want to express my appreciation in particular for two colleagues who passed away in recent years and are greatly missed: John Darby who, as Director of INCORE and my first academic boss, was unfailingly generous and full of wisdom and good humour, and Elizabeth Meehan whom I first met as a PhD student in Queen’s University Belfast and much later had the great pleasure of working with as co-editor of a book on Irish politics with Katy Hayward. I benefited greatly from time spent as a visiting fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the University of Auckland, the National Centre for Peace and

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Conflict Studies in the University of Otago, Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast, and as a visiting researcher at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. While writing the book I had the privilege of working with a group of excellent and dedicated early-career researchers and PhD students who were working on related topics. I learnt much while working with Maggie Scull and Thomas Leahy during their time as Irish Research Council postdoctoral scholars in NUI Galway, and from PhD students Giada Laganà, Gary Hussey, Anna Tulin-Brett, Peter Doherty, Carmel Martyn, Michael Martin, Shadi Abu-Ayyash, Maciej Cuprys, Deirdre McHugh, and Elizabeth Ball. Thank you to interns Giada Laganà, Agnieszka Sendur, Jasmine Ashby, Cian Hegarty, and Aoife Inman who each spent a number of weeks annotating archival documents. I am deeply grateful to the late Brendan Duddy for sharing his memories and his analysis over a period of several years and for making his extraordinary personal archive available to researchers through the university archives in the National University of Ireland Galway. I say more about him in the epilogue. Thank you to the members of his family who were unfailingly helpful and who spoke to me, and to wider audiences, about their perspective on events, including Margo, Brendan Jr, Shauna, Patricia, Larry, and Brendan’s son-in-law Eamonn Downey, who organized Brendan’s private papers with exceptional care and commitment. An old friend, Garbhán Downey, played a vital role in the genesis and development of this book. I am grateful for all of his support and advice. Thank you to Mick Ruane for filming the interviews with Brendan Duddy in Derry and editing them for deposit in the NUI Galway archive. And thanks to my former colleague in INCORE, Lyn Moffett, for coming to a talk I gave in Derry a few years after I had published ‘Civil Rights to Armalites’, my monograph on the early years of the Troubles, and saying to me afterwards ‘I’m waiting for the sequel.’ This is a kind of sequel. Thanks to friends in Derry and Donegal, Paul O’Connor and Laura Pozo-Rodriguez, George Holbrooke and Conor Gilmore, Lisa Rodgers and Colin Burns, and to Dióg, Fergal and the late Deirdre O’Connell for all of their help. Warmest thanks and appreciation to my mother-in-law, Terry, and late father-inlaw, Andy Barr who have been an unfailing source of local Derry knowledge for decades. I am deeply grateful to all of the interviewees who shared their analysis and memories. I have been greatly impressed by the calibre of those involved in the effort to bring an end to conflict in Northern Ireland, on all sides. A special word of thanks to the late and much-missed Maurice Hayes for his clear-eyed thinking and enjoyable company. His papers, which he deposited in NUI Galway shortly before his death, are an as-yet untapped resource for scholars of community relations and conflict transformation.

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Thank you to my inspiring and committed colleagues at NUI Galway for their support, advice, ideas, and conversations over the years, especially Dan Carey, Shane Darcy, Su-Ming Khoo, Anne Byrne, Chris Curtin, Pete Morriss, Ricca Edmondson, Ray Murphy, Rachel Hilliard, John Canavan, Eoin Daly, Brendan Flynn, Mary Harris, Kathleen Cavanaugh, Mark Haugaard, Kevin O’Sullivan, Deirdre Byrnes, Henrike Rau, Nicholas Allen, Seán Ryder, Lionel Pilkington, and Stacey Scriver. Many thanks to Vera Orschel, Kieran Hoare, Barry Houlihan, and Aisling Keane of the NUI Galway archives, and to librarian John Cox and Louis de Paor, for all of their work on, and support for, the accession of the Duddy papers to the James Hardiman library in NUI Galway. Thank you to the staff and archivists at the Linenhall library political collection in Belfast, the McClay library in Queen’s University Belfast, the LSE archives, the King’s College London archives, the National Archives at Kew, the National Library, and the National Archives in Dublin. I am grateful to the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives for permission to quote from the Endgame in Ireland archives, to the James Hardiman library at NUI Galway and the family of Brendan Duddy for permission to reproduce materials from the Brendan Duddy collection, and to Kat O’Mara of AP for organizing, in the midst of Covid-19, the scanning of the photo of Donald Middleton. Some of the material in the book has appeared in different forms in a variety of publications over the past decade. I am grateful for permission to reproduce material that previously appeared in the Field Day Review, Political Studies, Journal of Peace Research, International Journal of Conflict Management (coauthored with Isak Svensson), Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, and in Track Two to Peace (Los Angeles: Figueroa Press). Full details of these publications are in the bibliography.¹ Some of the research for the book was supported by the Irish Research Council New Foundations grant ‘Political Violence: Building a New International Network’; the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences grant ‘The Mediation of Armed Conflicts in Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (with Siniša Malešević); a Galway University Foundation grant to film interviews for the Brendan Duddy Archive at NUI Galway; and an NUI Galway College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Celtic Studies Research Support Scheme grant to study the 1980/81 hunger strikes. My thanks to Cathryn Steele at Oxford University Press for overseeing the journey from book proposal to book with great professionalism and patience, to Katie Bishop, Emma Varley, Sinduja Abirami, and Kalpana Sagayanathan for

¹ Ó Dochartaigh 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2015; Ó Dochartaigh and Svensson 2013,

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ensuring a smooth production process, to Phil Dines for the thorough and careful copyediting, and to the three readers for their thoughtful and helpful comments. Thank you to my parents Niamh and Eoin and to my brother and sisters Conor, Eavan, and Aideen for their support. Thanks above all to Carol-Ann, Caoimhe, and Dara for their always lively company, their great encouragement, and for keeping me on my toes.

This publication was grant-aided by the Publications Fund of National University of Ireland Galway / Rinneadh maoiniú ar an bhfoilseachán seo trí Chiste Foilseachán Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh

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Contents List of Illustrations

Introduction: Negotiating Political Violence

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1

1. Escalation: ‘Their War Got Out of Hand and Ours Got Out of Hand Too’

19

2. Negotiation: ‘Dogmatic and Impossible Demands’

41

3. The Intermediary: ‘A Vessel To Be Used’

73

4. Contact: ‘Climbing a Mountain Without Ropes’

97

5. 1975 Ceasefire: ‘Everyone Trying’

117

6. Long War and a Policy Vacuum: ‘Passing the Time Decently’

150

7. The Hunger Strikes: ‘Playing Their Last Card’?

165

8. British Policy and IRA Strategy: ‘A Difficult Hand to Play’

188

9. Back To the Back-Channel: ‘They Should Tell Us Privately’

211

10. Peace Process: ‘All Their Cards on the Table Including the Deeds of Their House’

235

Conclusion: Negotiation, Transformation and Strategic Action

266

Epilogue: Diaries of a Long-Distance Runner

278

Bibliography Index

285 299

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Detailed Table of Contents

Introduction: Negotiating Political Violence Local Escalation, National Settlement Negotiated Relationships Agency and Strategy in the Transition from Violence Context and Emotion The Exceptional Case of Northern Ireland Research and Secrecy From Escalation to Settlement

1 4 6 7 7 8 9 14

1. Escalation: ‘Their War Got Out of Hand and Ours Got Out of Hand Too’ Negotiating Civil Rights Talking to Militants Negotiating with the British Army West Belfast Pressures against Compromise Breakdown The Pen and the Gun

19 20 24 26 29 32 35 38

2. Negotiation: ‘Dogmatic and Impossible Demands’ Provisional Politics Theorizing Negotiation Negotiating Positions Preparing for Engagement ‘Truce’ Cheyne Walk Breakdown Violence, Politics, and Negotiation

41 44 45 48 53 57 59 67 70

3. The Intermediary: ‘A Vessel To Be Used’ Covert Diplomacy Coffeeman The Making of an Intermediary Phase One Information and Power The Intermediary as Mediator

73 74 79 82 89 93 96

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4. Contact: ‘Climbing a Mountain Without Ropes’ Phase Two Kidnap A First Message Currency Modalities of Engagement Authority, Trust and Secrecy Other Channels Are Closed

97 99 100 103 107 109 112 115

5. 1975 Ceasefire: ‘Everyone Trying’ Interpreting the Ceasefire British Policy Republican Strategy ‘Everyone Trying’ ‘The Breaking of the Truce’ Final Efforts Understanding a Failed Negotiation

117 118 121 127 134 140 142 145

6. Long War and a Policy Vacuum: ‘Passing the Time Decently’ Long War A Final Push for British Engagement with the IRA Filling the Policy Vacuum The Escalating Prison Dispute

150 151 154 156 157

7. The Hunger Strikes: ‘Playing Their Last Card’? The Hunger Strike as Protest Tactic Negotiating to a Deadline Time Pressure in the 1980 Hunger Strike ‘A Few Lousy Hours’: Negotiating the 1980 Hunger Strike ‘Utmost Haste’: Negotiating the 1981 Hunger Strike Body and Clock Compromise Deferred

165 166 169 171 172 177 185 187

8. British Policy and IRA Strategy: ‘A Difficult Hand to Play’ ‘The Provos Need a Victory’ British Choices ‘An End To All Acts of War’: Strategic Action by the Republican Leadership ‘The Wrong Project’

188 189 194

9. Back To the Back-Channel: ‘They Should Tell Us Privately’ Nationalist Back-channels Imaginative Remarks ‘They Should Tell Us Privately’ ‘No Selfish Strategic or Economic Interest’ Reopening the Channel The Man with Three Names Encouraging the Doves Together in the Middle

211 212 216 220 222 224 226 230 233

198 203

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10. Peace Process: ‘All Their Cards on the Table Including the Deeds of Their House’ The Nine Paragraphs Fresh Flowers and a New Tie ‘The Crucial Move’ ‘All Their Cards on the Table’ The Irish Government and John Hume The Downing Street Declaration Edging Towards Peace Towards a New Relationship

xv

235 237 241 245 248 252 257 261 264

Conclusion: Negotiation, Transformation, and Strategic Action A Mutually Hurting Stalemate Intra-party Struggles and Central Control Strategic Dilemmas Transforming Relationships The Power of Secrecy

266 267 270 272 273 275

Epilogue: Diaries of a Long-Distance Runner

278

Bibliography Index

285 299

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List of Illustrations 1.1. Bernadette Devlin, Civil Rights leader and MP for Mid-Ulster, in Derry on 14 August 1969, the day British troops were deployed in the city

23

1.2. RUC District Inspector Frank Lagan tours the Lower Falls with Colonel Roger May in October 1969. Along the way he stopped to talk to Jim Sullivan, second-in-command of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade. Lagan would later play a role in setting up the back-channel between the IRA and MI6

30

2.1. IRA leaders Seamus Twomey (OC Belfast Brigade), Sean Mac Stiofáin (Chief of Staff), Martin McGuinness (OC Derry Brigade), and David O’Connell pictured outside an IRA press conference in Derry on 13 June 1972 at which they invited William Whitelaw to come to Derry for peace talks. A few weeks later, the British government would fly them and two others—Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell—to London for secret talks

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3.1. Brendan Duddy, Oakleaf Athletic Club, running in a five-mile time trial in 1956

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4.1. Michael Oatley, the SIS Officer who from 1973 worked with intermediary Brendan Duddy to develop the back-channel into a robust channel for communication and negotiation and negotiated the IRA ceasefire of 1975. He would play a crucial role again during the 1980/81 hunger strikes and the peace process in the 1990s. Photo taken in 2000

98

5.1. ‘If there is a peaceful way out they will take it’. Brendan Duddy sets out his understanding of the IRA position in an entry in his diary on 27 October 1975

144

6.1. British diplomat Donald Middleton takes shelter from a rocket attack by the wing of an Air America plane evacuating British embassy staff from Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge captured the city in March 1975. A short time later he was posted to Belfast to take charge of talks with the IRA during the 1975 ceasefire

160

7.1. Entry from ‘The Red Book’, intermediary Brendan Duddy’s record of messages exchanged during the 1981 hunger strike. It gives a sense of the immense time pressure exerted. The numbers on the right, 11.58, 11.59, indicate that he was expecting a reply from the British government by midnight but that he didn’t get it until after 2.10 a.m. on 8 July

184

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9.1. Business card of MI6 agent Robert McLaren, also known as Colin Ferguson and ‘Fred’, the British government representative in the back-channel from 1991 to 1993 10.1. ‘The conflict is over’: The February 1993 message that triggered a series of intense contacts between the British government and the republican leadership, culminating in an IRA ceasefire offer in May

227

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Introduction Negotiating Political Violence

In June 1972, British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw told his cabinet colleagues that, after three years of conflict and almost 400 deaths, ‘it was inescapable that some understanding would have to be reached with the “Provisional” IRA; no solution seemed possible unless their point of view were represented.’¹ By the time an inclusive settlement was finally reached more than a quarter of a century later, more than 3,600 people had been killed, and tens of thousands injured and imprisoned, in ‘the Troubles’. Negotiation and engagement had repeatedly failed to prevent the escalation of conflict. Several efforts to end the violence had been unsuccessful, even when the parties involved were willing to compromise. But ultimately, efforts to make peace through secret back-channel negotiations bore fruit in the early 1990s, opening the way to negotiations that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which inaugurated new political and constitutional arrangements. When violent conflict escalates but no party looks likely to achieve a swift or decisive victory, it can be difficult to bring hostilities to an end through negotiated compromise. Conflicts that may at first appear soluble can drag on for years or decades. Given that, since 1990, violent conflicts—including many that appeared intractable—have increasingly ended in negotiated compromises, analysis of how best to reach the point of settlement has obvious policy implications. The Northern Ireland conflict provides a revelatory case of back-channel negotiation. It is one of the few conflicts for which there is extensive, reliable primary documentation, from disparate sources, of clandestine engagement through an intermediary. Hence, it is possible to obtain an unusually accurate and finely grained picture—one that illuminates those shadowy spaces where the parties to conflict attempted to talk their way out of violence, that identifies the dynamics of engagement, and that elaborates the distinctive features of negotiations conducted in secret. As Henry Kissinger long ago pointed out—in the spirit of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’²—‘force’ and ‘diplomacy’ are not ‘discrete phenomena’; rather, violence and negotiation are part of a single bargaining process.³ Hence, if the factors that ¹ Meeting of GEN 79, 16 June 1972, CAB130/560, UK National Archives. ² Clausewitz 1976[1832]. ³ Kissinger 1979, 62.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0001

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cause efforts at compromise to succeed on some occasions and collapse on others are to be fully understood, violence and negotiation must be analysed together as part of a single process of conflict transformation.⁴ On three separate occasions, in June 1972, January 1975, and April 1991, the conflict in Northern Ireland looked sufficiently ‘ripe’⁵ for settlement that the British government and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) leadership initiated back-channel contacts aimed at a peaceful compromise. However, only on the third occasion did those efforts succeed. An analysis of these efforts reveals bargaining to have been a recurring feature of the conflict, sometimes tacit, at other times explicit and formal. It was a continuous strand, integrated throughout with the use of coercion and violence, shaping the ways in which force was used and intermittently crystallizing in formal processes. Back-channel negotiations are analysed here in the context of the long-term bargaining relationship between the parties. John Whyte wrote in 1991 that ‘Relative to its size Northern Ireland is possibly the most heavily researched area on earth.’⁶ Reflecting on the exponential growth since then, Political Scientist Brendan O’Leary commented in 2019 that ‘There is no sign that the flood of publications on Northern Ireland will stop.’ He estimated that he had read thousands of ‘book[s] of history or political science’ related to the conflict in the preceding decades, and many thousands of academic articles.⁷ Much of that scholarship seeks to explain the outbreak and persistence of violence in terms of various combinations of ideology, communal divisions, culture, or deep social and economic forces.⁸ But, with a few notable exceptions, it has not focused on the dynamics of negotiation aimed at ending violence.⁹ Comparative ⁴ Stedman’s 1991 study of international mediation in Zimbabwe remains one of the few such studies. ⁵ Zartman 1989. ⁶ Whyte 1991, back cover. ⁷ O’Leary 2019, 26. ⁸ John H. Whyte’s 1991 Interpreting Northern Ireland and John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary’s 1995 Explaining Northern Ireland have continuing value as surveys of the main lines of argument and interpretation in the literature on the Troubles. Bernadette Hayes’ and Ian McAllister’s 2013 study of opinion poll and survey findings in Northern Ireland over a fifty-year period provides an inventory of most of the major themes in the scholarship: religion, national identity, constitutional preferences, party support, community relations, educational integration, and the legacy of violence, to which we might add social class and economic conditions. ⁹ There are some notable exceptions: In two books published in 2015, The British and Peace in Northern Ireland and From Armed Struggle to Political Struggle, Graham Spencer analysed British government and Irish republican approaches to negotiation in the 1990s, primarily on the basis of interviews with the protagonists (Spencer 2015a, 2015b). Paul Dixon’s 2018 book Performing the Northern Ireland Peace Process examines performative aspects of negotiation and the use of deception and manipulation. John Coakley and Jennifer Todd’s 2020 book Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland: 1969–2019 (Coakley and Todd 2020) draws on witness seminars and interviews with British and Irish civil servants and politicians and sheds new light on intergovernmental negotiations—but it is not centrally focused on negotiation with the IRA. Much has been published in the past decade on contact and negotiation between the IRA and the British government, but it addresses debates in intelligence studies and terrorism research rather than analysing the dynamics of negotiation. See especially Bew et al. 2009; Cowper-Coles 2012; Craig 2012, 2014; Mumford 2011. A few excellent studies of the IRA deal extensively with back-channel contacts, some of them from a journalistic rather than an academic perspective, including Peter Taylor’s Provos (1997), Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA (2002, 2007) and Richard English’s Armed Struggle (2003).

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and theoretical scholarship on negotiation provides rich resources for understanding both the persistence of violence and the alignment of forces that ends it. Central themes in the scholarship that are particularly relevant to the Irish case include: the coexistence of uncompromising public rhetoric with a willingness to concede; failure to reach agreement even when the parties involved want an agreement and are willing to compromise; concealment by parties of information about the compromises they are willing to make. Ira William Zartman and Guy Faure note that, notwithstanding Kissinger’s admonishment, ‘too little analysis has placed negotiation within the dynamic context of conflict.’¹⁰ Negotiation needs to be analysed, then, in the context of the conflict of which it forms a part. Violent conflict is often thought of as a phase during which communication is shut down and contact severed. But in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s communication channels proliferated, and engagement intensified when civil unrest and confrontation escalated. A police officer walked through a hail of stones in search of someone with authority in a rioting crowd;¹¹ a government minister approached a barricade to discuss the grievances of its defenders;¹² IRA leaders met secretly with British Army officers and agreed on measures to avert confrontation and public disorder.¹³ New forces emerged, and forces that previously had little or no contact sought each other out, finding new ways to communicate and connect. Coercive force was integral to these dense new networks of communication: parties used force to convey commitment and capacity in the most unequivocal and convincing terms, with the direct aim of shaping the political engagements aimed at limiting or terminating conflict. Secrecy was vital in protecting these lines of communication. When warring parties begin to talk peace, the site of that encounter is charged with danger. The leaderships of opposing sides often use back-channels to shield talk of compromise from their political opponents and the wider public, but also from forces within their own organizations opposed to concession.¹⁴ The very act of contact can arouse fierce anger and suspicion: there is a fine line between compromise and complicity. Back-channels are little understood precisely because parties that have recourse to them conspire to screen them from view. In Northern Ireland, a concern not to confer legitimacy on the IRA inhibited the British government’s engagement with the organization. After 1972, it only made covert contact with the organization through intermediaries and mediators. During the course of the Troubles, the primary conduit between the British government and the IRA was a Derry businessman, Brendan Duddy, who acted as intermediary in 1972–76, 1980–81, ¹⁰ Zartman and Faure 2005b, 5. ¹¹ District Inspector Francis Armstrong, testimony to the Scarman Tribunal, Scarman Tribunal transcripts, McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast. ¹² Anderson 2002, 200–1. ¹³ Sunday Times Insight Team 1971, 241–4. ¹⁴ Pruitt 2006, 2008, 230, 298–9; Putnam and Carcasson 1997; Wanis-St. John 2006.

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and 1991–93. Carefully using the information that accumulated in the space between the two parties, Duddy was able to achieve a certain agency, shaping engagement and, on occasion, stimulating progress. The importance of deniable contacts to negotiated peace agreements in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel–Palestine in the early-1990s has frequently been highlighted.¹⁵ Here, the concern is to analyse the distinctive features of backchannel negotiation that contributed to a settlement in Northern Ireland; to examine the development of solidarity between interlocuters, the back-channel’s effect on intra-party negotiation, and its importance in drawing the positions of the two parties closer at crucial moments. In analysing the factors that eventually made for a successful peace agreement, this book builds on recent research in History, Political Science, and Sociology. It is sensitive to the importance of process, contingency, and agency in explaining and driving political change. Hence, it highlights the strategic thinking and leadership involved in ending a violent conflict and the commitment and collective action this requires. The analysis is founded on a rich store of evidence, including the private papers of key Irish republican leaders and British politicians, recently released papers from national archives in Dublin and London, and the papers of Brendan Duddy, the intermediary who acted as the primary contact between the IRA and the British government for many years, including papers that have not yet been made publicly available. This documentary evidence, combined with original interviews with politicians, mediators, civil servants, and republicans, allows a vivid picture to emerge of the complex manoeuvring at this intersection. It provides a textured account that extends our understanding of the distinctive dynamics of negotiations conducted in secret and the conditions conducive to the negotiated settlement of conflict. It disrupts and challenges some conventional notions about the conflict in Northern Ireland, offering a fresh analysis of the political dynamics and the intra-party struggles that sustained violent conflict and prevented settlement for so long.

Local Escalation, National Settlement Since the early 2000s there has been renewed scholarly interest in political violence; civil war research, in particular, is a vibrant field of study. This rich new body of work includes research on the local dynamics of violence and on

¹⁵ Bercovitch 1997; Kriesberg 2001; Pruitt, Bercovitch, and Zartman 1997; Lieberfeld 1999, 2002; Pruitt 2008.

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negotiated relationships between states and armed rebels that is of particular value in understanding how conflicts end.¹⁶ ‘Civil war’ is a contested term. As Stathis Kalyvas notes, ruling authorities often reject it as conceding too much legitimacy to armed oppositional forces.¹⁷ Opposition forces, on the other hand, prefer terms like revolution or war of national liberation. One need not define the Northern Ireland conflict as a civil war to accept that the civil war scholarship provides valuable conceptual tools for analysing its dynamics. The British Army’s in-house assessment of ‘Operation Banner’, the official name for its campaign in Northern Ireland, calls the IRA ‘one of the most effective terrorist organisations in history’, but it also characterizes the initial stages of the conflict as an insurgency: [The period] from the summer of 1971 until the mid-1970s, is best described as a classic insurgency. Both the Official and Provisional wings of the Irish Republican Army (OIRA and PIRA) fought the security forces in more-or-less formed bodies. Both had a structure of companies, battalions and brigades, with a recognisable structure and headquarters staff. Protracted firefights were common. The Army responded with operations at up to brigade and even divisional level.¹⁸

One influential strand within the new civil war research examines how local cleavages and networks interact with national projects in the shaping of violence.¹⁹ This focus on the local, part of a much broader trend in peace and conflict research,²⁰ challenges the view that coherent projects at national or central level drive civil wars. It explains patterns of militant action and mobilization in terms of alliances between local actors and central national leaderships. These divisions within rebel groups are paralleled in some respects by tensions within state apparatuses between the various agencies and elements representing the state or allied with it. It is an analysis that resonates with the emphasis in the negotiation literature on the way in which intra-party struggles shape negotiations between the parties to conflict. Viewing an armed organization as an alliance between a central leadership and localities helps in explaining why it was difficult for the IRA to sustain a ceasefire in 1972 in the face of a local confrontation in west Belfast. It sheds light, too, on why the British government, which was unable to sufficiently control its security forces, failed to pin down the IRA ceasefire of 1975. The power of local forces to constrain central leaderships is crucial to understanding why it is so difficult to

¹⁶ Arjona 2008, 2014; Cederman and Vogt 2017; Kalyvas 2006; Staniland 2012, 2017. ¹⁷ Kalyvas 2006. ¹⁸ ‘Operation Banner’ 2006, 3. ¹⁹ Cederman and Vogt 2017; Kalyvas 2006. ²⁰ Cederman and Gleditsch 2009.

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reach a peace agreement even when the leaderships of the parties to conflict are actively working towards that end. This local turn in the analysis of violence has not been as evident in research on the negotiated ending of violence. But if these internal tensions and centre–local disjunctures help to explain the escalation of violence, they can also illuminate patterns of engagement and peacemaking. In Northern Ireland, as in other deeply divided societies, struggles between central leaderships and local forces shaped engagement between the parties and influenced their attempts to negotiate and compromise. Internal divisions constituted an important obstacle to compromise and intra-party struggles shaped negotiations with the opponent.

Negotiated Relationships A second important strand in the new civil war research is the work on zones of control, wartime political orders, and wartime institutions pioneered by Stathis Kalyvas, Paul Staniland, Ana Arjona, and others.²¹ Some of this research analyses engagement between states and armed opponents and examines the extent to which they sometimes cooperate to maintain order and stability. Staniland’s work illuminates the dynamics of engagement by examining how local zones of rebel control are sustained not just through violence but often through negotiated arrangements and tacit agreements. This agenda has broadened out more recently to encompass the negotiated character of relationships between states and armed opponents more generally, and to consider the continuities between phases of violent and non-violent interaction.²² Staniland has recently proposed ‘armed politics’ as a framework for analysing relations between states and armed groups, examining how the political relationships between armed actors span phases of active confrontation as well as periods of peaceful cooperation. Engagement, ‘the level of cooperation between the state and an insurgent actor’, is at the heart of it: It is here where political interests shape the interaction between organized specialists in violence . . . this dimension is where we should see dynamics of cooperation and bargaining operating alongside violence and conflict . . . By looking at the level of cooperation, we can see how political orders within and across civil wars emerge and change . . . ²³

While Staniland’s work focuses on situations of ongoing conflict rather than the ending of violence, it has an obvious relevance for the analysis of peace negotiations. It examines violence and negotiation together as part of a continuous ²¹ Kalyvas 2006; Staniland 2012, 2017; Arjona 2008, 2014. ²³ Staniland 2017, 247.

²² Staniland 2017.

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political relationship that stretches through periods of both peace and violence. In focusing attention on the long-term bargaining relationship between parties, it opens up new perspectives on engagement aimed at reaching sustainable peace settlements.

Agency and Strategy in the Transition from Violence The ‘contentious politics’ approach developed by social movement scholars over the past two decades offers a unified framework for the analysis of all forms of conflictual political action, both violent and non-violent.²⁴ It has been applied in recent years to the study of terrorism and political violence with fruitful results by scholars such as Donatella della Porta, Lorenzo Bosi, Stefan Malthaner, Chares Demetriou, and others.²⁵ Their work reintegrates the study of armed violence with other forms of political contention, highlighting the continuities between different phases of struggle and drawing attention to the importance of intra-organizational struggles and the changing relations between parties. Much of this research focused initially on the escalation and perpetuation of violent conflict rather than its termination, but a growing body of work now analyses the transition from armed conflict to non-violent action, emphasizing the importance of strategic choice and the exercise of agency.²⁶ In its emphasis on the continuities between violent and non-violent phases of contention, the contentious politics approach is of particular value in foregrounding the strategic goals and political calculations that run through, and link together, these different phases of contention.

Context and Emotion One cannot abstract events in the Northern Ireland case from the specific context. The ideological messages around which people mobilized, their repertoires of contention, and the normative commitments that they brought to the conflict were embedded in long-term struggles over the social and political relationships between Britain and Ireland, between Irish nationalism and unionism, and between Catholic and Protestant communities in Ireland, north and south of the border. Dialogue through secret back-channels and around the negotiating

²⁴ See especially McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 2003; Tilly and Tarrow 2007. ²⁵ Bosi and Malthaner 2015; Bosi, Demetriou, and Malthaner 2014; Della Porta 2006, 2008; Della Porta et al. 2018; Demetriou, Malthaner, and Bosi 2014, ch.1; Goodwin 2012; Maney 2008; Tarrow 2007. ²⁶ Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Dudouet 2010, 2012, 2013; Acosta 2014.

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table would return repeatedly to those struggles and the ways in which deeper historical relationships might be transformed through an agreed settlement. By the same token, the failure or success of peace talks cannot be explained solely by reference to cool reason or dispassionate strategic moves. Official papers generated by both the British and Irish governments are suffused with outrage and anger at the violent challenge to the state by paramilitary organizations, both republican and loyalist. Disdain for representatives of these organizations and for those seeking to speak on their behalf radiates from many pages, particularly in the British papers. Differences of class and professional position frequently inflect this disdain. Rage is present too, often in more intense and open form, on the republican side and among Ulster loyalists, especially in relation to the treatment of prisoners. Moral outrage, righteous anger, a sense of obligation to those who had suffered and alienation from those on the other side who had inflicted suffering were among the main obstacles to a dispassionate exploration of the possibilities for compromise. One valuable effect of the back-channels between the parties was their infusion of more positive emotions into these relationships. The diaries which the key intermediary kept during the 1975 talks between the IRA and the British government are saturated with passion and emotion as hope for a settlement ebbs and flows. They reveal the often-confrontational character of conversations and arguments in ways rarely allowed to surface in official accounts. But they also provide evidence of the occasional transfer of positive emotional power across this boundary, and a shared emotional commitment to the search for peace.

The Exceptional Case of Northern Ireland In the last third of the twentieth century, while most of Western Europe was experiencing a period of unprecedented peace and stability, Northern Ireland became an intensively militarized society embroiled in an apparently endless conflict. The conflict was finally brought to an end in the 1990s not through the marginalization and defeat of those engaged in a violent challenge to the state, but through their incorporation and through a transformation of structures of governance and of the maintenance of order. The Northern Ireland conflict demonstrated that a long-established and stable democracy such as the United Kingdom could still face the spectre of civil war in one of its parts in the late twentieth century. And, notwithstanding the radical ideas circulating within militant movements, it was essentially a family dispute within western liberal democracy in which all sides invoked the principles of majority rule, territorial integrity, self-determination, and popular sovereignty. In a time when political violence is frequently represented as a pathological expression of anti-democratic cultures or ideologies, the Northern Ireland conflict is a

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reminder that contention over the interpretation of core liberal democratic principles can lead to extremes of violence. There were several influential actors in the Northern Ireland conflict. Ulster unionists and loyalists, Irish nationalists and republicans, and both the British and Irish states were all important forces; influence from the United States and the European Union also played a role. Here, the central concern is the relationship between the British state and the republican movement that included both Sinn Féin and the IRA. The main contention is that the final cessation of the IRA campaign in the 1990s and the inclusion of republicans in a subsequent peace agreement can best be understood as the outcome of a long bargaining process conducted both tacitly and explicitly over a span of more than two decades. These two actors, the republican movement and the British state, actively and persistently contested the question of sovereign control in Northern Ireland. Despite the huge gap between them in terms of resources, organizational complexity, democratic mandate, and international and domestic legitimacy, both asserted mutually exclusive claims to a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. The two main unionist parties, not republicans, exerted the dominant shaping power on British policy throughout the Troubles and the peace process, while the Irish government and moderate nationalists also directly influenced events. The eventual establishment of stable government in Northern Ireland was dependent on the successful conclusion of negotiations between all significant parties. Nonetheless, the ending of large-scale organized violence was crucially dependent on realigning these two competing assertions of legitimacy and sovereignty. As one Ulster Unionist Party member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Duncan Shipley-Dalton, put it in 2002: ‘The peace process essentially is a process of agreement, compromise, negotiation between the British government and the republican movement, those two groups of people fighting each other.’²⁷

Research and Secrecy Contact between governments and armed opponents is one of the most sensitive activities in which a state can engage. Consequently, secrecy is a defining feature of back-channel communication, which makes it particularly difficult to investigate.²⁸ Participants withhold and conceal information during negotiations, from each other, from their own supporters, and from the outside world; they also seek to shape narratives for decades afterwards. Thirty-five years on, key British government files on the primary channel of communication with the republican

²⁷ In an interview with Christopher Farrington (Farrington 2006, 288).

²⁸ Dylan 2017, 343.

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leadership remain closed; moreover, documents about it have also been retained from multiple files that have been deposited in the UK national archives. Secrecy and deception present a challenge to social science research that has no direct equivalent in the natural sciences. Atoms have no great interest in concealing their constitution or the play of cause and effect in which they are implicated, but control of information through concealment, obfuscation, and misdirection is integral to the exercise of political power. As Alexander Lee puts it, ‘One of the generic challenges of political science is explaining the behaviour of institutions and actors who have strong incentives to hide their real resources and motivations from outsiders.’²⁹ The contacts analysed here were hidden not just from the public and from rank and file activists and officials on all sides but from cabinet ministers and the most senior military and police commanders. The republican movement restricted knowledge of the contacts with the British to a small inner circle. Both parties sought to misdirect those who might reveal secret talks. In 1975, British officials and republican representatives held a series of publicly announced bilateral meetings in Belfast with the purpose of drawing press attention away from the secret talks then taking place in Derry. They shaped reports and analyses by journalists and commentators in order to protect channels and conceal the underlying exchanges taking place. Still, sufficient information is now available about the operation of back-channels in Northern Ireland to allow researchers ‘to observe and analyze a phenomenon previously inaccessible to scientific investigation’.³⁰ The most powerful force in opening this case to scrutiny is the passage of time. While many of the most important and sensitive papers remain closed, sufficient British and Irish state papers have been released under the thirty-year rule (now being incrementally reduced to twenty years in the UK) to allow a detailed examination of relationships. Those who contributed to state papers operated for much of the period in a pre-digital age, before mobile phones, search engines, social networks, and online databases made archival records accessible to a wide public audience. The civil servants of the 1970s could reasonably expect that only historians and perhaps some public policy researchers would be poring over their internal memos thirty years later and that the results of this academic research would have limited circulation. They were, as a consequence, sometimes more candid than we might expect. Civil servants in the 2000s are much more alert to the possibility of instant global circulation of their suggestions and their casual remarks. Particularly revealing are documents from the earliest phases of conflict. James Jasper argues that certain difficult dilemmas are never discussed within

²⁹ Lee 2015, 3.

³⁰ Bryman 2016, 61–3.

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organizations, sometimes ‘due to cultural or psychological reasons’ and other times because ‘powerful players within the team make the decision for everyone else.’ He argues that ‘the only way we can show that issues are being suppressed is to find times when they were not suppressed—when open discussion leads to their removal at a later point.’³¹ In the early 1970s, when attitudes were still shifting, and policy positions had not become entrenched, officials could advocate courses of action that would later be firmly excluded from consideration and could no longer be openly discussed. It is harder to keep the official story straight when the story has not yet been agreed, and it is possible during these early stages to get a clearer view of the factors shaping choices and the options being considered. Despite their limitations, state papers provide the basis for quite radical reinterpretations of the dynamics at play during the conflict. The limitations are significant of course. Many key papers have not been released. Notably, correspondence involving MI6 officer Michael Oatley, Northern Ireland Permanent Undersecretary Frank Cooper, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson surrounding the approach to the IRA ceasefire of 1975 remains sealed.³² The British authorities have retained several files from the British Prime Minister’s office covering Northern Ireland in the early months of 1975, a retention unusual in its scale for this series. Typically, only individual documents are retained or redacted when the concern is to protect the identity of an individual or the details of a meeting or operation. Retaining entire files suggests a desire to conceal some more general aspect of this engagement, perhaps to avoid confirming ideas already in the public domain, but perhaps to conceal something no researcher has yet found evidence of or even imagined. Some important collections are closed to researchers: MI5 and MI6 files—with the exception of a very limited release of older MI5 files to the UK National Archives—have been opened only to those agencies’ respective official historians, Christopher Andrew and the late Keith Jeffrey, who was a historian of Ireland at Queen’s University, Belfast.³³ Other British government archives have been systematically destroyed, including the masses of colonial records incinerated as Britain withdrew from Empire. And some have been hidden from view—in breach of the UK Public Records Act. In 2013 it was revealed that the British Foreign Office had a secret archive at a high security Foreign Office and MI6 outstation at Hanslope Park, 60 miles north of London. It contained more than a million files of which the UK National Archives knew nothing. It emerged too that the Ministry ³¹ Jasper 2004, 11. ³² Dates and details of several of these retained documents are in PREM16/152, UK National Archives. ³³ Andrew 2010; Jeffery 2010. Research Guide: Intelligence and Security Services, UK National Archives. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/intelligenceand-security-services/. Accessed 19 June 2020.

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of Defence had its own hidden archive of more than 66,000 files, including thousands of files from Headquarters Northern Ireland.³⁴ Paradoxically, identifying which documents are retained can help in creating an inventory of the things that still cannot be spoken of, bringing these pools of silence into view. Continued concealment of information about such contacts decades afterwards caution us that, however many layers are excavated, there are deeper layers whose significance it remains difficult to assess. Operational documents pertaining to a sensitive topic, that is, documents once classified as secret or top secret, are often difficult to interpret. State documents serve several purposes for their authors, and almost always situate discussion within a framework of unquestioned state legitimacy. If an innovative idea is to gain purchase it has to be aligned carefully with dominant values and positions, and its promoters need to be alert to boundaries that cannot be crossed. As a consequence, some issues, including the question of whether a government should work towards a negotiated compromise with violent opponents, cannot always be openly or directly discussed but must be approached obliquely, while certain possible positions may be completely silenced. The lines of internal division and debate on the most sensitive issues can be difficult to discern. The records of hunger strike negotiations in July 1981 are a case in point. For years the issue of prisoners wearing their own clothing was treated as a point of principle on which concession was impossible. In the course of secret negotiations, through a back-channel with the IRA, the British government decided to concede the right of prisoners to wear their own clothes. However, the transition to this new position is not foregrounded in the official records. One moment it is an impossibility and a matter of principle and the next it is something that has already happened, almost as though it was policy all along. The path of change is sometimes smoothest if it can be presented in terms of continuity—drawing attention to an intended shift can imperil it. Many of the most sensitive and important interactions are not recorded in writing at all. Interviews with participants provide a route to this vital realm of interaction. In the Northern Ireland case there is rich written evidence from several different perspectives. Again, there are official papers from the UK and Ireland, two intimately involved states with quite divergent perspectives and webs of connection, as well as evidence from other states—from the archives of East Germany’s Stasi³⁵ to the US National Archives.³⁶ There is also extensive contemporary documentation from key figures in the Irish republican leadership for three periods of direct high-level engagement, in 1975–76, in 1980–81, and in the early 1990s. The republican movement was not a state, but it sought to act like a state ³⁴ Cobain, Ian (2013) Foreign Office hoarding 1m historic files in secret archive. The Guardian, 18 October 2013; Cobain 2016. ³⁵ Aan De Wiel 2015. ³⁶ Dumbrell 1995; McLoughlin and Meagher 2019.

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when it could, and it too produced and preserved internal documentation. Aware that the British representatives in the 1975 talks were reporting back to their superiors after every meeting, republican lead-negotiator Ruairí Ó Brádaigh kept scrupulous records for the IRA Army Council of the 1975 negotiations with the British government.³⁷ In creating this record he split the typing work between three individuals so none of them would build up a complete picture of the talks. When, thirty years after the talks, in 2005, he deposited the notes in the archives of the National University of Ireland Galway, he did so in conscious imitation of the British and Irish states’ thirty-year rule for the release of state papers, and as a counterweight to their papers.³⁸ An awareness of the dangers and sensitivities involved in contact with the British was a factor in his decision to keep a record of the meetings: it would help him to explain himself if he was subsequently asked to account for his actions: ‘I was writing the facts, as I saw them, truthfully . . . I would have to stand behind them and defend them for the rest of my life.’³⁹ The papers of the leading republican strategist of the 1970s, Dave O’Connell (in Irish, Daithí Ó Conaill), were quietly deposited in the National Library of Ireland several years ago, initially buried and almost invisible in a much larger collection on Irish republicanism.⁴⁰ While more fragmentary and disparate than Ó Brádaigh’s papers, they too give a perspective on republican thinking. No less than official papers in state archives, the republican documents have their omissions and silences, but, as with state papers, these silences can help in mapping out the areas of sensitivity and greatest difficulty. For the 1990s, both Sinn Féin and the British government published extensive records of communication between them, which differed only in detail.⁴¹ Indeed, the British government accepted the republican documentation of the 1993 contacts, published by Sinn Féin as Setting the Record Straight,⁴² as a more accurate record than its own initial version and revised the official account accordingly. And then, providing a link between the British and the republican records, there is the archive of the intermediary, Brendan Duddy.⁴³ The existence of the secret channel, in which Duddy was centrally involved, was dramatically revealed in November 1993 when a document relating to the back-channel was leaked to Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP Rev. William McCrea.⁴⁴ Then, from the

³⁷ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh Papers, National University of Ireland Galway. ³⁸ Remarks by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh at a ceremony to mark the deposit of his papers in the National University of Ireland Galway, June 2005. ³⁹ Interview with Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, 18 July 2012. Author’s translation from the Irish: ‘An rud a raibh mise ag scríobh ná na fíricí, mar a chonaic mise iad, go fírinneach, agus go mbeadh orm seasamh taobh thiar dóibh agus iad a chosaint, ar feadh an chuid eile do mo shaol.’ ⁴⁰ Daithí Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland. ⁴¹ McKittrick and McCrystal 1993. ⁴² Sinn Féin 1994. ⁴³ The Brendan Duddy Papers, James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway. ⁴⁴ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 232–4.

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late 1990s, a few books described the development of the channel.⁴⁵ The identity of the intermediary remained secret for several more years however, with Duddy first being publicly identified in the 2008 BBC documentary The Secret Peacemaker. He deposited his papers at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2009. They include personal diaries written during intense periods of negotiation and full of the passion and emotion and sense of hope and possibility that is absent or muted in the British government and the republican sources. These three perspectives, supplemented by interviews, allow a multifaceted picture of interaction between the parties to emerge. They provide, too, a rich view of the independent role played by a mediator whose own records can be checked against those of both parties, showing us what he was revealing and concealing and how he was framing the messages and contacts to both parties. All of these documents have to be interpreted with care, and all yield different insights when analysed through different analytical frameworks or interrogated with different questions. They show how vital public positions and the structuring of public debate were in the struggle for political advantage. Public positions often concealed or obscured underlying political dynamics and a willingness to engage with armed opponents. The efforts of the British government and the IRA to shape the public debate for political advantage and impose their analysis, efforts that were at times mutually reinforcing, have obscured the factors that sustained the conflict for so long, and the main obstacles to peace. The increased availability of evidence, both documentary and oral, allows for a much fuller examination now of the dynamics of these engagements. The struggle to shape understanding of these channels has become less charged and intense with the passage of time. It is easier to admit to a history of secret contact and exchange when there is broad consensus that the outcome justified the means. And so, given the small number of cases of secret communication for which detailed information is available, this study, combining critical analysis with historical methodologies, provides a powerful means of developing our understanding of back-channel negotiation more generally.⁴⁶

From Escalation to Settlement The book begins with an analysis of how the civil rights campaign of the late 1960s gave way to escalating violence in the early 1970s as pragmatic local arrangements aimed at keeping the peace came under increasing pressure. Chapter 1, on escalation, shows the extent of the shared interests and cooperation between the British state and Irish republicans and nationalists at this early stage and explains the

⁴⁵ Taylor 1997, 2001.

⁴⁶ Flyvbjerg 2006; Howell and Prevenier 2001.

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bargaining failure that led to the breakdown of relationships and the closure of these early back-channels. It analyses the local networks of back-channel communication that would help to lay the foundations for subsequent high-level secret contacts. The first high-level attempt to negotiate an end to the conflict took place in July 1972 when a team of six IRA leaders was flown to London to negotiate with Secretary of State William Whitelaw. Existing accounts argue that those talks failed because the IRA made impossible demands driven by ideological extremism. Chapter 2 provides an alternative analysis that re-examines the IRA’s ideological positions in the context of its negotiating relationship with the British government. It highlights the political flexibility that underlay the IRA’s often harsh and uncompromising rhetoric. It draws on negotiation theory to explain the failure of this first engagement, arguing that internal struggles and lack of centralized control are more important than ideological rigidity in explaining the breakdown. When the British government imposed a ban on direct contact with the IRA after the 1972 talks, it created a new opening for mediators and intermediaries. Chapter 3 traces the initial construction from late 1972 onwards of a back-channel that linked the IRA Army Council and the British government through intermediary Brendan Duddy. Archival sources reveal that the channel was built to a great extent from the middle out by the intermediary who initiated the contact and worked to draw the positions of the two parties closer together. It contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of mediation, explaining how an intermediary, even a private individual with no organizational backing, could acquire significant independent power and influence over the interaction between the parties. Beginning in late 1973, there was a step change in communication between the IRA leadership and the British government. The back-channel that hitherto had involved little more than the exchange of political thinking was used increasingly for negotiation on urgent issues including kidnappings, hunger strikes, and the legalization of Sinn Féin. Chapter 4 examines the modes of reciprocal exchange and protocols for communication that developed over the course of 1974. It highlights the close involvement of the British Prime Minister and other government ministers in the exchanges, and it examines the use of the back-channel to clarify the meaning of public statements. This series of exchanges in 1974 allowed both parties to test whether their interlocutors really had the authority to make commitments and the power to deliver on them. The exchanges contributed to the building of limited trust between the IRA leadership and the British government, as each side learned that the other would stand by commitments, respect the integrity of protocols for communication, and not abuse contact for direct military or political advantage.

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This new communication infrastructure, reinforced by repeated interaction and exchanges, provided a strong foundation for the subsequent intensification and deepening of political engagement. Back-channel contacts led in early 1975 to an IRA ceasefire that lasted for much of that year. Members of the IRA and representatives of the British government now embarked for the first time since the outbreak of the Troubles on a series of regular face-to-face meetings aimed at negotiating an end to the conflict. The venue was the house of intermediary Brendan Duddy in Derry. Chapter 5 offers a new explanation for the failure of a serious and sustained effort to bring a negotiated end to the conflict during the IRA ceasefire of 1975. It outlines the mutual understanding and goodwill that developed in the course of these secret talks. It shows the extent of the intra-party divisions that hindered compromise and explains how they contributed to the collapse of the ceasefire and the breakdown of talks. It argues that, in many important respects, this process was a precursor to the peace settlement of the 1990s and shared many of its key features, including a willingness by the IRA to compromise on its core ideological positions and to contemplate alternatives to Irish reunification. The ‘Long War’ that stretched from the end of the 1975 ceasefire to the mid1990s is conventionally understood as a battle for victory that finally ended with mutual recognition that neither side could either achieve a military victory or be defeated. Chapter 6 offers a very different account. It analyses this phase of conflict not as a struggle for victory but as a phase in the process of bargaining both within and between the key parties. It provides a new interpretation of the policies of normalization, criminalization, and Ulsterization that the British government adopted, arguing they were not a well-thought-out strategy but were instead the outcome of political drift that contributed to renewed escalation. Chapter 7 analyses back-channel negotiations during the republican hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. Although it has ancient precedents in Ireland, hungerstriking is a modern negotiating tactic. Time was crucial to the power exerted by the H-Block hunger strikers of 1980 and 1981, and it is a key focus of the analysis here of the negotiations to end their strikes. The central concerns are the negotiating dynamics at work in the hunger strikes and the intense struggle over time that they involved. The chapter analyses how and when the deadline set by the prospect of a hunger striker dying generated movement in negotiations and the temporal strategies deployed during the approach to this deadline, focusing on the nexus of information, biological processes, and communication. The hunger strikes distilled the wider conflict, concentrating it in time and space. It became the site of a massive concentration of forces by both the British government and the IRA, and both parties understood it as a location at which the outcome of the conflict that had begun in 1969 might finally be determined. The failure to negotiate a settlement illuminates some of the deep structural pressures working against a compromise that would end the wider conflict. But it also provides

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glimpses of some of the underlying forces that would bring both Britain and the IRA back to the back-channel in the 1990s. The Provisional IRA campaign was finally ended through an inclusive negotiated peace agreement that saw it decommission its weapons and effectively disband. Much research on peace agreements emphasizes the pressure on parties to compromise when they reach a stalemate, representing them as pushed into peace. Chapter 8 highlights instead the strategic choices made by the British government and the IRA as they nudged towards peace from the late 1980s. Progress at times seemed painfully slow. From 1989 onwards, the British government and the IRA made conciliatory public statements and gestures. Then, in April 1991, the British government reopened the back-channel to the IRA, sending an emissary to ask Brendan Duddy to act once again as intermediary. Chapter 9 focuses on the use of the back-channel from 1991 through 1993 and on the distinctive role of secrecy in the development of a sense of common purpose between the parties. It highlights the contribution of key British officials who advocated the reopening of the channel and an inclusive peace settlement. It also examines the importance of back-channel links between the Irish government and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) on one hand, and Sinn Féin on the other, in creating pressure for progress. The particular back-channel involving Duddy established a joint project of secrecy, creating a shared task that built trust and mutual understanding. Close interpersonal relationships, continuity of personnel with previous phases of conflict, and the exclusion of internal opponents contributed to distinctively strong cooperative dynamics that helped to sustain cooperation and generate substantial progress. In February 1993 the British government received, via the back-channel, a message purported to be from the IRA. It read: ‘The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close.’ Chapter 10 elaborates the sequence of contacts that led to a secret face-to-face meeting between a British government representative and republican leaders for the first time since 1976 and that culminated in a secret IRA ceasefire offer in May 1993. It examines, too, the influence of the back-channel on the joint declaration by the British and Irish governments in December 1993 that helped to pave the way for an IRA ceasefire in August 1994. The Conclusion considers why it took so long to negotiate an end to the Northern Ireland conflict, examining the role of internal divisions and leadership, emphasizing the importance of strategic action, and suggesting a more agential approach to understanding peace settlements. It outlines how back-channel negotiation allowed two key parties to the Northern Ireland conflict to coordinate their actions, and to assist each other in resolving strategic dilemmas and in overcoming intra-party resistance to compromise when direct contact and open meetings were impossible. It sets out how an analysis of the conflict through the

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lens of negotiation can enhance understanding of the factors that make for peace agreements. An Epilogue offers a personal account of the author’s initial meeting with intermediary Brendan Duddy in 1997, their contacts over the following years, and the background to Duddy’s decision to deposit his private papers in the National University of Ireland Galway in 2009.

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1 Escalation ‘Their War Got Out of Hand and Ours Got Out of Hand Too’

When the first civil rights marches began in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1968, no one predicted just how bad things would get in the coming years, that thousands would be killed in bomb attacks and massacres, in targeted assassinations and random sectarian killings, that the shaping power of violent conflict would transform Northern society, nurturing silence, suspicion, and brutality. The student protestors marching to Belfast city centre in the winter of 1968 with Paris and Berkeley on their minds had no premonition of the chaotic violence that would dominate their lives for years to come. Nor did any of the forces set to be main players in the opening of the crisis—the Unionist government, loyalist paramilitaries, the British government, the leadership of the IRA—know where events were leading. As events gathered pace and violence began to escalate, all parties found themselves manoeuvring and adapting in a rapidly changing situation that none could control. In seeking to understand the shape the conflict took, there is a tendency to concentrate on the intensification of violence, but the forces that hindered escalation and limited violence are equally important. The rising violence between October 1968 and the summer of 1972 stimulated the proliferation of new communication channels and a widespread increase in contact across political divides. There was now an urgent need to build connections between forces that hitherto had rarely communicated directly with each other. Police commanders dealt secretly with civil rights leaders. IRA leaders made bargains with British Army officers. Unionist minister (and later Prime Minister) Brian Faulkner and a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer walked up to a barricade in east Belfast’s Short Strand to negotiate directly with IRA veteran Joe Cahill.¹ Clergy, politicians, and businesspeople acted as intermediaries. Imaginative efforts were made to try to slow the acceleration of violence, to impose limits to conflict, and to maintain order on the basis of limited but tangible shared interests. Into the early months of 1971, compromise arrangements between state forces and a range of groups in

¹ Anderson 2002, 200.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0002

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nationalist urban areas, including, but not limited to, the Official and Provisional IRA, significantly controlled violence. Compromises involving the Provisionals and the British state reveal these key actors to have had certain shared interests and a capacity to cooperate in pursuit of those interests. Escalation is sometimes characterized as a distinct phase of conflict during which parties push hard for victory by increasing the level of violence.² But rather than being two separate phases, escalation and negotiation are aspects of the same relational process and have to be analysed together. ‘Escalation is the other side of settlement, and negotiation links them together’, as Zartman and Faure put it.³ Parties often escalate their violence deliberately to create pressure on an opponent to negotiate, but violence has a habit of escaping their control and can escalate much more sharply than any party intends, transforming the context in which they are operating: Conflict is escalated by a party, but it also escalates by itself. There is an inherent tendency for escalation to proceed on its own, dragging the parties along and making decisions for them, engulfing them in unintended and inescapable consequences.⁴

Analysing the failure of local bargaining and the breakdown of cooperative agreements reveals how the increasingly violent conflict gradually escaped the control of the key parties. It also exposes the underlying interests that allowed them to engage in limited cooperation and develop mutual understandings.

Negotiating Civil Rights The ‘Troubles’ began in Derry on 5 October 1968 when violence broke out at one of the first civil rights marches. The organizers had defied a police ban on the march with the express aim of provoking confrontation, but the violence that ensued went far beyond their expectations. It also generated interventions by both the British and Irish governments and produced a surge of support for the civil rights movement.⁵ In doing so, it demonstrated that violent confrontation could generate a swift response from the centres of power: it validated the organizers’ refusal to modify their route or accept the ban.⁶ The newly formed Derry Citizens Action Committee (DCAC) now planned a second march for 16 November 1968. This march, which was expected to be much

² Zartman 2009, 329. ³ Zartman and Faure 2005c, 295. ⁴ Zartman and Faure 2005a, 8. ⁵ Ó Dochartaigh 2005, 24–5.

⁶ McCann 1974, 38–51.

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larger than that of 5 October, was also banned and so the stage seemed set for much more serious violence than the trouble of 5 October. As with many mass movements, the civil rights movement derived much of its bargaining power from the potential for violence and disorder communicated by its capacity for mobilization.⁷ But an uncontrolled escalation of violence was not in the movement’s interests. And so, in the weeks before the march—which attracted some 15,000 participants, the largest attendance at any civil rights protest—it sought to exert leverage by at once communicating the possibility of violence and sharing with the police its commitment to minimizing it. In advance of the march, both the RUC and the DCAC secretly decided they would concede on certain issues in order to avoid violence. The Inspector General of the RUC gave ‘very strict’ instructions that batons and ‘other forcible methods’ were not to be used to halt the marchers. If marchers insisted on pushing through police lines, the police would give way. For their part, the DCAC resolved the night before the march that it would be content with a ‘symbolic confrontation’ whereby several committee members would cross the police line to defy the ban. They would not attempt to lead all the marchers along the banned route.⁸ Civil rights leader Ivan Cooper later recalled how the police and a few of the civil rights leaders secretly coordinated their efforts to avert confrontation, unknown to the marchers and even to many of the organizers: I had spoken to the police beforehand and . . . what I had arranged with the police was a breaking of the barrier by a number of people, one of them was James Doherty, Michael Canavan, [i.e. the leadership of the civil rights committee] and they ceremoniously broke the barrier. But there were so many people there that day I knew that they [the police] had no possible chance of containing that crowd.⁹

Few of the marchers had any idea there was an understanding with the police. Indeed, there were plenty in the crowd who would have welcomed violent confrontation, and the stewards marshalling the crowd had their work cut out to prevent some of them attacking the police.¹⁰ In accordance with the deal brokered before the march, rather than preventing the leaders from breaching the barriers, the police permitted a symbolic breach of the line by four of the protest leaders.¹¹ In return, the civil rights leaders did not attempt to lead the crowd in forcing their way through the police lines but directed them to take other routes into the city centre.

⁷ McAdam 1983, 735. ⁸ Prince and Warner 2012, 113. ⁹ Ivan Cooper interview, 16 March 2004. ¹⁰ Doherty 2001, 69–79; McClean 1983, 52–5. ¹¹ Prince and Warner 2012, 113.

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The efforts to avert confrontation at the march involved figures located at the boundary between the two parties, playing an intermediary role even if they were fully committed to one of those parties; such figures are, in Louis Kriesberg’s terms, ‘quasi-mediators’.¹² In November 1968, Ivan Cooper was a prominent civil rights leader who, in February 1969, would be returned to Stormont as an Independent MP; in August 1970 he became a founding member of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party. But as a Protestant and former Young Unionist Party activist he also had extensive connections in the Protestant community. At the head of the march on 5 October, he had bumped into a neighbour: In the two rows of police that were there to stop the march, which ultimately used the batons, the person in charge of the front row was my neighbour . . . from Killaloe, Billy N—. The first thing he said to me was ‘What are you doing here with this bunch of Fenians, Ivan?’¹³

Figures such as Cooper were well positioned to act as intermediaries because of their contacts across the political divide. But their cross-community connections could also make them a focus of suspicion at times. Regardless of personal background, the roles of advocate for one side and intermediary between the two could easily became blurred. Up close, the interface between the two sides looked like a broad frontier, a zone of engagement and shifting positions rather than a clear line of division. Quasi-mediators had to be careful not to move too far ahead of their own party. If the parties backed away from engagement, and the lines of demarcation between the two sides suddenly became much sharper, they could find themselves exposed. Negotiation and compromise could not be avoided of course. They were a ubiquitous feature of protest, even for those most wary of any compromise with the state. Radical civil rights leader Bernadette (née Devlin) McAliskey (Fig. 1.1) recalled the limited but direct engagement with police that often took place at the front line of demonstrations: That was an ongoing everyday thing, debating with the police and arguing with the police and negotiating with the police. But at a very immediate tactical level on the ground you were already standing here with all your troops and they were already standing there with all theirs . . . . The police were telling me they were going to read the Riot Act in three minutes; of course, once they read the Riot Act they could then charge. And you’d be negotiating with them to say ‘Look, here’s what’s going to happen, you read the Riot Act, you charge, there’s going to be a riot; you’re going to cause it.’

¹² Kriesberg 1991.

¹³ Ivan Cooper interview, 16 March 2004.

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Fig. 1.1 Bernadette Devlin, Civil Rights leader and MP for Mid-Ulster, in Derry on 14 August 1969, the day British troops were deployed in the city Source: Evening Standard via Getty Images.

Even in these direct encounters, engagement could stretch beyond a simple exchange of positions to concrete proposals for compromise that involved direct concessions: Like you’d be saying ‘ . . . People here can see there’s no way through here but unless they’re allowed then to register a protest and sit here peacefully for half an hour; so you’re either going to have to allow people, since you won’t let us through, [to] sit here peacefully, register their protest and then get up and walk away’ . . . and then of course the police would be saying ‘no, we are going to read the Riot Act now so you have three minutes to tell them’ . . . . [and] I was saying ‘I don’t negotiate like that, sorry, I’m going to sit down now and when you come in three minutes good luck to you.’

Such short-term agreements, in which police prevented marchers proceeding along a particular route yet allowed them to register their protest, were a frequent

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occurrence. But more extended engagement, particularly where it took place in secret, aroused mistrust. McAliskey saw several dangers: It’s a principle that I believe that when you cross a line you get stuck there; I have never engaged in a non-transparent negotiation with an opponent in my life. I think the danger of it is that in first allowing yourself to be the person who negotiates in secret, to be drawn in to the confidence; you take the conscious step to dislocate yourself from everybody else . . . people would say ‘why would that person be chosen’; you can say maybe they’re better negotiators, maybe they are more likely to see the alternative point of view. To my mind they are more likely to be vulnerable to the flattery of having been chosen. So you’re already losing. Then you have taken the second step, which is—none of this is personal—and you’ve just personalized it. So, if this is secret and you agree to that then you’ve also cut yourself off from the critical analysis of different viewpoints that could better inform what’s happening here. Now, the power base with which you’re negotiating of course hasn’t done that. So, you’re now already negotiating with the entire collective and you’ve cut yourself off from your own intellectual [support].¹⁴

The Derry agreement illustrates the ambiguity of compromise. The RUC and civil rights leaders had both made concessions, but who had conceded most? Senior RUC officers in Derry had advised the Stormont government beforehand that they might not be able to enforce the ban and recommended that the march should be allowed to take place. However, hard-line Home Affairs Minister Bill Craig had insisted they stop it.¹⁵ And so by taking a conciliatory approach on the day of the march, the RUC had de facto frustrated the confrontational intent of the Home Affairs Minister. But without the secret agreement the police might have had to stand aside and allow the march to proceed to its destination, which would have been a public humiliation for Stormont. The civil rights leaders might have been able to march along the original route without any violence and without compromising.

Talking to Militants Negotiations aimed at short-term de-escalation continued throughout the civil rights campaign and with ever greater urgency as the situation spun out of control in 1969. Almost every local agreement during this early period involved the same ¹⁴ Bernadette McAliskey interview, at ‘The Human Rights Scholar: Activist or Activist-Scholar’, Kevin Boyle symposium at NUI Galway, 28 November 2014. ¹⁵ Prince and Warner 2012, 112.

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basic exchange: the security forces would exercise restraint in return for an end to, or reduction in, rioting or violence. This exchange often involved the RUC withdrawing from nationalist areas such as the Bogside in return for moderates’ ensuring that there was an end to disorder. Agreements of this kind were successfully brokered in Derry in January and April 1969.¹⁶ Contact could be made and compromises agreed in the most unpromising of circumstances. In his testimony to the Scarman Tribunal, RUC District Inspector Francis Armstrong recalled how he managed to make contact with those on the other side during a riot in Derry in July 1969: I decided I would go down and speak to [the Civil Rights stewards], to see if there was any assistance that I could give them . . . . as soon as I appeared in Butcher Street a hail of stones came over, but I nevertheless walked on down and they stopped throwing stones as I approached them. I spoke to the Civil Rights stewards and asked them if there was any assistance that I could give them. They said that they felt it would be an advantage if I removed what police there were in the Diamond area, back up Bishop St, the purpose being that this crowd were obviously wanting to attack the police, and if the police were not to be seen, that this would make the job of the civil rights stewards more easy. I considered this a reasonable suggestion, and I went back up to the Diamond. There was a sergeant and about six constables on duty in the Diamond area, and I withdrew all of them up Bishop St to London St . . . ¹⁷

As violence escalated, the police and later the military made contact with both moderates and militants. In the days before the contentious Apprentice Boys of Derry march of 12 August 1969, District Inspector Armstrong sought a secret meeting with Seán Keenan, then the most prominent republican in Derry: when the IRA spilt a few months later Keenan would help to set up the Provisionals. He was also one of the two leading figures in the Derry Citizens Defence Association (DCDA) that was preparing for local ‘defence’ on the day of the march. The Principal of a local Christian Brothers School, a Brother O’Sullivan, sought to act as an intermediary between Armstrong and Keenan. Armstrong would later tell the Scarman Inquiry of that abortive attempt to meet: I did make an attempt to meet the chairman of the newly formed DCDA through a third party who arranged the meeting. I was most anxious to meet this man to discuss the 12th August from the point of view of keeping peace in the city. I would have been prepared to tell him what I proposed to do as far as the police point of view was concerned, and I hoped that he would tell me what he was ¹⁶ Doherty 2001, 109–10; Ó Dochartaigh 2005, 45. ¹⁷ District Inspector Armstrong, testimony to the Scarman Tribunal.

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  arranging and that we would be on the same wavelength, so to speak, when the 12th August arrived. However, although I turned up at the third-party house, and while Mr. Keenan did come to that house and spoke to the third party, he was not prepared to meet me . . . as a policeman.

Keenan, for his part, explained to the Inquiry how he had responded to the request to meet with Armstrong: I was asked along by a Brother O’Sullivan, a Christian Brother. I was asked to meet him [O’Sullivan] on a Saturday night . . . I only arrived home from work at seven and rang him up and told him I would be there at 8 o’clock. He asked me if I would like to meet a District Inspector . . . I said: No; that I would talk to anyone else other than the police in order to keep the peace.¹⁸

Armstrong’s effort to negotiate with a prominent republican was a measure of the extent to which the advantage had passed to the opposition in the summer of 1969. As reasons for the RUC to compromise had grown, reasons for republicans to adopt conciliatory positions had diminished. Confrontation at the march would advantage republicans by weakening the Stormont government and undermining the RUC. But Keenan had other reasons not to engage with Armstrong that night: ‘I could not meet anyone as Chairman of the Defence Association without first putting it to that Committee, and as I had no prior knowledge of this arrangement I could not do it.’ Contacts, then, raised questions of authority, sanction, and propriety. Once a leader took part in a secret encounter without the sanction of their organization, dangers arose. A few days after this abortive attempt at mediation, violence at the Apprentice Boys’ march reached such a pitch that the RUC was unable to contain it. British troops were deployed on the streets of Belfast and Derry for the first time since the 1920s and contact between state forces and republican leaders moved on to a new level.

Negotiating with the British Army At 5.15 p.m. on the afternoon of 14 August 1969, jeeps and lorries packed with heavily armed British troops swept into the centre of Derry and steel-helmeted soldiers rushed past the shops in Waterloo Place towards the rioting at the edge of the Bogside. For three days and nights, people in the area had fought to keep the police out. Carrying heavy barricades and dragging coils of barbed wire behind them, the soldiers ran through the ranks of the police and quickly dragged the

¹⁸ Seán Keenan, testimony to the Scarman Tribunal.

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barricades across William Street and Waterloo Street. With CS gas canisters clipped to their belts and black gas masks hiding their faces, they then took up positions alongside helmeted RUC men and groups of recently mobilized BSpecials. It was a moment of huge uncertainty and tension. The stance of the troops suggested they were there as heavily armed reinforcements for the RUC to prevent rioters from breaking through to the city centre. But the barriers they had pulled into place were also a sign that they were not, for the moment, planning to advance. Violence might easily have escalated at this point. In these uncertain minutes, as rioters considered whether to continue throwing stones, those who had organized the rebellion, including republicans and left-wing radicals as well as civil rights leaders and Nationalist Party figures, moved to prevent escalation, linking arms and, with some difficulty, pushing the boisterous crowd back from the front line. Then, Defence Committee leader Paddy Doherty walked slowly forward, megaphone in hand, towards the line of gas-masked troops arrayed behind the barbed wire barricades.¹⁹ As he walked, he addressed the troops through the same megaphone he had used to appeal for an end to rioting. Gentlemen please, it is very important. Is there a superior officer in the area? . . . Someone take a message, gentlemen, to the officer commanding this force that I Patrick Doherty, representing the people of this city, wish to speak with an officer . . . we ask in the name of God that you would please speak to us. The use of force at this juncture may cause the loss of a lot of life. Please, gentlemen.²⁰

The tone of Doherty’s appeal is a reminder that there was no certainty that the British Army would recognize these rebellious forces or even agree to communicate with them. To Doherty’s surprise, his initiative drew a quick and positive response. The army opened the barrier and invited him through.²¹ Doherty and Michael Canavan, accompanied and supported by British Labour MP Stan Orme, quickly reached an agreement with Lieutenant Colonel Todd, the officer commanding British troops in the city.²² The Defence Association would maintain peace in the Bogside if the RUC and B-Specials were withdrawn and the army made no attempt to enter the area. Thus was an important new channel established, linking

¹⁹ Doherty 2001,146–8. ²⁰ ‘Talking to British Troops 1969’, Northern Ireland 1969. RTE Archives, 1969. http://www.rte.ie/ archives/exhibitions/1042-northern-ireland-1969/1048-august-1969/320433-troops-go-into-derry/video ²¹ No Go—The Free Derry Story (2006) Vinny Cunningham. Open Reel productions, Derry. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4Ai6QND-vc ²² Lt Col WAE Todd, testimony to the Scarman Tribunal; Doherty 2001, 146–50.

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militant forces in the nationalist community directly to the British state for the first time. This initial compromise reflected some of the deep underlying political dynamics, most importantly the reluctance of the British state to assist the Unionist government in suppressing a popular rebellion by the minority community. To the dismay of many RUC men and B-Specials, their officers ordered them to withdraw from the front lines. The soldiers who had appeared to be allies arriving to reinforce them had immediately made a bargain with their enemies. The Defence Association now assumed responsibility for maintaining order within the area in liaison with the British Army. Over the following weeks the Defence Association used the barricades as a bargaining counter as it pressed the British government for radical political changes. British Army commanders on the ground were now among the strongest and most sympathetic advocates of the Defence Association’s case within the state apparatus and relations were good. In a photograph of Defence Committee members taken ten days after the troops had arrived, Lieutenant Colonel Milmann, Commander of the 1st Battalion, Queen’s Own Regiment, stands beside senior republican Seán Keenan, both men relaxed and smiling, Keenan with a cigarette in hand. Keenan would become a prominent Provisional republican. Also pictured are Keenan’s fellow Citizens’ Action Committee members, John Hume and Paddy Doherty.²³ A few weeks later, Brigadier Peter Leng, the overall commander of troops in Derry, wrote to Headquarters Northern Ireland in terms that strongly endorsed the arguments of the Defence Association, advising that a new locally recruited police force be established for the city: The RUC are accepted by the Protestants, but the Catholics are totally and completely clear that they will never accept them again . . . .The RUC is the heart of the problem in Londonderry. No amount of disguising the present RUC in the form of stronger Catholic representation or injecting new leaders to the old force will work. A completely new force must be found.²⁴

In the beginning then, the British Army and the Defence Associations were partners of a kind, cooperating to prevent escalation, maintain public order, and even advocate for political change. Violent escalation had prompted the building of these strong new channels of communication between the British state and militant forces in the nationalist community.

²³ Photo by Larry Doherty c/o Victor Patterson, Belfast. https://victorpatterson.photoshelter.com/ image/I0000GMXHlYQyn1Y ²⁴ ‘RUC—City Londonderry’. Brig PJH Leng to Major General Toler at HQNI, 11 September 1969, WO305/3147, UK National Archives.

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West Belfast In west Belfast, there was similarly close cooperation: here, the army and senior reformist figures in the RUC accorded a high degree of recognition to the local Defence Association and in particular to Jim Sullivan, the IRA Commander in the Lower Falls. RUC District Inspector Frank Lagan was a central figure in this cooperation. Himself a Catholic, Lagan was a native of Lisnamuck, at the foot of the Glenshane Pass in rural county Derry. Here, republican politics and nationalist culture and sports were all strong. Brackaghreilly Hall, where People’s Democracy marchers had stayed overnight on their Long March from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, was in the next townland over; a local IRA unit was said to have watched over them. Lagan’s family was deeply involved in the cultural life of the nationalist community. But there was also a family background in policing. His maternal grandfather, an O’Donnell from County Donegal, had served in the RIC before partition.²⁵ Still, for many republicans, Lagan’s joining the RUC in 1936 had been treachery plain and simple, and when he came home for a visit shortly after he graduated from the RUC training college, his brother’s car was set alight outside the family home.²⁶ Despite this, Lagan retained a strong identification with the Catholic community. By the mid-1960s he was District Inspector for the Lower Falls, the most senior RUC officer in this heartland of Belfast republicanism. As the crisis had escalated in 1969, Lagan had emerged as one of the strongest supporters of a conciliatory approach to policing, and he became a close ally of reformist British officials. It was Lagan who brought the new Chief Constable of the RUC, Englishman Sir Arthur Young, to meet with the Central Citizens’ Defence Committee (CCDC), including IRA members, in an upstairs room in west Belfast in late 1969.²⁷ And when limited RUC foot patrols returned to west Belfast in October 1969 under conditions negotiated with the CCDC, it was Lagan and two women police officers who conducted the first patrol (Fig. 1.2). Along the way, Lagan stopped to talk to local IRA leader Jim Sullivan, second-in-command of the Belfast Brigade, about ‘private business between the RUC and the CCDC’, as Sullivan later told reporters.²⁸ Over the following months, policing in the Lower Falls proceeded on the basis of cooperation and negotiation between the local IRA leadership, the British Army, and Frank Lagan. In a diary that he kept at the time, Sir Arthur Young mentions that when he went on a walkabout in west Belfast in September 1969 ²⁵ Anon (2005) ‘Policeman who tried to contain Bloody Sunday’, Obituary of Frank Lagan, The Irish Times, 18 June 2005. ²⁶ Ivan Cooper interview, 16 March 2004; Frank Curran interview, 16 March 2004; Anonymous interview, 10 April 2017. ²⁷ Bishop and Mallie 1988, 124. ²⁸ Andrew Hamilton, ‘Almost like old times in Falls’, The Irish Times, 18 October 1969.

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Fig. 1.2 RUC District Inspector Frank Lagan tours the Lower Falls with Colonel Roger May in October 1969. Along the way he stopped to talk to Jim Sullivan, second-in-command of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade. Lagan would later play a role in setting up the back-channel between the IRA and MI6 Source: Belfast Telegraph.

with the local priest, IRA leader Jim Sullivan joined them and they walked together: ‘It was obvious that he had very considerable local influence’, he wrote,

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‘especially with the vigilantes and that he was being very helpful to me.’²⁹ The British Labour government, working through the army and pro-reform police officers, was seeking to maintain order while avoiding escalation, and senior IRA figures were helping to sustain these arrangements. This kind of arrangement is not uncommon in deeply divided societies. Research on ‘rebel governance’ and ‘wartime political orders’ demonstrates that states often secure order by agreeing semi-stable compromise arrangements that concede a degree of recognition to militant oppositional forces, even when the ultimate goal of those forces is secession from the state or the overthrow of its government.³⁰ States and those who violently oppose them have more grounds for ongoing cooperation than one might expect, including a shared interest in maintaining order. Now that Catholic quiescence had ended and mass mobilization had taken place, order could not be maintained in nationalist urban areas without the cooperation of republicans or their marginalization and defeat. The latter, if it were possible, would require a costly confrontation. In both Derry and Belfast, however, the predominantly Protestant rank and file of the RUC effectively staged a rebellion against the compromises brokered with the local defence committees. In Derry, RUC members refused to wear the new police uniforms recommended by the Hunt Commission on Policing reform, while in west Belfast officers refused en masse to patrol under new arrangements proposed by it.³¹ Tension mounted as unionists pressed for state forces to reassert control of the no-go areas behind the barricades. Billy McKee, Commander of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, later remembered a changing of the mood in his engagements with the British military: It was usually about the barricades first . . . and then it was about men standing about; they wanted that all disappeared . . . they came to us about any problems. Sometimes they came very nice and then in the middle of the conversation they would let us know what they were going to do, this brutality. Let us know they were going to use a heavy hand.³²

Unionists complained that the British Army had secured order in August 1969 by handing control of the Lower Falls to the IRA. From a unionist perspective this temporary expedient simply strengthened the IRA in preparing a campaign they were determined to launch in any case. Significantly however, Sullivan, the IRA Commander with whom the army and the RUC liaised in west Belfast, sided with ²⁹ Narrative and extracts from personal diary (Sir Arthur Young) 26 September 1969 to 14 October 1970, CJ4/153, UK National Archives. ³⁰ Arjona 2008, 2014; Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly 2015; Staniland 2012, 2017. ³¹ ‘Narrative and Extracts from Personal Diary’ (Sir Arthur Young), 26 September 1969 to 14 October 1970, CJ4/153, UK National Archives. ³² Billy McKee interview, 3 December 2014.

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the ‘Official’ faction against the more militant Provisionals when the republican movement split in 1970. The Official IRA called a permanent ceasefire in 1972. They then gradually moved towards a position of neutrality towards the state, and eventually towards support for security force repression of the Provisional IRA.³³ That is, for some sections of the IRA, and for figures such as Sullivan, who was elected to Belfast City Council in 1973 and served as a Councillor for several years, this early cooperation was actually part of a longer-term trajectory towards an, albeit uneasy, rapprochement with the state. And compromise arrangements involved difficult decisions for republicans as well as for the British, opening figures like Sullivan to criticism from others within the movement. Gerry Adams, then a young republican activist in west Belfast, recalls that he and others felt it wasn’t appropriate for Sullivan to escort Sir Arthur Young around the barricades in late 1969.³⁴ From the first deployment of British troops in Derry and Belfast in August 1969, the army and oppositional forces had brokered compromises. By the spring of 1970, however, it was clear that reforms would be limited and that there were no plans for fundamental changes to the structures of government. The Unionist government at Stormont remained in power, but now the British Army would maintain its control. And so, with Unionist control unchanged, with the issue of policing unresolved, and with the army increasingly perceived in a more negative light, local compromises started to break down.

Pressures against Compromise There was an important change in the wider political context on 19 June 1970 when Prime Minister Edward Heath took office in London at the head of a newly elected Conservative Government. A new Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, took over responsibility for relations with the Unionist government in Northern Ireland. Partly because the Conservatives believed that unionists had been pressured too much by Labour, and partly in order to lighten the workload on the Home Office, Maudling eased off on the direct supervision of both Stormont and the British Army.³⁵ The result was to shift power downwards, from the Home Office in London back to the Unionist government, and from the political level down to the operational, allowing the army more autonomy. The army now became more susceptible to pressure and influence from the Unionist government. Several days after the new government took office in London, a local compromise arrangement in Derry became a focus of contention. Following the arrest ³³ Hanley and Millar 2010. ³⁵ Smith 2011.

³⁴ Gerry Adams interview, 6 September 2008.

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of Bernadette Devlin on 26 June for her part in the disturbances of August 1969, large-scale rioting broke out in Derry and continued for three days. On Sunday 28 June, a delegation including Catholic moderates such as John Hume but also Michael Canavan—who had close relationships with republicans—and left-wing radical Eamonn McCann, met in Derry with the local army commander and with RUC Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan. Lagan had recently been promoted and transferred from west Belfast to Derry to take charge of the RUC in the city. It was agreed that soldiers and police would stay out of the Bogside for an initial period of two weeks while a local committee would work to prevent renewed rioting.³⁶ RUC Chief Constable Sir Arthur Young recorded in his diary that ‘both the police and the army had been withdrawn’ and that the General Officer Commanding (GOC) had concurred with this.³⁷ The agreement was based on their shared interest in ending street violence. The political reaction to this local agreement points up how difficult it was to sustain such compromises. After the meeting, John Hume issued a statement indicating an agreement had been reached, partly to demonstrate that moderates were still in a position to secure concessions from the army. The subsequent press coverage undermined the compromise by making it a focus for unionist disquiet. The following day, at a meeting of the Stormont Joint Security Committee (JSC) the Stormont Minister for Home Affairs asked for ‘clarification of the reported agreement between the Army and Mr Hume’.³⁸ The response of LieutenantGeneral Sir Ian Freeland, the GOC, was defensive, dismissing the report as a ‘fabrication’ and insisting there had been ‘no formal agreement. All that had been arranged was that for an initial period of a fortnight the apparent presence of troops would be reduced in an attempt to defuse the situation. There would be no reduction in actual Army availability in the area.’ He was acknowledging that there had indeed been an agreement to keep troops out of the Bogside but sought to minimize its significance. In response, ‘The [Northern Ireland] Prime Minister and others expressed concern about creating another “no go” situation in the area and the disastrous effect this would have on the situation in Belfast.’ The Unionist government feared that a new ‘no-go’ area in Derry could stoke further violence in Belfast where six people were shot dead at sectarian interfaces that weekend, five of them killed by the Provisional IRA. The contrast between the Derry meeting and the Stormont Joint Security Committee meeting points up the imbalance between nationalist and unionist influence on the British government and army. While the leader of the nationalist opposition John Hume was involved, with others, in making a tentative deal with ³⁶ Ó Dochartaigh 2005, 184–7. ³⁷ Narrative and extracts from personal diary (Sir Arthur Young), 26 September 1969 to 14 October 1970, CJ4/153, UK National Archives. ³⁸ Minutes of a meeting of the Joint Security Committee, 29 June 1970, DEFE13/731, UK National Archives.

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local military and police commanders for minor localized adjustments in behaviour, Unionist leaders were meeting regularly with the head of the British Army and the British government’s political representatives as colleagues and, to a certain extent, their political masters. Channels of influence between nationalists and the British state were ad hoc and irregular, while those between unionists and the state were robust and deeply institutionalized. Engagement through these structures bound the British government and army ever more tightly to unionism. After the meeting, the Joint Security Committee issued a delicately balanced statement that acknowledged Hume’s role but denied there had been an agreement: The Committee wishes to make it clear that no agreement with Mr John Hume or with any representatives of the Bogside area has been made. Last night Army and police officers met Mr Hume to discuss possible ways of defusing the situation.³⁹

The public announcement of this agreement had helped to undermine the compromise. In this case, it was not only, or even primarily, because unionist ministers opposed the measures but because they felt the need to oppose such compromises publicly in order to secure their right flank and stave off pressure from more extreme loyalists. Secrecy ensured that sensitive compromises did not become political issues. Shielding political figures from knowledge of such arrangements protected them from having to rigidly oppose flexible measures that might ultimately serve their interests by controlling violence. The controversy also illuminates the dynamics of mediation. In this case John Hume acted as an insider-partial mediator,⁴⁰ valuable for his mediation efforts precisely because he was strongly identified with the nationalist community rather than being neutral. His value to the military came from his ability to persuade those on the nationalist side to compromise. But the means Hume employed to do so—a public statement—caused problems. One purpose of Hume’s statement was to convince nationalists to stop rioting by emphasizing that the British had made a significant concession. But this concession by the army was only sustainable if it was not publicly presented as a concession. Publicity could undermine the original purpose of the agreement. A central feature of later secret agreements between the IRA and the British government was the commitment that concessions by one party would not be claimed publicly by the other side as a victory, for the very practical reason that this would make it more difficult for the opposing party to deliver. John Hume’s high public profile complicated matters. A public figure acting as a mediator has interests of their own, especially the need to demonstrate their

³⁹ The Irish Times, 30 June 1970.

⁴⁰ Wehr and Lederach 1991.

