ONE foggy summer evening in Dublin, around the middle of August 1994, a man stood waiting outside the Irish Independent office in Middle Abbey Street. Out of the mist, an attractive woman appeared and approached him. She asked, "Do you think Dublin will win on Sunday?" Recognising the code words, he handed her a document and they both walked off in different directions.
The woman was from Sinn Fein, and the document she was given was one drafted by Niall O'Dowd, [publisher of the Irish Voice in New York] which the IRA urgently required. Sinn Fein had sent an enigmatic message to O'Dowd in New York, by hand, on August 10th to say that events were moving at a steady pace towards a "new situation" and the IRA wanted immediate amplification of what the Irish Americans were saying they could guarantee after a ceasefire. The Irish-American response would be a key element in determining their decision.
O'Dowd asked a friend in Dublin to find a "safe" fax machine to which he could transmit a summary of what was on offer. The friend was then told that he should go to a specific location in the centre of Dublin at a certain time, and that he should give the document to a person who would approach him and ask about the outcome of the match the following Sunday between Dublin and Leitrim in the all-Ireland football semi-final. He did so and everything worked according to plan (and Dublin did win).
In the document the Irish-American "peacemakers" committed themselves to a campaign to achieve certain goals if an unarmed strategy was pursued by the republican movement. The list of attainable goals included: unrestricted access to the US for Gerry Adams and other Sinn Fein members; parity of treatment with other Northern Ireland leaders in Washington; early release or the transfer to Ireland of IRA prisoners in the US and the end of FBI surveillance; the opening of a nationalist office in Washington; a major campaign to influence public opinion in the US; US government support for the peace process with the aim of getting Washington to act as a guarantor of any agreements in Northern Ireland; and the promotion of Irish-American business and investment in the North of Ireland.
These commitments carried considerable weight with the IRA. The Irish Americans had already delivered the visa for Adams and broken the grip the US State Department had on Irish policy. Also implicit was the promise of considerable financial backing from figures like Chuck Feeney [US-born, self-made billionaire, largely from duty-free shops] for the development of the Sinn Fein operation in the US once the violence stopped.
That summer, as would later be revealed, the republican movement was debating a document which stated that the way to the movement's goal of a 32-county democratic socialist republic was to "construct an Irish nationalist consensus with international support". To win the struggle they must strengthen it "from other nationalist constituencies led by SDLP, Dublin Government and the emerging Irish-American lobby".
It noted that there was "potentially a very important Irish-American lobby not in hock to any particular party in Ireland or Britain" and that "Clinton is perhaps the first US president in decades to be substantially influenced by such a lobby".
For a time, however, it had looked as if the prospects for an IRA ceasefire on which this strategy was predicated were fading. A Sinn Fein conference held in the Donegal town of Letterkenny in June 1994 had taken decisions which were highly critical of the Joint Declaration of the British and Irish Governments on the way ahead. This led many commentators to believe that the IRA was rejecting the idea of a cessation.
"There was an expectation that Letterkenny would see some kind of an announcement," Albert Reynolds said. "I don't know how that perception grew because it was never in my mind that there would be an announcement. The Sinn Fein conference was to be used to sort of bring the thing farther, to get a mandate from the floor as to what they were at ... They hadn't everything in place. They were worried ... There was a leak, in the Mail in London, about an impending ceasefire and that postponed the announcement. It could have come earlier. Everything had to be strictly confidential. It had to be a tight ship, otherwise if these guys were put in a corner by the media they'd have walked away. You had to take them slowly, step by step."
In Washington Nancy Soderberg [member of the National Security Council and President Clinton's special adviser on Ireland] was growing impatient. She too was concerned about the reports from Letterkenny, which were almost universally negative. One day her patience snapped. She rang O'Dowd, who was holidaying in Co Kerry. Echoing Senator Patrick Moynihan's query to Kennedy after the Heathrow mortar bombs, she asked was the administration being taken for a ride. "Where's the ceasefire you promised me?" she demanded sharply.
"I was really at that point very depressed," Soderberg said, "well not depressed, but I was beginning to think the ceasefire was not going to come. By July the people who opposed it were all saying, `See we told you so,' every time a bomb went off. It got sort of annoying after a certain point. O'Dowd had told me ahead of time, to watch, there's going to be some very important announcement coming out of this party conference. And he basically ginned me up to think something was going to happen.
