A DIRECT personal appeal from the IRA leadership to British prime minister Harold Wilson along with codenamed contacts for those involved in secret talks to resolve the Northern conflict were revealed in documents unveiled at NUI Galway yesterday.
The documents kept by Derry businessman and mediator Brendan Duddy, which were discussed at a symposium attended by key British counter-intelligence official Michael Oatley and former senior Irish diplomat Seán Ó hUigínn at NUIG, record how Provisional republican leadership figures were codenamed “Greek tycoons” in 1981.
During attempts by British officials to resolve the 1981 hunger strikes, “Onassis” was the codename for Martin McGuinness, and “Niarchos” for Gerry Adams. The British government was known as “the Company” and the Irish government as “the Americans”. The Democratic Unionist Party was referred to as “P&O”, the SDLP as “Euroferries”, and the Official Unionist Party as “Cunard”.
Mr McGuinness was codenamed “Walter”, and his colleagues were referred to as “Walter’s people” during peace negotiations in May 1993.
Duddy acted as intermediary between the British government and the IRA during three main periods of the conflict – in the early and mid 1970s, the early 1980s and between 1990 and 1993, when then Northern secretary Sir Peter Brooke decided to try to bring the IRA into a political settlement.
NUIG political science lecturer Dr Niall Ó Dochartaigh, who has studied the archive in detail, notes most accounts of the time argue the British “duped” the IRA into a 1975 ceasefire and “strung them along to weaken them militarily”.
However, the archive includes a message sent by the British to the Provisional IRA leadership in January 1975, which acknowledged this concern: “We know that the Provisionals fear that we may be stringing them along.”
It includes a letter from the IRA with a “formal and courteous tone” to Harold Wilson, also in January 1975. A telephone message from the British to the IRA that February via Duddy concludes with “We will ring you. Don’t ring us.”
Mr Oatley said the archive “shows the importance of understanding the different motivations and instances that can produce political violence”, and the “importance of dialogue”.
Mr Oatley said that “all sorts of pressures” were involved in ending conflict, but he found the notion of a “war on terror” which “lumps particular situations together” such as the Middle East and the conflict in Chechyna, to be “offensive” and there was nothing constructive to be gained by such an approach.
Mr Ó hUiginn said the archive showed the peace process had roots, “both positive and negative”, including the fact that dialogue had been going on.
Mr Duddy’s role as a mediator was “impeccable”, Mr Ó hUigínn noted, and the fact he had ensured his own ego “stayed out of the frame” was very significant.
Mr Duddy and members of his family and Prof Paul Arthur,author and former politics professor at the University of Ulster, also attended the symposium.