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influence to both their base and their opponents. Hence, John Hume had strong motivations to publicize mediation efforts and to emphasize the extent of concessions made. For parties to negotiation however, success often depends on minimizing the distance travelled and playing down any concessions. For this reason, there were significant drawbacks for parties to negotiation in allowing any public figure to play the role of intermediary or mediator.

Breakdown Despite mounting tension and violence, communication and cooperation between IRA leaders and British commanders continued into early 1971. The story of the subsequent escalation of violence is frequently told as one in which the opposing parties emerged in their true colours. Republicans see this as a phase in which the British state is exposed as imperialist.⁴¹ For unionists, it is the period when the IRA begins an aggressive campaign that it had been conspiring to launch all along. But the escalation of violence was the result in part of a breakdown in relations that escaped the control of both parties. The basis for secret engagement in late 1970 and early 1971 had been a shared interest in maintaining order and avoiding head-on confrontation at a time when neither party was prepared for it. Many IRA leaders had deeply conservative attitudes and valued high levels of social order. ‘The police are not welcome’, one Belfast Provisional leader Leo Martin explained in early 1971, but ‘we can’t allow a state of anarchy to exist. We are Irish.’⁴² The side effects of civil disorder, including the lessening of social controls over local teenagers, were a source of disquiet, and in the absence of effective state policing, there was pressure on the IRA from local nationalists to exert control. Despite the belief of many unionists that the IRA had masterminded large-scale rioting to escalate violence, street violence had disadvantages for the IRA. It was unpopular with many in nationalist areas and it made it difficult for the IRA to build up its organization and train new recruits. The Provisional IRA was in an early stage of development and was not getting the space it needed to consolidate.⁴³ For its part, the army simply did not have enough troops to manage the city without the cooperation of republicans. Army officers were meeting accordingly with IRA Commanders to deal with issues such as stone-throwing by young children.⁴⁴ They enjoyed full support from the Commander of Land Forces Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley and Brigade Commander Frank Kitson, who was in charge of Belfast. Both men had met personally with senior IRA officers.⁴⁵ ⁴¹ Farrell 1980; Kelley 1988. ⁴² Sunday Times Insight Team 1972, 241. ⁴³ Sunday Times Insight Team 1972, 204. ⁴⁴ Bishop and Mallie 1988, 173. ⁴⁵ Taylor 2002, 54, 57.

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When these contacts were highlighted by unionists in late January 1971, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, on a visit to Belfast, ‘raised the problem of vigilantes’ at a meeting with senior army officers. Their responses convey the extent of their contacts and some of the reasons for them: [The General Officer Commanding Sir Ian Freeland replied] who do you speak to? The vigilantes are the leaders on the streets. One doesn’t want to talk to them but . . . . in the early days, it was maybe right that deals were struck in the interests of the preservation of the peace. Brigadier Kitson [in charge of Belfast] added that all too often the vigilantes were the IRA, but with the force levels available in Belfast, it was necessary to keep some areas quiet, in case all of them went wrong simultaneously. Brigadier Cowan [in charge of Derry] said that in Londonderry, they call the vigilantes something else, and persuade them to attend joint meetings and go to the local police stations.⁴⁶

In January 1971, army officers and Provisional IRA leaders had agreed to reduce violence in the Clonard area of west Belfast. There would be no military or police activity in the area, and local groups, among which the IRA was the most powerful, would work to maintain order locally. However, this arrangement soon collapsed. On 27 January former Home Affairs Minister and prominent right-wing unionist Bill Craig announced in Stormont that two RUC officers who entered Clonard had been ordered to leave by Provisionals. The RUC men then approached British troops who ‘confirmed the advice’.⁴⁷ The two policemen may have gone into Clonard to expose the army’s relationship with the Provisionals. Unionists now applied strong pressure on the army to assert its presence and authority in nationalist areas. A few days later, on 3 February, in what seems to have been a direct response to unionist pressure, the army cordoned off Clonard and Ardoyne to carry out house searches in these two working-class nationalist areas. The Sunday Times Insight Team were told by a military source that the aim was to ‘cut the Provisionals down to size’ and show that the army could ‘invade’ their areas at will.⁴⁸ Very serious rioting broke out, and as rioting continued into a second day, IRA members directly attacked the soldiers. On that second day, General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley publicly named five men as IRA leaders on television; he avoided mentioning that he knew their names because his officers had been regularly meeting with them. Watching Farrar-Hockley, one IRA leader remarked that it had been ‘a breach of confidence’, an abandonment of an understanding that the two parties should maintain the confidentiality of

⁴⁶ ‘A record of some points that were raised at an impromptu meeting at Girdwood Park after lunch on 29 January 1971’, DEFE 24/873, UK National Archives. ⁴⁷ Sunday Times Insight Team 1972, 242. ⁴⁸ Sunday Times Insight Team 1972, 243.

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contacts.⁴⁹ The contacts were sensitive for republicans as well as for the army, and the public revelations came as a surprise to rank and file IRA members as well as to the public. The following day proved fateful. After a blast bomb was thrown at British soldiers in Ardoyne they shot dead 28-year-old Barney Watt, an unarmed Catholic civilian who had been involved in the rioting. Gun battles then broke out during which the army shot dead an IRA member, James Saunders. Then, at 2.00 a.m. on the nearby New Lodge Road, the Provisional IRA shot dead Gunner Robert Curtis, the first British soldier to be killed in the conflict. The escalating sequence that had resulted in these three deaths had begun with the exposure and collapse of a secret cooperative agreement between the army and senior IRA members. The three deaths were a direct outcome of ‘bargaining failure’.⁵⁰ Many explanations of the escalation locate it in the character of the parties involved. In the case of the Provisional IRA, scholars and commentators have represented it as an uncompromising force determined to push forward violently to achieve Irish unification come what may. But such an analysis succumbs to the ‘fundamental attribution error’, that is, it explains parties’ actions in terms of their inherent nature rather than looking to the circumstances in which they made decisions. It does not explain why the IRA moved from limited cooperation with the British Army to head-on confrontation in the space of a few weeks. Conflict was transforming the Provisional IRA. By late 1971 the overwhelming majority of its activists and supporters were people who had played no part in its founding but had joined the organization in a context of accelerating violence and, now, these young recruits applied pressure for intensified action. One former member has described how the leadership held back its members only with difficulty after the Falls Road Curfew in June 1970, ‘We wanted to go out and shoot Brits but we weren’t allowed to.’⁵¹ The Provisional IRA, then, was moving beyond the plans and expectations of many of those involved in its founding. Temporary arrangements to keep the peace showed there was a basis for limited cooperation, but increasing violence was leading to a hardening of positions that made compromise and restraint riskier for leaders. The deployment of British troops had created a situation of moral hazard for unionists. Negative consequences of Stormont government decisions would now be borne to a much greater extent by the Westminster government and the British Army. Through late 1968 and 1969, Stormont had been unable to fully control its territory, and it had been obliged to make a series of compromises over the control of Catholic urban areas. But the arrival of British troops put greater coercive

⁴⁹ Sunday Times Insight Team 1972, 244. ⁵¹ Bishop and Mallie 1988, 173.

⁵⁰ Zartman 2009, 322.

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power at the disposal of the Unionist government, even if the use of this force required careful negotiation with the British government. Unionists now had the British Army on hand to deal with the consequences of taking an uncompromising approach; they could be less conciliatory, less open to negotiation and to short-term compromises aimed at preventing breakdown and escalation. In the absence of a high-level political agreement that tackled the fundamental issues, local agreements to control or moderate violence collapsed. Violence escalated in 1971 well beyond the intentions or expectations of those in charge on both sides, accelerated by the logics of swift retaliation, loose central control, and by what von Clausewitz calls ‘the explosive forces inherent to violence’—the unpredictability and contingency of violence.⁵² As Billy McKee, Commander of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA until April 1971 put it to this author in 2014: ‘Their war got out of hand and ours got out of hand too. We went hell for leather at each other.’⁵³ The arrest of McKee in April 1971 removed an important force for restraint in Belfast and contributed to a sharp, uncontrolled escalation of violence. His replacement, Joe Cahill, made much less effort to restrain his Volunteers.⁵⁴ From the beginning of the civil rights campaign, the escalation of violence had been accompanied by an intensification in communication and negotiation between opposing parties. Communication and compromise served to gauge the depth of shared interests, to clarify the limits of cooperation, and to accurately assess the pressures against compromise on all sides. The persistence of cooperation and secret contact into early 1971 testifies to the extent of the interests shared by the British state and militant republicans. It demonstrates the potential that existed for them to re-establish a cooperative relationship based on the pursuit of shared interests, if the wider political context was favourable. Behind the scenes, several intermediaries now sought to encourage contact between the British government and the IRA at a much higher level, and with a much more ambitious goal: to negotiate an agreement that would end the violence completely.

The Pen and the Gun As violence intensified in Derry and Belfast in 1970 and 1971, retired British Army General and Principal of King’s College London Sir John Hackett and his wife, Margaret, continued to visit their holiday home on Loughros Point on the west coast of County Donegal. On one of those visits, Hackett and his wife struck up a friendship with Dave O’Connell, a woodwork teacher in a local vocational school who lived in Glencolumbkille, just a 20-mile drive away, through the wild and ⁵² 1976[1832]. ⁵³ Billy McKee interview, 3 December 2014. ⁵⁴ Bishop and Mallie 1988, 178–9.

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remote Glengesh Pass, and his wife Deirdre.⁵⁵ Margaret Hackett urged Deirdre several times to visit her for tea in Loughros, an invitation she never managed to take her up on.⁵⁶ The friendship between the General and woodwork teacher would provide the basis for an early effort to establish communication between the British government and the IRA leadership.⁵⁷ The General had an exceptional record. In 1943, at the age of 33, he was charged with establishing and commanding the 4th Parachute Brigade, making him the youngest Brigadier of the British Army. He commanded the Paratroopers at Arnhem, where they took heavy casualties and he himself was wounded and captured, subsequently escaping. He later served in both Palestine and Egypt, being badly wounded on two further occasions. He served as GOC in Northern Ireland in the early 1960s, meaning he was the commander of British troops there during the latter years of the IRA’s border campaign.⁵⁸ Dave O’Connell, the woodwork teacher, had been on the other side during the border campaign; indeed, he had injuries of his own, having been shot several times by RUC officers near Lough Neagh in 1959 before being captured and imprisoned for four years in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol. In 1969–72, O’Connell was emerging as the Provisional IRA’s chief strategist, focused sharply on political goals but respected by Volunteers on the ground, and by some on the British side. Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s press secretary from 1969 to 1976, once remarked that O’Connell ‘demonstrated an intellectual quality greater than many politicians we had met in the North . . . . He is not a man to be underestimated.’⁵⁹ MI6 officer Frank Steele, who would negotiate with O’Connell in 1972, told BBC journalist Peter Taylor in the 1990s that O’Connell ‘was a very quiet, self-contained and selfdisciplined man. I know it’s an unfashionable thing to say but I liked him. I could do business with him.’⁶⁰ On Saturday 29 January 1972, Hackett, along with Richard Hauser, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, met in Jury’s Hotel in Dublin with Sinn Féin President Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, and the Commander of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, Joe Cahill.⁶¹ Having been GOC at the end of the last IRA campaign, Hackett knew it was Ó Brádaigh who in 1962 had drafted the press release announcing the unilateral end of the campaign. He had done so despite strong opposition from some in the movement. At the meeting, Hackett told Ó Brádaigh, ‘I remember sitting down in headquarters in Lisburn and reading your

⁵⁵ Arthur (1997). ⁵⁶ Deirdre O’Connell interview, 20 January 2011. ⁵⁷ A British government file on Hackett’s efforts to act as intermediary in 1973 provides rich evidence of his contacts with O’Connell: CJ4/319, UK National Archives. ⁵⁸ Arthur (1997). ⁵⁹ Joe Haines 1977, 126. ⁶⁰ Taylor 1997, 138. ⁶¹ Ó Brádaigh interview, 18 July 2012; Kelvin White to Sir S. Crawford, ‘General Sir John Hackett and talks with the IRA’, 11 February 1972, FCO 87/1. CJ4/319, UK National Archives.

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statement in 1962 saying it was all over.’ ‘You might have to reach for your pen a second time’, Hackett now joked.⁶² The meeting in Jury’s Hotel demonstrates the IRA leadership’s keenness to establish a reliable channel of communication with the British government. Hackett and Hauser subsequently reported to British officials on the meeting, but the British response showed that the government would be circumspect in whom they accepted as an intermediary. They refused to communicate with the IRA through Hackett and would later insist that he cease all efforts to act as an intermediary.⁶³ If these contacts were ever revealed, Hackett’s background in the British military would make it appear that the British government had appointed an official emissary to the IRA: ‘it hardly seems possible . . . that the leadership of the IRA can regard a General of the British Army, albeit retired, as a private person of no standing’, Hackett was told when he made another attempt to act as an intermediary in late 1973.⁶⁴ Equally importantly, Hackett was a well-connected public figure with a certain degree of influence, and would be in a position to pressure the British government or to cause it political damage if talks broke down. The day after that meeting in Jury’s Hotel, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen civilians at an anti-internment march in Derry on a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. In the aftermath of those killings, compromise was more difficult for the IRA leadership, but the subsequent intensification of violence provoked a shift in British government policy away from shoring up the Unionist government in Stormont. In March 1972, the British suspended Stormont and introduced direct rule from London. As Britain began to discuss the options for a new system of government in the North, engagement with the IRA began to move from short-term arrangements aimed at keeping peace on the ground to high-level contacts aimed at achieving a settlement. On 20 June 1972, Dave O’Connell and the young Belfast republican Gerry Adams met secretly with MI6 officer Frank Steele and senior British official Philip Woodfield in Ballyarnett House on the outskirts of Derry to finalize arrangements for an IRA ceasefire. Then, two weeks later, on 7 July, a group of six IRA leaders was flown to London for face-to-face negotiations with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw. While it lasted, this engagement would be characterized by closer cooperation between the two parties than anything that had gone before.

⁶² Ó Brádaigh interview, 18 July 2012. ⁶³ Craig 2012; Whitelaw to Hackett, 13 October 1973, CJ4/319, UK National Archives. ⁶⁴ Undated draft letter from William Whitelaw to Gen Sir John Hackett drafted by Philip Woodfield, October 1973. CJ4/319, UK National Archives.

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2 Negotiation ‘Dogmatic and Impossible Demands’

On the morning of Friday 7 July 1972, a British military helicopter flew an IRA delegation over the Glenshane Pass to Aldergrove Airport near Belfast, where they boarded an RAF plane and were flown to a meeting in London with William Whitelaw, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The purpose: to negotiate an end to the IRA campaign. The story has been told many times; of the IRA delegation turning up late for the rendezvous on a deserted country road near the border, all packed into one small car because their other car had broken down; of the disapproval of the military personnel who oversaw the boarding of the plane, giving the IRA leaders earmuffs for the noisy flight; and then of the drive in a blacked-out limousine from a military airfield in Oxfordshire to a grand eighteenth-century house looking out over the Thames on the Chelsea Embankment, a district where old wealth and power rubbed shoulders with the Swinging London of the nearby King’s Road.¹ The story usually emphasizes the recognition this meeting accorded to the IRA, but the meeting also served to drive home the message of British power—an educational trip for the IRA leadership to the heart of the British state. In a piece of brash propaganda, the IRA had publicly invited Whitelaw to talks on their home ground in Free Derry in mid-June (Fig. 2.1), but now they were meeting him on his home ground instead. Two decades later Martin McGuinness recalled the journey: ‘We were brought then by RAF plane to a military airfield in England, where we were met by a fleet of limousines. They were the fanciest cars I had ever seen in my life: it was a most unreal experience.’² The message of British power was amplified by the sprawl of London and by the grandeur of the drawing room of 96 Cheyne Walk, the town house of Guinness heir and Junior Minister Paul Channon. The setting helped to convey the capacity and the historical depth of the state that the IRA had pitted itself against. MI6 officer Frank Steele worked to reinforce the effect, emphasizing Britain’s global reach, telling IRA leaders on the plane that Britain could easily tolerate the losses

¹ Adams 1996, 202–6; Bishop and Mallie 1987, 226–8; Coogan 1996, 173–8; Mac Stiofáin 1975, 278–86; Taylor 2001, 121–5. ² McKittrick 1993.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0003

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Fig. 2.1 IRA leaders Seamus Twomey (OC Belfast Brigade), Sean Mac Stiofáin (Chief of Staff), Martin McGuinness (OC Derry Brigade), and David O’Connell pictured outside an IRA press conference in Derry on 13 June 1972 at which they invited William Whitelaw to come to Derry for peace talks. A few weeks later, the British government would fly them and two others—Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell—to London for secret talks. Source: Mirrorpix via Getty Images.

inflicted by the IRA, that they lost more soldiers to accidents in the British Army on the Rhine.³ The IRA leaders who entered the great high-ceilinged drawing room included the Chief of Staff and the Officers Commanding (OCs) of its Derry and Belfast brigades, some of them still in their early twenties. Some had dressed down for the occasion in defiant rejection of the sartorial standards that the setting seemed to demand. Belfast IRA leader Ivor Bell was dissuaded at the last moment from wearing combat gear, while Gerry Adams chose to wear a jumper with a hole in it.⁴ Dressed as their own version of ‘ordinary lads’, they sought to bring a sense of the streets of west Belfast and Derry with them into the drawing room, to dress and conduct themselves as outsiders who would not be bought off. When offered drinks, they all refused.⁵ The contrast between the two sides was one of class as ³ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 285. ⁴ Adams 1996, 202. ⁵ David McKittrick, Ulster’s troubles cloak long history of secret meetings. The Independent, 18 November 1993.

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much as nation—popular ideology meeting metropolitan realpolitik. They made a point, too, of refusing to be impressed. ‘I went into the bathroom, which was very untidy, with sheets in the bath’, Adams later wrote, ‘and I wondered whether the person who owned the house hadn’t been given much notice.’⁶ Mac Stiofáin recalled: We were guided upstairs to a very spacious carpeted room. A massive library of books filled an entire wall. The furniture was valuable and antique, but I would have been far more impressed had there been any signs of businesslike preparation for a conference. There were none, no proper working table, no paper for notes, not even the elementary civility of a jug of water.⁷

That refusal to be impressed reflected a keen awareness of the power of the setting. And then there is the story’s climax—the IRA peremptorily delivering their impossible demands. A rag-tag band of ill-qualified agitators misreading the signs, taking the smooth diplomatic courtesy of the British and the grandeur of the setting as evidence of their own influence and strength rather than that of the British state. They have been portrayed in some accounts of the meeting as malevolent figures but also as comical and ridiculous, fantasists acting out their part in a ‘tragi-comedy’ of mutual incomprehension.⁸ Days later, the IRA ceasefire ended in gunfire in west Belfast. Never again in their campaign would the IRA leadership get the kind of official recognition they had been accorded at Cheyne Walk. It would be a quarter of a century before an inclusive peace settlement of the kind that Whitelaw attempted in 1972 was finally concluded. Why did this first bold attempt come to nothing? Surely it should have been easier to reach an agreement at this early stage of the conflict, when the death toll was measured still in hundreds rather than in thousands? Those hostile to Irish republicanism typically attribute the failure to negotiate a compromise in 1972 to the ideological rigidity, fanaticism, and political fantasizing of the Provisional IRA. The settlement of the 1990s is explained as the outcome of a ponderously dull-witted and reluctant rethinking eventually forced on the IRA by the failure of their armed campaign. In these analyses, the Provisional IRA was incapable of a negotiated compromise before decades of conflict brought it to the realization that there was no other choice. But analysing Provisional IRA politics through the lens of negotiation theory leads to a very different conclusion with profound implications for the interpretation of the conflict and the course it took: that, from a very early stage, the IRA was oriented towards a negotiated settlement that would involve major compromises and leave some key aims unachieved.

⁶ Adams 1996, 203.

⁷ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 281.

⁸ Bew and Patterson 1985, 51.

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Provisional Politics Numerous accounts of the Troubles stress the ideological rigidity of the IRA. John Bew and his co-authors in their analysis of negotiation during the conflict refer, for example, to ‘the intransigence of the IRA—and its refusal to give up “armed struggle” until its aims had been achieved’.⁹ Peter Neumann explains the failed peace efforts of two Northern Ireland Secretaries of State in terms of the IRA’s intransigence: ‘Whitelaw’s and Rees’ strategies were equally flawed in that both of them overestimated the degree to which republicans were prepared to compromise on their ultimate aim.’¹⁰ A second central theme is the IRA leadership’s failure to understand real politics. Paul Bew and Henry Patterson refer to ‘the essential primitivism of the Provisionals’ notions of the nature of British policy’.¹¹ If the IRA could not understand the give and take required in real-world politics then it was impossible to negotiate and compromise with them—until military pressure eventually forced open their eyes, that is. Not only are they rigidly fixed on key goals, they are also uncomprehending and incompetent political actors. But the IRA is not the only uncomprehending actor posited in these accounts. In accepting that IRA rigidity prevented settlement, we are also invited, indeed obliged, to accept a reading of key British state actors as uncomprehending as well. In one of the earliest studies of British policy on the conflict, Bew and Patterson characterized the British state’s perspective as ‘a mixture of wishful thinking and an incapacity to understand the dynamics of republicanism as an ideology’ and argued that it was the ‘abysmal ignorance of the British ruling-class’ about Irish history that gave Whitelaw false hope in 1972. Whitelaw’s hope for a compromise peace, based on his identification of ‘the germs of a more reasonable republicanism’ was ‘impossibly utopian’, they argued.¹² Neumann similarly faulted British politicians for their failure to appreciate the implacable nature of the IRA: ‘Arguably it was naïve for London to assume that the IRA—at the height of its military campaign—could be “educated” or made susceptible to the British notion of negotiation as a means of teasing out a compromise.’¹³ Moloney concurred: if the British were ‘disappointed by the IRA’s inflexibility [at Cheyne Walk] they were naïve to have anticipated anything else’.¹⁴ We are presented then with two uncomprehending and naïve actors, the IRA misunderstanding the limits of its capacities and the nature of politics, the British misunderstanding the IRA and Irish republicanism. This view fits neatly with the perspective of a very different set of contemporary actors: those substantial elements in the security forces and Ulster unionism who argued at the time that military victory over the IRA was both desirable and possible and who rejected all ⁹ Bew, Frampton and Gurruchaga 2009, 48. ¹⁰ Neumann 2003, 92. ¹¹ Bew and Patterson 1985, 88. ¹² Bew and Patterson 1985, 51. ¹³ Neumann 2003, 82. ¹⁴ Moloney 2010, 98.

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engagement and negotiation on the grounds that it boosted the morale of the IRA and undermined efforts to defeat them. The presentation of the British and the IRA as naïve implies, then, that the parties to direct negotiation were essentially uncomprehending of the process in which they were involved. It implies, too, that those who opposed negotiation and were excluded from it understood its dynamics far better. Any analysis that rests on such assumptions should be treated with scepticism.

Theorizing Negotiation Compromise is inherent to negotiation, defined by theorist Ira William Zartman as ‘the process of combining conflicting positions into a joint agreement’.¹⁵ Republican bargaining positions have been treated by many writers as nonnegotiable ultimatums. Calls for Irish self-determination and for British withdrawal in particular are seen as impossible demands. In fact, the IRA carefully avoided using the term ‘demands’ in its key statements. The IRA’s formal bargaining positions provide rich evidence of its understanding of negotiation and its anticipation of difficult compromises. Studies of negotiation have discerned a capacity to maintain consistency as vital to successful negotiation strategies. As Roger Fisher and William Ury put it, participants in negotiation ‘need to reconcile the stand [they] take in a negotiation or an agreement with [their] past words and deeds’.¹⁶ Taking a position that is fundamentally inconsistent with previous stances endangers a party’s relationship with its support base but also calls into question its reliability and integrity as an interlocutor, undermining credibility with opponents as well as with supporters. We should expect a party to enter negotiations with a position that is consistent with its previously stated goals and ideals and seek to maintain that consistency within talks. Likewise, studies emphasize that successful negotiators frame the outcome of talks in a way that is consistent with their position before talks. That republicans staked out public positions that sought progress towards the core ideological goals of the movement does not mean they were not open to compromise; rather, the precise way in which their positions were formulated reveals much of their potential flexibility. But if the Provisionals were willing to make major compromises, why did they not just say so directly and plainly? Part of the answer lies with the struggle over information that is at the heart of negotiation, and in particular the power

¹⁵ Zartman 2009, 322–39, 324.

¹⁶ Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991, 29.

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conferred by accurately identifying the other party’s ‘resistance point’,¹⁷ the point below which they will prefer not to make any agreement at all. One of the greatest dangers of making one’s resistance point known is that it invites the other party to immediately lower its offer to that point. Hence, a party revealing its resistance point maximizes the other party’s gains and unnecessarily concedes important ground.¹⁸ A party will not set its opening position at its resistance point not only because parties seek to maximize their gains from negotiation but also because it leaves it with no ground to concede. Opening at your resistance point gives your position the character of an ultimatum, removing the possibility that the opposing party can claim to have made gains in the process. The control of this information is therefore crucial in determining the outcome of negotiation and provides parties with powerful incentives to conceal the terms that they consider minimally acceptable. In any case, a party may only be able to identify these terms accurately once negotiations are underway and the extent of intra-party resistance to compromise becomes clear. It is not possible to accurately read the solution minimally acceptable to republicans from their stated position any more than one can read that of any other party to negotiation from public statements. There is a further danger to a party in showing a willingness to compromise; what Jerome Podell and William Knapp call the ‘Bargainer’s Dilemma’.¹⁹ The position a party adopts provides important information about its capacity, its resolve, and its determination. Adopting a conciliatory position can communicate a lack of resolve, an eagerness to end the conflict that can have the paradoxical effect of encouraging the opponent to raise its expectations, thus making a negotiated settlement less likely. IRA leaders who sought a compromise peace settlement faced the dilemma throughout the conflict that any softening in the IRA position might indicate weakness and thus serve only to encourage those within the state who sought one final push that would secure military victory. According to Maria McGuire, who worked closely with both Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell in 1971–72, ‘It was most important of all, we felt, never to let it be thought that we were in a position of weakness.’²⁰ These two factors ensured that republicans and the British government alike had good reason to maintain firm positions in the early stages of negotiation.

¹⁷ Or ‘reservation point’. ¹⁸ Walton and McKersie 1991, 54, 61–8. ¹⁹ Podell and Knapp 1969. ²⁰ McGuire 1973, 95. McGuire fled to England in 1972, published a memoir of her time in the IRA, and subsequently disappeared from public view. Many years later she was elected to Croyden Council in London as a Conservative Party Councillor under her married name, Maria Gatland. Her IRA past was publicly exposed in a council debate in 2008 by a Labour Councillor. The Observer, 7 December 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/dec/07/ira-northern-ireland-conservatives

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Commitment is also vital to understanding how parties position themselves. A key negotiating tactic is the making of commitments that deliberately restrict your own freedom of movement and thereby demonstrate the limits to your capacity for compromise. A party might limit its options by making a public promise not to compromise on a particular issue, for example. It can then explain in negotiations that it is not possible to give ground on the issue because of the public promise. The example most frequently given in game theory is from the ‘Game’ of ‘Chicken’. Two cars race headlong towards one another at full speed. The loser is the one who swerves at the last minute to avoid a crash. If one of the players can clearly communicate his or her commitment to not swerving by, for example, throwing the steering wheel out the window, it immediately strengthens his or her position in the game. Disaster can only be averted now if the opponent swerves.²¹ The risks of this tactic are immense. If both parties simultaneously commit in this way, disaster is assured. And if the commitment is made but not clearly communicated it can have the same result. One of the key concerns in negotiation is to prevent an opponent from making firm commitments, not only because they may strengthen the opponent’s bargaining position but also because they may render a negotiated settlement impossible. Premature or excessive commitment due to lack of information about the opposing party can prevent an agreement by closing off options that need to remain open if the opponent is to make a deal. Conversely, formulating principled positions in such a way as to minimize commitments leaves room for manoeuvre and compromise once negotiations begin. In short, the IRA’s positions had to be consistent with the movement’s previously stated goals, which in this case meant aligning them with the core ideological positions of the movement. In addition, they had to closely guard information about the compromises they were willing to make. Finally, the level of commitment expressed in their stated goals provides a strong indication of how tightly they wished to circumscribe their room for manoeuvre and thus the extent of their willingness to compromise. Above all, negotiation has to be understood as a process that changes relationships, a process the outcome of which is not determined by the positions adopted at the outset. Cooperation in negotiation facilitates further cooperation and creates pressures for compromise and movement. The very fact of recognizing an opponent and signalling ‘respect for the central power position of the other side’ can improve relations.²² The process itself opens up new possibilities and contributes to changing relationships both within and between parties. As Richard Walton and Robert McKersie emphasize, ‘an additional major function of negotiations is influencing the relationships between parties, in particular such

²¹ Kahn 1965, 9–11.

²² Walton and McKersie 1991, 237.

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attitudes as friendliness-hostility, trust, respect.’²³ It is also decisive in shaping the balance of power within organizations, creating pressure to resolve disagreements and divisions: ‘the negotiation process itself may offer one element of the organization an opportunity to induce another element to adopt the first’s point of view.’²⁴ Crucially, the earlier a party is involved in a negotiation process, the greater its sense of ownership of, and therefore commitment to, any agreement reached through that process.²⁵ Regardless of the extent of their flexibility or the settlement they regarded as minimally acceptable, the Provisionals would not support any arrangement they had not been involved in negotiating because exclusion presented an existential challenge to the organization. They would oppose a settlement from which they had been excluded for the same reason that a trade union would: in denying their power position it presented a direct challenge to their authority as an organization. Regardless of the shape of the settlement, their inclusion in the process was crucial to their acceptance of it. Occasionally they made this explicit, as when Ruairí Ó Brádaigh told RTE in March 1971: ‘The IRA would not agree to any settlement in which they had no part . . . If the IRA were not involved in the agreement, it would not “be worth the paper it was written on”.’²⁶

Negotiating Positions The effects of IRA violence were so shocking and the condemnation of the Provisionals so loud during the conflict that it was often difficult for people to hear what they were saying. This failure to hear the Provisionals has hindered understanding of the IRA’s efforts to end the conflict. There is no question but that the public rhetoric of the IRA at its annual Easter commemorations or in the weekly publications Republican News and An Phoblacht emphasized core ideological positions and usually set a defiant and uncompromising tone and that key figures were often bullish in their public statements. ‘We’ve no doubt that military victory is within our grasp’, Chief of Staff Seán Mac Stiofáin boasted in early 1972.²⁷ But such messages were targeted at multiple audiences, aimed at mobilizing and maintaining morale by rallying supporters and activists while at the same time conveying resolve and determination to political opponents. It would not have been possible for the IRA to mobilize for an armed campaign, to sustain mobilization, and to exert pressure on the British state if it stated clearly that it expected the outcome to be a compromise settlement that would disappoint in important

²³ Walton and McKersie 1991, 5. ²⁴ Walton and McKersie 1991, 281–2. ²⁵ Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991, 27–9. ²⁶ The Irish Times, 13 March 1972. ²⁷ Mulholland 2002, 103.

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ways. Mobilization could only be effectively sustained if it was directed towards the unifying goal of victory. In the context of a settlement, ground could be conceded and compromises justified if they were balanced by visible gains, but core goals could not be abandoned in advance. The formal positions adopted by the IRA in the early 1970s were considerably more nuanced than the rhetoric that was deployed to mobilize and maintain morale. Indeed, a focus on negotiation was evident in July 1971 when Ó Brádaigh remarked to a reporter that ‘I cannot imagine the IRA driving the British Army into the sea, or anything like that, but I think it would be possible to force the British authorities to the conference table.’²⁸ The Provisional IRA was, in many ways, a creature of the events of 1969–72, and it was late 1971 before they got around to formalizing their position. The introduction of internment in August 1971 and the consequent surge in popular support provided the impetus. For the first time since the outbreak of violence, the IRA was in a position now to exert significant political leverage, and it sought a way to convert this leverage into political gains. According to McGuire’s account, the IRA’s initial proposals were intended as ‘an important first step in . . . establishing ourselves as a body which could not be ignored when it came to considering the future of Ireland’, a phrasing that emphasizes the importance the IRA attached to their inclusion in any settlement.²⁹ On 4 September 1971 the IRA set out what The Irish Times called their ‘conditions for ending their campaign’ and what the Provisionals called ‘interim proposals’ to the British government to ‘end the agony of our people’. Most telling here are the omissions and the discontinuities between this first iteration of their position and subsequent versions. They called for: 1. An immediate cessation to the British forces campaign of violence against [the] Irish people. 2. Abolition of the Stormont Parliament. 3. A guarantee of non-interference with a free election to establish a regional parliament for the historic province of Ulster as a first step towards a new governmental structure for the 32 Counties. 4. A release of all Irish political prisoners, tried and untried, in England and Ireland 5. A guarantee of compensation for all those who [had] suffered as a result of direct and indirect British violence.³⁰ ²⁸ Quoted in White 2006, 169. ²⁹ McGuire 1973, 27. ³⁰ ‘Provisionals list terms to end fighting’, The Irish Times, 6 September 1971; ‘Mr Heath will seek Eire cooperation against IRA terrorists’, The Times, 6 September 1971. McGuire 1973, 25–7. This is the version reproduced in The Irish Times. The Times quoted some of the text directly and paraphrased much of it without any alteration to the substance. It varied from The Irish Times only in saying that the IRA called for the ‘immediate’ release of prisoners. McGuire’s version of these conditions omits the

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Three of the five points related to issues arising from the conflict rather than to core ideological goals: prisoner releases, an end to British military activity, and financial compensation. They reflect the importance of these conflict-related issues to the movement. In every subsequent iteration of their aims the Provisionals would maintain this relatively even balance between the issues of prisoner releases and British Army deployment on the one hand and the longterm ideological goals of the movement on the other. The issue of compensation would disappear, however. It reflected an awkward awareness of the need for British financial support to underpin any new settlement. The priority of securing such support remained, but it would never appear again among the formal aims of the movement, resurfacing instead in discussion on the need for a financial package (a ‘peace dividend’ of sorts) to underpin any settlement. The condition that there be an end to ‘British violence’ would subsequently be hardened into a call for the total withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland, but this initial formulation exposed the kernel of the ‘withdrawal’ demand: an end to the intense British military presence in nationalist areas. Implicit here was a demand for policing reform radical enough to remove the need for the military presence. The call for prisoner releases would subsequently be firmed up and reformulated as a call for amnesty. These two latter points were open to negotiation across a spectrum that stretched from early release and increased remission to full amnesty in the case of prisoners, and from withdrawal of troops from nationalist areas and the dismantling of army bases to full withdrawal of troops in the latter case. Neither set an impossible obstacle to agreement. The British government was willing to move on these two areas, and significant movement along this spectrum would represent clear gains for the IRA. There were clear precedents for government concessions in the early release of IRA prisoners after previous campaigns. This left two concrete aims relating to political structures—the abolition of Stormont and elections to a new nine-county Ulster parliament as a first step towards new thirty-two-county structures. Abolition of Stormont was eminently negotiable, as demonstrated by its prorogation several months later, in March 1972. Somewhat curiously, the call for elections to a nine-county Ulster parliament was the only point that related directly to the IRA’s core ideological aims of Irish unity and self-determination. The Provisionals had not called for the British government to organize elections. The somewhat awkward call for a ‘guarantee of non-interference’ did not in fact require the British or the Irish government to organize anything at all. Implicitly, it placed the onus on the republicans and any allies they could secure to mastermind and manage such elections. If they stumbled, as seemed likely, the next step—to establish new thirty-two-county reference to a ‘guarantee of non-interference with elections’, which has the effect of implying that the British government was being asked to organize the proposed election.

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structures—was rendered irrelevant. Little wonder that this point was quickly dropped and would never reappear. The call for elections was intended to highlight the Provisionals’ Éire Nua programme as a retort to those who argued that they offered no positive alternative to the existing system or, indeed, any political alternative to violence. Éire Nua proposed a federal united Ireland with four regional parliaments. But as a precondition for a ceasefire it was both too soft—removing responsibility from the British government—and too hard—in insisting on concrete steps towards realizing the Provisionals’ programme for a federal Ireland. The IRA would subsequently emphasize that new structures of government were a matter for negotiation between all parties after the end of hostilities. In October 1971, a few weeks after publication of these five proposals, key Provisional leader Dave O’Connell proposed to the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis (annual conference) a resolution to reformulate and simplify these points, calling on the British government to: 1) Acknowledge the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without let or hindrance. 2) Announce a date for the withdrawal of British armed forces from Ireland. 3) Declare a general amnesty for all political prisoners and for all on the wanted list.³¹ In this greatly simplified version, the prisoner release is now clarified as an amnesty and is extended to cover ‘on the runs’, while the reference to British troops has been significantly hardened. In place of the call for elections to an Ulster parliament, the single point relating to core republican ideology now calls for an acknowledgement by the British government of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future. It is most striking for what it does not say. There is no demand for a referendum on unity, for actual reunification, or for the establishment of all-Ireland structures, no demand for an end to British sovereignty, and no deadlines. These omissions were far from trivial. Strictly speaking, the call for Britain to ‘acknowledge the right of the Irish people to determine their own future’ required only a statement by the British government on a point of principle. Even if a mechanism was devised to exercise that right, it could lead to an endorsement of partition. The fact that the key phrase ‘national selfdetermination’ was omitted even left the way open for a declaration that did not explicitly speak in those terms. That an organization that relentlessly deployed the rhetoric of national liberation, self-determination, and sovereignty should minimize the use of these terms ³¹ ‘Daithí Ó Conaill’s speech on Resolution 31’, 29 October 1971, MS 44,165/6, Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland.

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in setting out its negotiating position is telling. It indicates a concern to avoid excessive commitment and to frame their demands in relatively open ways. The call for a deadline to be set for the withdrawal of all British troops was clear and concrete, by contrast, but it did not specify a date, and the fact that it was a development of the earlier aim of getting troops off the streets meant that the end of the military presence in nationalist areas would constitute significant progress towards fulfilling this aim. The struggle to shape IRA positions in a way that maintained some openness was brought to public attention by Irish Labour Party (later Fianna Fáil) TD Dr John O’Connell, who was in regular dialogue with Dave O’Connell (no relation) and who would play an important role as intermediary in early 1972. In a speech at UCD in January 1972, he ‘appealed to the IRA not to make dogmatic and impossible demands as a pre-condition to a bombing halt but to accept the assurance that their five-point plan . . . be included on an agreed agenda for discussions’.³² John O’Connell emphasized above all that negotiations on a settlement had to include the Provisionals. The IRA sought to secure gains in engagement with the British government, but the principle of their inclusion in any settlement was almost as important. Shortly after this speech, John O’Connell met with a British official in the first of a series of informal meetings and stressed the room for manoeuvre, emphasizing, for example, that getting troops off the streets was the most important element in the IRA’s call for troop withdrawal. As the British official reported: ‘the emphasis was more on getting them off the streets so that their presence was similar to that of troops in England or Wales rather than leaving Northern Ireland without any armed forces whatever.’³³ Some months later, O’Connell again emphasized the flexibility in the IRA’s call for a declaration, telling British Junior Minister Paul Channon (in whose Cheyne Walk house the IRA had met William Whitelaw) that ‘the declaration should contain the idea that the people of all Ireland should solve their problems together’, that the principle of a declaration was not negotiable but that ‘details and timings were’. He spoke of a draft declaration that would be shown to the IRA, then put on the agenda for discussion between the IRA and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and that might then be discussed at a ‘constitutional conference of all Ireland’. The idea that the text might be discussed in advance with loyalists characterized it as something to be negotiated, a declaration that loyalists might be expected to contribute to shaping rather than a blunt public statement by the British government in response to an IRA ultimatum.³⁴ Before dismissing the possibility as fanciful, it is worth bearing ³² As reported to London by the British embassy in Dublin: Blatherwick to Bone, 18 January 1972, CJ4/134, UK National Archives. ³³ GL Angel, Note of a meeting with Dr O’Connell, 27 January 1972, CJ4/134, UK National Archives. ³⁴ Note of a meeting, 17 July 1972, CJ4/134, UK National Archives.

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in mind that the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, in which the British government endorsed a version of self-determination, involved input behind the scenes from loyalists and unionists.³⁵ Mac Stiofáin would later talk of the allIreland conference as one that would include all organizations ‘actively involved in the situation in the North’, a formula that accepted that it could effectively be a Northern conference, albeit with an all-Ireland dimension. Of course, John O’Connell, as an intermediary, had an interest in emphasizing the possibilities for compromise and presenting the Provisional position in its softest version. The thrust of his argument, however—that in the context of a broader process there would be room for major compromises—chimes with the way in which both Dave O’Connell and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh were speaking at the time and with the relative openness of the IRA’s formal negotiating position. This openness reflected the strength within the movement of those who sought to minimize commitment in advance of negotiation in order to increase the chances of a negotiated compromise.

Preparing for Engagement The occasion for the next iteration of IRA aims was its unilateral three-day ceasefire from 11–13 March 1972. The ceasefire aimed to demonstrate the capacity of the leadership to exert control over the rank and file and thereby establish the IRA as a viable interlocutor. Republicans were clear on the purpose of the ceasefire: ‘It will be clearly seen that a truce can be seen to be followed through, that there is a chain of command and that orders will be carried out’, Ó Brádaigh told an RTE interviewer.³⁶ The reformulated proposals were shaped by the imminent prospect of engagement. Once again, the Provisionals eschewed the language of ‘demands’ and presented their points as a ‘peace plan’. This version recovered elements of the five proposals of September 1971 and combined them with David O’Connell’s three points of October 1971. They called for: 1. The immediate withdrawal of British armed forces from the streets of Northern Ireland, coupled with a statement of intent as to the eventual evacuation of British forces and an acknowledgement of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from the British government. 2. The abolition of the Stormont Parliament.

³⁵ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 222–4.

³⁶ The Irish Times, 13 March 1972, 7.

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  3. A total amnesty for all political prisoners in Ireland and Britain, both tried and untried, and for all those on the wanted list.³⁷

Some shifts in emphasis were evident. Most significantly, the abolition of Stormont had been promoted in importance. It had been one of five points in September 1971 but was not a core element of republican doctrine, having first come to the fore in August 1969 as a proposed quid pro quo for the removal of barricades by local defence associations in Belfast and Derry. When O’Connell simplified the five points to three in October 1971, he had simply dropped the point about Stormont. By awkwardly squeezing together two of O’Connell’s three points from October 1971—on troop withdrawal and a British statement on Irish self-determination— the Provisionals made room for the abolition of Stormont to be reintroduced, but now with an elevated status as one of three key points rather than five. Abolition of Stormont prior to an eventual settlement was not an issue of principle but of strategy. It would weaken unionism of course but, much more importantly, it was a realistic prospect and on 28 March 1972, just two weeks after this IRA statement, Stormont was in fact prorogued. Elevating its importance would allow the Provisionals to present Stormont’s anticipated abolition as meeting one of their key aims. Having achievable aims on which victory might be claimed strengthened the movement by allowing it to claim incremental progress towards its goals while also strengthening the hand of the leadership in relation to rank and file supporters by allowing them to claim success for their strategic approach. The amnesty demand has become a little more detailed in this version, indicating a concern to make sure there were no loose ends on this issue as the prospect of engagement increased. O’Connell’s October 1971 points called on Britain to announce a date for the withdrawal of all troops from Ireland, but, by March 1972, there had been two significant changes. First, the IRA now called for ‘a statement of intent as to the eventual evacuation of British forces’, a form of wording that replaced the call for a date to be set with the elastic term ‘eventual’.³⁸

³⁷ The Irish Press, 11 March 1972, 1; The Irish Times, 11 March 1972, 1. There are some trivial differences between the versions in the two papers. But there is a non-trivial difference between this public statement and the version passed by intermediary John O’Connell that began ‘The leadership of the Republican Movement wishes to state that the following conditions are considered necessary to secure peace in the present conflict between British and Irish forces.’ Items 2 and 3 were the same, but item 1 sought ‘A declaration of intent from the British Government to withdraw its forces from our country along with an immediate cessation of all British Army activity in the North’ and made no reference to ‘the right of the Irish people to determine their own future’. Maybe last-minute alterations were made after it was sent to the British. From Sir Robert Armstrong, ‘IRA Peace Proposals, March 9 1972’, 10 March 1972, FCO 87/1, UK National Archives. ³⁸ To complicate the picture further, the version in the main Belfast nationalist paper the Irish News called for an ‘actual evacuation date’ for British forces, sounding more urgent and demanding than ‘eventual’ evacuation (quoted in English 2003, 155).

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Second, the reference to ‘immediate withdrawal . . . from the streets’ reintroduced the issue of the army presence in nationalist areas that had featured in September 1971. The reintroduction of gradations of troop withdrawal—with troops off the streets being the first step—established a clear continuum along which the British might address this point. Withdrawal of troops from nationalist areas and the dismantling of army posts could be presented as a major step towards achieving this aim. Troop withdrawal and a declaration on self-determination were combined in the first point, but they would later be disentangled, and the two elements need to be taken separately. The demand for troops to be taken off the streets and eventually withdrawn from Ireland had no necessary connection with the removal of British sovereignty, although the two have sometimes been conflated. The most notable aspect of the evolving Provisional bargaining position is the framing, from October 1971, of the central republican objective as ‘an acknowledgement of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from the British government’. Particularly notable is the avoidance of any explicit reference to Irish reunification. In late 1971, both Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell were publicly working to reframe the goal of reunification and reduce expectations surrounding Irish unity. In April 1972, for example, O’Connell told a public meeting in Monaghan that ‘we seek [loyalist] co-operation to build a new Ulster . . . the politicians of the south will talk about a united Ireland. Republicans reject the politicians’ concept of a united Ireland.’³⁹ Republican News put it even more strongly a few months later: ‘The term United Ireland means nothing but the incorporation of the Six Counties in the 26 County system of over-centralised economic imperialism. Sinn Féin has long ceased to advocate merely a “United Ireland” because of what it has come to mean in the public mind’.⁴⁰ Abstentionist Westminster MP Frank McManus, who was sympathetic to the Provisionals but not formally aligned with them, drew attention to this subtext when he commented that: ‘Surprisingly, the IRA’s demands are much less far reaching than those of other anti-Unionists including John Hume, whose stated position is a 32-county republic.’⁴¹ The openness indicated by these positions encouraged the British government from late 1971 to explore the possibility of engagement with the Provisionals at the highest level. The first major step was the meeting in Dublin of Harold Wilson, leader of the opposition Labour Party in Britain, with IRA leaders

³⁹ ‘Oration by Daithí Ó Conaill—Monaghan, 2 April 1972’, MS 44,165/6, Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland. ⁴⁰ Republican News, 17 November 1972, quoted in Ó Ruairc 2011. ⁴¹ The Irish Times, 13 March 1972, 7.

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including O’Connell during the three-day IRA ceasefire in March 1972. Wilson was accompanied by Merlyn Rees, shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In response to these moves the British cabinet agreed in June 1972 that Secretary of State William Whitelaw should explore the possibilities for an agreement with the Provisionals.⁴² The first formal meeting between IRA leaders and British officials took place soon afterwards, on 20 June, in Ballyarnett House, the large nineteenth-century home of Colonel Michael McCorkell and Lady Aileen McCorkell on the outskirts of Derry, just a few hundred yards from the border with County Donegal. On the IRA side were the two men who, in succession, would steer the political direction of the movement for the next four decades; Dave O’Connell from Cork, who at the age of 34 counted as a veteran in a movement whose rank and file was now dominated by teenagers, and 21-year-old Gerry Adams from Belfast. O’Connell was the key political strategist in the IRA at the time. They had Belfast lawyer Paddy McGrory join them briefly at the beginning to add an air of formality to the proceedings.⁴³ On the other side of the table were two of the most senior and influential members of Britain’s Northern Ireland team. MI6 officer Frank Steele, the pivotal figure in advocating and organizing this engagement, and senior Northern Ireland Office (NIO) official Philip Woodfield. Woodfield had previously been in charge of Northern Ireland affairs in the Home Office, and he would later serve as Permanent Undersecretary in the Home Office. In that capacity he would be involved in the back-channel negotiations with the IRA during the 1981 hunger strike.⁴⁴ Their presence was a sign of the seriousness with which the British were seeking an inclusive settlement. Woodfield was struck by the IRA representatives’ approach to the meeting and the cooperative tone of the encounter: ‘they made no bombastic defence of their past’, he reported, ‘and made no attacks on the British Government . . . Their response to every argument was reasonable and moderate.’ He wrote too that ‘there is no doubt whatever that these two genuinely want a ceasefire and a permanent end to violence.’⁴⁵ At this meeting they negotiated without difficulty the final details of the IRA ceasefire and laid the groundwork for the meeting with William Whitelaw in London two weeks later.

⁴² Meeting of GEN79, 16 June 1972, CAB130/560 UK National Archives. ⁴³ Adams 1996, 199. ⁴⁴ Letter from the Private Secretary 10 Downing St to Stephen Boys-Smith, 7 July 1981, PREM 19/506: ‘Hunger strike: Message to be sent through the channel’, 6 July 1981, PREM 19/506; The Maze Hunger Strike’, 8 July 1981, PREM 19/506, UK National Archives. ⁴⁵ Note of a meeting with representatives of the Provisional IRA, 21 June 1972, PREM 15/1009, UK National Archives.

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‘Truce’ On 26 June, the IRA declared an open-ended ceasefire, characterizing it as a bilateral truce with the British. They did so in return for the granting of special category status to prisoners, a reduction in British Army activity, and an agreement that they would meet Secretary of State William Whitelaw after the ceasefire had held for ten days: small steps in the direction of their key aims. One concern for the IRA was that they had now suspended their campaign without securing any major gains and faced the prospect of a long-drawn-out negotiation that could weaken the movement and make it difficult to return to armed action. Did they think the British government would now quickly concede their key goals, given that it had not done so while the campaign was underway? It seems unlikely, but the IRA did need to achieve political progress as soon as possible if they were to sustain the ceasefire. A statement issued by Sinn Féin coincident with the IRA’s announcement of the ceasefire provides evidence of the leadership’s intentions at this stage. It avoids talk of victory, British withdrawal or reunification, emphasizing instead ‘the cause of justice and lasting peace’. ‘The possibilities for creating a new Ireland were never greater’, it states, but ‘generosity is required from all parties.’ It sought to moderate expectations of victory and prepare the ground for compromise. The statement outlines a programme of action for republican activists that provides a glimpse of the leadership’s expectations of the post-ceasefire period: The present situation calls for discipline and forebearance [sic] on a very high level. Offensive military action only has been suspended. The civil disobedience campaign must be maintained and, if possible, intensified. Not alone must the free areas be kept intact but they must be strengthened by the erection of properly-based community institutions, as is proposed in Free Derry . . . Political activity by Sinn Féin must take place on an unprecedented scale to organize the people, articulate their demands and give them leadership and direction.⁴⁶

‘Offensive military action’ may have been suspended, activists were being told, but the struggle must continue in other forms and on other fronts. The programme of work that they outlined for their activists reveals much about the form which the republican leaders hoped that struggle would take: Short term direction will include: 1. Release of all political prisoners: 2. Abolition of the Special Powers Act: 3. Removal of the ban on Sinn Féin: 4. Withdrawal of

⁴⁶ Peck to FCO and UKREP Belfast, 28 June 72, FCO 87/76, UK National Archives.

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  all political test oaths and their restrictions on candidates contesting elections: 5. Removal of the oath of allegiance to the British crown as a condition of employment: 6. Confirmation of the proportional system of election.

The release of prisoners had been one of the three conditions which the IRA had set for a permanent end to its campaign. That they placed the release of prisoners at the top of the agenda indicates that they envisaged a political struggle over the issue that would proceed during the ceasefire. That is, the IRA did not expect to secure this aim quickly or easily in talks with the British government. They envisaged fighting for it politically in the context of an ongoing truce. Most of the other goals they called on their supporters to pursue were aimed at making it easier for the Provisionals to pursue the route of political activism and strongly emphasized electoral activity. The call for activists to work to protect the use of Proportional Representation in elections in the North and for Sinn Féin to be legalized indicate that they hoped the ceasefire would provide an opportunity to effect a deep shift from military to political activism. Gerry Adams was one of those involved on the ground, and the activity he describes in his memoir, Before the Dawn, is consistent with the approach outlined in the Sinn Féin statement. I and other Sinn Féin activists worked to generate a political presence in Belfast, and I attended a sizable Sinn Féin meeting in Whiterock. Now that we were no longer compelled to be covert, we wanted to move quickly to set up an office and engage in open political work.⁴⁷

The concluding sentence of the Sinn Féin statement invoked support for the Provisionals not as a triumphant armed group but as a movement that was turning to peaceful methods and looking to end the violence: Sinn Féin calls on the people of Ireland to rally and support the Republican leadership, now engaged in peaceful endeavours to secure a just and lasting peace. (emphasis added)

The emphasis on peace reflects the leadership’s concern to reorient the movement and its activists, and to attract public support on the basis of its ‘peaceful endeavours’. It supports the view that the leadership was trying to convert the ceasefire into a permanent end to the campaign and to effect a shift from military to political activism.

⁴⁷ Adams 1996, 200–1.

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Cheyne Walk Willie Whitelaw’s memoirs, published in 1989, made much of IRA intransigence at the meeting in Cheyne Walk: The meeting was a non-event. The IRA leaders simply made impossible demands which I told them the British government would never concede. They were in fact still in a mood of defiance and determination to carry on until their absurd ultimatums were met.⁴⁸

Frank Steele later amplified this version of the meeting, telling Peter Taylor that ‘Mac Stiofáin behaved like the representative of an army that had fought the British to a standstill . . . he was in cloud-cuckoo-land.’⁴⁹ Whitelaw’s account and, to a lesser extent, that of Steele, have strongly influenced analyses of the failure of the talks. Taylor, for example, echoes both: The British realized that the IRA was making impossible demands that no British Government could accept. Mac Stiofáin and his colleagues were absolutists with no concept of the Government’s obligations to the Protestant majority in the North and the constitutional position of the province.⁵⁰

Bishop and Mallie provide a similar judgement: ‘The Provisionals’ cast of mind left no room for manoeuvre . . . They had bombed their way to the conference table only to find to their disgust that they were still expected to negotiate’.⁵¹ But Whitelaw’s account of the meeting was part of a blame game in which all of those involved sought to avoid political damage upon the resumption of violence. The incentives to stress the ‘mistaken’ nature of the encounter were reinforced over the years as Britain’s military position strengthened further and a refusal to engage with the IRA was increasingly asserted as a point of principle rather than a strategic decision. Some of those involved on the republican side also contributed to this view of the encounter as hopeless and sterile by emphasizing their hard-nosed and defiant approach. McGuinness later told Bishop and Mallie that he ‘quickly realised that there was nothing in the talks for us. They [the British] just wanted to buy time for the truce.’⁵² Here, McGuinness presents the British as the key party seeking to sustain the ceasefire, but he had played a central role in bringing about the cessation in the first place. He had travelled to Dublin with Seán Keenan to propose the March 1972 ceasefire, providing the support and credibility of a key Northern commander for the efforts of figures such as O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh ⁴⁸ Whitelaw 1989, 100. ⁴⁹ Taylor 2001, 123. ⁵⁰ Taylor 2001, 123. ⁵¹ Bishop and Mallie 1988, 229–30. ⁵² Bishop and Mallie 1988, 228.

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to negotiate a compromise and end the campaign.⁵³ Moreover, when the IRA announced the ceasefire, the British embassy in Dublin reported to London that while the attitude of IRA commanders in Belfast was uncertain, the Derry leader backed the move: ‘The immediate public acceptance of the truce by McGuinness in Londonderry is not being questioned.’⁵⁴ Gerry Adams too would later play down the potential of these contacts: ‘In March [1972] there had been a three-day IRA ceasefire; no good had come of it’, he wrote in the 1990s as he steered the IRA towards negotiation with the British government.⁵⁵ But opposition leader Harold Wilson, who was engaging with the IRA with the tacit support of Prime Minister Edward Heath, publicly acknowledged that the March ceasefire had demonstrated the effectiveness of IRA command and control: This truce declaration has shown that if those in charge of violence call a truce then it runs. It has shown that there is a well-disciplined, tightly-knit group and their order runs.⁵⁶

The ceasefire, then, had produced a great deal of ‘good’ for the Provisionals, paving the way for direct negotiation with the British Secretary of State at Cheyne Walk. Adams emphasized his scepticism when writing about the initial meeting with Frank Steele. According to Adams, he told O’Connell after the meeting ‘unless there was going to be a political agreement with the British, it was not in the republican interest to be involved in a long, protracted truce.’⁵⁷ The fear was that the British would focus on secondary issues such as the release of internees, and that, the longer the IRA was inactive, the more difficult it would be to return to the armed campaign, thus weakening its negotiators’ bargaining power. Yet Adams’s emphasis on the need for a political settlement was in line with the approach of the leadership and it did not imply an unwillingness to compromise in the negotiation of that settlement. The British report on the meeting at McCorkell’s house in June 1972 portrayed Adams as closely aligned with O’Connell in seriously seeking a peace agreement. A report to the British security forces that same year claimed that Adams wanted to take the IRA ‘in a more overtly political direction’ but that he did not get any backing for this approach from the Belfast Brigade at the time.⁵⁸ In the 1980s, playing down the significance of these early contacts served to diminish the leadership skills of O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh whom Adams and McGuinness had replaced as leaders of the movement and many of whose policies, ⁵³ Bishop and Mallie 1988, 224–5. ⁵⁴ John Peck, ‘Local reactions to the truce’. To immediate FCO Tel No 445 of 23 June 1972, FCO 87/76, UK National Archives. ⁵⁵ Adams 1996, 198. ⁵⁶ The Irish Times, 14 March 1972, 9. ⁵⁷ Adams 1996, 200. ⁵⁸ Sharrock and Devenport 1998, 149.

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notably, Éire Nua and abstention from the Dáil, they had abandoned. Presentation of themselves as staunchly uncompromising and sceptical of early ceasefires at a time when they themselves were moving towards a peace settlement helped to insulate them against accusations of sell-out by republican voices that, after 1986, included the breakaway Republican Sinn Féin led by Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell. The latter sought to represent the new leadership as at once naïve and politically ambitious ‘careerists’. In other words, the concern of key figures on all sides—the British and the old and new republican leaderships—to reposition themselves as political ground shifted has obscured this first attempt to negotiate a settlement. Still, Cheyne Walk constituted a major disappointment for those seeking a compromise. It did not live up to the promise of the IRA’s public positions of the previous months or the conciliatory and diplomatic tone of the preliminary meeting of the British with O’Connell and Adams. This is not to say that Cheyne Walk revealed the true unyielding core of the IRA or that it demonstrated to the British government that compromise was impossible. Instead, it indicated the importance of struggles for control within the republican movement and the high expectations of the grassroots. Both served to disrupt and delay moves towards compromise. Perhaps the single most important indicator of the depth and importance of IRA divisions was the make-up of the delegation. At the meeting in McCorkells’ with O’Connell and Adams, the British had asked about the size and composition of the IRA delegation. Woodfield reported that it was the one time that O’Connell ‘bristled’: the British, the IRA man said, could not be allowed to dictate on this issue. The issue was a source of tension within the IRA. Asked if Mac Stiofáin would be there, O’Connell held out the possibility that he might not be, indicating a shared awareness between the British and O’Connell that Mac Stiofáin’s presence might be problematic.⁵⁹ In the end, Mac Stiofáin headed the delegation while O’Connell’s key ally, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, who had engaged with Hackett and other prospective intermediaries, was excluded on the grounds that he represented Sinn Féin and not the IRA.⁶⁰ A key figure who had worked for engagement and who had managed earlier contacts was pushed to the side. Contact with the British placed those involved in a pivotal and influential position, and as that engagement became more serious Mac Stiofáin sought to assert his own position as a key interlocutor. This assertion of his authority was bound up with struggles for position within the republican leadership. The size of the delegation also reflected a concern to maintain the unity of the organization by representing key constituencies, especially the IRA on the ground in Belfast and Derry. Three of the six were from Belfast. But the larger a negotiating team, the lower the chances of success.⁶¹ Delegates begin to perform ⁵⁹ Note of a meeting with representatives of the Provisional IRA, 21 June 1972, PREM 15/1009, UK National Archives. ⁶⁰ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 278. ⁶¹ Walton and McKersie, 1991.

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for one another and the pressures to adopt a hard line in order to assert credentials are intensified. Hence, the very size of the IRA delegation at Cheyne Walk inhibited progress. Mac Stiofáin’s bullish attitude at the meeting was as much a performance for his fellow IRA leaders as for the British. Adopting a hard line served both to assert his primacy in engagement with the British and demonstrate that he could be trusted not to sell out. He himself recalled, ‘I probably did about seventy per cent of the talking on our side’,⁶² even though O’Connell had been managing the communication with the British government until this point. The opening statement he read on behalf of the IRA presented an altered version of its publicly stated position. The preamble stated disingenuously that, ‘We set out again the main points of the peace plan’, but the points were different. This version now suggested a date of 1 January 1975 for troop withdrawal. The point on self-determination had been hardened up too, apparently on the advice of prominent public figure Seán MacBride, by modifying the call for the Irish people to determine the future of Ireland by adding the phrase ‘acting as a unit’, closing it up a little more tightly.⁶³ Part of the explanation for their approach to negotiation lies in the predominant understanding within the IRA leadership of the nature of bargaining and the most effective negotiating tactics, an issue on which there was discussion and disagreement in the days before the meeting. Adams recalls that he took part in a series of internal meetings in preparation for the talks, and he says that he argued against a ‘very formalized approach’ that treated these talks as analogous to the treaty negotiations of 1921.⁶⁴ The 1921 talks deeply shaped IRA understandings of contemporary contacts—Seán McBride, from whom they sought advice, had been part of Michael Collins’s entourage at the Anglo-Irish Treaty talks in London— but Adams’s comments indicate that he and others were alert to the danger of drawing parallels. They were in an immeasurably weaker position than the delegation in 1921. Mac Stiofáin later wrote that he consulted trade union officials and others with experience of negotiation before the meeting and that they had told him about the ‘subtle tricks’ that might be used.⁶⁵ They had obviously alerted him to the information that could be picked up in interactions outside formal meetings. As MI6 officer Frank Steele chatted to them on the plane, Mac Stiofáin told Seamus Twomey, OC of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, to ‘listen very carefully to this guy. What we’re getting off the cuff is as valuable as anything at the meeting.’⁶⁶ Mac Stiofáin naïvely believed Steele was being ‘indiscreet’, but the MI6 officer’s informal tone was calculated. Nonetheless, it looks as though Mac Stiofáin had ⁶² Mac Stiofáin 1975, 282. ⁶³ ‘The IRA Truce 26 June 1972–10 July 1972’, CJ4/1456, UK National Archives. ⁶⁴ Adams 1996, 201. ⁶⁵ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 279. ⁶⁶ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 285.

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accepted some very bad advice. He seems to have been strongly advised to use hard-bargaining tactics of the kind that were then widely regarded as the most effective approach to negotiation; keeping the opening bid high, adopting a tough ‘distributive’ style that treated it as a contest rather than a cooperative process. Recalling discussion of how long they would allow the British to reply to their proposals he wrote: We would open the bidding at three days and take it up bit by bit . . . [we told Whitelaw] ‘we . . . require an answer to [our proposals] by next Monday’. That led to hard bargaining, but we finally dug our heels in at one week.⁶⁷

Scholars of negotiation were pointing out in the mid-1960s that such tactics could be counterproductive and hinder agreement,⁶⁸ but it would be years before this became common wisdom. The first piece of advice Roger Fisher and William Ury give in their influential 1981 book Getting to Yes is to abandon the kind of approach the IRA took at Cheyne Walk: ‘don’t bargain over positions.’ Positional bargaining encourages intransigence, is inefficient, and ‘endangers ongoing relationships’. They do not recommend being ‘soft’ or ‘nice’ but rather that negotiators concentrate on the merits of the case, explaining their reasoning and grounding their positions in principles that both sides might be expected to accept. The IRA was aware that the Westminster summer recess was approaching and quite reasonably sought to ensure that momentum was not lost because of the break. But the sudden demand for a reply on fundamental issues within three days, intended as an opening bid in a hard-bargaining contest, set a tone of confrontation that was disruptive and destructive. In retrospect, it comes across as ad hoc and amateurish. It reflects the conflictual dynamics within the delegation, and the IRA as a whole, and the real anxiety and uncertainty created by the fact that they had declared a ceasefire without securing any timeline for political progress. Without such movement it would be difficult to sustain the ceasefire on the ground. But the Provisionals quickly made it clear that they were not setting a deadline for acceptance of their proposals. Many authors have treated the ‘deadline’ as an ultimatum to the British government to capitulate to IRA demands, but it was actually a date by which British officials would meet again with IRA representatives to provide a reply to the positions set out by the IRA. The two sides agreed on a date. The IRA did not insist on British acceptance of their proposals at the next meeting as a condition for the continuation of the ceasefire. And significantly too, British reports indicate that they did not interpret the setting of this date as an ultimatum that threatened the ceasefire.

⁶⁷ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 284.

⁶⁸ Walton and McKersie 1991[1965].

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The IRA also showed some awareness of the damage done by the hardline tone and confrontational approach and stressed at the meeting that their call for a private British statement on the two points did not require any public statement for the moment. Mac Stiofáin recalled that ‘Before our discussion ended, we impressed on him [Whitelaw] that we were anxious to secure a peace agreement . . . Whereas our original offer had been to suspend operations for seven days, the truce was now to be open-ended.’⁶⁹ He also later wrote that his priority during the truce was to make progress in organizing a convention that would include meaningful Protestant and unionist participation: If Heath and Whitelaw saw we were making the slightest headway, they would be tempted to hold their hand on an outright rejection of the London proposals. That would help to keep the truce open.

Even Mac Stiofáin did not expect the British to come back in a week with agreement to the Provisionals’ points. He envisioned instead a period of bargaining during which the Provisionals could build a stronger political organization. The prospect of such a conference may have been small. Still, it indicates an intent, on the part of a ‘hardliner’, to use the ceasefire to move away from the armed campaign towards political action. He wrote too that, ‘the longer the Truce held, the more it would produce the atmosphere and conditions that would make it possible for the Protestants to meet us in neutrally convened talks.’⁷⁰ From this perspective, a continuing truce could be justified on grounds other than concessions by the British government. It could be justified on the basis that it created space for the Provisionals to build political support as an alternative source of pressure on the British government. Finally, Mac Stiofáin’s comments on the relationship between the truce and this political initiative are also telling: As long as the truce held there was still a chance that we could also negotiate with the Protestants. Stand-by arrangements already existed for convening a conference of Irish organisations of all politics and denominations actively involved in the situation in the North. We knew of course that without meaningful Protestant participation such a conference would be worthless.⁷¹

In other words, Mac Stiofáin believed a resumption of violence would make it impossible to negotiate with ‘the Protestants’, thus rendering the proposed conference ‘worthless’. Renewed IRA violence would hinder the Provisionals’ attempt to reach a settlement.

⁶⁹ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 284.

⁷⁰ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 286.

⁷¹ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 286.

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Mac Stiofáin’s argument, in a memoir published three years after Cheyne Walk, may seem a post-hoc justification, but it fits perfectly with the tone of the Sinn Féin ceasefire statement, and it is more plausible than the argument that the IRA thought the British would quickly capitulate in talks. The truce was not dependent on the British conceding the IRA’s core demands and it did not end because of the absence of any such concession. Mac Stiofáin’s hardline attitude at the meeting and his apparent dominance in the IRA leadership was unquestionably a source of deep concern to the British. It is understandable that Frank Steele, who had been impressed with O’Connell and Adams, was dismayed at the hardening of tone and position. But there was more to this engagement than the peremptory encounter later described by Whitelaw. O’Connell was involved in extensive discussions with Steele over the phone in the following days. According to Maria McGuire, O’Connell told her after the London meeting that he was pleased and that ‘Things are going O.K.’, and held out hopes that there would be a lasting truce. He told her too that it had been agreed with the British that the Provisionals would have a place at the conference table for any discussions on a settlement. He also hoped that a date would be announced for the withdrawal of troops, to which the IRA would respond by announcing an end to hostilities.⁷² If a compromise statement on troop reductions and a major reduction in the army presence in nationalist areas might have been sufficient, O’Connell’s reported optimism is not as fanciful as it might seem. When O’Connell and Adams met British representatives in Ballyarnett House in June 1972, they had emphasized the importance of reducing the army presence on the ground: they asked whether a ceasefire would be followed rapidly by the withdrawal of the Army from Catholic areas, particularly in Belfast, and whether their patrolling could be confined to main roads . . . [they] said that if there could be a rapid reduction in Army activity this would bring dividends and create a new atmosphere.⁷³

Again, in McGuire’s account, O’Connell regarded the securing of a place at the table in any future all-party talks as the central achievement of the Cheyne Walk meeting. He expressed satisfaction with incremental progress that would secure their involvement in a settlement rather than an expectation that the British would capitulate. A few hours after the Cheyne Walk meeting, Heath’s principal private secretary, Robert Armstrong, and a colleague met with Whitelaw and Woodfield and ⁷² McGuire 1973, 132. ⁷³ Note of a meeting with representatives of the Provisional IRA, 21 June 1972, PREM 15/1009, UK National Archives.

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wrote a report for Heath that took a relatively bleak view of the meeting. ‘Mr Mac Stiofáin was very much in charge’, they reported, adding that Whitelaw was ‘clearly depressed at the outcome of the meeting, and had found the experience of meeting and talking to Mr Mac Stiofáin very unpleasant’. In discussing ‘whether the position of the IRA leaders was to be regarded as an opening bid which was negotiable’, Armstrong reported that Whitelaw and Woodfield felt there was room for negotiation on some points, and they noted the relative softness of the declaration the Provisionals had asked for: On the Declaration of Intent the formula of the IRA was very close to the position of Mr. Lynch [The Taoiseach], that the future of Ireland should be decided by the people of Ireland as a whole. As formulated it would commend itself to many members of the minority in Northern Ireland.

The British expressed doubts about the possibilities for compromise on this issue, however. Armstrong reported that it was ‘difficult to see how the IRA leaders could accept any reformulation of the Declaration of Intent which preserved the British government’s commitment not to alter the status of Northern Ireland except in accordance with the will of the majority of people of Northern Ireland’. On the face of it, this comment suggests that they saw little hope of compromise, but the broadly negative tone of the report may also reflect the way in which Whitelaw and Woodfield’s assessment was refracted through the perspective of senior civil servants at the heart of the system in London such as Armstrong. MI6 officer Frank Steele had encouraged Whitelaw to stretch beyond his comfort zone⁷⁴ and to risk great damage to his reputation and political career, and it would be understandable if some in the civil service were sceptical of the venture. Most significantly of all, both Prime Minister Edward Heath and Whitelaw advocated further exploration of a negotiated compromise with the Provisionals, indicating that they had not concluded from the meeting that no negotiated compromise was possible. Rather, they were alert to the intensity of internal struggles for position within the IRA. Heath told cabinet colleagues a few days later that the meeting showed that the Provisionals were divided on tactics.⁷⁵ Whitelaw told the Irish ambassador to the UK around the same time that he believed that ‘O’Connell is a genuine moderate and that he can be counted on to exert a valuable influence . . . If Stephenson [Mac Stiofáin] could be got rid of then real progress with the IRA might be possible.’⁷⁶ The British also asked the Irish government to ‘restrain or harass the hard-liners’ in order to change the balance of forces within the IRA leadership.⁷⁷ ⁷⁴ Taylor 2001, 122. ⁷⁵ Smith 2011, 253. ⁷⁶ Smith 2011, 254. ⁷⁷ Douglas-Home To immediate Dublin telegram No. 169 of 10 July, FCO 87/76, UK National Archives.

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The ceasefire broke down on 9 July, two days after the talks, over local clashes in west Belfast. Even then, however, both the British and O’Connell remained intent on re-engaging and hopeful that talks could get back on course. Heath told cabinet colleagues after violence resumed that it was important to seek every opportunity of reducing tension in the hope that the more moderate leaders of the IRA would prevail and that a resumption of the ceasefire might enable the Government to continue their policy of reconciliation in the search for a political settlement.⁷⁸

O’Connell told Maria McGuire he hoped talks could be resumed within a week,⁷⁹ and on 18 July Harold Wilson and Merlyn Rees, again with Heath’s approval, met secretly in Wilson’s house in Great Missenden with an IRA delegation led by Joe Cahill in a further effort to restore the ceasefire.⁸⁰ O’Connell was especially concerned to maintain a relationship of trust with the British and to avoid arousing the hostility of the Irish government to these efforts. News of the secret talks was leaked to the press, a move that has been represented as a sign of the IRA’s negative or amateurish approach, but this was apparently done without O’Connell’s knowledge, and his wife Deirdre O’Connell recalls his reaction when the news came out: I remember Dave being very, very annoyed it was all there to be read . . . eventually it turned out that Mac Stiofáin was the one . . . [who] had instigated the publishing of it . . . I think he [O’Connell] wanted to keep it [secret] because it . . . hadn’t progressed far enough and it caused quite a bit of disturbance I’m sure. The Lynch government knew very well what was happening, but they were ripping that it had come out and was published.⁸¹

Breakdown It was a confrontation over housing in west Belfast that ended the IRA ceasefire, not the failure to reach a compromise on fundamental issues at Cheyne Walk. Years later both Mac Stiofáin and O’Connell still insisted they had neither wanted the ceasefire to end nor the IRA’s discussions with the British to be discontinued.⁸² Certainly, key figures in the Belfast IRA were sceptical of the ceasefire and returned to violence with enthusiasm, but the leadership did make intensive efforts to prevent the ceasefire from breaking down. ⁷⁸ Smith 2011, 254. ⁷⁹ McGuire 1973, 139. ⁸⁰ Taylor 1997, 146. ⁸¹ Deirdre O’Connell Interview, 20 January 2011. ⁸² Tim Jones ‘IRA is ready for an indefinite fight’, The Times, 2 May 1981, 2.

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The form the breakdown took reveals some of the deep structural obstacles to a negotiated agreement between the British government and the IRA. Strictly speaking, the republicans had a good case on the housing issue. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive had allocated sixteen houses in Lenadoon in west Belfast to Catholics who had been forced out of other areas of the city. But Protestant families had previously occupied the vacant houses, and the UDA threatened to use force to prevent the Catholics from moving into them. When a lorry carrying the families’ possessions drove towards the houses, with the IRA standing by to back them up, the British rammed it, effectively enforcing the preferences of the UDA against the decision of the Housing Executive.⁸³ Notes of a meeting of senior army commanders the day before the clash records that: ‘The army [including] the GOC, CLF and Commander 39 Brigade, affirmed that confrontation with the IRA, who were supporting the Catholic families, was preferable to “the sectarian confrontation that would be involved” if the UDA resisted their movement.’⁸⁴ On the face of it, army commanders were saying that it was preferable for them to confront the IRA than allow large-scale sectarian confrontation to develop. But there was an alternative that is not mentioned in the document—that the army might enforce the decision of the Housing Executive, confronting the UDA if necessary. This was never seriously considered. For the army, it was better to fight the IRA than to confront the UDA. There is a broad consensus that the ceasefire ended because the IRA wanted to end it and that many in the Belfast IRA were happy to return to their armed campaign. Journalist Ed Moloney argues that Belfast IRA commander Seamus Twomey felt that they would be better to return to violence and come back to the conference table in a few months’ time with a strengthened military position.⁸⁵ If these arguments strengthen the view that ‘hardliners’ in Belfast deliberately brought the ceasefire to an end, McGuire presents a plausible alternative perspective. She argues that the breakdown resulted from a perception that the British in submitting to UDA pressure had themselves failed to respect the truce. Moreover, a perception that the British were partial towards loyalists had hardened during the truce, as loyalists intensified their attacks on Catholic civilians. She says that O’Connell saw the breakdown of the truce as the result of the various parties in Belfast taking up positions from which it was difficult to back down, that is, a local negotiation failure.⁸⁶ To a certain extent, the national IRA leadership felt that they were unable to prevent the IRA resumption of violence. Mac Stiofáin wrote that ‘Catholics in Belfast bitterly abused and reproached Republican units for our

⁸³ Bishop and Mallie 1988, 228–9; FCO Tel No 476 of 10 July, ‘Provisionals ending of truce’, FCO 87/76, UK National Archives, provides the Provisionals’ statement. ⁸⁴ ‘The IRA Truce 26 June 1972—10 July 1972’, CJ4/1456, UK National Archives. ⁸⁵ Moloney 2002, 114. ⁸⁶ McGuire 1973, 135–9.

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last-minute efforts to rescue the truce by negotiation’, and some important figures in the national leadership only heard about the end of the ceasefire after shooting had already broken out.⁸⁷ In any case, O’Connell’s serious and intensive efforts to negotiate a compromise that would prevent breakdown were not reciprocated with the same intensity on the British side.⁸⁸ The breakdown, then, was a product of pressures for escalation that were beyond the capacity of either party to control. Whitelaw publicly blamed the IRA for the resumption of violence, but, as Thomas Leahy points out, he told cabinet colleagues in private that ‘the heaviest responsibility for the resumption of violence rested with the Ulster Defence Association, who had never welcomed the [IRA] “ceasefire”.’⁸⁹ Efforts to restore the ceasefire resumed after the Lenadoon confrontation. However, a major IRA bombing operation—aimed at demonstrating that the ceasefire had not diminished its military capacity—strengthened those on the British side opposed to negotiating with the IRA, making a resumption of talks unlikely. On Friday 21 July, the IRA planted more than twenty bombs all over Belfast city centre. The organization gave warnings, but there was not enough time for the security forces to clear civilians. Nine people were killed by the bombs, seven of them civilians, on a day that was dubbed Bloody Friday, with gruesome images appearing on television and in newspapers. It illustrated the failure of the IRA leadership to control its violence effectively and the great risks which engagement with the IRA posed for British politicians. Bloody Friday also tipped the political balance towards a major military initiative against the IRA. Whitelaw authorized an invasion of the nationalist no-go areas in Derry on 31 July. ‘Operation Motorman’, as it was called, stripped the IRA of symbolic power and practical resources in the city and abruptly altered the negotiating balance between the two parties.⁹⁰ Prior to Bloody Friday, the British government had ruled out such an invasion because of the political repercussions for their relationship with Irish nationalists on both sides of the Irish border. The talks with the IRA had improved the British image among nationalists by indicating willingness to compromise. In this context, the bombings in Belfast provided Whitelaw with an opportunity to move against the IRA at a greatly reduced political cost. At the same time, it repaired some of the damage done to him by the recent revelations that he had met secretly with the IRA, alleviating pressure from loyalist paramilitaries, mainstream unionists, and the Tory right. McGuire’s description of O’Connell as deeply disheartened by the resumption of violence and the receding prospect of negotiation paints a convincing picture of

⁸⁷ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 288. ⁸⁸ Taylor 1997, 145. ⁸⁹ Leahy 2019, 58, citing CAB 130/560, Meeting at 10 Downing Street, 10 July 1972, pp.1–4, UK National Archives. ⁹⁰ Smith and Neumann 2005.

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an individual preoccupied with bringing the campaign to an end with some kind of political achievement and a leadership oriented to a negotiated compromise whose central element was a recognition of their political position and their inclusion in a settlement.⁹¹ Subsequent escalation is best understood not as an abandonment of bargaining and an attempt to secure outright military victory but as an attempt to get back to the negotiating table.

Violence, Politics, and Negotiation The eighteenth-century house in which the IRA delegation met William Whitelaw was built on the site of the gardens of Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia (1516). More’s political parable describes an imagined island where equality, virtue, and justice reign. However, Utopia came to signify not only perfection but also delusion; fantasies of perfectibility that stoked fanaticism. In most tellings, the meeting there on 7 July 1972 is represented as a clash of two kinds of utopian: unrealistic patrician Englishmen coming face-to-face with the grim fantasists of the IRA, fanatics fixed on a vision of a perfectly formed but unattainable ideal. But the IRA and the British officials were no more utopians than More himself. In many ways, they understood each other much better than any of the other parties to the conflict did. From the very earliest stages, the IRA was preparing for compromise, aware of its perilous position and the necessity of securing a guarantee of republicans’ involvement in any negotiations on future political arrangements while it still constituted a significant threat to the British state. The IRA leadership had to manage relationships not only with unionists and the British and Irish states but also with a support base whose expectations were high. The British government understood the IRA’s situation, but it faced powerful pressures against engagement and compromise, pressures that made the pursuit of a settlement a difficult option that required immense political effort and carried great risks. The uncompromising public rhetoric of the IRA—its focus on ultimate objectives—owed much to both the necessity of carefully controlling and concealing information about its resistance point, the better to maximize leverage at the conference table, and its need to maintain organizational strength, unity, and cohesion. Opponents seeking to resist pressures for compromise could use this rhetoric. Compromise was not possible with the IRA, they could explain, because they will not settle for anything but their ultimate objectives. They are too extreme. The strength of the British government’s presentation of this message as it turned away

⁹¹ McGuire 1973, 140–1.

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from engagement after Cheyne Walk was powerful enough to shape both contemporary media coverage and subsequent political strategies, which, in turn, clouded understanding of the dynamics of the conflict. Moreover, the IRA bombing campaign risked large-scale civilian casualties, as happened on Bloody Friday. Hence, its renewed campaign—most especially, the bombing of commercial targets—increased the risks of contact for the British government. Contingent events such as Bloody Friday played an important role in tipping the balance away from engagement, but internal divisions and organizational control in the IRA were a longer-term structural obstacle to negotiation. There were other important obstacles to a negotiated compromise. Powerful forces were opposed to any concessions to the IRA, not just on the big constitutional issues but on prisoner releases, reductions in troops, police reform, and above all on the principle of inclusion that was so important to the IRA. As the IRA moved towards a ceasefire in 1972, loyalists stepped up the killing of Catholic civilians, staged mass demonstrations, and threatened to barricade loyalist areas against the army. When Whitelaw was preparing for the Cheyne Walk meeting with the IRA, he met a number of times with the UDA to offer them concessions. A brief to the relevant cabinet committee on the IRA ceasefire in 1972 reported that ‘The period since the ceasefire has been dominated by the Protestant Ulster Defence Association.’⁹² In other words, loyalists—seeking to prevent the British government from making concessions to the IRA—had responded to the republican ceasefire with an intensification of violence and political pressure. For the British, any benefits to be gained by a compromise with the IRA had to be balanced against the costs of confrontation with the unionist majority. In explaining the breakdown, Frank Steele emphasized the ‘unrealistic demands of the IRA’ but outlined too some of the other factors that militated against a negotiated compromise: There were too many people who could influence the continuation of the ceasefire, who didn’t want it. The unionists didn’t want it as they wanted the British army to go on knocking hell out of the IRA. The RUC didn’t want it as they wanted to be able to fight with the British army against the IRA and restore some of their credibility and morale . . . The Protestant paramilitaries didn’t want it as they saw themselves fighting alongside the British army against the IRA. Part of the British army didn’t want it as they reckoned the IRA could still be beaten militarily.⁹³

⁹² ‘Events since the Provisional Ceasefire’, revised brief for GEN 79, FCO 87/76, UK National Archives. ⁹³ Taylor 1997, 146–7.

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Despite all of the forces working against it, there remained powerful reasons to include the Provisionals in any negotiated settlement. Explaining his move towards talks with the IRA in June 1972, Whitelaw told cabinet colleagues ‘it was inescapable that some understanding would have to be reached with the “Provisional” IRA; no solution seemed possible unless their point of view were represented.’⁹⁴ This underlying logic would draw the British government back towards engagement again. When the RAF plane carrying the IRA delegation landed back in Northern Ireland in July 1972, O’Connell folded his earmuffs, put them in his pocket, and brought them back to Dublin as a souvenir.⁹⁵ He would not need the earmuffs again, but for the following two years, key figures in the IRA leadership would focus on getting the movement back to the position they had reached in the summer of 1972, talking directly with the British government across a conference table. Now, as the violence plumbed new depths, the British government and republican leaders gradually built a relationship of limited trust and engaged in a mutual exploration of positions through a secret channel of communication that would provide the foundations for a second and much more sustained effort to negotiate an end to the IRA campaign. This time, the tone and the tactics would be very different.

⁹⁴ Meeting of GEN79, 16 June 1972, CAB130/560, UK National Archives. ⁹⁵ Deirdre O’Connell interview, 20 January 2011.

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3 The Intermediary ‘A Vessel To Be Used’

From late 1972 onwards, a secret channel between the IRA Army Council and the British government was painstakingly constructed in the most difficult of circumstances. Relying on the same intermediary for intermittent contacts over a span of more than twenty years, the IRA and the British would use this channel to negotiate the ending of several hunger strikes and kidnappings and for highlevel contacts aimed at ending the conflict. The initial opening of this channel in September 1972 involved combining local networks for secret communication with the covert diplomacy of MI6: covert diplomacy being ‘the use of secret services to conduct diplomatic relations . . . where intelligence services are used to engage in secret and deniable discussions with adversaries’.¹ It was an exceptionally difficult and sensitive endeavour because, after the exposure of the Cheyne Walk meeting, William Whitelaw had imposed a strict ban on direct contact between British officials and the IRA.² For this reason, and because of the channel’s political potential, British Prime Minister Edward Heath was made aware of its existence from the outset. Officers of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Britain’s foreign intelligence service, popularly known as MI6, oversaw the channel on the British side. The officers involved had worked across the globe, from South East Asia and the Middle East to West Africa, in contexts where the use of violent coercion by state and non-state actors alike was openly integrated with political power. They knew from personal experience, in Cyprus and Kenya, for example, that bitterly and violently opposed enemies could become valued allies. This channel had something of the character, then, of an international diplomatic initiative. It nested the relationship with the republican leadership in broader geopolitical contexts and placed it in tension with those forces in the state apparatus that sought to treat the conflict as a strictly internal matter for the United Kingdom. And if MI6 agents located the channel in wider contexts, they also took a longer view than most politicians.

¹ Dylan 2017, 339; See also Scott 2004. Dylan and Scott use the term ‘clandestine diplomacy’; Smith 2003, 365 calls it ‘parallel diplomacy’. ² Garnett and Aitken 2003; Taylor 1997, 166.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0004

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The opening of the channel integrated this diplomatic expertise with local networks of secret communication forged during the initial escalation of violence. Conciliatory security force figures such as RUC Chief Frank Lagan had established trust, authority, and strong affective relationships with contacts in the nationalist community through repeated interaction aimed at preventing escalation. That provided a foundation now for the building of a high-level channel between the British government and the IRA. There is a continuum between unofficial back-channel communication on the one hand and officially sanctioned and formalized back-channel communication on the other, but there are also distinctive differences between these two forms, and it is important to distinguish clearly between them. The channel dealt with here involves what Anthony Wanis St John calls ‘back-channel negotiation’, which he defines as ‘officially sanctioned negotiations conducted in secret between the parties to a dispute’, sometimes conducted by a third party or involving an intermediary. It is official, formally sanctioned at the highest levels, and it involves negotiation on specific issues even if those issues are initially limited to the procedures for contact.³ Crucially, back-channel contact permits negotiation on the question of legitimacy without conceding legitimacy. Thus, a central purpose of back-channel communication is what is sometimes referred to as ‘prenegotiation’, talks on the conditions for entry to front-channel talks.⁴ It allows for an exploration of underlying interests, with a view to establishing whether parties are willing to be more flexible than they can indicate publicly. By banning direct contact with the IRA and creating the need for deniable contacts, the British had opened up opportunities for mediators and intermediaries to play a much more influential role. Deriving power from asymmetries of information, the intermediary at the heart of this new channel began to carve out a small space at the grinding intersection between the parties that allowed him to exercise a little agency of his own, shaping engagement and stimulating progress. The channel that was built now was shaped as much by the figure operating in the middle as by those at either end. Control of information was central to the power he would wield.

Covert Diplomacy Frank Steele was the MI6 officer who began the building of this channel from the British side. He had organized that first secret meeting with IRA leaders in June 1972 and had flown over and back to London with the IRA delegation. The ban on

³ Wanis-St. John 2006.

⁴ Wanis-St. John 2006, 123.

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direct contact inhibited his work, but he continued to meet with a variety of intermediaries who sought to convey the views of the IRA. Steele’s entire life was bound up with the rise and fall of Britain’s imperial project across the twentieth century. Born in Bangalore, in 1923, ‘into a family long involved with the subcontinent’, he had served in the British Army in India and Malaya from 1945 until 1947. Then, he had spent two years, 1948–50, in charge of the large and remote West Nile district of northern Uganda as an assistant District Officer. He had joined MI6 in 1951, and his first posting was to Basra in southern Iraq.⁵ Thereafter, he served in Cyprus, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, and Kenya during the turbulent 1950s and 60s. The deployment of a figure of Steele’s seniority and experience to Belfast in November 1971 was a mark of the gravity of the crisis. In Belfast he served as deputy and counsellor to the UK Representative Howard Smith, another high-flyer who would later serve as ambassador to Moscow at the height of the Cold War and then as director of MI5. Smith was part British ambassador to Stormont, part colonial governor, protecting British government interests.⁶ Steele’s vaguely described position as counsellor to Smith, and later as special advisor to William Whitelaw, obscured the extent of his power. His reports on the Stormont Joint Security Committee show that he and Smith had considerable power and authority to shape and steer the policies of both the Unionist government and the British military even before direct rule.⁷ But while Steele exercised power at the heart of the state apparatus, the primary rationale for his appointment was to build links with people on the ground, and especially in the nationalist community.⁸ In time, his dense connections with oppositional forces would act as a counterbalance to the British government’s strong links to majority unionist opinion. Smith and Steele had offices in Laneside, a secluded villa near the shores of Belfast Lough in Cultra, a prosperous outer suburb of Belfast. Senior unionist civil servant Robert Ramsay noted with dissatisfaction that Laneside quickly became a point of contact for all sorts of critics and opponents of the NI government . . . we learned that representations [from nationalists] which normally would have come to government were now passing to London, via Laneside. The very existence of Laneside stimulated and exacerbated this debilitating trend.⁹

⁵ Maitland 1998; Zinkin and Iftikhar 1998. ⁶ Craig 2012; Patterson 2008. ⁷ See CJ4/82, UK National Archives. ⁸ Ó Dochartaigh 2011, 3; Smith to Woodfield, UKREP Belfast Tel No 43, 23 August 1971, CJ4/82, UK National Archives. ⁹ Ramsay 2009, 84–5.

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With the proroguing of Stormont in March 1972, the office of the UK Representative became division three of the Northern Ireland Office. It continued to be associated with MI6 and the Foreign Office, and Laneside became an everbusier centre for informal and often secret meetings between British officials and forces across the political spectrum.¹⁰ Steele steadily built strong connections with community workers, clergy, and opposition politicians, as well as people connected to armed groups, seeking to influence figures within the nationalist community to support, or at least accept, British authority and to assist in undermining the IRA. But he also sought out ways to engage with the IRA. There is something incongruous in a senior diplomatic figure wielding power through informal chats with parish priests, editors of provincial newspapers, and community workers, but the attention and care he and his successors devoted to cultivating these figures had powerful cumulative effect. Steele had particularly strong contacts with SDLP Stormont MPs John Hume and Ivan Cooper and maintained intensive cooperative contact with senior Catholic civil servant Maurice Hayes. MI6 agents may not have been trained in negotiation, but they were taught how to exercise ‘influence’. An engaging personality and an easy manner were among the most important tools of their craft, and these attributes would be as central to MI6 engagement with the IRA as to their contact with parish priests. There was a deliberate informality in their manner. After Philip Woodfield and Frank Steele met with Dave O’Connell and Gerry Adams in 1972, Woodfield reported that: I had previously arranged with Mr Steele that after these opening exchanges we would bring our discussions into the form of a normal conversation with the object of drawing out the IRA representatives and helping each other out if the discussion reached awkward corners. At this point the IRA representatives began to raise a number of other matters and the exchange became more informal as planned.¹¹

The effect of this ‘planned informality’ was often to make contacts think of them as friends more than as government officials, but the agents also had to exude a genuine warmth and openness if people were not to feel manipulated. Some people were immune to charm. Desmond Boal, a former Unionist MP and confidante of Ian Paisley, who was secretly in contact with the IRA, received a phone call from an MI6 officer. Might they chat? the caller asked. Boal abruptly answered ‘No’ and hung up. But he was the only one who ever hung up on that

¹⁰ Craig 2014. ¹¹ Woodfield, ‘Note of a meeting with representatives of the Provisional IRA’, 21 June 1972, PREM 15/1009, UK National Archives.

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agent.¹² Some civil society figures came to appreciate the power these agents could exert. Derry Journal editor Frank Curran recalled that ‘Steele was one of these great characters that was a more important man than he appeared to be, put it that way.’¹³ Michael Oatley, who took over from Steele in spring 1973 and developed this channel into something much more substantial, also built extensive grassroots networks, including links with Catholic priests in areas where the IRA enjoyed strong support. Denis Bradley, then a parish priest in the Bogside, recalls Oatley calling to parish vestries in Derry to speak individually and informally to parish priests in the city.¹⁴ He also built links with community workers, including some who were strongly sympathetic to republicans. Oatley had joined SIS at the height of the Cold War and held a series of African postings in the 1960s and early 1970s. After Northern Ireland, he would move steadily up through the ranks, becoming MI6 station head in the Middle East (1984–88), then Europe Director as the Cold War drew to an end (1988–91). Indeed, he came close, in the 1980s, to being appointed Director of MI6.¹⁵ Many contacts who were cultivated by MI6 agents found them hugely impressive figures. Frank Curran, whose influential local paper was often strongly critical of the military and police, ‘never met anyone so much aware of Irish history’ as Frank Steele.¹⁶ No doubt, Steele had similarly impressed people in Beirut and Basra with his knowledge of their history. At a later stage of his life, when he served as President of the Royal Asiatic Society and then as Vice President of the Royal Geographic Society, it was his deep knowledge of Tibet and his collection of Tibetan objects and art that were most remarked upon.¹⁷ Through respectful engagement and discussion, MI6 officers were at once trying to gather information and to shape the thinking and behaviour of their contacts. This exercise of influence had a powerful logic and purpose. Those engaged at this intersection could find themselves drawn over the line, gently assimilated to the British position, compromised without realizing what was happening. The intermediary Brendan Duddy was acutely aware of the dangers. ‘The skill’, he told me, is let the Brendan Duddys of this world do the talking and then, bit by bit . . . Now if you don’t know how it works I don’t care who you are, you’re like a salmon who is in a big pool and they try fly number one, doesn’t work, [and so on until] fly number 55, ‘ah, 55 works’. And by that stage you’re hooked and you’re on the bank.¹⁸ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁵ ¹⁷

According to a senior official knowledgeable about the events. Frank Curran interview, 16 March 2004. ¹⁴ Denis Bradley interview, 9 March 2017. Taylor 2001, 317; Taylor 2011. ¹⁶ Frank Curran interview, 16 March 2004. Maitland 1998; Zinkin and Iftikhar 1998. ¹⁸ Brendan Duddy interview, 15 October 2009.

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One of their most powerful tools was flattery: ‘there’s no better way to be trapped [than] by your vanity and your ego’, Duddy reflected in 2009.¹⁹ Only in retrospect did SDLP MP Ivan Cooper appreciate the gap in capability between these agents and their local interlocutors: ‘We didn’t know they were MI5 [and MI6] at the time . . . If we had been genned up on MI5 and MI6 we would have realized what we were confronted with.’²⁰ On the other hand, agents’ interactions with nationalists and republicans opened the way to a certain genuine sympathy. Both Steele and Oatley sought to erode republican power and weaken the IRA, but their occasional interviews and public statements in later years convey a strong awareness and understanding of the grievances of Irish nationalists and republicans.²¹ When the British government was insisting in the 1990s that the IRA decommission its weapons before talks, Michael Oatley made a rare contribution to public debate, arguing strongly for the British government to moderate its position and to trust Sinn Féin’s commitment to the peace process.²² The tone of respectful engagement they adopted was all the more powerful for being unfeigned. Its political importance should not be overstated. Intermediary Brendan Duddy liked to say of these agents that ‘they all have their future place in the Kingdom’, that is, they were limited in their sympathy and independence by the need to progress their careers within the British state apparatus, not least to secure their pension entitlements. And those who were genuinely sympathetic might in the end prove the most dangerous of enemies. Covert diplomacy was not just about manipulation, however. It was also about envisioning compromise and concessions by the British state and exploring options through dialogue. Influence flowed through this channel in both directions. Astute figures such as John Hume and Maurice Hayes realized quickly that Steele provided a direct way to influence British policy. Their input ensured that British policy responded not only to the strong continuous pressure from the unionist majority but also to minority opinion. Internment is an important case in point. In one-to-one conversations, Steele tried to convince influential nationalists such as Frank Curran to support internment, but without success.²³ But having failed to convince them, he acted as a channel and even a champion of their views within the state apparatus. When a large group of senior army and RUC Special Branch commanders led by the Commander Land Forces Robert Ford confronted Steele and a senior NIO civil servant at a tense meeting in late 1972, complaining forcefully about the restraints on repression and restrictions on internment powers, Steele stood his ground, pointing out the drawbacks of the measure: ¹⁹ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–8 July 2009. ²⁰ Ivan Cooper interview, 16 March 2004. ²¹ Taylor 1997, 129–30; 2001, 121–5; See also Michael Oatley speaking at Negotiating Peace Symposium, NUI Galway, 13 October 2011. Event organized by the author: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=jSfmNLn-nQk&list=PLp-6_r7fj3wPxnW8W7D1qw8Z6b41TH5_X&index=5 ²² Oatley 1999. ²³ Frank Curran interview, 16 March 2004.

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Internment, under whatever name, was a highly emotive issue and would continue to alienate a large section of the community. It was counterproductive not only on political grounds but also on security grounds in that it tended to breed a new younger and even wilder brand of replacement IRA.²⁴

There was a certain reciprocity, then, to the play of influence between MI6 officers and their opposition contacts: if agents were set on influencing people to further the state’s interests, those opposition figures with whom they engaged often sought to turn the flow of influence back in the other direction. Struggles to shape the direction and strength of these flows of influence characterized the backchannel of communication with the IRA, and some of the techniques used by MI6 would be assimilated by those they engaged with.

Coffeeman RUC Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan established local channels of backchannel communication on which Steele and later Oatley built. By 1972, Lagan had deep experience of operating in the charged space between the British state and militant forces in the nationalist community. In the Lower Falls in August 1969, he had taken part in negotiations with Official IRA leader Jim Sullivan to avert confrontation at the barricades.²⁵ Posted to Derry in 1970 to take charge of the RUC in the city, he quickly established networks in the nationalist community that stretched from senior Catholic clergy and conservative nationalists like James Doherty through SDLP MP John Hume to Brigid Bond of the Official republican movement. He would subsequently build links to the Provisionals too. The Widgery Inquiry into the killing by British troops of thirteen civilians on Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972 revealed that Lagan tried to broker a secret deal to avert confrontation, and made desperate last-minute attempts to stop the paratroopers from going into the Bogside.²⁶ He is codenamed ‘Coffeeman’ in Brendan Duddy’s record of the 1975 ceasefire talks, associating him with ‘The Coffee House’, a private home at the foot of Binevanagh mountain in Co. Derry where meetings between Duddy and MI6 agents took place in the 1970s. The owners of the house offered biscuits and the use of a coffee-machine. It helped that Lagan had been a boarder in St Columb’s College, the Catholic grammar school in Derry, and had personal links, as a result, to many of the most influential Catholic men in the city.²⁷

²⁴ ‘Minutes of a meeting on arrest and detention policy at HQNI on 24 August 1972’, FCO 87/4, UK National Archives. ²⁵ Frank Lagan testimony to the Scarman Tribunal. ²⁶ Ó Dochartaigh 2009. ²⁷ Ó Dochartaigh 2005, 269–89.

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Like RUC commanders before him in Derry, Lagan made concessions to prevent escalation, but he stretched his position further than others in the pursuit of ‘pacification’. A range of people, including Catholic clergy, would approach him on behalf of young people who were ‘on the run’ in Donegal asking if they could come back to Derry without fear of arrest. One former Provisional IRA member recalls the process: After Motorman people would have [asked], ‘is my son Jimmy [who is] on the run . . . is he alright’? [to return to Derry] Lagan would have said yea or nay, you could believe what he said. [He would] say ‘look they’re not under our notice so they’re ok’. But he wouldn’t put them under his notice either; do you know what I mean?²⁸

According to this former Volunteer, Lagan even collected on-the-runs at the border on occasion and drove them back into Derry. There were deep ambiguities here. If Lagan’s approach facilitated IRA Volunteers to quit the organization, he was weakening it. But many in the RUC would undoubtedly have viewed him as helping suspected perpetrators to escape punishment. Such ambiguous actions would be necessary on a much wider scale if the conflict were to be ended through compromise. Ivan Cooper regularly phoned Lagan to inquire about constituents who had been picked up by the RUC Special Branch. Some of them would be released, and it was Cooper’s understanding that Lagan would insist to Detective Chief Inspector Sam Donnelly, the head of RUC Special Branch in the city, that he either provide good grounds for detaining people or release them.²⁹ Lagan’s strong links to nationalist leaders did not go unnoticed or unopposed, and Ian Paisley condemned him publicly in Stormont. He faced revolt against some of his conciliatory measures from the predominantly Protestant and unionist-minded rank and file of the RUC and he was in an ongoing struggle with Special Branch. He had a direct personal line on his desk so that others in the police force could not listen in to his calls: He also had a phone on his desk in the police station in Strand Road which was a direct line. The reasons for that were that he couldn’t trust going through the switchboard . . . . [I had] a direct line to Lagan at his home, and a direct line to his desk. All of us had those numbers.³⁰

Lagan was by no means a marginal figure in the state apparatus. He had been closely allied with reformist elements of the British state when policing west ²⁸ Interview with former Derry PIRA Volunteer, 9 December 2011. ²⁹ Ivan Cooper interview, 16 March 2004. ³⁰ Ivan Cooper interview, 16 March 2004.

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Belfast in late 1969, and in late 1970 the British Army Brigadier in Derry reported to his superiors that: relations between Frank Lagan and myself are such that we claim to think as one on current and future policy. I know that I could tackle the Chief Constable on police matters with full confidence that Frank would agree with virtually every word: he could do the same to the GOC on military policy. This is a very happy state of affairs.³¹

When Whitelaw was considering whether to meet secretly with the IRA leadership in June 1972, he asked UK Representative Howard Smith to ‘enquire through such people as Mr Hume and Mr Lagan the reactions of the people in Londonderry to the latest developments’ before deciding.³² And crucially, from late 1971 onward, Lagan had strong working relationships with MI6 officer Frank Steele and then with Michael Oatley. Lagan was well placed to facilitate the workings of this new high-level channel. As commander of the RUC in Derry he had strong cross-border links with the Garda Síochána, the Irish police force, and he helped to ensure that the intermediary’s regular journeys across the border and his clandestine meetings with republican leaders did not trigger investigation. The intermediary visited republican safe houses across counties Donegal, Sligo, Roscommon, Leitrim, and Mayo—to mention just a few—and was stopped at numerous roadblocks in the Republic of Ireland. But, according to his own recollection, he was never once detained or subjected to questioning. For example, if I was going South, let’s say to this imaginary upper room in a Clones [Co Monaghan] hotel, Lagan would have known. If I was stopped by the Garda Síochána, right, and [they] asked me what I was doing I would have said to them . . . the person you should contact is . . . Frank Lagan of RUC, Derry. That ended Garda,—I was going to say interference—that ended Garda seeking out more knowledge, all the time.³³

According to Duddy, he would let Lagan know in advance whenever he was travelling. It was his belief that Lagan ensured that records of his car’s movements that might attract attention were swept out of the system. Lagan’s capacity to protect this channel was augmented considerably in spring 1974 when he was promoted to Assistant Chief Constable (ACC), the second highest rank in the ³¹ ‘Extract of a letter from COMD 8 INF BDE TO CGS 26 oct 70’, DEFE 24/1611, UK National Archives. ³² Sweeney, Eamon, ‘Top British General thought the Irish were “shocking old cry babies” ’, Derry Journal, 15 December 2015. ³³ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–8 July 2009.

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force, and given responsibility for the policing of the border. His appointment as ACC—one of just three ACCs—is an indication that his approach was in alignment with British government policy at the time. On occasion, Lagan played a surprisingly direct role in the secret contacts. When the British government organized secret talks with IRA representatives in Derry in 1975, one of the greatest practical difficulties was how to regularly bring Sinn Féin President Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and other republicans across the border without them being arrested. Lagan himself drove the Sinn Féin President over the border more than once. As they approached a checkpoint on one occasion Lagan told him: You just sit there, I’ll talk to these people. Don’t get out of the car, you’re not big enough [to be a police officer]. I’ll just tell them, if they ask who you are, that [you’re one of my officers who] has been doing a bit of work in ‘the State’ [i.e. the ‘Free State’]. I’m just picking you up and bringing you back. But don’t open your mouth either.³⁴

Lagan also drove Billy McKee, Commander of the Belfast IRA, across the border on at least two occasions, but in the other direction, into Donegal.³⁵ It was one of Lagan’s strongest contacts who would become the main intermediary between the British and the IRA—Derry businessman Brendan Duddy.

The Making of an Intermediary I have spent so many years concealing Brendan Duddy’s identity that it is difficult for me to even say his name. —Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, 18 July 2012³⁶ The individual at the heart of the channel acted as what Lior Lehrs has called a ‘Private Peace Entrepreneur’ (PPE).³⁷ State officials often belittle and seek to marginalize private individuals who try to act as peace intermediaries because they challenge the state’s monopoly on policy and limit their room for manoeuvre. One tactic is: ‘A discourse of contempt, which aims to decrease the initiative’s apparent importance, to question the PPE’s credibility, and to present discussion of the issue as ridiculous and unnecessary’.³⁸ British officials wrote numerous scathing reports that portrayed intermediaries as self-serving and self-interested ³⁴ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 18 July 2012. ³⁵ Billy McKee interview, 3 December 2014. ³⁶ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 18 July 2012. Author’s translation from the Irish: ‘tá mé tar éis na blianta fada ag ceilt Brendan Duddy . . . agus tá sé deacair orm fiú amháin Brendan Duddy a rá dá bharr.’ ³⁷ Lehrs 2016. ³⁸ Lehrs 2016, 394.

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or amateurish and naïve ‘do-gooders’ who were far less influential than they claimed to be. The contempt was unconcealed in one British official’s report of his response to Irish Labour Party TD John O’Connell when he urged the British to engage with the IRA: ‘I said that apart from getting his history sadly wrong, he was making a public fool of himself . . . [he is] inspired primarily by a desire for cheap publicity in Dublin . . . he is a political lightweight with a great opinion of himself.’³⁹ At the other extreme, mediators and intermediaries are often idealized as having a pure and selfless calling beyond the political. The primary intermediary in Northern Ireland, businessman Brendan Duddy, was driven by the goal of a sustainable peace settlement that would end the violence, but his work as an intermediary was deeply political and involved the unabashed and insistent exercise of power and influence. It was a form of strategic political action, intervening in the play of forces and seeking to shape the interaction between the main power actors. He sought out the role in order to exercise power in what he saw as the most important political space in the conflict—that between the British government and the IRA. He was convinced that no settlement that excluded the Provisionals could succeed and that any settlement would require agreement between them and the British government. He sought to exert, in secret, the kind of influence that a powerful politician might exert in public. And one of his driving concerns was to find a way to reach the top of the British state and exert influence at the level of executive power. One important foundation for his role was his long-standing organic links to the marginal but important republican milieu in Derry. His father had been involved in amateur dramatics with Neil Gillespie, an IRA man who had fought in the War of Independence and Civil War, and other republicans active in the 1940s and 50s. As a teenager, Duddy was close to the dynamic and respected young republican idealist Larry Boyle. At a time of deadening conservatism and social conformity Boyle had long flowing hair and was widely known in Derry as the man who had pledged not to cut his hair until Ireland was free.⁴⁰ As a teenager, Duddy went to Irish language classes in the local Craobh (Branch) of Conradh na Gaeilge with Boyle and other local republicans. Those links led to his first experience of acting as an intermediary. According to Duddy’s recollection, one of the Catholic priests who taught in St Columb’s College, a Father Coulter, asked him one day to go to Larry Boyle and urge him to stand against Nationalist Party candidate Eddie McAteer in a forthcoming election. Looking back decades later, Duddy had no idea why he had been asked to do so or what politics lay behind it, but he identified it as his first involvement with politics. It stands as a curious foreshadowing of the role he would later play. ³⁹ PJC Evans to Bone, ‘Dr John O’Connell’, 9 March 1972, FCO 87/1, UK National Archives. ⁴⁰ Theresa Barr interview, 25 June 2018; Brendan Duddy interview, 11 June 2009.

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Others in the College sought to end Duddy’s links with republicans. According to Duddy’s recollections many years later, school authorities ordered that he stop attending Irish classes, which Duddy presumed was because of the links with the republican movement.⁴¹ Another factor in spurring Duddy to political action was his relationship with John Hume. They had been brought up around the corner from one another and played in the street together as small children. Derry is a small city and as Hume rose to prominence in the civil rights movement and moved into electoral politics Duddy was in regular contact with him and sought to advise him and influence his direction.⁴² Seeing Hume’s achievements in the public realm stoked his own ambitions to make a political impact. When young left-wing and republican radicals began to agitate in Derry in the 1960s, Duddy’s fish and chip shop on William Street became the site of excited, earnest late night political discussions in which he was an active participant. He was part of the ferment of the civil rights movement and was close to many of its leaders, including John Hume, Ivan Cooper, and Eamonn McCann. On the eve of the big civil rights march of 16 November 1968 the members of the Citizens’ Action Committee, fearing they might be arrested before the march, nominated deputies to replace them. Ivan Cooper nominated Duddy as his replacement. On the morning of the march the committee members and their deputies all assembled in a room above Duddy’s shop in William Street.⁴³ In May 1973, by which stage he had already acted as an intermediary between MI6 and the IRA, he ran for election to Derry City Council as an Independent, but without success. He sought out other ways to influence political developments behind the scenes. When Observer journalist Mary Holland had come to Derry to cover the civil rights campaign, he had got to know her well and he sought to encourage and facilitate her continued engagement with the story.⁴⁴ He built links too with other people in the media, among them the legendary New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, who visited the Duddys in Derry with his family and remained in contact with them over many years.⁴⁵ Such contacts sharpened his understanding of political dynamics. Duddy’s business experience was another asset in his work as an intermediary. He understood well the dynamics of negotiation, the power of information, and the importance of building up alternatives to negotiated agreement and keeping multiple options open for as long as possible. He drove a hard bargain and was not afraid of confrontation and disagreement. ‘Every day I was a salesman’, he would say of his role in the 1990s.⁴⁶ Most importantly, he brought the understanding that bargains could be made if underlying interests were compatible, as he believed ⁴¹ Brendan Duddy interview, 11 June 2009. ⁴² Brendan Duddy interview, 15 March 2004. ⁴³ Doherty 2001, 70. ⁴⁴ Brendan Duddy interview, 18 March 2004; 11 June 2009. ⁴⁵ Margo Duddy interview, 18 May 2018. ⁴⁶ Brendan Duddy interview, 14 October 2009.

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they were in relation to the British government and the IRA. This didn’t mean he thought that the two parties’ interests could be reduced to the instrumental pursuit of personal gain. Archival records of his contacts with British officials show him repeatedly stressing the importance of addressing republican ideology in reaching a settlement. As an entrepreneur who had set up his own business, Duddy was used to being a dominant personality rather than part of a larger hierarchical organization. It gave him experience of imposing his will on others, asserting his preferences forcefully, and pushing others in his preferred direction. Ready for conflict, disagreement, and confrontation, he treated peacemaking as an intense struggle, and he was not afraid to push, to manipulate, to wear down, and to influence. In a tape recording that he made of his side of a phone conversation with a British agent in 1974 or 1975 he speaks in a tightly controlled way, making his points politely and clearly but conveying an unmistakeable sense of pressure. The British agent at the other end of the line is suggesting an arrangement that falls short of what Duddy thinks is adequate and his responses are polite but sometimes curt: Their [the IRA] attitude to this is that this is an extremely important piece of business and that you have been told that the only way [to deal with this] piece of business is in the prescribed manner. Now, what you’re saying to me is [you won’t do it] in the prescribed manner . . . and what I’m saying to you is that the very positive answer to that [by the IRA] would be ‘OK, that’s it, forget it’. Now I can’t alter that, and what’s more is that, and I’m quite sincere about this, I’ve not got the slightest intentions of trying.⁴⁷

This exchange is biting struggle rather than friendly cooperation. In the play of influence at this nexus between Britain and the IRA Duddy’s willingness to be politely insistent, to be obdurate and, on occasion, icily confrontational, were important assets. He also brought physical and mental stamina. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the Sinn Féin President who would be Duddy’s main contact on the republican side, emphasizes that one of the essential attributes of an intermediary is a capacity to be always available, at any time of day or night and any day of the week.⁴⁸ Phone calls came at unpredictable times and negotiations took place in the middle of the night and went on for hours, both sides seeking to extract information while avoiding giving anything away. Duddy’s family background was one of deep poverty. But for the 1947 Education Act, he would never have got to St Columb’s, the Catholic grammar school. There, as a boy from the working-class Rosemount area, he felt a strong

⁴⁷ Brendan Duddy Papers, POL 35.

⁴⁸ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 27 June 2005.

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sense of hostility from some of the teachers and a need to constantly prove himself.⁴⁹ His main outlet for this was middle-distance and long-distance running. He prided himself on being the fastest mile runner in his school and he became a good, tough, competitive runner (Fig. 3.1). I had a very difficult time there and the only thing that saved my life was that I learned to run very very quickly in life. I remember winning my first race at ten years of age and for the next fifty years I ran and trained every day. That was the bit that absorbed and saved me.⁵⁰

In one cross-country race in the depths of winter 1960, when he was 23 years of age, he ‘forced [the] favourite into third position’ to finish second in a field of a

Fig. 3.1 Brendan Duddy, Oakleaf Athletic Club, running in a five-mile time trial in 1956 Source: Family of Brendan Duddy.

⁴⁹ Brendan Duddy interview, 15 March 2004. ⁵⁰ Brendan Duddy interview, 26 November 2009.

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hundred runners in a six-mile championship in Armagh.⁵¹ Running required a high degree of determination, mental toughness, and self-discipline: ‘the training for running meant I didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, I think I had my first drink at 35’.⁵² These personal qualities fit well with negotiation theorist Lior Lehrs’s observation that: Most PPEs also possess the characteristics of stubbornness and persistence. The Sisyphean ability of PPEs to keep trying again and again, even after many failures, objections, and criticism, and to keep focusing their efforts on one clear goal over long periods of time is a major power resource. The Israeli PPE Nimrod Novik called this ability ‘the Nahum Takum ability’ (a roly-poly toy in Hebrew) and he stressed the ability of ‘one actor [who] keeps focusing all the time on one goal when everyone else is doing 1001 things all at once’ as a significant resource for a PPE’s activities (Novik 2009).⁵³

Paradoxically, it was amateur athletics that gave him his first experience of negotiations related to the Irish border. By 1963 he was Chairman of the Oak Leaf Athletic Club in Derry and was appointed as one of eight delegates to represent the all-Ireland National Athletic and Cycling Association (NACA),⁵⁴ in talks with the unionist-dominated Northern Ireland Amateur Athletic Association (NIAAA)⁵⁵ about ‘unification’ of the two associations.⁵⁶ There was much optimistic talk of unity in advance of the talks, but Duddy sounded a note of caution. Speaking in the Park Hotel in Virginia, County Cavan, a location to which he may well have returned for meetings with IRA leaders in the 1970s, he told a reporter that, ‘I live and work with them [members of the NIAAA] and I know their feelings on the subject. The average six county AAA athlete is quite satisfied with his present set-up. He is not interested in any changes.’⁵⁷ Later, as an intermediary, the need for a clear-eyed assessment of the unionist position would be one of his abiding concerns. Duddy’s fish and chip shop in William Street was on the front line of the escalating street violence in 1969, and this brought him into regular contact with the military and the police. When Lagan came to Derry in 1970, he and Duddy cooperated on a range of matters aimed at moderating violence and preventing escalation, as the RUC man did with others too. In 1971 he asked Duddy to join the Derry City Centre Liaison Committee. He became the sole Catholic among the

⁵¹ ⁵² ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵ ⁵⁶ ⁵⁷

‘Junior title for Derry athlete’, Strabane Chronicle, 16 January 1960, 8. Brendan Duddy interview, 26 November 2009. ⁵³ Lehrs 2016, 391. National Athletic and Cycling Association. Affiliated to the British Amateur Athletic Board. ‘Strong effort to heal “split” ’, Irish Independent, 8 October 1963, 16. Sean Diffley, ‘Are we any nearer now to unity in Athletics’, Irish Press, 12 February 1963, 16.

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business owners on the committee. It brought him into regular contact with senior military and police figures in the city, with the associated risks: I went to that committee at a time when you had to hide, I mean literally you’d to walk down the Strand Road, press the button to get the steel gate opened, only if there was nobody within twenty yards behind you or twenty yards in front of you, you were in so much danger at that time . . . the only thing you had in it was that you had access to either the Divisional Commander of the RUC in Derry and you had access to . . . the British Army Commander . . . I must say none of them ever, ever approached [me] in the sense of ‘Psst, do you know an armed man’, you know. That didn’t enter into it . . . [I was] probably being used fully and didn’t appreciate it at the time, but never, ever did anyone cross the line, because that I’d been tuned into.

Duddy’s close contacts with the security forces would ensure that republicans always treated him with a degree of suspicion. For the republicans, ‘anyone who has contact with the other side cannot really be sound.’⁵⁸ Duddy would later say the republican leaders had to be as guarded in his presence as they would be with the British. The IRA had to be very careful always with me because you would have been a very foolish IRA man to say, ‘Brendan is OK.’ I was meeting with British intelligence for a lifetime. Bottom, bottom, bottom line it was not possible not to think of me as a member of MI5 or whatever. The point was that I understood that.⁵⁹

By the same token, his contacts with republicans could cause problems for him with the British authorities. Just before Operation Motorman at the end of July 1972 there was a tussle between the Commander Land Forces General Robert Ford, who wanted to take the IRA by surprise and was willing to accept the risk of gun battles that would allow his troops to kill or capture IRA members, and other powerful figures, including Frank Steele, who wanted to avoid violent confrontation. The latter won out, and secret channels, disguised by a subsequent public statement by William Whitelaw, gave the IRA advance notice of the operation.⁶⁰ And so the IRA had time to move personnel and weapons from the area before the British took it over. According to Duddy, Frank Lagan, acting on Steele’s advice, asked him to ensure that all IRA guns were removed from Free Derry to avert the

⁵⁸ Brendan Duddy interview, 18 March 2004. ⁵⁹ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009. ⁶⁰ Craig 2012, 106; Whitelaw 1989, 133–4; ‘Policy in Northern Ireland’, Frank Steele, 25 July 1972, CJ4/644, UK National Archives.

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danger of gun battles. There was a precedent for such measures. In August 1969, British commanders had indicated to the Defence Association that they would leave a route out of Free Derry and across the border open for twenty-four hours if there was anything the Association wished to remove from the area.⁶¹ Shortly before Operation Motorman, IRA members gathered together weapons stored in Free Derry and stacked them in a van. Around midnight on a July night, the van drove out the back road from Creggan estate in darkness and heavy rain. After just a few hundred yards, it made a right turn onto the Glen Road and pulled up in front of Duddy’s house, where he helped to unload the weapons for temporary storage in his attic.⁶² A member of his family recalls going up into the attic and seeing the dark, heavy rifles stacked together, reeking of gun grease, before they were later moved over the border to Donegal. Duddy was acutely aware that such actions might be difficult to explain in a court of law: I used to have sleeping nightmares of a judge with a folded arm listening to all of this stuff and saying ‘well it’s obvious Mr Duddy that you were complicit [with the IRA] I therefore sentence you to fifteen years’, and all the people that I was depending on to say ‘well he wasn’t really doing that’, either have been shipped abroad or [are] turning a blind eye, or ‘too bad, join the ranks of the people inside.’ Always conscious of that.⁶³

Phase One Some time in 1972, Brendan Duddy met Sinn Féin President Ruairí Ó Brádaigh for the first time. They struck up an acquaintance that would develop into a friendship with a strong sense of mutual loyalty.⁶⁴ Ó Brádaigh would become Duddy’s key republican contact. He would also provide a bridge for Duddy to the pivotal IRA strategist Dave O’Connell with whom Ó Brádaigh was strongly allied. Connecting directly to the IRA’s national leadership rather than to the Derry IRA was vital to the successful operation of the channel for two reasons. Given Duddy’s aim of contributing to an overall settlement, he sought to work directly with the decision-makers at the top of the national organization rather than with local representatives. In addition, Lagan had warned Duddy that RUC Special Branch had penetrated the Derry IRA and it was likely to pick up on any communications that went through the local organization.⁶⁵ ⁶¹ McCann 1974, 64. ⁶² Brendan Duddy interview, 11 June 2009; Brendan Duddy, undated handwritten draft memoir, 29pp. ⁶³ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–8 July 2009. ⁶⁴ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 2 December 2009. ⁶⁵ Brendan Duddy interviews, 11 June 2009; 28 July 2009.

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After the failure of the Cheyne Walk talks in July 1972 Duddy sought out regular meetings with Ó Brádaigh at locations across Ireland. In the approach to those talks, SDLP leaders John Hume and Paddy Devlin had acted as intermediaries between Britain and the IRA.⁶⁶ According to one republican source who spoke to Ed Moloney, Duddy suggested to Ó Brádaigh after the collapse of the truce that the IRA should not permit the SDLP to act as intermediaries again as it had weakened republican control of the process. He suggested the IRA seek out a new way of communicating with the British, and later he came back and said, ‘If you ever want a way of communicating with the British, then I can do it for you.’⁶⁷ In Duddy’s private papers there is an elliptical and laconic chronology of the development of this channel that seems to have been drawn up by one of the MI6 officers involved.⁶⁸ It designates the period from September 1972 to January 1973 as ‘Phase One’, thus locating the origins of the channel in Duddy’s first meeting with Frank Steele in September 1972. ‘Phase One’ began when Duddy built on his personal relationship with Ó Brádaigh to establish a communication channel between the IRA leadership and the British government. He sent a message in September 1972 to Frank Steele through two different people. One of those was undoubtedly Frank Lagan; the other was probably nationalist businessman James Doherty. Duddy’s message said that Ó Brádaigh had asked him to pass a message to the British government asking them to take action that would strengthen the position of moderates within the IRA against hardliner Seán Mac Stiofáin. Duddy asked for a meeting with Steele ‘so that he could give the full story personally’.⁶⁹ Given Ó Brádaigh’s cautious and circumspect approach to contact with the British over the following years, there is no possibility that he asked Duddy to get the British to intervene in the internal politics of the IRA. Rather, Duddy was presenting his own analysis of the shared interests of IRA moderates and the British government in the form of a message from Ó Brádaigh. Duddy’s analysis was based on intensive contact with Ó Brádaigh, but presenting it as a message gave some extra weight to the analysis. Most importantly, it helped to secure a meeting with Steele, despite the fact that the transparency of the ploy was obvious to the MI6 officer who remarked: ‘it is possible that he may have useful information, even though the actual message from O’Brady [Ó Brádaigh⁷⁰] is a piece of rather hopeless straw-clutching.’ Steele clearly wanted a line of communication to the IRA and it served his purposes to not robustly challenge the fiction of a

⁶⁶ Taylor 1997, 136; CJ4/136, UK National Archives. ⁶⁷ Quoted in Moloney 2002, 405. ⁶⁸ Typescript chronology of events from September 1972 to 6/7 February 1975, POL35/74, Brendan Duddy Papers. ⁶⁹ ‘The Provisional IRA’, Steele to Woodfield, 22 September 1972, FCO 87/4, UK National Archives. ⁷⁰ UK officials consistently anglicized the names of republican leaders in official correspondence.

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‘message’ from the IRA asking for British help. It gave him an excuse to respond and engage. Steele was meeting several prospective intermediaries around this time, but this channel was different. He regarded Duddy as highly credible and treated him with utmost seriousness from the outset. Other prospective intermediaries were invariably named in internal correspondence, but Duddy’s identity was concealed. It is notable too that Steele informed Edward Heath about this very first meeting with the ‘Londonderry friend of Rory O’Brady’ and that the Prime Minister asked to be kept informed of developments.⁷¹ Clearly, Lagan had vouched for Duddy and confirmed his reliability. Steele could repose a high degree of trust in Duddy because he had a proven record of involvement in local efforts to slow escalation in Derry. In these early meetings, Duddy conveyed Ó Brádaigh’s thinking on a range of issues and his own analysis of the republican position while encouraging Steele to convey British thinking: ‘[He] said that it would be useful if our thinking could be explained to O’Brady’, ran one of Steele’s reports, ‘[and] he was willing to offer himself as a channel for this, provided it was done completely securely.’⁷² Steele’s reports indicate that their conversations covered British government thinking on possible structures of government, the potential for an all-Ireland council, expected loyalist responses, the IRA’s capacity, and the possibility of Sinn Féin contesting elections, among other things. Steele was fully aware that Duddy would recount these conversations to Ó Brádaigh within a few days, reporting that ‘he sees O’Brady soon after each of our meetings.’⁷³ In having these wide-ranging but detailed conversations on key issues of contention, MI6 was taking up Duddy’s invitation to convey British thinking to the IRA. Steele impressed on Duddy that he would not deal with him as a ‘negotiator from the IRA’, but he was nonetheless now engaged, through him, in an exchange of positions and views with that organization. Steele emphasized in his reports that Duddy spoke about these meetings only to Ó Brádaigh, but there can be no doubt that Ó Brádaigh’s close associate O’Connell was involved from the start. Given the closeness of their partnership, it is equally certain that any positions Ó Brádaigh conveyed to Duddy had O’Connell’s imprimatur. As time went on, Duddy would also meet O’Connell regularly.⁷⁴ Because both sides knew that their positions and thinking would be communicated in detail to the other side, they had to treat contacts with Duddy most

⁷¹ ‘My TEL 032 of 22 September: Provisional IRA’, Steele to FCO Private Office, 10 October 1972, FCO 87/4, UK National Archives. ⁷² ‘The Provisional IRA’, Steele to Woodfield, 22 September 1972, FCO 87/4, UK National Archives. ⁷³ ‘My TEL 033 of 10 Oct: Provisional IRA’, Steele to Woodfield, 13 November 1972, FCO 87/4, UK National Archives. ⁷⁴ Brendan Duddy interview, 18 March 2004.

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seriously, speaking as carefully as they would in a face-to-face negotiation and making sure to communicate what they wanted to get across to the other side without providing information that would be helpful to them. Steele believed that some of what Ó Brádaigh was saying to Duddy was ‘speaking for effect’. That is, he was not being entirely candid with Duddy but was trying to convince him of the IRA’s strength and resolve so that Duddy would in turn convince the British of this. Clearly, there was continued interest on both sides in a negotiated compromise. But regardless of whether the channel made any contribution to a settlement, each side had a strong incentive to engage: the channel was a source of information. The ban on meeting with the IRA had deprived Britain’s covert diplomats of a fundamental diplomatic tool—direct contact. This channel offered a substitute compatible with the publicly stated position of the British government. It was valuable because it served the same purposes as conventional diplomatic contact: the eliciting of information about the orientations, attitudes, expectations and potential flexibility of the other side that was not available through public sources, while allowing an exploration of possible common ground. Thus, in proposing that he continue to meet Duddy, Steele argued that, ‘He could be a useful source of information and perhaps a channel through which we could influence O’Brady.’⁷⁵ Ó Brádaigh too valued the informational aspect of the channel: ‘It was useful in a way to have this because people can act on information that is not true, the British government or the IRA . . . not only was it useful, it was valuable that this existed.’⁷⁶ When the British government or the IRA made public statements, they simultaneously addressed several different audiences—their supporters, whose morale they had to sustain and whose expectations they had to manage; potential supporters, who they had to convince of their idealism; and political opponents both internally and externally, whose opposition they had to offset. Communication through the intermediary was not perfect, but it was at least not distorted by the need to simultaneously address other audiences and send public messages of various kinds. Duddy knew that if he could stimulate even the slightest exchange it might kick-start a cycle that could gather momentum. The very first ‘message’ from Ó Brádaigh was intended to stimulate a British reply, to which Ó Brádaigh would then reply in turn. From the outset, Duddy grasped that being an intermediary allowed him to exert influence: the two sides were exchanging information and ⁷⁵ ‘My TEL 032 of 22 September: Provisional IRA’, Steele to FCO Private Office, 10 October 1972, FCO 87/4, UK National Archives. ⁷⁶ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh Interview, 2 December 2009. Author’s translation from the Irish: ‘Bhí sé úsaideach ar bhealach a leithéid a bheith ann mar is féidir le daoine gníomhú ar nuaíocht nach bhfuil fíor, rialtas Sasana nó an tIRA . . . ní amháin go raibh sé úsáideach, bhí sé luachmhar a leithéid a bheith ann.’

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they were doing so through him. Privileged access to that information allowed him to begin to carve out a small space for independent action.

Information and Power Brendan Duddy’s lack of power made him ideal for the role. Unlike the clergy and politicians who often sought to act as intermediaries, he did not have the backing of a large organization. He had no public profile and he was not in a position to damage the parties by publicly denouncing one side or the other if talks went nowhere. Neither was he pursuing the interests of an organization that might be in tension with those of the two parties. From this position, the intermediary sought to work with both parties to identify underlying priorities and concerns; the goal, then, was to establish a basis for drawing their positions closer together and ultimately to establish direct contact between the parties. He understood that they only agreed to speak to him because it served their interests: ‘I had a feeling of course of being utterly used and was totally aware all the time, absolutely all the time that . . . I was a vessel to be used.’⁷⁷ The point of contact between these two pivotal parties was such a concentrated site of power that the intermediary enjoyed a small but significant capacity to exert influence. The secret of this limited power was the informational aspect of the channel. Duddy occupied a space to which neither of the parties had full access. One of the simplest and most important ways in which he made use of this privileged position was in choosing what to emphasize and what to report when conveying the views of the other party. Duddy noted that in every four hours of conversation there was one half sentence that was useful, that could provide a basis for progress. In one four-hour dialogue with anybody you want to mention, Michael, Rob, any of them, there would be half a sentence that mattered, and you trained yourself to listen for that half sentence . . . and it was that half sentence which made the difference. Either way. That’s how it works . . . I would have waited a month, two months, forever, and waiting on that slip, and they were also waiting on me.⁷⁸

In reporting back to the other side, he was the one who decided which half sentence to highlight. Through his interpretation and his reporting of tone and attitude he could shape how the other side perceived these moves. At their third meeting, Steele reported that Duddy ‘claimed that our discussions, which he had retailed to O’Brady, . . . had had an effect in strengthening in the Provisional IRA ⁷⁷ Brendan Duddy interview, 15 October 2009.

⁷⁸ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–8 July 2009.

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the need to end violence and to use political methods instead’ and that ‘O’Brady’s very important remark at the Ard Fheis that the Protestants in the North could not be expected to join the South in its present form was directly the result of something I had said.’ Steele was well aware that Duddy might have been using these informational asymmetries to keep the British engaged, but he could not be completely sure: ‘It is of course impossible to know whether this is so or not: the Londonderry man may well have been exaggerating to try and make us think that his meetings with me are important and productive and should be continued.’⁷⁹ British eschewal of direct contact created a space for information exchange that was difficult for either side to penetrate. Arrangements for Duddy’s meetings with republicans were aimed at frustrating surveillance by agencies such as the RUC and Garda Special Branch, but they also hindered penetration by MI6. Duddy met Ó Brádaigh at many locations across the west and north-west of Ireland and in and around Dublin. They met in the kitchens of private houses, in hotel lobbies, and other public places that could not be easily bugged at short notice. They made sure not to return to the same location within a two-month period. [We met in] various pubs, roadhouses, above pubs, everywhere you know, and occasionally in quite fancy hotels. I remember meeting Ruairí one evening in Clontarf Castle hotel [near Dublin] . . . and I always had to assume, and he did too of course, that the security services in the Republic were completely aware of it, you know. So, the idea was, if you met there once you didn’t go back again for two months so that surveillance could not be set up, that type of thing.⁸⁰

The British were able to check some aspects of his reports, and he certainly had to be careful not to make claims that would be exposed. If he reported things that were clearly at odds with information coming from other sources, it would undermine his credibility and weaken his position. But in an age of limited surveillance technology, it was often difficult to check the fine detail of his accounts. Thus, Duddy told Steele in a January 1973 meeting that he had recently visited Ó Brádaigh in prison in the Curragh in County Kildare. This demonstrated to Steele that Duddy still maintained close contact with Ó Brádaigh and had direct access to the republican leadership. Steele had no way of verifying the visit but said he had ‘no reason to doubt him’.⁸¹ Ó Brádaigh says, however, that Duddy did not visit him, recalling clearly that just one person apart from family and close friends visited him while he was in the Curragh, a Dr O’Toole from Galway who brought ⁷⁹ ‘My TEL 033 of 10 Oct: Provisional IRA’, Steele to Woodfield, 13 November 1972, FCO 87/4, UK National Archives. ⁸⁰ Brendan Duddy interview, 11 June 2009. ⁸¹ Re ‘My TEL 041 of 13 November, ‘The Provisional IRA’, for Woodfield from Steele. Frank Steele to NIO London Tel No 001(A) of 26 January 1973, FCO 87/177, UK National Archives.

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him several books.⁸² It reveals Duddy’s fear that his role might be ended if either side believed he no longer had access to the other, and it suggests too that he exaggerated to both parties the extent of that access. There was always a danger that one side or the other would learn that he was exaggerating his access to the other. Duddy was well aware that the British had multiple intelligence sources and they made sure he knew it. The British people that I met frequently made it totally clear to me that for protection of this situation that phone [in his house] was permanently tapped plus Bernadette’s down the street [safe house where republican leaders stayed] was tapped, plus Paula’s [his daughter] . . . And that I think was to make sure that I wasn’t yak-yakking on the phone. Now having said that, their fear was that some other branch of security surveillance would go in on top of their work or beside their work and all of a sudden this thing would be blown to pieces. That was their fear.⁸³

Duddy was always alert to the possibility that the British might get information from other sources about his meetings: I would always work on the assumption that the British had people and agents and electronic devices . . . how do you exist in it? . . . You exist by being truthful so that there’s no mysteries, you’re not deceiving people.⁸⁴

There were other ways in which he could use his access to information to sustain momentum. Most obviously, he had a certain measure of control over the timing and sequencing of communication. If he had several items of information to convey, he could save some of the less urgent elements, or deliver the good news before the bad. If there was a break in contact from one side, the fact that he had retained information meant that he still had something ‘new’ to relay. He could also influence the timing of negotiation moves with a view to sustaining and supporting the overall rhythm of the process. If it came to a point where there seemed to be no prospect of movement, he could bring out a stored piece of information that might then stimulate a response from the other side. On a few occasions he altered messages, softening them with a view to getting a positive response from the other party. He reflected on his approach in his diary in November 1975: ‘My job is not to invent positions, but to report only the facts; only altering or retaining knowledge; when there is reasonable hope of change.’⁸⁵

⁸² Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 2 December 2009. ⁸³ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–8 July 2009. ⁸⁴ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–8 July 2009. ⁸⁵ Brendan Duddy 1975, diary, 9 November 1975, POL35/62, Duddy Papers.

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Duddy would frequently talk about the way in which both the British and the IRA managed and controlled information: You’ve got to think of it like this, let’s take a hundred little wooden boxes in this Chinese medicine cabinet . . . I say ‘pick your box’ and you say ‘55’, so we bring down box 55. That box will not give you data in relation to box 25 or 75 or 95. It will only give you data in relation to that . . . [Someone] might have known box 27 and it may have taken two more years to [get to] box 40. Now it wasn’t that box 40 was superior to box 1, 2, 3, and 4, it was just data which was not for him. And that’s how it worked. And that data was constantly withheld from me . . . ⁸⁶

The control of information served multiple purposes for both republicans and the British, not least in allowing them to trace connections between people and to track leaks. And learning how both parties controlled information, Duddy began to seal it up in boxes of his own. He apprehended that, regardless of the substance of the information, there was value in tracking it and controlling the timing of its release.

The Intermediary as Mediator The mediation literature notes that ‘The more information a mediator has the greater its ability to bargain, and, hence, the more influence it has over the disputants.’⁸⁷ Brendan Duddy’s capacity to influence engagement increased as he accumulated information. And the more information he accumulated, the more his influence and leverage increased. Yet that also transformed his role, changing it from that of a facilitator to a bargaining party. An intermediary does not simply deliver messages. As Thomas Princen argues, the roles of intermediary and mediator are essentially the same.⁸⁸ Duddy, rather than simply bearing messages, engaged in dialogue from which he extracted key points that might produce a response or reciprocation at the other end of the channel. He sought to stimulate exchanges of all kinds, from initial exchanges of position to reciprocal actions such as the release of hostages in return for public statements. Through the very act of moving between the two parties, he stimulated a flow of information.

⁸⁶ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–9 July 2009.

⁸⁷ Princen 1992, 42.

⁸⁸ Princen 1992.

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4 Contact ‘Climbing a Mountain without Ropes’

It is difficult to establish a relationship of trust between opponents in an armed conflict. The problem is nicely distilled in the impatient response of one British embassy official to the suggestion by intermediary Dr John O’Connell in 1972 that the British engage with the IRA. Brusquely dismissing the idea, Peter Evans told him: It was inconceivable that the leaders of either faction of the IRA a. could be trusted to keep their word; b. could themselves guarantee control over those who claimed membership of their organisations . . . Moreover, no-one could have the slightest confidence in the good faith of illegal organisations who were currently carrying on a mindless and murderous campaign.¹

If the IRA could not be trusted to keep its word and couldn’t control its forces, no agreement with them could be relied upon. But Evans’s objections went beyond these immediate practical concerns and stemmed from his understanding of the nature of the organization. If the IRA was essentially ‘mindless’ rather than political, there was no prospect of building a cooperative relationship with them. Evans’s arguments were those of an official seeking to parry third-party involvement and to resist pressure for compromise. Viewed from a different angle, they can be seen as challenges to be surmounted by those within the British system who advocated contact. As Walton and McKersie note, ‘trust is required’ in negotiation because it reduces distortion and thus makes more accurate communication possible, emphasizing further that changes in key attitudes in the relationships between parties, including attitudes to trust, are a ‘major function’ of negotiations.² The only way trust could be established was through a series of interactions and interchanges that built confidence. If interaction

¹ ‘Dr John O’Connell’, PJC Evans to Bone, 9 March 1972, FCO 87/1, UK National Archives. ‘Either faction’ refers to the Provisional and the Official IRA. ² Walton and McKersie 1991, 142, 181–2.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0005

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established that the IRA could in fact be trusted in certain limited respects, and that it could be engaged with as an essentially political actor, it opened the way to something much more profound than short-term deals—the possibility of transforming the relationship between the British state and militant Irish republicanism, and gradually moving from implacable opposition and confrontation towards active cooperation. The IRA leadership, for their part, needed to be convinced that the British could be trusted; and that those who engaged with them were not simply set on crushing them. In winter 1973, a step change occurred in the interaction between the IRA leadership and the British government. Hitherto, their contact through Duddy had involved little more than the exchange of political thinking. In January 1973, in his final meeting with MI6 officer Frank Steele, Duddy expressed his frustration that Steele ‘had given him no information nor anything which he could use as an inducement to get the Provisionals to cease fire. He felt that he was wasting his time.’³ When Steele left the North a few months later, Michael Oatley (Fig. 4.1) took over his MI6 role and began to develop the channel into something much more substantial. Frank Lagan first introduced him to Brendan Duddy in the

Fig. 4.1 Michael Oatley, the SIS Officer who from 1973 worked with intermediary Brendan Duddy to develop the back-channel into a robust channel for communication and negotiation and negotiated the IRA ceasefire of 1975. He would play a crucial role again during the 1980/81 hunger strikes and the peace process in the 1990s. Photo taken in 2000. Source: David Barker.

³ Re ‘My TEL 041 of 13 November, ‘The Provisional IRA’, for Woodfield from Steele. Frank Steele to NIO London, telno 001(A) of 26 January 1973, FCO 87/177, UK National Archives.

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house of Derry businessman James Doherty. Oatley recalled later that though it was the middle of the day they drew the curtains of the sitting-room where they spoke.⁴ Over the next few months, Duddy facilitated indirect exchanges between the IRA and Oatley, and both sides began to work cooperatively on protecting the shared secret of this back-channel communication. Repeated interaction built trust. It also reinforced an infrastructure for engagement that was underpinned by shared norms and understandings. The transition from general political discussion to direct reciprocal exchange was prompted by a kidnapping in west Belfast two days after Christmas Day 1973 that triggered the first message through this channel from Prime Minister Edward Heath. Ironically, when this message was first communicated to the intermediary, he refused to relay it to the IRA.

Phase Two The cryptic document in Brendan Duddy’s papers that provides a chronology of the back-channel identifies 14–29 November 1973 as the ‘Opening of Phase Two’.⁵ 14 November was the day eight young men and women from west Belfast were convicted in Winchester of bomb attacks in London and sentenced to life in prison. They included Marion and Dolours Price, two sisters in their early twenties who were both student teachers. The bombings for which the Price sisters and their associates had been convicted had been the first Provisional IRA bomb attacks in Britain and they were the first members of the organization to be sentenced to long prison terms outside Ireland. The sisters immediately went on hunger strike to secure their transfer to a prison in Northern Ireland where they would have the same special category status as other paramilitary prisoners, that is, they would not have to wear prison uniform or do prison work, and they would be allowed ‘free association’: they would not be housed with loyalists or ‘ordinary decent criminals’. They were soon joined on hunger strike by fellow student teacher Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, both of whom had been convicted of involvement in the bombing campaign. All four would be force-fed, with the effect of extending their hunger strikes over more than 200 days. The convictions and hunger strikes triggered renewed contact between the British and the IRA through Duddy. So began this second phase of contact, a phase dominated for some eighteen months by the demand for the repatriation of IRA members gaoled in Britain. ⁴ Michael Oatley speaking at Negotiating Peace Symposium, NUI Galway, 13 October 2011. Event organized by the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSfmNLn-nQk&list=PLp-6_ r7fj3wPxnW8W7D1qw8Z6b41TH5_X&index=5 ⁵ Typescript chronology of events from September 1972 to 6/7 February 1975, POL35/74, Brendan Duddy Papers.

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The broader context was one of political flux and uncertainty in which the British government was trying to build a settlement from the middle out, excluding both republicans and hard-line unionists—the opposite of the inclusive settlement Duddy was working towards. On 21 November 1973, just a week after the conviction of the IRA bombers, moderate unionists led by Brian Faulkner, the SDLP, and the Alliance Party, agreed to establish a power-sharing executive as part of the process that led to the Sunningdale Agreement on powersharing and cross-border cooperation. But it was immediately clear this new government, which took up office on 1 January 1974, would be strenuously opposed by many unionists and loyalists, and its success was far from assured. 29 November is the second date mentioned. It was just a few days before Heath recalled the powerful Secretary of State William Whitelaw, the driving force behind the power-sharing agreement, to Great Britain to become Secretary of State for Employment and manage difficult negotiations with the National Union of Mineworkers. Francis Pym, a less powerful figure, succeeded him as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. It was an early sign of Britain’s fading commitment to an Agreement that seemed to be headed for trouble. Even if the new executive survived the challenge from unionists, the British government would still face an IRA campaign. The weaknesses of a settlement that included neither republican nor loyalist paramilitaries were already obvious, not least because the ongoing IRA campaign strengthened unionist resistance to compromise. Keeping open a line of communication with the IRA helped to keep British options open at a time of great uncertainty.

Kidnap At 11 p.m. on Thursday 27 December 1973, two men knocked on the front door of Thomas Niedermeyer in west Belfast. Niedermeyer was the German consul in Belfast and manager of the German-owned Grundig factory. The men at his door told him they had crashed into his parked car, but when he went with them to inspect the damage, they kidnapped him. Niedermeyer’s kidnapping would become the first occasion the British and the IRA used the channel to deal with an urgent and immediate problem rather than for political exchange and dialogue. Being the first occasion, it involved the testing of boundaries and, as a result, there was more openness in their communication than at later stages. No organization claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and there was no authoritative public statement or demand. Instead the British government and the RUC received multiple messages through intermediaries as well as phone calls from people claiming to be the kidnappers. They included a message from

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Dr John O’Connell saying that the IRA had carried it out and that they would release Niedermeyer in return for the transfer to Northern Ireland of the ‘Winchester prisoners’, including the Price sisters. The British government had no idea which of the messages was reliable. Establishing communication with the IRA was an especially urgent priority in this case because German Chancellor Willy Brandt immediately applied pressure on the British government to secure Niedermeyer’s release, even if that meant meeting the kidnappers’ demands. Thus, at 1.30 a.m. on the morning of Saturday 29 December, a little more than twenty-four hours after the kidnapping, and as part of their urgent efforts to sort out which of these messages was genuine, someone on the British side phoned Brendan Duddy (‘Contact’, as he was codenamed) to ask ‘Do you have anything to tell us about Mr Niedermeyer?’⁶ The following day, Sunday 30 December, before they had heard back from Duddy, the British heard from another source, apparently Dr John O’Connell, that Niedermeyer was alive. He said the IRA was asking for agreement within twelve hours to the demand of a transfer of the Winchester prisoners to Belfast. This seemed to be a firm and clear message from the IRA, but the deadline was unrealistic, and this must have called its authenticity into question. That same day the German ambassador called on the British Home Secretary. When told that the British government would not negotiate, the ambassador replied that: The British government’s reaction would be regarded as unsatisfactory and disappointing. Should he understand that we [the British] were unwilling to negotiate at all with the other side? . . . If there was the least flicker of hope, would we not be prepared to try to find out more about the intentions of the other side? It seemed to him that the proposed transfer of the Winchester group to Belfast was a fairly modest demand. His precise question therefore was whether we were completely unwilling to negotiate and to follow up the messages which had been received. Secondly if these messages involved transfers to Northern Ireland, would we really not be willing to do this?⁷

The ambassador had set out the German government’s preferences unambiguously—that the British communicate with the kidnappers, that they negotiate with them, and that they consider meeting the reported demands. Lest there be any doubt as to the strength of the German view, the ambassador met that evening with Prime Minister Heath and delivered a personal message from

⁶ ‘Telephone communication with the contact’, 28 December–8 February [handwritten note], CJ4/ 808, UK National Archives. ⁷ ‘The kidnapped German consul in Belfast’, to Bonn embassy, 31 December 1973, CJ4/808, UK National Archives.

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Chancellor Willy Brandt that directly suggested that the British negotiate through a third party: He said that the time was fast approaching when the federal government might feel it necessary to take some public action, for example, an appeal to the abductors of Herr Niedermeyer for clemency. He suggested that some third body might be called upon to negotiate with the kidnappers, and he mentioned the Red Cross, Grundig or Mr Faulkner. He also suggested that his government might wish to send over an expert in matters of abduction.⁸

He suggested too that Grundig might offer to pay a ransom. Heath was now effectively being asked by Brandt to negotiate Niedermeyer’s release. When Heath ‘stressed the difficulty and danger which would be caused if any ransom were to be paid’, the German ambassador pushed harder on the issue of contact with the kidnappers. The ambassador . . . said that he had received the impression from his talk with the Home Secretary that, having made their decision not to meet the demands of the abductors the British government would not be interested in the nature of such demands. The Prime Minister said that the British government would seek to maintain channels of communication through which any relevant information could be obtained, but he held out no hope that the British government would at any time give a different answer on the question of meeting the abductors’ demands.⁹

Heath had now conceded some ground by assuring the German ambassador they would maintain communication channels to seek information. The need for a reliable channel of communication between the British and the IRA leadership had never been more apparent. The British government had to establish which channel to the IRA might provide the most reliable way to gather information and perhaps to negotiate. The following morning, Monday 31 December, a third message was received from John O’Connell, and once again it had an unrealistic deadline, ‘hint[ing] that Herr Niedermeyer might be killed unless a favourable decision were given by 3pm this afternoon’.¹⁰ And still there was no reliable public claim of responsibility or credible public demands. At 3.00 p.m. that same day, the hour of the deadline, the British spoke to Duddy again. He told them ‘Friend [O Brádaigh] extremely ⁸ Prime Minister’s Private Secretary to UK ambassador to Germany, 1 January 1974, FCO 87/345, UK National Archives. ⁹ Prime Minister’s Private Secretary to UK ambassador to Germany, 1 January 1974, FCO 87/345, UK National Archives. ¹⁰ ‘The kidnapped German consul in Belfast’, to Bonn embassy, 31 December 1973, CJ4/808, UK National Archives.

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anxious: he would be annoyed to think he had not been informed.’ By indicating that this senior leadership figure was not fully informed of the kidnapping, and the demands, it called into question the credibility of John O’Connell’s information. It also suggested that even if the IRA was involved, elements in the leadership disapproved of the action and they were anxious to resolve the situation speedily. While other sources were making firm and confident claims, Duddy’s response was cautious. When the British spoke to Duddy later that day at 5 p.m., they told him they were receiving ‘other news’, suggesting they were attempting to use Duddy to probe the authenticity of the other messages and the demands made. The British official, probably James Allen or Michael Oatley (the latter may have been on leave at the time), wrote at 9 p.m. that night, ‘Contact says British have been playing games’. The note appears to indicate that Duddy had given him the dates and times of contact between John O’Connell and the British.¹¹ In accusing the British of ‘playing games.’ Duddy may have been suggesting they had been checking if he did indeed have access to the republican leadership. Providing the British with these details of John O’Connell’s contacts served to assert the ‘validity’ of this channel, proving that he did indeed provide a route to the heart of the IRA and that this channel should be treated as more reliable than others. He also said that he ‘fear[ed] the worst’. This was the context in which Duddy was asked for the first time to convey a message from the British Prime Minister to the IRA leadership.

A First Message Frank Steele had being doing the work of two, and when Michael Oatley took over his MI6 role, senior Foreign Office diplomat James Allan replaced Steele as Political Advisor to the Secretary of State.¹² It was Allan who now called Duddy, shortly after midnight on 2 January. Allan’s report notes that he made the call ‘on instructions from PUS Frank Cooper’, the recording of higher-level authorization marking the sensitivities involved. Cooper was the Permanent Undersecretary in the Northern Ireland Office, the civil servant who effectively ran Northern Ireland. Cooper, in turn, had doubtless received direct authorization from the Prime Minister’s office to contact the IRA through Duddy. There was no ambiguity in the message. Allan said that he had called ‘Contact’ because he was ‘in touch with a member of PIRA leadership’. [I] said that I had now been asked to pass on the suggestion that they should release Niedermeyer and that the British would make sure that nothing was said by them, the Germans or the victim of what had happened.¹³ ¹¹ The note reads: ‘Gives dates + times of D.E.K. > O’Connell contact’. ¹² Taylor 2001, 163. ¹³ Allan to Flash FCO Tel no 1 of 2 January 1974, CJ4/808, UK National Archives.

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Allan emphasized in his report that ‘Throughout I gave absolutely no repeat no suggestion that HMG would entertain any deal whatsoever with the PIRA.’ Carefully couched in terms that distanced it from negotiation, it was nonetheless the first clear offer through this channel of a reciprocal exchange; release in return for silence. That they chose to convey it through this channel indicates the level of trust that they placed in Duddy; they don’t appear to have responded to messages delivered through John O’Connell or other intermediaries in this way. Crucially, this call involved much more than passing on a message. Allan and Duddy spoke for more than an hour, and Allan’s note of the exchange provides a rare insight into the workings of the channel at this early stage. Notably, Duddy rejected the idea of relaying this message. ‘My contact said that he was against passing this on’, Allan reported, ‘whatever the logic of this suggestion [that the IRA release Niedermeyer] the people who we were dealing with would not feel they were on a hook—they were quite used to murder—and would just laugh the suggestion out-of-court.’¹⁴ In short, Duddy was arguing that the offer was inadequate, but was careful to frame this point in terms that would resonate with the British. He was not a postman, delivering messages. Every communication was simultaneously a negotiation. According to Allan, Duddy suggested that the IRA might modify its demands in return for concessions: [O Brádaigh] had demanded [of the IRA] the right to know what was going on but certainly would not wish to use his good offices further unless he saw an acceptable way of solving the problem . . . My contact speculated that it might be possible for us to accede to modified requests from PIRA in which we could make the condition that Niedermeyer should be released beforehand.¹⁵

Duddy, then, was responding to this first small British move by advising greater movement and, as he would do many times over the coming decades, suggesting moves by ‘speculating’ about what might be sufficient. The boundary between mediator and negotiator is blurred here. Duddy was also presenting Ó Brádaigh as a kind of mediator or negotiator in his own right, as someone within the republican movement who would have to make a case to others in the IRA and who would need to be able to bring something to the table. Duddy also introduced here a mechanism for compromise that would be used repeatedly—the IRA would jump first on the basis of secret assurances through the back-channel that the British would then respond. If the IRA moved first, the British could explain subsequent moves as a response to public appeals by moderate forces such as the Catholic Church or the SDLP. It would allow them ¹⁴ Allan to Flash FCO Tel no 1 of 2 January 1974, CJ4/808, UK National Archives. ¹⁵ Allan to Flash FCO Tel no 1 of 2 January 1974, CJ4/808, UK National Archives.

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to insist that they had not acted under duress. Duddy’s reference to ‘modified requests’ from the IRA suggests he was making similar suggestions to Ó Brádaigh, seeking to move the IRA position closer to the British, suggesting they might settle for something less than the transfer of the prisoners. In the process, Duddy was seeking out information from Allan and Ó Brádaigh on the degree of movement that might be possible on either side, building a fuller picture of the possibilities for convergence. At 2.00 a.m. Duddy called Allan to say that he had spoken to Ó Brádaigh: My contact [Duddy] telephoned [to?] say he had in fact passed on the suggestion in paragraph 1 above [release of Niedermeyer in return for silence] but his man [O Brádaigh] had agreed with the analysis in paragraph 2 [that it would be laughed out of court]. His man was however prepared to quote go on fighting unquote for a reasonable outcome if some new message giving hope of an offer of whatever sort was received.¹⁶

Duddy had thus delivered the British message to Ó Brádaigh, but had, it seems, bundled it up with his own analysis of its inadequacy. Anticipating rejection, he had aligned himself with that rejection in advance. And in reporting that Ó Brádaigh was prepared to fight ‘for a reasonable outcome’ if there was ‘hope of an offer’, Duddy was trying to extract some further move from the British that would allow him in turn to press the IRA, via Ó Brádaigh, to reciprocate. Allan’s report went ‘urgently’ to Number 10 as well as to the Home Office and the Northern Ireland Office. Allan could not be certain, however, that Duddy had been in touch with Ó Brádaigh at all. The following day [3 January] at 8.00 p.m. Allan phoned ‘a mutual friend of my contact’ in order to make sure the message had got through. He notes that he made the call ‘After discussion Cooper/ Armstrong and Butler (No 10)’. Robert Armstrong was Principal Private Secretary to Edward Heath while Robin Butler was Heath’s Private Secretary; both men would remain at the centre of power for the next two decades and would play key roles in the peace process of the 1990s. Clearly, his officials were keeping Heath closely informed. A handwritten note by Allan that was filed with his typed report indicates that this ‘mutual friend’ was Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan. Allan reported that he had told Lagan of the offer of silence in return for release but was concerned that the message might not have been relayed by Duddy: I said that I was not certain that full contents of my message had got through to the leadership. Emphasising that HMG never negotiated under duress and that I was sceptical as to whether Niedermeyer was still alive I underlined our belief

¹⁶ Allan to Flash FCO Tel no 1 of 2 January 1974, CJ4/808, UK National Archives.

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that PIRA had got themselves on a hook and that we were prepared to make sure silence was maintained on the episode if Niedermeyer was released unharmed. My friend immediately passed this on and was told by Contact he believed Niedermeyer was still alive. Contact said that he did not know nature of proposal from PIRA side but suspected that it was connected with Price sisters. Offer of no publicity had no attraction and there would be a reluctance on the part of his man [Ó Brádaigh] to try it with his colleagues. Nevertheless my friend feels pretty sure that Contact will have subsequently been in touch with his man last night.¹⁷

Here, Allan was trying to use Lagan to test this channel from another angle, and to prompt Duddy to pass the message on if he had not done so already. The report indicates just how intimately Lagan was connected to this channel and how much he was trusted with knowledge of secret contacts with the IRA. And it also shows Lagan vouching for Duddy’s credibility. By this stage, Niedermeyer was four days dead. On the evening of 30 December he had tried to escape; his captors had forcibly subdued him, hitting him on the head with a gun, and he had died from the effects of the blow. These facts would not emerge until years later. After his death, the IRA publicly denied responsibility for the kidnapping and any connection with the demands communicated to Downing Street. There is a strong possibility that the kidnapping had been organized in Belfast without authorization from the IRA leadership in Dublin, which would explain Ó Brádaigh’s difficulty in finding out what was happening.¹⁸ Duddy’s caution, and his knowledge of the fine detail of other contacts, must have increased his credibility. A few weeks later Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, wrote to the British ambassador in Dublin asking him to seek a meeting with Taoiseach Jack Lynch. He instructed him to tell Lynch about an approach from an unnamed intermediary, which is clearly Duddy, and affirmed the British government’s confidence in him: From time to time people get in touch with us claiming that they have authority to pass on messages from the I.R.A. One such approach came on 13 February, and we had good reason to suppose that this particular intermediary did indeed speak with authority.¹⁹

The use of the channel to send direct messages authorized by the Prime Minister’s office indicated a high degree of confidence that neither the intermediary nor the IRA would leak the details. Apparent too in this incident was Duddy’s agency, his efforts to use every conversation to secure information about positions, to make ¹⁷ [re] ‘My tel no 1.’, Allan to Kelvin White Tel no 2 of 4 January, CJ4/808, UK National Archives. ¹⁸ Howard 2004; Bell 1993; Phoenix, 2009. ¹⁹ Douglas-Home to Dublin embassy, 18 February 1974, FCO87/288, UK National Archives.

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proposals for movement, and to seek to promote convergence. This set of intense interactions now provided the springboard for a small but significant initiative in the broader political arena.

Currency A few weeks after this intense burst of communication, the British government made a public move in direct response to communication from Brendan Duddy. At 1.15 a.m. on 24 January 1974, Duddy had called James Allan. They spoke for an hour. ‘The contact who we used over Niedermeyer . . . had nothing specific to say’, Allan reported to the Northern Ireland Director and Coordinator of Intelligence, MI5 officer Denis Payne, ‘but clearly wished to find out whether there was anything that we wished to say on any front.’²⁰ Duddy was seeking now to generate some political movement. The conversation ranged over the political landscape, and Allan’s report shows that he was aware that Duddy was seeking to elicit some kind of message or information to bring back to Ó Brádaigh. The very fact that Allan was willing to talk gave Duddy something to bring back to sustain a sense of momentum and of an active and ongoing process of communication. Three weeks later, on the night of 13–14 February 1974, Duddy followed up with a request that the British make a specific political move to bolster those within the republican movement who wanted to get involved in electoral politics. Sinn Féin was a proscribed organization in the North and their candidates had not been standing in elections. According to Allan, Duddy claimed to speak ‘on behalf of O’Brady and with the support of O’Connell’. He had asked if Sinn Féin candidates would be allowed to stand for election in Northern Ireland and whether they would be arrested if they did so. He said the IRA Army Council had agreed to allow Sinn Féin candidates to stand in elections in the North if the British made a statement on the issue, preferably removing the ban but at least making clear that candidates could stand without fear of arrest.²¹ The British now moved very quickly on the issue despite the fact that ‘there might well be accusations we were negotiating with the IRA.’ Just two days later, Northern Ireland Secretary Francis Pym gave a speech in which he said there was no reason that those who supported the political views of ‘for example the UVF and Sinn Féin’ should not do so: ‘All we ask is that such views should be advanced

²⁰ Allan to Payne—cc Oatley and Mr Gowan, 24 January 1974, CJ4/808, UK National Archives. ²¹ Douglas-Home to flash Dublin telno 53 of 14 February, 1974 FCO 87/288, UK National Archives.

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through the democratic processes.’²² The cryptic chronology of the channel in Duddy’s papers describes the contacts as follows: 5–15 Feb: Phase Two re-opens and quickly achieves some positive action to support Michael’s [Ó Brádaigh’s] attempts to change course. A speech is made (16 Feb).²³

The British government had now made a direct public response to a secret request purported to have come from the IRA Army Council. The agreed sequencing of information exchange confirmed that the IRA and the British could do business through the channel. Alerting Duddy to the timing and content of the speech allowed him to give the IRA advance notice. That notice, in turn, constituted the speech as a direct response to the IRA. Public posturing by parties to a conflict can severely distort communication.²⁴ When one side makes a public statement, the other side has to interpret it in the light of the audiences to which it is addressed, and it can be hard to make out what the intended message is. As Duddy once put it, ‘you halved everything you read in the media or you took it as the exact opposite.’²⁵ Back-channel communication helped to overcome this problem. When a message was passed through the back-channel highlighting the significant parts of a public speech and pointing out that they were intended as messages to the opponent, it offset the possibility of a misunderstanding. John Chilcot, who was involved in reopening this channel in the 1990s, emphasized the value of back-channels in clarifying the importance and meaning of public statements: Remarks which are made in public deliberately—we did it ourselves a lot— which are designed to carry a particular and precise message which you then will, if you can, interpret privately through a back-channel if you’ve got one to say ‘this is what we mean by what we are saying in public.’²⁶

The small group within the leadership of the republican movement who knew of the intermediary’s existence now had tangible evidence that he provided a route to the top of the British system. For the IRA, moves such as this served both to confirm the authority of those on the other side and also established that the British would do as they promised. The IRA ‘request’ had been politically sensitive, and it required a little work on the part of the British to ensure it did not have negative repercussions for them, but they acceded to it because it fitted with their ²² Douglas-Home to immediate Dublin telegram number 55 of 16 February, 1974 FCO 87/288. ²³ Typescript chronology of events from September 1972 to 6/7 February 1975, POL35/74, Brendan Duddy Papers. ²⁴ Walton and McKersie 1991. ²⁵ Brendan Duddy interview, 15 October 2009. ²⁶ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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own aim of encouraging the Provisionals to move away from the armed campaign. And by responding to a direct request in this way they reinforced the pattern of reciprocal moves through this channel, strengthening its reliability and authority.

Modalities of Engagement The chronology of the channel in Brendan Duddy’s papers provides the first use of a mountain-climbing metaphor to describe these contacts. The anonymously authored document states that after Harold Wilson returned to power at the head of a minority Labour government in February 1974, ‘A mountain was climbed without the mountaineering equipment which it had been hoped might be obtained’ and that in early October 1974, shortly before Wilson was returned with a working majority, they began ‘Re-climbing the mountain without ropes’. Wilson, it seems, was reluctant to take risks with the channel while he headed a minority government. Still, events kept the channel open. Notably, shortly after midnight on 5 June 1974, IRA members acting without authorization from the leadership kidnapped Lord and Lady Donoughmore from their home, Knocklofty House, in Waterford, in the south-east of Ireland, and demanded the transfer of the Price sisters to the North. The kidnapping threatened to severely damage the republican movement if it ended with the deaths of the elderly Donoughmores, and its leadership had strong motivations to seek a compromise. On the British side, meanwhile, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had been preparing to make some concessions on the Price sisters in any case. Less than a week before the kidnapping, on 31 May, SDLP politician Paddy Devlin contacted Irish diplomat Seán Donlon to make representations to the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs on behalf of the sisters. The SDLP had hitherto declined to advocate on their behalf and the Taoiseach’s office asked Donlon why their approach had suddenly changed. Paddy Devlin, he explained, was ‘acting on ‘winks and hints’ from the British that the Home Secretary might be considering some move in relation to the sisters and that it would be helpful to the British government if the SDLP could make representations on the sisters’ behalf.²⁷ In effect, the British had asked the SDLP to put pressure on them so that subsequent concessions could be represented as a response to the SDLP. The Home Office was concerned that movement on its part should not be seen as a response to the pressure exerted through the hunger strike or, indeed, as a concession to the republicans. On 1 June, the day after Devlin’s approach to Dublin, Jenkins announced it would be reasonable for the sisters to serve the bulk of their sentences in Northern Ireland but refused to

²⁷ ‘Price Sisters’, 31 May 1974, TAOIS/2005/7/589 1/3, National Archives of Ireland. I am very grateful to Peter Doherty for alerting me to this document.

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transfer them for the moment due to the ongoing political violence in Northern Ireland. They continued their hunger strike. Following the abduction of Lord and Lady Donoughmore, Duddy became involved in brokering a deal to secure their safe release. It required the British government to trust that the people they were dealing with through Duddy genuinely spoke for the IRA and had the capacity to effect their release. On Friday 7 June, two days after the kidnapping, the Price sisters, on being briefed on concessions which Jenkins proposed to make, came off their hunger strike, as did Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney. The sisters had received assurances that they could wear their own clothes and would not have to do prison work while in Brixton prison awaiting transfer. Early on Sunday morning, 9 June, the Donoughmores were released in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, and then, on 13 June Jenkins announced that the Price sisters would be transferred to the North within the year ‘if there was no great outbreak of violence or deterioration in the security situation’.²⁸ London publicly represented Jenkins’s initiative as resulting solely from contact between the Home Office and the sisters through the SDLP’s Paddy Devlin and others.²⁹ In truth, the release of the Donoughmores and the subsequent announcement on repatriation of the Price sisters were intertwined with a reciprocal exchange negotiated through the channel by the British and the IRA. When both sides followed through on their commitments in this case it contributed to confidence in making such agreements in the future. The agreement made in this case shared certain features with the kidnapping of Thomas Niedermeyer, when the British had offered to ensure that no one involved in the compromise would speak about the case if he was released.³⁰ After their release, the Donoughmores declined to say anything about their experience.³¹ The principle here was that neither party to a secret agreement would use it to gain political advantage. Thus, concessions could be made without fear that they would cause further damage by the other side claiming victory and seeking to press the advantage. It also effectively promised that this process of engagement would not be used to gather evidence against the kidnappers. In both instances—one which failed (Niedermeyer) and one which met with success (Donoughmores)—agreements necessarily had a tacit component that allowed the British government to state that it was not negotiating. As communication between the British and the IRA through this channel intensified during the second half of 1974, commitments made were increasingly tacit rather than explicit.

²⁸ ‘Price sisters will be transferred this year’, The Irish Times, 14 June 1974. ³⁰ Brendan Duddy interview, 27–8 July 2009. ³¹ Kelleher 2008.

²⁹ Ellis 1974.

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During the Niedermeyer kidnapping, the British had directly offered a reciprocal arrangement. More commonly, however, British representatives would outline the response that a move by the IRA would be likely to generate from the British government rather than directly offering to make a move. Duddy would then exert pressure on the British for further elaboration on their likely response. The British, in turn, would then elaborate on the details, or expand its scope, or add in related moves that might happen in consequence. Thus, the British could reach reciprocal arrangements without a formal acknowledgement at any stage that they were involved in a process of negotiation. Secrecy created doubts about such arrangements. In a situation where both sides accepted that a move could not be publicly acknowledged to be part of a reciprocal exchange, there might be reasonable doubt on the part of either the IRA or the British as to whether outcomes were indeed the direct result of agreements made through this channel. The parties demonstrated this by communicating the content of public statements in advance through the back-channel. The flip side was that steps that were not communicated through the channel in advance did not count as concessions even where they met demands made by the other side. Thus, in July 1975, British Secretary of State Merlyn Rees publicly announced a date for the end of internment, a step that republicans had been demanding for years. Duddy indicates in his diary that the British had been supposed to let him (and, ipso facto, the IRA) know in advance, but had failed to do so.³² By announcing the ending of internment without giving the IRA advance notice, the British were signalling that it should not be regarded as a concession or as part of a reciprocal exchange. It signalled a rejection of the IRA’s power position. During the Niedermeyer kidnapping, Duddy had characterized Ó Brádaigh as a kind of mediator or negotiator in his own right who would have to make the case for compromise or concession to other republicans and who needed to be supported in this role. There was some substance to this, evident in Ó Brádaigh’s account of the release of a British soldier by the IRA. The IRA had kidnapped the off-duty soldier while he was visiting his family in County Donegal in June 1974.³³ Duddy told Ó Brádaigh that the British had requested the release of the soldier. Ó Brádaigh then travelled to speak to those holding him. The logistics of such missions were complicated: I remember a British soldier was captured in Donegal where he was visiting his family . . . the British were afraid he would be killed . . . Duddy would contact me to find out if anything could be done about this . . . I had to go looking for certain

³² Brendan Duddy diary 1975, 24 July 1975, Duddy Papers.

³³ Taylor 1997, 170–1.

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people to present the story to them, which was difficult enough because I was in the public eye and a lot of people knew me who I didn’t know . . . I had to be very careful indeed and at times had to wait for a day or two or three.³⁴

In the case of the kidnapped soldier, Ó Brádaigh now found himself acting as a negotiator within the republican movement, making the case for release to the key authority figure, presumably the Officer Commanding of the local IRA unit: The question I put to him was ‘what good would it do [to kill him]?’ . . . ‘Well’ [he replied], ‘these people engage in spying.’ ‘Well’ [I said], ‘they probably do, and listen to conversations and so on, and we have to ensure there will be no welcome for them south of the border and so on, but it won’t do any good at this time to put someone like this to death.’³⁵

The soldier would undoubtedly have been killed were it not for this intervention, and Ó Brádaigh had spent some of his political capital within the movement to make a concrete conciliatory move in direct response to a request through this channel. One difficulty in building the channel was the reluctance of the British to reciprocate. Because Michael Oatley had almost no ‘currency’ to trade with the IRA, creative ways had to be found to maintain a sense of reciprocity and exchange. One way was the provision of information. Oatley could let the republicans know in advance when an internee was due to be released, for example. And when Sinn Féin activists were planning to cross the border, Ó Brádaigh could ask through this channel if they were wanted by the RUC and likely to be arrested. He would be told whether or not it was safe for them to enter the North, and he was satisfied that the information given was reliable and accurate.³⁶

Authority, Trust, and Secrecy Two of the most important functions of this channel were to test whether the principals at each end really had the authority to make commitments and deliver ³⁴ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 18 July 2012; Author’s translation from the Irish: Is cuimhin liom gur gabhadh saighdiúir Sasanach i gContae Dún na nGall, áit a raibh sé ar cuairt ar a mhuintir . . . bhí imní ar na Sasanaigh go marófaí é . . . dhéanadh Duddy teagmháil liomsa, a fháil amach an féidir aon rud a dhéanamh faoi seo . . . bhí ormsa dul ar thóir dhaoine áirithe leis an scéal a chur ina láthair, rud a bhí deacair go leor mar bhí mé ós comhair an phobail agus bhí aithne ag go leor leor daoine ormsa, nach raibh aithne agamsa orthu siúd . . . bhí orm bheith an-chúramach go deo agus amantaí fanacht lá nó dhó nó trí. ³⁵ Author’s translation from the Irish: sin an cheist a chur me air ‘cen mhaitheas a bheadh ann?’ . . . ‘Bhuel bíonn na daoine seo, bionn siad ag spiaireacht’. ‘Ah bhuel, is dóigh go mbíonnn, agus ag éísteachta scéalta agus mar sin de, agus caithfear a ghéaru [dhearbhú?] nach bhfuil aon fháilte rompu ar an taobh ó dheas den teorann agus mar sin de, ach ní dheánfaidh sé aon mhaitheas ag an am seo a leithéide a chur chun báis.’ ³⁶ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 18 July 2012.

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on them and that the interlocutors had the authority to ‘speak for and exert influence over’ the principals on their side, given that the principals on either side could not make their relationship to agents publicly clear.³⁷ Neither side involved in the back-channel communication could take for granted that their counterparts had the authority to make commitments. British officials repeatedly expressed doubts that the IRA leadership was in full control of the organization. Rejecting one overture in late 1972, Frank Steele had argued that ‘there was not any one man or group in the IRA who were both willing and able to deliver an effective and lasting ceasefire.’³⁸ Given that only a few people on either side were aware of the existence of such channels, republicans too faced a problem in determining whether a chain of communication actually reached the highest levels of the British state. Thus when the IRA secretly agreed terms for the 1972 ceasefire, the British agreed to insert a distinctive phrase into a House of Commons speech by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, to indicate government assent, and provide proof to the IRA that they were dealing with the highest levels of the British government.³⁹ Likewise, the use of this channel for a series of reciprocal gestures in 1973–74 confirmed to the British that it reached directly to the top of the IRA’s command structure. Use of the channel built trust in three distinct respects. It established that the IRA and the British would stand by commitments given through this channel, with just a few exceptions, typically as a result of the tide within a negotiator’s organization turning against a particular course of action. Failure to uphold commitments on these rare occasions stoked anger. Second, use of the channel built trust by establishing that those involved were generally truthful, within the usual limits of diplomatic practice between warring parties. This did not rule out misdirection, manipulation, or selective release of information, but both sides gradually established that the other side was generally scrupulous in not stating outright lies. The IRA was concerned to ensure it should not be blamed for things it had not done. Thus, Ó Brádaigh delivered proof at one meeting with British representatives in 1975 that an IRA denial of responsibility for the killing of a policeman was true. His intention was to demonstrate that ‘we are not liars.’ For Ó Brádaigh, it was important that the British government be able to believe what the IRA was saying to them: ‘[Duddy] said to me once’, he told the present author, ‘that the British understood about us that we would implement anything that we had agreed to—and another thing—that we were not lying to them.’⁴⁰ ³⁷ Putnam and Carcasson 1997, 253. ³⁸ ‘IRA and Peace: From UKREP Belfast to priority Dublin TELNO 028’, Frank Steele, 28 November 1972, Prem15/1016, UK National Archives. ³⁹ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 27 June 2005. ⁴⁰ Dúirt sé uair amháin liom gur thuig na Sasanaigh, maidir linne, rud ar bith gur aontaigh muid leis go raibh siad sasta go gcómhlíonadh muid sin agus rud eile, nach raibheamar ag déanamh bréag leo.

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The British had a much richer store of experience of exerting advantage through misinformation and manipulation of information without lying directly, and there was a certain asymmetry to this shared commitment to not directly lying. Duddy would later reflect that the republicans ‘were too honourable in a way’ in 1975,⁴¹ not just avoiding lies but being slower than the British to engage in other kinds of deception and misdirection. But to a great extent this asymmetry was simply a reflection of the power imbalance. The far weaker position of the IRA meant that it was often not in a position to push for greater clarity on issues that were left deliberately vague by the British. But while the British undoubtedly managed and manipulated information effectively, they too were careful to avoid direct lies, for to do so would undermine the basis for future negotiation. Third, and finally, both sides came to accept that the opposing party would respect the integrity of protocols for communication and not abuse contact for direct military advantage. Neither side would take advantage of meetings to kill, arrest, or kidnap representatives of their counterparts. They did not completely relax. An armed agent always accompanied British representatives at the 1975 talks, while Duddy believed that there was always a ‘third man’ present to ensure security during his meetings in public locations with a British representative in 1981, even in the centre of London.⁴² After a few initial meetings at Duddy’s home in 1991, the British representative requested that they meet in a safer venue, explaining that if kidnapped by the IRA ‘I have so much knowledge I’m a danger to my government.’⁴³ On the other hand, republican representatives were alert to the possibility that their contacts with the British might be used to gather evidence against them that might culminate in their being brought before the courts. Nonetheless, both sides came to accept that contact was valuable enough to the other side that it would not be exploited for immediate advantage. As Duddy puts it: Continuously the British had to trust me even though they had their own third or fourth or fifth man. I had to equally trust them. In turn there was a code of trust within the IRA if I [was] meeting in a Belfast hotel or . . . wherever it was. Never was I asked where or how . . . so there was all that trust, but that trust also had to have boundary walls of guardianship.⁴⁴

Those ‘walls of guardianship’ maintained a separation between interaction aimed at a negotiated settlement on the one hand and the violent interaction between parties aimed at securing military advantage that took place in parallel. In this

⁴¹ ⁴² ⁴³ ⁴⁴

Brendan Duddy interview, 15 October 2009. Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009. Brendan Duddy interview 27 November 2009. Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009.

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restricted realm of the practicalities of contact, the British government and the IRA developed relatively high levels of mutual trust. The experience of contact also established that the other side, and the intermediary, would maintain the secrecy and confidentiality of the channel. Intermediaries sometimes leak. Thus, as the British government finalized arrangements for secret talks with the IRA in late 1974, a senior Irish official told a British counterpart that Belfast-based republican Seamus Loughran, who was acting as an intermediary, ‘was openly claiming that HMG had agreed to a meeting somewhere outside Ireland at which three Provisional [IRA] representatives would meet three “British representatives”’ and had even named two of the three republican representatives who did in fact later take part in these talks.⁴⁵ Given that the Irish government was a key party from which the British sought to conceal talks, such leaks could be extremely damaging. Some intermediaries active at this time who were regarded by the British as unreliable received prominent press coverage of their roles. By contrast, Duddy’s role during this period did not emerge until a quarter century had elapsed. Both sides could be confident that Duddy would maintain secrecy. Neither side, as a rule, leaked information that passed through this channel. The republicans maintained secrecy about the 1975 talks for thirty years. Information about the 1991–93 contacts leaked when they broke down, but confidentiality was carefully maintained for the two and a half years that the channel was active. For both the British and the IRA, trust was limited and coexisted with deep distrust of the strategy and long-term intentions of the other side. Nonetheless, that trust provided a building block for the development of a negotiating relationship, and it was a key component in the communication infrastructure. It underlay cooperative relationships established on the basis of a gradually increasing certainty about the intentions and patterns of behaviour of opponents. Ultimately it was use of the channel that gradually increased the levels of trust and of mutual understanding necessary to change relationships. The communication infrastructure, reinforced by repeated engagements, changed the relationship between the parties to the extent that, in January 1975, they embarked for the first time on a series of regular face-to-face meetings aimed at achieving a negotiated end to the conflict.

Other Channels Are Closed In the course of 1973–74, British officials maintained contact with several people who sought to act as intermediaries with the IRA.⁴⁶ But as contact intensified in ⁴⁵ ‘To immediate FCO telegram number 8’, ‘PIRA ceasefire’, 7 January 1975, Prem 16/515, UK National Archives. ⁴⁶ Craig 2012; Moloney 2002; Mumford 2011; O’Connell 1989.

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late 1974, it was in the interests of both the British and the IRA that there be a single authoritative channel of communication, and one that did not leak. It was also important that a single individual act as intermediary. According to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the nature of the communication required that there be a single clear channel of communication: multiple voices would have caused confusion.⁴⁷ While other individuals were intimately involved in the operation of this channel and in the practicalities of communication, it was a single individual, Brendan Duddy, who acted as the key intermediary. As the IRA and the British government moved tentatively towards direct talks in January 1975, the IRA sent a message to Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson though Dr John O’Connell that it had already sent through Duddy. They were trying to make certain that the message had actually reached Wilson. The British declined to answer through O’Connell. Instead they sent a message to the IRA through Duddy saying they were unhappy that the IRA had tried to make contact through O’Connell. They asked that henceforth they communicate only through Duddy.⁴⁸ The Derryman was now the sole authorized channel for communication between the British government and the leadership of the IRA, and the sole channel for the face-to-face talks between representatives of the IRA Army Council and the British government that would begin in February 1975 in Duddy’s house on the Glen Road in Derry.

⁴⁷ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 2 December 2009. ⁴⁸ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh interview, 27 June 2005.

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5 1975 Ceasefire ‘Everyone Trying’

For most of 1975, the Provisional IRA was officially on ceasefire. It was a major and sustained initiative by the Provisionals, despite the fact that there was a variety of breaches and that sectarian violence escalated during this period. Its maintenance for such a long period raises the question of why it did not provide the basis for a lasting peace. It was the first time the Provisional IRA had maintained a ceasefire for more than a few weeks. It was not until 1994 that the IRA would again maintain a ceasefire for a comparable duration. The 1994 ceasefire was a direct precursor to republican acceptance of major compromises in the comprehensive peace settlement of 1998. Why was it, then, that the long IRA ceasefire of 1975 did not lead to a similar settlement? Throughout the ceasefire, British government representatives held regular secret talks with a republican team that reported directly to the IRA Army Council. It was the only time in the conflict that such a series of meetings took place. When the ceasefire ended, the British government turned away from efforts to negotiate and focused its attention on the military defeat of the IRA. Existing accounts characterize these talks as a ploy to weaken the IRA and argue that the talks and the ceasefire were only sustained by a pretence that the British government was considering withdrawal. They argue that a simplistic republican analysis of the British state, republican misreading of British intentions, and a dogmatic focus on ideological goals ensured that the talks never had any prospect of delivering a permanent peace agreement. The ideological rigidity of the IRA is identified as a central reason for the failure of these negotiations, as it was for the failure of the 1972 talks. Certainly, some republican leaders overestimated the likelihood of British withdrawal. However, they had a more nuanced analysis of British intentions than is generally acknowledged, and the IRA did seriously consider a settlement that would involve major compromises and a significant shift in its position. The breakdown of the talks cannot be ascribed primarily to republican dogmatism.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0006

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Interpreting the Ceasefire The 1975 ceasefire has puzzled scholars, including some of those most hostile to the IRA. Assumptions of ideological dogmatism and determined militarism make it difficult to explain why the IRA should have sustained a ceasefire for so long after it became clear that it could not yield military benefits nor allow it to achieve its core objectives. Analysing IRA decision-making in terms of military strategy, M. L. R. Smith comments: The ceasefire . . . begs the question, why did the Provisionals, both moderates and hardliners alike, allow themselves to be ensnared in a ‘demoralising’ and ‘damaging’ truce for so long? . . . they persisted even after it was clear . . . that the British were not interested in talking to [the] IRA and were busily pursuing their own political agenda with the constitutional convention.¹

The dominant explanation in the academic literature is that the British government duped the republican leadership into believing that withdrawal was on the cards. Jonathan Tonge states it baldly: ‘Duped by the British government that withdrawal might be on the agenda, the IRA leadership called a ceasefire in 1974–5.’² Paul Bew and Henry Patterson offer a variation on the same theme: The purpose of the truce was to divide and weaken the Provisionals and to get rid of internment, as prelude to reasserting the rule of law . . . the true nature of that policy was revealed in 1976.³

According to this explanation, the British government strung out the talks in order to divide and weaken the IRA militarily and politically, laying the foundation for the subsequent success of security force action against the IRA. The chief source for this explanation is the memoirs of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Labour MP Merlyn Rees, where it is expounded at some length.⁴ Many academic accounts accept Rees’s argument to a greater or lesser degree.⁵ His account of a strategy of deception also finds some support in contemporary documents such as the minutes of meetings of the Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland. ‘The importance of a ceasefire’, Rees told the committee on ¹ Smith 1997, 133. After the collapse of the Sunningdale agreement and the power-sharing executive in 1974, the British government held elections in May 1975 for a Constitutional Convention that was intended to make proposals for the future government of Northern Ireland. The Provisionals boycotted the election and the convention. The unionist parties at the convention ultimately recommended a return to unionist majority rule, modified only by the inclusion of the SDLP in all-party parliamentary committees. This proposal was rejected by the British government, which then settled into a period of extended direct rule. ² Tonge 2006, 48. ³ Bew and Patterson 1985, 87. ⁴ Rees 1985. ⁵ See for example Bew and Patterson 1985; Dixon 2001a; Neumann 2003; Smith 1997; Tonge 2002.

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18 February 1975, ‘is that it offers us the opportunity to create the conditions in which the Provisionals’ “military” organisation and structure may be weakened. They would not find it easy to start a campaign again from scratch.’ But in the same meeting, Rees noted: As against this, there is the risk that the Provisionals can rest, re-supply and regroup so as to re-emerge more strongly . . . They badly needed a ceasefire if only in order to reorganize after a long period of attrition and disruptions at the hands of the Security Forces. But they are not beaten. Their cohesion and discipline are remarkable.⁶

Throughout the ceasefire, the question of whether it had weakened or strengthened the Provisionals was in fact a hotly contested point. In May 1975, a few months into the truce, the head of the British Army in the North, General Sir Frank King, and his senior officers complained to Rees that: ‘The PIRA were becoming stronger every day, but the Security Forces were becoming weaker . . . It would take a considerable time now to reverse the PIRA’s new-found strength.’⁷ Conservatives and unionists heavily criticized Rees for the concessions he had made to secure and maintain the ceasefire. It is to be expected that he would defend his position by emphasizing that his main aim was the weakening of the IRA, but, even then, he was simultaneously offering the prospect of a negotiated settlement to his colleagues, aiming, he said, ‘to look for the outside chance of reaching some more substantial settlement with the Provisionals should they be sufficiently tired of violence to want to give up’.⁸ One variation on the theme of deception holds that the British government entered talks with the intention of ‘politicizing’ the IRA and incorporating it in the political life of Northern Ireland, but abandoned this approach when it became clear it would lead nowhere. According to journalist Desmond Hamill in his study of the British Army’s role in Northern Ireland: ‘As officials explored the openings they began to realize that the Provisionals lived in a “dream world” and did not understand the facts of political life.’⁹ This is more or less a direct restatement of the analysis presented by Rees himself: At the beginning of the ceasefire I had thought there was at least a chance of the Provisional IRA getting itself involved in the politics of the [Constitutional]

⁶ Memo on IRA ceasefire from Merlyn Rees to IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 18 February 1975, CAB 134/3921, UK National Archives. ⁷ ‘Force levels and the ceasefire. Note of a meeting held at 2.15pm on Friday, 2 May 1975’, CJ4/839, UK National Archives. ⁸ Memo on IRA ceasefire from Merlyn Rees to IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 18 February 1975 ⁹ Hamill 1985, 177.

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Convention but the reports to me of the talks with the Provisional Sinn Féin had soon shown that real politics were outside its ken.¹⁰

Rees emphasized that the British turned to deception only after it became clear that the IRA could not be incorporated in the political system. Here, he identified republican ideological rigidity as the central obstacle to a settlement. This account has strong attractions for key figures on all sides. For Rees and the Labour government, it served to protect them from denunciation as traitors who were undermining a successful military campaign against the IRA. At one stage Enoch Powell, who had been elected as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down in October 1974, publicly accused civil servants dealing with republicans of being engaged in ‘near treasonable activities’, while Rees himself was called a ‘traitor’ in the House of Commons.¹¹ When Rees represents these talks as a successful security initiative, laying the groundwork for the subsequent reduction in violence in the late 1970s, it is partly in response to the allegation that he was engaged in a misguided and even treacherous attempt to achieve a negotiated settlement with incorrigible terrorists. This version of events has taken such a firm hold because it also suited the new leadership which took over control of the republican movement in the years after the ceasefire. The claim that Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell had been fooled by the British in 1975 strengthened the argument for pushing them aside in the early 1980s. It validated in retrospect the strong opposition to the talks that had been expressed in Belfast and South Armagh and strengthened those who had opposed the ceasefire.¹² Some elements of Rees’s account also suit the republican leadership that called the ceasefire. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the lead negotiator in 1975, argued that the British initially favoured withdrawal but moved away from this position under pressure from loyalists and the Irish government.¹³ This analysis is compatible with the proposition that, while the British may have employed deception (especially during the later stages of the ceasefire), the leadership in 1975 stood firmly by republican principles in exploring a genuine opportunity for British withdrawal, unlike the leadership of the 1990s, which accepted a partitionist settlement. But, in emphasizing that republicans engaged in talks only because of the prospect of British withdrawal, this account can be used to confirm the argument that the republicans were ideologically rigid and that there was therefore no prospect of a negotiated compromise. Some recent work has begun to explore the weaknesses in these accounts of deception. Ed Moloney, for example, raises doubts about the claim that the ceasefire was a successful move to weaken the IRA, citing former senior IRA ¹⁰ Rees 1985, 248. ¹³ Coogan 1996, 259.

¹¹ Rees 1985, 243, 245.

¹² Moloney 2002, 138, 142–4, 169–70.

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member Brendan Hughes, who told him: ‘I can’t understand these people who say that the truce wrecked us. In my view it strengthened us . . . the ceasefire was a godsend.’¹⁴ At the same time, John Bew, Martyn Frampton, and Iñigo Gurruchaga note that the British government considered withdrawal in 1975 rather more seriously than it was subsequently comfortable to admit.¹⁵ But even these analyses leave intact the characterization of republican ideology as an immovable obstacle to a negotiated compromise in 1975. In fact, there are strong grounds for believing that both parties to the 1975 talks entered negotiations with the genuine aim of exploring the potential for an agreement that would end violence, and that both sides were prepared to consider major compromises. Contrary to the received wisdom, the talks were neither a British ploy to weaken the IRA nor the product of a deluded IRA assessment that it had achieved victory. Existing work on the 1975 ceasefire operates with a very thin concept of negotiation. To understand the 1975 ceasefire and its collapse it is necessary to analyse the talks as a negotiating process, tracing a number of key themes and identifying some of the factors that contributed to the failure of this initiative.

British Policy The argument that republicans were dupes implies that the British government was not seriously considering ‘withdrawal’. It also assumes that the republicans were characterized by political ‘primitivism’, to use Bew and Patterson’s characterization of IRA understandings of British policy.¹⁶ Both assumptions are questionable. The narrative of British deception assumes that the British state never seriously considered a compromise solution that had a serious chance of acceptance by the IRA. This is plainly incorrect. When Labour took office under Harold Wilson in February 1974, it brought to power a Prime Minister who had publicly expressed his preference for withdrawal. His fifteen-point plan of November 1971 proposed a settlement that would permit British withdrawal through the granting of dominion status to Northern Ireland. He had also spoken of ‘finding a means of . . . progressing towards a United Ireland’.¹⁷ As leader of the opposition, he had met with IRA leaders, including David O’Connell in Dublin in March 1972, and again at his country home in England in July 1972.¹⁸ Wilson was strongly attracted to British ‘disengagement’ or ‘withdrawal’ and remained an advocate of this option throughout the year of secret talks with the IRA. His May 1974 speech, delivered without consultation with his advisers,¹⁹ in

¹⁴ Moloney 2002, 141, 177. ¹⁵ Bew, Frampton and Gurruchaga 2009, 57–8. ¹⁶ Bew and Patterson 1985, 88. ¹⁷ Coogan 1996, 156. ¹⁸ Taylor 1997 124–31; Haines 1977, 132–3, 146. ¹⁹ Coogan 1996, 207.

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which he referred to Ulster loyalists as ‘spongers’ after the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike had brought about the collapse of the power-sharing executive at Stormont and the Sunningdale Agreement, provided a public indication of his distance from unionism and his distaste for continued British commitment to Northern Ireland. His close advisers, Bernard Donoughue and Joe Haines, whose presence in government was intended to act as a counterweight to the conservatism of the civil service ‘machine’, both expressed strong support at different stages for withdrawal. In his memoir of the Wilson government, Haines stated forthrightly, ‘England has only one more role to play in Ireland, and that role is her withdrawal from it.’²⁰ Wilson’s interest in withdrawal remained strong throughout 1974. In October of that year, as contacts with the Provisionals intensified in the approach to the ceasefire, Wilson wrote to Rees: I have been turning over in my mind the proposal I made in my speech on 25 November 1971 [the fifteen-point speech] . . . I think there is a strong case for reviving this idea at the right time . . . very fundamental decisions may have to be taken, requiring the assent of the whole House of Commons.²¹

Even during the dying stages of contact with the IRA in late 1975, when the British government had supposedly moved to a policy of outright deception, Wilson regularly returned to the theme of withdrawal. In September 1975, for example, Wilson summed up a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, at which withdrawal had been presented as unfeasible, in the following terms: there [were] signs that popular feeling in Great Britain was turning against the continued involvement of the Army in Northern Ireland . . . Very early withdrawal, integration, and . . . repartition had been shown in discussion to be unpromising but no option or scenario should yet be finally excluded from examination . . . The implications of a gradual withdrawal from major responsibility for security in Northern Ireland might have to be considered, and variants of the option of withdrawal, such as the granting of dominion status to Northern Ireland, should not be ruled out in the long term.²²

By stating that it was ‘very early’ withdrawal, rather than withdrawal itself, that was ‘unpromising’, Wilson sought to keep the door open for ‘variants of the option of withdrawal’.

²⁰ Haines 1977, 115. ²¹ Harold Wilson to Merlyn Rees, 22 October 1974, Prem 16/151, UK National Archives. ²² Minutes of IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 24 September 1975, CAB 134/ 3921, UK National Archives.

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Just a few weeks before British representatives held their final formal meeting with the IRA in early February 1976, Wilson wrote an ‘Apocalyptic note for the record’, in which he advocated that the British government make contingency plans in case of a renewed loyalist challenge or a breakdown of control, in which case ‘The only solution . . . would be one or other variety of withdrawal, most likely taking the form of negotiated independence of some kind.’²³ This note looks like an attempt to prompt reluctant civil servants to draw up concrete plans for withdrawal. It is also closely aligned with the outline settlement that was emerging from the secret talks with the IRA. By late 1975 the British government believed that the IRA would be willing to accept independence for the North on the basis that it would deliver their key goal of ending British sovereignty even if it did not deliver Irish unity.²⁴ The message the Provisionals were getting in the secret talks, that the long-term preference of the British government was for ‘withdrawal’ and ‘disengagement’, accurately reflected Wilson’s persistent advocacy of this option, although it did not indicate that it was likely he would, or could, implement it. And Wilson was not the only cabinet member advocating forms of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘disengagement’ in late 1974 and early 1975. When Rees was asked on a Thames television programme on Northern Ireland in August 1974 whether the British government planned to ‘disengage’, he replied: In the view of pulling out and let them get on with it—no. In the sense that I believe strongly that it is the people of Northern Ireland who must and will work out their own salvation—if that is disengagement, then the answer is yes. And I accept that in one sense it is . . . I’m not talking about next week or the week after or even the next month.²⁵

Several weeks later Home Secretary Roy Jenkins told a government committee meeting that ‘he thought we would probably have to withdraw.’²⁶ Crucially, however, these terms had a range of meanings, with ‘withdrawal’ often being used to refer to the withdrawal of troops from the North not constitutional disengagement. In this sense, even senior British military commanders repeatedly advocated limited ‘withdrawal’ in 1973 and 1974, to allow the British Army to meet commitments elsewhere. And ‘disengagement’ was used to refer to a range of

²³ Harold Wilson, ‘Apocalyptic note for the record—for strictly limited circulation. No. 10 only and Sir John Hunt’, CJ4/1358, UK National Archives. ²⁴ Leahy 2019, 64–77, 103–11. ²⁵ NIO Press notice, 13 August 1974, ‘Mr Merlyn Rees says not a “pull-out” ’, FCO87/177, UK National Archives. ²⁶ John Hunt to Harold Wilson, ‘Northern Ireland: future trends of policy’, 3 December 1974, Prem 16/158, UK National Archives.

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options for creating greater distance and separation between the North and the British government. Thus, when MI6 officer Michael Oatley told IRA leader Billy McKee at a secret meeting in early 1975 that he was prepared to discuss ‘withdrawal’²⁷ he was using a term that was regularly used in discussion and advocacy around the cabinet table and in British policy and military circles. He was quite accurately reflecting British policy. However, even in its strongest form, as the kind of constitutional separation advocated by Wilson, ‘withdrawal’ was never synonymous with Irish reunification. The version of ‘withdrawal’ most frequently canvassed in British government circles was a form of independence that would probably leave Northern Ireland linked to Britain in some way, perhaps as a dominion. One of the reasons it was favoured was that it had strong attractions for many loyalists and unionists and seemed like it could provide the basis for a deal encompassing republicans and loyalists as well as nationalists and unionists. In offering to discuss ‘withdrawal’ or ‘disengagement’, rather than ‘Irish unity’ or Irish ‘selfdetermination’ the British used terms that were entirely compatible with the options they were willing to consider seriously. That choice of terminology indicates a careful attempt to bridge the gap between the demand of republicans for a declaration of intent to withdraw and the very real willingness of the British government to withdraw troops and ‘disengage’ from the running of the North, even to the point of relinquishing sovereignty. The British indication of willingness to discuss withdrawal is best understood as a formula that was necessary to allow the IRA leadership to call a ceasefire in 1975 and enter talks, given their prior demand for a declaration on Irish self-determination and a promise to withdraw troops. Throughout 1974 the Provisionals had been sending strong signals of their willingness to compromise. ‘We want a situation to come about where political advance can take the place of guerrilla warfare’, Ó Brádaigh had said in April 1974, ‘What we see is an honourable accommodation with the British coupled with an honourable accommodation with the loyalists.’²⁸ The talks held the promise for the Provisional leadership that the undoubted British interest in forms of withdrawal and disengagement might be reconciled with republican demands for selfdetermination and with loyalist and unionist preferences for a majority-rule parliament in Belfast. Given the difficulty that republicans had had in extracting from the British even the slightest shift in their position during the secret negotiations that led to the ceasefire, it is unlikely they ever thought that a compromise settlement was a certainty. The story of successful British deception has taken such a strong hold that even the most sceptical scholars of the period have not seriously addressed the question

²⁷ Taylor 1997, 178–81.

²⁸ Republican News, 5 April 1974.

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of whether the British government was prepared to make a declaration of intent to withdraw. If a ‘declaration of withdrawal’ was an item of faith in the catechism of a dogmatic republican movement, it would indeed seem unlikely that the British government would have ever considered making such a declaration in 1975. But if such a declaration was but one item on a republican agenda, and therefore subject to negotiation, it becomes much easier to understand how and why the British government might have been prepared to devise a workable compromise on this point. In fact, Rees stated quite plainly to a Cabinet Committee meeting in February 1975 that he was prepared to move towards the Provisionals on this issue: The Provisionals will no doubt try to bring us quickly to discuss a declaration of British intent to withdraw. We must try to make them realize that this is in a sense an irrelevancy; it is their Protestant fellow-Irishmen with whom they must come to terms. But if the Provisionals are looking for a face-saving formula, I do not rule out the possibility that we could find a form of words which would be consistent with previous ministerial statements and not inflame the loyalists.²⁹

The message is clear. A declaration of some kind was open to negotiation. Rees was willing to work towards a form of words that the Provisional leadership could point to as meeting its requirement for a declaration of intent to withdraw. It might be argued that the British government could never have found a form of words that the Provisional leadership would accept, but it is entirely unsafe to make this assumption. The 1993 Joint Declaration by the British and Irish Governments accepted the right to self-determination of the Irish people, albeit as a right that required majority consent in both jurisdictions. It did not fully meet republican demands, but as part of a broader package of measures that gave the republicans some tangible gains it contributed to the IRA ending its campaign in the 1990s. If both parties were seriously exploring the possibilities for a negotiated settlement, the issue of a declaration of intent to withdraw can then be viewed, not as an impossible and intransigent demand, but as a site of struggle and an issue for negotiation. The Provisionals were also demanding the release of prisoners and the end of internment; they also sought radical changes to policing. Maybe they would have completely rejected a negotiated agreement that delivered on all of these issues if it did not also produce a declaration of withdrawal made in precisely the terms that they demanded. Maybe, but it seems unlikely. As early as 1971 there had been discussions of how the text of such a declaration might be negotiated

²⁹ Memo on IRA ceasefire from Merlyn Rees to IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 18 February 1975.

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with loyalists and unionists in advance.³⁰ In early 1975, Desmond Boal, former unionist MP and trusted confidante of Ian Paisley told an IRA representative at a secret meeting that Paisley ‘would have difficulty in selling . . . a blunt statement’ about withdrawal by the British government. Boal suggested instead that the substance of a declaration of withdrawal could be ‘enshrined . . . in a new constitution for N.I.’.³¹ Both the IRA leadership and some influential unionists were thinking about the proposed ‘declaration’ as a piece of text that could be discussed and agreed in advance with loyalists. Precisely because the Provisionals have been portrayed as dogmatists, the place of the declaration in these talks has been consistently misunderstood, as an impossible stumbling block. But it was not the rock on which the process foundered. The assessment that the secret talks were initially a genuine attempt to negotiate a settlement, while both sides simultaneously manoeuvred for advantage in the event of failure or breakdown, is supported by Wilson’s direct involvement and close interest in the talks. In the past few years new evidence of his involvement has emerged, although the evidence is patchy because key records have not been released. Three files on Northern Ireland in the Prime Minister’s office covering the early months of 1975 are still withheld from release, unusually for this file series. It seems certain that they relate to these talks. Given that Merlyn Rees was at this time considering a form of words that might satisfy the IRA demand for a declaration, it is tempting to speculate that one of those closed folders might contain a draft declaration of some kind. Crucially, Wilson was directly involved in the management of the contacts with the IRA from a very early stage, and he carefully concealed them from other members of his government. Thus, when Oatley was in contact with the IRA in late 1974 and early 1975, it was Wilson himself who provided the authorization, and knowledge of the contacts was limited to Oatley, Wilson, and a few senior civil servants, including the Permanent Undersecretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Frank Cooper. Initially not even Rees was informed.³² According to one of those centrally involved, Wilson told Cooper, when he (Wilson) was approving these contacts with the IRA, that Cooper need not bother Rees with it because Rees had enough on his plate already.³³ The secret contacts with the IRA thus originated as an initiative with the direct personal sanction of Wilson, initially bypassing not only the cabinet but even the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh’s papers indicate that British representatives told him that Wilson was personally consulted on the fine details of the 1975 ceasefire arrangements. This seems plausible. These terms were so sensitive that it is unlikely that Rees could have endorsed them without Wilson’s direct support. It may be that in

³⁰ Note of a meeting, 17 July 1972, CJ4/134, UK National Archives. ³¹ Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland, 44,166/9. ³² Powell 2008, 68. ³³ Anonymous interview with former British official, 7 October 2008.

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agreeing these ceasefire terms, Wilson had stretched the British state to a position that went beyond what the security forces would accept. Given Wilson’s longstanding advocacy of withdrawal, there seems little doubt that he was open to an outcome that went further than simply attempting to get the IRA to accept the constitutional status quo. Reinforcing the impression that Wilson looked on the talks with the Provisional leadership as a personal initiative, it emerged from the MI5 archives in 2009 that Wilson instructed the Director General of MI5 to report directly to him and to Rees on these talks and not to report on them to Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, who would normally receive such reports.³⁴ Furthermore, these scattered pieces of evidence strongly suggest that Wilson maintained his interest in the talks primarily because of their potential to secure a negotiated peace settlement that would facilitate British withdrawal, rather than as a ruse to weaken the Provisionals in preparation for a renewed drive for military victory. The extent to which Wilson was willing or able to implement a policy shift in this direction was, however, a very different matter.

Republican Strategy A key element in the argument that the IRA was deceived is the suggestion that republicans took British talk of withdrawal as an indication that they had won the war and were now negotiating the terms of British surrender. As M.L.R. Smith puts it: ‘The Provisionals fell into the trap of believing that they had forced Britain into the ceasefire, and were, consequently, in a position to exact everything they wanted.’³⁵ However, the British government and army assessed at the time that ‘hardliners’ in the IRA were persuaded to a ceasefire primarily on the basis that it would provide a much-needed respite for an organization under intense pressure from the British Army.³⁶ This picture of an organization under such pressure that even its hardliners calculated that the risks of a ceasefire were worth trading for the benefits of a respite cannot be reconciled with the picture of an organization that believed it was in a position to exact everything it wanted from the British government. The former overestimates the importance of IRA weakness in motivating the ceasefire while the latter is plainly incorrect. John Bew and his co-authors come closer to a convincing explanation for the truce when they argue that it was prompted by two factors: the IRA’s appreciation of its own weakness, and ‘optimism that the British were wobbling and that political success was within reach’.³⁷ To the extent that it attaches due importance ³⁴ Andrew 2010, 626. ³⁵ Smith 1997, 130. ³⁷ Bew, Frampton, and Gurruchaga 2009, 54.

³⁶ Hamill 1985, 178.

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to the IRA’s assessment of its weaknesses, this argument constitutes an advance on Smith, but the description of IRA ‘optimism that the British were wobbling’ is problematic. Why stop pushing if your opponent is wobbling? This version has some explanatory power, of course, but it leaves intact the problematic assumption that the IRA felt it was on the verge of victory. Some senior republicans assessed in 1974 that it was now in the British government’s interests to withdraw and that it was seriously considering a form of withdrawal. But this assessment did not derive primarily from a sense of IRA victory. Dave O’Connell, for one, was quite explicit that it was the success of the UWC strike in May 1974 that had transformed the political landscape.³⁸ The strike demonstrated to the IRA that there was a growing mutual alienation between Ulster loyalists and the British state. It assessed correctly that this had produced strong pressures for withdrawal in Britain. If the IRA assessed that the British were seriously considering withdrawal, it did not mean the IRA thought they were on the verge of achieving a united Ireland, merely that there was a new political climate in which the possibilities for a negotiated solution seemed promising. British, loyalist, and republican aims might be more easily reconciled in the context of British disengagement, but it equally raised the prospect of civil war and a loyalist Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on the Rhodesian model. When Ó Brádaigh stated in 1974 that they would work with the British government to avoid a Congo-style situation, he was implicitly acknowledging that British withdrawal could lead to civil war and the establishment of a new loyalist state, rather than the reunification of Ireland. When O’Connell was asked in the same year how he could guarantee that there would not be a Protestant backlash if Britain declared its intention to withdraw, he replied, ‘well nobody can give an absolute guarantee that the Protestants will not go for a backlash, nobody could do that.’³⁹ Significantly too, the comments of both Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell indicate that key figures in the republican leadership were acutely aware that ‘withdrawal’ and ‘disengagement’ were not synonyms for Irish reunification. If some republican leaders wrongly assessed the likelihood that Wilson’s preference for withdrawal would prevail, or underestimated the countervailing pressures against such a move, they shared this assessment with many outside the republican movement. The Irish coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour also regarded British withdrawal as a distinct possibility and made strenuous diplomatic efforts to dissuade Wilson from this policy, while loyalists escalated their armed campaign with the same aim.⁴⁰ And so the Provisionals were not ³⁸ Verbatim transcript of item on BBC television programme Midweek’, 4 June 1974, PREM 16/148, UK National Archives. ³⁹ ‘Verbatim transcript of item on BBC television programme Midweek’, 4 June 1974, PREM 16/148, UK National Archives. ⁴⁰ FitzGerald 1991, 259, 271.

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alone in identifying withdrawal as a possible short-term outcome that could be advanced and shaped by the efforts of various parties. It might be objected that the republicans nonetheless entered talks only because they saw an opportunity to achieve their rigidly defined goal: Irish unity. Since this was impossible it would have led to the breakdown of talks sooner or later. But the Provisional leadership had been working steadily over the previous few years to reformulate this goal in a way that sought to reconcile it with unionist and loyalist aspirations. Their work to reduce expectations surrounding Irish reunification are detailed in Chapter Two. The political distance they had already travelled was in itself a measure of their willingness to move away from simplistic demands. The Éire Nua (New Ireland) policy of the Provisionals, announced in late 1971 and associated most closely with O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh, held out the promise of a unionist-controlled nine-county Ulster parliament with extensive powers. Often characterized as a fantastical document reflecting the detachment of the Provisionals from reality, it is much better understood as an attempt to reconcile unionist desire for majority rule in the North with both the Irish republican demand for self-determination and the British readiness to withdraw, as expressed by some mainstream British political figures and supported by British opinion polls. It is usual to identify Irish unity as the core aim of the Provisionals, but by focusing instead on self-determination, and emphasizing that new structures would have to be negotiated with unionists, the Provisionals left the way open for a settlement that might even leave the border in place. That this new territorial policy constituted a serious move to render Irish national territory divisible in a way that would reconcile unionist concerns with republican ideology is illustrated by the surprisingly positive response from mainstream unionist figures from several points on the political spectrum. It was the prospect of a strong majority-rule Ulster parliament in an Irish context that prompted Desmond Boal, a key ally of Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Ian Paisley, to declare his support in early 1974 for a united Ireland with an autonomous northern parliament, if Britain was indeed seeking to ‘disengage’. A Guardian journalist noted that ‘oddly enough’ his proposal had similarities with Éire Nua.⁴¹ In early 1973, John Taylor, a prominent figure in the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), advocated an independent Ulster that would include all nine Ulster counties. To the extent that Taylor was proposing an arrangement that would end British sovereignty of Northern Ireland and create a new unit covering all of the province of Ulster, it echoed the proposals in Éire Nua. Taylor’s proposal was welcomed by Sinn Féin’s Comhairle Chonnachta in the west of Ireland, where Ó

⁴¹ Brown 1974.

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Brádaigh was based, indicating that some in the party regarded unionist interest in independence from the UK as a step towards a compromise solution.⁴² The Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the loyalist paramilitary organization, similarly expressed interest in further exploration of these ideas and advocated independence for Northern Ireland partly because it might provide a way to reconcile loyalist and republican aspirations. Writing in The Irish Times in 2009 about the failure of Irish nationalists to lay out a vision of the place that unionists might have in a united Ireland, former loyalist political activist David Adams argued that the Éire Nua policy of O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh ‘remains the only serious bid by any strand of nationalism or republicanism to address the issue at all’.⁴³ Certain key loyalists and unionists, then, recognized the IRA proposals for what they were—an attempt to reconcile republican and unionist positions. Keeping Northern Ireland in the UK was not the irreducible and eternal core of unionism, even of the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) variety. In the late 1940s, for example, the election of a Labour government in Great Britain generated substantial interest within the UUP in the possibility of dominion status as a means to escape the ‘socialist’ policies of the new government.⁴⁴ Such a development would have placed Northern Ireland in the same family as New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, opening the path to full independence. The existence of substantial unionist support for dominion status in certain circumstances makes it clear that there was room for compromise on the constitutional status of the North. Crucially, Ó Brádaigh’s biographer comments: ‘What was important for Ó Brádaigh was that Éire Nua and Dáil Uladh [the proposed nine-county Ulster parliament] might be a basis for continued dialogue and a resolution to the conflict.’⁴⁵ Analysts of the republican movement characterize the Éire Nua policy as no more than a reformulation of the demand for Irish reunification. But this is to insist on ideological rigidity in the face of clear evidence of flexibility. Éire Nua was a negotiating position aimed at moving republicans closer to northern unionists and to the British government. It indicated a readiness to consider shifts in traditional republican thinking on territorial arrangements for government in Ireland, and an acceptance of unionist regional dominance in the North. Nevertheless, commentary on this period continues to focus on the Provisionals’ demand for a British declaration of intent to withdraw as the central obstacle to compromise. Again, it is necessary to understand the significance of the term ‘withdrawal’ for these talks, not as a restatement of republican dogma, but as a central feature of the attempt to reformulate republican objectives. The

⁴² Blatherwick in British Embassy, Dublin, to Bone, Republic of Ireland Dept, FCO, 15 January 1973, FCO87/211, UK National Archives. ⁴³ Adams (2009). ⁴⁴ Bew, Gibbon, and Patterson 1979, 118–23. ⁴⁵ White 2006, 213.

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fact that republicans chose the terminology of ‘withdrawal’ or ‘disengagement’ rather than ‘reunification’ is no trivial matter. Withdrawal was not synonymous with ending British sovereignty. When O’Connell spoke in favour of a Sinn Féin resolution to formulate the key demands of the Provisionals in October 1971, he referred repeatedly to the withdrawal of British troops, rather than the withdrawal of British sovereignty, and stressed the goal of ‘self-determination’ rather than reunification. Their formulation of demands back in 1971 had separated out the two issues of ‘withdrawal’ of troops and ‘self-determination’, making it easier to claim advances on either in any future settlement. A withdrawal of troops could be hailed as progress towards the achievement of republican objectives even if it was not accompanied by the ending of British sovereignty, while an ‘acknowledgement’ of the right of self-determination would represent progress even if troops still remained.⁴⁶ An undated typescript entitled ‘Draft policy document’ in the papers of O’Connell, which can be dated to the early 1970s, shows how far the Provisional leadership was considering stretching its position towards loyalists and unionists in that period. The status of the document is unclear, but the language and substance point strongly towards it being a draft for discussion by the leadership rather than an external document. It outlined key positions on ‘selfdetermination’ that went to the very limit of the possibilities for the republican movement. At several points, the references in the draft to a ‘claim’ are crossed out and replaced with the word ‘right’, resulting in phrases such as the ‘right of the Ulster Protestant people to self-determination’. British refusal to recognize Irish sovereignty in Ulster [Northern Ireland] is criticized as ‘in effect, a refusal to recognize the right of the Irish nation (and its consequent duty) to provide for the self-determination of Ulster Protestants within Ireland and within the Irish national state’. That is, a British recognition of an Irish right to self-determination would open the way for an Irish recognition of an Ulster Protestant right to ‘selfdetermination’. This document provides an indication of the logic that underlay IRA proposals for a federal Ireland. The document also stated that the new Ulster parliament ‘would accord to the Ulster Protestants the right . . . of forming an exclusively Protestant (provincial) government’. That is, unlike a solution in the UK context, a federal solution in an Irish context would permit majority rule in the North. The statement in the draft that ‘the absorption of Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland is out of the question’ echoes the public rhetoric of both O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh in the early 1970s.⁴⁷

⁴⁶ ‘Daithí Ó Conaill’s speech on Resolution 31’, 29 October 1971, MS 44, 165/6, Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland. ⁴⁷ ‘Draft policy document’, undated, MS 44, 172/6, Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland.

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By the mid-1970s, key figures in the IRA leadership were intently focused on negotiation. In June 1974, in the wake of the UWC strike, O’Connell gave an interview in which he repeatedly stressed steps forward, rather than ultimate goals, and characterized a declaration of intent to withdraw primarily as a device that would facilitate the ending of the IRA campaign and the opening of inclusive negotiations in an atmosphere of peace: [I]f we get a declaration from the British Government coupled with an amnesty and moves towards a lasting political solution, we have a termination to the war between the British forces and ourselves. Now surely it would be recognized that this is one hell of a positive step forward, a climate would evolve within which there is a duty on us as republicans to negotiate the peace with the loyalists of Ulster.⁴⁸

O’Connell went on to say: ‘Once that happens we have a termination of the conflict, then we’re into a new climate where all political proposals, the proposals of [William] Craig, Paisley, the [Ulster] Workers’ Council and so forth can be put together.’ That is, the Provisionals would end their campaign before any final determination on the future of the North had been made and while Britain was still the sovereign power, and they would then negotiate a settlement with unionists and loyalists. The emphasis on a declaration of ‘withdrawal’ here needs properly to be understood as an attempt to provide an opening for negotiations with unionists while maintaining consistency with republican ideology, rather than as a dogmatic demand. Another characteristic feature of this interview is O’Connell’s concern to avoid committing to positions that the Provisionals might subsequently have to abandon in negotiations. When asked what IRA policy was, for example, he replied in terms that avoided the rhetoric on a united thirty-two-county republic and said instead: ‘Our policy, or aims are pretty well known. Basically we seek an integration within our country.’ Invited to set a time limit for British withdrawal, O’Connell declined. This is emphatically not to say that O’Connell was prepared to yield on all of these issues, but rather that the Provisional leadership was attempting to formulate its position in a way that opened rather than closed doors, that increased the possibilities for compromise. This concern to avoid committing to positions that would constrain the leadership in negotiations is reflected, too, in the terms in which the IRA phrased a ceasefire statement on 2 January 1975: A permanent peace will be established only when the causes of the war are courageously examined and eradicated . . . The peace enjoyed over Christmas can ⁴⁸ ‘Verbatim transcript of item on BBC television programme Midweek’, 4 June 1974, PREM 16/148, UK National Archives.

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be made permanent if the British Government proves its sincerity by pursuing a reasonable and responsible policy. Peace with justice is the universal demand of all our people, and the responsibility for granting same rests with the British Government.⁴⁹

The statement nowhere mentions either withdrawal or a united Ireland. Once again, their absence did not mean that either goal had been abandoned. Nonetheless, there is a calculated use of an alternative rhetoric, highlighting ‘the causes of war’ and the demand for ‘peace with justice’. If the Provisionals were ideological dogmatists, we might argue that they simply felt no need to state the obvious. But if we take the Provisionals seriously as negotiators, the statement exhibits a clear concern to minimize commitment in advance of formal negotiation. It might be objected that all of these Provisional attempts to reformulate the issue of withdrawal were irrelevant because the ending of British sovereignty remained a ‘red line’ issue for the Provisionals and therefore an immovable obstacle to compromise. But the Provisionals’ reformulation of withdrawal is much more important for the trajectory that it indicates than for the content. Their proposals indicated a willingness to sign up to a negotiated compromise that would fall far short of the visions and hopes of their own supporters. No one can say with certainty what compromises the republican leadership would have accepted in 1975, but it is unsafe to assume that their stated position represented their minimum demands. Republican proposals represented a negotiating position. As such, they were not an accurate guide to the settlement that republicans would consider minimally acceptable. Duddy, who played a pivotal role in these negotiations as intermediary, is insistent that the Provisionals were working determinedly in 1975 for a compromise settlement. Asked whether the talks failed because of republican rigidity, he replied: It’s the very opposite in fact . . . the Provos were—too simple a phrase but it comes close . . . they did not want this war to continue. It didn’t mean that they were demoralised or that they had run out of war materials . . . Anybody who was involved, Ó Conaill, [Seamus] Twomey, [Billy] McKee, Ó Brádaigh, [Seán] Keenan, you name them, wanted an honourable settlement.⁵⁰

Significantly, Duddy refers to both ‘moderates’ and ‘hardliners’. The IRA entered talks neither because it was duped into believing it had beaten the British, nor because it thought it was on the verge of achieving a united Ireland, but because it ⁴⁹ ‘Statement by the Provisional IRA on 2 January 1975’, FCO87/446, UK National Archives. ⁵⁰ Brendan Duddy interview, 26 November 2009.

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assessed that there was potential for a negotiated compromise agreement that would be acceptable to the republican movement as a whole and because it was actively seeking a principled agreement that would allow it to end its campaign. Ironically, this eagerness for an agreement may provide an important part of the explanation for the failure of these talks. The clear signs of republican willingness to compromise may have led the British to believe that the IRA campaign was effectively at an end and that the organization was so keen to reach a settlement that it could accept anything.

‘Everyone Trying’ The initial phase of the negotiations that opened in January 1975 was characterized by high levels of commitment on both sides and by tangible concessions by the British government in response to the ceasefire. These concessions included the establishment of incident centres, the opening of regular formal talks to be held in secret, agreements for the return of IRA prisoners in Great Britain to jails in Northern Ireland, and orders to British Army units to scale back their activities. The seniority of the British representative involved in the talks, Michael Oatley, was a further indication of British commitment. Oatley was one of the most influential figures in the British administration in Northern Ireland, part of a tight inner circle. The concessions made by the British at this early stage were substantial enough that, by Duddy’s account, O’Connell told Ó Brádaigh that the Provisionals had got more than he expected in the negotiations for ceasefire terms.⁵¹ There is also extensive evidence that the British initially pursued an agenda of major changes in key policy areas, including police reform and reorganization, and the early release of prisoners. These concessions and the initial efforts to implement policy changes were enough to generate intense resistance within the intelligence services, the military, and the police. Senior MI5 officer Denis Payne, the Director and Coordinator of Intelligence Northern Ireland, was not supportive of the talks with the IRA, according to a senior official knowledgeable about the process. Important senior military figures were appalled at the ceasefire conditions and there is a note of something close to open rebellion in some of the records from the period. ‘If the current ceasefire ends, our problems will be over’ was the opening line of a planning document sent by army headquarters in Lisburn to the NIO, as the NIO began to tie down the ceasefire in February 1975.⁵² ⁵¹ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 8 February 1975, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. ⁵² ‘Military conduct of 1975’ by Lt. Col. C. L. Tarver attached to letter from Brig. C. P. Campbell, HQNI, to J. B. Bourn, NIO, 17 February 1975.

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Senior army figures, in particular General King, the GOC, made it clear they saw no value in attempts to negotiate a settlement and expressed a direct preference for the pursuit of a military victory over the IRA. There were rumours of this dissent at the time, but it is only with the release of contemporary records in recent years that its character and extent have become evident. For example, at a meeting on 2 May 1975 to discuss reductions in military activity, the GOC was recorded as telling Rees that ‘HQNI and all battalion commanders were becoming increasingly worried by . . . the current level of violence and by the government’s overall policy which appeared to be striving to facilitate the achievement of the PIRA’s aims.’⁵³ Given that the notes of such meetings tend to minimize evidence of conflict, General King’s remarks constituted an exceptionally strong statement of military dissent, coming close to the accusations of treachery being made in the public domain. At a further meeting with military commanders ten days later, King told Rees that ‘Political agreement with the IRA . . . was a chimera’ and told him ‘the only viable solution’ required a return to the ‘treadmill of violence’ (turning a favourite phrase of Rees’s back against him) and the defeat of the IRA.⁵⁴ Rees later said of General King: ‘You have never played at politics and I have never played at being a soldier; that’s why we have got on so well.’⁵⁵ Now that we have access to the official documents from the period, we can see that Rees was actually inverting the position. On the ground, some British military commanders resisted instructions to adopt a lower profile, to the extent of directly disobeying orders.⁵⁶ Robin Evelegh, a British Army Commander in west Belfast at the time, recalled that one commander became so frustrated by his informants telling him of secret contacts and NIO proposals that he set up a unit to try to determine the British government’s actual policy.⁵⁷ Within weeks, the failure to rein in the army was endangering the ceasefire, and in mid-March, Duddy wrote in his diary: Rob [the British representative,] told me that some of the BA [British Army] officers were convinced that the ceasefire would not hold. Therefore, they were not fully co-operating in easing off. I said they would be right but for the wrong reason as the Rep. Movement really wanted an on-going peace. But couldn’t be expected to hold their position if BA did not begin to pull back.⁵⁸

⁵³ ‘Force levels and the ceasefire: note of a meeting held at 2.15pm on Friday, 2 May 1975’. Top secret. CJ4/839, UK National Archives. ⁵⁴ ‘Force levels and the ceasefire: note of a meeting held at 2pm on Monday, 12 May 1975’. Top secret. CJ4/839, UK National Archives. ⁵⁵ Anon (1998). ⁵⁶ Hamill 1985, 179. ⁵⁷ Evelegh 1978, 103. Thanks to Aogán Mulcahy for alerting me to this. ⁵⁸ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 15 March 1975, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers.

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British officials at the NIO instructed the military at this early stage that they should treat the ceasefire as permanent and they made repeated and detailed requests for reductions in British Army activity. They faced strong resistance from the highest levels of the military. At the same time, the leadership of the RUC directly rejected British government entreaties to restrain the police in order to protect the ceasefire. Instead, they actively extended RUC patrolling and activity into nationalist areas where police had been unable to patrol before the ceasefire. In late 1974, Rees had written to Wilson that ‘The army is the only real arm of government on which I can depend in a crisis in the province’,⁵⁹ thereby expressing his doubts about the willingness of the RUC to implement British government policy. The RUC’s conduct in early 1975 validated Rees’s conclusion. Chris Ryder’s sympathetic account of RUC reaction to the ceasefire paints a picture of deliberate and concerted sabotage of the British government’s efforts to secure it: [RUC Chief Constable Jamie] Flanagan was one of the first to recognize the inherent dangers [of the ceasefire]. He ignored hints to soft-pedal and not endanger it by police action. Checks were actually stepped up in west Belfast to see that cars were taxed and insured—the chief constable’s way of emphasizing that police operations could not be turned off and on like a tap. He also opposed so-called ‘Incident Centres’.⁶⁰

Brendan Duddy’s diary for these early months contains repeated references to the problems with the RUC and identifies the failure to deal with policing as a central threat to the negotiations. Duddy’s diary also indicates, as does some of the material in the UK National Archives, that the British initially made serious attempts to resolve the issue of policing nationalist areas in a conciliatory way. In late July 1974, Rees had written to Wilson proposing the establishment of an unarmed local ‘Community Patrol Service’ that would allow nationalists to take part in policing at local level without joining the RUC, but he records that the following day the proposal was ‘forcibly’ rejected by the RUC Chief Constable.⁶¹ Despite that setback, Rees repeatedly emphasized the need to make policing acceptable to nationalists and identified policing as a central obstacle to the resolution of the conflict. In early 1975, the British made renewed efforts to make changes to policing that might pave the way for a compromise acceptable to nationalists. Ryder notes that the British government ‘were indeed tinkering with various ideas to replace the RUC or create acceptable mechanisms for community policing to work alongside it’ and reports the ‘angry’ reactions of police chiefs in west Belfast to British efforts to make a start on this without consulting them.⁶² ⁵⁹ Rees to Wilson, 28 October 1974, Prem 16/151, UK National Archives. ⁶¹ Rees 1985, 117. ⁶² Ryder 2000, 130.

⁶⁰ Ryder 2000, 130.

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Having failed to circumvent the RUC, the NIO tried another route to create movement on the policing issue, and in early May 1975, Frank Cooper wrote to the GOC: ‘Would it be practicable for the army’s basic contribution [in Derry] to consist entirely of military police . . . Are there areas of Belfast, which could in the same [manner] suggested for Londonderry, be handed over to military police?’⁶³ Cooper had direct personal experience of both warfare and sensitive negotiations. As a fighter pilot in the RAF during the Second World War, he had been shot down behind enemy lines in Italy, but within twenty-four hours had made his own way back to base. As Cyprus moved towards independence after a bitter insurgency in the 1950s, he had negotiated intensively on the retention of sovereign British bases with Archbishop Makarios, who was closely identified with the insurgency and became the first President.⁶⁴ Cooper was seen by many at the time as the man who really ran British policy in the North, and who steered Rees. Cooper’s decision to write several times to the GOC in early 1975, asking in detailed terms for reductions in military activity and changes to policing that would help to bed down the ceasefire, indicates the serious intent of the NIO. It also indicates Cooper’s recognition of the centrality of policing and the dangers to the ceasefire if major changes to policing were not implemented. Two examples from Duddy’s diary indicate the recurring emphasis during these early weeks on both police reform and control of the police: Fri. 28/2/75 Serious problem beginning with RUC . . . British fumble RUC issue. I stressed need for police service separate from politics. Fri. 14/3/75 . . . we had a 2 hr block on the RUC. I explained that N.I. was not ‘ordinary’ and that there was every historical likelihood to suggest that the RUC would wreck any ceasefire. All agree the RUC was a major problem and it was left.⁶⁵

A day or two after this ‘2 hr block’ on the RUC, Rees asked the RUC Chief Constable to ease off. Ryder notes that Chief Constable Flanagan ‘ignored hints’ that he do so, and perhaps this was one such occasion. Rees’s diary entry on 16 March 1975, just after this meeting, expressed disappointment with the outcome: ‘If only I was in a position to assure the Provisional IRA, not that anyone who has committed a crime would not be chased, but that those who had never done anything would not be chased.’⁶⁶ That entry might be understood as an oblique admission that he had been unable to convince the RUC to refrain from arresting

⁶³ Frank Cooper, PS at the NIO, to Gen. King, GOC, 1 May 1975, CJ4/839 634, UK National Archives. ⁶⁴ Fairhall 2002. ⁶⁵ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 28 February and 14 March, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. ⁶⁶ Rees 1985, 223.

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IRA members for offences committed before the ceasefire. It invites the observation that a stronger figure than Rees, backed by a stronger government with a more secure parliamentary majority, might not have been so easily rebuffed on an issue that so directly threatened the IRA ceasefire and the negotiations. RUC commanders made the most of Rees’s reluctance to restrain them. Hamill writes: ‘According to the police, who were watching with some interest, there was a constant stream of directives to [HQNI at] Lisburn instructing the Army to “go soft”. The police, however, felt that they themselves were able to carry on as usual with no undue, overt influence from Stormont.’⁶⁷ The RUC was well aware that the army was under instructions to hold back in order to secure the ceasefire, but it resisted and ignored the more hesitant and nervous attempts of Rees and the NIO to get it to do the same. It is in sharp contrast with the clear recognition during the peace process of the 1990s that RUC activity had to be restricted in such a way as to sustain the IRA ceasefire, even though this generated resentment among some senior RUC officers.⁶⁸ RUC members also made direct targeted interventions aimed at collapsing the ceasefire. On 8 May 1975, Derry IRA member Shane Paul O’Doherty, who was wanted for sending letter bombs to England, returned from County Donegal to his home in Derry, confident he would not be arrested because of the ceasefire. He had just planted a tree in his parents’ front garden a few days later when plainclothes RUC officers arrived to arrest him. Holding a gun to his head as they bundled him into the back seat of an unmarked car, they told him, as O’Doherty recalled in a TV documentary in 2019: ‘We’re going to use you, the London bomber, to wreck this fucking ceasefire.’⁶⁹ The IRA in Derry retaliated two days later by shooting dead RUC Constable Paul Gray in the city centre, the first clear breach of the ceasefire by the IRA. Ongoing pressure from the RUC and the British Army made it extremely difficult for the republican leadership to restrain local units and strengthened ‘spoilers’ within the republican movement. republican activity, in turn, made it more difficult for the British government to argue for a more generous response to the ceasefire. A sharp intensification of loyalist sectarian killings, aimed at preventing a British agreement with the Provisionals, made it even more difficult for the IRA leadership to restrain its Volunteers from retaliating or carrying out sectarian killings. With senior military and police officers pushing back against government policy, the Conservative Party moved decisively away from bipartisanship.

⁶⁷ Hamill 1985, 179. ⁶⁸ See Mowlam 2002; Holland and Phoenix 1996, 266, 284. ⁶⁹ Chris Thornton (2019) Spotlight on the Troubles: A Secret History, Episode Two. BBC Northern Ireland, 17 September 2019. O’Doherty’s 2019 account of the arrest has added credibility because by then he was a fierce critic of the IRA. See also O’Doherty 1993, 142–3, 181 and Taylor 1997, 192.

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Within weeks of the ceasefire announcement, powerful and numerous forces within the state were working against attempts to secure it. Given its narrow majority in Parliament, the Labour Party was in a weak position to resist these forces. By late March, the talks with the IRA appeared to be on the verge of collapse. On 1 April, Duddy recorded in his diary: The ceasefire is in great danger. The British just don’t understand and their machine is impossible to move. The Brits can’t make dramatic gestures and I am only realizing that the B[ritish] Army is simply incapable of changing and Rees is not strong enough to tell them just where to get off. The more I find out about the ‘B[ritish] system’ the more hopeless it gets.⁷⁰

At the end of March 1975, the British representative had phoned Duddy: ‘Rob phoned very depressed. No progress and not likely to get any. I said War and he said Yes.’⁷¹ In advance of a formal meeting two days later between British and republican representatives, Duddy pressed for movement by the British to shore up the ceasefire with little success: ‘BD Insisted that B[ritish] must move. Rob said it was hopeless. It would just be war . . . ’.⁷² ‘Rob’ indicated he would not make any attempt to conceal this from the republicans: ‘Told me he was going to be tough with the Provos, “telling them a few facts of life”. Meeting started at 8 p.m. [James] Allen and Rob . . . O’Bradaigh and McKee.’⁷³ Duddy’s terse account is unequivocal: Rob talked for 2 Hrs. Provos ‘shocked into silence’. McKee said it was probably the last ‘meeting’.⁷⁴

This account is confirmed by Ó Brádaigh’s notes, which state that the British representative told the Provisionals that a declaration of intent to withdraw was ‘totally and absolutely’ out of the question because it would lead to an escalation of violence.⁷⁵ The argument that the IRA ceasefire lasted so long because of successful deception by the British sits uneasily with all known reports of this meeting and the evidence of the struggle between the NIO and security force commanders. They tell a quite different story, of a British government that could not pin down the ceasefire to a great degree because of strong resistance to compromise within its own security forces.

⁷⁰ ⁷¹ ⁷² ⁷³ ⁷⁴ ⁷⁵

Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 1 April, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 31 March, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 2 April, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 2 April, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, April, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. White 2006, 235.

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‘The Breaking of the Truce’ Republicans maintained their ceasefire after this meeting for a number of reasons. In the first place, there continued to be enough military advantages to this period of respite from conflict to secure the assent of Army Council members who were sceptical of the initiative. In the second place, republicans assessed that it would be to their political advantage to allow the Constitutional Convention to be seen to fail on the mistaken but not entirely unfounded assumption that this failure would impel the British to return to considerations of withdrawal. From an early stage, republicans suspected the British were seeking to back away from negotiation altogether and were simply talking enough to maintain the ceasefire while having no clear policy on how the negotiations might lead to a settlement. The intermediary repeatedly assessed that the British were overconfident about the ceasefire because they believed the Provisionals were reluctant to return to their campaign. In May, for example, Duddy recorded: Had 1 hr talk with O’Bradaigh. I insisted that British were playing it very fine. Betting that the PAC [Provisional Army Council] did not want to break the ceasefire and would back down. It’s a game they might lose.⁷⁶

At the same time, Duddy was applying pressure to the British by insisting to their representative, Robert Browning, that their assessment was incorrect and that if they did not move, the ceasefire would break down; I again said that the ceasefire was breaking and that the British were listening too much to their minor officials saying that the Provos desperately wanted the peace to hold and could ‘accept’ anything. I said ‘No.’⁷⁷

By early June 1975, at which stage the republican leadership held out relatively little hope for a successful outcome to the negotiations, Duddy discussed the situation with Ó Brádaigh: We discussed at length what we thought the British position was. 1. Real fear of a Loyalist take-over. 2. Simple slowness due to London remoteness. 3. Keep the Rep. on the long finger, hoping they will fade away. 4. Let the truce slide away and it’s easier to blame the Provos turning public opinion and thus hold the Loyalists from going over the top. We decided on this last one.⁷⁸ ⁷⁶ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 14 May, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. ⁷⁷ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 15 May, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. ⁷⁸ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 12 June, POL35/62, Duddy Papers.

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Only the second of these options is compatible with an IRA belief that withdrawal was inevitable or a ‘belief that they had literally beaten the British in battle’ and that they could ‘hammer home their advantage’ in the talks.⁷⁹ It emphasizes again that the republicans were knowingly manoeuvring in a complex and difficult negotiating process, assessing that Britain had strong interest in disengagement but also aware that this did not for a moment guarantee that Britain would conclude an agreement with them. When the Provisionals applied pressure to the British shortly after this, in early June, in an attempt to revive the talks, the message they formulated showed little evidence of ideological rigidity, unrealistic expectations, or a sense of victory. Citing lack of progress in the talks, they refused to meet with the British and instructed Duddy to send the following message, as he recorded it in his diary: 1. The leadership of the RM [Republican Movement] is very dissatisfied with the lack of progress. 2. The holding of political hostages. There is no truce with sectarian murderers. The RM question the wisdom of holding meaningless talks. HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] could answer this through me, or directly to Ruairi and Co. providing they, i.e. the British, meant business.⁸⁰

This juncture was one of several moments at which the Provisionals might have demanded a declaration of intent to withdraw but did not. It does not suggest a leadership that foolishly conceived itself to be negotiating with a defeated enemy, pressing for the fine details of British withdrawal. Rather, it shows a leadership seeking minimal concessions that would permit it to maintain a ceasefire, setting an extremely low threshold for the continuation of talks. In this case they sought action in two areas: the release of internees and action to deal with loyalist assassinations. These are not the rigid demands of a movement characterized by an ‘essential primitivism’ but the understandable positions of a leadership involved in a negotiation process that is increasingly opposed by its own rank and file, which faces intensified pressure from the police, ongoing arrests of members, intensifying loyalist assassinations, and continued British military pressure. It is an attempt to stay in negotiations. While the Provisionals intermittently urged the British to make a declaration of intent to withdraw, they did not at any stage make this a condition for continued talks.

⁷⁹ Smith 1997, 134.

⁸⁰ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 4 June, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers.

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Final Efforts After June 1975, British representatives in these talks had little to offer to the republicans except reassurances that ‘disengagement’ or ‘withdrawal’ remained the long-term intention of the British government. Regardless of their intent at this stage, the British were politically unable to make the concessions that would have allowed the republican leadership to sustain the ceasefire. In an entry in his diary in November 1975, Brendan Duddy expressed his frustration at the difficulties involved in securing even minor concessions from the British state: ‘By the time a simple initiative like clarifying the way the internees are to be released goes down the corridor and the doors open in turn each department taking its slice the end result is aborted as to help no one and anger most.’⁸¹ With all other means of sustaining the ceasefire gone, this emphasis on analysis was the one option left to the British, but it was not a simple matter of deceiving the republicans. The continued emphasis on withdrawal also reflected the ongoing direct input of Wilson into this channel of communication and his continuing advocacy of withdrawal as late as January 1976. The emphasis that British representatives placed on Wilson’s views suggests they too may have misjudged the level of influence he could, or would, exert. At an early stage Duddy records that: The whole position is beginning to drift, as the British don’t seem to appreciate that they have a ceasefire at all. Rob phoned. He seemed to think that ‘Wilson’ would make everything OK. I doubt it.⁸²

This is not to say that the prospect of British disengagement was not centrally important to these talks. Duddy repeatedly told British representatives that withdrawal was crucial to securing a settlement and they intermittently emphasized that the British state wanted to disengage, and that withdrawal was inevitable. Thus, Duddy recorded in late May 1975 that ‘Rob’ told him that ‘everyone now agrees with your thinking, though don’t expect to see it in print. It is inevitable that the British are going . . . ’⁸³ Duddy also records speaking to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh the following day: ‘I explained the 6 p.m. call. Almost impossible because what I am saying is that Ireland is soon going to be free. O’Br. was equally quietened.’⁸⁴ It is tempting to take this as straightforward evidence that the Provisionals remained in talks because the British fooled them into believing they were

⁸¹ ⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁴

Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 21 November, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 24 March, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 20 May, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 21 May, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers.

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withdrawing. But later that same day Duddy spoke again to MI6 officer ‘Rob’ to attempt to get progress in the talks: I insisted on a Thursday meeting explaining that . . . progress would have to be made and seen to be made otherwise the PAC would have no option but to prove they are not bluffing . . . Rob went on the phone [to his superiors]. Answer—No. I insisted. Time 7pm. He went mad. He banged the table. Fucked. Swore. Phoned and re-phoned. Still the answer—No.⁸⁵

Duddy subsequently relayed this refusal to Ó Brádaigh: Saw O’Bradaigh in Dungiven . . . Told him. He was disappointed. I was disgusted. We are both frightened of going back to war.⁸⁶

Thus, barely twenty-four hours after the British representative had emphasized the long-term desire to withdraw, the British had refused to make a minor concession aimed at advancing the negotiations, and both Duddy and Ó Brádaigh were contemplating the prospect of the renewal of conflict. Less than two weeks later, Duddy wrote in his diary: I decide I must tell O’Bradaigh that the British have decided:- 1. It’s easier to fight the Rep. and thus prevent a Prod. paramilitary UDI . . . 3. The Provos are too anxious not to break the truce and will take anything.⁸⁷

It was clear to the Provisionals at every stage of these talks that a long-term British desire to withdraw was quite compatible with a refusal to make concessions to the Provisionals and a willingness to resume the conflict with the IRA. In October 1975, Duddy set out his understanding of the compromises the IRA would be prepared to accept to his British interlocuter Donald Middleton (Fig. 5.1): The war had to end some day. The PAC [IRA Army Council] felt now. Would they work politically? Yes. Would they withdraw all guns and explosives? Yes. Would all non-democratic (means) cease? Yes. Could the Rep[ublican] Mov[ement] work with the Loyalists? Yes. In a six County, Northern Irish state? Yes. . . . Would normal policing be accepted? Yes, after it had been worked at. ⁸⁵ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 21 May, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. ⁸⁶ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 21 May, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. ⁸⁷ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 2 June, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers.

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Fig. 5.1 ‘If there is a peaceful way out they will take it.’ Brendan Duddy sets out his understanding of the IRA position in an entry in his diary on 27 October 1975 Source: Brendan Duddy papers, NUI Galway.

. . . The Rep. Mov. had but one aim:- eventual withdrawal of the British. Everything is compromisable after the British Declaration of Intent.

It anticipates many of the compromises the movement would make more than two decades later, in the peace process of the 1990s. According to the entry in his diary, Duddy told Middleton that he believed the Provisionals would accept a loyalist-controlled majority-rule Northern Ireland in return for a private British declaration of intent to withdraw. At this crucial meeting to discuss the British response to this idea, it became clear to Duddy that the British were not going to act on it and that they had no alternative to propose. He responded angrily: I said, ‘ . . . The Provos know fine well that the British can’t publish a Dec. [laration] of Int.[ent] Also, that you, D[onald] M[iddleton,] can’t present them with a signed piece of paper. In fact, they know that a “Dec. of Int.” doesn’t exist, can’t exist. It’s a myth, a gesture, a feeling, a hand across the table. The Irish need affection, not your most careful consideration.’⁸⁸

He was castigating what he saw as the British failure to work with republicans as partners. He was effectively arguing, as he did throughout the negotiations, that they should be taking what theorists of negotiation refer to as an ‘integrative’ or

⁸⁸ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 27 October, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers.

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‘problem-solving’ approach. From this perspective, the declaration of intent was primarily a device, a way for the British to move towards the Provisionals and towards a negotiated settlement. Thus, when British representative Donald Middleton told him in December 1975 that the British were planning to offer a form of devolved government to unionists, Duddy records in his diary that he asked for the details in order to pass them on to the Provisionals and said: Excellent, excellent . . . first bit of common sense in years. Include the Provos and you have the beginnings of peace. Leave them out of the mix and we will ensure failure.⁸⁹

This is not to say that the Provisionals would have accepted these proposals. Duddy was reiterating the point that a crucial element in any settlement was to include the Provisionals in its negotiation. As the ceasefire broke down in late 1975, Duddy repeatedly urged the British to develop a concerted policy to reach a negotiated settlement. In August he recorded that Middleton had told him he was about to meet Rees and that he asked Duddy what he should say. According to Duddy’s diary, he told him: ‘Tell him to stop worrying, the truce will hold. Violence will subside. DON’T PANIC—PRODUCE A POLICY.’⁹⁰ Republican representatives did not insist on a declaration of withdrawal during these talks. Rather, they applied pressure for British movement on everyday practical matters that would allow the IRA to maintain the ceasefire. The Provisionals remained in talks as long as they did at least partly because they sought to provide the British government with an opportunity to develop a policy that would lead to an ‘honourable settlement’. ‘Withdrawal’ was seen as providing a shared interest that could form the basis for such a settlement.

Understanding a Failed Negotiation Standard accounts of the 1975 ceasefire claim there were no negotiations to speak of, simply a republican misunderstanding encouraged by British officials. The position adopted by the Provisionals at the outset of the talks is characterized as non-negotiable. If we treat the opening position of republicans as immutable, we must assume that they expected the British government, William Craig, Paisley, and the loyalist paramilitary organizations to adopt the policies of Provisional Sinn Féin. Despite the implausibility of this proposition, it is the implicit assumption underlying most accounts of the ceasefire. Given that both Ó Brádaigh and ⁸⁹ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary,11 December, POL 35 4/62, Duddy Papers. ⁹⁰ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary,12 August, POL 35 4/62, Duddy Papers; original emphasis.

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O’Connell had repeatedly stressed that any solution could emerge only from negotiation between nationalists and unionists, it is clear that they knew the republican position would have to be modified. Republicans’ identification of a British willingness to disengage does not indicate that they expected there would be no need to negotiate. The tortuous weeks of negotiation before the ceasefire had shown that they would have to fight for every single inch of ground within these talks. The elaborate structural arrangements that the republicans made for these talks indicate how seriously they took the prospect that the British would use the talks to divide them and pave the way for their military defeat or would induce them to agree to a settlement that would split the movement. They took these talks seriously as part of a negotiation process whose outcome was not predetermined but dependent on factors both within and outside the negotiating room. The great promise of the 1975 talks was that they constituted an attempt to negotiate a compromise that included the republican movement, whatever shape that agreement might take. Subsequent attempts to resolve conflict that excluded republicans from the process were predicated on the expectation or hope of their eventual marginalization and defeat, before the British returned in the early 1990s to an attempt to repeat the approach of 1975. Intra-organizational bargaining, in which competing factions and agencies within an organization struggle to shape that organization’s negotiating position,⁹¹ provide much of the explanation for the failure of the 1975 talks. Both the British state and the republican movement were complex organizations that encompassed a range of preferences and interests and a range of attitudes to negotiation. The republican leadership in these negotiations faced pressure from more militant elements in the IRA to end the ceasefire, and this severely constrained it. Rees acknowledged the constraints on the republican leadership when he wrote in an internal memo in late 1975 that ‘until recently the IRA have managed to hold their ceasefire with a considerable degree of discipline . . . it is unlikely that the IRA can hold their ceasefire for much longer, even if they wish to.’⁹² For its part, the British government was hindered in instituting police reforms, scaling back military activity, and releasing internees throughout 1975 by determined internal resistance. The attempt at compromise did not founder primarily because of the ‘intransigence of the IRA—and its refusal to give up “armed struggle” until its aims had been achieved’.⁹³ It foundered to a great extent because intra-organizational struggles in the British state and the intensification of loyalist violence meant that the British government was unable to ease the

⁹¹ Walton and McKersie 1991, 281–351. ⁹² Rees, ‘Draft: security policy: note by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland’, CJ4/1780, UK National Archives. ⁹³ Bew, Frampton, and Gurruchaga 2009, 49.

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pressure on republicans to the degree necessary for the IRA leadership to maintain the ceasefire. In late 1975, Duddy recorded in his diary: ‘I told the British that the Provos had really no choice. They had backed peace, but the corridors of power had ensured that no progress was possible.’⁹⁴ Thirty-five years later, he reiterated the substance of this analysis: The British government decided as the boat was coming forward they couldn’t get on it—let’s say they had good reasons for it—and they turned the boat onto the left-hand shore. Prior to that, that boat was going straight ahead.⁹⁵

None of this is to suggest that the British government capriciously or carelessly rejected a simple and obvious peace settlement. As the Provisionals recognized, British decisions were shaped by the reality of loyalist violence and the threat of its intensification, the intensity of unionist and Conservative hostility to any settlement with the IRA, and direct resistance by senior military and police figures to the scaling back of military activity and to the reform of policing. Reaching a compromise settlement with the IRA that involved concessions on sensitive issues such as policing and prisoners would have required difficult struggles with these multiple forces and held the danger that loyalist violence might escalate uncontrollably. It would have been extremely difficult to manage all of these forces. Acknowledging that difficulty is not, however, the same as saying that the process collapsed because of intransigence on the part of the Provisionals. If the Provisionals were weakening and if they were reluctant to restart their campaign, it did not make sense for the British government to incur the costs involved in negotiating a settlement with them. These two points are captured in the account by Brendan Duddy of a conversation with his British interlocutor, Donald Middleton (DM), as the British government withdrew from engagement with the Provisionals in early 1976: I said ‘the IRA want peace, but we need a way out of this war. Let us talk and somehow we will end all of this killing’. DM agreed but said ‘if the IRA is losing support, why should we aid them by giving them a way out?’⁹⁶

Throughout the ceasefire, both sides manoeuvred to avoid blame for its breakdown, and in its aftermath the British promoted a narrative of republican intransigence that attached blame for the failure of talks and for renewed violence to the Provisionals. One Foreign Office official wrote in August 1975, ⁹⁴ Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 21 November, POL 35 4/62, Duddy Papers. ⁹⁵ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009. ⁹⁶ Brendan Duddy 1976 diary, 8 May, POL 35/131, Duddy Papers.

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If the ceasefire breaks down, our immediate aims will be: (a) to minimise the danger to the civilian population and to the Security Forces, and (b) to ensure that all blame for the breakdown and consequent events lies on the IRA⁹⁷

The end of the ceasefire brought with it a vigorous renewal of visions of IRA defeat and military victory for Britain, and aligned the state with the preferences of the unionist majority to a degree scarcely imaginable only a year previously. In early 1976, Andy Tyrie, the head of the UDA, met with British officials after Wilson had made a hardline speech indicating that he was turning away from an accommodation with the IRA. Tyrie told the British officials: He thought that the Security Forces should now be given a free rein to demolish the Provisional IRA . . . Mr Tyrie thought that the wheel had now turned full circle, from the use of the B-Specials, through Mr Whitelaw’s soft line approach, to the mobilisation of the UDR and the introduction of the SAS. It appeared that the Security Forces had at last recognized who the enemy was and was going on the offensive.⁹⁸

The history of cooperative contacts with the Provisional leadership and joint efforts to reduce and end violence undermined the newly reinvigorated official narrative of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil. The argument that the ceasefire had been aimed at weakening the IRA retrospectively assimilated this failed attempt at compromise to the policy of seeking military victory. It represented the talks with the IRA as a crucial step on the road to that military victory. No deal with the Provisionals had been possible because of their impossible demands, the argument went, but talking to them had been justified because it was aimed at laying the groundwork for their eventual military defeat. The 1975 ceasefire period has been represented so frequently as a disaster and a failure for the IRA that it has become almost impossible to think of it in terms of disaster and failure for the British government. But if the IRA called a ceasefire in January 1975 with the intention of bringing a permanent end to their campaign, and if the movement was committed to negotiating a compromise with unionists and loyalists, it seems quite perverse to argue that the collapse of this ceasefire and

⁹⁷ ‘Draft memorandum: The ending of the ceasefire: HM Government’s aims and the means to achieve them’, G. W. Harding, Republic of Ireland Dept of the FCO, 19 August 1975, Prem 16/158, UK National Archives. The list continued, making a few more points. ⁹⁸ ‘Note of meeting held at Laneside with UDA representatives, 19 January 1976’, Prem 16/960, UK National Archives.

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the subsequent two decades of violence somehow represent a positive achievement for the British state. And if the British government strenuously sought to make changes to policing and to restrain security force activity in 1975, and if it was prepared to move towards the IRA position on a declaration of intent to withdraw and on prisoner releases, the ceasefire and talks in 1975 look very much like a missed opportunity for peace.

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6 Long War and a Policy Vacuum ‘Passing the Time Decently’

. . . the N[orthern] I[reland] Office firmly believes that the Provos are defeated. I have told them that they are very wrong, but might as well spit into the Lagan.¹ Brendan Duddy Diary entry, 23 June 1976² In February 1976, a few months after the formal end of the IRA ceasefire, British representatives held one final secret meeting with the three republican negotiators, Billy McKee, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, and Joe McCallion. The reluctance with which the Provisionals returned to their campaign is evident in the British report of the meeting, most strikingly in their account of the attitude of McKee. In an emotional (but not angry) outburst, McKee said that the violence in Northern Ireland, from which people of both communities had suffered for over 6 years, was destroying both the physical and spiritual qualities of life; the people had nothing to live for, and they looked in dread at the prospects ahead for their children.³

Noting that ‘The Provisional Sinn Féin representatives spoke calmly . . . pointedly avoided making provocative statements . . . and appeared to welcome the opportunity to meet our men’, they paint a picture of a leadership that did not wish to go back to a war of any kind, let alone embark on a twenty-year war. Why then did the IRA campaign continue for another two decades when they had come so close in 1975 to ending it? The standard account of the Troubles argues that after 1975, the British and the IRA settled into a long struggle that ended only when both sides accepted that they could not defeat each other. According to this account, the British government adopted a policy from late 1975 of normalization, criminalization, and Ulsterization, with a view to defeating the IRA. It aimed to treat the conflict as a criminal problem to be dealt with by policing measures while minimizing the

¹ The River Lagan in Belfast. ² Brendan Duddy 1976 diary, POL 35/131, Duddy Papers. ³ Spun Sugar 10: Meeting with O’Brady [Ó Brádaigh], McKee and McCallion, 10 February 1976, PREM 16/960, UK National Archives.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0007

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impact on British public opinion by withdrawing British troops and replacing them with an expanded RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). External political pressure would be held at bay through an emphasis on the problem of violence rather than on politics, and there would be no need for engagement or negotiation with the ‘men of violence’. At the same time, the IRA settled into a Long War, reorganizing to ensure that they could sustain a campaign long enough to eventually ‘sicken’ the British into withdrawal.⁴ The alternative analysis elaborated here sees the IRA’s ‘Long War’ as a bargaining move aimed at securing a return to negotiation as soon as possible. Indeed, some British officials recognized in 1976 that opportunities existed for a compromise settlement and argued for an early return to engagement. However, policy drift allowed operational priorities to steer political decision-making, and the British failed to engage. Ultimately, this lack of direction contributed to the intensification of confrontation in the prisons which culminated in the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981.

Long War It is now a commonplace that the Provisionals’ Long War was a strategy aimed at securing British withdrawal through a sustained armed campaign.⁵ According to Henry Patterson, ‘The “Long War” strategy developed by Adams and his comrades in the late 1970s was based on the calculation that it could take up to two decades of armed struggle to break Britain’s will to remain in Northern Ireland.’⁶ However, the so-called ‘Long War’ invites analysis not only as strategy but also as a bargaining move aimed at pressuring the British government to return to negotiations. The 1975 ceasefire and the outcome of the associated talks had demonstrated to the Provisionals that they did not pose a sufficiently serious threat to the British state to achieve a negotiated compromise settlement, given the countervailing pressures from loyalists, unionists, the security forces, the parliamentary opposition, and the Irish government. The refusal of the British to make significant concessions had revealed the limited leverage that the republican movement enjoyed. It also revealed another conundrum too: the IRA’s communication of a strong willingness to end its campaign had the perverse effect of providing an incentive for the British government to minimize movement towards the republican position. The Long War, then, can be seen as both a strategic plan and a bargaining position aimed at pressurizing the British government to return to substantive ⁴ As Martin McGuiness put it in a 1988 speech. Cited in O’Brien 1999. ⁵ English 2003, 212–15; Patterson 1990, 11; Smith 1997. ⁶ Patterson 2013, 198.

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engagement. The British would return to engagement not because the IRA would or could intensify its violence to the point necessary to defeat the British militarily, but because it would persist. The origins of the ‘Long War’ can be traced in contemporary sources, including speeches and statements by republicans and in internal IRA papers. Among the latter is an IRA planning document from 1977 which asserts that ‘We must gear ourselves towards Long-Term Armed Struggle.’⁷ Talk of victory or of forcing Britain to withdraw is entirely absent from the document, which notes instead that new security policies were ‘contributing to our defeat’. Far from being a roadmap for military victory, it aimed at ensuring the survival and persistence of the IRA.⁸ The optimum outcome of the Long War was a return to talks within a few years. This was the hope of Brendan Duddy, who for the two years after the closing of the back-channel, expected the British to re-establish contact.⁹ Writing under the pen name ‘Brownie’ in August 1976, Gerry Adams, the most important figure in the emerging leadership, imagined the conflict continuing for as long as seven years—not the eighteen years to the ceasefire of August 1994, nor the twenty-one years to the IRA’s final cessation in July 1997.¹⁰ The appointment of Roy Mason, a hardline former Minister of Defence, as Northern Ireland Secretary of State in 1976, the election to power of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and the escalation surrounding the 1981 hunger strike were among the factors that worked against an early return to engagement. In addition, a series of particularly provocative IRA attacks, including the killings of Ewart Biggs, the British Ambassador, in Dublin in 1976 and Lord Mountbatten in Mullaghmore, County Sligo in 1979, had targeted the British political establishment directly. Such attacks made it much more difficult, on the British side, to argue for any move to re-engage with the Provisionals, not least because it would indicate weakness. Against this it might be argued that the Provisionals repeatedly proclaimed their determination in the late 1970s and 1980s to achieve military victory through a long struggle that would ‘sicken’ the British government into withdrawal. They also took up a more rigid bargaining position, hardening up their demand for British withdrawal.¹¹ While not discounting these bargaining moves and hardline rhetoric entirely, they are not an accurate guide to the strategic thinking and expectations of the leadership, even if some within the movement were convinced that eventual victory was possible. The notion of a long struggle that could achieve victory was necessary not only to convince the British government of the movement’s willingness to continue on an open-ended basis, but also to motivate volunteers to renew the struggle after the experience of a ceasefire. In addition, ⁷ O’Brien 1999, 109. ⁸ Moloney 2002, 150. ⁹ Brendan Duddy interview, 16 October 2009. ¹¹ Moloney 2002, 170–1.

¹⁰ Moloney 2002, 150.

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there was little to be gained politically from moderating their bargaining position until there was a prospect of engagement. The established IRA leadership, dominated by Dave O’Connell and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, learned in the course of the 1975 talks that it was extraordinarily difficult to secure movement from the British state, even on issues such as transfer of prisoners or release of internees that were peripheral to the larger constitutional question. The emerging leadership set to replace it in the 1980s was heavily involved in attempts to negotiate a resolution of the prison dispute from 1978 onwards and found it similarly difficult to secure concessions.¹² Given their shared experience of the difficulties of securing gains in negotiation with the British state, it is implausible to suggest that either the established or emerging leadership ever envisaged a moment when they would finally impose their demands on the British government. One drawback of making a threat is that there are costs involved in both carrying it out and failing to carry it out.¹³ The costs of the threatened Long War were so high for the Provisionals that it is understandable that the British government would test them on their capacity to prosecute that war.¹⁴ The British government’s definitive termination in 1977 of all communication with the IRA through Brendan Duddy can also usefully be interpreted as a bargaining move. As Thomas Schelling emphasizes in his classic 1960 text, The Strategy of Conflict, making oneself unavailable for negotiation can be an effective bargaining strategy: Threats are no good if they cannot be communicated . . . When the outcome depends on coordination, the timely destruction of communication may be a winning tactic . . . If the threatened person can be unavailable for messages, or can destroy the communication channels, even though he does so in an obvious effort to avert threat, he may deter the threat itself.¹⁵

Disengagement from contact sent the message that the British government would refuse to receive any threats or offers communicated by the republicans. They would refuse to engage with them at any level, make no concessions, and take the necessary steps to counter their military campaign. The government was calling the IRA’s bluff, so to speak. It was adopting a hardball negotiating position that tacitly demanded that the IRA end its campaign unilaterally, an outcome for which there was a fairly recent precedent in the IRA’s abandonment of the border campaign in 1962. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the British would achieve this objective. Speaking to Peter Taylor in the 1990s, Billy McKee recalled a discussion with Seamus Twomey in early 1976 about ending the campaign: ‘Things were getting a bit critical and we made plans about what way ¹² Adams 2003, 11; Clarke 1987, 103–7. ¹⁴ Cowper-Coles 2012; Kerr 2011, 280.

¹³ Schelling 1980, 35–6. ¹⁵ Schelling 1980 [1960], 38–9, 146.

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it would finish. I said to Seamus, “If we do ever have to call it off, no matter what happens, one thing we can always say is that we got rid of Stormont”.’ McKee was head of the Belfast Brigade and Twomey was IRA Chief-of-Staff at the time. Two of the most senior IRA leaders, men who had driven the campaign since the early 1970s and had been involved in the 1975 talks with the British, were contemplating a unilateral end to the campaign.¹⁶ But their day had passed. They were pushed aside now by a new leadership that was determined that the campaign would continue.

A Final Push for British Engagement with the IRA Before the orthodoxy of this new British approach had become firmly established, there was a lively internal debate in the spring of 1976 about the wisdom of excluding the Provisionals. The debate was driven by the MI6/Foreign Office– dominated office at Laneside, which a hostile new Secretary of State Roy Mason would abolish several months later. It illustrates the strong awareness of some within the state apparatus of two points that, in the 1990s, would be crucial in getting the British state to re-engage with the Provisionals. The first was that the Provisionals were actively seeking to end their campaign and they were willing to negotiate a compromise which would involve major concessions. The 1975 negotiations had taught this lesson. The second was that, contrary to the British state’s propaganda, the Provisionals enjoyed sufficient support in the nationalist community that, regardless of British political and military initiatives, they would remain a significant force. They would not fade away. The implication of this latter understanding was that a settlement without the Provisionals was no settlement at all. In an analysis that pushed back against the gathering consensus on defeating the Provisionals, one civil servant wrote in a paper on the republican movement in May 1976: Unless we take more determined steps to involve the leaders of the Republican tradition in political life, the formation and execution of a coherent long-term political strategy will fail . . . if we are to give real encouragement to the republican movement to pursue their aims politically—and now is as good a time as any in view of their reported disillusion over the lack of success of their military campaign—then some such statement [a declaration of some kind] is required . . . such a policy could finish the SDLP but that would be a small price to pay for peace . . . a politicised Provisional Sinn Féin would be more likely to produce political stability throughout Ireland as a whole than the continuation of a

¹⁶ Taylor 1997, 198–9.

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terrorist movement, however isolated. It is in our interest to see a strong Provisional Sinn Féin, if at the expense of the SDLP, so that the extremists are brought into the mainstream of politics and are forced to act politically and in due course responsibly.¹⁷

It is important to note that this was a ‘losing paper’, presenting a perspective that would be almost completely marginalized a few months later. In the context of the broader shift away from engagement in 1976, this looks like the dying kick of a policy of engagement with paramilitary groups that was now being criticized as ‘appeasement’. With hindsight, however, it has the ring of prophecy. The document indicates two clear understandings: the Provisionals were prepared to accept a compromise settlement, and a settlement without them would ‘fail’. The prognosis that a politicized Provisional movement would eclipse the SDLP also indicates an awareness that the Provisionals were in tune with a far broader section of the Catholic population than was publicly acknowledged and that they were yet to fully realize their electoral potential. In May 1976, these arguments were being made in the teeth of a dominant consensus that the Provisionals could be beaten and that it was not necessary to engage with them. For those within the state apparatus arguing for engagement, excluding the Provisionals was kicking the can down the road. Shutting them out guaranteed continued conflict. It took a few years before opposition to contact with the republicans hardened into a taboo, however, and one meeting in West Belfast in 1978 shows that some influential British politicians still felt it was worthwhile to explore the possibilities for dialogue. In February 1978, at the invitation of a BBC reporter, Douglas Hurd, then Tory opposition spokesperson on European Affairs, met for three hours with Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison in Ballymurphy community centre in West Belfast. He met subsequently with women relatives of IRA prisoners. Although he had only recently become an MP, Hurd was no minor politician. He was an experienced diplomat and would later serve as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1984–85), as Home Secretary (1985–89), and as Foreign Secretary (1989–95). His account captures the uncompromising message the republicans were seeking to convey as they settled into the ‘Long War’: I can remember the hall, a gloomy place in Ballymurphy in which the meeting was held . . . it just added to the feeling of gloom about it all. They were so unyielding, so it just helped to form a pattern in my mind . . . at both meetings I was just looking for signs of hope or malleability if there is such a word. And when I didn’t find it, [it] confirmed to me that there wasn’t a real prospect [of compromise].¹⁸ ¹⁷ ‘The Republican Movement’, 5 May 1976, CJ4/1427, UK National Archives. ¹⁸ Douglas Hurd interview, 2 May 2013. See also Moloney 1991, Hurd 2003.

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He had secured permission in advance from Labour Secretary of State Roy Mason and Airey Neave, the Tory’s spokesperson on the North. But neither of them asked him for a report on the meeting or displayed any interest in the outcome: I just think they thought it wasn’t really important, do you know. I was not important. I mean Airey Neave could well have put a veto on it but he didn’t; perhaps Roy Mason even more, I don’t know but anyway although I was innocent in these matters I did know that you had to go a little carefully and they did need to be able to say it’s ok . . . I was just a backbencher and with no background in the subject at all.

Hurd’s meeting showed that interest in engagement with republicans survived at high levels within the British political system, but the republican determination to convey a hardline message about their commitment to the Long War as it got underway made it difficult for such approaches to get anywhere.

Filling the Policy Vacuum As the British government moved away in 1976 from attempts to secure an agreed settlement, operational goals began to drive policy. Rather than seeing the late 1970s as a period in which the British carefully implemented a well-thought-out policy, predicated on Ulsterization, criminalization, and normalization, the period might be better understood as one defined by the opening up of a policy vacuum that was filled by the priorities and agenda of the security forces. Roy Mason, the Secretary of State who succeeded Merlyn Rees in September 1976, epitomized this turn away from politics. Perhaps the most quietly damning comment on Mason’s tenure is that of the most senior civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office, Permanent Undersecretary Brian Cubbon. In a letter accompanying a 1979 paper in which he discussed possible political ways forward, Cubbon refers to some possible courses of action and then adds: ‘Or the new Secretary of State might seek to avoid the political whirlpool altogether, as Mr Mason has. Is this possible?’¹⁹ In the absence of any clear political vision or policy, those in charge of security began to drive policy by setting operational goals. And those goals had a clear political colour. Writing to the head of the Northern Ireland Office and the General Officer Commanding (GOC) in 1976, the incoming RUC Chief Constable Kenneth Newman, presented the normalization of policing as a sharply focused political project to defeat the IRA:

¹⁹ Letter from Brian Cubbon, 7 February 1979, CJ4/2710, UK National Archives.

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My first priority must be to create a strong and efficient crime fighting machine designed to erode and ultimately overthrow the power of the PIRA . . . the primacy of the police can not be established until the PIRA is weakened and ultimately eliminated . . . my concept of police primacy involves . . . full mobilisation of manpower and resources for the investigation and detection of crimes generally and, in particular, the defeat of the PIRA.²⁰

Over the previous two years, loyalists had killed almost exactly as many people as republicans, but Newman’s sixteen-point memo was dominated almost entirely by the aim of defeating the IRA. Loyalists finally get a secondary mention in point 13, which makes passing reference to dealing with ‘republicans and loyalists.’ Cheered by the emphasis on defeating the IRA rather than achieving a compromise political settlement, unionists took great heart from what appeared to be a new departure. In fact, the emphasis on security reflected an exhaustion of political will and energy that is distilled in the response of one civil servant to Cubbon’s suggestions in 1979 for a new departure: ‘Since there are no foreseeable solutions to the Irish problem (and HMG have anyway no ultimate objective), we are only seeking to pass the time decently.’²¹ In the absence of a long-term policy, British efforts were concentrated from 1976 onwards on pressing the military advantage and pushing the IRA towards a unilateral abandonment of its campaign, while long-term policy thinking was marginalized.

The Escalating Prison Dispute The most damaging consequence of this imbalance between operational goals and long-term policy was the steep escalation of confrontation in the prisons. Far from seeking to remove the special conditions that IRA prisoners enjoyed under special category status, Secretary of State Merlyn Rees had actually sought in 1975 to retain all but one of those conditions by extending them to all prisoners in Northern Ireland, but his view had not prevailed.²² Even then, the NIO seriously considered in 1976 allowing prisoners to wear their own clothes. Writing in October 1980, an NIO Official described the debate that had taken place in 1976: ‘On the administration side [among civil servants] there was support for abolition of uniform’, but there were ‘strong objections . . . to the abolition of prison uniform or to any concession on the issue . . . on the operational side’ [the

²⁰ Newman to PUS and GOC, 16 April 1976, CJ4/1780, UK National Archives. ²¹ P.W.J. Buxton, 20 February 1979, CJ4/2710, UK National Archives. ²² Email communication from Dr Stuart Aveyard about 1975 UK archives, 23 June 2020.

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prison authorities] . . . the operational viewpoint by agreement prevailed . . . ’.²³ The uniform was imposed not as part of a carefully designed criminalization policy, but, at least partly, because of pressure from prison governors and staff. If prisoners had been allowed to wear their own clothes, or if most elements of special category status had been retained, as Rees proposed, some of the most important elements subsequently sustaining the conflict would have been removed. As republican prisoners protested against the removal of those conditions in 1976, prison authorities responded with steadily harsher measures, to which the prisoners responded by escalating the protest.²⁴ A sense among some on the British side that the defeat of the IRA was within reach helps explain how the government allowed the prison dispute to escalate to the stage where the IRA launched a hunger strike. On the eve of the first hunger strike in October 1980, Permanent Undersecretary Ken Stowe told his colleagues: Senior Northern Ireland civil servants believed that the Catholic community considered the war to be over. Although the position might be affected by the H Block hunger strike there did appear to be a real chance that over the next few months the men of violence would find themselves increasingly isolated . . . and the security forces would be able to mop them up gradually.²⁵

Instead, the stage was set for a confrontation that would expose the limitations and dangers of allowing operational priorities and the security apparatus to drive government policy. It would bring the British government and the IRA back into secret contact for the first time since the end of the 1975 ceasefire in a struggle over time that pitted the biological rhythms of the body against the institutional time of the state. * In March 1975, as the secret talks between Britain and the IRA proceeded in Derry, the British diplomat who would provide a direct link between the 1975 ceasefire and the next phase of back-channel contact in 1980–81²⁶ was sheltering under the wing of an American military transport plane on the tarmac at Phnom Penh airport.²⁷ Donald Middleton had been transferred just a few weeks beforehand from his post as Deputy High Commissioner in Ibadan, Nigeria to take over as Head of Mission in the British embassy to Cambodia. His task: to close the

²³ E N Barry to Mr Blelloch, 21 October 1980, CJ4/3622, UK National Archives. ²⁴ Clarke 1987. ²⁵ ‘Political developments in Northern Ireland—the next steps’. Notes of a meeting held on 14 October 1980, FCO87/1036, UK National Archives. ²⁶ On this point I am relying solely on interviews with Brendan Duddy and on his draft memoir of the period: ‘Hunger Strikes—Brendan Duddy’s story’. Brendan Duddy Papers, POL 35/200–201. Official sources do not identify the British agent involved in back-channel contact in 1981. ²⁷ Brendan Duddy understood Middleton to be an MI6 officer (Duddy interview, 15 October 2009). Given the centrality of MI6 to the engagement with the IRA, this seems plausible.

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embassy and organize the evacuation of staff and British civilians before the Khmer Rouge captured the capital. The US consul in Ibadan cabled his colleagues in Phnom Penh to brief them on Middleton: ‘He has served previously in Lagos and as head of chancery in Saigon. U.S. consulate personnel Ibadan have found him unfailingly helpful and open . . . He is self-effacing, but has keen analytical mind, ready grasp of facts and sound judgement. He was valuable colleague and friend.’²⁸ The reference would help Middleton now to secure American assistance. As the Khmer Rouge closed in on the city, he arranged the evacuation on 11 March of the last British civilians and a diverse gathering from other states— among them Indians, Germans, and Australians; around thirty people in total. As they boarded cars at the embassy under his direction, mortars exploded around the embassy grounds, but everyone was evacuated safely.²⁹ Middleton and five embassy colleagues would stay in Phnom Penh for a further ten days before driving to the airport on 21 March to catch a special evacuation flight organized by the CIA-owned Air America—one of the last flights to leave Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge took control. As they waited on the runway to board the Dakota C47, several rockets landed near the airport terminal. A photograph in The Times shows Middleton taking shelter by the wing of the aircraft (Fig. 6.1).³⁰ Middleton was flown to the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, where he had once served as Head of Chancery in the British embassy. He told a reporter from The Times ‘he would remain in Saigon and attempt to return to Phnom Penh every few weeks if circumstances allowed.’³¹ He would never return, and he would not remain in Saigon for long. A few weeks later, on 20 April, the North Vietnamese Army overran the last line of defence outside the city and on Thursday 24 April the British evacuated their embassy. The New York Times reported that ‘Diplomats spent the morning burning official papers and clearing out belongings.’ Like the Americans, whose evacuation was accompanied by chaotic scenes of overladen helicopters taking off from the embassy rooftop, the British left in a hurry. One hundred Britons were flown out on an RAF transport to Singapore.³²

²⁸ FM AMCONSUL IBADAN TO AMEMBASSY PHNOM PENH, ‘New UK Head of Mission to Cambodia (Middleton, Donald K.)’, 18 February 1975. https://aad.archives.gov/aad/createpdf?rid= 93807&dt=2476&dl=1345 ²⁹ Reuters TV, ‘Khmer Republic: Rockets hit near British embassy as evacuees leave’, 11 March 1975. ³⁰ The Times, 21 March 1975. Middleton can be seen getting into an official car in Reuters footage of the last staff leaving the embassy on 21 March: ‘Khmer republic: British embassy closes doors and new defence minister performs first official duties’. Reuters, Screenocean, 23 March 1975. https://reuters. screenocean.com/record/435387 ³¹ The Times, 22 March 1975. ³² New York Times, 25 April 1975.

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Fig. 6.1 British diplomat Donald Middleton takes shelter from a rocket attack by the wing of an Air America plane evacuating British embassy staff from Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge captured the city in March 1975. A short time later he was posted to Belfast to take charge of talks with the IRA during the 1975 ceasefire Source: AP via Shutterstock.

Back in London in spring 1975, Middleton was given a very different, and far more sensitive, assignment: to take charge of the secret talks with the IRA.³³ Over the following months he met several times with IRA negotiators, Ó Brádaigh, McKee, and McCallion. The Provisionals were aware they were negotiating with a man who had recently organized a British ‘withdrawal’ of a kind. Forty years later, Billy McKee, who was given a lift back from Derry to Belfast by Middleton on at least two occasions, recalled what he knew of his activities in South East Asia, including the suggestion that he had negotiated with the Khmer Rouge: Middleton . . . was the head man at the British embassy . . . And he negotiated with; they were getting surrounded and he got two hours or twelve hours or something to get out his groupings and he got a lot of planes and took some of the [local] people, got them all out. I believe he pulled [off] a great job at that time, he got well recommended . . . ³⁴

³³ Maurice Hayes, Secretary to the Constitutional Convention, recorded in his diary on 26 May 1976 that the office at Laneside was being ‘upgraded’ and that ‘the last Charge d’Affaires from Phnom Penh’ was coming to take over. POL 41/8/262, Hayes papers, NUI Galway. ³⁴ Billy McKee interview, 3 December 2014.

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Brendan Duddy met frequently with Middleton through the second half of 1975 as the talks with the IRA were running into the ground and Duddy’s diaries capture the heightened emotions of those encounters, and occasional moments of candour. On Saturday 19 July Duddy wrote ‘My annoyance at British lack of policy was expressed very, very clearly to DM’ [Donald Middleton]. ‘He saw I was angry, and said it was his job to test my reactions. I said I was fed up with the strain of holding both ends together. Middleton reassured me and said he was only drawing me out. I said “Nothing personal.” ’³⁵ There was an ongoing struggle, but also a degree of mutual respect. ‘Middleton is good’ he wrote after another three-hour meeting on 28 July, ‘I have to be on my toes to read him.’³⁶ The two men discussed the case of IRA prisoner Frank Stagg a number of times. An emigrant from County Mayo, he had been arrested in England in April 1973 and convicted of criminal damage and conspiracy to commit arson. He was sentenced to ten years in jail. In March 1974 he and Michael Gaughan, also from Mayo, went on hunger strike at the same time as the Price sisters and Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, demanding to be transferred to prisons in Northern Ireland where they would be entitled to special category status.³⁷ Gaughan died in June 1974 from the effects of force-feeding, and in April 1975 Duddy negotiated the transfer of the four others during the ceasefire. That just left Stagg. According to Duddy, the British promised in June 1975 that Stagg would be transferred.³⁸ As the ceasefire slipped away, Duddy referred to Stagg in his diary with increasing frequency. In mid-September, at what Duddy described as a ‘disastrous meeting’, Middleton and James Allen told him and the IRA representatives that Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had refused the transfer of Frank Stagg, ‘which was already agreed’, Duddy wrote.³⁹ When Middleton phoned on 19 September Duddy ‘told him we were drifting into war’ and ‘begged him for a quick injection of internee releases and the immediate return of F. Stagg’.⁴⁰ Stagg’s case now became tied up with the early stages of criminalization in Northern Ireland. At a meeting on 30 October, Middleton told Duddy that Merlyn Rees would shortly announce the abolition of special category status for prisoners convicted after 1 March 1976. Duddy was furious: ‘I burst. My God! You’re mad! You can’t win that battle! . . . Have you no knowledge of Irish History? . . . My feeling of hopelessness was never so great.’⁴¹

³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹

Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 19 July, POL 35 4/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 28 July, POL 35 4/62, Duddy Papers. O’Donnell 2015 103; 350–400. Brendan Duddy 1976 diary, 15 January, POL 35/131, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 16 and 17 September, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 19 September, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 30 October, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers.

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Efforts to secure Stagg’s transfer took on a new urgency on 14 December when he embarked once again on a hunger strike shortly after he had been transferred to Wakefield prison. Ten days later, on Christmas Eve, Duddy received an urgent phone call: O’Bradaigh rang. “Please help Frank Stagg! He is on a thirst strike. His mind is going.” I was really moved. I said Yes. I will. O’B. said ring me anytime if you get any news at all. I rang N.I. Office. DM [Donald Middleton] please help Fr. Stagg. All he wants is to drink from a water tap and not from a drink supplied by prison staff. DM was equally moved. I promise you I will do all I can, this instant. Good night and a happy Christmas.⁴²

It was a rare transfer of emotion across the divide. Whether Middleton played a role or not, the issue was resolved and Stagg began drinking water again.⁴³ If he had continued to refuse water he would have died within a matter of days. Duddy now became increasingly emotionally invested in Stagg’s case. On Monday 5 January 1976, a ‘terrible wet day’, and the day on which IRA members would carry out the Kingsmill massacre, killing ten Protestant workmen in one of the worst sectarian atrocities of the conflict, Duddy prepared to travel once again to Belfast to meet Middleton. He wrote in his diary: ‘I have made a strange decision today. I have stopped eating solid food.’ He explained the decision to me in 2009: I really couldn’t eat a meal up there [in Laneside] so I decided to go and not eat. I came down [the stairs] and told Margo and a couple of other friends, ‘I’m not eating’ and the usual hullaballoo [ensued] and so forth, and I made it clear that I was not going to kill myself . . . So I didn’t eat but I also said to a few people—the best known would be Denis Bradley—and I said to him if I get to the point [when I should stop] . . . come to me and I’ll know that’s it.⁴⁴

Duddy was seeking to bring the hunger strike to the door of Laneside. At the meeting, he told Middleton and a second official who was present that he had

⁴² Brendan Duddy 1975 diary, 24 December, POL 35/62, Duddy Papers. ⁴³ ‘Hunger striker in “reasonable” condition’, The Irish Times, 29 December 1975. ⁴⁴ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009.

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stopped eating. ‘Their attitude . . . was hostile; Stagg is a ‘criminal’, a ‘bomber’. Duddy confided the reasons to his diary: The reason I am stopping eating is that I, too, have become a glib talker, feeling no pain as I join the chorus of ‘I whole-heartedly condemn etc. etc.etc.’ . . . My point is that all of us, PAC, N.I. Office, British politicians have it too good. The pains of hunger will make me try harder.⁴⁵

On 15 January Duddy wrote in his diary: ‘ . . . now 11 days without food . . . RTE radio spoke of Fr.[ank] Stagg today. He is set for death. I am glad I am sharing his pain’⁴⁶ Shortly after this, Duddy ended his fast. On 12 February 1976, Stagg died after sixty-two days on hunger strike. A bitter struggle between republicans and the Irish government to control his funeral and burial ensued. The Irish government commandeered the body and buried Stagg under six feet of concrete in the cemetery in Ballina, County Mayo to ensure he would not be buried in the republican plot. Twenty-two months later republicans retrieved Stagg’s coffin in the darkness of night and reinterred his remains in the republican plot, beside the grave of Michael Gaughan.⁴⁷ The anger that this episode aroused in Duddy foreshadows the reaction of moderate Irish nationalists to the 1981 hunger strike. Stagg had starved to death in pursuit of the conditions that special category prisoners enjoyed in Northern Ireland. Less than three weeks after his death, special category status was abolished. Now, every newly convicted republican prisoner in the North was in the same position Stagg had been in. They embarked on a prison protest, refusing to do prison work or to wear the uniform. Although he had been imprisoned in England, Stagg became an important symbol of the British criminalization policy, the first casualty in the struggle over political status. As he prepared to go on hunger strike in February 1981, the IRA OC on the H-Blocks, Bobby Sands, told the IRA leadership that he wanted to be buried beside Frank Stagg and Michael Gaughan in Ballina, County Mayo, signalling his identification with those earlier hunger strikers.⁴⁸ By that time Brendan Duddy was once again meeting secretly in London with a British official, attempting to avert the planned hunger strike. Sands was kept apprised of Duddy’s mediation efforts in 1980/81,⁴⁹ and perhaps he knew that Duddy had tried to negotiate in Stagg’s case. Sands certainly didn’t know, however, that Duddy was negotiating in 1981 with Donald Middleton, the same man he had dealt with during Frank Stagg’s hunger strike. During his lifetime, Duddy

⁴⁵ Brendan Duddy 1976 diary, 5 January, POL 35/131, Duddy Papers. ⁴⁶ Brendan Duddy 1976 diary, 15 January, POL 35/131, Duddy Papers. ⁴⁷ O’Donnell 2015, 350–400, 477. ⁴⁸ O’Hearn 2006, 375. ⁴⁹ O’Hearn 2006, 292.

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never told the republicans, allowing them to assume, incorrectly, that it was Michael Oatley.⁵⁰ After the closure of Laneside and the ending of MI6’s role in the North in 1977, Middleton had been appointed British High Commissioner to Papua New Guinea.⁵¹ As 1980 drew to a close, he returned to London to negotiate with the IRA through the back-channel one last time. Duddy hoped that a compromise settlement of the hunger strike would pave the way for discussion between Britain and the IRA on a negotiated end to the conflict. That Middleton, who had led the political negotiations with the IRA in 1975, was his interlocutor, must have reinforced the connection in his mind. Over the following months the two men struggled and negotiated as they had over the case of Frank Stagg in 1975–76, but to no avail. The resulting escalation would push the hoped-for settlement far into the future.

⁵⁰ As mentioned in note 26 above, on this specific point I am relying solely on interviews with Brendan Duddy and on his draft memoir of the period. ⁵¹ He would serve in that role until 1983.

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7 The Hunger Strikes ‘Playing Their Last Card’?

Time is to politics what space is to geometry. Régis Debray, Time and Politics, 1973¹ We were beat by a few lousy hours. IRA prison leader Bobby Sands on the collapse of the 1980 hunger strike.² The republican hunger strike of 1981 in which ten men died is sometimes represented as either a primitive form of protest or a romantic one, bound up with notions of blood sacrifice and martyrdom.³ But if it has ancient precedents, hunger-striking is a profoundly modern negotiating tactic, one of the few mechanisms available to a weak party to set a clear deadline for the conclusion of negotiations with a complex bureaucracy. W.B. Yeats’s The King’s Threshold (1903), a play about a medieval poet fasting to bring disgrace on a king who has wronged him, is the literary reference of choice for the Irish hunger strikes. But we might be better served here by Kafka than by Yeats. Franz Kafka’s short story ‘Before the Law’, about a man waiting for justice at a different kind of threshold, captures sharply the importance of control over time to the power of bureaucracy and the modern state: BEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. ‘It is possible,’ says the doorkeeper, ‘but not at the moment.’ . . . The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years.⁴

The faint prospect of movement is enough to avert direct confrontation indefinitely, securing quiescence without the need for concession or costly confrontation. But time runs out in the end for the man from the country. The biological

¹ Debray 1973, 103. ² O’Hearn 2006, 300. ⁴ Frank Kafka, ‘Before the Law’, in Glatzer 1971, 3–4.

³ Sweeney 1993.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0008

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mechanisms of his body wind to a halt while the endless clock time of the bureaucracy ticks on. The story portrays bureaucracy as a system of deferral in which immense power is exerted through the management and control of time, by delay and postponement. Crucial to the power of deferral is the asymmetrical effect of the passage of time. In Kafka’s story, it bears down much more heavily on the man from the country. The problem he faces, if he had only known it at the outset, is how to exert that same kind of time pressure on the system, to force it to a point of decision before his own time runs out. A hunger strike creates intense time pressure by setting the biological rhythms of the human body against the institutional time of a bureaucratic system whose power rests to a great extent on deferral and delay. It provides one of the few ways to create this kind of time pressure, one of the few ways in which a weak actor can set a deadline for a powerful bureaucracy. Time was crucial to the power exerted by the H-Block hunger strikers of 1980 and 1981, and it is crucial to understanding the negotiations to end their strikes. The central concerns here are the negotiating dynamics at work in the hunger strikes and the intense struggle over time that they involved. The chapter analyses how and when the deadline set by the prospect of a hunger striker dying generated movement in negotiations and the temporal strategies deployed during the approach to this deadline, focusing on the nexus of information, biological processes, and communication. If a hunger striker achieves power by putting moral pressure on the more powerful actor, power is also derived from the temporal concentration of forces that the strike’s deadlinesetting generates. The H-Block hunger strikes displayed in concentrated form some of the central obstacles to negotiated compromise between Britain and the IRA. At the same time, they revealed much about the importance of direct engagement between both parties. The logic that brought the British government into secret negotiation with the IRA in 1981 was the same logic that would bring both parties back together again in the peace process of the 1990s.

The Hunger Strike as Protest Tactic Hunger-striking is a commonly used and frequently successful tactic in asymmetrical struggles. Its modern history begins with Russian radicals and British suffragettes in the late nineteenth century and ranges across Irish, Indian, and Kurdish nationalists, Soviet and Cuban dissidents, and student protestors in Tiananmen Square in the twentieth century. It was a central element in Mahatma Gandhi’s repertoire of non-violent protest.⁵ Cuban dissidents, Palestinian prisoners,

⁵ Sharp 1973, 637.

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Islamist detainees in Guantanamo Bay, and asylum seekers in detention centres have already had recourse to it in the twenty-first century. One neo-Durkheimian analysis has emphasized the importance of pre-modern values and communal identity to the hunger strike tactic,⁶ but other work provides strong evidence of its deeply modern character and its strategic rationality. One of the few detailed studies of the prevalence of hunger-striking compared its use in the United States and in Israel (excluding Palestinian hunger strikes) over a twenty-six-year period.⁷ It found that hunger strikes are extremely common, frequently successful, and are far more commonly used by Israelis than Americans, although the author does point out that many of these were shortterm hunger strikes rather than fasts to the death. Israel Waismel-Manor argues that the intensive use of the tactic in Israel reflects the difficulties of exerting pressure on bureaucratic systems in a state where there is a single electoral constituency and thus no local constituency representatives in parliament.⁸ He thus explains the use of the tactic primarily in terms of the difficulty of dealing with a complex modern bureaucracy. Karin Fierke too, identifies the modernity of the tactic, pointing out the importance of globalized communication technologies to its effectiveness.⁹ The increasing use of the hunger strike tactic from the late nineteenth century onwards is also a reflection of the growing complexity of bureaucratic apparatuses that draw much of their power from their capacity to defer and delay. Despite its use in a range of different political contexts, both democratic and authoritarian, and by individuals from across the political spectrum, there is relatively little research on hunger-striking. Its neglect is surprising for the tactic is of particular interest to scholars of both non-violent protest and political violence: hunger-striking provides armed organizations with an alternative, non-violent tactic that requires them to orient themselves to short-term compromises with their opponents, to build popular support, and to build alliances with those who do not support their armed campaign. All of these features of hunger-striking can contribute to a long-term shift from armed struggle to nonviolent action. Such work that has been done on hunger-striking has focused on a limited range of issues. There is a substantial body of work on the medical issues, for example, and the related ethical debates surrounding medical intervention and forced feeding.¹⁰ This work is little concerned however with issues of power and politics. There is also an extensive literature that analyses specific hunger strikes.¹¹ Many of these studies explain the tactic in predominantly cultural terms. For

⁶ ⁸ ¹⁰ ¹¹

Dingley and Mollica 2007. ⁷ Waismel-Manor 2005. Waismel-Manor 2005, 288, 294–5. ⁹ Fierke 2013. Brockman 1999; Oguz and Miles 2005; Peel 1997. Anderson 2004; Bargu 2014; Koçan and Öncü 2006; Reiter 2014; Yuill 2007.

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example, notions of myth and cultural determinism inflect Pádraig O’Malley’s analyses of Irish republican hunger-striking: Their actions ultimately were not the actions of autonomous individuals . . . Their self-images, reinforced by the chronicles of oppression on which they had been raised and the experiences of their young lives, impaired their ability to act independently and diminished their capacity to act on their own behalf. In the end they were the victims of our myths.¹²

Approaches that emphasize culture and meaning allow the hunger strike to be compared with other tactics in which themes of sacrifice, martyrdom, and tradition feature prominently. Hunger strikes have been discussed alongside the selfimmolation protests of Buddhist monks.¹³ They have also been defined as a form of violence, characterized as ‘suicide terrorism’, and analysed as part of a set that includes suicide bombings and Kamikaze attacks.¹⁴ Bargu talks of ‘the weaponization of life’.¹⁵ Labelling this tactic as part of a repertoire of violence is problematic. Although armed groups have used the hunger strike, it has also had a central place in the repertoire of non-violent groups. Its use by actors attached to armed organizations does not make it a violent tactic. More importantly, characterizing the hunger strike as a form of violence or martyrdom sets up obstacles to understanding how it works. Neither self-immolation nor suicide bombings set a deadline intended to create pressure for focused short-term negotiations aimed at achieving a limited compromise. In this sense, the hunger strike has far more in common with a labour strike than with self-immolation. Laurence McKeown, for example, emphasizes the rationality of his decision to join the 1981 Irish republican hunger strike. He volunteered because: I believed in the struggle, I believed in the protest, our view was if they criminalized us then they criminalized the whole republican struggle . . . I was, at that stage, twenty-four, wasn’t married, so to me it was just a rational decision.¹⁶

McKeown and his fellow prisoners felt that alternative tactics had been tried and failed over a period of several years, and that the movement and the prisoners were facing a crushing defeat in the near future. Their understanding of their position—and decision to go on hunger strike—is consistent with WaismelManor’s conclusion that hunger strikers are ‘strategic actors embedded in their

¹² O’Malley 1990, 117. ¹³ Biggs 2013; Fierke 2013. ¹⁴ Dingley and Mollica 2007; Michelsen 2016; Silke 2006. ¹⁶ Laurence McKeown interview, 3 March 2016.

¹⁵ Bargu 2014, 300.

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cultural and institutional contexts who believe that a hunger strike can best advance their cause’.¹⁷

Negotiating to a Deadline A hunger strike either should not be attempted at all, or else should be undertaken with the serious resolve to carry it through to the end. Vera Figner (1852–1942), Russian revolutionary¹⁸ The exercise of power through the control of time defines hunger-striking. Setting a deadline is a common bargaining move aimed at forcing agreement or concessions that might otherwise be deferred indefinitely. There is an extensive literature on the use of time pressure in negotiations, much of it from a rational choice perspective.¹⁹ It focuses on the quality of agreements made, the effect on negotiator strategies, and whether deadlines increase the likelihood of agreement, but it is not much concerned with the varying effects of different kinds of deadlines, their role in mobilizing third parties, or the struggles surrounding their credibility or meaningfulness. Surprisingly, there does not appear to be any work on the distinctive temporalities of deadlines based on biological processes. The deadline created by a hunger strike immediately raises two questions. First: is it credible? Will they actually fast to the death if there is no agreement? Second: is it meaningful? That is, will the opposing party be damaged significantly if it allows a hunger striker to die? The deadline itself—its credibility and meaningfulness— becomes the primary focus of a struggle over information and influence that stretches far beyond the parties to direct negotiation and reaches a peak of intensity in the final days and hours. Demonstrating commitment is essential to establishing credibility. The hunger strike tactic itself provides strong evidence of commitment: in the first instance, the hunger striker denies him or herself the nourishment and pleasure of food and resists the craving for it; the body is gradually damaged, including the deterioration and often the loss of senses, including sight; and, then, the hunger striker eventually enters a period of uncertainty when death could come at any moment. But until those last hours, the possibility remains that the strike may end in capitulation. Maintaining a hunger strike requires intense commitment day after day, hour after hour, but it can be ended in a single moment. And while the hunger strike tactic is common, commitment to fast to the death is extraordinarily rare. In the numerous hunger strikes that Waismel-Manor examined, he found

¹⁷ Waismel-Manor 2005, 297. ¹⁸ Figner 1991, 100. ¹⁹ Carnevale and Lawler 1986; Pinfari 2011; Stuhlmacher et al. 1998.

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that just one of the thousands of hunger strikers in the US or Israel had fasted to the death.²⁰ The second issue, establishing the meaningfulness of a deadline, i.e. the extent of the damage that will ensue from failing to meet it, is an equally intense focus of struggle. As John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary have pointed out, a hunger strike is a version of the game of ‘chicken’—where two cars race headlong towards each other and the loser is the one who swerves first.²¹ At the heart of this ‘game’ is a deadline—the moment of impact. All of the power is concentrated in those final seconds when the decision to swerve can no longer be deferred. In the game of chicken, time forces out information about commitment. One of the distinctive features of the hunger strike is that there is also time-sensitive uncertainty about the consequences of the collision. Imagine a game of chicken in which one player is certain to die if they collide but the other player might emerge from the crash with just a few scrapes, but neither is in a position to assess this accurately until the final moments. The more a state secures its political position and secures allies in the course of a hunger strike, the less damage a death will inflict. If the death of a hunger striker will do no significant damage, it is not a meaningful deadline at all. Crucial here is the reaction of wider audiences—political groups and their supporters and the international community—whose responses to the death of a hunger striker may translate into significant political damage for the state. Public opinion is thus one of the most important sources of bargaining power for the parties involved. This ‘game’ of chicken is not a matter of individualized decision-making of course, as both parties are complex, hierarchical organizations. Decisions on both sides are the outcome of clashing preferences within each party that can shift significantly in the course of the process. Moreover, calculations at different levels of the system may become misaligned and internal division has to be actively managed on both sides. The probable damage of letting a hunger striker die cannot effectively be assessed until near the end. Most obviously, the level of damage depends, in some measure, on perceptions of attempts to negotiate a compromise. The more unreasonable the hunger strikers appear, the less damage that would be caused if they were to die and, hence, the weaker their bargaining power. The only true guide to the state’s assessment of potential damage comes in the offers made by both sides. In those final hours there is accordingly a struggle on two tracks, a struggle to establish or undermine levels of commitment and a struggle to control the extent of the damage that ‘collision’ will cause. Bargaining moves, demonstrations of commitment, and the meaningfulness of a deadline are completely intertwined. There is a general tendency in negotiations conducted under the shadow of a deadline for hard bargaining to be concentrated in the very last stages. But, in a ²⁰ Waismel-Manor 2005, 298.

²¹ McGarry and O’Leary 1995, 247.

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hunger strike, the levels of uncertainty surrounding commitment and the meaningfulness of the deadline create unusually strong incentives for both sides to withhold information and agreement until the very last moments to see what unexpected information emerges. In those final stages, small intervals of time can be manipulated to exert great pressure and secure significant advances in a party’s position. Struggles to shape the outcome take place against a background of unpredictable time pressure created by the biological rhythms of the human body and the struggle for information about how close hunger strikers are to death. The distinctive temporal dimensions of these elements of a hunger strike are central to understanding its power.

Time Pressure in the 1980 Hunger Strike The Irish republican hunger strike of 1980 originated in a prison protest that had lasted for four years.²² When the British government withdrew special category status from newly convicted IRA prisoners in 1976 they refused to wear prison uniform, wearing only blankets instead. As the authorities exerted pressure aimed at breaking this protest, the ‘blanket protest’ escalated into a ‘no-wash protest’ that began in March 1978. Within a few months, unwashed and unshaven prisoners were in bare cells, the walls of which they had smeared with their own excrement.²³ Such conditions could not be endured indefinitely. From an early stage, the IRA leadership feared that escalation of the protest to unsustainable levels would culminate in collapse and defeat. They sought to make protest less punishing and more sustainable. When Brendan Hughes, a senior IRA figure and ally of Gerry Adams, became Officer Commanding (OC) of the IRA prisoners in the HBlocks in late 1977, he and his deputy Bobby Sands tried to de-escalate the protest, proposing that they wear the prison uniform and challenge the prison authorities in a different, less costly way.²⁴ Their fellow prisoners strongly rejected these suggestions, arguing that the protest could meet with success if only pressure were intensified outside the prison—it was an early disjuncture between the positions and expectations of the prisoners and the IRA leadership. Newly convicted prisoners were now finding it difficult to join such a gruelling protest. Moreover, some prisoners began to abandon the protest and to conform to the prison regime.²⁵ From January 1980, there were back-channel negotiations through senior Catholic clergy, but they made no progress. The passage of time was ²² Beresford 1987; Clarke 1987; Coogan 1980; Hennessey 2014; O’Hearn 2006; O’Hearn 2009. ²³ O’Hearn 2006, 190–2. ²⁴ O’Hearn 2006, 180–1. ²⁵ O’Hearn 2006, 232.

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asymmetrically damaging to the IRA, giving an incentive to the British government to stall and to defer even minimal change. When it was finally decided to embark on a hunger strike, one aim was to allow the prisoners to escape from the punishing and unsustainable no-wash protest. Brendan Hughes, who stood down as OC of the IRA in the prison to lead the first hunger strike, acknowledged as much: By this stage my main objective was to end this bloody protest. Men were beginning to crack up. It was getting far too much. So from the initial objective of giving the outside an issue to build on, my main objective now was to end the conditions that the men were in. And I believed we had done enough for the political issue on the outside. The objective now was to end the protest.²⁶

There, thrice in six sentences, he explicitly states that the purpose of the hunger strike was ‘to end’ the no-wash protest. Regardless of its outcome, then, the commencement of a hunger strike had achieved one objective—ending the nowash protest. For this reason, the announcement of the hunger strike brought the prisoners a sense of relief.²⁷ In setting a deadline, with the commencement of the hunger strike, for an agreement with the British government on long-term prison policy, the hunger strike allowed the IRA to force negotiations to a conclusion before its own weakening position forced it into capitulation. It was however a strategy that carried the highest risks and one on which they embarked with great reluctance. If the hunger strike was seen to fail, a crushing defeat in the prisons could help the British to achieve victory outside the prisons over a demoralized IRA.

‘A Few Lousy Hours’: Negotiating the 1980 Hunger Strike In the final forty-eight hours of the 1980 hunger strike, power was concentrated into decreasingly small intervals of time as the deadline approached and information on the strength of each side’s commitment was forced out under pressure of time. Around forty days into the hunger strike, the condition of hunger striker Seán McKenna began to deteriorate much more rapidly than the other hunger strikers. The republican leadership began to have serious concerns that the hunger strike might collapse and that the British were aware of this possibility.²⁸ This awareness of their own weakness provides the backdrop to the first direct exchange of positions between the republican leadership and the British government. At around 2.00 a.m. on Thursday 18 December, when Seán McKenna was ²⁶ O’Hearn 2006, 272. ²⁷ O’Hearn 2006, 273. ²⁸ Danny Morrison interview, 29 January 2016.

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believed to be within a day or two of dying, Brendan Duddy phoned MI6 officer Michael Oatley in London. The two men had been at the centre of the IRA ceasefire negotiations in 1975 and remained in contact on an informal basis thereafter. Duddy suggested a formula that he believed would allow the republican leadership to call off the hunger strike. Oatley understood from the conversation that the republicans desperately wanted to bring an end to the strike and that very minor moves would be sufficient to achieve this. Crucially, the proposed text from the British government would be delivered to the republican leadership, according them a degree of recognition that had hitherto been withheld. In an hour-long conversation, they agreed a form of words. Early on the morning of 18 December, Oatley went to MI6 Headquarters in Century House in London, where he had a secretary put the formula into a working paper. At 9.00 a.m. he presented himself at the Northern Ireland Office seeking an interview with the Permanent Undersecretary, Sir Kenneth Stowe. According to a senior official familiar with the events, Stowe was quickly convinced that the government would be able to live with the document and he immediately recommended to the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, that it should be put as an offer to the hunger strikers and Atkins agreed. Some alterations were now made to the text and Oatley phoned Duddy from London to check if it would still be acceptable. Stowe then rang Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, calling her out of a meeting, to get her consent. By 10.30 a.m., Oatley was a passenger in Stowe’s official car as it drove at high speed up the hard shoulder of the M4 to Heathrow to catch a morning flight to Belfast.²⁹ The republican leadership and the prisoners were to receive two documents— an advance copy of a short statement by Atkins and a thirty-four-page paper entitled ‘Regimes in Northern Ireland Prisons’, a slightly altered version of a document which the British government had lodged in the House of Commons library in early December.³⁰ The documents were to be handed by Oatley in Belfast to Fr Brendan Meagher, a priest who worked in the prison and was trusted by the republican leadership. That morning Father Meagher went into the prison and told the hunger strikers that a document was on its way. Leo Green, one of the seven hunger strikers, recalls: Father Meagher came into the prison on the morning of the crucial day . . . When Father Meagher called in to my cell, he was very reassuring about the prospects of a settlement and said he would be getting a document setting out what was on offer and would be back later with it.³¹

²⁹ Moore 2014, 599–600; Anonymous 2015; Taylor 2001, 233–6; Taylor 2011, 26–8. ³⁰ Danny Morrison interview, 9 July 2016; O’Hearn 2006, 294. ³¹ Leo Green email, 17 November 2016.

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The IRA and the British government made these moves under crushing time pressure. As Walton and MacKersie point out, huge power can be exerted through the timing and sequencing of moves in the final stages of a negotiation.³² Given the limited time remaining, the British documents that emerged from these contacts constituted a ‘last offer first’ strategy. There was virtually no time now for the republicans to bargain over the detail or to treat this as the first step in a round of negotiations: it was take it or leave it. If the deadline had produced movement from the republicans—communicating to Duddy their willingness to settle—the British had moved too. They might well have responded to the proposal devised by Duddy and Oatley by saying ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists.’ The very fact that they had responded, and with some speed, indicated that the hunger strike had created at least some leverage, as key republican negotiator Danny Morrison recognized: ‘They’re taking a big risk here, dealing with us, because that alone is a huge story—“you shouldn’t talk to these people” and here you are, flying somebody over.’³³ Once again, the setting of a deadline had forced out information and produced movement, but only in the final hours. At this stage, however, there was a delay of several hours in the further transmission of the documents, and it made a huge difference to the outcome. A senior security official in Northern Ireland insisted now that the document should only be handed over in a public place under observation by Special Branch officers.³⁴ The handover was thus delayed until the evening and took place in Aldergrove airport, after the last flight had left and there were few people around. This delay of several hours provided the time now for several further bargaining moves. At 1 p.m. that day, by which time Oatley was in Belfast, the Prison Governor Stanley Hilditch called Bobby Sands, who had replaced Brendan Hughes as OC of the IRA prisoners, to a meeting with the Chief Medical Officer Dr David Ross and several of the prison medical officers. Ross told Sands that McKenna would pass the point of no return that day. The Governor told him, ‘If you are playing at brinksmanship you had better pull out now, as it will be too late.’ Some of the medical officers added their voices. Sands denied the prisoners were playing at brinkmanship. ‘Men will die’, he insisted.³⁵ Crucially, Sands was not now permitted to meet or speak with the hunger strikers in the hospital block. The leader of the hunger strikers was Brendan Hughes, who had been the OC of the IRA prisoners for the four years prior to the hunger strike and was accustomed to being in charge of the much younger Sands. In the late afternoon, Dr Ross told Hughes in the hospital block that McKenna had only a few hours to live and that he was transferring him to an outside hospital.³⁶

³² Walton and MacKersie 1991, 90. ³³ Danny Morrison interview, 9 July 2016. ³⁴ According to a senior official knowledgeable about the events. ³⁵ O’Hearn 2006, 299. ³⁶ O’Hearn 2006, 298.

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What happened next is not totally clear, but it is clear that Hughes acted without having an opportunity to consult Bobby Sands. By refusing Sands entry, the prison authorities had disrupted the chain of command and isolated Hughes from his OC. A British report on the strike completed several weeks later reported that: When the decision was made to remove McKenna to the Musgrave Park Hospital, the doctors made it very clear to Hughes and the others that he was about to die and that the other hunger strikers would follow soon. This was undoubtedly the critical point for the strikers and it is evident . . . that Hughes’ determination had given way at this point under the double stress of responsibility for McKenna’s death and the imminence of his own death.³⁷

By Hughes’ own account, given to journalist Ed Moloney, when he saw the orderlies moving McKenna out of the prison hospital on a trolley, he shouted to Dr Ross to feed him.³⁸ There is some doubt about the details of this account: it may be that Hughes did not call off the hunger strike until after McKenna was moved. In any case, Hughes now called a meeting of the hunger strikers to determine their next move. Critically, as Leo Green, who was one of those hunger strikers, later recalled, they understood that both Meagher’s arrival, with documents from the British government that could end the hunger strike, and McKenna’s death were now imminent: Five of us then met in the canteen in the prison hospital for a brief discussion. We were given to believe that Sean was now in a coma and had only hours to live. We had a discussion on what to do. The critical thing for us at this point was Sean’s condition and whether or not he might die while we waited until Fr Meagher returned . . . While none of us had any precise idea of how long he might have lasted, we didn’t doubt that he was near the point of death.³⁹

Crucial to their decision-making was their lack of access to accurate medical knowledge and their consequent reliance on the prison authorities for an assessment of the time that McKenna had left. The uncertainty surrounding biological processes, combined with the information asymmetry between prison staff and the hunger strikers, was decisive in their decision to end the strike. Communication was also important. The weakness of communication channels between IRA members within the prison—especially Sands and the hunger strikers in the hospital wing—and those linking the IRA in the prison with the organization outside allowed gaps in positions to open up between different levels of the command structure. The knowledge that a document was on the way, ³⁷ ‘The Republican Hunger Strikes: 27 October–19 Dec 1980’, PRONI NIO/12/196A. ³⁸ Moloney 2010, 239. ³⁹ Leo Green email, 17 November 2016.

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combined with a delay of several hours in transmitting it, created a sense of hope that fatally undermined commitment. That evening, Oatley finally met with Meagher at Aldergrove airport. He showed him a document stamped ‘draft’ and explained that the final version would be with them shortly, flown over from London. Shortly afterwards he left and returned with the new version.⁴⁰ Meagher brought this document, and the advance statement by Atkins, to the republican leadership in Belfast. While they were reading them, they got news from the prison that the hunger strike had collapsed.⁴¹ It was 11 p.m. before Meagher got to the hospital block with the two documents.⁴² The statement by Atkins promised little that was new but did state that ‘we will, subject to the overriding requirements of security, keep prison conditions—and that includes clothing, work, association, education, training and remission— under continuing review.’ This explicit reference to four of the prisoners’ five demands had been added to the draft statement after Michael Oatley’s conversation with Brendan Duddy.⁴³ It promised nothing concrete but suggested the possibility of future movement on the key demands once the British were no longer under pressure from a hunger strike. If the IRA had sustained the hunger strike until the documents had arrived, they would have been in a stronger position to push for movement in these areas after calling off the hunger strike. Alternatively, the IRA might have continued the hunger strike and used the document as a baseline for further bargaining. As it was, the British government and the press regarded the collapse as a major defeat for the IRA. A British analysis a few weeks later concluded that: Probably the single most important factor was that the seven hunger strikers just did not have the will to die . . . By watching McKenna the other six were given a preview of the fate which awaited them. Their death was clearly going to be painful and degrading and the leader Hughes was burdened with the responsibility of standing by and watching one of his subordinates die, probably in vain, while he still lived . . . ⁴⁴

Margaret Thatcher later recalled, ‘I remember thinking that we had ended for all time the method of the hunger strike.’⁴⁵ The republican leadership now issued a statement saying the prisoners had called off the strike because they had received the document and that it contained significant concessions. It was aimed at saving face but also confirmed their wish to de-escalate the dispute. ⁴⁰ Beresford 1987, 9–11; O’Hearn 2006, 300. ⁴¹ Beresford 1987, 11–12; O’Hearn 2006, 301. ⁴² ‘The Republican Hunger Strikes: 27 October–19 December 1980’, PRONI NIO/12/196A. ⁴³ ‘What will happen when the protests end’, 18 December 1980, and draft statement 17 December 1980, PREM 19/503, UK National Archives. ⁴⁴ ‘The Republican Hunger Strikes: 27 October–19 December 1980’, PRONI NIO/12/196A. ⁴⁵ Moore 2014, 600.

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On 26 December 1980, a small group of senior republican leaders visited Brendan Duddy in his Derry home to discuss the next steps in engagement with the British government. The group included Danny Morrison, who had never met him before and had been unaware of his identity until then.⁴⁶ Over the following weeks the republicans and the British government maintained back-channel contact through Duddy’s link to a British representative he referred to as ‘Tom’. On 3 January 1981, Duddy flew to London to meet ‘Tom’ in the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair. According to Duddy, ‘Tom’ was Donald Middleton, who had been in charge of Laneside and the talks with the IRA in late 1975.⁴⁷ According to an unpublished memoir that Duddy wrote some years later, Middleton told him in the Park Lane Hotel that the December 1980 document provided the basis for a settlement and that no more would be available from the British government.⁴⁸ Duddy also recorded in his memoir that Middleton gave repeated reassurances during this period that progress would be made and that he insisted too that patience was required on the part of the Provisionals. But this was quite at odds with the approach being taken by the British government, which viewed the collapse of the hunger strike as having exposed the weakness of the IRA and was determined now to give no ground. * Deferral concentrates power in the hands of the stronger party. Commitment, information, communication, and the control of time are critical in determining the outcome of a hunger strike. Fractured lines of communication can contribute to a sense of panic. Controlling the timing and sequence of communication for just a few hours on 18 December 1980 made the difference between compromise and defeat. Asymmetries in medical information gave an advantage to the British government. It also shows how the exchange of bargaining positions was completely integrated into the struggle for advantage. Conveying a position could lead to compromise, but it could equally well push hunger strikers into capitulation by raising hopes and undermining commitment.

‘Utmost Haste’: Negotiating the 1981 Hunger Strike Peter Taylor has suggested that ‘a mixture of intransigence and inflexibility on the part of the prison authorities’ prevented a solution of the prison dispute in January

⁴⁶ Danny Morrison interview. ⁴⁷ As mentioned in note 26 of chapter seven, on this specific point I am relying solely on Brendan Duddy’s account. Official sources provide no indication of the identity of Duddy’s British interlocuter during the 1981 hunger strike, but Duddy’s draft memoir repeatedly refers to Middleton as his contact in 1981. In Duddy’s numerous interviews with me, he never wavered on this point. ⁴⁸ ‘Hunger Strikes—Brendan Duddy’s story’. Brendan Duddy Papers, POL 35/200–201.

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1981 and that the situation might have been resolved—and a second hunger strike averted—‘had the Government encouraged them to do so’.⁴⁹ It was a view shared by others at the time. In fact, the prison authorities were now subjected to exceptionally tight and direct political control by the British government and the prison dispute was closely managed on a day-to-day basis by John Blelloch, one of two Deputy Secretaries at the Northern Ireland Office.⁵⁰ In that role, Blelloch was responsible for security policy, the prisons department, and the criminal justice department; all of the sensitive policy areas that related to the conflict. He is said to have been an MI5 officer⁵¹ and, as such, linked to a policy perspective that was traditionally hostile to efforts to negotiate and compromise with republicans. Thus, when Prison Governor Stanley Hilditch met Bobby Sands on 21 January for discussions on a step-by-step compromise that might end the protest, he spoke to a tightly drafted script prepared by Blelloch and approved by the NIO which set out exactly what he should say and how to respond to any remarks Sands might make.⁵² Sands proposed that prisoners would end their nowash protest and move into clean cells as part of a step-by-step approach to reaching a settlement. The British government decided that these prisoners should not be given their own clothing (‘leisure clothing’) even if they came off the protest at a time when they would be entitled to wear it, until they had shown they were willing to conform fully to prison regulations. Before getting their own clothes they would have to put on the prison uniform and carry out allocated prison work ‘other than that which we know they would be likely to settle for’.⁵³ The prisoners were being asked for full and immediate compliance with the prison regime. Sands regarded it as a demand for capitulation rather than a step-by-step approach. Blelloch and his colleagues understood that their stance would probably trigger a renewed confrontation and possibly a hunger strike. Sands ordered the prisoners to smash up their cells and return to protest and pressed the IRA leadership now for permission to launch a second hunger strike.⁵⁴ In March 1981, despite opposition from the IRA leadership outside the prison who feared a major defeat, republican prisoners launched a second hunger strike in the H-Blocks. Negotiation in the 1981 hunger strike would be similarly concentrated into the final days before the expected death of a hunger striker. In 1981, however, the IRA established the credibility of the deadline at an early stage. Bobby Sands, who led the hunger strike, convincingly communicated strong commitment, repeatedly insisting that he would die. Later, John Blelloch, the ⁴⁹ Taylor 1997, 235–6. ⁵⁰ Hennessey 2014, 127–40. ⁵¹ Hennessey 2014, 100. ⁵² Speaking note used by Governor in talking to Sands, 21 January 1981, CJ4/3639, UK National Archives; Hennessey 2014, 127–40. ⁵³ HMP Maze Prison Protest: The next moves, 20 January 1981, CJ4/3639, UK National Archives; Hennessey 2014, 133. ⁵⁴ Taylor 1997, 236–7.

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key British strategist, recalled his expectation that Sands would go through with the hunger strike: we all, I think, realised that the second hunger strike was more likely to lead to someone dying, particularly as we read, as I read, Sands’ personality . . . So, when the second strike was announced, I think most of us felt that Sands personally, and maybe some others, would go through with it.⁵⁵

The British responded by demonstrating a firm commitment to let the deadlines go past and wait out the strike until it collapsed. Towards the end of March 1981, Duddy met Middleton in London again. According to Duddy’s recollection the diplomat told him that there was no room for movement and that no concessions would be forthcoming.⁵⁶ Demonstrating strong commitment increases bargaining power, but it also constrains. The British had left themselves with little room for manoeuvre and, on 9 April, circumstances changed dramatically when Sands was elected as Westminster MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The overwhelming majority of Catholics in the constituency had voted for him. Sands’ election added ‘value’ to him as a hunger striker, confronting Margaret Thatcher with the prospect of letting an MP die. And it grabbed the attention of the world’s media. It raised the spectre that Sinn Féin, the party associated with the IRA, might become the main electoral representative of Northern Catholics, completely undermining the British position. The potential for political damage quickly mounted to unanticipated levels. For the British government, ‘victory’ over the hunger strikers might now constitute a major defeat and setback. But the government refused to compromise: Sands died on 5 May 1981. An estimated 100,000 people attended his funeral, making it the largest nationalist public gathering in Northern Ireland since the outbreak of the Troubles. It triggered intense, large-scale street rioting of a kind not seen in years. The hunger strike continued, with Francis Hughes dying on 12 May, and Raymond McCreesh and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) Volunteer Patsy O’Hara on 21 May. Still, the British maintained an uncompromising public position aimed at demonstrating that their commitment would not falter. They did so privately too. Throughout these months, Duddy remained in contact with ‘Tom’. Duddy wrote in his memoir that ‘The month of June 1981 was terrible. Tom was always polite, but his job was not to give a hint of softening.’

⁵⁵ ‘Exclusive—MI5 on Hunger Strike’, unpublished interview by Pádraig O’Malley with John Blelloch in September 1986 on the website of the Bobby Sands Trust. https://www.bobbysandstrust. com/exclusive-mi5-on-hunger-strike/ ⁵⁶ Brendan Duddy interview, 26 November 2009.

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By early June 1981, not only had four hunger strikers died, but so too had fifty others, including ten RUC members, eight British soldiers, seven UDR, six republican paramilitaries, and nineteen civilians.⁵⁷ Now, senior police and military commanders began to press strongly for a more conciliatory approach.⁵⁸ The balance of opinion also started to shift at the highest levels of the British government, and several key figures, including Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins and his Permanent Undersecretary Ken Stowe, began to push for a change of course.⁵⁹ Several new mediators put themselves forward in an effort to broker an end to the hunger strike, most notably the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP) but, crucially, they could not speak with authority on behalf of the IRA. If the British government made concessions to the ICJP but the IRA did not reciprocate by calling off the hunger strike, unionists would condemn Britain for betraying the prison staff and for encouraging the hunger strike by showing weakness. The British would still have to deal with an ongoing hunger strike. The British government was in a trap from which only one organization could release them—the IRA. Hence, once it decided, in June 1981, to seek a negotiated compromise that would end the strike, the British government engaged in sustained contact through Brendan Duddy with the IRA leadership for the first time since 1976. The impending death of the fifth hunger striker, Joe McDonnell, provided a temporal focus for the contending forces. The meaningfulness of the deadline had greatly intensified, but its credibility could not be taken for granted. The hunger strike could still collapse at any moment. Pressure was mounting on the IRA as well: to many republicans, the hunger strike was hopeless and doomed to fail. The IRA made the first move. On Saturday 4 July, republicans issued a statement from the prisoners stating they were content for any changes to the prison regime to be extended to all prisoners. In doing so, the prisoners were publicly stepping back from their call for ‘political status’. They also provided a detailed elaboration of their demands on work and association that presented them as relatively limited. It was a significant public dilution of their bargaining position. At 10.00 p.m. on 4 July, the day on which the prisoners issued their statement, Brendan Duddy phoned ‘Tom’.⁶⁰ Three days of secret and intensive negotiation, through the Duddy–Middleton channel, now began between the British

⁵⁷ Author’s calculation from the Sutton Index of Deaths, Conflict Archive on the Internet, https:// cain.ulster.ac.uk/sutton/index.html ⁵⁸ Hennessey 2014, 247–9, 275–6. ⁵⁹ Hennessey 2014, 262–3. ⁶⁰ Beresford 1987, 292–301; ‘Soon’, 6 July 1981, PREM 19/506, UK National Archives; ‘Red Book’, POL 35/166 Brendan Duddy Papers. We know the details of these contacts from three different sources. Duddy recorded both republican and British positions in his handwritten diary, along with brief personal comments while ‘Tom’ wrote detailed reports on the first eight phone calls (over a period of fifty-two hours). We also have detailed records of British government drafts of positions to be conveyed through this channel. The republican leadership’s record of the contacts, including the ‘comms’ smuggled in and out of the prison, was published in Beresford’s ‘Ten Men Dead’ in 1987.

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government and the republican leadership. The records of these contacts indicate a biting struggle in which time pressure was deployed by both sides to extract information about the other party’s resistance point, positions were forced out as the deadline came closer, and every hour was used to gain advantage. In this first call, Duddy sought to use the prisoners’ statement to stimulate the British government to formulate a bargaining position. He suggested that the republicans might try to contact the British through him and said the British should have a response ready. The next call, at 2.30 a.m., lasted for two and a half hours during which Duddy appears to have attempted to gain as much information as possible about the British position. The British government had given hints to mediators over the previous few days that they were prepared to concede on the issue of clothing, allowing all prisoners to wear their own clothes, but the position had not been formally communicated. ‘Tom’ indicated to Duddy that prisoners could be given their own clothes, informally communicating elements of the British government’s likely bargaining position before it had been formalized. Duddy then sought to extract more detail. ‘The majority of the remainder of the conversation’, ‘Tom’ reported, ‘was taken up with [Duddy’s] views on how the mechanism for issuing of clothing should occur. He produced two or three scenarios over a period of an hour.’ Finally, ‘after a long and generally unrewarding discussion over the minute details of the issue of clothing’, the British agent suggested to Duddy a ‘probable line’ that the British government would take. By the time the call ended at 5 a.m., Duddy had thus succeeded in extracting extra snippets of information through this discussion of hypothetical scenarios. It allowed him to provide a relatively detailed outline of the likely British position to the republican leadership. Briefed on this emerging position, Danny Morrison then went into the prison to convey this to the prisoners. When Duddy called ‘Tom’ again at 2.00 p.m. that day he sought to use time pressure to extract more information. ‘Tom’ responded by seeking to establish the republican position: [Duddy] said that time was of the essence and asked what the current HMG position was. We explained that it was important, before drafting any document for consideration by ministers, that we should possess the Provisionals’ view.⁶¹

In a subsequent call at 3.00 p.m. (call 5), Duddy sought more detail on how the clothing issue would be dealt with after the ending of the strike. He was, it seems, seeking to extract information that he could present to the republicans as a further elaboration of the British position. However, the British contact told him that ‘There was little point in considering this while [the Provisionals’] view on the nature of a settlement was unclear.’

⁶¹ ‘Soon’, 6 July 1981, PREM 19/506, UK National Archives.

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Duddy and Middleton were now engaged in a struggle to extract information in which time was crucial. In a subsequent phone call just before midnight the same day (call 7) ‘Tom’ ‘said that time was pressing and it was now imperative that we have a statement of the Provisionals’ position’. After seven calls, neither side had yet conveyed its formal position. Finally, at 1.00 a.m. on 6 July (call 8) Duddy conveyed the republican position: the 4 July statement by the prisoners was ‘the only basis for a successful draft proposal’ by the British. The republicans had now endorsed the prisoners’ statement but refused to give any further ground in advance of a statement of the British position. ‘Having delivered this [message]’, the British agent reported, ‘Soon [i.e. Duddy] said that the Provisionals were very worried about the timescale now involved. He said that the situation would be irreparably damaged if a hunger striker died and he urged HMG to act with the utmost haste.’ Duddy had further impressed on ‘Tom’ that the republican leadership would need to see the draft of any British statement before it was issued. It would be almost twenty-four hours later before the British responded with their position. At 7.30 p.m. on 6 July, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met with Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Humphrey Atkins and a number of others, including Philip Woodfield, Permanent Undersecretary in the Home Office, and one person whose name has been redacted—presumably ‘Tom’—to review the situation. Atkins was reluctant to advocate compromise at this meeting, lest he seem soft, perhaps, but he nonetheless emphasized the importance of the deadline, stressing that ‘unless the government took some action before the death of McDonnell, which was expected on Wednesday, there could be no prospect of an early end to the protest.’ The meeting concluded that the government could concede on the issue of clothing, but only if it was likely to bring an end to the hunger strike: ‘The statement would therefore have to be shown to the PIRA before it was made.’⁶² Atkins was asked to draft a message to the IRA and later that night he brought the draft to the Prime Minister.⁶³ Thatcher now altered the draft to make it less conciliatory. In this message the British formally conceded on the issue of clothing for the first time, but they also signalled they would not concede on the two other most important issues—association and work. ‘Tom’ conveyed the British message to Duddy at 11.30 p.m. on Monday 6 July. The British stated that if they received a ‘satisfactory response’ by 9.00 a.m. the following morning they would give the republicans an advance copy of the full statement. The republicans now used this time window to try and pull the British position forward. At 3.30 a.m. on Tuesday 7 July, they asked for British

⁶² Letter from the Private Secretary 10 Downing St to Stephen Boys-Smith, 7 July 1981, PREM 19/ 506, UK National Archives. ⁶³ ‘Hunger strike: Message to be sent through the channel’, 6 July 1981, PREM 19/506, UK National Archives.

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‘elaboration’ on remission, work, and association. Duddy recorded a strongly negative reaction from ‘Tom’: ‘Their response amounts to a rejection. We are appalled by this decision.’⁶⁴ There was no further response from the British on Tuesday, and just before 8.00 p.m. on Tuesday evening Duddy sent a message from the republicans restating their position and seeking an acknowledgement of their early morning message. Sometime later they sent another message again making their case and asking if the British wished to continue. Middleton, acting it seems on advice from Duddy, now sought to generate further movement in the British position. At fifteen minutes past midnight on Wednesday 8 July, Margaret Thatcher met with three others to discuss a further message to the IRA—Humphrey Atkins, one person whose name has been redacted, presumably ‘Tom’, and Philip Woodfield. Like Middleton, Woodfield had negotiated face to face with IRA leaders in the 1970s: it was he, with MI6 officer Frank Steele, who had met Dave O’Connell and Gerry Adams in the McCorkell’s house near Derry in June 1972, and he had taken part in the Cheyne Walk talks a few weeks later. Atkins suggested sending another statement, ‘enlarging’ on the previous message, giving a little more detail on the work issue but with no change in substance. The unnamed participant told them it was believed (presumably by Duddy) that such a statement would be sufficient to get the IRA leadership to call off the hunger strike. Margaret Thatcher duly authorized the message with the proviso that if it did not end the strike the British government would immediately issue an alternative statement.⁶⁵ Time pressure in these final hours had helped to pull the British position forward marginally, but it had also helped the republicans to identify the British resistance point. Duddy’s notes indicate he was waiting anxiously for this British response from just before midnight until 2.10 a.m. on Wednesday 8 July (Fig. 7.1). Around that time, hunger striker Joe McDonnell went into a coma, a development Duddy and the republicans remained unaware of. Previous hunger strikers had died around forty-eight hours after becoming comatose, which may have led the British government to believe that some time now remained. Republicans, however, had far less access to information, and they had to rely, in part, on inferences they could make from British actions. Given their lack of detailed knowledge of Joe McDonnell’s condition, they were now bargaining in a grey zone wherein, as far as they knew, death could come at any moment. At 4.00 a.m. the Provisionals asked that their main political leader Gerry Adams, who had not been allowed into the prison previously, be admitted to the H-Blocks ‘to ensure success’. They followed this request, at 5.00 a.m., with a proposal that the British provide an additional private document setting out in detail what moves would take place on ⁶⁴ ‘Red Book’, POL35/166, Brendan Duddy Papers. ⁶⁵ ‘The Maze Hunger Strike’, 8 July 1981, PREM 19/506, UK National Archives.

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Fig. 7.1 Entry from ‘The Red Book’, intermediary Brendan Duddy’s record of messages exchanged during the 1981 hunger strike. It gives a sense of the immense time pressure exerted. The numbers on the right, 11.58, 11.59, indicate that he was expecting a reply from the British government by midnight but that he didn’t get it until after 2.10 a.m. on 8 July Source: Brendan Duddy Papers, NUI Galway.

work or association.⁶⁶ Given that they could not expect a representative to get into the prison to consult with the hunger strikers for a few hours, they may have been seeking to use the final hours before that to extract more concessions, or at least to establish the furthest limits of the British position. Then, at around 5.00 a.m., Joe McDonnell died. A short time later, ‘Tom’ phoned and, without mentioning the death, said that the British rejected the demand for a second document and that they were closing the channel. It was 7.00 a.m. before Duddy and the republican leadership heard the news on the radio. Such was the informational asymmetry between the two sides that in that final

⁶⁶ ‘Red Book’, POL35/166, Brendan Duddy Papers.

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conversation in which the British conveyed strong commitment by abruptly cutting contact, one side to the dispute did not know the hunger striker had died. Four months after the hunger strike had begun, and after four men had died, the British government had conceded on the issue of clothing just thirty hours before the death of the fifth hunger striker. The power of time pressure is evident too in the way in which the IRA leadership then sought to use those thirty hours to pull the British position as far forward as they possibly could. The temporalities of communication became an integral part of negotiations between the British and IRA to end the hunger strike, and they played a powerful role in determining the outcome. Both parties managed, directed, and resisted massive political pressure by seizing control of decreasingly small intervals of time, controlling the timing and pace of communication and the exchange of information. The temporalities of communication were tightly interlinked with those of biological processes. Because positions were so revealing of expectations, intent, and commitment, there were strong incentives to withhold positions until the very final stages when the opponent had minimal opportunity to take advantage. Withholding positions until the last moment presented the opponent with a situation in which there was no time for further bargaining and almost no time to scrutinize the detail, or to engage in intra-party bargaining over a possible compromise. There is also the paradoxical phenomenon that by communicating willingness to compromise at a crucial moment, a government can help to secure victory by collapsing a hunger strike, as had happened in December 1980. The role of a conciliatory message in collapsing the 1980 hunger strike has much broader implications for understanding the exertion of time pressure as a source of power for protestors. It suggests the timing of mediation and communication efforts can have powerful effects on the outcome of negotiations in the shadow of a deadline.

Body and Clock A hunger strike exerts power by setting a meaningful and credible deadline for the conclusion of bargaining. The capacity to generate powerful emotional responses among supporters is important, as are the themes of self-sacrifice and suffering, but time not emotion is the key to understanding a hunger strike. In this sense the hunger strike is a deeply modern phenomenon, a technique for the exercise of power by weak actors in a social and political context increasingly dominated by complex bureaucratic organizations that exercise much of their power through deferral and delay. The hunger strike sets biological time against the institutional time of modernity and creates an unpredictable and imprecise deadline for action that is not easily assimilated to bureaucratic decision-making processes organized according to the clock. The evenly spaced and endless flow of institutional time is forcibly punctuated by a deadline based on the very different rhythms of biological time.

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The hunger strike is a confrontational tactic, testing the commitment of opposing sides. But there is a paradox in the hunger strike that is linked directly to its temporal character. In setting an imminent deadline, protestors are obliged to focus on goals that might be achieved before it and modify their demands accordingly. It forces them to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the opposing party, to understand the constraints within which they are working, and to assess what conditions might allow the target to concede. It generates intense pressure on protestors to decide their bottom line, the least for which they will settle. The powerful orientation to negotiation that was evident in the Irish hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981 shows that a hunger strike can provide an important site for engagement, exchange of information, and hard thinking. However, the outcomes demonstrated the difficult of converting the pressure generated by a hunger strike into a negotiated settlement. Increased attention to the use of time pressure by protestors can help to advance an understanding of why and when armed actors adopt non-violent tactics and strategies and to address the broader question of why and when they move away entirely from armed campaigns. Such attention would deepen our understanding of the relationship between violent and non-violent political actions.⁶⁷ A large-n study by Stephan and Chenoweth concludes that non-violent campaigns are more effective than armed struggle. They argue that a campaign’s ‘commitment to non-violent methods enhances its domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance, which translates into increased pressure being brought to bear on the target’.⁶⁸ The hunger strike delivered all of these outcomes for the republican movement, confirming the power and efficacy of non-violent protest and electoral competition. It would take more than a decade for the movement to finally make the transition to exclusively non-violent political action, but mass mobilization and electoral success during the hunger strike demonstrated that in certain circumstances non-violent action could deliver much more substantial political gains than a military campaign. Crucial to making these gains was the deadline the hunger strikes had set for all parties, not just for the target but for supporters, sympathizers, and third parties. Ultimately, one of its most important effects was to set a deadline for the protestors themselves, generating valuable information about the extent and limits of their power, forcing them to move towards the opponent’s position in the search for a negotiated settlement under huge time pressure, and forcing them to reassess their bottom line and consider just how much they were willing to compromise. Paradoxically, this most extreme of tactics exerted strong structural pressures for moderation and compromise.

⁶⁷ Dudouet 2013, 401.

⁶⁸ Stephan and Chenoweth 2008, 8–9.

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Compromise Deferred The hunger strikes distilled the wider conflict, concentrating it in time and space. They became the site of a massive concentration of forces by both the British government and the IRA and both parties understood this as a location at which the outcome of the conflict that had begun in 1969 might finally be determined. The failure to negotiate a settlement illuminates some of the deep structural pressures working against a compromise that would end the wider conflict. But it also provides glimpses of some of the underlying forces that would bring both Britain and the IRA back towards engagement in the 1990s. The hunger strikes brought home to the emerging leadership of Adams, McGuinness, and others just how difficult it was to secure even minimal advances in negotiations with the British government. But the hunger strikes also established that Britain was prepared to engage with them on potential compromises if sufficient pressure was exerted. And so, the strikes of 1980 and 1981 reinforced republican leaders’ awareness that it was only through negotiation with the British government that they could deliver the kind of changes that they might be able to present to their supporters as either victory or honourable compromise. However, the hunger strikes also highlighted the danger that compromise could be seen as a betrayal that might split and destroy their movement. In certain circumstances, compromise could be more damaging to the movement than ‘defeat’. For the British, the hunger strikes contributed to an awareness that if the British government was to make major concessions to nationalist opinion that were aimed at ending the IRA campaign it made sense to offer them directly to the IRA—the people who could actually deliver that outcome—rather than to their political opponents in the nationalist community. In the medium term, however, the outcome of the hunger strikes weakened the forces for compromise on both sides. The strikes re-energized the IRA, drawing former volunteers back into the movement, generating mass mobilization and increased commitment. They weakened those on the British side who had been quietly keeping alive the idea of allowing the IRA a ‘way out’ of the conflict. Those on the British side who had argued that the dispute might be settled through backchannel negotiation had been proven wrong. Intermediary Brendan Duddy had hoped that a compromise settlement of the second hunger strike would open the way to re-engagement on a broader peace settlement: ‘What I saw was the opportunity of renewing the dialogue between the British and the IRA . . . dialogue to stop the bigger picture, to stop the war.’⁶⁹ Instead the 1981 hunger strike would push the British and the republicans further apart than ever before, and push the eventual settlement far into the future.

⁶⁹ Brendan Duddy interviews, 16 October 2009; 26 November 2009.

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8 British Policy and IRA Strategy ‘A Difficult Hand To Play’

The most important people are your activist base. They are the people who will give you freedom or limit you in terms of what you can and can’t do. Jim Gibney, Sinn Féin strategist¹ We had learned what both the history [and] the ideology, [of] Sinn Féin, the republican movement, needed if they were to be responsive . . . If you talked about defeat you were just making it more difficult for yourself because you’re making it too difficult for them. Sir John Chilcot, Permanent Undersecretary, Northern Ireland Office (1990–97)² The Northern Ireland conflict finally ended in the late 1990s with a negotiated agreement that brought a permanent end to the IRA campaign. Much research on the ending of this and other conflicts emphasizes constraint and structure—the forces that pressure parties to compromise when they reach a ‘Mutually Hurting Stalemate’. Parties are seen as the objects of greater forces, propelled towards settlement by external factors and conditions. Much of the terrorism scholarship also emphasizes constraint but with a different emphasis, portraying insurgent groups as forced or enticed into peace agreements. It represents states as agents of settlement, pressing for peace, while the armed groups which they oppose are objects of action, forced, dragged or lured into peace. This elision of the agency of armed groups in relation to peace settlements is especially notable because much of the terrorism literature portrays the same groups as full of agency when it comes to initiating and sustaining armed campaigns. But all parties to peace settlements have agency; both governments and insurgents make strategic choices and have to engage in often bitter intra-party struggles with opponents of compromise in pursuit of the goal of peace. Analysing agency and structural constraint together offers a richer understanding

¹ Jim Gibney interview, 17 April 2013.

² John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0009

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of the relationship between the two and a more convincing account of the role of agency in the ending of the Northern Ireland conflict.

‘The Provos Need a Victory’ The IRA had difficult choices to make in the 1980s: a negotiated settlement was not the only available option. Whether or not the IRA succeeded in its macropolitical aims, a continued campaign brought it many benefits. The IRA’s opponents often pointed out that the IRA profited greatly from protection rackets and legal business fronts, which they would lose with any peace settlement; likewise, the status which involvement in the IRA conferred on its members, not least through local ‘policing’, would also likely be eroded. Furthermore, the IRA campaign had created ongoing pressure for political change in the direction of the nationalist minority, from the abolition of the Stormont Parliament in 1972 through to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, that might be weakened if there was a permanent ceasefire. Finally, continuing the campaign helped to sustain organizational coherence and popular legitimacy; it avoided difficult internal struggles and maintained the IRA as a strong, unified organization. On the other hand, if the IRA sought to end its campaign short of achieving victory, a negotiated settlement was not the only way to do this. Several previous IRA campaigns had been called off without a negotiated settlement or concessions of any kind, most recently in 1962. Ending previous campaigns unilaterally had secured the release of internees, freed up organizational resources for peaceful political action, and provided time and space for regrouping and strategic rethinking. It had also made it easier to build cooperation and alliances with other radical forces. In the 1960s it had opened up space for republican activists to build alliances with other left-wing groups through housing action committees and the civil rights campaign. It had the advantage over a negotiated compromise that it preserved ideological purity and did not compromise opposition to the state, thus maintaining internal solidarity and ideological continuity—important resources for possible future campaigns and political growth. The IRA might gain considerable political credit and open the way to new political alliances without having to compromise with the British government. Indeed, this was the course of action that a number of sympathetic but critical figures urged on the republican leadership in the late 1980s or early 1990s when they approached them privately to urge that the IRA campaign be ended unilaterally.³

³ Bernadette McAliskey interview, 28 November 2014; Michael Farrell, speaking at ‘The Human Rights Scholar: Activist or Activist-Scholar’, Kevin Boyle symposium at NUI Galway, 28 November 2014.

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Why then would the leadership risk splitting the movement by working in the 1980s and 1990s towards a negotiated settlement that would require some acknowledgment of the British state’s legitimacy and control in the North, fall far short of achieving IRA goals, and require compromises that some of their most dedicated and long-standing activists would regard as surrender and betrayal? Why did they not declare a unilateral ceasefire? The answer lay with the strength of the IRA. Despite the immense challenges it faced from state security forces, the organization had a huge stockpile of weaponry, a powerful community presence—including a ‘civil administration’ that exercised policing functions—widespread popular support, and a sufficiently steady flow of recruits and resources to sustain the campaign at a level that would exert ongoing pressure on the British government. No previous armed campaign had achieved anything remotely comparable with this level of stable and sustainable coercive power. Any leadership that abandoned that hard-won resource with nothing in return would face strong internal opposition to a ceasefire. This issue was compounded by the extent of the costs incurred during the campaign, with hundreds of members killed and thousands imprisoned. It was a difficulty that senior British figures such as Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1989 to 1992 were quite conscious of. He explained to me in 2010 his understanding of the challenges that the republicans faced in the early 1990s and his efforts to put himself in their position: John Hume made a very good remark, he said ‘[Adams and McGuinness] are anxious to find a way through but they’ve got a problem with which you and I are entirely familiar, Peter; as Constituency members of parliament. You call a meeting, the leadership of your party is doing something which is not necessarily going to be universally popular but which in terms of the leadership needs to happen. All Constitutional politicians have that dilemma periodically’ . . . He said, and this is John Hume hypothesizing, he said ‘Adams and McGuinness are on a platform and there are a hundred of their supporters in the room, just Constituency meeting like you and I are totally used to, and you’re explaining, you, you Adams and McGuinness or you and I, Peter, are explaining what the policy is and why we’re changing it. You know it’s not going to be wholly popular but this is what we’re going to do and why and there’s one question you don’t want to be asked and there’s a man in the back who asks it . . . And the man at the back says “that’s all very well” what they’re saying is we’ve been trying to do this with arms for twenty years and it’s not working and I think we can be pretty certain now it’s not going to work and therefore we need to try another avenue and the man at the back says, “that’s alright, I know what you’re saying but if that’s what we’re going to do why did Paddy die?” [i.e. an IRA member] And that question, as in a Constituency meeting of your own supporters in your own parliamentary Constituency, totally

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constitutional, that remark becomes an infection which then spreads through the room and the whole mood of the room changes as a result of that one remark.’ And he [Hume] said, ‘so they’ve got a difficult hand to play.’⁴

Given the costs the movement had incurred, IRA figures who proposed a unilateral halt with no gains of any kind would probably have been unable to gather a critical mass of members behind their position. From the point of view of organizational coherence and solidarity, continuing the campaign probably presented fewer difficulties than unilaterally ending it. And a unilateral disarmament and decommissioning of weapons was impossible given the human and financial costs of acquiring them and the danger that decommissioned weapons might later be unearthed and used in prosecutions for decades to come. There were other factors to consider that had not been as important in previous campaigns when IRA members had been interned and were released when the campaign ended. The IRA could not simply call an end to the campaign in the 1990s as they had on previous occasions because the courts had convicted hundreds of their members who faced many more years in prison. To walk away from prisoners and abandon the bargaining power that might secure their release raised questions of responsibility that the leaders of previous campaigns had not faced, or at least not to the same degree. The prospect was also there that state security forces dominated by unionist opinion and freed of the burden of fighting the IRA would pursue suspected IRA activists for decades into the future, potentially ensuring that the prisons would remain a source of grievance after the ending of the campaign. Popular nationalist resistance to policing in the absence of major reform would also ensure that street violence and disorder would persist. There would be fertile ground for others to take up the mantle of resistance to the security forces. Continued violent opposition to the British state from other sources would, in turn, remove an important source of pressure for compromise on unionists, creating a post-conflict context in which they would be in a strong position to insist on the exclusion of republicans from power and influence. Given the strength of the IRA, and the extent of these sources of potential aggravation in a post-ceasefire era, surrender was not in the gift of any republican leadership. A negotiated peace settlement did not offer hope of ‘victory’ to the IRA, but the republican leadership had realized at an early stage in the conflict that it could not achieve a simple military victory. After a brief period of euphoric mobilization in the early 1970s, the IRA leadership realized that the most it could achieve was a negotiated settlement and that the struggle would ultimately produce a settlement that fell well short of the aspirations of their supporters in important ways. This analysis still held good by the early 1990s.

⁴ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010.

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The Provisionals would end their campaign to enter negotiations but would not end it unilaterally. Interviewed in 2013, Jim Gibney, a long-time republican strategist, emphasized that he and other key figures apprehended the strategic continuity: All the ceasefires that the IRA have been involved in are linked . . . by motivation and principle . . . the first ceasefire in ’72 it’s really republicans trying to end the war, OK? Minimize the price that people are paying, try and find some way out of it peacefully. ’74 is exactly the same, the motivation is to end the conflict, end the conflict. What can we get out of it? Now when you then come to the ceasefire of ’94 the motivation is the same but there’s a different experienced political leadership who have a sense of the capacity of what the IRA are about and how to use that capacity to achieve political demands.⁵

The evidence of those earlier negotiations suggest Gibney’s remarks are more than just a post hoc justification for the decision to end the IRA campaign without achieving a united Ireland. But what kind of negotiated settlement would be acceptable to the Provisionals? While contemporary critics focused on the details of the movement’s demands and argued that they could not be met, Brendan Duddy, the intermediary between the parties, had always emphasized to his British interlocutors not the details of a settlement but its general character. For a variety of reasons, the Provisionals needed a settlement that delivered visible gains. Duddy repeatedly made this point during the 1975 contacts. When the British representative told him in early 1976 that the Secretary of State Merlyn Rees was about to announce the withdrawal of a substantial number of troops from the North, for example, he wrote in his diary that he requested that they: Delete a sentence in Rees’ speech, saying ‘reduction of troops to peace-time levels’. This would give the Rep.[ublican] Mov.[ement] no option but to declare a ‘fight’. I asked that the sentence read;—It is our intention to reduce our troops in N. I. or something similar . . . to state, in advance, the final position leaves no room for Provo’s victory, which is a prerequisite for ending the Rep. necessity to fight the British.⁶

Peace could be achieved by implementing changes that the British government was content to make, including changes that served its interests, such as the withdrawal of troops. But it had to be part of an agreed process in which the Provisionals secured visible gains. The British government had to be willing to ⁵ Jim Gibney interview, 17 April 2013. ⁶ Brendan Duddy 1976 diary, 10 January, POL 35/131, Duddy Papers; emphasis added.

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coordinate these changes with the Provisionals, allow them to influence these changes, and acknowledge that they were being made partly in response to the Provisionals. This was a crucial element in any settlement. Permanent Undersecretary John Chilcot who was one of the most important drivers of British policy in the early 1990s makes the same point, from a different perspective: I think, by 1990 . . . we had learned what both the history, the ideology, Sinn Féin, the republican movement needed if they were to be responsive . . . If you talked about defeat you were just making it more difficult for yourself because you’re making it too difficult for them.⁷

Only a negotiated compromise that secured gains that roughly reflected the bargaining power of the movement would fulfil the minimal expectations of members and allow the leadership to deliver overwhelming support within the movement for an end to the armed campaign. If the movement was to stop short of its goals, it had at least to secure an ‘honourable settlement’, a term used by the Provisionals both in the 1970s and the 1990s. The kind of gains that would allow the leadership to end the campaign while avoiding accusations that they had betrayed or had failed utterly as leaders included the release of prisoners, the removal of troops from the streets, and the reform of policing, along with a reorganization of the political system. The movement leadership pursued compromise while seeking to minimize the scale and seriousness of internal opposition and political splits in the movement. This involved simultaneously negotiating with supporters as well as with the British government as senior Sinn Féin strategist Jim Gibney recalled: Tom Hartley and I in the autumn of 1994 travelled the North and met republicans in their hundreds . . . to talk to them about what we were about to embark upon, what was happening, what the expectations were and they were very, very difficult meetings. We were accused of being traitors . . . republicans were saying to us . . . that the IRA said there would never be a ceasefire, ‘why is there one? Is this what people died for? Where’s the united Ireland?’ All of that stuff, we got it everywhere we went . . . these are people all their lives in the IRA, gaol, shot, lost comrades. I mean they weren’t going to take it easy and they didn’t. They weren’t going to; it was a case of shooting the messenger in those circumstances . . . So, you got it in the face everywhere you went, but you also got praise. People said ‘no, this is the right way, we fought them to a standstill, this is time for peace.

⁷ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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We wish you well.’ And then there was a debate around the release of prisoners. But it was a tough time.⁸

The point made repeatedly by the intermediary in 1975, that the Provisionals would accept a compromise peace settlement, but that they needed to secure visible gains, had direct implications for the role of the British government. As the sovereign power, only the British government had the power to deliver these gains and to manage the political opposition they might arouse from other quarters. Other forces, such as the Irish government and the White House, might help to pressure the British government to move in this direction, but ultimately, it alone could facilitate the republican leadership in their strategic goal of ending the armed campaign in a way that avoided their political destruction. Peace would require active cooperation and coordination between the two parties. It would require a kind of partnership.

British Choices The central dilemma facing the British government was how to reach a settlement that would bring an end to the IRA campaign without generating an even more costly conflict with unionists and loyalists. The failure to settle the conflict earlier reflects the difficulty of resolving this dilemma. Internal divisions in both the republican movement and the British state made it difficult to reach a compromise settlement, but the British state was a much more complex organization and those divisions were much deeper and more difficult to manage on the British side. Unionists predominated in the massive and heavily armed security apparatus, as they did in the local state apparatus as a whole: any initiative that provoked deep unionist opposition might be impossible to implement. In addition to that, the atrocities carried out by the IRA over the years, and particularly the mass killings of civilians in bomb attacks in Great Britain, ensured that there could be significant opposition by large sections of the British media, civil service, and political class to any moves perceived as compromise with the IRA. In Britain, however, a widespread public sense that the conflict was a costly nuisance balanced distaste for compromise with republicans. Unionists opposed not only the ultimate political goals of the IRA but also the shorter term conflict-related demands for police reform and release of prisoners. They rejected too the basic principle that republicans should be included in a peace settlement and opposed contact and engagement of any kind with ‘terrorists’, pressing publicly at least for a settlement founded on military defeat of the

⁸ Jim Gibney interview, 17 April 2013.

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IRA. An Ulster Unionist Party election pamphlet from 1977 is characteristic: ‘The Ulster Unionist party will continue to press for total victory over the terrorist forces. There can be no compromise.’⁹ Despite these obstacles, there were strong reasons why the British government might be open to major compromises to secure an end to the IRA campaign in the early 1990s. In June 1970, as the situation began to deteriorate, Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend had drawn up a briefing paper for Prime Minister Edward Heath on the options facing the British government, urging him to instruct the Minister for Home Affairs to ‘devise some fresh political initiative to enable us to break out of the vicious circle in which we are at present trapped.’ He suggested three ways the situation might develop. The one he clearly thought most likely was that it could remain much as it is—stabilized only by the presence of British troops and trembling on the edge of disaster but never quite tipping over. The resultant burden on ourselves, in terms both of men and of money, would be so intolerable if it were maintained indefinitely that we ought not to contemplate it if it can be avoided.¹⁰

Just as Burke Trend feared, the British became trapped in a ‘vicious circle’, albeit at a level of violence far higher than envisaged in that note. And by the 1990s they had been trapped in it for more than twenty years. With the passage of time, the notion that there was ‘no solution’ encouraged a certain fatalistic acceptance of the new status quo, but the point made by Burke Trend was as true in 1990 as it had been in 1970—this was an ‘intolerable’ situation and at executive level there was an acute awareness of the ongoing cost.¹¹ What then of the option of pushing on with a hard security approach for as long as was necessary to deliver victory over the IRA? Some members of RUC Special Branch were arguing in the 1980s and 1990s that they were close to victory, that it was just a matter of devoting enough personnel and resources to finish the task. In his posthumous memoir, Special Branch Officer Ian Phoenix¹² describes the intensive multi-person operations required to monitor individual suspects and expresses frustration that they were not being given sufficient resources to continue and expand them.¹³ There were two major problems with this proposed route to peace. Advocates of this approach had been promising victory for twenty years, as the new RUC Chief Constable Kenneth Newman had done in 1976 when

⁹ Searle 2014, 199. ¹⁰ Burke Trend to PM [Heath] ‘Northern Ireland’, 21 June 1970, DEFE25/274, UK National Archives. ¹¹ Douglas Hurd interview, 2 May 2013. ¹² He died in June 1994 in a helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre along with twenty-eight other senior intelligence, military, and RUC Special Branch personnel. ¹³ Holland and Phoenix 1996.

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he wrote of achieving ‘the defeat of the IRA’, but they had never delivered it. Some senior military commanders in contrast had come round to the view by the late 1980s that neither they nor the IRA could win decisively, and when Peter Brooke made initial overtures to republicans in 1989 and 1990, senior military figures gave him strong encouragement.¹⁴ The second issue was the huge cost of the kind of intensive security measures described by Phoenix. It agitated even sympathetic figures such as Margaret Thatcher, who told cabinet colleagues in 1984: ‘Ten thousand British soldiers could not be left in Northern Ireland forever, nor could the very considerable cost of subsidising the Province be sustained, without continuing the search for possible forward movement.’¹⁵ Enthusiasts for efforts to defeat the IRA frequently pointed to the decline in killings in Northern Ireland since the mid-1970s as evidence of the success of the intense security approach, but that success came at great cost. The violence was reduced, but the commitment required to achieve this in the 1990s was just as high as it had been at the peak of the Troubles in 1972. In the early 1990s, 30,000 armed soldiers and police officers were permanently employed in pinning down this small territory, almost exactly as many as at the height of the violence in the early 1970s.¹⁶ From the point of view of the British state, the conflict was draining as much time and resources as it had ever done. The IRA carried out several highprofile bomb attacks in London from 1990 onwards that inflicted huge financial costs,¹⁷ including one bomb in April 1992 that was estimated to have caused more financial damage than the entire IRA campaign up to that point.¹⁸ The annual death toll might have been reduced, but the financial cost of the IRA campaign remained as high as ever. Even if victory might be possible within a few years by following unionist recommendations for a more determined security approach and more resources, and if the British were willing to incur the associated financial and political costs, other factors made such an outcome politically unattractive. The state apparatus worked as hard as it could to contain the IRA and push it towards defeat, but a genuinely decisive defeat of the IRA outside the context of a broader inclusive political settlement could create massive political difficulties and store up longterm problems for the future. It was a problem that had been acknowledged openly in the early stages of the conflict. In his final days in office in early 1971, Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland James Chichester Clark told his fellow MPs in Stormont,

¹⁴ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010. ¹⁵ CAB 128/80, Most Confidential annex to cabinet minutes, 28 June 1984, cited in http://www.rte. ie/news/special-reports/2014/0103/495690-british-state-papers/ ¹⁶ McGarry and O’Leary 1995, 85. ¹⁷ O’Brien 1999, 162. ¹⁸ Tonge 2006, 117.

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that we do no service to the people of Northern Ireland if we snuff out the present campaign in ways which merely make a resumption at some other time and with increased popular support, inevitable. Our aim is not just to defeat the present vicious conspiracy but to create conditions in which such men and such activities can never prosper again.¹⁹

A military victory by unionist-dominated security forces fighting alongside the British army to impose the solution favoured by unionists and loyalists would create toxic conditions for the nurturing of future rebellion and long-term destabilization. As one British civil servant put it in a draft paper in late 1976, arguing for an inclusive settlement involving the IRA: ‘[In the event of] a military defeat of “the IRA” . . . the republican ideology would be strengthened rather than destroyed, and remain capable of being taken up by future dissatisfied generations.’²⁰ In a context in which the Catholic minority was steadily growing, and in which repression could help to make Sinn Féin the dominant nationalist party, ‘Victory’ would ensure the need for a massive and expensive security apparatus run by the unionist community to control working-class nationalist areas on an open-ended basis. Intermediary Brendan Duddy made the point from another angle, telling a British official that ‘even if you do arrive at a solution in Ireland, it is better to have peace with the republicans than 3,000 people in jail and armed police at every corner, the Provos may not win but they can never be totally defeated.’²¹ For many unionists, and many of those involved in the local security forces, an open-ended, low-level but expensive conflict paid for by the British treasury was a better option than a compromise settlement that would make concessions to the republicans and lead to large cuts in security force numbers. For unionists, the ‘Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement’ (their BATNA, to use Fisher and Ury’s term) had strong attractions. It was not at all as attractive for the British government. There was a substantial gap then between British government and unionists’ assessments of their respective BATNAs. One measure of the gap was the reported reaction of Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux to the IRA ceasefire of 1994: it was, he is said to have remarked, ‘the most destabilising event since partition’ and ‘the worst thing that has ever happened to us.²² The problem for unionists was that ultimately they relied on the British government to continue underwriting unionists’ Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. Britain was unwilling to do that if a viable compromise with the IRA was possible.

¹⁹ Cited in Kelly 1972, 16. ²⁰ ‘Towards a long-term solution in Northern Ireland’, draft paper sent to I.M. Burns, 15 September 1976, CJ4/1427, UK National Archives. ²¹ Brendan Duddy 1976 diary, 1 July, POL 35/131, Duddy Papers. ²² O’Leary 2019, 145.

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‘An End To All Acts of War’: Strategic Action by the Republican Leadership Republican moves towards ending the IRA campaign in the early 1990s are most frequently portrayed as the result of structural pressures and the actions of others. They are pressured to end their campaign and in the face of this pressure are both pushed and enticed towards peace, offered a face-saving way out of violence by the British and Irish governments. Few internal republican documents that would illuminate debates and strategic discussions at leadership level are available. One document that does provide an insight into the internal discussions at leadership level is a short typescript policy proposal, ‘A Working Paper’, written and submitted to the republican leadership around September 1990, by Brendan Duddy, and two colleagues with whom he had worked closely over many years, Denis Bradley and Noel Gallagher.²³ ‘A Working Paper’ presents problems of interpretation. It is a suggestion made by figures contributing from outside the movement’s structures. It does not purport to present the position of the leadership or set out the movement’s plans, but given the paucity of internal documentation about republican strategy it nonetheless provides access to some of the ideas circulating within the IRA leadership around 1990. The authors of the document had, by this stage, twenty years’ experience of the republican leadership and of the negotiating relationship between the IRA and the British government. They had a good sense of the realities of engagement between the two parties, of the political possibilities, and of the kind of ideas and approaches that would resonate with the leadership. Discernible in the document is the imprint of republican strategic thinking on people who were sensitive to every nuance of that position: the authors deliberately sought to align their proposals with their perception of the leadership’s current thinking. It is a particularly valuable document because two drafts exist, showing how the authors fine-tuned it and the areas that they identified as problematic. Most importantly, as an effort by people familiar with the leadership of the IRA to influence its medium-term strategic thinking, ‘A Working Paper’ reflects their understanding of that thinking. Interestingly, a number of the ideas it contains appear in Towards a Lasting Peace in Ireland, Sinn Féin’s 1992 position paper. Whether or not ‘A Working Paper’ directly influenced that paper, its close alignment with some of that document’s key themes confirms that the authors were in tune with thinking within the leadership and understood the kinds of arguments that would resonate with it. The central concern of ‘A Working Paper’ is to map a political route to a permanent peace settlement; it does so three years before the joint efforts of the

²³ ‘A working paper’, POL 35/223, Duddy Papers.

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two governments bore fruit in the Downing Street Declaration and before the peace process began in earnest. It provides a prescient analysis too of how the political dynamics would play out. The central thrust of the document is that the republican movement should seek to institutionalize its political power by working towards a peace initiative that would bring a complete end to the IRA campaign. The promise of peace would allow the movement to build the political alliances necessary to make this transition and to overcome the expected resistance and foot-dragging from the British government. It presents the ending of the IRA campaign as a central strategic aim, essential to advancing the position of the movement. It characterizes the achievement of political power through the ending of the armed campaign as a strategic goal that would be difficult to achieve. The proposal is directed to the Ard-Chomhairle, Sinn Féin’s ruling body, abbreviated throughout to AC. ‘A Working Paper’ begins by setting out its central concern: The proposals are designed to bring the Ard-C[h]omhairle into the decisionmaking process and to reverse the primary position of the Westminster government in Irish affairs.

The concern, then, is the institutionalization of the movement’s political power in the ‘decision-making process’, rather than the long-term goals of British withdrawal and Irish unity. Arguing that the promise of peace is essential for building the political alliances necessary to bring the AC into the ‘decision-making process’, ‘A Working Paper’ proposes the ending of the armed campaign. It specifically identifies the importance of securing support from the Irish Prime Minister, the Taoiseach, then Charles J. Haughey, as well as referring to the importance of the European and global context—these elements would feature prominently in Towards a Lasting Peace. The document however is much more explicit about the centrality of the ending of the IRA campaign to this process, arguing that the promise of ‘an end to all acts of war’ must be the basis for securing external support for the process: . . . the objective is a public position for the 1990s which world opinion can easily identify with and support, a position which is totally defendable [sic] . . . It will be vital to have a peace proposal which can be accepted by all the European heads of state. It is self-evident that this peace proposal must offer the hope of an end to all acts of war, by all parties involved in the Irish conflict. The peace proposals must have the support of the Irish head of state, An Taoiseach . . .

‘A Working Paper’, then, is the work of people with some familiarity with the thinking of the IRA leadership, who believed it was open to long-term strategic thinking, foresight, and calculation in pursuit of the goal of a compromise peace.

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It is a mirror in which one can glimpse reflections of the IRA’s strategic thinking. The strategic vision it presents speaks in interactional terms about how the movement might most effectively orient itself and manoeuvre in relation to other actors, conscious too of the importance of the interaction between those actors. It is not composed for the passive object of the efforts of others, but rather to illuminate, for the AC, how it might actively draw others into a process that is intended to culminate in the end of the IRA campaign. It also sets out some of the goals the movement might seek to achieve in return for the ending of the campaign: The key proposal is that all acts of war will stop on an agreed date to enable an all-Ireland conference to take place to include the representatives of the Ard C [h]omhairle. A public declaration by the British government to accept and support the decisions which may come out of this conference. The mechanisms surrounding the setting up of such a conference should be very flexible, and the Ard C[h]omhairle should not box itself in with any pre-conditions.

The proposal for an end to the campaign in return for the setting up of an allIreland peace conference and a British declaration that it will abide by its decisions connects to the long-standing core demand of the movement for a British declaration on self-determination. The strongest emphasis is on the long-standing core republican aim of inclusion in a peace settlement and a contribution to its shaping. Implicit in the proposal for a conference is the necessity of compromise with unionists, and the other major political forces in Ireland. The comment that the movement should not ‘box itself in’ in relation to the shape of a conference emphasizes strategic flexibility and the need to be ready to concede ground on these issues. And it sets a realistically low threshold for the end of the campaign in terms of the actions required of the British government. The crucial element is inclusion of the republicans in negotiations for a comprehensive settlement allied to a British declaration of some kind. The document displays an awareness of the danger that the British government might obstruct this process, and the need to prepare to deal with it. In short, it is a vision of the path ahead that in many respects was borne out by events, notably the intense struggle between the British and Irish governments that took place around the Downing Street Declaration in 1993 when the British resisted Irish Government pressure to respond more positively to the prospect of an IRA ceasefire: The likely outcome of this key proposal has been assessed as follows: we know that the British government will immediately reject this proposal and will work actively against its acceptance. The main British objective will be to convince

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Mr Haughey to reject this document . . . The British will attempt to create preconditions which will block and confuse the main simple key proposal. The method of presentation is most important. The ambition of the present Taoiseach will trap him. He will see himself as the first modern Taoiseach to put forward an agreed, reasonable all-Ireland peace plan. John Hume will be more cautious but would find it very difficult to reject the proposals.

Thus, three years before the Downing Street Declaration, at a time when the republican leadership had back-channel contacts with John Hume and Charles Haughey but was not yet in touch with the British government, the republican leadership was receiving a document with ideas on how it might secure the support of the Taoiseach and the leader of the SDLP to overcome the resistance of the British government to Sinn Féin’s involvement in the ‘decision-making process’. The authors of the document conceived republican leaders, with whom they had some familiarity, as actively strategizing to pressure the British government into a position to the political advantage of the republican movement but, crucially, in the context of working towards a complete end to violence. It is important not to go too far in the other direction and take ‘A Working Paper’ as evidence that the republicans were managing and steering the whole process. But it does call into question the idea that the peace process and the ending of the IRA campaign were the result of their being enticed or forced reluctantly into the process by the British and Irish governments. ‘A Working Paper’ conceives the Movement to be strategizing to achieve a settlement that will bring a permanent end to the IRA campaign and institutionalize the movement’s political power in the decision-making process and thinking about the interaction and political relationships that will be involved in that process. If the IRA’s Long War was a bargaining move, aimed not at achieving victory but at pressuring the British government to re-engage, the political moves made by the Provisionals in the late 1980s and early 1990s can be understood not as a major change of direction, but as attempts to find additional or alternative ways of exerting pressure towards the same goal. Republican initiatives to engage with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Fianna Fáil in the 1980s²⁴ can usefully be interpreted as attempts to alter the negotiating balance, as bargaining moves aimed at generating British engagement just as the Long War strategy aimed to do. To those who argued that all that was necessary to generate such engagement was for the IRA to end its campaign of violence, the republicans could point to the experience of 1975 and argue that the ending of the IRA campaign had generated neither British movement towards a negotiated compromise nor an end to violence. The experience of 1975 taught them instead that ending their

²⁴ O’Donnell 2007.

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campaign removed pressure for movement towards the republican position by the British government while unionist and loyalist pressure against compromise was not only maintained but intensified. And so, the development of Sinn Féin as an electoral force in the 1980s appears not primarily as an attempt to augment the armed struggle in pursuit of military victory, but as a major innovation that strengthened the bargaining position of the Provisionals in their pursuit of an inclusive settlement that would deliver political gains. Brendan O’Brien, in a useful history of the IRA, strikes the right note, when he argues that The thinking of the leadership [in the early 1980s] was that, whatever else, the movement had to remain strong enough to become part of the ultimate political solution when the time came . . . that meant getting into elections, maximising their political support north and south, to arrive finally, at the negotiating ‘table’ with the strongest possible mandate. But this in itself was a significant admission, indicating that the IRA on their own were not able to beat the British out of Ireland.²⁵

These innovations in the 1980s augmented the pressure on the British government to negotiate a settlement, involving republicans. The movement’s engagement in the peace process, then, did not result from a realization that they had recently entered a mutually hurting stalemate, nor was it a response to irresistible pressures. Rather, it was a strategic decision consistent with the strategic perspective that had underpinned the campaign from the earliest stages. The description of the movement’s strategy in these years by one of its most ideologically motivated and powerful leadership figures, Brian Keenan, is framed very much in these terms: It would be wrong to assume that the IRA’s cessation in August 1994 was inevitable. It wasn’t. It came out of a particular, chosen path going back several years . . . The IRA’s decision was undoubtedly difficult, but it was fairly logical. It was well-debated at Army leadership level. All the alternatives were looked at: military and political. We had all the information that was needed to carry out the required assessment . . . The Army leadership was well aware of the Army’s capabilities in terms of its arms, structures and capacity to sustain its war. All of that was judged against the broad political mood, as you would expect. The questions were simple—the answers were more difficult.²⁶

²⁵ O’Brien 1999, 119.

²⁶ An Phoblacht, 27 March 2008.

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Notwithstanding the emphatic tone of Keenan’s comments, it is clear that there was not unanimity within the republican leadership over the conditions under which it would enter negotiations. The precise circumstances under which the leadership re-engaged with the British government in the 1990s was shaped by intense internal struggles, and some within the movement were deeply disappointed with the settlement that was eventually reached.

‘The Wrong Project’ In winter 1989–90, Northern Ireland Secretary of State Peter Brooke, working with a core group of senior civil servants in the Northern Ireland Office, made a calculated move to re-engage with the Provisionals. It marked a significant shift in British government policy, a decision to explore, for the first time since the mid1970s, the possibility of a political settlement that included the Provisionals. John Chilcot recalled in a 2020 interview that discussion of the possibility of engagement and compromise with republicans ‘was in the air all the time’ during his time as Head of the Home Office Police Department in the 1980s, but that ‘it was quite difficult to talk about it officially and openly while Margaret Thatcher remained Prime Minister.’²⁷ Nonetheless, moves to re-engage with the Provisionals began under the stewardship of Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister most associated with hardline rejection of the IRA. During her early period in office, Thatcher had expressed confidence that victory over the Provisionals was within reach. The conflict had then persisted for a further decade and, according to one Conservative MP, Thatcher admitted to him privately in the late 1980s that ‘she [has] no solution to the Irish problem, no glimmer of light— the first time he had heard her admit defeat on any issue.’²⁸ That Peter Brooke was admired and respected by Margaret Thatcher for his work as a ‘dry’ economic Minister in the Treasury was an important factor. It gave him greater latitude to innovate than others might have enjoyed. And Brooke was, ‘in his very tactful and discreet way, willing and indeed desiring to exercise that degree of freedom’, John Chilcot recalls.²⁹ Statements made by the republican leadership in the late 1980s signalling its interest in a compromise settlement also strengthened the arguments of those in the state apparatus who favoured re-engagement. The failure of the existing policy approach to achieve its goal made it easier to argue that it was worthwhile exploring the possibility of an inclusive settlement, on the basis that the existing policy of excluding the republicans was not delivering.

²⁷ John Chilcot interview, 25 May 2020. ²⁸ Lees-Milne 2008, 151, cited in Bew et al. 2009, 104–5. ²⁹ John Chilcot interview, 25 May 2020.

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Quentin Thomas, a senior civil servant involved in the formulation of policy at the time, recalled this development in a 2010 interview, pointing out that there was an important shift from that position that involved marginalizing Sinn Féin, demonizing them even, to one which recognized that, well firstly that that project was unlikely to succeed and secondly, that it was the wrong project anyway . . . the project of marginalizing Sinn Féin was unnecessary and probably doomed to fail.³⁰

Key figures, then, were reaching the conclusion that excluding the Provisionals would not work, but it was also ‘unnecessary’ because they were amenable to a negotiated compromise, and their political ideology—characterized by Thomas as involving ‘a certain millenarianism, a certain quasi-socialism, a certain fascism if you like, anti-clericalism’³¹—was not an insurmountable obstacle to their inclusion in a compromise settlement. Two additional factors created the circumstances in which this realist argument became ‘consensual knowledge’.³² The first was the rise of Sinn Féin, from the early 1980s, as a formidable electoral force. This presented a genuinely novel policy dilemma: how to deal with this newly strengthened political party. Engagement with the Provisionals could be represented not as a belated return to the policies of the early 1970s but as a sensible, strategic response to a new situation. The rise of Sinn Féin also made engagement more practicable. Including the Provisionals in a settlement in 1972 or 1975 had required giving the IRA a credible political form. In the 1990s, it required only the inclusion of the elected representatives of a political party that enjoyed substantial electoral support. The second factor was dissatisfaction with the failure of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement to deliver a decisive military advantage against the IRA through enhanced security cooperation with the Republic of Ireland.³³ As John Chilcot put it in 2010: [T]he security cooperation which was one of the elements of the deal with Garret³⁴ [the Anglo-Irish Agreement] hadn’t come through in any particularly noticeable or practical way and I think that was what forced the re-think in the late ’80s, that that was not a track that was going to resolve the problem from a British perspective by itself.³⁵

³⁰ ³¹ ³³ ³⁵

Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010. Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010. ³² Haas 1990; Tannam 2001. Thatcher 1993, 406–7. ³⁴ Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald. John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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The 1985 Agreement was a joint project of the British and Irish states with a much wider remit than security cooperation. It had been sold to Margaret Thatcher very much on the basis of this element, but we should not take this to mean that she was content to pay for a security solution on an open-ended basis. Most analysis of the Agreement stresses that Thatcher had agreed to it because it promised a more effective security response, but no less important was her sense that the costly status quo was intolerable. If increased security cooperation did not transform the situation, then this deep concern with the ongoing cost would encourage the consideration of other options. It is ironic, nonetheless, that dissatisfaction with the security aspects of the Agreement was central to the subsequent argument for engagement with the Provisionals. Engagement could be advocated as a way to make progress on the broader strategic goal of moving beyond a failing Agreement. Explaining the move to engage with the Provisionals, Thomas emphasizes that ‘the project underpinning the Agreement, which was an Irish initiative rather than a British one, was to marginalize Sinn Féin. So, it was their project not ours.’³⁶ The aim of marginalizing and excluding Sinn Féin, then, could be represented as a relatively recent and problematic tactic rather than as a foundation stone of British policy. The failure to implement a security solution to the conflict by defeating the IRA could be presented as a regrettable failure of an Agreement that was strongly associated with the Irish government. Some scholars have argued that, for the British government, the secret dialogue it commenced with the Provisionals was secondary to its efforts to reach an agreement between the ‘constitutional’ parties. Brendan O’Duffy, for example, argues that ‘While using the secret dialogue to explore the republican movement’s willingness to accept a negotiated settlement, the British government was more hopeful that constitutional parties could reach agreement which would effectively marginalise the IRA’.³⁷ But there is evidence that this dialogue represented a much deeper shift in British policy. According to John Chilcot There was a very clear strategy at the top which everybody who was in a position to respond to it was aware of. By the time John Major became Prime Minister it was really a strategy shared right at the top of government in London too. [That strategy was] essentially to hold the Unionist majority, as it were, in check and attract and entice nationalism, including its republican expression, into dialogue.³⁸

³⁶ Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010. ³⁸ John Chilcot interview, 25 May 2020.

³⁷ O’Duffy 2000, 409.

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Chilcot stresses that Secretary of State Peter Brooke was crucial in driving this new strategic approach: Peter was extremely well informed and alive to the long history; the different attempts at dialogue, usually indirect, not always. Certainly, his whole bent was towards promoting the possibility of, first of all, a ceasefire and then finally, probably at some distance ahead in time, some accommodation.³⁹

John Chilcot describes how talks with the constitutional parties and engagement with the Provisionals constituted parallel strands in government activity, both of them important: [T]he thing was pretty much ordered and articulated. We had two main streams, small p political activity going on called Political Development . . . for working with the Constitutional parties and the Irish government but the other was Political Movement, which was trying to engage with the republicans and, to the extent it was useful or possible, with Loyalism. So, there were quite ordered streams of activity going on.⁴⁰

Likewise, Thomas’s recollection of the government’s objective indicates that the inclusion of the Provisionals in a settlement was the preferred outcome. Rather than aiming to marginalize Sinn Féin, then, the talks were seen as a way of exerting pressure on Sinn Féin: [A]longside the project of . . . talks was the project of trying to encourage Sinn Féin and the IRA . . . to abandon violence and enter the political process. Now that involved, as we saw it, putting both positive and negative pressure on Sinn Féin. The positive pressure was to say this will be an open agenda, there’s nothing ruled out save achieving agreement . . . . Now the negative pressure was obviously to say this is an important political and constitutional process we’re launching and if you’re out of it you will miss something very important.⁴¹

Thomas emphasizes that the inclusion of Sinn Féin in the process was preferable to a settlement without them: [A] deal with the constitutional politicians while the violence continued would be much less strong and robust than one which embraced those who had previously thought it right to deploy force to advance their political interests . . . when the talks started in March 1991 involving constitutional politicians [only] that was ³⁹ John Chilcot interview, 25 May 2020 ⁴⁰ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010. ⁴¹ Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010.

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not our choice, our wish was to bring in all those who would commit themselves to constitutional means.⁴²

The ultimate aim was a successful talks process involving all of the parties. There was no point in including Sinn Féin if the other parties were lost to the process. But inclusion of Sinn Féin was such an important objective that when the talks from which they were excluded collapsed, Chilcot regarded it as a broadly positive development: ‘all-party talks minus Sinn Féin would present a hell of a problem if they succeeded . . . to get Sinn Féin in subsequently would be far too difficult. You’d have to renegotiate the whole thing.’⁴³ The dynamics of this policy shift provide some support for the thesis that policy ‘learning’ was crucial to the resolution of the conflict.⁴⁴ Discussions within the state apparatus in 1989–90 show clear evidence of ‘critical reassessment and reevaluation of underlying assumptions’.⁴⁵ Ernst Haas notes that crises generate fundamental rethinking.⁴⁶ The growth of Sinn Féin and the failure of the AngloIrish Agreement to deliver a security solution in the 1980s served as a ‘crisis’ that generated a deep re-evaluation and that permitted this knowledge to become ‘consensual’. A strong awareness of the lessons to be learnt from previous backchannel contacts was an important aspect of this re-evaluation, as John Chilcot describes: David Cooke [who would draft the messages to the republican leadership] was an historian at Oxford. I was a Medievalist more than anything, but there was a strong bent among that group of us towards the historical perspective and its potential significance in understanding the present and the near future.⁴⁷

As the back-channel developed in the early 1990s, the government files on the 1975 talks with the IRA and the secret contacts during the 1981 hunger strike were circulated to the small group of senior officials involved in the back-channel.⁴⁸ Chilcot even borrowed senior Catholic civil servant Maurice Hayes’ private diary of the 1975 Constitutional Convention. The diary, which would not become publicly available until its deposit in the NUI Galway Archives in 2018, reveals that Frank Cooper, Permanent Undersecretary at the time, had asked Hayes in early 1975 to find a way to include paramilitaries in the Constitutional Convention but that others had blocked the initiative. Hayes also indicates in

⁴² Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010. ⁴³ O’Kane 2004, 80–1. ⁴⁴ O’Leary 1997, 675–6; Tannam 2001. ⁴⁵ Tannam 2001, 494. ⁴⁶ Haas 1990. ⁴⁷ Chilcot interview, 2020. ⁴⁸ David Cooke, former senior NIO official who played a key role in writing the messages sent through the back-channel in 1993. London, 27 June 2019.

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the diary that he felt Cooper had chosen him for the role partly because his network of contacts extended to the paramilitaries.⁴⁹ The contemporaneous indications by Sinn Féin that the IRA was open to a negotiated settlement of the conflict were crucial in facilitating this policy shift. Back-channel contact between the parties then facilitated a progression from tacit bargaining to an embryonic if uneasy partnership and a limited coordination of action, most notably in preventing leaks. On the British side, those involved have emphasized the importance of maintaining consistency with earlier policy statements and of working within long established policy parameters. Above all, they insisted on the primacy of the principle that changes to the constitutional status of the North required majority consent within the North. These parameters had not excluded engagement with the Provisionals in the 1970s, however, and they did not exclude it in the 1990s. If the goal of ending a conflict that involved great human and financial costs rather than living with it was the main driving force behind this policy shift, a number of other factors provided strong incentives. Permanent exclusion of the Provisionals provided increased political leverage to unionists, to the SDLP, and to the Irish government in different ways and constituted a significant restriction of the British government’s political freedom. Explaining in 1860 why he refused to rule out an alliance with the ideological enemy, France, that grand master of realpolitik Otto Von Bismarck explained that this would be like playing chess without being able to use all of the squares on the board.⁵⁰ By engaging Sinn Féin, the British government brought these other squares on the board into play and increased its room for manoeuvre, decreasing the leverage that other parties could exert on its policy. Global patterns of change also influenced the termination of the conflict, just as they had influenced its outbreak. In the late 1960s, the American civil rights movement and the guerrilla war in Vietnam provided influential models for the Northern Irish civil rights movement and the IRA campaigns, respectively. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, South African and Israeli–Palestinian peace talks similarly provided models that informed moves towards a negotiated settlement in Ireland. Crucially, they provided a new frame for interpreting, explaining, and legitimating engagement on the part of governments with armed opponents. The dominant rhetoric of counterterrorism was partially displaced by the language of peace processes in public discourse. Some scholars present the reopening of back-channel contact between the parties as a relatively trivial adjustment in British government policy, ‘a shift in style, rather than substance’.⁵¹ But if we take it that the Provisionals had been aiming for a negotiated compromise settlement for many years, the crucially ⁴⁹ POL 41/8/262, Maurice Hayes Papers, NUI Galway. ⁵¹ Bew et al. 2009, 116.

⁵⁰ Steinberg 2011, 133, 313.

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important political development of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the decision of the British government to offer engagement that might lead to such a settlement. For Duddy, who once again became the key intermediary between the parties from 1991 to 1993, this policy shift was crucial: ‘[T]he choice was made by the British to end it . . . England had decided the time had come to alter the structure in Ireland. And frankly all of us . . . were bit players in that bigger picture.’⁵² In 1989–90, then, the ship of state shifted course. It may have shifted course by only a single degree, but over the next decade the effects of that calculated policy change increased exponentially. Engagement between the republican movement and the British state was crucial to the ending of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. The republican movement was an active agent in the initiation of the peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Its agency was constrained however by the need to secure sufficient gains to convince the bulk of the movement to accept a compromise that fell well short of its long-standing objectives. Hence, republican efforts to move towards peace required a cooperative relationship with the British state as only the British state had the capacity to deliver those limited gains. There was an awareness within the British state apparatus from the early 1970s that the Provisionals were willing to accept a compromise settlement but also that the political price of such a settlement for the British government could be high, given the suspicion and likely resistance of Ulster loyalists and unionists. But the British state was not bringing the Provisionals into politics by a combination of carrot and stick. Rather, the peace settlement was the outcome of a conscious, if bumpily uneven, coordination between the two parties. The emergence of Sinn Féin in the 1980s created what was in many senses a novel problem for the British state. Exclusion of the Provisionals now required the ongoing exclusion of a well-supported political party with representation in a variety of elected fora. It added a layer of difficulty for any British government committed to a policy of exclusion. The British decision in 1989–90 to begin working towards a settlement that included the Provisionals was, on the whole, a more significant development than the rethinking of republican policy in the 1980s. Two understandings that had circulated for many years within the state apparatus drove the decision to return to engagement after a gap of many years: first, a compromise agreement without the Provisionals would not resolve the conflict; and second, the Provisionals were willing to settle for a compromise that fell well short of their ideal. Much debate over British government policy in Northern Ireland centres on the concept of ‘policy learning’—the extent to which the state incrementally developed a more sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of the conflict and the

⁵² Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009.

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measures necessary to resolve it.⁵³ Given that the key understandings underpinning the engagement with Sinn Féin—a compromise agreement without the Provisionals was no solution and the Provisionals were prepared to compromise—had been in circulation in the mid-1970s, why had those understandings not become ‘accepted’ knowledge? Why were they ‘forgotten’ for the duration of the long war of the late 1970s and 1980s? Crucial to the shaping of policy was not the simple availability of knowledge but the struggles involving power, politics, and ideology in which certain kinds of learning were marginalized and forgotten and others became ‘consensual’. Such struggles are vitally important in generating apparent discontinuities in policy. Ernst Haas has noted that crises generate fundamental rethinking.⁵⁴ The parallel growth of Sinn Féin and the failure of the Anglo-Irish Agreement to deliver a security solution in the 1980s served as a ‘crisis’ that generated a reevaluation, and that permitted this knowledge to become ‘consensual’. Within high-level decision-making and military circles there was apparently no significant resistance to this initial move towards engagement. There were no loud voices at the highest levels arguing that the state should instead push on and attempt finally to secure a military victory over the Provisionals.⁵⁵ The ending of the violence in the 1990s required the development of a cooperative relationship between the British state and the Provisional leadership. Ultimately, this partnership between the Provisionals and the British government would bring both parties back full circle to that early, uneasy, cooperative relationship that had existed when British troops were first deployed in August 1969.

⁵³ Dixon 2001; O’Leary 1997. ⁵⁴ Haas 1990. ⁵⁵ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010.

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9 Back To the Back-channel ‘They Should Tell Us Privately’

In 1991, the British government reopened the secret back-channel to the IRA. Codenamed CHIFFON, the aim of this bold, high-risk initiative, conducted under the auspices of MI5, was to ‘achieve a ceasefire and talks’ with the Provisional IRA.¹ It was part of the strategy pursued by Northern Ireland Secretary of State Peter Brooke since his appointment in 1989 to secure an end to the IRA campaign through engagement with republicans. The reopening of the channel was a major political move, the first engagement with the IRA on a possible settlement since 1975–76. Over the previous four years, new back-channels had been opened up between the republican leadership and the Irish government. They shared many features with the British back-channel to the IRA. Contact between the IRA and the Irish government would be vital to the process at key stages, but the British government and the IRA were the key parties and, hence, the channel between them was the primary locus of negotiation. Importantly, throughout this period, both the Irish and British governments engaged with the Sinn Féin leadership on the understanding that it spoke for the IRA and that commitments made by the IRA through these channels were authoritative. The experience of the British government and the republican leadership of back-channel negotiation over the previous two decades, and, most especially, their assessment of each other’s commitment, gave them confidence to engage in this initiative. Senior civil servants and intelligence agents played an important role in advocating for this initiative and helped to sustain it against strong internal opposition. Secrecy defined the back-channel, and the chapter analyses the distinctive features of secret contact that contributed to the development of a limited sense of common purpose between the parties. By the time the media exposed the channel in November 1993, the IRA had crossed a fateful threshold, secretly offering in May 1993 to call a ceasefire in return for talks with the British government. Intermediary Brendan Duddy retained almost every scrap of paper exchanged during these years, and his papers include a coded and cryptic ‘narrative’ of the

¹ Andrew 2010, 783.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0010

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1993 contacts, a diary he kept when communication was at its most intense. These sources are triangulated with documentation from Sinn Féin and the British government who both published extensive records of their communications between 1990 and 1993.² Combined with excellent contemporary journalism by David McKittrick, Eamonn Mallie, Brian Rowan, and others who interviewed key actors when events were still fresh in their minds, these sources bring the secret diplomacy into focus.³

Nationalist Back-channels He [Taoiseach Charles Haughey] said to me that if it ever got out that these meetings were taking place that in effect I was on my own, that he wouldn’t be able to admit that these were under his direction . . . in my view it if had come out Haughey’s government wouldn’t have lasted five seconds. Dermot Ahern, Fianna Fáil TD, on being asked by Taoiseach Charles Haughey in 1988 to meet secretly with Sinn Féin on a deniable basis.⁴

As early as November 1984, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams suggested publicly that Sinn Féin, the SDLP, and the main parties in the Republic should agree a unified nationalist position.⁵ He talked of the other parties drawing closer to the republican position, but in truth a joint position would necessitate ideological compromises by Sinn Féin and would have to offer the clear prospect of an end to the IRA campaign. A senior Protestant cleric told journalist Ed Moloney in the 1990s that as early as 1983 or 1984 Adams was seeking to explore, through intermediary Fr. Alec Reid, how the British government and unionists might respond to an IRA ceasefire.⁶ The republican leadership had begun to work then towards a negotiated end to the IRA campaign before the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, but the Agreement accelerated the process. The Anglo-Irish Agreement gave the Irish government a strongly institutionalized role in Northern Ireland for the first time, dismaying unionists and stimulating new thinking among nationalists and republicans. Within months of the signing of the Agreement, the plates began to shift within Irish nationalism: in the course of 1986 and 1987 both the Irish government and SDLP leader John Hume opened up new lines of back-channel communication with Sinn Féin.⁷ The Agreement was a catalyst for change because it showed that the British government was prepared to make compromises aimed at conciliating nationalists ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁷

McKittrick and McCrystal 1993; Sinn Féin 1994. Mallie and McKittrick 1996; Rowan 1995. Endgame in Ireland interview, Liddell Hart Centre for Military archives, King’s College London. Moloney 2002, 238–9. ⁶ Moloney 2002, 240. Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 73–4; Mansergh 2007, 114–16.

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even if they were opposed by the bulk of unionists, and that they were willing to accept a formal role for the Irish government in the affairs of Northern Ireland.⁸ SDLP leader John Hume now argued that the Agreement demonstrated that Britain was neutral and that the republican justification of force was completely untenable.⁹ Sinn Féin rejected this argument and continued to offer full-throated support for the IRA campaign. Still, republicans recognized that something fundamental had changed. Several months after the Agreement, Sinn Féin Chairman Mitchel McLaughlin wrote in an internal paper that was subsequently adopted by Sinn Féin that ‘The British government position has changed and changed irrevocably. They have actually indicated, in terms of historical perspective, that they can be moved along.’¹⁰ Back-channel contact between the Irish government and Sinn Féin aimed at a settlement began in August 1986, when Fr Alec Reid, a redemptorist priest from County Tipperary who was attached to Clonard monastery in west Belfast, visited Fianna Fáil leader Charles Haughey in his home in Kinsealy, north county Dublin for the first time.¹¹ Reid knew Adams well and he urged Haughey, who would become Taoiseach the following March, to meet Adams and to support him in efforts to secure an end to the IRA campaign. The key to progress, Reid said, was getting a historic statement by the British government on the right to Irish selfdetermination that would enable Adams to argue to the IRA that the campaign had achieved a key objective and should be ended.¹² The most senior Catholic clergyman in the country, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, the Primate of all-Ireland, strongly supported Reid’s efforts and may have facilitated his meeting with Haughey.¹³ His support was crucial. In early autumn 1987, Haughey, now Taoiseach, contemplated a direct meeting with Adams, but the Enniskillen bombing of November 1987, in which the IRA killed ten Protestant civilians and a police officer, made it politically impossible.¹⁴ Haughey’s career had come undone in the ‘Arms Trial’ of 1970 when, as Minister for Finance, he had been tried for importing arms for the IRA while serving on a cabinet subcommittee charged with organizing emergency relief for the North. He was found not guilty, but many commentators in Ireland and Britain saw him as ‘soft’ on the IRA. If he met with Adams secretly and the meeting was revealed it would be taken as a sign of sympathy or even cooperation with the IRA and would probably topple his government. Crucially, however, Haughey authorized Martin Mansergh, his special advisor on Northern Ireland, to stay in touch with Reid after that initial meeting in August 1986, opening a back-channel to Adams and the ⁸ Aughey and Gormley-Heenan 2011; O’Leary 2019, 87–134; Todd 2013, 7, 12. ⁹ Routledge 1997, 211. ¹⁰ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 36. ¹¹ Martin Mansergh interview, 21 October 2010. Mansergh recalls that Charles Haughey showed him the entry in his appointments diary. ¹² Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 72; McKeever 2017. ¹³ Moloney 2002, 232–3. ¹⁴ Martin Mansergh interview, 21 October 2010.

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IRA. At the same time, Haughey began a series of meetings with Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, who was also in regular direct contact with Adams and kept Haughey updated on the substance of their exchanges. A few months later, in spring 1987, Alec Reid wrote to SDLP leader John Hume to ask him to meet Adams. Hume agreed, and he and Adams met, in secret, a number of times over the following months. In early 1988, the SDLP and Sinn Féin held a series of publicly acknowledged meetings between teams from both parties in St Gerard’s monastery in north Belfast.¹⁵ In parallel with these publicly acknowledged talks, Charles Haughey asked Mansergh and Fianna Fáil TD Dermot Ahern to meet secretly with Sinn Féin, holding two meetings in Dundalk in March and June 1988.¹⁶ These secret meetings did not yield tangible progress, but their significance went far beyond the concrete outcomes. They were the first officially sanctioned, formal, back-channel meetings between Irish government and republican representatives since the founding of the Provisional IRA in 1970. The SDLP/Sinn Féin talks trailed off in September 1988 with both parties publicly expressing regret that they could not reach agreement. But the key figures on both sides, SDLP leader John Hume and Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, continued to meet secretly; they were to meet four times in 1989. John Hume consulted Haughey regularly about these meetings with Adams.¹⁷ Hence, by July 1989, when Peter Brooke became Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, intensive back-channel contacts between the republicans and both the Irish government and the SDLP were well underway. Those contacts were focused on the conditions under which the IRA might end its campaign and were underpinned by the understanding that the IRA was prepared to end violence even if it did not achieve its ultimate goals. The prospect of an end to the IRA campaign was a live issue for the first time in a decade and a half. The British government was aware of some of these contacts at least. When Peter Brooke took office, John Hume told him of his secret meetings with Adams,¹⁸ and John Chilcot, the top civil servant in the NIO from 1990 to 1997, recalls that ‘we assumed all the time that [the Irish Government] were’ in contact with Sinn Féin.¹⁹ Therein lies part of the explanation for the reopening of the British backchannel to the IRA. If the IRA was moving towards a ceasefire the British government needed to be well-informed in order to position itself favorably and to shape the process as directly as possible. A ceasefire could create increased pressure for change from the Irish government, the SDLP and others. It carried the potential too for increased international pressure from the United States and

¹⁵ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 73–4; 79; McKeever 2017; Moloney 2002, 269–79; Rowan 1995, 11–17. ¹⁶ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 87. ¹⁷ Major 1999, 446; Routledge 1997, 237–9. ¹⁸ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010. ¹⁹ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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the European Union and the danger that Sinn Féin might quickly increase its electoral support. Republicans’ contacts with the Irish government and SDLP made it all the more important for the British government to be in touch with them. There are parallels here with Israel’s back-channel to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) at around the same time. Israel opened the secret Oslo channel when it was under pressure from the US and others to compromise with Palestinian representatives in the Madrid peace talks. Secret direct contact with the PLO allowed the Israelis to ease the pressure from allied states such as the US, seize control of the process, and gain greater concessions directly from the PLO than they might have been able to secure in the Madrid talks.²⁰ Similarly, direct contact with republicans increased the opportunities for the British government to take control of the process and strike a deal of its own with the IRA that might be more advantageous than an agreement reached under pressure from the Irish government, the SDLP, and others. And while contact with the Irish Government and SDLP was valuable to the republican leadership as a source of pressure on Britain to compromise, the republicans too had strong reasons for pursuing a direct bilateral understanding with the British government. As the sovereign power, only the UK could implement the changes sought by the republicans. ‘We had to engage with the British government who were the key players in all of this’, Martin McGuinness would later say.²¹ In an interview in 2010, John Chilcot fully concurred: ‘Ultimately . . . the basic players in this game are the British government and the republican movement . . . it wasn’t that a private deal [between Irish nationalists] could be done because how could it be done? I mean you do the deal with the British’.²² Throughout the period April 1991–November 1993, communication between Britain and the IRA through the back-channel took place at the same time as Hume, Adams, and the Irish government tried to reach agreement on a declaration of some kind. Originally conceived as a joint declaration by Irish nationalists, those involved soon began to conceive of it instead as the basis for a joint declaration by the British and Irish governments, as Seán Ó hUiginn recalled in 2019: I think the first drafts that existed [in 1991] were on the basis of a pan-nationalist—not in the pejorative sense but in the technical sense—a pan-nationalist declaration. That very soon morphed into the idea of a joint declaration by the two governments that would enable the IRA to produce a ceasefire.²³ ²⁰ Waage 2004. ²¹ Martin McGuinness, Endgame in Ireland interview, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London. ²² John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010. ²³ Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019.

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The prospect that the IRA might deliver a ceasefire to the Irish government on the basis of a joint nationalist declaration, in circumstances that would be politically disadvantageous to the British government, must have been a factor in the British willingness to engage in high-risk secret contact with republicans. This parallel process inflected every move in the back-channel between the British and the IRA.

Imaginative Remarks In November 1989, one hundred days into his term as Secretary of State, Peter Brooke made remarks that provoked a storm of protest from unionists. Asked if he could foresee a day when the British government would talk to Sinn Féin Brooke replied: it is difficult to envisage a military defeat [of the IRA] . . . if, in fact, the terrorists were to decide that the moment had come when they wished to withdraw from their activities, then I think the government would need to be imaginative . . . as to how that process should be managed . . . Let me remind you of the move towards independence in Cyprus and a British minister stood up in the House of Commons and used the word ‘never’ in a way which within two years there had been a retreat from that word.²⁴

Mention of Cyprus, from which the British had withdrawn after negotiations with nationalist opponents, made his comments particularly explosive. Brooke later said that some of his remarks had been off-the-cuff, but the underlying message—that the British government would respond positively if the IRA made moves to end its campaign—reflected thinking and discussion within the NIO at the time; his remarks had been a deliberate attempt ‘to communicate my attitude on talks to Sinn Féin’.²⁵ Brooke was regarded as an imaginative figure and did not fit the conventional image of a Tory MP. Many years later, he ascribed to John Hume the view that ‘the ceasefire would have come earlier if I hadn’t been moved out’ after the general election of 1992.²⁶ His public signal to the republicans was unmistakable—a deal was possible. To anyone familiar with the key issues, the reference to an ‘imaginative’ response suggested at the very least that issues such as prisoner releases and the removal of British troops from the streets could be up for discussion. Efforts to develop an imaginative policy received a further boost in late 1990 when John Chilcot was appointed as Permanent Undersecretary in the Northern Ireland Office. Chilcot’s personal interest and professional involvement in the ²⁴ The Irish Times, 4 November 1989. ²⁵ Moloney 2002, 248. ²⁶ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010.

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conflict went back a quarter of a century. He had been Junior Private Secretary to Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary from 1965 to 1967, when civil rights activism was beginning in Northern Ireland, and in 1967 he was promoted to head the Home Office desk that dealt with Northern Ireland. As violence began to intensify in late 1968, Chilcot was the key civil servant liaising with Stormont. In early 1969, he was transferred to the centre of government, but as violence intensified that year he was ‘whisked back fairly quickly’ to the Home Office. His task; to draw up contingency plans for direct rule by the British government. He was keenly aware of some of the historical failings in British policy and recalls the ‘extraordinarily tough and ruthless stance the British Labour government took in refusing to meddle or intervene in any way with devolved Unionist administration [prior to 1968]’. He felt that the neglect of the minority’s grievances in Northern Ireland had been a mistake: I had been worried at the time when I was still the desk officer that Roy Jenkins had really turned his attention away from the mounting Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. He had got his own very dominant reform agenda in mind and didn’t want to be distracted from it. I think the result was that movements like the Campaign for [Democracy in Ulster] . . . received no attention or support . . . And dare I say at this great distance in time I thought that they were not well treated actually by being ignored. Paul Rose was the leading Member of Parliament I think who spearheaded the Campaign for [Democracy in Ulster] and he never even got an audience.²⁷

In the mid-1980s, Chilcot was appointed to head up the Home Office Police Department, as number 2 in the Home Office. In this capacity he was in charge of the counterterrorism side of the Home Office, working closely with security and intelligence agencies. It provided a strong foundation for his subsequent involvement in the peace process: The Northern Ireland portfolio was perhaps at that point the most important part of the whole security and counter terrorism agenda in London . . . . I think if I hadn’t had that background it would have been much harder to take on the responsibility for Northern Ireland.

He developed a strong personal interest: ‘I got more and more personally interested in the problem’, he told Graham Spencer in 2015, ‘and when I was offered the job of Permanent Secretary in 1990 I jumped at it.’²⁸

²⁷ Chilcot interview, 2020.

²⁸ Spencer 2015a, 79.

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Chilcot would play a driving role in the peace process, providing strategic direction and acting as a powerful advocate of the process on the British side.²⁹ In establishing and supporting the back-channel, Chilcot worked in close partnership with John Deverell, the MI5 officer who was Director and Coordinator of Intelligence in Northern Ireland.³⁰ Deverell’s support for the process was all the more important because there was a record of senior MI5 figures in the North being hostile to back-channel contact with the IRA, in the 1970s and again in 1980. By 1990, there had been a fundamental change: ‘I think by the time John Deverell was in office it had turned right round 180 degrees’, John Chilcot recalled in 2020. That said, Deverell’s boss, the head of MI5, Stella Rimington, was sceptical of this new effort to engage with the IRA.³¹ Although MI5 was primarily concerned with domestic rather than international security, Deverell was a colonial ‘retread’ whose personal and professional background had much in common with that of the MI6 agents who had managed engagement with the IRA during earlier phases of contact. His father had been a colonial governor in the Caribbean,³² and Deverell was born in Kenya and spent his early childhood there. In the 1950s, he returned to Kenya as a soldier, serving in the King’s African Rifles during the final stages of the Mau Mau rebellion.³³ Recruited to the Colonial Service, he started his career in the far reaches of the former Empire as a District Officer in Fiji.³⁴ His work with MI5 also had a strongly international dimension, and he built his reputation partly through his work with high-level Soviet defectors during the Cold War. He thus had deep personal and professional experience of the outward-facing aspects of the British state. John Chilcot remembers that Deverell had a different approach and outlook to many others in MI5: I worked with MI5 on and off, and closely sometimes . . . from the end of the ’60s in different roles. John was outside the mould in the sense he was, I thought, more—dare I even use the words—liberal, flexible, certainly [more] understanding than many of the senior people in MI5 until recent times . . . He was a very, very good and useful interlocutor . . . You could test ideas including policy ideas on him and get, not, as it were, a standard Security Service response. You would actually get an exploration of an idea from John; he had that sort of mind that could run outside its own confines.³⁵

Deverell was also willing at times to push the boundaries of his remit. In the mid1980s he had been a rising star within MI5 and the favourite to take over as ²⁹ See especially POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ³⁰ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 104. ³¹ Rimington 2002. ³² Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010. ³³ Wilsey 2011, 145. This account of Deverell’s role by General John Wilsey (GOC in Northern Ireland from 1990 to 1993), draws on interviews with Deverell’s widow Margie. ³⁴ Snow 1998, 265. ³⁵ John Chilcot interview, 2020.

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Director General. However, that prospect evaporated due to his involvement in undercover operations, codenamed WARD and SCREAM, that aimed to recruit Irish emigrants in Germany as informers, in breach of agreements with the German authorities. Embarrassingly, An Phoblacht, the Provisional’s weekly newspaper, published leaked copies in 1989 of documents detailing these illicit operations and naming Deverell.³⁶ If Deverell’s international background helps to explain his support for engagement with the IRA despite opposition at higher levels within MI5, General Sir John Wilsey, GOC in Northern Ireland from 1990 to 1993, has emphasized the strength of Deverell’s personal commitment to the project, highlighting his willingness to take risks: His task was delicate. Given the PUS NIO’s [Chilcot’s] decision to use the new opportunity for dialogue that the Link³⁷ presented, Deverell had to control and manage it. In this he would have been guided by his instincts as a past colonial service officer, brought up in an atmosphere of ‘can-do’ and accustomed to taking responsibility. His strength of character and persuasive powers would have enabled him to overcome the lack of enthusiasm for his task from his own Director General [Stella Rimington] and to ignore the innate suspicions among his contemporaries and rivals for promotion.³⁸

Peter Brooke also attests to strong personal commitment by both Chilcot and Deverell to these efforts at achieving a settlement: John [Deverell] refused the task of being head of MI5 . . . because he was so totally involved in the job he had in Northern Ireland, he thought it was so important, just like Chilcot later. Chilcot was offered the Permanent Secretaryship of the Home Office and turned it down because he wanted to stay in Northern Ireland.³⁹

Throughout the process there were deep divisions and differences of opinion within the British state, with some office holders acting as strong advocates for a political initiative that would end the conflict through a compromise peace settlement that would include Sinn Féin while others resisted the kinds of concessions this would require. Support for engagement by pivotal senior figures such

³⁶ Statewatch Bulletin, 4(4), July–August 1994. http://www.statewatch.org/docbin/bulletin/bul-4-4. pdf; Wilsey 2011, 146. ³⁷ That is, the channel of communication via Duddy. PUS is Permanent Undersecretary. ³⁸ Wilsey 2011, 152–3. ³⁹ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010; Deverell never got to see these efforts come to fruition. In June 1994, a few months before the IRA ceasefire of August 1994, he and twenty-eight other senior security personnel died in a helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre.

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as Chilcot and Deverell, along with others such as Quentin Thomas, Political Director at the NIO from 1988 to 1998, made an enormous difference to the outcome of these struggles.

‘They Should Tell Us Privately’ Peter Brooke’s comments at the press conference in November 1989 triggered a response from the Provisional IRA leadership. In February 1990, Martin McGuinness, seen then as the hardline IRA militarist of the republican leadership duo, with his colleague Gerry Adams regarded as more political, asked Brooke in a public speech to outline what ‘imaginative steps’ the British government would take ‘if the IRA’s armed struggle ceased’. SDLP leader John Hume subsequently pointed out that McGuinness had referred in his speech to a complete end to the IRA campaign, not just a temporary ceasefire.⁴⁰ Moreover, McGuinness envisaged a British government response that would follow not precede a cessation. It was a signal that the IRA would countenance jumping first. The An Phoblacht/Republican News report on McGuinness’s speech stressed the point that the IRA set no preconditions for talks. In the speech McGuinness extended a public invitation to the British government to renew its use of the secret back-channel: If they think there is something to be lost by stating publicly how flexible they would be, or how imaginative, we are saying they should tell us privately . . . [the British government] have talked before. They have talked in the past and at this point in time there is an avenue which they are aware of whereby they can make what imaginative steps they are thinking about known to the Republican movement.⁴¹

John Chilcot recalled these remarks immediately when asked about them twenty years later. He characterized it as ‘a confirmation that dialogue was possible from their side’.⁴² The ‘avenue of which [the British] are aware’, for privately communicating with the republican movement, was undoubtedly McGuinness’s fellow Derryman Brendan Duddy; hence, with McGuinness’s speech in February 1990, the republican leadership was signalling a readiness to engage with the British government via Duddy.

⁴⁰ George Jackson (1990) ‘Sinn Féin signal decoded by Hume’, The Irish Times, in POL 35/218, Duddy Papers. ⁴¹ An Phoblacht, 22 February 1990, ‘No cease-fires’. ⁴² John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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Following the failed attempt to reach a compromise settlement of the 1981 hunger strike, MI6 officer Michael Oatley and Brendan Duddy had stayed in touch. Their relationship was now one of close friendship based on their unsuccessful efforts to reach a compromise peace settlement in the past. They shared the understanding that Oatley could provide a communication route to the British government if opportunities for dialogue opened up. During these years, Oatley held a series of increasingly senior positions in MI6. In 1984, he established a new MI6 counterterrorism section and served as its Director from 1985 to 1988. This new section had the potential to re-establish a role for MI6 in Northern Ireland, but in the event, MI5 remained in charge. In 1988, he was appointed MI6 Controller Europe, one of the most senior positions in the organization.⁴³ Signs of movement in the republican position after the Anglo-Irish Agreement seem to have stimulated renewed discussion between Oatley and Duddy. In April 1986, Oatley wrote to Duddy, on Arabic-headed notepaper, providing contact numbers for evenings and weekends.⁴⁴ Despite the security risks, Oatley made occasional trips to Derry. Duddy’s daughter Shauna remembers one occasion when her father told her a car would be parked in her garage for the next few days, out of sight of anyone who might be passing. He mentioned no names, but she assumed the car was connected to his work as an intermediary. When her husband, who had no idea of his father-in-law’s secret activities, asked her why the strange car was in their garage, she refused to tell him, no matter how hard he pressed.⁴⁵ In spring 1990, several weeks after McGuinness’s speech, Oatley travelled to Derry on a private family visit, staying with Duddy at his home. On his return to England, he wrote thanking him for his hospitality and encouraging him to meet him soon in London ‘for every reason’, an indication that they may have begun to talk about the possibility of reopening the back-channel.⁴⁶ In July 1990, Oatley sent Duddy an editorial from The Independent which condemned Peter Brooke’s ‘futile search for a compromise in Ulster’. ‘It’s a point of view!’ Oatley scribbled in the margins, with his characteristic economy of expression.⁴⁷

⁴³ Taylor 2011, 30. ⁴⁴ Handwritten note from Michael Oatley, 21 April 1986, POL 35/209, Duddy Papers. ⁴⁵ Shauna Duddy and Eamonn Downey speaking in panel on ‘Reassessing the Northern Ireland peace process’, Political Studies Association of Ireland annual conference, Derry, 20 October 2012. Organized by the author. ⁴⁶ Letter from Oatley to Duddy, 12 April 1990, POL 35/219. Letter from Oatley to Duddy 30 April 1990, POL 35/220, Duddy Papers. ⁴⁷ Press cutting sent by Michael Oatley to Brendan Duddy; from editorial page of the Independent on Sunday, 3 June 1990, POL 35/222, Duddy Papers.

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‘No Selfish Strategic or Economic Interest’ In November 1990, Peter Brooke made his second major move. He and his team wrote a speech directly addressing the republican leadership. They decided he should deliver it in his own constituency in London to emphasize that it was a message from the British government rather than associating it with the Northern Ireland Office. He gave the speech on 9 November 1990 in the Whitbread Restaurant in London, and twenty years later he remembered that it ‘was wholly incidentally delivered to the fruit importers of Great Britain who were a bit puzzled . . . [as to] why they had been singled out for this particular address’.⁴⁸ It included the words ‘The British government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland: our role is to help, enable and encourage.’⁴⁹ The text was the outcome of extensive collective discussion. As Quentin Thomas puts it, ‘Peter Brooke was in charge and masterminded it and took all the key decisions, but it was a team effort to work out how we should present things and what we should say and what our pitch should be.’⁵⁰ John Chilcot reinforces this impression of a carefully constructed attempt to engage with the Provisionals for the first time in many years: ‘Yes that [speech] was very much the concern of all of us and carefully chosen adjectives and carefully omitted commas!’⁵¹ Brooke and his team embarked on this significant step with the full awareness and consent of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. ‘There is no way’, he told this writer in 2010, ‘in which I could deliver the Whitbread speech without Mrs Thatcher being wholly aware of it. I mean absolutely total clearance.’⁵² According to Brooke, ‘the seed of the Whitbread speech was sown in the conversation with John Hume’, who had been urging him to make a statement along these lines.⁵³ At this stage, John Hume, who was meeting secretly with Gerry Adams, was effectively providing a back-channel link between the Sinn Féin leader on one side and Brooke and Chilcot on the other. Crucially, a copy of the speech was passed to the republican leadership in advance, perhaps through John Hume.⁵⁴ It was a signal of the British willingness to communicate in some way with the republicans, a confidence-building measure, and an important foreshadowing of the exchanges to come. Events now moved quickly. On 28 November 1990, just a few weeks after the Whitbread speech, John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister,

⁴⁸ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010. ⁴⁹ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 107. Omitting a comma after ‘selfish’ indicated that, even if the British government had strategic or economic interests in Northern Ireland, they were not selfish ones. ⁵⁰ Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010. ⁵¹ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010. ⁵² Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010. ⁵³ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010. ⁵⁴ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010; Sinn Féin 1994.

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opening the way for bolder and more imaginative gestures and statements. Then, in December 1990, the IRA called a three-day Christmas ceasefire, the first ceasefire in fifteen years. It was both a signal to the British government of its willingness to move towards peace and a direct response to the Whitbread speech.⁵⁵ Brooke in turn issued a statement on 23 December, welcoming the ceasefire. Given that progress subsequently stalled, it is remarkable to look back at how enthusiastically Brooke responded to this ceasefire, envisaging a ‘lasting solution’ in the coming year. At the end of the year in which the momentous changes in Europe [the collapse of Soviet control in eastern Europe] have shown the scope for new political development, a ceasefire in Northern Ireland albeit brief is a welcome epilogue to 1990 and may be a pointer to achieving a lasting solution in 1991.⁵⁶

While stressing, as one would expect, that ‘there is no future for terrorism’, Brooke’s statement highlighted the importance of ‘dialogue’. Before the formal talks with other political parties had even begun, Brooke was publicly envisioning a settlement in which the ending of the IRA campaign would form a central part. Brendan Duddy received a typescript of Brooke’s December 1990 statement, almost certainly in advance of public delivery and for transmission to the IRA. It was likely the first document passed to the Provisionals through Duddy during this new phase of contact, but still there was no formal channel. That is, no British agent had yet been formally appointed to act as an interlocuter. The British government was hearing the views of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams at secondhand from John Hume, but there was a limit to the communication that was possible without a secure and reliable back-channel that allowed the British government to communicate more directly with the Provisionals. John Chilcot keenly felt the limitations imposed by the lack of direct contact, and his preference for closer contact is evident in his recollection of a missed rendezvous with John Hume in the Bogside in the early 1990s: I’d planned to meet John Hume . . . . John and I misunderstood each other and I went to see him in the Bogside in that little house he had not very far from Martin [McGuinness] and I do remember thinking . . . I thought it would be quite interesting if John just sort of walks me down the street [to McGuinness’s house], but it didn’t happen.⁵⁷

⁵⁵ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 111. ⁵⁶ Copy typescript statement by Peter Brooke, 23 December 1990, POL 35/224, Duddy Papers. ⁵⁷ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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The lack of direct contact with the republican leadership would be addressed by reopening the channel through intermediary Brendan Duddy that had last been used during the 1981 hunger strike.

Reopening the Channel As Peter Brooke’s team reached out publicly to the republicans, a senior MI6 officer met secretly with a republican leader for the first time since the 1970s. The purpose of this unauthorized contact was to prompt the British government to re-establish back-channel contact with the IRA. Shortly before he was due to retire from MI6, Michael Oatley visited Brendan Duddy in Derry in late 1990 or early 1991. The two men had decided to make one final effort to establish a channel of communication between the republican leadership and the British government. Duddy organized for Michael Oatley to meet Martin McGuinness in Bernadette Mount’s house down the road from the Duddy household.⁵⁸ She had worked closely with Duddy for many years, driving republican leaders across the border to take part in secret talks during the 1975 ceasefire and organizing accommodation and logistics. Indeed, members of the IRA negotiating team had been billeted in her house during the 1975 talks. Duddy and Oatley were in the house when Martin McGuinness entered. He would be the lead republican figure in the engagement with the British in the 1990s as he had been during the hunger strikes. The republican movement had given him a ‘listening brief ’ for this meeting. He was to learn as much as he could from Oatley without communicating any message from the republican leadership.⁵⁹ Continuity of personnel is a striking characteristic of this channel and must be considered a key element in facilitating the development of a cooperative relationship. Because both sides accepted Brendan Duddy as intermediary in repeated engagements, a key infrastructural element for the renewal of contact was in place at this key moment. As a result, communication was now re-established quickly and more or less smoothly. The establishing of the legitimacy of this channel in the early-1970s meant that there was not the same need for extensive preliminary probing and testing in 1990–91. The previous record of an intermediary is vital in determining whether parties to a dispute accept their involvement and the degree of confidence that he or she enjoys. ‘I think the essential feature of trust’, John Chilcot once put it, ‘is who are they and what is their “track record”?’⁶⁰ The meeting served to confirm for both sides the continuing legitimacy of the link through Duddy. It showed the republicans he still had the capacity to put ⁵⁸ Taylor 2011, 33–5; Sinn Féin 1994. Sinn Féin say it was October 1990, but Taylor gives the date as February 1991. See also Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 246. ⁵⁹ Sinn Féin 1994. ⁶⁰ Spencer 2015a, 80.

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them in touch with the highest levels of the British state, and it showed the British his links to the republicans remained strong. Oatley was there on his own initiative. He had not asked anyone for permission and had no formal mandate to engage with the IRA, and the republicans could not know what influence he might exert. But even if Oatley was not making a formal approach at the behest of the British government, he had the connections and authority to stimulate new action on the British side. Duddy stayed for the first few minutes, but then left the two men alone to talk. In an informal conversation stretching over a few hours, McGuinness and Oatley discussed the political landscape. More important than any of the detail was the way in which McGuinness communicated his expectation of an end to the IRA campaign in the foreseeable future, mentioning, among other things, that he looked forward to being able to go fishing in Scotland at some stage.⁶¹ Oatley subsequently wrote a report and met John Chilcot to give him an account of the meeting, telling him that McGuinness was interested in dialogue.⁶² The crucial question for Chilcot and John Deverell now was whether the British government should re-establish the kind of back-channel to the republicans that had operated in the past. Oatley’s senior position in MI6 gave weight to his report of the meeting with McGuinness and his assessment of the possibilities for engagement. The British now formally reopened the back-channel because it fitted well with the strategic priorities of key figures such as Peter Brooke, John Chilcot, and John Deverell and worked with the deep grain of British policy as it was then developing. Around this time, John Deverell and one or two others, presumably including John Chilcot, met with Peter Brooke to tell him that a British agent who had provided a link to the IRA over many years (Oatley) was retiring and that they had to make a decision on whether to replace him; We had an extremely small meeting . . . in which it was explained to me that there was a conduit in Derry which consisted of a businessman . . . who was prepared to act as an intermediary . . . I was further told that in principle there was no face to face meeting [with republicans]. I wasn’t asking a whole series of questions because . . . I had no desire to know any more about what we were talking about than I needed to . . . . And what I was told was that the officer in the British intelligence services who had been a contact on our side . . . going back to the 1970s was about to retire from the service and the practical question and the reason I was being told about it for the first time was that, there was the issue of whether we should replace him or whether the conduit should actually be closed . . . I was being asked because the appointment of somebody else was going to be

⁶¹ POL 35/227, Duddy Papers.

⁶² Taylor 2001, 316–17; Taylor 2011, 33–5.

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a discreet—probably in both senses of the word discrete—a discreet action and that since I would be involved in it, I needed to know what I was being involved in. And no doubt, though I’ve only thought about that in the course of this morning, no doubt in putting the proposition to the Prime Minister who was by then John Major then, he would no doubt ask whether the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland knew and . . . he was going to be told that I did. And I was asked whether I would support the idea, whether I would endorse the idea on the ground that the reason I was asked was that in the event of anything going wrong and it becoming a public fact . . . I would be the first person in the firing line . . . And I said well, my answer was that if it has been going since the 1970s it seems to be, and it had remained entirely secure until this moment, fifteen years later . . . then it would be silly to throw it away and that as far as I was concerned I was quite prepared to take the damage if anything happened to it . . . ⁶³

With Oatley’s retirement, a valuable and important link with the IRA was being lost, but it was an informal link. He had not been officially tasked with that role for many years. Characterizing the appointment of a new agent as a ‘replacement’ for Oatley emphasized continuity, but it obscured the extent to which it was a major new initiative. And the appointment of a new agent was itself a powerful signal to the IRA of the British government’s willingness to contemplate a negotiated peace settlement. The back-channel was now re-established under the auspices of an MI5 operation codenamed CHIFFON. According to the official history of MI5, its aim was ‘to achieve a ceasefire and talks’ with the Provisional IRA.⁶⁴ This was not a vague probing exercise but an operation with clear goals that aligned it with the strategic aim of a negotiated peace settlement that included the Provisionals.

The Man with Three Names The very moment [MI5 agent] Robert appeared, the very second he appeared, I knew: the British government don’t send Robert to me unless they want to do business.⁶⁵ Brendan Duddy, 15 October 2009

In June 1991, a man with a Scottish accent phoned Brendan Duddy out of the blue and introduced himself as Colin Ferguson, a businessman representing a company called ‘Euroassets’ with an address in Connaught Street near London’s Hyde Park (Fig. 9.1).⁶⁶ Some aspects of spy-craft had not changed much since 1918 when the ⁶³ Peter Brooke interview, 7 December 2010. ⁶⁵ Brendan Duddy interview, 15 October 2009.

⁶⁴ Andrew 2010, 783. ⁶⁶ POL 35/589; POL 35/590, Duddy Papers.

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Fig. 9.1 Business card of MI6 agent Robert McLaren, also known as Colin Ferguson and ‘Fred’, the British government representative in the back-channel from 1991 to 1993 Source: Brendan Duddy Papers, NUI Galway.

Secret Service manual told its agents there was ‘nothing to beat sound commercial cover’.⁶⁷ Ferguson sought Duddy’s help to find a premises for a German company that wanted to invest in Derry. Duddy tried to put him off, reluctant to waste time on it, but Ferguson was insistent. He rang again the next day and said he was calling to the house in the Glen Road to see him in person.⁶⁸ Soon after arriving at the house he revealed his real purpose, asking Duddy to serve as an intermediary once again. The agent told Duddy that Colin Ferguson was an alias and that his real name was Robert McLaren.⁶⁹ Duddy did not believe that McLaren was his real name either and he would insist on addressing him as ‘Fred’ to signal his refusal to accept either name as genuine. David Cooke, a senior NIO official who was centrally involved in communication through the back-channel, recalls that McLaren’s multiple identities could be a source of confusion for his own colleagues. On one occasion, McLaren had difficulty gaining access to the Admiralty Building in Whitehall for a meeting with Cooke and Quentin Thomas because one or other of his names was not recognized at reception.⁷⁰ Duddy told the Provisionals of the new link immediately, as the British intended he should, thus constituting it as a link between the British and the

⁶⁷ Jeffery 2010, 64–5. Emphasis in the original. ⁶⁸ POL 35/590, Duddy Papers. Duddy’s recollections as recorded by his son-in-law Eamonn Downey. ⁶⁹ His surname has been given in a number of publications as McLarnon, but this seems to be an error, one which this author mistakenly perpetuated in previous publications. Duddy’s papers include a printed receipt for a theatre booking by ‘Robert McLaren’. This is the only printed record of this alias. He signed one handwritten note as RMcL. POL 35/593, Duddy Papers. ⁷⁰ David Cooke, speaking at a witness seminar on the Downing Street Declaration, All Souls College, Oxford, 10 December 2018.

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IRA even if few direct messages would be passed during the first two years. The arrival of Robert was a message in its own right, indicating that the British government was prepared to take risks and to include the republicans in a peace settlement. This new British interlocutor was an MI6 officer seconded to MI5 for the purposes of this operation and working under John Deverell. There was a fierce tussle between MI5 and MI6 over control of the operation, and his secondment represented a compromise between the two agencies. Deverell’s attitude to this struggle reveals his strong support for the initiative despite opposition within his own agency: In appointing ‘Fred’ one of those irritating but predictable turf wars developed high within the intelligence community: to whom should Fred be answerable? In his office at Stormont, John Deverell was frustrated by the argument. He did not mind who ‘owned’ Fred as long as the momentum of the peace overtures for which he was responsible was maintained.⁷¹

The international experience of both Deverell and McLaren ensured that there were strong continuities between the operation of the back-channel in the 1990s and previous phases of contact. Like previous engagements, it had the character of a covert diplomatic initiative rather than a domestic intelligence operation. A number of other back-channels operated during this period as they had done during earlier periods,⁷² but none of them constituted a sustained primary channel between the British government and the IRA. This was the sole official channel between the IRA Army Council and the British Prime Minister. Initially, McLaren visited Duddy’s house, but they soon began meeting in other venues instead. The risk of his being kidnapped in the Glen Road, just a few miles from the Irish border, was too high. The official history of MI5 indicates that the two men held regular meetings from the beginning, usually meeting fortnightly.⁷³ Their conversations included long discussions about the history of contact between the two parties and about British policy and the republican movement, the kind of conversations Duddy had been having with MI6 agents on and off since 1972. For both the British and the republicans, these conversations provided political intelligence, giving them an insight into the thinking of the other side at a time when both parties were also engaging with the Irish government and others. The main topics of discussion were the potential for an IRA ceasefire, the conditions for entry to talks, and the principle of inclusion of the republicans in any talks. While McLaren was learning about current trends in republican

⁷¹ Wilsey 2011, 152–3.

⁷² Moloney 2002.

⁷³ Andrew 2010, 783.

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thinking, Duddy was constantly seeking to move the British towards a deeper engagement with the republican leadership. Duddy was struck by one major difference from previous periods of engagement. From the beginning, McLaren was giving him documents.⁷⁴ These papers included updates on the talks process with other political parties in the North and at least one document discussing the Irish government and a proposed joint declaration by the British and Irish governments. Officials shared documents about the talks with McLaren so that he would be well informed, but they never expected him to pass them on to the intermediary and for them ultimately to pass into republican hands.⁷⁵ By the early 1990s, Duddy had learned a great deal from the MI6 and MI5 agents he had worked with over the years, coming to understand how they used time pressure and delay and techniques of flattery and influence. He brought all of this learning to bear now in his efforts to influence the British position. Through his long involvement with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, participating in their annual Leicester Group Relations conference from the late 1970s, he had learned a great deal about authority, power, and organizational dynamics and had a keen sense of what it might take to bring the parties closer together. He had also become harder, more willing to confront and demand. This change in attitude stemmed in part from frustration that British officials had been coming and going for decades without a settlement ever being reached: by this stage I was getting pretty pissed off. And I’ll tell you why I was getting fed up, because I had been at it from whenever it is, 1973, . . . and James Allan, a lovely man, I hope he’s still alive and well, he’d retired to Governor of Mauritius and . . . somebody else had retired to somewhere else, Michael Oatley had retired to the southern counties of England, right, and along was coming Robert, another one. And I felt like, do you know those boys that had the horse plough in the olden days? You know with the wooden shaft digging up a piece of ground? And I said I’ve had enough of this . . . ⁷⁶

Personality and personal compatibility were deployed in order to make this channel work, and McLaren and Duddy got on extremely well. Duddy explains: ‘at this level they choose a person that would be compatible with my personality . . . they knew me with a thousand telephone calls.’⁷⁷ They discussed Irish history, politics, and culture at length, and in August 1992 McLaren ordered two tickets for the Brian Friel play Dancing at Lughnasa, at the Garrick Theatre in London’s

⁷⁴ Brendan Duddy interview, 15 October 2009. ⁷⁶ Brendan Duddy interview, 15 October 2009. ⁷⁷ Brendan Duddy interview, 14 October 2009.

⁷⁵ Unattributable source, June 2019.

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West End.⁷⁸ They developed a sense of shared purpose, as Duddy had done with several of the previous agents. The higher levels of trust required in secret contact may well intensify the need for strong personal relationships if contact is to be sustained. Back-channels gain an added intensity by binding individuals together through their shared secrets. Negotiators on both sides are susceptible to criticism from those on their own side because of the strong opposition to the very act of ‘talking to the enemy’, and the fear of principals that interlocuters may become too understanding of the other side. As a consequence, their professional and personal reputations are extremely dependent on the discretion of their opposite numbers for many years after these contacts have ended. It intensifies the sense of a joint mission.

Encouraging the Doves Over the course of 1991, the British and the republicans edged a little closer to each other in public statements and comments. One moment was at a debate in University College Dublin in November 1991, when Gerry Adams bluntly stated that, ‘I think we’ll have to compromise. I think we’ll have to give and take. I think we will have to come to an arrangement which won’t necessarily fulfil the republican objectives.’⁷⁹ His remarks publicly confirmed the flexibility of the republican leadership. But progress in the back-channel was slow in the year following McLaren’s appointment, and on 18 February 1992 he sent a personal handwritten note to Duddy to express a sense of shared frustration: ‘neither your side nor ours seems to have the ideas to bring peace closer—I know you need an honourable peace (with all that implies) and you know our basic condition before we can talk.’⁸⁰ When Patrick Mayhew replaced Peter Brooke as Secretary of State in April 1992, momentum seemed to slow even further. Mayhew had an Anglo-Irish background that stretched back for several centuries. He was related on his mother’s side to the Lords Fermoy of County Cork, and he spent his summers sailing in west Cork, at his house just outside Castletownshend.⁸¹ Mayhew was perceived as much more cautious about engagement with the IRA than Brooke had been. Nonetheless, in late 1992, the British recommitted to the initiative. Duddy would write a few months later that, ‘It was June’s [Duddy’s] opinion that ⁷⁸ Printed receipt for theatre seat booking, 14 August 1992, POL 35/247, Duddy Papers. ⁷⁹ Reported in a newspaper story that Duddy clipped and kept: Press cutting from The Irish Times (author unnamed) entitled ‘Compromise is needed to end conflict, says Adams’, 14 November 1991, POL 35/234, Duddy Papers. ⁸⁰ Photocopy note from ‘RMcL’ [Robert McLaren], 18 February 1992, POL 35/242 and POL 35/592 Duddy Papers. ⁸¹ Email from Lionel Pilkington, 10 September 2019; Anonymous (2016) Patrick Mayhew: Northern Ireland Secretary at a critical time in peace process. The Irish Times, 2 July 2016.

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the decision had already been taken by John C. [Chilcot] as far back as the late autumn of 1992 to begin dialogue.’⁸² In late 1992, the British team began work on a major speech addressed to the republican leadership and aimed at generating movement towards a ceasefire. Delivered by Sir Patrick Mayhew at the University of Ulster in Coleraine in December 1992, it was a direct public overture to the IRA. An earlier draft was passed via Duddy to the republicans several weeks before the speech was delivered.⁸³ Mayhew now fleshed out Brooke’s reference to ‘imaginative’ responses, giving a number of concrete examples of how the British government might respond to an IRA ceasefire: In the event of a genuine and established cessation of violence, the whole range of responses that we have had to make to that violence could, and would, inevitably be looked at afresh . . . when terrorism is seen to have genuinely ended, there will indeed be profound consequences for the maintenance of law and order, and for the administration of justice . . . The Royal Ulster Constabulary would be free to give fresh priority to the quality and accessibility of its service . . . The army could return to its garrison role, as in the rest of the United Kingdom. Similarly, the emergency legislation on which many of these responses are founded would have served its purpose. Normality could return.

The Northern Ireland Office insisted he was saying nothing new, but it was a major move, and the Sunday Express noted that ‘the plan is regarded as the most conciliatory offer to the IRA in many years.’⁸⁴ It attracted support from an unexpected quarter, Ulster Unionist MP John Taylor, who had a strong independent streak but remained an influential senior figure in the party. Taylor had been shot several times and nearly killed in an assassination attempt by the Official IRA in 1972, and he made reference to the Officials now in his statement. Taylor characterized Mayhew’s speech as a new initiative that could lead to Sinn Féin’s inclusion in the political system and offered his public support: [Taylor] attacked reports claiming all unionists were critical of Sir Patrick’s peace plan, which promised that troops would be withdrawn to barracks if the IRA stopped its campaign of violence . . . Mr Taylor said the doves in the IRA must be given hope and encouragement . . . He said he wanted the Provisional IRA to follow the path of the old Official IRA. They [the Officials] were accepted into the political mainstream and the same would happen again.⁸⁵

⁸² POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ⁸³ Typescript speech by Sir Patrick Mayhew, 16 December 1992, POL 35/250 and POL 35/255, Duddy Papers. ⁸⁴ POL 35/256, Duddy Papers. ⁸⁵ POL 35/256, Duddy Papers.

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Taylor’s statement suggested that there had been a diplomatic effort by the NIO to build some support for the initiative among unionists and, as such, it underlined its significance. Mayhew said too that the British government sought a ‘comprehensive political accommodation encompassing relationships not only within Northern Ireland but also within the island of Ireland and between the two Governments’, thus indicating a willingness to make a concerted effort to reach a settlement with a strong ‘All-Ireland’ dimension. Mayhew gave his speech at the University of Ulster’s Conflict Research Centre (CRC). Much of the research carried out at the Centre—and in INCORE, the International Conflict Research Centre that subsequently grew out of the CRC— analysed the Northern Ireland conflict in a comparative framework, drawing parallels with ethnonational conflicts elsewhere. Mayhew’s speech resonated strongly with this framing of the conflict as ethnonational. It was a frame that lent itself much more readily to appeals for a compromise peace agreement than the terrorism frame that dominated much media coverage. In this academic setting, Mayhew compared the conflict to the situation in the former Yugoslavia, characterizing it as a political conflict connected to deep national divisions that related to Ireland as a whole rather than simply to the North. This at once included an All-Ireland dimension and affirmed, as the British government’s view, that the conflict would likely only be ended by a negotiated compromise. The issue of what kind of IRA ceasefire would be sufficient to open the way to talks would bedevil the efforts to negotiate peace over the following six months and, indeed, for years to come. Crucially, this speech avoided making any demand that the IRA permanently end their campaign before talks began, but officials were clearly thinking about the issue. In the earlier draft of Mayhew’s speech that Duddy received in October 1992 there was a handwritten addition by one of the British drafters, changing the line promising British government action, ‘In the event of a genuine cessation of violence’ to, ‘In the event of a genuine and established cessation of violence’. This tightened up the conditions somewhat, but without stipulating a permanent ceasefire as a precondition for talks (pace Hennessey).⁸⁶ Officials were trying to avoid making public demands that might make it too difficult for the IRA leadership to argue internally for a ceasefire and limit the British government’s options in the future.⁸⁷ It may be that this speech was an attempt to make a big push before the new year brought worsening conditions. By early 1993, John Major was facing a serious rebellion by Tory backbenchers who opposed ratification of the February 1992 Maastricht Treaty that deepened European integration and established the European Union. He was increasingly dependent on the nine Ulster Unionist

⁸⁶ Hennessey 2000, 71. ⁸⁷ Draft speech by Sir Patrick Mayhew in 7 points, 26 October 1992, POL 35/250, Duddy Papers.

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MPs led by James Molyneaux.⁸⁸ If the British government was to make a gesture to the Provisionals, it made sense to do it well in advance of the decisive votes at Westminster.

Together in the Middle Crucial to the progress of these negotiations was the building of strong relationships between those working at the intersection between the IRA and the British government, based partly on the development of shared understandings through dialogue. Richard Walton and Robert McKersie, in their study of trade union negotiations note that ‘an awareness of a common experience or fate . . . produces positive feelings between participants.’⁸⁹ Back-channel communication created an unusually intense common experience and was particularly conducive to the development of a sense of joint mission and cooperation. Deep internal divisions provided much of the impetus for the sense of shared enterprise. Like the British agents working with the back-channel in the 1970s, McLaren repeatedly found himself applying pressure for further engagement by his own side. There were similarly deep divisions on the republican side. Walton and McKersie emphasize that organizations are often internally divided and argue that ‘the negotiation process itself may offer one element of the organization an opportunity to induce another element to adopt the first’s point of view.’⁹⁰ They point out too that it is almost inevitable that ‘the negotiator comes into conflict with his own organization because he cannot, or prefers not to, ignore the demands and expectations of his opponent.’⁹¹ McLaren would repeatedly, if intermittently, align himself with the intermediary against recalcitrant forces on both sides, seeking, in cooperation with Duddy, to help the republicans to win their internal battles against more hardline forces while also making the case for movement to his own side. This joint action served to push the process forward. On a few occasions it led to direct cooperation to keep the process going. Thus, when the IRA offered a ceasefire in May 1993 to facilitate talks but the British did not respond positively, McLaren sent a message to Duddy for the IRA, advising that he pose specific questions, on behalf of the IRA, that would require an answer from Patrick Mayhew: We are appalled at the present mess. We are trying to think of questions that you could put that will give you all the assurance of our goodwill and good intentions

⁸⁸ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 179, 186. ⁹⁰ Walton and McKersie 1991, 281–2.

⁸⁹ Walton and McKersie 1991, 230. ⁹¹ Walton and McKersie 1991, 298–9.

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that you need. Suggest you ask, for instance, for clear answer on timing, which only Chairman [Patrick Mayhew] can answer.⁹²

‘Timing’ refers to the issue of how long would have to elapse after the declaration of a ceasefire before the British met face-to-face with Sinn Féin. In this case, McLaren was suggesting the IRA send a message that would help him to generate further action on the British side, essentially asking for assistance in his internal struggle. Walton and McKersie note that ‘private meetings enable a negotiator to differentiate himself from the actions or ideas of his organization with a minimum of risk of negative sanctions from his own group. These private encounters increase the flexibility of Party in giving aid and assistance or otherwise associating himself with something Opponent likes.’⁹³ This particular message from McLaren to Duddy illustrates this flexibility and shows the extent to which this point of contact had generated active cooperation that united those at the interface and pitted them, albeit to a limited extent, against others on their own side. It confirms Walton and McKersie’s observation that in many negotiation situations, ‘the opponent becomes an ally of sorts.’⁹⁴ This was just one of several occasions on which those at the intersection worked together to generate action and to move the process forward. It is difficult to assess precisely the direct effect of the arguments made by British and republican negotiators to those on their own side for movement that would keep the process going. Nonetheless, they regularly made such arguments, and during these periods of negotiation, both sides moved their positions significantly in the direction urged by negotiators. This happened despite intense internal opposition. By February 1993, the optimism surrounding Mayhew’s December speech was evaporating and hopes for a major initiative were receding. In this context, those working at the intersection between the IRA and the British government cooperated on 22 February 1993 to draft a fake message from the IRA to the British government that restarted the process. It shows the extent of the solidarity and sense of common purpose that had developed between those working in the backchannel.

⁹² POL 35 9/279, Duddy Papers. ⁹⁴ Walton and McKersie 1991, 299.

⁹³ Walton and McKersie 1991, 248.

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10 Peace Process ‘All Their Cards on the Table Including the Deeds of Their House’

When the British government reopened the back-channel to the republican leadership in early 1991, there were great hopes that it might quickly bear fruit, but progress was painfully slow and by early 1993 the process appeared to be deadlocked. On 22 February 1993, intermediary Brendan Duddy met in a hotel room at Heathrow Airport with Robert McLaren, the British agent with whom he had been meeting regularly over the previous two years. Unusually, Duddy was accompanied by Noel Gallagher, a republican who had served as a link between Duddy and the republican leadership for two decades and who was closer than Duddy to the thinking of the movement.¹ By the end of the meeting the British agent had a document written in his own hand. It contained the electrifying words, ‘The conflict is over but we need your (British) advice on how to bring it to a close. We wish to have an unannounced ceasefire in order to hold dialogue leading to peace.’ (Fig. 10.1)² The ‘conflict is over’ message was passed back to the Northern Ireland Office team who were managing the back-channel, and then to Prime Minister John Major, with confirmation that it was a message from republican leader Martin McGuinness. Believing the message to be from McGuinness, which it was not, the British government immediately responded. The back-channel came alive as messages were now passed back and forth at an accelerated pace. The ‘conflict is over’ message was designed to reverberate strongly within the British system, and it did. Those who wrote it had a finely tuned sense of what it would take to trigger action by the British government. When Quentin Thomas, Political Director at the NIO, read the message, his reaction was that this was exactly what the British government had been working towards for the past twenty years.³ The message had broken the logjam, and the British and

¹ Reynolds 2009, 343. ² The single page from this document in Brendan Duddy’s papers begins with the number 4, suggesting it is the last part of a four-paragraph document. POL 35/262 and POL 35/594, Duddy Papers. ³ Quentin Thomas, speaking at a witness seminar on the Downing Street Declaration, All Souls College, Oxford, 10 December 2018.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0011

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Fig. 10.1 ‘The conflict is over’: The February 1993 message that triggered a series of intense contacts between the British government and the republican leadership, culminating in an IRA ceasefire offer in May Source: Brendan Duddy Papers, NUI Galway.

republicans made much progress through intensive contact over the following three months. Who composed the ‘conflict is over’ message?⁴ Certainly, republicans would never have sent a message seeking British ‘advice’ on ending their campaign. The message was not the product of a single hand but emerged from a collaborative process involving the British representative Robert McLaren and intermediary Brendan Duddy, who was in turn working closely with two colleagues, Denis Bradley and Noel Gallagher. It reflected Duddy’s and his colleagues’ understanding of the republican position, phrased in a way that Duddy and McLaren knew would prompt action by the British government. In one sense, it was not far from the truth; republicans did need the assistance of the British, in the form of concessions, to bring an end to the armed struggle. It echoed a theme in Martin McGuinness’s speech at the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis two days beforehand, in which he said, ‘We must all allow each other room for manoeuvre.’ McGuinness had

⁴ The question has been discussed by, among others, Bew et al. 2009; Mallie and McKittrick 2001, 106–7; McKittrick and McVea 2012; O’Kane 2015; O’Leary 2019; Taylor 2001, 323–4.

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come close here to saying that the British and the IRA would have to help one another.⁵ Duddy now told the republican leadership that British re-engagement was a direct response to that speech by McGuinness: in other words, he concealed the ‘Conflict is over’ message from them. For John Chilcot, the most important aspect of the message was its potential to open the way to further progress. Speaking in 2020, he recalled the day that he received the message: It was John [Deverell] who brought me the much argued about message late one evening, ostensibly emanating from Martin McGuinness or at any rate the IRA leadership, ‘the conflict is over.’ Now where that really originated from is open to question I think. Probably somewhere in between. But it was John and I who had to sit down together late that evening and decide what do we do with this. Well the first thing of course was to make sure that the Secretary of State was made aware of it, but how to handle it on a wider Whitehall basis and how much credence to put on it. I think it is fair to say it didn’t matter so much whether it was a true bill as coming straight from the IRA as that it opened the door a little bit to constructive dialogue and to response. So we in effect decided to take it as if it was valid; it didn’t matter that much whether it was or not because, provided it wasn’t rejected out of hand and publicly by the IRA, it had its own value.⁶

The message has striking similarities to that very first message Duddy sent to MI6 officer Frank Steele back in September 1972 to say that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh wanted the British government’s help to strengthen the more politically inclined Provisionals against the more militant wing.⁷ Both messages sought assistance of a kind from the British government in terms that the republican leaders themselves would never have used. Both messages nonetheless opened the way to a deeper engagement. Whatever the precise details of the composition of the 1993 message, it was generated collaboratively at the intersection between the two sides, a product in part of the uniquely powerful dynamics of back-channel negotiation.

The Nine Paragraphs The day after the ‘conflict is over’ message was received, senior NIO official David Cooke was tasked with drafting a reply. He would draw up the initial drafts of all of the subsequent messages and statements sent to the republican leadership

⁵ Sinn Féin 1994. ⁶ John Chilcot interview, 25 May 2020. ⁷ ‘The Provisional IRA’, Steele to Woodfield, 22 September 1972, FCO87/4, UK National Archives.

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through the intermediary.⁸ The first communication from the British government was a short holding message promising a substantive reply soon.⁹ They now began to formulate a position paper setting out the conditions for direct, face-to-face dialogue with republicans. The final version would consist of nine points, and Duddy refers to it in his diary as ‘the nine paragraphs’. In meetings with Duddy on 24 and 26 February, just a few days after the ‘conflict is over’ message, McLaren suggested that a suspension of the IRA campaign for two or three weeks would be sufficient to allow the British to begin a series of meetings with the republicans. They also discussed the logistics of the proposed delegate meetings, with McLaren indicating that the British government might fly the republican leaders to secret talks at a venue in Norway, Denmark, or Scotland. At an early stage of these exchanges, on 5 March, the republicans sent a message requesting ‘an exploratory meeting with you as soon as possible’.¹⁰ That is, they wanted an initial face-to-face meeting before asking the IRA to commit to a ceasefire. McLaren now consulted with Duddy on the proposed British response. Duddy and his wife Margo flew to Lanzarote for a previously arranged holiday with two friends from Derry and McLaren flew out to join Duddy on the south-west coast of the island to discuss the British position paper that would outline the conditions for ‘dialogue’.¹¹ By mid-March the British government had finalized the nine-paragraph position paper and on 19 March Duddy met McLaren and a second British representative in the Forte Crest hotel at Heathrow airport. When the other man left the room, McLaren gave Duddy the nine-paragraph statement.¹² He may not have been authorized to do so. There is some ambiguity in the language used. It did not demand a permanent ceasefire before talks began, but it did seek ‘an assurance that organized violence had been brought to an end’. The position of the British Government is that any dialogue could only follow a halt to violent activity. It is understood that in the first instance this would have to be unannounced. If violence had genuinely been brought to an end whether or not that fact had been announced then progressive entry into dialogue could take place . . . once a halt to activity became public the British government would have to acknowledge and defend its entry into dialogue. It would do so by pointing out that its agreement to exploratory dialogue about the possibility of an inclusive

⁸ David Cooke and Quentin Thomas, speaking at a witness seminar on the Downing Street Declaration, All Souls College, Oxford, 10 December 2018. ⁹ POL 35/264 26 February 1993, Duddy Papers. ¹⁰ Sinn Féin 1994; POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ¹¹ Fax re travel to Tenerife, 27 February 1993, POL 35/265, Duddy Papers; Margo Duddy interview, 18 May 2018. ¹² POL 35/266, Duddy Papers.

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process had been given because—and only because—it had received a private assurance that organized violence had been brought to an end.¹³

The reference to dialogue taking place after ‘a halt to violent activity’ and ‘progressive entry into dialogue . . . If violence had genuinely been brought to an end’ is compatible with holding initial meetings on the basis of a short-term ceasefire, as McLaren had suggested. Continuation of that dialogue would depend on a ‘genuine’ end to violence. But the subsequent line that the British government would ‘defend its entry into dialogue . . . by pointing out that its agreement to exploratory dialogue about the possibility of an inclusive process had been given because . . . it had received a private assurance that organized violence had been brought to an end’ suggested something a little different—that even exploratory dialogue required that violence be ‘brought to an end’ first. Still, avoiding the qualification of the noun ‘end’ with an adjective like ‘permanent’ or ‘complete’ reflected a concern not to impose conditions that were too tight. The statement also indicated willingness to show imagination, by repeating Patrick Mayhew’s remark that ‘In the event of a genuine and established ending of violence, the whole range of responses to it would inevitably be looked at afresh.’¹⁴ That same day the republican negotiators asked the British, via Duddy, for a response to their 5 March request for a face-to-face exploratory meeting ahead of any IRA decision on a ceasefire.¹⁵ According to journalist Ed Moloney, who has extensive contacts with republican opponents of the trajectory of the movement in the 1990s, a number of hardline members of the IRA Army Council dismissed the British policy statement and urged that dialogue be halted, but Gerry Adams won the internal argument for continuing the contacts. The exploratory meeting now became crucial to the republican leadership’s plans, for it would put them in a stronger position to argue for a ceasefire within the IRA; Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly were chosen to represent the republicans in that meeting. The following day, on Saturday 20 March, Duddy and McLaren had another meeting, at 3.00 p.m. in Business Room 3 of the Dunadry Hotel near Belfast International Airport in Aldergrove. They would be joined later by John Deverell. Deverell’s presence at this meeting signalled the depth of the British side’s commitment to the initiative and the feeling on the British side that they were nearing a breakthrough. At this pivotal moment, news came through that an IRA bomb had exploded in Warrington, in the north-west of England, killing two boys aged three and twelve years old. When Deverell arrived at 4.30 p.m. he told them that John Major’s office had phoned Chilcot to stop the handing over of the final

¹³ Typescript document in nine paragraphs from the British government, 19 March 1993, POL 35/ 270, Duddy Papers. ¹⁴ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 248. ¹⁵ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers.

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draft of the British position paper (in fact, it had already been passed to the republican side) and to call off any proposed meeting with McGuinness.¹⁶ The Warrington bombing was exactly the kind of attack that had made the British so wary of contact and engagement, but paradoxically it now produced accelerated efforts to reach agreement on an IRA ceasefire. By starkly demonstrating the human and political costs of the continuing armed campaign the attack probably strengthened those in the IRA who were seeking to end the campaign and made it easier for them to argue for a ceasefire. The following night, Sunday 21 March, at 10.00 p.m. Duddy met with Noel Gallagher, his primary conduit to Martin McGuinness. Both men were worried, with Duddy noting in his diary that they agreed that ‘The position which had been developing since June 22nd 1992 right through to December 1992, that the entire position was in danger of being lost as had happened so many times in the past and immediate action needed to be taken.’¹⁷ They agreed that Duddy should push hard now for the preliminary face-to-face meeting between British and republican representatives that the latter had requested. The meeting would clarify the conditions for entry to dialogue and was seen as crucial in helping republican negotiators to win the argument within the IRA for declaring a ceasefire to facilitate talks. If it went ahead, it would be the first formal meeting since 1976, a major development and a risky step for the British government. Late that night Duddy spoke to McLaren on the phone and pressed for an early meeting between the British and the republicans ‘to explore the possibility of full scale talks and that this emergency action was needed to counteract the developing Warrington disaster’.¹⁸ To increase the pressure, the following day, Monday 22 March, Duddy sent a message through McLaren to Chilcot, purporting to be from the republican leadership: it sought an immediate meeting with British representatives, to take place on the night of 23 March. Duddy was now applying intense time pressure and was involved in some subterfuge. That same day, Deverell flew from London to Belfast to meet Duddy at 4.00 p.m. According to Duddy’s diary, Deverell said ‘it was agreed that an exploratory meeting [would] be held’ between Deverell, McLaren, and two republican representatives. At 9.00 p.m. that night, Monday 22 March, Duddy and Gallagher met McGuinness and secured republican agreement to a meeting with those two British representatives at 9.00 p.m. the following night, Tuesday 23 March.¹⁹

¹⁶ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ¹⁸ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers.

¹⁷ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ¹⁹ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers.

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Fresh Flowers and a New Tie As Shauna Duddy was leaving for work that Tuesday morning, her father asked her to buy flowers to bring back after work. There was to be an important meeting in the boardroom at the front of the house that evening, he said, and he wanted to make sure the place looked well. Shauna thought it was an unusual request. At work that day in the family’s city centre clothing store, she heard it mentioned that Martin McGuinness wanted to buy a new tie..²⁰ McGuinness’s new tie and the flowers for the room both spoke to the historic nature of the meeting. On the British side would be John Deverell and Robert McLaren. On the other, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, both of them Sinn Féin elected representatives who had long backgrounds as senior IRA leaders. Duddy had negotiated Kelly’s transfer to Northern Ireland from a British prison during the 1975 ceasefire. The secrecy, the formal equality of having two delegates from each side, and even the location of the meeting in Duddy’s house, all closely matched the format of the talks during the 1975 ceasefire. All involved in the meeting understood that it was intended as a crucial step on the path to ending the IRA campaign, a signal of British recognition and willingness to be ‘imaginative’ that would help to secure an IRA ceasefire. It had not been easy to organize. According to Duddy’s account: The day of [Tuesday] 23 March²¹ was hectic with continual contact between Fred [McLaren] and June [Duddy]. Fred’s difficulty was that he could not get a clear substantive reply from James [John Deverell] as to whether or not James would attend the meeting.

This suggested either that circumstances had changed since Duddy had spoken to Deverell the previous day, or that Deverell’s commitment had not been as firm as Duddy’s entry in his diary suggests. Duddy’s diary also records that he and McLaren spoke every half hour on the phone that day, until finally at 2.00 p.m. McLaren met Duddy on the outskirts of Derry to tell him the arrangements were in place. At 4.30 p.m. Duddy phoned McLaren to confirm that the two republican representatives would be there for the meeting at 9.00 p.m. and McLaren ‘agreed that he and James [John Deverell] would be there and that the agreed meeting was

²⁰ Shauna Duddy, speaking at ‘Can you keep a secret: family life with a secret peacemaker’. Public interview by the author with four members of the family of intermediary Brendan Duddy. NUI Galway, 25 October 2016. ²¹ Duddy has Monday 23rd in his diary, but this seems to be an error. Monday was the 22nd, and these events clearly took place on the Tuesday.

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acceptable’, according to Duddy’s account.²² But a few hours later McLaren called to say that neither he nor Deverell could attend after all. At 630 pm Fred phones to say that James had been withdrawn and would not be attending and that Fred himself had been instructed only to speak to June. The tension exploded and June insisted that under no circumstances would this be possible.²³

Duddy now placed enormous pressure on McLaren, threatening both to withdraw from his role as intermediary and arguing that this breach of faith would shatter any hopes of an IRA ceasefire. There was real biting confrontation . . . There was three to four, five hours possibly of telephone calls in which I was very bluntly saying to Robert [McLaren], this is it, it has taken a big effort for me to get Kelly and McGuinness, it has taken a big effort for them to come. If you don’t come now don’t come back next week, you are really blowing it. I deeply pressurized him, and I also added that I wouldn’t be around next week if they came to do this.²⁴

Duddy wrote some days later in his diary: June insisted that . . . the incident would be seen as very very damaging, confirming the constant notion of deception which was forever present. Fred insisted that he did not have an option but to come and speak with June and June flatly refused, an event which itself was very unusual. Fred asked for a ten minute break on the telephone, rang back and said, No, that his instructions were the same and June refused to meet Fred on the grounds that it would be a most destructive position.²⁵

Duddy argued on the phone that the consequences of the apparent about turn would be taken as a signal for immediate direct action [IRA attacks] and that the least Fred could do would to be in the same building as Walter [McGuinness] and Campbell [Kelly] . . . Fred asked for another break on the telephone this time for half an hour, but he returned in six minutes to say OK he was coming.

By threatening to withdraw as intermediary, Duddy was presenting the British with the prospect that the possibility of an IRA ceasefire might slip away and that ²² POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ²³ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ²⁴ Brendan Duddy interview, 26–7 November 2009. ²⁵ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers.

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they would lose this valuable source of political intelligence on the IRA; he was doing so at a time when the Irish government was in regular back-channel contact with republicans. A face-to-face meeting between the British and senior republicans was such a risky move that writing not long after these contacts were revealed, Mallie and McKittrick understandably speculated that ‘the idea of the delegate meetings [to follow a ceasefire] may have been a Machiavellian British scheme to test the readiness of republicans to talk about ideas short of a British declaration of intent to withdraw.’²⁶ But the balance of evidence suggests the British were not involved in a Machiavellian deception. When this author put it to John Chilcot that British discussion of possible meetings that then never took place aroused suspicion of a ruse or deceit, his response was blunt: ‘ “Ruse” and “deceit”? What possible end?’²⁷ To promise a meeting with no intention of attending and then cancel it would serve no positive purpose and it would have great costs, shattering the trust that had been painstakingly established. It would also be out of pattern with the behaviour of both parties in this phase of contact, as in previous phases, when they were at pains to stress that their side kept its word. John Chilcot stressed to me that Deverell would only have agreed to go if he had been given authority to do so, but also indicated that McLaren did not operate under the same constraints: John [Deverell] had fewer degrees of freedom than others. And therefore would act under quite explicit policy guidance and direction which you couldn’t and shouldn’t seek to exert over somebody who is further out on the limb . . . John [Deverell] would not have gone without authority and John would not have allowed it to be said that he would go without authority. Now whether somebody said it nonetheless [that he would go] is another matter.²⁸

If Deverell did indeed agree to go to the meeting, as Duddy’s account states,²⁹ he may have secured provisional authorization, or he may have agreed to go in the expectation or hope of securing permission. His withdrawal presumably resulted either from a change in circumstances or a failure to secure the expected authorization. To preserve the channel, McLaren agreed to go to Duddy’s house that night to meet with McGuinness and Kelly, but they refused to come when they heard there was only one British representative there. In a desperate attempt to salvage the situation, Duddy’s colleagues, Gallagher and Bradley, drove McLaren to McGuinness’s house in the Bogside to convince him and Kelly to come to the meeting.³⁰ Although Duddy was not himself present in McGuinness’s house, his

²⁶ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 254. ²⁷ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010. ²⁸ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010. ²⁹ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ³⁰ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers; Mallie and McKittrick 2001, 108–11.

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diary includes a vivid account of the scene when the three men arrived into the small terraced house in the Bogside some time after 9.00 p.m.: The tiny living room was crowded and the lady of the house was most upset but a very tough lady she is and it was considered necessary by all concerned, five big grown men, to move out into the kitchenette area which was even smaller than the living room and pushed the tension and the anger even higher . . . it was as if all the tension of the last twenty years of war in Ireland was being acted out vocally in that little kitchen³¹

Eventually, McGuinness and Kelly agreed to go with McLaren to take part in the meeting in Duddy’s boardroom. The meeting lasted from just after 10.00 p.m. until 12.45 a.m. Present were McGuinness, Kelly, and McLaren, along with Duddy, Gallagher, and Bradley as observers. According to Duddy, ‘The atmosphere was in complete contrast to what had taken place in the little house in the Bogside. It was very cordial, very dignified, very businesslike and very direct.’³² He recorded in his diary that McLaren said ‘The conditions of dialogue were that there would be a halt to the armed campaign to enable dialogue to take place and that there would be no declaration of intent by the British government on withdrawal from Ireland.’ He also affirmed that if the IRA called a ceasefire, the British government would engage in preliminary secret talks with them immediately. Indeed, according to the Sinn Féin account, McLaren told them at the meeting that ‘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. This island will be as one.’³³ Although McLaren reported on this extraordinary meeting to at least some in the NIO (‘very few people’),³⁴ he had attended it without formal authorization, and he accepted full responsibility for doing so. It’s arguable, however, that unauthorized action of this kind—deniable contact—was in fact an implicit part of his remit as an intelligence agent, as someone who was ‘further out on the limb’ than others. Ultimately, this unauthorized meeting with McGuinness and Kelly advanced the process significantly. The key question after the meeting was whether it was enough to secure an IRA ceasefire. The meeting with McLaren undoubtedly strengthened the case. The republican leadership now drafted a message to the British offering an IRA ceasefire.³⁵

³¹ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ³⁴ POL 35/307, Duddy Papers.

³² POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ³⁵ Moloney 2002, 407–8.

³³ Sinn Féin 1994.

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‘The Crucial Move’ On 10 May 1993, the IRA gave their response to the meeting with McLaren, offering to cease operations for two weeks on the understanding republicans would have secret face-to-face talks with British officials once the ceasefire began, and holding out the prospect that those talks would pave the way for a complete end to the IRA’s campaign.³⁶ Because of the reference to a two-week ceasefire, this offer may seem a quite limited gesture. However, in 1972, an initial one-week ceasefire was extended indefinitely after the British government agreed to meet, and in 1974–75, a twoweek cessation was followed by an open-ended ceasefire once Michael Oatley had held a preliminary secret meeting with republicans. The hope and expectation on both sides was that a similar trajectory would be followed in 1993. In February 1993, Duddy reported that McLaren had told him that the British ‘believed that two or three weeks was a sufficient period to convince republicans’ that the IRA campaign was unnecessary.³⁷ After the exposure of these contacts, Gerry Adams stressed that point, writing in his autobiography that the British had proposed ‘an intensive round of negotiations, after which, they asserted, the IRA would be convinced that armed struggle was no longer necessary’.³⁸ Both parties understood that this short-term ceasefire was expected to develop into an openended ceasefire. At the meeting with McLaren, McGuinness had asked him what would happen in the event they were unable to reach agreement in the initial meetings: ‘What if a genuine effort is made say, over a period of five to ten days and no progress is possible, what then?’ is Duddy’s version of his question.³⁹ In asking this question, McGuinness was envisaging a situation in which they were unable to extend the ceasefire after two weeks, but it also indicates the shared hope and expectation that they would make enough progress in those two weeks for the ceasefire to be extended. The IRA offer of a ceasefire, the outcome of a hard-fought internal struggle, was a major achievement for those republicans who wanted to move towards a settlement. Internal tensions are evident in the document. Indeed, Moloney ascribes the ‘delicately worded’ nature of the ceasefire offer to ‘the lengthy wrangling that had gone on inside the army council’.⁴⁰ Crucial points are expressed in opaque terms as a result. To appreciate its significance, it is necessary to draw out some of these points. The task is complicated by the existence of three slightly different versions of the message, one in Sinn Féin’s 1994 account of these contacts, ‘Setting the record straight’, another made public by the British government,⁴¹ and another in Duddy’s papers. ³⁶ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 249–50. ³⁷ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 247. ³⁸ Adams 1996, 320. ³⁹ POL 35/266, Duddy Papers. ⁴⁰ Moloney 2002, 407–8. ⁴¹ Rosselli 1993, 13.

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So sensitive was the topic that there is no explicit mention of a ceasefire in the document. Republicans were not willing to commit specifics to paper. Instead, Duddy was instructed to notify the British verbally of the two-week ceasefire offer when he delivered the written message.⁴² The written message Duddy was given states: We are responding directly to your request for advice recognising fully the sensitivity of any position from you or us which is committed to paper at this stage. Our response has been couched accordingly but it is clear that we are prepared to make the crucial move if a genuine peace process is set in place.⁴³ (emphasis added)

It is an opaque sentence, but the statement that ‘we are prepared to make the crucial move if a genuine peace process is set in place’ is of great significance. It is an allusion to the ending of the campaign rather than a reference to the two-week ceasefire. It implies, cryptically, that they are prepared to bring an end to the IRA campaign if a ‘genuine peace process’ is put in place. This is quite separate from the offer of a temporary ceasefire to facilitate initial meetings as is made clear subsequently: You say that you require a private assurance in order to defend publicly your entry into dialogue with us . . . . We wish now to proceed without delay to the delegation meetings. In order to facilitate this step we sought and received a commitment which will permit you to proceed [i.e. the two-week ceasefire] so that we can both explore the potential for developing a real peace process.⁴⁴ (emphasis added)

That is, the purpose of the initial ‘delegation meetings’, facilitated by a two-week ceasefire, is to ‘explore the potential’ for a ‘real’ peace process. If a peace process is then put in place, they are prepared to ‘make the crucial move’, i.e., to end the armed campaign. There was, then, a dual offer in the IRA’s message: a short-term ceasefire in return for initial talks and an offer to then make the ‘crucial move’ in return for the beginning of ‘a real peace process’. John Chilcot understood this perfectly. He later recalled that Prime Minister John Major had some difficulty with the offer of a short ceasefire, but that he himself appreciated its ambiguities:

⁴² Sinn Féin 1994. ⁴³ File of handwritten and typescript versions of the IRA ceasefire message of 10 May, 10–11 May 1993, POL 35/283, Duddy Papers. ⁴⁴ File of handwritten and typescript versions of the IRA ceasefire message of 10 May, 10–11 May 1993, POL 35/283, Duddy Papers.

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I think John Major felt that he was entitled to something more than a mere two weeks ceasefire. The wording perhaps didn’t take the republican leadership, if they were ever put the question by their own supporters, any further than that. But I think all the contextual surround would be that this ceasefire, if it prospered in terms of getting into dialogue, would then be extended indefinitely, and would be, as it were, the end to violence.⁴⁵

While the republicans might have used opaque language, they were signalling a readiness to move towards ending the armed campaign. At this stage, the three versions of the ceasefire offer diverge. Duddy’s typescript version says ‘It is important that you understand how important a gesture this is and even though it may be of a short duration it underlines the sincerity of those involved and their faith in us’ (emphasis added). Duddy deliberately omitted the words ‘and even though it may be of a short duration’ when delivering the message to McLaren as an oral ‘speaking note’: I decided to read out the ceasefire document, a trick I had learned from the British . . . By reading it out I left out the bit that said the ceasefire [might be] short, or whatever the words were—the words were short duration or something—because I knew that would kill dead the possibility of dialogue.⁴⁶

Duddy told his son-in-law some years later that when he delivered the message to ‘James’ [John Deverell] and a second British official, ‘David’, in London on 11 May, he ‘consciously’ omitted the half-sentence ‘where Sinn Féin caution the ceasefire may be only of a short duration’.⁴⁷ According to Duddy’s recollection, he identified this problematic phrase when Martin McGuinness first gave him the message: McGuinness came here about 11 at night and it was on A4 [paper], very clearly a dictated message from the Army Council because the paper was rolled and rolled and scrolled and scrolled. Mc Guinness read it out and as he was reading it out there was a sentence, it’s easy recalled, a bit of the sentence making it clear—you could see the Army Council battle—making it clear: ‘Do not take this ceasefire for granted. But it is an opportunity, it is a window. If you want to take it you can take it.’ But the bit in it opened the door to people within the counsel of the British government saying ‘don’t buy this here because it leaves the door open to be working with these people for five days and bang off goes a bomb and these people walk away. And you are left in trouble’ . . . So that sentence, when I read it out, I simply diverted [sic] my gaze and missed it.⁴⁸ ⁴⁵ Mallie and McKittrick 2001, 95. ⁴⁷ POL 35/283, Duddy Papers.

⁴⁶ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009. ⁴⁸ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009.

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Duddy was of the view that the line about ‘short duration’ was there at the insistence of hardliners, which is in line with Ed Moloney’s account of divisions on the Army Council. In an interview in 2009, he recalled that he pointed out the problem to McGuinness: I said to Martin McGuinness on that night, that sentence will wreck your intention, and he looked at me and said that is the document I am giving you. He didn’t say anything else and he didn’t . . . say anything else is the best way of putting it. And you can make whatever you please out of that. That is where I got the very strong impression that that sentence was inserted by the people who were not in agreement with the ceasefire within the Army Council . . . it was the other side of the argument.⁴⁹

The Sinn Féin text of the offer reads: ‘It is important that you understand how important a gesture this is and how [“how” is not in the Duddy version] even though it will be of a short duration it underlines the sincerity of those involved and their faith in us’ (emphasis added). Here, the word ‘will’ seems to rule out the possibility that the ceasefire would be extended if talks were making progress, but that was clearly not the intention of the republican leadership. Perhaps the text given to Duddy did use the term ‘may’, but when Sinn Féin publicized the message they hardened it up to ‘will’. Alternatively, it may be a typographical error, or the word ‘will’ may have been used in an earlier draft before it was handed to Duddy. In any case, this was the message the British had been waiting for. Duddy recalled that after he read out the statement to John Deverell and ‘David’, They couldn’t get out of the room quick enough. I mean it was almost vulgar, it was ‘find your way down the stairs Brendan’, it was that type of situation . . . They literally got out the door as quickly as that. If you want to be simple about it, they were possibly waiting for it . . . I [am] beginning to think the security services MI5 were aware of the contents of the document. All I was doing was actually solidifying their knowledge. Now whether that is true or not true I don’t know.⁵⁰

‘All Their Cards on the Table’ John Chilcot had now secured a ceasefire offer from the IRA that he hoped would open the way to secret British talks with the republicans, but at this point the limits of British flexibility became clear. Parliamentary arithmetic had changed after the 1992 election, leaving the Tories with a much smaller majority. A backbench ⁴⁹ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009. ⁵⁰ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009.

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rebellion against the Maastricht treaty by Eurosceptic Conservatives now threatened to bring down the government. In November 1992, John Major’s government won an important vote on the treaty by just three votes, as dozens of Tories voted against the government or abstained. As a series of critical votes on the Maastricht treaty approached in 1993, John Major found himself dependent on the nine Ulster Unionist MPs led by James Molyneaux.⁵¹ In one vote, on 22 July, the result could not have been closer: 317 to 317. Only the casting vote of the Speaker, and the support of the nine UUP MPs, saved the government from defeat.⁵² Molyneaux was much less adventurous than John Taylor, strongly opposing what he called ‘high-wire acts’ such as the attempt to secure an IRA ceasefire. Dependence on the UUP would act now as a powerful brake on the British government’s efforts to secure an end to the IRA campaign. ‘By this time’, Duddy wrote in his diary in March 1993, ‘it was becoming obvious that the Maastricht vote was taking centre stage and the Chairman [Patrick Mayhew] was not available to the ear of Mister C [Chilcot].’⁵³ There were intense discussions on the British side in the days after they received the ceasefire offer. Then, on Monday 17 May, John Major held a meeting of a small number of key officials and cabinet ministers to discuss their response; the key figures present were Patrick Mayhew, John Chilcot, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, and Rodric Braithwaite, John Major’s foreign policy advisor and Chairman of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee (1992–93) who had served as ambassador in Moscow from 1988 until 1992. It is telling that the Foreign Secretary was present, but that Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke initially wasn’t, even though MI5 reported to the latter. The presence of Braithwaite and Hurd suggests the Foreign Office and MI6 may have maintained a role in the process at a strategic level. Hurd had met with Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison in west Belfast in 1978 at a time when the IRA campaign was in full-flow and there was no immediate prospect of a ceasefire. He was more open than most ministers to talks with the republicans. John Chilcot was probably the strongest advocate of talks present at the meeting. At this crucial moment, Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke joined them, and John Major invited him to share his thoughts. Clarke expressed strong opposition to any move, according to the report McLaren later gave Duddy: [Clarke] in buoyant, bombastic mood advised John Major that the proposition was much too risky at the present time with the government under siege. If the Republicans were sincere about their intentions then the Prime Minister should

⁵¹ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 179, 186. ⁵² Major 1999, 342–200. Mallie and McKittrrick 1996, 186. ⁵³ POL 35/266/1–5, Duddy Papers.

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hasten slowly to adopt such a radical departure from their previously publicly successful, anti-terrorist line.⁵⁴

This effectively sabotaged the prospect of movement and pointed up a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the Home Office for engagement with the IRA. Even if CHIFFON was officially an MI5 operation, Clarke did not display here any great sense of ownership of, or advocacy for, the initiative. Just ten days later, Clarke would move from the Home Office to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, and this may also have contributed to his reluctance to endorse such a bold move. Major now decided British officials would not have any meeting with Sinn Féin until an IRA ceasefire had held for three months, a much more restrictive position than had been suggested in the contacts up to this point.⁵⁵ It was, in essence, an outright rejection of the IRA offer. Both the British government and republicans were of course acutely aware that if the IRA campaign resumed after two weeks of secret talks and those talks were revealed, as both parties expected they would be, it would probably do immense damage to the government and provide a big propaganda boost to the IRA. Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler recalled his anxiety on this point: ‘Was this a trap? Was this a way of trying to draw us into direct contact with the IRA which they would then publicize and use it to try and embarrass the Government?’⁵⁶ The response the British sent now to the IRA was non-committal and evasive and offered no reply to the questions the IRA had posed about the timing and location of talks. The republicans regarded it as a flat rejection of their offer. The NIO team had succeeded in stretching the Provisionals to a position that they thought would allow them to convince John Major to permit a meeting. But in the time it had taken to reach that point, the winds had shifted and the political climate had become less favourable. It was at this juncture that the back-channel effectively ran into the ground. The British government’s failure to make any significant reciprocal move or gesture in response to the IRA offer spoke of a reluctance to take risks and a determination to yield minimal political ground. Duddy gave his angry view of the British response to McLaren when the latter called him on 28 May to ask ‘if there was any hope of getting this thing back on the rails’. According to his own contemporaneous account, Duddy had replied ‘that

⁵⁴ POL 35/266/52–56, Duddy Papers. Mallie and McKittrick (1996, 252) found it so unlikely that a detailed account of such a meeting would have been passed on to the Republicans that they suspected it was a fabrication. They were later able to confirm it was accurate. See also Mallie and McKittrick 2001, 95–6. ⁵⁵ Handwritten note by Eamonn Downey, POL 35/292; ‘The Narrative’, 9 June 1993, POL 35/264, Duddy Papers; Mallie and McKittrick 2001, 96. ⁵⁶ Interview by Eamonn O’Kane with Lord Butler of Brockwell, 9 November 2000. In O’Kane 2004, 86.

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the Republican movement had put all their cards on the table including the deeds of their house and they hadn’t even had the courtesy of a reply’.⁵⁷ Republicans were now considering if the British had duped them into making this offer. Writing to Martin McGuinness a few weeks later, Duddy argued that it would be wrong to ‘search for conspiracies’, and emphasized the tendency of the British state to pull in different directions at the one time and the Conservative Party’s record of looking on Ireland through the lens of law and order: The British system is perfectly capable of going in many different directions at the same time, each section pushing to develop its own particular agenda. Most of these agendas never reach the light of day, but the Irish agenda is so centrally tied in to the Conservative party tradition of Law and Order, that on this occasion Chilcott [sic] misjudged the mood of the Inner Cabinet committee on Northern Ireland.⁵⁸

The back-channel would operate for several more months, but the failure to respond to the ceasefire offer ensured there was no further progress. There was one great practical difficulty now for those at the centre of the channel. The false ‘conflict is over’ message had created parallel realities. On the one hand, messages to the republicans had to be compatible with a reality in which the ‘conflict is over’ message had never been sent and in which the meeting with McLaren had been authorized by the British government. Messages to the British, on the other hand, had to be consistent with the ‘conflict is over’ message but also with a parallel reality in which the unauthorized meeting with McLaren had never taken place. This placed strains on the channel that intensified over time as these two realities diverged. Duddy and McLaren found themselves having to regularly tweak messages to keep them aligned and occasionally to send fake messages, which compounded the difficulties of keeping the story straight. ‘Could you tell your friends’, McLaren wrote to Duddy on 18 August, that they are inadvertently causing great difficulties for me by their frequent references to my having met them. This was only known of by very few people and officially my instructions were only to speak to you. The problem is that these notes are seen by 7 or 8 people, all of whom know that such a meeting is contrary to our stated policy. Grateful if you could explain the situation otherwise things are going to come adrift.⁵⁹

⁵⁷ POL 35/266/52–56, Duddy Papers. ⁵⁸ Typescript draft letter (from ‘Roadrunner’ [Brendan Duddy] to ‘Penguin’ [‘Walter’/Martin McGuinness]), 2 June 1993, POL 35/288, Duddy Papers. ⁵⁹ POL 35/307, Duddy Papers.

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Duddy and McLaren finally ran out of road in November 1993 after Duddy sent another unauthorized message purporting to come from the Provisionals. On 26 November 1993, a few days before the secret channel became public knowledge, the republicans wrote to the British to say that they would no longer use Duddy as an intermediary.⁶⁰ Ironically, it was Duddy himself who had to deliver the message, as he was their only direct channel of communication with the British. The IRA had closed the channel, partly because there was the prospect now of rapid progress through other channels involving the Irish government and John Hume.

The Irish Government and John Hume From the outset, the development of the back-channel between the British and the republicans was interconnected with the contacts between republicans, the SDLP leader John Hume, and the Irish government. The differences between British and Irish government attitudes to an IRA ceasefire ran deep. While some British officials and ministers were still expressing scepticism about the possibility of an end to the IRA campaign on the eve of the ceasefire in August 1994,⁶¹ key Irish figures had viewed the republican leadership’s efforts to end violence with great seriousness from an early stage. Irish diplomat Seán Ó hUiginn, who headed up the Irish side of the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in Maryfield from 1987 to 1990 and was head of the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Anglo-Irish division during the crucial years of 1991–97, was the single most influential official on the Irish side. He was the lead Irish negotiator with the British in meetings where the atmosphere at times became explosive. He had deep experience of the North, having acted as the Department’s main liaison with unionists and loyalists in the late 1970s, and he had strong connections to SDLP leader John Hume and often spoke to him informally. From the start, he viewed the project of the republican leadership as a genuine and serious effort to end the campaign, even if he thought they would find that very difficult to achieve.⁶² Others on the Irish government side shared that view. Fianna Fáil TD Dermot Ahern, who met secretly with republicans in 1988 together with Martin Mansergh, believed that the republican leaders were ‘on a hook’ and wanted to end the IRA campaign, but doubted they would be able to prevail within the organization.⁶³ In short, the Irish government and senior civil servants had a much more positive and supportive approach to the achievement of an IRA ceasefire than many of those on the British side.

⁶⁰ POL 35/327, Duddy Papers. ⁶¹ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 302–3. ⁶² Seán Ó hUiginn interview 23 January 2019. ⁶³ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 89–90.

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In October 1991, John Hume produced a first draft of a text that was intended to provide the basis for a joint declaration by the British and Irish governments.⁶⁴ Irish government officials now contributed to editing the document. Hume later recalled that Haughey ‘was extremely encouraging and . . . played a major role in the whole development’.⁶⁵ The draft declaration came to be known as the Hume– Adams document, but in fact it was a collaborative effort involving input from several sources, as Irish diplomat Seán Ó hUiginn explains: People speak of the Hume/Adams document but it really didn’t exist in the sense of being a tablet of stone; it existed as a floating drafting exercise for which there was all kinds of inputs, Gerry Adams, Fr. Reid, John Hume, Martin Mansergh, no doubt others and then at a later stage Sir Robin Butler and his officials [for the British Government] and Dermot Nally and myself [for the Irish Government] on this particular exercise.

Ó hUiginn describes the early input into the document from the Irish government side: ‘The first drafts naturally enough were pretty much the republican wish list and Martin Mansergh, mostly in conjunction with Mr Haughey, would point out things that were basically non-starters with the British.’⁶⁶ With the work on an agreed document almost complete, Haughey proposed the idea of a joint declaration to John Major in December 1991, and the following month the Irish government sent Major a copy of the draft declaration. But the Prime Minister rejected the idea out of hand, dismissing the draft as ‘utterly onesided’. Haughey’s successor as Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, would take up the work on the joint declaration, stepping up the back-channel engagement with the republican leadership and pressing John Major to agree to a joint declaration. Crucial to the progress that was now made was Reynold’s willingness to take risks: ‘He had a strain of determined single-mindedness in him which was actually very good in the circumstances’, Seán Ó hUiginn told me in 2019.⁶⁷ By the time he became Taoiseach, Reynolds had already established a private, informal back-channel of his own with the republican leadership. Sometime in late 1990 or 1991, Reynolds, then Minister for Finance, was introduced by a colleague to Noel Gallagher in the Dáil restaurant. Gallagher, who had been involved in the back-channel contacts with the British since the early 1970s and was working closely with Brendan Duddy, told Reynolds that he had unsuccessfully sought to give a document to Charlie Haughey. He told Reynolds that he was in regular contact with Martin McGuinness, and Reynolds and Gallagher now began to meet whenever Gallagher came to Dublin.⁶⁸ ⁶⁴ Routledge 1997, 237–9. ⁶⁵ Rowan 1995, 46. ⁶⁶ Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019. ⁶⁷ Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019. ⁶⁸ Reynolds 2009, 160–1.

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In late 1992, as the British began to intensify their engagement with the republicans, Albert Reynolds sharply stepped up the back-channel contacts with Sinn Féin through intermediary Fr Alec Reid, authorizing senior advisor Martin Mansergh to meet twice with republican leaders in October 1992.⁶⁹ Between October 1992 and June 1993, Mansergh met regularly with Martin McGuinness, who was usually accompanied to meetings by Aidan McAteer and sometimes by Tom Hartley.⁷⁰ They worked on developing a text that republicans, the SDLP, and the Irish government could all sign up to and that they hoped could form the basis for a joint British-Irish declaration that would secure an IRA ceasefire.⁷¹ At around the same time, Albert Reynolds later wrote in his autobiography, Noel Gallagher became ‘a regular visitor, keeping me informed of the situation’. There was now a significant overlap between the two channels, with McGuinness and Gallagher directly involved—in different ways—in parallel contacts with both the British and Irish governments.⁷² Progress on this front accelerated further after a secret meeting between Gerry Adams and John Hume in Derry became public knowledge in April 1993. The two men issued a joint statement several days afterwards saying they were trying to reach an agreement on key issues, bringing these efforts into the open.⁷³ A month later, in May 1993, at almost exactly the same time as the IRA secretly offered a ceasefire to the British through Brendan Duddy, Albert Reynolds wrote to Gerry Adams setting out how the Irish government would respond to an ending of the IRA campaign, indicating his willingness to make concessions on issues such as prisoner releases.⁷⁴ For republicans, then, the channel to the Irish government was becoming stronger and more promising at exactly that moment when the British seemed to be blocking any further progress through the Duddy channel. This strengthening of links between republicans and the Irish government seems to have been a source of some concern to the British. Duddy later recalled that he told McLaren some time in spring 1993 that Albert Reynolds was going to put his weight behind the proposal for a joint British-Irish declaration. His account of McLaren’s reaction, perhaps somewhat embellished, suggests some concern on the British side about the role of the Irish government: I says ‘Albert Reynolds is totally supporting this’ and he looked at me, he says, ‘you can’t be right.’ I says ‘of course I’m right’ and I knew that I had pressed a button and his next words were, ‘that leaves us sucking the hind teat.’ Now I don’t have to tell anybody in Ireland what that means. It means you’ve been

⁶⁹ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 162–3. ⁷⁰ Martin Mansergh interview, 21 October 2010. ⁷¹ Reynolds 2009, 290. ⁷² Reynolds 2009, 288. ⁷³ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 171–2. ⁷⁴ Mallie and McKittrrick 1996, 175–6.

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outsmarted. You’ve been outpaced. So, there’s an example of a slight slip by me and a double slip by him.⁷⁵

In June 1993, just a few weeks after John Major had rejected talks with Sinn Féin on the basis of the IRA ceasefire offer, Reynolds phoned Major to say he had the text of a joint declaration that could pave the way to an IRA ceasefire. Reynolds proposed to fly to London with the document so that he and Major could discuss it face-to-face, with no one else in the room.⁷⁶ Given his contacts with Gallagher and with John Hume, there can be little doubt that Reynolds had learned of the recent IRA ceasefire offer. The offer showed that the IRA was ready to cross a fateful threshold. It seems certain that the knowledge that Adams and McGuinness had won the argument for a ceasefire in the Army Council gave Reynolds the confidence to push hard. It helps to explain why he now put all of his weight behind the proposed declaration. Major dissuaded Reynolds from travelling to London. Instead he sent British Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler to Baldonnel Airport near Dublin to collect it. Reynolds handed it over personally.⁷⁷ Reynolds’ decision now to advocate strongly for a joint declaration opened up a new source of pressure on the British government to make moves that would help to bring about an IRA ceasefire. This initiative was unwelcome to many on the British government side. The Irish government was acutely aware of differences of opinion on the British side. They perceived some figures as strong and active opponents of the Irish government’s proposals. Chief among them were Rod Lyne, the recently appointed Private Secretary to John Major who advised him on foreign affairs, defence, and Northern Ireland, and the British ambassador in Dublin, David Blatherwick. Lyne was a senior diplomat who had served as counsellor and head of Chancery in the Moscow embassy (1987–90) before heading up the Foreign Office’s Soviet (later eastern) Department (1990–93). Conversely, they regarded Chilcot and Quentin Thomas, who had both been closely involved with communication through the back-channel, as advocates of progress.⁷⁸ Duddy regarded the British government as resistant to the proposal for a declaration. In June 1993, he wrote to McGuinness with his analysis: The most important thing which has happened in recent history has been a development of the dialogue between Northern Nationalists, Hume and Adams. The British are terrified of this development and they instinctively wish it to be destroyed. The British must prevent the development of an Irish pan Nationalist ⁷⁵ Brendan Duddy interview, 11 June 2009. A ‘slight slip’, in that Duddy had revealed Albert Reynolds’ intentions. A ‘double slip’ by McLaren, in revealing that the British were not aware of Reynolds’ plans and that the proposed Declaration was a source of anxiety. ⁷⁶ Reynolds 2009, 298. ⁷⁷ Major 1999, 448. ⁷⁸ Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019; Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 224, 226.

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initiative representing the Republicans, SDLP Nationalists and the Coalition Government in the South. This is the position which the British cannot cope with diplomatically; 80% of the people of Ireland saying together, we want to sort out this problem.⁷⁹

The collapse of the back-channel now became tangled up with the political manouevering surrounding a possible joint declaration by the British and Irish Governments. In the same letter, Duddy made a suggestion for action: Albert Reynolds, John Hume and Gerry Adams should know that the Republicans have offered peace to the British . . . They do not have to be told the channel or the mechanisms used but they should be left in no doubt that this was not a one off throw of the dice, but was the culmination of many years of Republican ongoing dialogue with the British and finally the British were proved to be incapable of coping with peace in Ireland.

While Martin McGuinness expressed his ‘total distaste of breaking the secrecy position they had kept for years’,⁸⁰ Duddy was less hesitant. According to Duddy, he let John Hume know about the ceasefire offer shortly after the British had given a negative response: I was sitting in the office working . . . and John came in, he looked as if he had been up all night . . . John says, ‘can I have a cup of coffee?’ From 3.30 to 8.30 John drunk eleven mugs of black coffee to the point of [me] saying ‘John you must eat something.’ He asked Larry my son to get him forty Benson and Hedges. John smoked all the time he kept talking and talking and talking . . . and I kept wondering where he was coming from. I must say he was better than me that day . . . and he was saying, ‘[I’m under huge pressure] and I’ve done my best to try and move things on.’ All of that almost like a stage play was so powerful and so strong . . . When it came to 6 or 7 I said, ‘you must ring Pat’ [John Hume’s wife] and he said, ‘no no no’. There was no chance of him going . . . The forty fags were done, so he said, ‘can Larry [Duddy’s son] get more’, Larry goes out and gets more.

According to Duddy, Hume’s account of the pressure he was under was so powerful that he decided to let him know about the IRA offer:

⁷⁹ Typescript draft letter from ‘Roadrunner’ [Brendan Duddy] to ‘Penguin’ [‘Walter’/Martin McGuinness, 2 June 1993, POL 35/288. ⁸⁰ Duddy papers, POL 35 9/264, Duddy Papers.

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I said to John, ‘I’m going to show you something.’ I brought down the IRA ceasefire statement that was delivered to London . . . I did what Frank Lagan did to me and I put the statement down on the table and said I had to go out to make a couple of phone calls. John read the document, he didn’t ask for it or put it in his pocket or anything else. I came back in 7, 8, 9, or 10 minutes earlier and John was transformed. He was vibrant, he was up on his feet.⁸¹

Hume had been the target in previous weeks of ferocious condemnation directed at him by a number of commentators in the Republic of Ireland since the Hume– Adams talks had been exposed. As Duddy recalls it, this knowledge of the IRA ceasefire offer spurred Hume on in his efforts. A decade and a half later, in November 2009, Duddy wondered why John Hume had called to the house that day. He concluded that someone had given Hume a hint of the IRA ceasefire offer: One night about a month ago . . . it occurred to me that Hume had got some insight, not the detail and had come here, had drunk the coffee, smoked the cigarettes, had not rang Pat waiting for exactly what happened. He didn’t know the details, but he knew there was something that could be offered, and he needed it. I have spent time musing who could possibly have given him insight.⁸²

A great deal had been achieved in the channel but one of its greatest impacts now was that its unravelling and exposure helped to produce agreement on a joint declaration by the British and Irish governments.

The Downing Street Declaration In late October 1993, the British government moved to block further progress on a joint declaration based on the Hume–Adams document. They succeeded in getting the Irish government to issue a joint statement with them at a European Community summit in Brussels that month. It was, on the surface, a joint disowning and rejection by the two governments of the Hume–Adams initiative.⁸³ The Irish government understood it to be necessary to make the declaration more acceptable to unionists. The British government on the other hand seem to have regarded it as the ending of the initiative, and that’s how it looked to the ⁸¹ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009. The story was also told, from another angle, by his son Larry at ‘Can you keep a secret: family life with a secret peacemaker’. Public interview by the author with four members of the family of intermediary Brendan Duddy. NUI Galway, 25 October 2016. ⁸² Brendan Duddy interview, 27 November 2009. ⁸³ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 192–3, 208–9.

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public. The subsequent reaction in the Republic of Ireland was highly critical of this development and indicated strong public support for the idea of a joint declaration that incorporated the ideas Hume and Adams had been discussing. Thunderous applause greeted any mention of Hume’s name at the Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis in early November.⁸⁴ Faced with the danger of being seen as the betrayer of John Hume, Albert Reynolds had already renewed his efforts to secure British agreement to a joint declaration.⁸⁵ It was one of those rare occasions when public and political opinion in the Republic of Ireland—that 80 per cent of opinion to which Duddy had referred in his June 1993 letter to McGuinness—created direct pressure on the British government to move towards a compromise settlement. Tensions between the British and Irish governments intensified in October 1993 as the Irish tried to draw the British back towards a more active initiative while the British tried to bury the declaration idea, fearful of unionist opposition. On 23 October 1993, an IRA attack on the Shankill Road killed nine civilians and one of the IRA bombers when the IRA bomb exploded prematurely. It raised tensions even higher, sparking a wave of killings in the following weeks: twentyseven people were killed that month, the greatest death toll in a single month since the mid-1970s. The British government then took a different tack. On 25 November, John Major presented the Irish government with an entirely new text as a basis for further discussion, citing the need to secure unionist support for any declaration. It dispensed with the text the two governments had been discussing over the previous six months and made no reference to the key issue of selfdetermination.⁸⁶ In Seán Ó hUiginn’s view, this proposed new text ‘would have been a massive rebuff to whoever in the republican Movement was advocating a peace process . . . Albert Reynolds saw very clearly that the process was at an end if this was their considered position.’⁸⁷ It was at this crucial moment that details of the British back-channel to the IRA through Brendan Duddy burst into the public domain. After initial press reports in mid-November, Martin McGuinness confirmed publicly he had been in touch with British officials⁸⁸ and on Sunday 28 November, Eamonn Mallie reported the story in the Observer.⁸⁹ In an attempt to explain and defend the contact with the IRA, Sir Patrick Mayhew dramatically revealed the ‘conflict is over’ message in the House of Commons. Martin McGuinness responded by strongly and convincingly denying he had ever sent such a message, saying no one in Ireland with a ‘titter of wit’ would believe he had done so.⁹⁰ ⁸⁴ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁸ ⁸⁹ ⁹⁰

Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 217–20. ⁸⁵ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 219–21. Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 228–31. ⁸⁷ Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019. Rowan 1995, 59–64. Mallie, Eamonn, ‘Ministers covered up Sinn Féin dialogue’, The Observer, 28 November 1993. Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 2001; Powell, 2008; Taylor 1997, 2001.

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As Sir Patrick Mayhew prepared to address the House of Commons, there was a real prospect that the British government would have to abandon the strategy pursued since 1989. John Chilcot recalled the sense of deep uncertainty, and the subsequent sense of relief: The whole thing came to a head I think on the Monday after the Observer revelations . . . it wasn’t known whether the House of Commons would call for . . . [Patrick Mayhew’s] head on a platter and possibly John Major’s as well, instead of which the reverse happened. The whole of the House of Commons, or all of it that mattered, rose up to say ‘thank God. This is the right thing to be doing’ . . . my heart was in my mouth that Monday, same as Patrick Mayhew’s. I was in the House of Commons, in the official box and it was a wonderful moment actually.⁹¹

Far from shutting down the process, the revelations accelerated it: ‘It changed the politics very materially’, John Chilcot recalls, ‘Whether it was the intended effect of the Observer publishing their scoop I don’t know. But the effect was entirely positive.’ Standing in the official box that day, Chilcot felt a sense ‘of immense relief and coupled with, I think, something more positive, elation really, that it really looked as though the thing was going to take wing and who knows, succeed. It took a long time after that, but nonetheless, that was a turning point.’⁹² With almost three years of secret British communication with the IRA now exposed, the Irish government pressed the British as hard as they could, to issue a joint declaration, in meetings that were sometimes turbulent and angry. On 3 December the atmosphere’ was ‘ice-cold’ at a summit meeting in Dublin Castle between the British and Irish governments at which the Irish government expressed its anger at the revelations and condemned the hypocrisy of the British government in talking to Sinn Féin.⁹³ Reynolds and Major met alone for an hour and emerged from the meeting ‘looking very pale and very tense’. Reynolds reportedly told Irish officials ‘it went all right—I chewed his bollocks off and he took a few lumps outa me.’⁹⁴ Astonishingly, less than two weeks later, on 15 December, the two governments issued the Downing Street Declaration. The exposure of the back-channel had greatly strengthened the position of the Irish government while also strengthening the hand of those many key figures on the British side who wanted to advance the process. Crucially, the Declaration included the first ever formal recognition by the British government of a right of self-determination for ‘the people of the island of Ireland’: ⁹¹ John Chilcot interview, 25 May 2020. ⁹² John Chilcot interview, 25 May 2020. ⁹³ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 228, 232–8, 257; Major 1999, 451–2. ⁹⁴ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 257–62.

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The British Government agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.⁹⁵

The Declaration heavily qualified the concept of Irish self-determination. Unification could only take place with the consent of a majority in both the North and the Republic of Ireland. Republican critics correctly pointed out that it made no immediate practical difference given that a majority in the North continued to reject reunification. Still, it did go some way to meeting a key ideological demand of republicans. The demand for self-determination had been reformulated by the Provisionals more than twenty years earlier, in 1972, as a demand for ‘an acknowledgement of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from the British government’.⁹⁶ They had not demanded Irish reunification and they had emphasized not the mechanics of self-determination but the principle that there should be no ‘interference’ by the British government with the exercise of that right. The Downing Street Declaration proclaimed that Britain had no right to decide whether Ireland would be reunified or not, that this decision rested with the sovereign power of the Irish people, even if the mechanism by which that sovereign power would be exercised maintained the principle of majority consent in the North. This point was emphasized to Adams by his lawyer Paddy McGrory, who had accompanied him and Dave O’Connell to that first secret meeting with British representatives in Ballyarnett House in June 1972 (see C2.P60 above). He wrote to Adams, who respected his views, stressing the importance of the Downing Street Declaration: There is no room for doubt that the Declaration concedes the Irish have a right to self-determination, without external interference. The importance of this simply must not be underestimated . . . A pledge to the Unionists that they will never be coerced into a United Ireland changes its character depending on whether that pledge comes from a British or an Irish source. When the pledge comes from a British source, that is external interference with the Irish right to selfdetermination, and constitutes a veto. When the pledge comes from an Irish source, however, that is merely the Irish exercising their right to selfdetermination in the way they have freely chosen, and without any external

⁹⁵ The Joint Declaration of 15 December 1993 (Downing Street Declaration) https://www.dfa.ie/ media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/ourrolesandpolicies/northernireland/peace-process–joint-declaration1993-1.pdf ⁹⁶ Irish Press, 11 March 1972, p. 1; The Irish Times, 11 March 1972, p. 1.

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interference. The Irish, as they are entitled to do, are by their own wish conferring a concession on a section of the nation.⁹⁷

The Declaration had gone a considerable way towards meeting the central ideological demand of the Provisionals, as initially formulated in 1971–72, for ‘an acknowledgement of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from the British government’.⁹⁸

Edging Towards Peace Perhaps the greatest paradox of the back-channel contact between Britain and the IRA in the 1990s is that its exposure and collapse helped to break the logjam and opened the way to an inclusive process. The British government now had to be much more responsive to the Irish government than it might have been if it had reached agreement directly with the republicans. After the exposure of the channel in late 1993, British Prime Minister John Major ‘regretted the loss of the backchannel’ despite the embarrassment surrounding its exposure.⁹⁹ Its closure had drastically curtailed his government’s understanding of the politics of the republican leadership and it made them more reliant on the Irish government. When the IRA finally announced ‘a complete cessation of military operations’ in August 1994, it took the British intelligence agencies by surprise: John Major first learned of it in a phone call from Albert Reynolds.¹⁰⁰ Even after the August 1994 ceasefire, there remained great differences in emphasis between the British and Irish governments. In the early stages, the British government demanded that the IRA declare that their ceasefire was permanent, while the Irish government worked from the beginning on the assumption it was permanent and urged the British to do the same. Several weeks after the ceasefire, John Major stated that he was prepared to proceed on the ‘working assumption’ that it was permanent, but a few months later a new obstacle to the inclusion of Sinn Féin emerged. In March 1995, Patrick Mayhew announced in Washington DC that Sinn Féin would not be allowed to take part in all-party talks until the IRA had decommissioned at least some weapons, to the frustration of some of the senior Irish and British civil servants at the centre of the process.¹⁰¹

⁹⁷ Mallie and McKittrick 1996, 293. ⁹⁸ Irish Press, 11 March 1972, p. 1; The Irish Times, 11 March 1972, p. 1. ⁹⁹ Major 1999. ¹⁰⁰ Mallie and McKittrick 2001, 200. Irish Republican Army (IRA) Ceasefire Statement, 31 August 1994. Online at https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/ira31894.htm ¹⁰¹ Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019; Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010; McKittrick and McVea 2012, 234–9.

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For Irish diplomat Seán Ó hUiginn, the demand for decommissioning in advance of talks was a deliberate ‘wrecking’ tactic ‘done by someone who basically wanted the thing to fail’. ‘The problem with it was that Gerry Adams couldn’t deliver’, Ó hUiginn points out. ‘If Adams had insisted on it [to the IRA], the peace process would have broken, absolutely. So you have to say, what are the motivations of somebody who puts a deal-breaker on the table as a precondition.’¹⁰² He suspected that it reflected the influence of figures opposed to the process on the British side.¹⁰³ In 2016, he told journalist Trevor Birney it was the ‘single most serious mistake’ made by any of the governments involved in the peace process.¹⁰⁴ Quentin Thomas, Political Director at the NIO and leader of the British talks team later expressed regret that his government’s response had not been as ‘imaginative’ as promised: Where I have some sympathy with them [Sinn Féin] is that there was a sort of line from outside, ‘If you only renounce violence we’ll be imaginative, you’ll be amazed at how imaginative we are’. But actually, when they did make their, what for them was a major historical statement, we said ‘well actually I’m not sure you mean it. You haven’t quite said, you haven’t used the word permanent, have you?’ We were quite niggling about it, whereas we implied we were going to be frightfully imaginative . . . . when they made their statement in August ’94 I think it was our side started to quibble about the terms. Now we weren’t wrong to do that because it wasn’t absolutely clear and subsequent events showed that it wasn’t clear because we had a bomb at Canary Wharf and so on. But we then got ourselves in a position of saying ‘well, of course if you really mean it, the best way you can demonstrate that is give up your arms’ . . . it’s not a wrong position but it was kind of, I suppose the word I’d use, it was a bit clumsy. Because it then became this thing that became central to the process, but one couldn’t kind of get around it . . . And the Unionists too were sucked in because I remember when Trimble was elected and he was asked about this, he said quite rightly ‘well this is not my point, this is the British government who have been going on about this, go and talk to them about it.’ But of course he couldn’t sustain that. In the end he had to make it his own as well. He had to become one of the principal proponents of the view that arms must be given up . . . the talks from ’96 to ’98 were bedevilled by this issue. It was the thing we had to get around the whole time and of course it continued for long after the Good Friday Agreement. And I think that was not very clever, actually, it was rather clumsy.¹⁰⁵

¹⁰² Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019. ¹⁰³ Seán Ó hUiginn interview, 23 January 2019. ¹⁰⁴ Trevor Birney (Director) (2016) The Docklands Bomb: Executing Peace. BBC Northern Ireland, 8 February 2016. ¹⁰⁵ Quentin Thomas interview, 7 December 2010. See also his interview with Graham Spencer (Spencer 2008, 467–8).

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The election of John Bruton as Taoiseach in December 1994 compounded the problem: leader of Fine Gael and an admirer of Home Rule politician John Redmond, he was much more hostile to the militant republican tradition than Reynolds was. When he took office, he backed the British position on decommissioning, distancing himself from the position of the Fianna Fáil–led government he had replaced.¹⁰⁶ In the face of continuing delays over Sinn Féin’s entry to talks, a powerful section of the IRA leadership demanded that the armed campaign be resumed.¹⁰⁷ Republican leaders who had advocated for the ceasefire now acquiesced in a resumption of the armed campaign rather than countenance a split that might destroy the movement. It did great damage to the political leaders’ credibility with important external allies, but it showed how deep a dilemma they faced. On Friday 9 February 1996 the IRA ended its ceasefire by setting off a huge bomb in London’s Docklands that caused £150 million worth of damage and killed two people. The IRA statement ending the ceasefire blamed the British government and Unionists, declaring that ‘the British government acted in bad faith with Mr Major and the Unionist leaders squandering this unprecedented opportunity to resolve the conflict.’¹⁰⁸ A few weeks after the Docklands bombing, former senior Northern Ireland civil servant Maurice Hayes was at an Irish Association conference in Oxford where he suggested to David Goodall, one of the British architects of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, that it might be helpful if Sinn Féin were given the opportunity to talk ‘to someone who could represent the British view unofficially and privately and who would listen to what they had to say’. On 6 March 1996, Hayes and Goodall met accordingly with Gerry Kelly, Mitchell McLaughlin, and Siobhán O’Hanlon of Sinn Féin in Clonard Monastery in west Belfast. Goodall reported that the ‘question of mutual mistrust was a central theme of the ensuing discussion, which lasted nearly one and a half hours’. His report to the British government conveys the message that despite the resumption of the campaign the IRA was still focused on a compromise peace settlement: Kelly reacted sharply to the suggestion that the ending of the ceasefire should be taken as evidence that the IRA’s objective was to prevent any further progress towards a negotiated settlement and that it reflected a preference for the armed struggle as an end in itself. He said that this was a complete misunderstanding of the IRA’s position. There was no question of bloodlust: the IRA wanted a peaceful settlement but British procrastination and bad faith since the 1994

¹⁰⁶ English 2003, 325–36; Hennessey 2000; Mac Ginty 1999; O’Kane 2007. ¹⁰⁷ Moloney 2002, 438–41. ¹⁰⁸ Irish Republican Army (IRA) Statement ending the Ceasefire, 9 February 1996. Online at https:// cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/ira9296.htm

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ceasefire had made them despair of the peaceful process getting anywhere. The British, in their long colonial history, had repeatedly practiced armed struggle themselves: it was inconceivable that they did not understand why the IRA had recourse to it.¹⁰⁹

Kelly was asserting that the IRA was using violence as a ‘political instrument’ to pursue political goals in much the same way that the British government had done in its many wars and counter-insurgency campaigns across the globe. The IRA would wage a campaign for the following eighteen months, but at a lower level than previously and focused on targets in Great Britain, attempting to exert pressure for a return to talks. They had little reason, however, to end the campaign while the Conservative government was still in power. It made more sense to deliver a second ceasefire to a new Labour Prime Minister in order to secure the maximum political impact. The IRA finally renewed its ceasefire on 20 July 1997, around ten weeks after the British general election brought Tony Blair’s Labour government to power with a massive majority. Just two weeks later, on 5 August, the new Northern Ireland Secretary of State Mo Mowlam met with Gerry Adams, an indication that this time the British government would move much more quickly to include Sinn Féin in the political process. Eight months later, on 10 April 1998, the Belfast Agreement, or Good Friday Agreement as it became popularly known, was signed after intensive talks chaired by US Special Envoy, and former Senator, George Mitchell. This compromise peace settlement would include Sinn Féin in government and it opened the way to police reform, the removal of troops from the streets, and the early release of paramilitary prisoners. The republican leadership made fundamental compromises in signing up to the Agreement. In doing so, it accepted a split in the IRA: that split, however, was far less serious and damaging than it might have been.

Towards a New Relationship The back-channel may have collapsed in public acrimony in late 1993, but it had helped to establish the foundations for the agreement that followed. The argument within the IRA for a ceasefire to facilitate talks had been won. The argument within the British state for an attempt to negotiate a settlement with republicans had been significantly advanced. This was no trivial achievement at a time when powerful forces in the British state continued to oppose contact. Crucial to those developments was the back-channel’s generation of opportunities for cooperation ¹⁰⁹ ‘Meeting at Clonard Monastery Belfast Wednesday 6 March 1996’, POL 41/26/16, Maurice Hayes Papers, NUI Galway.

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between those involved on both sides, nurturing trust and beginning to change attitudes and increase mutual understanding. Public attention can often force parties to take up positions aimed at generating public approval rather than focusing on the achievement of a negotiated settlement. Freed of this ‘audience effect’, contact in back-channel communication could be much more focused on problem-solving.¹¹⁰ The operation of the channel required the development of a high degree of understanding of the limits which the other party operated within, as well as limited trust and active coordination. John Chilcot once put it well: [I]t’s a process of mutual understanding, where, and it’s not two static positions of course, is it? It’s a process. Can we come together, and can we build enough trust and confidence about the other side’s intentions, the limits around their freedom to move, pace of movement, direction of movement. Both sides are doing it.¹¹¹

Both sides learned well the constraints within which the other party was operating, and gradually became willing to make the moves and concessions that would allow the other party to move in turn. They also came to rely on the judgement of the other party as to how far they could move. It was the site at which the parties began to build a new and less conflictual relationship. That relationship would develop and strengthen further as contact moved into the open. Ultimately, the British government and Sinn Féin, in certain ways and on certain occasions, would come to cooperate and coordinate more closely with each other than either of them did with any of the other parties to negotiation.¹¹²

¹¹⁰ Wanis-St. John 2006, 20. ¹¹² Powell 2008.

¹¹¹ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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Conclusion Negotiation, Transformation, and Strategic Action

Why did it take so long to negotiate an end to the Northern Ireland conflict? And what implications does the answer have for efforts to resolve protracted violent conflicts elsewhere? The back-channel is a crucial locus of explanation, for it brings the reasons for both the failure of early efforts to end the conflict and the eventual success of the peace process in the 1990s into much sharper focus. Analysis of the back-channel also serves to cut through the public rhetoric of the parties, thus allowing the positions they adopted and the choices they made to be more fully understood. Contextualizing these efforts as part of a long bargaining process in which violence, political action, and negotiation were fully integrated helps to explain why peace initiatives failed even when the key parties were open to compromise. For some scholars the peace process was the outcome of a ‘Mutually Hurting Stalemate’—compromise was a rational choice for the two key protagonists because neither could expect military victory and both were suffering from the ongoing violence.¹ Others maintain the British achieved a military defeat of the IRA, sometimes defined as a kind of stalemate in which the British only had to get a ‘draw’ to win, as Thomas Hennessey puts it.² In contrast, some unionist and conservative opponents of the peace process represent it as a ‘capitulation’ to IRA violence, a ‘surrender process’ rather than a peace process.³ These various analyses represent the peace process—including the occasion or timing of it, in the early 1990s, and its outcome—as strongly shaped by the military balance of forces. Time matters of course. By the 1990s it was more difficult than in the 1970s for the protagonists to argue that one more push would, in time, secure outright victory—whether the argument was made by IRA volunteers who argued for a ‘Tet Offensive’ or RUC Special Branch officers who believed that they could defeat the IRA either with current policies or by ‘taking the gloves off ’. However, the military balance of forces cannot alone explain the occasion of the peace process.

¹ Dixon 2011, 2012, 2018. ² Bew and Frampton 2012; Hennessey 2000, 220; Moloney 2007, 590. ³ Views discussed in Dixon 2011, 2012.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0012

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Notwithstanding the lessons of hard experience, the most important conditions for a settlement were in place many years before an agreement was reached to end the violence. Both the IRA leadership and the British government realized at a very early stage that the conflict would not end in a simple victory for one side or the other.⁴ And from the outset the IRA displayed flexibility on its core ideological goals, despite its fierce public rhetoric. Hence, the failure to settle earlier has to be understood in relation to a multitude of factors that shaped negotiating outcomes, including intra-party struggle and the structure and dynamics of the organizations involved. Examining back-channel communication and negotiation in Northern Ireland throws into sharp relief the elements that contributed to the failure and ultimate success of efforts to develop a peace process that could lead to agreed institutional arrangements for government. When parties engage with one another, they must decide how far they are prepared to move. Leaderships on both sides begin hard bargaining within their own organizations, and their relationship with each other starts to change. In the process, parties are reshaped. Only at the site of engagement is it possible to track these developments and delineate their limits. Analysing negotiations illuminates the dynamics of intra-party struggle, the agency of leadership and rank and file alike, the strategic dilemmas involved, the independent effects of mediation, the transformation of relationships, and the distinctive role of secrecy in facilitating compromise. By focusing on the backchannel, some general observations can be made about the relationship between political violence and negotiation which can enhance understanding of the factors that make for peace settlements. Not least, a focus on the site of engagement enables reassessment of one of the most influential explanations of how and why peace is made—the Mutually Hurting Stalemate.

A Mutually Hurting Stalemate When both parties reach the point where they can no longer escalate their way to victory and the sunk costs plus the countering efforts of the other side make for a costly deadlock, the point of a mutually hurting stalemate has arrived. When this realization has taken hold, the situation is ripe for resolution. I. William Zartman, ‘Bargaining and Conflict Reduction’ (1996), p. 276

⁴ A point on which Dixon (2012, 310); O’Kane (2006, 272); and Tonge, Shirlow, and McAuley (2011, 15) all concur.

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The idea that a Mutually Hurting Stalemate (MHS) has to be in place before a conflict is ‘ripe’ for settlement remains a central orienting concept for research on negotiated peace settlements and international mediation. It has strongly influenced scholarship on the Irish peace process.⁵ However, the concepts of Ripeness and the Mutually Hurting Stalemate as originally introduced by Ira William Zartman in 1989, have since been considerably modified by scholars, not least by Zartman himself. It is argued now that a hurting stalemate is not sufficient to generate compromise: there needs to be a Mutually Enticing Opportunity and a Way Out, that is, an attractive alternative to continued violence and a clear pathway forward. Ripeness has been reassessed at a deeper level too, reframed as a matter of perception rather than a set of objectively existing background conditions: ripeness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Parties have to believe they have reached a stalemate in order for a conflict to be ripe for settlement, and these perceptions can be shaped and influenced by the other parties to conflict and by external mediators.⁶ Despite these modifications, constraint and pressure—that is, conditions pressing parties towards settlement—still dominate the concept of a Mutually Hurting Stalemate. Dean Pruitt’s concept of ‘readiness’, a revision of ripeness theory, places greater emphasis on leadership and agency. It suggests that ‘motivation’—a sense that the costs of conflict outweigh the benefits—and ‘optimism’ about the outcome of negotiation are necessary before parties will seriously attempt to reach agreement.⁷ In the Northern Irish case, ripeness and readiness were present decades before the conflict was actually settled. As early as 1972, the view that compromise was the only way to end the conflict and that a politically worthwhile victory was not attainable was shared by pivotal figures on both the republican and British sides, some of whom would remain in leadership positions for over three decades. There was a certain ‘optimism’ too, in the awareness of the other side’s capacity for movement. For sure, over the following quarter century there was an ebb and flow in the debates over these issues within both parties, over whether a compromise settlement was either possible or necessary. But even when the voices arguing for military victory were at their loudest, there were always other voices, even if those other voices softened to a whisper on the British side after 1976 and among republicans during the push to replace the leadership of Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell in the early 1980s. Still, at the height of confrontation during the 1980 hunger strike, when the two parties seemed further apart than ever, Robert Armstrong, then Cabinet Secretary and one of the most powerful and influential British civil servants, suggested to Margaret Thatcher that they should ‘find a way ⁵ See, for example, Connolly and Doyle 2018; Dixon 2018; O’Kane 2006; Pruitt 2007; Spencer 2008; Tonge, Shirlow, and McAuley 2011. ⁶ Zartman 2000. ⁷ Pruitt 2005, 2007.

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of getting the strikers and the PIRA off the hook’: that is, they should not aim to inflict a crushing defeat on them.⁸ A few months later he reported Northern Ireland Office Permanent Undersecretary Sir Kenneth Stowe’s view that: ‘There is reason to believe that the PIRA have been thinking seriously about an end to the campaign of violence, but feel they need a success, an avenue to pursue their aims politically, and something more on the prison regime.’⁹ Armstrong had long personal experience of back-channel contact with the IRA. He had reported to Edward Heath on William Whitelaw’s talks with the IRA at Cheyne Walk in 1972; he had been involved in contact surrounding the Niedermeyer kidnapping in 1974, and he had served as Harold Wilson’s Principal Private Secretary during the secret talks with the IRA in 1975. He was instrumental too in persuading Margaret Thatcher of the merits of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. And so, the idea that the British government might moderate its position in order to facilitate the ending of the IRA campaign—the principle that would underpin any compromise peace settlement—remained in circulation at the highest levels of the state even during the most intense phases of conflict. ‘Ripeness’ and the associated ideas of Mutually Hurting Stalemate and Mutually Enticing Opportunity all turn on coercive capacity and the prospect of a viable compromise. A party that believes it can overwhelm an opponent militarily at an acceptable political and economic cost is unlikely to seek a compromise settlement. But the structural emphasis of the approach, even when modified by acknowledgement of the importance of perceptions, provides insufficient space for agency. Perception does, however, provide a starting point for a more agential approach to settlement. Perceptions are an object of struggle, and political actors work to shape them. Jennifer Todd has argued that ‘cognitive and ideological assumptions’ were serious ‘obstacles to change’ when it came to British policy on Northern Ireland. A precondition for the peace process, accordingly, was the crossing by British state actors of ‘A recognition threshold . . . where the necessity and possibility of state change [were] recognised’. The peace process thus required ‘considerable strategic effort . . . to change interpretations’.¹⁰ This was equally true of the republican movement. As Eamonn O’Kane points out, there were serious divisions on both the British and republican sides in the 1990s as to whether a Mutually Hurting Stalemate and/or a Mutually Enticing Opportunity existed.¹¹ Within both the IRA and the British state, key actors had to bring their organizations across the recognition threshold, before they could cross the ‘agenda threshold where change is prioritized and its form planned’.¹² That required them to make the case to their own organizations and their support base that

⁸ Robert Armstrong to PM, 7 November 1980, PREM 19/282, UK National Archives. ⁹ Robert Armstrong to Alexander on points made by Kenneth Stowe after the election of Bobby Sands, 13 April 1981, PREM 19/503, UK National Archives. ¹⁰ Todd 2013, 3–4. ¹¹ O’Kane 2006, 274. ¹² Todd 2013, 4.

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there existed both a Hurting Stalemate and an Enticing Opportunity (the ‘mutual’ aspect was less important when making the argument to one’s own constituency). And that required leadership, alliance-building, and commitment of time, intellectual energy, and resources.

Intra-party Struggles and Central Control Peace was made in Northern Ireland between complex bureaucratic organizations, not communities or nations, and only an analysis of those organizations can explain the timing of the settlement. Among the most important changes between the 1970s and the 1990s were changes in the character of those parties, including the depth of internal divisions and the levels of centralized control. If the outbreak and escalation of civil war is intensely localized and uneven, settlement needs to be national, requiring the upholding of agreements by relatively unified and disciplined organizations responsive to central control. Internal divisions set the limits of action for any political organization, and changes in the nature and scale of those divisions made a peace settlement more viable for both the Provisional IRA and the British state in the 1990s than it had been in the 1970s. The Provisional IRA began life as a decentralized organization, rushed into unexpectedly sharp and rapid escalation because of the force of local dynamics that it could not master or control. Internal divisions and weak central control are crucial to explaining why the 1972 and 1975 talks failed despite the IRA leadership’s desire to negotiate a compromise settlement. Thereafter, centralized control of the IRA began to tighten up with the establishment of a Northern Command in late 1976.¹³ Much to the dissatisfaction of some local commanders, the leadership continued to strengthen its control in the 1980s, and even more so in the approach to the 1994 ceasefire.¹⁴ The assertion of tight control over local units and the development of more robust bureaucratic structures were critical to the IRA’s successful participation in the peace process of the 1990s. The strength of the leadership was also important. By the early-1980s, a powerful and unified duo, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, were the public leaders of the republican movement. They maintained a disciplined, unified stance, and enjoyed huge authority within the different branches of the movement. This gave the British government confidence that they could deliver on commitments: key civil servant John Chilcot recalled in 2010 ‘that you could trust the judgement of Adams, McGuinness, Kelly and company as to what they could do . . . If they were ready to make a move or adopt some words or something you didn’t then seriously question can they deliver on it.’¹⁵ ¹³ Taylor 1997, 213. ¹⁴ Moloney 2002, 156, 160. ¹⁵ John Chilcot interview, 8 December 2010.

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The British state was a far larger, more disparate, and more complex organization: the divisions ran much deeper and were more difficult to manage. Nonetheless, there were analogous changes on the British side. Crucially, the state’s control over local security forces increased greatly between the early 1970s and the 1990s. In the mid-1970s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees could not fully trust the RUC or the UDR—a locally recruited and overwhelmingly Protestant regiment of the British Army—to enforce British government policies.¹⁶ The RUC in particular presented an obstacle to maintenance of the IRA ceasefire in 1975. Increased professionalization of policing and the increased institutionalization of Direct Rule from the late 1970s facilitated much stronger central control of the RUC. When the force stood firm in dealing with loyalist protests against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, it demonstrated that even when faced with strong opposition from unionists, the RUC would act as an agent of the central state. From the early 1980s, the UDR was reduced in size before being merged with the Royal Irish Regiment in 1992.¹⁷ These measures served to reduce its relative importance within the local security apparatus. These changes occurred in parallel with an incremental weakening of unionist leverage from the mid-1970s onwards, evident in the contrast between the successful campaign against the power-sharing executive in 1974 and the failure of the campaign against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. By the early 1990s, then, the British government had achieved a new level of control over its forces in Northern Ireland. Changes in leadership occurred on the British side too. In 1975 when Prime Minister Harold Wilson had launched his secret peace initiative, his powers were failing and he was nearing the end of his career. He had a wafer-thin majority in Parliament, and he was presiding over a divided cabinet. A stronger and fresher leader with a more secure position might well have been able to make more of the opportunities presented. John Major’s personal commitment to the search for a compromise was important in advancing the process in the 1990s. Nevertheless, his government’s dependence on the Ulster Unionist Party in 1992–93 fatally narrowed his room for manoeuvre. ‘How Terrorism ends’, a 1999 report by the United States Institute of Peace, concludes that there are two conditions for successful negotiations between a government and an insurgent group: a period of self-evaluation by the insurgent group, and a government with a strong popular mandate. Although there were others factors conducive to peace when Tony Blair came to power in 1997, the strength of his position in his party—which he had led to power for the first time in eighteen years—and in parliament, where he had an overwhelming majority, gave a massive boost to the prospects for peace. A new,

¹⁶ Rees to Wilson, 28 October 1974, PREM 16/151, UK National Archives. ¹⁷ Ryder 1991; Phoenix 2017.

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energetic, and secure leader with a strong popular mandate, Blair was able to drive the process forward. The contrast with Harold Wilson’s position in 1975 is stark.

Strategic Dilemmas The strategic interaction approach developed by James Jasper and others provides a useful framework for analysing the dilemmas that the parties to conflict in Northern Ireland faced and the strategic choices that they made as part of a dynamic process of interaction with other actors.¹⁸ Both the republican leadership and the British government faced a series of dilemmas. One of the most important, in Jasper’s phrase, was a Dilemma of Shifting Goals: ‘Compromise . . . often allows limited victories at the cost of more sweeping ones. Such shifts are usually controversial, as movements can factionalize into pragmatists and hard-core believers.’¹⁹ For the republican leadership, there was no point in reaching a compromise agreement with the British if a significant section of its base rejected it and the conflict continued regardless: they were determined to minimize the scale of any ‘split’ that took place. And it was a dilemma for the British government too: key figures were conscious of potential resistance by unionists or from within the security forces that might make it impossible to implement a negotiated compromise: militant unionists, after all, had brought down the power-sharing institutions that resulted from the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974. Leaderships had to maintain control of their forces as they shifted their goals. A key British negotiator, Jonathan Powell, has commented that if the destination had been clear at the outset, republican leaders would never have been able to bring their movement with them.²⁰ One might make a similar remark about the British government: if the ultimate outcome of prisoner releases, major police reform, and Sinn Féin in government had been set out at the very start of the process, it too might have found it difficult to win the support of the Ulster Unionist Party and the acquiescence of the security forces. The extent of unity, and disunity, became apparent at the site of engagement, but it was a site, too, for the forging of organizational unity and the testing of discipline. Negotiation crystallized relations within the parties to conflict as well as between them. Also important for both parties was what Jasper terms ‘Naughty or Nice’ or the ‘Chaos Dilemma’. Violence can repel potential allies, cause a loss of legitimacy, and limit public support. If this dilemma was a central issue for the IRA, the British government also faced a version of it—it had to choose between continuing with intensively militarized policing that drew criticism from Northern nationalists, undermined the British partnership with the Republic of Ireland, and, ¹⁸ Duyvendak and Jasper 2015; Jasper 2004; 2006; 2012; Demetriou et al. 2014, 5. ¹⁹ Jasper 2004, 8. ²⁰ Jonathan Powell interview, 2 May 2013.

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sporadically, disconcerted allies, on the one hand, and making the compromises that would remove the need for such security, on the other. Those dilemmas manifested themselves in internal struggles on both sides. Observing that ‘[Strategic] dilemmas are frequently transferred into conflicts [within organizations], as different individuals or factions favor different choices’, Jasper argues that those conflicts or internal debates, in turn, illuminate the dilemmas: ‘Participants may disagree permanently, say, over the relative importance of different audiences, a disagreement that may surface in decision after decision and perhaps lead ultimately to schism.’²¹ In the Irish case, negotiation with the opposing party acted as a catalyst for those internal debates and disagreements. In working strategically towards an inclusive and stable peace settlement, based on their limited but important shared interest in an end to violent conflict, both the British government and republicans faced dilemmas that required hard choices and the exercise of agency and leadership. At a time when violent conflict inhibited direct public contact, back-channel negotiation allowed the two parties to coordinate their actions, and to assist each other in resolving strategic dilemmas and in overcoming intra-party resistance to compromise.

Transforming Relationships Convicted in 1977 of the murder of a member of the RUC, IRA Volunteer Leo Green served over seventeen years in the H-Blocks, during which time he participated in the blanket and no-wash protests and the 1980 hunger strike; he went fifty-three days without food. On his release in 1995, Green joined the Sinn Féin negotiating team. In a cramped little office on the Falls Road in West Belfast, he met with a party official who pointed from behind his desk to a box full of paperbacks with a garish yellow and red cover. He told Green to take a copy and to read it. The book was Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury’s guide to integrative bargaining. Green took a copy but never read it, and he doubted that most others on the team did either.²² Still, the acquisition of multiple copies of a book on bargaining reflects a concerted effort by the republican leadership to promote an integrative approach to negotiation. As such, the box of books is a marker of the distance republicans had travelled in their understanding of negotiation since that first encounter with the British government in Cheyne Walk in 1972 when Seán Mac Stiofáin, had ‘open[ed] the bidding at three days and take[n] it up bit by bit’, taking a hard ‘distributive’ approach to bargaining on the advice of trade union officials.²³

²¹ Jasper 2004, 10. ²² Leo Green interview, 15 November 2016. ²³ Mac Stiofáin 1975, 284.

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Over time, Green became a key figure in the Sinn Féin leadership team. He was later appointed as the party’s Political Director at Stormont, negotiating with the DUP and other parties after they formed a power-sharing government in 2007.²⁴ He describes how contact with the DUP helped to build a new relationship between the opposing parties now that large-scale violence was over: You start off at these meetings it’s very much two sides of the table, you know, and very much watching your words and watching their words and a bit of pointscoring going on as well . . . So, the early meetings would have been combative to some degree. There were some very angry meetings. You’d have been working very much to prepare Sinn Féin’s positions, nobody giving any obvious ground at a meeting, and then the other side of the table would have been kind of in a similar vein. But as time wore on you got to know people, and you got to know them on first name terms and there’d be a bit of craic crept into the meetings, and a bit of banter and slagging.

There were tensions, particularly when one side or the other rowed back on commitments because of grassroots resistance. But there was a slow and incremental change in relationships: The whole process developed to the point where . . . I had a fairly good relationship with NIO officials and Dublin officials by the end of it all . . . so over the years you develop that . . . and similarly with the other parties, the same process. I got to know fairly well a couple of DUP advisors . . . to the point where, you’re . . . in and out of their office without speaking notes, without preparing it . . . so it becomes more informal meetings and off the cuff conversations.

A vast gulf seems to separate the extreme tactic of hunger-striking from the pragmatic give and take of political bargaining. But the role of Green and many other former IRA Volunteers in this new phase of political bargaining and party politics affirms von Clausewitz’s insistence on the continuities between armed conflict and peaceful political contention: ‘war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different . . . The main lines along which military events progress . . . are political lines that continue throughout the war into the subsequent peace.’²⁵ Green was involved in relatively open engagement with unionists and the British government, not in a back-channel where a premium was placed on secrecy. Still, the transformative effect of ongoing contact, negotiation, and cooperation that he describes is similar to the effects of contact through the

²⁴ Moriarty (2014a, 2014b).

²⁵ von Clausewitz 1976 [1832], 605.

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back-channel from 1972 onwards. During the long decades when open contact was impossible, back-channel contact allowed those on opposing sides to build mutually beneficial relationships in the most difficult of circumstances, and to develop a degree of mutual understanding. If republican veterans of the hunger strikes such as Leo Green engaged in new and more positive ways with former enemies during the peace process, so too did some of those who had been on the other side during that bitterest of confrontations. John Blelloch, Deputy Secretary in the NIO, had been the unyielding face of the British state during the hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981. He had overseen the implementation of a government policy aimed at defeating the prisoners by allowing them to die one after the other until they gave up. His involvement was direct and intimate. On 10 December 1980, he went into the prison for a onehour meeting with the seven hunger strikers, then on their forty-fourth day without food, to tell them there would be no concessions.²⁶ This contributed to the collapse of the first hunger strike a week later. At 2:00 a.m. on 20 July 1981, after six prisoners had died during the second hunger strike, Blelloch visited the prison and went from cell to cell to speak individually with the five remaining hunger strikers. He offered to meet with them as a group—without their Commanding Officer Bik McFarlane—to explain the British position. It was an attempt to defeat the strike by bypassing the IRA leadership, and the hunger strikers refused.²⁷ Four of the five men he spoke to that night would die in the following weeks. There is a striking symmetry in the role he played during the peace process, almost twenty years later. In 1998, he came out of retirement to manage the most controversial element of the Good Friday Agreement. As co-chair of the Northern Ireland Sentence Review Commission between 1998 and 2000, Blelloch would oversee the early release of almost five hundred paramilitary prisoners. Once again, he would determine the fate of prisoners—but now on the basis of a recognition of their political status and affiliations and in the context of a wider political settlement.

The Power of Secrecy The First World War, which many politicians, historians, and commentators attributed to the ‘evils of secret diplomacy’ sparked an outcry against diplomacy behind closed doors (Low, 1918: 210). Millions had marched to their deaths, due in part to secret treaties of which they knew nothing. The critique retains force today. Advocates of transparency in negotiations to end conflict value openness

²⁶ Hennessey 2014, 107–8.

²⁷ Hennessey 2014, 379–81.

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on the basis that it serves the cause of peace. But what if transparency makes it harder to achieve peace and increases the risks of war? Writing in 1918, as defeat loomed for Germany, sociologist and theorist of power Max Weber advocated increased transparency in domestic politics and blamed Germany’s disastrous conduct of the war partly on its lack of democracy. But he had a very different view of secrecy when it came to peace-making and foreign relations. Criticizing the view ‘that conducting things in public, particularly diplomacy . . . will always operate in favour of peace’, he argued that ‘making things public . . . can seriously interfere with the objectivity and unprejudiced character of current deliberations, thus actually endangering or preventing peace’ (emphasis in the original).²⁸ Indeed, many commentators who fiercely criticized secret treaties after the First World war recognized the value of negotiating in secret. Maurice Low was caustically critical of ‘the vice of secret diplomacy’, but he insisted on the validity of certain kinds of secrecy: Secret negotiation is not only proper, but, in many cases, absolutely essential; it is so necessary that if negotiations were not kept secret few treaties could be concluded and the negotiators would always be hampered . . . Secrecy, therefore, in the early stages of negotiation is perfectly proper.²⁹

While secrecy is no more a panacea than transparency, Weber’s argument for the use of secrecy in the pursuit of peace is largely confirmed by the scholarship on back-channel negotiation and the use of secrecy in peace processes.³⁰ It can be extraordinarily difficult to make peace in the glare of public attention or even if knowledge is shared with all of one’s own senior colleagues. Back-channel negotiation is central to peace processes for this very reason. Weber’s argument that full transparency in peace negotiations can be a threat to peace has stood the test of time. Certainly, secret contact can make it possible to determine if a compromise is possible and to make enough progress to convince those who have opposed engagement of its value. It can be crucial in allowing parties to move past a roadblock that simply could not be navigated in front of others on their own side. ³¹ Dean Pruitt points out that back-channel negotiators, unhindered by sceptical colleagues, can push negotiations forward to the stage where opponents of compromise are presented with a fait accompli.³² The backchannel in the Irish case was a locus not just for communication but also for the generation and propagation of new ideas, a site where the intermediary for whom a settlement was the overriding priority exercised a certain independent power. That power derived in large part from the accumulation of information in that

²⁸ Weber 1994 [1918], 186. ²⁹ Low 1918, 212. ³⁰ Bjola and Murray 2016; Lieberfeld 2008; Pruitt 2008; Wanis-St. John 2006, 2011. ³¹ Wanis-St. John 2006. ³² Pruitt 2008.

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privileged and protected space between the parties: Duddy, the intermediary, could seal it in metaphorical boxes, to be opened at an opportune time, when sharing knowledge, with one side or another, might further the project of settlement. Secret contact does not always work, but it allows for a clarity of communication that has immense practical value and allows states to engage without conceding legitimacy. It allows one side to test another side’s reliability, trustworthiness, and authority. Ultimately, however, it is more than just a mechanism for clear communication between parties to conflict. It creates a space in which parties learn how far they can move and are forced to finalize their own positions, making sure they stay aligned with their public positions but moving gradually away from uncompromising rhetoric. If a cooperative dynamic emerges in many negotiations, it is a defining feature of back-channel negotiations, characterized, as they are, by a shared commitment to secrecy and the exclusion of internal opponents. Secrecy intensifies an aspect of negotiation that has been well-noted in the literature: the growth of a sense of mutual solidarity and joint action at the intersection and the resultant cooperation in moving forward the positions of their respective parties.³³ Above all, a back-channel, when it works, is a means of transforming relationships between opponents in the most intractable conflicts.³⁴ Parties, working together on a shared project of secrecy, develop limited trust, learn about the limits to which their counterparts can go, and can begin to develop a new and less confrontational relationship.

³³ Walton and McKersie 1991, 230, 298–9. ³⁴ Lederach 2003; Putnam and Carcasson 1997: 252.

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Epilogue Diaries of a Long-Distance Runner

I ran to a steady jog-trot rhythm, and soon it was so smooth that I forgot I was running, and I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out, and my lungs didn’t seem to be working at all, and my heart stopped that wicked thumping I always get at the beginning of a run. Because you see I never race at all; I just run, and somehow I know that if I forget I’m racing and only jog-trot along until I don’t know I’m running I always win the race. Alan Sillitoe, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner’ (1959) On a sunny afternoon in May 1997, less than a year before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to large-scale violent conflict in Northern Ireland, I found myself at a funeral in Derry’s City Cemetery. I was in the company of a local businessman with an intense manner who had phoned me out of the blue earlier that day and asked me to come to talk with him in his house. Now he was pointing out senior republicans among the mourners. There was Martin McGuinness, reputed to be a senior figure in the IRA, and beside him Mitchel McLaughlin, one of Sinn Féin’s most prominent public representatives. It was the funeral, the businessman explained, of Kathleen McDermott, the wife of Donal McDermott, a popular local doctor known to secretly treat IRA volunteers who feared arrest if they went to hospital. Their son, Éamonn, had spent fifteen years in prison after his conviction for the murder of RUC detective Patrick McNulty, shot dead by the IRA in 1977. The conviction would eventually be quashed in 2007.¹ The businessman was Brendan Duddy. I had never heard of him before he phoned me that morning in Magee College where I was working as a researcher with INCORE, the University of Ulster’s International Conflict Research Centre. He introduced himself, expressing surprise that he had been able to reach me so quickly since he had assumed I would be very busy. It was a little gentle flattery. I agreed to call to his home, which turned out to be his business headquarters too. ¹ On McDermott’s secret treatment of IRA Volunteers and others see Collins 2018, 215 and McKinney 2018.

Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Oxford University Press (2021). © Niall Ó Dochartaigh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894762.003.0013

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A side door in the family kitchen opened onto a large office full of desks and computers, staffed mostly by family members involved in the running of his various enterprises including bars, restaurants, and shops. The house was on Derry’s Glen Road, a long curving street of detached middle-class houses, secluded behind high hedges, where cars were parked in ones or twos in large driveways rather than out on the street. I had just published a book on the escalation of violence in Derry in the first four years of the Troubles.² Duddy had phoned me because he liked the book, he said. He had asked his son-in-law, Eamonn Downey, a primary schoolteacher, to join us, and as our conversation continued there was a back and forth between them that helped him to clarify his thoughts and his memories of the sequence of events. We were in a spacious study lined with wooden bookcases. The shelves were dominated by volumes on Irish history and politics. Beneath the shelves were sliding wooden doors. Duddy, pacing around the room as he spoke, did most of the talking. He spoke for three or four hours that day—in the study, in the car, and in the cemetery. And yet, by the end of the afternoon, I was unsure why he had contacted me—something was being left unsaid. We agreed to talk again. I mentioned the puzzling encounter to a friend who was connected to local republican networks. He raised his eyebrows. He told me that Duddy turned up to almost every public meeting in the city, frequently making thought-provoking contributions from the floor. A few weeks later, I left Derry to take up a lectureship in my hometown, Galway, four hours’ drive away on the other side of the border. Over the next few years, my attention turned to other things, teaching large numbers of students in packed lecture theatres, writing about Internet research and online activism rather than the politics of the Troubles, and, not least, becoming a father for the first time. Six years later, as the Saville Inquiry on Bloody Sunday neared the end of its public hearings in Derry, I began work on a second edition of the book that had interested Duddy. It would include a new chapter on the events of 30 January 1972. I phoned a friend from university, Garbhán Downey, who was then the editor of a Derry newspaper to ask advice on sources. ‘Have you heard of Brendan Duddy?’, he asked. I explained our meeting in 1997 and that I hadn’t spoken to him since. ‘Call him’, he said, ‘he has a story to tell.’ I phoned. Duddy immediately said that he remembered me, and he invited me to come up to the house. There, our conversation again involved some circumlocution, but he hinted that he had been involved in behind-the-scenes contact between protagonists from opposing sides. He told me to ask him anything

² Ó Dochartaigh 1997, 2005.

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I wanted, suggesting that I send him a list of questions arising from my research on Bloody Sunday. Later, I wrote out a long list and sent it on. The Saville Inquiry had revealed secret contacts in Derry between RUC Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan and civil rights activist Brigid Bond, and through her to Malachy McGurran, the most senior Official IRA commander in Derry.³ I hoped that Brendan Duddy might hold the key to understanding how these lines of communication worked around the time of Bloody Sunday. And so those back-channels—the conduits between local actors—were the focus of most of my questions. When we next met, Duddy said little by way of direct reply to my questions about local agreements to keep the peace. Rather, he made an extraordinary claim. He had acted, he told me, as the main intermediary between the British government and the IRA over a span of more than twenty years, hosting secret talks in the small sitting room beside his study during the 1975 ceasefire, negotiating the fine details of a possible solution to the 1981 hunger strike—one of the most fraught episodes of the Troubles—and acting as intermediary again in the 1990s. I was not sure if I could believe him. I knew from other sources that Duddy had played a covert role of some kind, but I had assumed it concerned local networks in Derry. Still, his repeatedly expressed concern to put his version of events—the ‘truth’—on record inclined me to believe him. He referred on several occasions to the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations of 1921 and he expressed regret that we would never know the truth of what had actually happened in those talks. He suspected that manipulation and espionage had played a more important role than the historical sources were ever likely to reveal, and he was determined that historians of the Northern Troubles and the peace process would have a fuller picture of what had taken place behind the scenes. Pride seemed to be a factor too: having worked in the shadows, he was concerned that others would write him out of the story as there was no public record of the role he had played. But how could I be sure that he was telling the truth? I started combing through histories of the IRA for details. I reread BBC journalist Peter Taylor’s 1997 book Provos, which described an anonymous ‘Contact’, a secret intermediary between the British government and the IRA, who had played a crucial role in the peace process of the early 1990s. Was Duddy the ‘Contact’? I relayed my suspicion to a well-networked friend in Derry. He made soundings and sent back word that the Contact described by Taylor was not Duddy but rather a composite figure—a number of different people had played the role attributed to the Contact, he told me. If this was the case, it would diminish Duddy’s significance and call his credibility into question.

³ Ó Dochartaigh 2010.

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By now, my focus was shifting from local back-channels around the time of Bloody Sunday—the contacts, via intermediaries, between Frank Lagan and both the Provisional and Official IRA in the city—to contacts between the republican movement’s national leadership and agents of the British state. I arranged to interview Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the former Sinn Féin President, at his home in Roscommon, about his role in the back-channel in 1975. He had deposited his notes of the secret 1975 ceasefire talks in the National University of Ireland Galway in 2005.⁴ Ó Brádaigh was elderly, but his recollections were sharp, and he had a reputation for being scrupulously truthful—if he chose to speak about a matter. The interview was in Irish. When I mentioned that I had been talking to Brendan Duddy, he betrayed no recognition of the name and he declined to comment when I said Duddy had told me he was the Contact mentioned in Taylor’s book. But contra what I had been told in Derry and consistent with Taylor’s book, he was emphatic that the Contact was a single individual, not a composite figure. The role of intermediary had to be carried out by a single individual, he insisted, otherwise wires would get crossed and clarity would be reduced. He emphasized too that the intermediary had to be available at any time of the day and night and be ready to act at a moment’s notice. I knew from my inquiries in Derry that Duddy had certainly carried out some of the actions attributed to the Contact by Taylor. Ó Brádaigh’s confirmation that a single individual had carried out all of those activities now inclined me to accept that Duddy was indeed the figure described in Taylor’s book.⁵ Duddy did not allow me to tape our early interviews, conducted in 2004, and so I furiously scribbled as he spoke. In time, however, he allowed me to start recording, and our meetings continued over the next few years. Then one day in 2007, when we were talking in his study, he turned in his chair and slowly slid back the thin wooden door of one of those cabinets below the bookshelves. Inside were several box folders and some old hardbound A4 desk diaries. He had kept diaries during secret talks that had taken place in his house in 1975 and 1976. He took out a box folder and opened it up. Inside were faxes and scribbled notes and typed statements passed secretly between the British government and the republican leadership in the 1990s, along with a typed diary he had kept at the time. There was also a faded and scuffed hardback notebook—he would call it the ‘Red Book’—his rough handwritten record of the frantic late-night phone negotiations during the 1981 Hunger Strike in which ten men had died. I was stunned. For more than twenty years, he had kept almost every scrap of paper relating to his role as intermediary, throwing everything into a large box. The cataloguing of the archive had first begun in 1995 when he gave Eamonn ⁴ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh Papers, NUI Galway. ⁵ Several years later, when Duddy’s name was in the public domain, Ó Brádaigh confirmed to me that he was indeed the Contact.

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Downey a big pile of scraps of paper from the box—envelopes with a few half sentences scribbled on them; receipts; cryptic handwritten messages—and asked him to organize them, giving no hint as to what they concerned. At first, Eamonn had assumed they related to business dealings, but it soon dawned on him that they concerned sensitive secret negotiations. Over the next few years, when Eamonn would finish teaching for the summer, Brendan would present him with additional papers to organize and sort, gradually giving him the more sensitive materials.⁶ Conscious of the sensitivity of the documents, Eamonn did not even tell his wife, Shauna, about the strange cataloguing he was doing for her father.⁷ And he worked away, summer after summer, until, by 2004, he had carefully organized and annotated all the papers. Duddy had created his own archive, albeit one with more eclectic and obliquely connected materials that those in the state archives, but an archive nonetheless. A receipt from a Häagen Dazs café in London for coffee and dessert illustrates the character of Duddy’s collection: he saved it because it provided a timed and dated record of a meeting with a former MI6 agent in a specific location. Both sides were reluctant to exchange written documents and some of the most important materials in the collection are cryptic, scribbled notes of telephone conversations. After giving me an opportunity to look over the papers, Duddy asked what I thought he should do with the archive. I was conscious of the value of what I had seen: here was a contemporary record of the flow of information through the back-channel, including details unlikely ever to surface in the state archive or, indeed, in republican sources. I told him that I thought it deserved a place in a national institution, preferably in Dublin given the all-Ireland character of his role, perhaps in the National Library of Ireland. Shortly afterwards, having consulted with University librarian John Cox, I let him know that my own university in Galway would be happy to receive the materials. A year later, Duddy phoned me to say that he had decided to deposit his papers in Galway. Together with archivist Kieran Hoare, I drove to Derry, where we spent two days systematically going through the papers with Brendan and Eamonn, recording their comments about each document. Several weeks later we drove back to collect the papers and bring them to Galway. As NUI Galway archivist Vera Orschel worked on listing the papers, I began to read through them and, based on my reading, I went back to Derry several times in the course of 2009 to interview Duddy about his many years of work as an intermediary—the interviews lasted for hours. In November 2009, I finally fulfilled a promise to film a series of interviews with him with friend and filmmaker Mick Ruane. We spent two days

⁶ Eamonn Downey interview, 5 July 2019. ⁷ Shauna Duddy and Eamonn Downey speaking in panel on ‘Reassessing the Northern Ireland peace process’, Political Studies Association of Ireland annual conference, Derry, 20 October 2012. Organized by the author.

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filming in the back room where IRA and British representatives had met in 1975. Brendan spoke almost continuously for six or seven hours each day, steadily reconstructing the development of his work as an intermediary and reflecting on the challenges of the role.⁸ Those long interviews with Duddy, who was then in his seventies, are testimony to his almost inexhaustible energy. His diaries, and the official British records of contact with him that have been released in recent years, show that he would talk with MI6 officers or republican leaders for up to six hours at a time, in person or on the phone, patiently, endlessly, into the night, sometimes until 3.00 or 4.00 a.m. Physical and mental stamina are among the most important qualifications of an intermediary. Brendan had been an accomplished middle- and long-distance runner in his youth, and he remained a runner all his life, completing marathons in his fifties and keeping up a daily training regime into his seventies. He brought the toughness, determination, and discipline of a long-distance runner to the role. Driven by a determination to see an end to violence, and by a conviction that no settlement that excluded the republican movement could succeed, Duddy’s work as an intermediary had involved the insistent exercise of power and influence. He had set out to occupy what he identified as the most important space in the conflict—that between the British government and the IRA. And there, he exerted, in secret, the kind of influence that a powerful politician exerts in public. Duddy came to Galway in October 2008 and again in June 2009, to speak about his work as an intermediary. By then, his role was starting to become widely known; Peter Taylor’s 2008 BBC documentary The Secret Peacemaker had publicly identified him as the Contact for the first time. Sadly, he suffered a massive stroke in 2010. Much to his frustration, his speech was severely affected. He came to subsequent events in Galway, but he could not contribute to discussion. If his voice was sorely missed, his sons and daughters now began to speak about their glimpses of their father’s secret life, illuminating the reverberations of his secret mediation on their own lives.⁹ When I had phoned Brendan Duddy in 2004, I had been interested in the intimate, local, and everyday character of back-channel contact in a small city in the midst of a violent conflict. His revelations had turned my attention to secret machinations at the highest level of the British state, and the highest level of the IRA. Duddy had positioned himself between those, on opposing sides, with the power to make decisions. From the earliest stages, this channel provided a direct line from the IRA leadership to the British Prime Minister. He had first acted as an ⁸ Excerpts may be watched online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwOcGDmZg38&t=6s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9v5Fx5WCCI&t=28s ⁹ Shauna Duddy and Eamonn Downey, speaking in panel on ‘Reassessing the Northern Ireland peace process’, Political Studies Association of Ireland annual conference, Derry, 20 October 2012; ‘Can you keep a secret: family life with a secret peacemaker’. Public interview by the author with four members of the family of intermediary Brendan Duddy. NUI Galway, 25 October 2016.

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intermediary between the British government and the IRA in late 1972, and his role finally came to an end in November 1993. He had learned at a very early stage to keep his expectations low. ‘There was no such a thing really as giving up or being disappointed’, he told me, ‘[It] didn’t matter what the day was or what the circumstances was [sic] or what the story was, that was the day’s work and then you went into another day’s work . . . [I learnt] to go in with no expectations of results.’¹⁰ He had approached the role of intermediary as he would the running of a marathon—moving forward without allowing his thoughts to stray ahead to a distant finishing line he might never reach, to go on relentlessly, to run without racing. His sons and daughters recall that he ran ‘effortlessly’.¹¹ When Duddy communicated an IRA offer of a ceasefire to the British government in May 1993, opening the way to the IRA cessation of violence in August 1994, the finishing line came into view and his race finally came to an end.

¹⁰ Brendan Duddy interview, 27 July 2009. ¹¹ Interview with Brendan, Shauna, Patricia, and Larry Duddy, 6 July 2019.

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Bibliography Interviews Anonymous, former British official, 7 October 2008; 26 June 2014. Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Féin (1983–2018), Dublin, 6 September 2008. Theresa Barr, lifelong Derry resident and former shirt-factory worker, Derry, 25 June 2018. Denis Bradley, former Catholic priest, Chief Executive of Northland Films, Vice-Chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board (2001–6), Co-Chairman of the Northern Ireland Consultative Group on the Past (2007–9). He worked closely with Brendan Duddy in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, Galway, 9 March 2017. Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (July 1989–April 1992), London, 7 December 2010. Sir John Chilcot, Permanent Undersecretary of State for Northern Ireland (1990–97), London, 8 December 2010; telephone interview, 25 May 2020. Ivan Cooper, civil rights activist; founding member of Social Democratic and Labour Party; Northern Ireland MP (Independent, 1969–70; SDLP, 1970–72; 1973–74), Derry, 16 March 2004. Frank Curran, Editor of the Derry Journal, Derry, 16 March 2004. Edward Daly, Bishop of Derry (Roman Catholic) (1974–94), Derry 2004. Eamonn Downey, son-in-law of Brendan Duddy and cataloguer of his archive, Derry, 5 July 2019. Brendan Duddy, businessman and intermediary, member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board (2006–07), Derry, 15 March 2004, 18 March 2004, 17 September 2004 (by phone); 2006, 2008 [exact dates not recorded], 11–13 May 2009, 27–29 July 2009, 13–16 October 2009, 26–27 November 2009. The two interviews in November 2009 each lasted approximately seven hours and were filmed. Excerpts may be watched online at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=PwOcGDmZg38&t=6s and https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=m9v5Fx5WCCI&t=28s Margo Duddy, wife of Brendan Duddy, Derry, 18 May 2018. Duddy family: Brendan, Shauna, Patricia, and Larry Duddy [the latter joining by phone]. Group interview with sons and daughters of Brendan Duddy, Derry, 6 July 2019. Jim Gibney, member of Sinn Féin Ard-Chomhairle, Belfast, 17 April 2013. Leo Green, one of the seven Republican prisoners on the 1980 hunger strike which ended after fifty-three days. Dublin, 15 November 2016, and follow-up email, 17 November 2016. Douglas Hurd, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1984–85), Foreign Secretary (1989–95), London, 2 May 2013. Martin Mansergh, Special Advisor to successive Fianna Fáil Taoisigh, Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds, and Bertie Ahern, Dublin, 21 October 2010. Bernadette (née Devlin) McAliskey, civil rights activist, co-founder of People’s Democracy and former Westminster MP. Interviewed at ‘The Human Rights Scholar: Activist or Activist-Scholar’, Kevin Boyle symposium at NUI Galway, Galway, 28 November 2014.

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Billy McKee, Officer Commanding of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA (January 1970–April 1971), latterly a supporter of Republican Sinn Féin (1986–2019), Belfast, 3 December 2014. Laurence McKeown, one of the 1981 hunger strikers. His family authorized medical intervention to save his life on the seventieth day of his hunger strike. Galway, 3 March 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58-yAUP-9F4&list=PLp-6_r7fj3wPxnW8W7D 1qw8Z6b41TH5_X&index=1 Danny Morrison, senior Republican who acted as the liaison between the leadership and the hunger strikers in 1980 and 1981. Belfast July 2013; 29 January 2016 (via Skype); Galway 9 July 2016. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, President of Provisional Sinn Féin (1970–83), President of Republican Sinn Féin (1987–2009), Roscommon, 27 June 2005; 2 December 2009; 18 July 2012. Deirdre O’Connell, wife of key Provisional Republican strategist Dave O’Connell, Dublin, 20 January 2011. Seán Ó hUiginn, head of the Anglo-Irish Division of the Dept of Foreign Affairs (1991–97), Galway, 23 January 2019. Jonathan Powell, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff (1997–2007), London, 2 May 2013. Sir Quentin Thomas, Political Director at the Northern Ireland Office (1988–98), London, 7 December 2010.

Public events ‘Can you keep a secret: family life with a secret peacemaker’. Public interview by the author with four members of the family of intermediary Brendan Duddy: Shauna Duddy, Larry Duddy, Patricia Duddy, and Eamonn Downey. National University of Ireland, Galway, 25 October 2016. https://digital.library.nuigalway.ie/islandora/object/nuigalway%3A5401 Shauna Duddy and Eamonn Downey speaking in panel on ‘Reassessing the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, Annual Conference of Political Studies Association of Ireland, Derry, 20 October 2012. Michael Oatley speaking at Negotiating Peace Symposium, National University of Ireland, Galway, 13 October 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSfmNLn-nQk&list=PLp6_r7fj3wPxnW8W7D1qw8Z6b41TH5_X&index=5

Archives Daithí Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, MS 130, National Library of Ireland Endgame in Ireland, Television Documentary Archives, GB0099, Liddell Hart Military Archives, King’s College London James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland Galway Brendan Duddy Papers, POL 35, accessible online at https://digital.library.nuigalway.ie/ islandora/object/nuigalway%253Aduddy Maurice Hayes Papers, POL 41 Ruairí Ó Brádaigh Papers, POL 28 Public Records Office of Northern Ireland

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Scarman Tribunal transcripts, McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast UK National Archives

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Adams, David 130 Adams, Gerry 32, 40, 42–3, 56, 58, 60–2, 65, 152, 155 and hunger strike 171, 183–4, 187 and peace process 190, 212–15, 220, 222–3, 230, 239, 245, 249, 253–8, 260, 262, 264, 270 agency 7, 188–9, 209, 267–70, 272–3 Ahern, Dermot 212, 214, 252 Allan, James 103–7, 139, 229 amateur athletics (see Duddy, Brendan) Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) 189, 204–5, 207, 210, 212, 221, 252, 263, 268–9, 271 Anglo-Irish treaty (1921) 62–3, 280 archives (see also National University of Ireland Galway) Brendan Duddy papers 13–14, 99, 109, 181n.61, 211–12, 281–3 colonial records, destruction of 11–12 and emotions 8 MI5 and MI6 files 11–12 republican papers 12–13 retention and redaction 11–12, 126 and secrecy 11–12 state papers (British and Irish) 9–10 Arjona, Ana 6 Armstrong, Francis 25–6 Armstrong, Robert 65–6, 105, 268–9 Atkins, Humphrey 173, 176, 180, 182–3 back-channels (see also negotiation and contact) 3–4, 14, 79, 92, 171–2 back-channel negotiation 74 between Irish government and republicans in the 1990s 212–16, 253–4 between Israel and the PLO 215 between UK government and republicans in the 1990s 211, 218, 220, 222, 224–30, 235, 250–3, 256, 258–9, 261, 264–5 and clarity of messages 108, 277, 281 continuity of personnel 224 cooperation 264–5, 272–5, 277

covert diplomacy 73–9, 92 and internal divisions 233, 267, 272–3, 276–7 difficulties in researching 10 leaks 67, 96 local back-channels 24–5, 36–7, 74, 91, 280 pre-negotiation 74 and secrecy 3, 9–10, 110–11, 115, 275–7, 283 solidarity between negotiators 230, 233, 277 timing of messages 108 Ballina, Co. Mayo 163 bargaining (see negotiation) BATNA (see negotiation) Belfast 10, 19, 33, 38, 68–9, 75 Aldergrove airport 41, 174, 176, 239–40 Ardoyne 36–7 Clonard 36–7 Clonard Monastery 213, 263 Lenadoon 68 west Belfast 29–32, 42–3, 67–9, 99, 136, 155 Whiterock 58 Belfast Agreement (see Good Friday Agreement) Bell, Ivor 42–3 Bew, John and Martyn Frampton, and Iñigo Gurruchaga 44, 120–1, 127–8 Bew, Paul and Henry Patterson 44, 118, 121 Biggs, Ewart 152 Bismarck Otto von 208 Blair, Tony 264, 271–2 Blatherwick, David 255 Blelloch, John 177–9, 275 Bloody Friday 69 Bloody Sunday 40, 79, 279–80 Boal, Desmond 76–7, 125–6, 129 Bogside (see Derry) Bond, Brigid 79, 280 border, crossing the 81–2 Boyle, Larry 83–4 Bradley, Denis 77, 162, 198, 236–7, 243–4 Braithwaite, Rodric 249 Breslin, Jimmy 84

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British army 32–4, 41–2, 65, 68–9, 71, 80–1, 197 and 1975 ceasefire 119, 123–4, 127, 134–9, 195 activity on the ground 65 deployment in Derry, August 1969 26–7 kidnap of soldier 111–12 military police 137 negotiation (see negotiation) Operation Banner 5 Operation Motorman 69, 88–9 and peace process 195–6, 210, 216, 231, 264 British government 13, 37–8, 75 and IRA 29–31, 44–5, 72, 194–8, 215 negotiation and contact with the IRA (see negotiation) and the peace process 203–10 policy drift 150–1, 156–7, 195 policy learning 207, 209–10 policy of normalization, criminalization, and Ulsterization 150–1, 156–7 British state 27–8, 35 internal divisions 146–7, 170 and IRA 9, 44 Brooke, Peter 190–1, 195–6, 203, 206, 211, 214, 216, 219–25, 230–1 Browning, Robert (’Rob’) 139–40, 142–3 Bruton, John (see Taoiseach) Butler, Robin 105, 250, 253, 255 Cahill, Joe 38–40, 67 Cambodia Air America 159 evacuation of British embassy 158–60 Canavan, Michael 21, 27–8, 32–3 Catholic clergy (see also Meagher, Fr. Brendan; Reid, Fr. Alec) 29–31, 77, 79–80, 83–4, 93, 171–2, 213 ceasefires (see IRA) Central Citizens’ Defence Committee (CCDC) 29 Channon, Paul 41–2, 52–3 Chichester Clark, James 196 Chiffon (see MI5) Chilcot, John 108, 188, 193, 203–8, 217 and back-channel 225–6 and peace process 214–20, 222–3, 230–1, 264–5, 270 civil rights campaign and marches 20–1, 29, 84, 189, 216–17 Campaign for Democracy in Ulster (CDU) 217 stewards 21, 25 civil servants and bureaucracy 10, 121–3, 142, 158 civil war (see political violence)

Clarke, Kenneth 249–50 Clausewitz, Carl von 1–2, 38, 274 Coffeeman (see Frank Lagan) Cold War 77, 218, 223 colonial experience and background of British officials 75, 137, 218–19 Communication channels 19–20, 27–8, 38, 153, 175–6 between nationalists and British government 33–4, 75–6, 78 community workers 76–7 Conradh na Gaeilge 83 consent, principle of 208, 260 Conservative government 32, 264 Conservative party 46n.20, 119, 138–9, 147, 248–9, 251, 266 Constitutional Convention 118, 118n.1, 119–20, 140, 207 ‘Contact’ (see Brendan Duddy) ‘contentious politics’ approach 7 Cooke, David 207, 227, 237–8 Cooper, Frank 11, 103, 105, 126, 137, 207–8 Cooper, Ivan 20–2, 78, 80, 84 covert diplomacy (see back channels) Cowan, Brigadier 36 Craig, William 24, 36–7, 132 Cubbon, Brian 156–7 Curran, Frank 76–8 Curtis, Robert 37 Cyprus 73, 75, 137, 216 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 13–14, 274 Derry 10, 20–2, 26–7, 31–4, 36, 40, 42–3, 79–81, 138 Ballyarnett House 55–6 Binevanagh mountain, Co. Derry 79 Bogside 24–5, 32–3, 77, 79, 223 Creggan 89 Free Derry 41, 57, 88–9 Lisnamuck, Co. Derry 29 republican milieu in 83 St Columb’s College 79, 83–6 William St 84, 87–8 Derry Citizens Action Committee (DCAC) 20–1, 84 Derry Citizens Defence Association (DCDA) 25–8, 88–9 Deverell, John 218–20, 225–6, 228, 237, 239–43, 247–8 Devlin, Bernadette (see McAliskey, Bernadette) Devlin, Paddy 90, 109–10 dialogue 78, 93 Director and Coordinator of Intelligence 106–7, 134, 218

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 Disengagement (see withdrawal) Doherty, James 21, 79, 90, 98–9 Doherty, Paddy 27–8 Donegal, Co. 29, 38–9, 80, 89, 111–12 Donlon, Seán 109–10 Donnelly, Sam 80 Donoughmore, Lord and Lady (kidnapping) 109–10 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec 106 Downey, Eamonn 279, 281–2 Downey, Garbhán 279 Downing Street Declaration 52–3, 125, 198–200, 229, 257–61 Hume-Adams document 215–16, 253–8 Dublin 39–40, 55–6, 59–60, 110, 213, 253, 255, 259, 282 University College Dublin (UCD) 52, 230 Duddy, Brendan 3–4, 77–9, 81–96, 98–9, 111–16, 152–3, 192, 197 and 1975 ceasefire 133, 135–45, 147 and 1980, 1981 hunger strikes 164, 172–4, 176–7, 179–85, 187 amateur athletics, talks on an all-Ireland association 87 and back-channel in the 1990s 220–1, 223–31, 233–48, 250–2, 254–6, 276–7 business experience 84–5 election candidate 84 and Frank Stagg hunger strike 161–4 and legalisation of Sinn Féin 107–8 and Michael Oatley 221, 224–5, 229 and Niedermeyer kidnapping 103–7 and peace process 198, 208–9 running 85–7, 278, 283 Duddy, Larry 256 Duddy, Margo 162 Duddy, Shauna 221, 281–2 emotions 8, 13–14, 47–8, 78, 82–3, 150, 161–2, 185 escalation (see political violence) European Union and European context 199, 214–15, 223, 244, 257–8 ‘Euroassets’ 226–7 Maastricht Treaty 232–3, 248–9 Evans, Peter 97–8 Evelegh, Robin 135 Farrar-Hockley, Sir Anthony 35–7 Faulkner, Brian 100 Faure, Guy (see Zartman, Ira William) Feeney, Hugh 99, 110

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Ferguson, Colin (see McLaren, Robert) Fianna Fáil 201–2, 257–8 Fierke, Karin 167 Figner, Vera 169 Fisher, Roger and William Ury 45, 63 Fitzgerald, Garret (see Taoiseach) Flanagan, Jamie 136–8 flattery 24, 78, 278–9 Ford, General Robert 78, 88–9 Foreign Office and Foreign Secretary 11–12, 76, 106, 147, 154–5, 249, 255 Frampton, Martyn (see Bew, John et al) ‘Fred’ (see McLaren, Robert) Freeland, Lieutenant-General Sir Ian 33, 36 fundamental attribution error 37 Gallagher, Noel 198, 235–7, 243–4, 253–5 Galway (see National University of Ireland Galway) Garda Síochána 81, 94 Gaughan, Michael 161, 163 Germany Brandt, Willy 100–2 German company as ‘commercial cover’ 226–7 German government 101–2 MI5 operation in 218–19 ’Getting to Yes’ 63, 273 Gibney, Jim 188, 192–4 Gillespie, Neil 83 Good Friday Agreement (1998) 209, 264, 275 Goodall, David 263 Gray, Paul 138 Green, Leo 173, 175, 273–5 Gurruchaga, Iñigo (See Bew, John et al) Haas, Ernst 207, 210 Hackett, General Sir John 38–40 Haines, Joe 39, 121–2 Hartley, Tom 193–4, 254 Haughey, Charles J. (see Taoiseach) Hauser, Richard 39–40 Hayes, Maurice, 76, 78, 207–8, 263 Heath, Edward 32, 60, 65–7, 73, 91, 99–102, 105, 195 Hennessey, Thomas 266 Hilditch, Stanley 174, 177–8 history 44, 77, 161, 206–8, 229–30, 279–80 Holland, Mary 84 Home Office and Home Secretary 32, 35–6, 56, 105, 109–10, 123–4, 183, 195, 203, 216–17, 219, 249–50 House of Commons 113, 122, 173, 216, 258–9

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Hughes, Brendan 120–1 and hunger strikes 171–2, 174–6 Hughes, Francis 179 Hume, John 28, 32–5, 55, 76, 78–9, 81, 84, 90 and peace process 190–1, 201, 212–16, 220, 222–3, 252–8 Hume, Pat 257 Hume-Adams document (see Downing Street Declaration) hunger strikes (see also Gaughan, Michael; Hughes, Francis; Kelly, Gerry; McDonnell, Joe; Price sisters, Marion and Dolours; 56, 99, 109–10, 268–9, 274–5 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes 158, 164, Chapter 7, 224 archives 12, 207, 281 biological time 165–6, 169, 171, 175, 185 comparative research on 167–8 cultural explanations 167–8 deadlines and time pressure 165–6, 168–72, 174, 177–83, 185–7 and information 170–2, 174–7, 180–1, 184–6 martyrdom 168 medical officers 174 modernity 165, 167, 185 and violence 168 Hurd, Douglas 155–6, 249 INCORE (International Conflict Research Centre, University of Ulster) 232, 278–9 independence for Northern Ireland (see withdrawal) intelligence studies 2n.9 intermediaries (see mediation) internal divisions and Intra-organizational struggles 7, 12, 219–20, 233, 270–3, 277 internment and internees 49, 78–9, 111, 118, 125–6, 141–2, 146–7 intra-party negotiation (see negotiation) IRA (Official) 5, 31–2, 231 IRA (Provisional) 5, 33, 35–8 Army Council, Provisional (PAC) 107, 140, 143, 239, 245, 247–8, 255 bomb attacks 69, 71, 91–2, 99, 194, 196 British army view of 5 British withdrawal (see withdrawal) ceasefires (see IRA ceasefires) Cheyne Walk 1972 41–3 decommissioning 78, 143, 191, 261–3 demands 48–53, 59, 62, 71 elections (see Sinn Féin) Enniskillen bombing 213–14

ideology 43–5, 47, 50–1, 84–5, 117–18, 120–1, 129–30, 132–3, 141, 189, 193, 197, 204, 212, 260–1, 267 inclusion in a settlement 47–9, 52, 65, 69–71, 146, 154–5, 194–5, 200, 202–4, 206–7, 209, 219–20, 226–9, 231 internal divisions 6, 61, 66–9, 90–1, 97, 146–7, 170, 193–4, 203, 239, 245 Kingsmill massacre 162 ‘Long war’ strategy 151–5, 201–2 and negotiation 43–5, 48–53, 59, 61–4, 68–70, 132–3, 141, 146, 151–2, 189 negotiation and contact with the British Government (see negotiation) non-violent action 186, 189 ‘on the runs’ 51, 80, 137–8 peace process 193–4 politics 44, 60, 64 Shankill bombing 258 splits 146, 187, 190, 193, 263–4, 272 strategy 118, 127–8, 151–2 sustaining support 48–9 truce (see IRA ceasefires) Warrington bombing 239–40 weaponry 190 IRA border campaign (1956–1962) 39–40, 153–4, 189 IRA ceasefires 192 ‘conflict is over’ message 235–8, 251, 258 March 1972 ceasefire 53, 55–6, 60 June 1972 ceasefire 57–69 1975 ceasefire 11–13, 224 incident centres 134, 136 Christmas 1990 ceasefire 222–3 discussion of potential ceasefire in 1990s 212, 214–16, 220, 226, 228–32, 234, 264–5 permanence of 1990s ceasefire 232, 238–9, 261–2 May 1993 ceasefire offer 211, 233 1994 ceasefire 202, 263–4 IRA prisoners 49–51, 54–5, 57–8, 125–6, 147 in England 99, 134, 161 hunger strikes (see hunger strikes) no wash protest 171–2, 177–8 peace process 191, 193–5, 264 prison authorities 157–8, 177–8, 180 prison dispute and protests 153, 155, 157–64, 171–2 prisoner releases 71, 134, 216, 254, 264, 272, 275 special category status 57, 99, 157–8, 161, 163, 171 uniform/clothing issue 157–8, 171, 176, 178, 181–2 Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP) 180

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 Irish government 67, 106, 115, 128–9, 163, 166, 274 contact with republicans 214, 228–9, 252–7 Department of Foreign Affairs 109–10, 252 peace process 200–1, 204–6, 208, 214–16, 229, 252–63 Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) 179 Jasper, James, 10–11, 272–3 Jenkins, Roy 109–10, 123–4, 127, 161, 216–17 Joint Security Committee (Stormont) 33–4, 75 Kafka, Franz 165–6 Kalyvas, Stathis 5–6 Keenan, Brian 202–3 Keenan, Seán 25, 28, 59–60, 133 Kelly, Gerry 99, 110, 239, 241–2, 263–4, 270 Kenya 73, 75, 218 Khmer Rouge (see Cambodia) kidnappings 111 (see also Donoughmores and Niedermeyer) King, General Sir Frank 119, 135 Kingsmill massacre 162 Kissinger, Henry 1–3 Kitson, Frank 35–6 Kriesberg, Louis 22 Labour Government 32, 138–9, 264 Lagan, Frank 29–33, 74, 79–82, 87–91, 98–9, 105–6, 257, 280–1 Laneside 75–6, 154, 162–4, 177 Lebanon 75 Lehrs, Lior 82–3 Leng, Brigadier Peter 28 London 41, 62 bombings 99, 196, 263 Cheyne Walk 41–2, 59–67 Heathrow Airport 235, 238 secret meetings in 163–4, 177, 281–2 Londonderry (see Derry) Loughran, Seamus 115 Low, Maurice 276 loyalists (see also withdrawal) 34, 55, 68–9, 71, 91, 252 1975 IRA ceasefire 128–9, 138, 140–1, 143 Tyrie, Andy 148 Ulster Defence Association (UDA) 52–3, 68–9, 71, 130, 148 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 107–8 Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike 121–2, 128 Lynch, Jack (see Taoiseach) Lyne, Rod 255

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MacBride, Seán 62 Mac Stiofáin, Seán 42–3, 48, 52–3, 59, 61–9 Major, John 222–3, 225–6, 232–3, 235, 239–40, 246–51, 253, 255, 258–9, 261, 263, 271–2 Mallie, Eamonn 59–60, 211–12, 243, 249n.53, 258 Mansergh, Martin 213–14, 252–4 Martin, Leo 35 Mason, Roy 152, 154, 156 Maudling, Reginald 32, 35–6 Mayhew, Patrick 230–4, 239, 248–9, 258–9, 261 McAliskey, Bernadette 22–4, 32–3 McAteer, Aidan 254 McAteer, Eddie 83–4 McCallion, Joe 150, 160 McCann, Eamonn 32–3, 84 McCorkell, Colonel Michael and Lady Aileen 55–6 McCrea, Rev. William 13–14 McCreesh, Raymond 179 McDermott, Kathleen, Dónal, and Éamonn, 278 McDonnell, Joe 180, 182–5 McGarry, John and Brendan O’Leary 170 McGrory, Paddy 56, 260 McGuinness, Martin 41, 59–61, 187, 278 and peace process 190–1, 215, 220, 223–5, 235–7, 239–45, 247–8, 251, 253–6, 258, 270 McGuire, Maria 46, 46n.20, 65, 68–70 McKee, Billy 31, 38, 82, 150, 153–4, 160 and 1975 ceasefire 124, 133, 139 McKenna, Seán 172–6 McKeown, Laurence 168–9 McKersie, Robert (see Walton, Richard) McKittrick, David 211–12, 243, 249n.53 McLaren, Robert (also known as Colin Ferguson and ‘Fred’) 226–30, 233–42 McLaughlin, Mitchel 212–13, 263, 278 McManus, Frank 55 McNulty, Patrick 278 Meagher, Fr Brendan 173, 175–6 Mediation 14, 34 insider-partial mediators 34, 112 intermediaries 22, 38, 40, 52, 74–5, 82–5, 90–3, 96, 242–3, 251, 281, 283–4 and negotiation 104 and political power 83 Private Peace Entrepreneurs (PPE) 82–3 public figures 34–5, 40 quasi-mediators 22 MI5 (see also Deverell, John; Payne, Denis; Rimington, Stella) 75, 78, 88, 107, 127, 177–8 Chiffon 211, 226 peace process 211, 218–19, 221, 226, 228–9, 248–50

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MI6 (see also Browning, Robert; Oatley, Michael; Steele, Frank) 73, 76–9, 81, 91, 94, 142–3, 154, 164, 173, 218, 221, 224–5, 228–9, 249, 283 archives 11–12 influence 76–9, 85, 92, 229 Middleton, Donald (’Tom’) 143–5, 147, 158–64 and 1981 hunger strike 177, 177n.48, 179–85 Milmann, Lieutenant Colonel 28 Mitchell, Senator, George 264 Moloney, Ed 2n.8, 2n.9, 42–4, 68, 90, 120–1, 175, 212, 239, 245, 248 Molyneaux, James 197, 212, 248–9 More, Sir Thomas 70 Morrison, Danny 155, 174, 177, 181, 249 Moscow 75 Mount, Bernadette 95, 224 mountain-climbing metaphor 109 Mountbatten, Lord Louis 152 Mowlam, Mo 264 National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) 283 Brendan Duddy papers 282–3 Maurice Hayes papers 207 Ruairí Ó Brádaigh papers 12–13, 281 nationalists 79, 163 Neave, Airey 156 Negotiation and contact (see also back-channels, IRA, mediation) 104–5 ‘audience effect’ 264–5 authority 106, 108–9, 112–13 bargainer’s Dilemma 46 bargaining failure 37, 68–9 BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) 197 blame, attribution of 148 British army 26–9, 32–7 British Government and IRA 76, 91–2, 104, 107–8, 110–11, 114–15, 119, 166, 187 civil rights campaign 20–6 commitment 47, 52–3, 169–72, 177–9, 184–6 deadlines and time pressure (see hunger strikes) distributive bargaining 63 ‘game’ of chicken 47, 170 information (see also hunger strikes) 45–6, 70, 74, 85, 92–6, 276–7 integrative bargaining 144–5, 273 intra-party negotiation 46–8, 112, 146–7, 233–4, 266, 272 IRA (see IRA: and negotiation) Mutually Hurting Stalemate 188, 202, 266–70 negotiation theory 45–8, 273

positional bargaining 63 ‘readiness’ 268–9 Red Cross 102 relationships 47–8, 63, 97–8, 115, 209–10, 233, 264–5, 267, 272–5, 277 resistance point 45–6, 180–1 ‘ripeness’ 1–2, 267–70 Royal Ulster Constabulary 20–6, 29–34, 36–7 secrecy 20–1, 24, 34–7, 256 ‘secret diplomacy’ 275–6 states and rebels 6, 271–2 time pressure (see deadlines above) timing and temporalities 185 trade unions 47–8, 62–3, 168, 233 transparency 275–7 trust 97–9, 104, 110, 113–15, 224, 230, 243, 263–5, 277 and violence 1–3, 20–1, 274 Neumann, Peter 44 Newman, Kenneth 156, 195–6 Niedermeyer, Thomas (kidnapping) 100–7, 110–11, 268–9 Northern Ireland Conflict 7–9 scholarship on 2n.8 Northern Ireland Housing Executive 68 Northern Ireland Office (NIO) 76, 103, 150, 156, 162, 163 and 1975 IRA Ceasefire 126, 134–9 and 1980-1981 hunger strikes 173, 177–8, 203, 275 and peace process 214, 216–17, 219–20, 222, 227, 231, 235–8, 244, 250–1, 262, 274–5 Oatley, Michael 11, 77–9, 81, 98–9, 103, 112, 124, 126, 134, 163–4, 245 and hunger strikes 172–4, 176 and peace process 221, 224–6, 229 Ó Brádaigh, Ruairí 12–13, 39–40, 46–9, 52–3, 55, 59–61, 82, 85, 89–95, 102–8, 111–13, 115–16, 268–9, 281 and 1975 ceasefire 120, 128, 133, 140, 142, 150, 153 and Frank Stagg 162 loyalists and unionists 124, 129–30 and negotiation 124, 130 O’Brady, Rory (see Ó Brádaigh, Ruairí) O’Connell, David 12–13, 38–40, 46, 51–6, 59–62, 65–70, 72, 76, 89, 91–2, 107, 121, 268–9 and 1975 ceasefire 120, 133–4, 143, 153 and IRA demands 131–2 loyalists and unionists 128, 130–2, 145–6 O’Connell, Deirdre 38–9, 67 O’Connell, Dr. John 52–3, 82–3, 97, 100–4, 116

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 Ó Conaill, Daithí (see O’Connell, David) O’Doherty, Shane Paul 138 Ó Fiaich, Cardinal Tomás 213 O’Hanlon, Siobhán 263 O’Hara, Patsy 179 Ó hUiginn, Seán 215, 258, 262 O’Kane, Eamonn 269–70 O’Leary, Brendan 2–3 (see also McGarry, John) O’Malley, Pádraig 167–8 Orme, Stan 27–8 Paisley, Ian 76–7, 80, 125–6 Parachute Regiment 39, 40 Patterson, Henry 151 (See also Bew, Paul and Henry Patterson) Payne, Denis 106–7, 134 peace processes comparisons with Israel-Palestine, South Africa, former-Yugoslavia 4, 208, 215, 232 and local-centre relations 6, 270–1 spoilers 138 Phoenix, Ian 195–6 Police and police reform (see Royal Ulster Constabulary) political violence ‘armed politics’ 6 civil war and insurgency 5, 8–9 and democracy 8–9 escalation 7, 20, 35–8, 68–70, 91 local dynamics 5 local-centre relations 5–6 and negotiation (see negotiation) terrorism (see terrorism) ‘wartime political orders’ 6, 31 zones of control 6 Powell, Enoch 120 Powell, Jonathan 272 Price Sisters, Marion and Dolours 99–101, 105–6, 109–10 prison dispute (see IRA prisoners) Pruitt, Dean 268, 276–7 Pym, Francis 100, 107 Ramsay, Robert 75 rational choice 169 Rees, Merlyn 44, 55–6, 67, 111, 157–8, 192 and 1975 ceasefire 118–20, 122–7, 135, 139, 145–7, 271 and policing 136–8 Reid, Fr. Alec 212–14, 253–4 Republican Sinn Féin 60–1 reunification (see united Ireland) Reynolds, Albert (See Taoiseach)

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Rimington, Stella 218–19 rioting 24–7, 32–3, 35–7, 179 Rose, Paul 217 Ross, Dr David 174–5 Rowan, Brian 211–12 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) 26–8, 39, 71, 80 and 1975 ceasefire 136–8 and loyalists 157 and negotiation (see negotiation) and normalization policy 150–1, 156–7 and peace process 195–6, 231 police reform 31, 50, 125–6, 134, 136–7, 143, 146–7, 191, 193–5, 264, 272 Special Branch 78, 80, 89, 174, 195–6, 266 Sands, Bobby 163–5, 171, 174–5, 177–9 Saunders, James 37 Schelling, Thomas 153 secrecy (see back-channels) Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) (see MI6) self-determination 8–9, 45, 51–5, 62, 66, 124–5, 129, 131 and peace process 200, 213, 258–61 Shipley-Dalton, Duncan 9 Sillitoe, Alan (‘The Loneliness of the Longdistance Runner’) 278 Sinn Féin 13, 57–8, 78, 112, 154–5 Ard Fheis 51, 93–4, 236–7 Éire Nua and federalism 51, 55, 129–30 elections 49–51, 57–8, 107–8, 119–20, 154–5, 179, 186, 202, 204 legalisation in Northern Ireland 107–8 and peace process 198–9, 201–2, 205–10, 212–14, 216–17, 231, 234, 244, 248, 250, 254, 259, 261–4, 272–4 Smith, Howard 75, 81 Smith, M. L. R. 118, 127 Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) (see also Cooper, Ivan; Devlin, Paddy; Hume, John) 22, 90, 109–10, 154–5, 201–2, 208 and peace process 212, 214–15, 254–6 social movement scholarship (see ‘contentious politics’) Spencer, Graham 217 Stagg, Frank 161–4 funeral 163 Staniland, Paul 6–7 Steele, Frank 39–42, 56, 59–60, 62–3, 65–6, 71, 74–8, 81, 88–95, 98–9, 103, 113, 237 Stormont government (see Unionist government) Stormont parliament 22, 49–51, 54, 189

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Stowe, Ken 158, 173, 180, 268–9 strategy and strategic action 7, 83, 168–9, 188–9, 192, 198–203, 205–6, 259, 269–70 strategic dilemmas 10–11, 272–3 strategic interaction approach 272 ‘The Strategy of Conflict’ 153 Sullivan, Jim 29–32, 79 Sunday Times Insight Team 36–7 Sunningdale Agreement 99–100, 272 surveillance 94–5 Taoiseach Bruton, John 263 Fitzgerald, Garret 204 Haughey, Charles J. 199–201, 212–14, 253 Lynch, Jack 106 Reynolds, Albert 253–6, 258–9, 261, 263 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 229 Taylor, John 129–30, 231–2 Taylor, Peter 2n.9, 39, 59, 153–4, 177–8, 280–1, 283 terrorism and counterterrorism 5, 7, 154–5, 208, 217, 231–2, 249–50, 271–2 terrorism research 2n.9, 188 Thatcher, Margaret 173, 176, 179, 182–3, 268–9 and peace process 195–6, 203, 205, 222 Theatre amateur dramatics 83 Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa 229–30 ‘like a stage play’ 256 Thomas, Quentin 204–7, 219–20, 222, 227, 262 Todd, Jennifer 2n.9, 269–70 Todd, Lieutenant Colonel 27–8 Trend, Burke 195 Trimble, David 262 Twomey, Seamus 62–3, 68, 133, 153–4 Tyrie, Andy (see loyalists) Ulster Defence Association (UDA) see loyalists Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) 150–1, 271 Ulster Unionist Party 9, 130, 194–5, 231–3, 248–9, 272 Unionist government 24, 32–4, 37–8, 40, 75, 216–17 prorogation of Stormont 40, 76

unionists and unionism 9, 33–4, 36–8, 44–5, 54, 64, 71, 75, 157 and 1975 ceasefire 119, 144–5, 147–8 and Downing Street Declaration 257–8 and Éire Nua 129–31, 145–6 and hunger strike 180 and peace process 192–7, 200, 205, 208–9, 212–13, 216, 231–2, 260–3, 266, 271–2 and withdrawal 124–6, 129, 132 United Ireland 51, 55, 121, 124, 129, 132–4, 244 United States 214–15, 264 Utopia and Utopians 44, 70 Vietnam (see also Cambodia) 208 evacuation of British embassy in Saigon 158–9 Vigilantes 29–31, 35–6 Waismel-Manor, Israel 167–70 Walton, Richard and Robert McKersie 47–8, 97–8, 174, 233–4 Wanis St John, Anthony 74 Watt, Barney 37 Weber, Max 275–7 Whitelaw, William 1, 41, 44, 52–3, 55–7, 59, 63–6, 68–73, 75, 81, 88–9, 100, 113, 148 Whyte, John 2–3 Widgery Inquiry 79 Wilsey, General Sir John 219 Wilson, Harold 11, 55–6, 60, 67, 109–10, 116, 268–9, 271–2 and 1975 ceasefire 121, 126–7, 142 and withdrawal 121–4, 128–9 Withdrawal 45, 50–1, 53–5, 62, 65, 152 and 1975 ceasefire 117–18, 120–33, 141–5 declaration of intent 52–3, 66, 124–6, 130–2, 139, 141, 144–5, 243–4 dominion status 121–2, 124, 130 independence for Northern Ireland 123–4, 128–30 and peace process 192–3 Woodfield, Philip 40, 56, 61, 65–6, 76, and 1981 hunger strike 182–3 Yeats, W.B. 165 Young, Sir Arthur 29, 32–3 Zartman, Ira William and Guy Faure 3, 20, 45, 267–8

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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 2/2/2021, SPi