"We kept in touch with him during this period and he was saying, prior to Letterkenny, that the ceasefire was still coming, it was going to work. We should have some positive statements coming out of it about the ceasefire, watch it carefully. And then when the statements came they were very hard-line. There was nothing new."
She came on pretty strong, recalled O'Dowd who said he had never given her any reason to suppose there would be an actual ceasefire announcement at Letterkenny. "There was clearly pressure on her. I said I could only tell her what, I knew. I had not been told there would be a ceasefire out of Letterkenny..."
[US businessman and peace envoy] Bill Flynn and his security consultant, Bill Barry, [former FBI man who owned his own security company and who had been Bobby Kennedy's bodyguard the day he was assassinated] meanwhile made another private visit to Ireland in mid-summer. They drove to meet Adams in a hotel in Dundalk. Barry claimed there was some tough talking at the meeting, which was guarded by men he thought were from the IRA.
"We met Adams with another man who didn't introduce himself," he said.
"Gerry Adams was telling Bill Flynn what he would like him to do. I said, `I don't think you understand who Bill Flynn is, he can't do your public relations for you'. Flynn staid to Adams, `Look you've got to understand where I'm coming from. If one more person is killed, we're out of here. You're going to lose corporate America.' I think Adams was visibly shaken, Bill was so direct." The Sinn Fein leader had a hard time figuring Flynn out, a source close to Adams said. "We thought he was a bit of a loose cannon, a wild card, more Catholic than Irish and a really complex character," he said.
Back in New York a few weeks later O'Dowd received the message about the urgent need for the Irish-American proposals in written form. In a hand delivered letter, his contact also asked the Connolly House Group to be ready to return to Belfast to lend visible support to what was about to happen. The
Irish Voice publisher got him on the telephone and asked what would be the appropriate time to come. "When should I take my holidays?" was how he put it. The contact replied, "Why don't you try the last week in August?" The message was clear.
The American group prepared to return to Ireland on August 25th. It included the original four, O'Dowd, Morrison, Flynn and Feeney, plus trade union executives Joe Jamison and Bill Lenihan representing the American labour movement, an addition which broadened it to embrace the worlds of politics, big business and labour. Bill Flynn brought Barry with him for personal security.
O'Dowd was convinced that without the Americans, and the guarantees outlined in the document he had compiled, there would be no ceasefire. Apart from being the visible guarantors of Irish-American support, the presence of the group served a vitally important function for the republican movement in Ireland.
It identified Irish America with an IRA ceasefire decision, thus making the possibility of a split in the US, a prospect which haunted republicans, less likely. It reinforced the American dimension to those in the IRA army council who were about to make what was to them a momentous decision to call off their war, to end voluntarily a tradition of physical force nationalism dating back to Fenian times. It brought tee promise of influential Irish-American support for an unarmed strategy.
The Irish Americans had already delivered much. Before the peace process, the republican movement's top-level contact in the US had been Martin Galvin of Noraid; now it included important representatives of American business, politics and trade unions, and could go all the way to the president of the US.
This was the group, the amateur emissaries of Gulliver, which had already helped win the visa for Gerry Adams and had opened up lines to the White House. They represented a crucial point of reference in the broadening of the nationalist debate, the others being the government of Albert Reynolds and the constitutional nationalists of the North represented by John Hume.
In his view, Joe Jamison said it would be in the interests of everyone concerned to pursue an unarmed struggle as "we have a very green White House and President Clinton wants to play a constructive role regarding Northern Ireland". Also "the Dublin government has moved the issue up to the top of its agenda and to his great credit John Hume has moved the two strands of Irish nationalism to his approach".
On Thursday August 25th the members of the Connolly House Group arrived back in Dublin. Reporters were told that this time they were private citizens who had come to Ireland at the invitation of Sinn Fein, which wished to solicit their views in relation to various decisions that might be taken in the future, views which they would relay back to the White House and Congress. If there was a substantive move by the IRA in terms of a ceasefire, said Morrison, then he believed the White House would be responsive
While they were keyed up to receive exciting news, the group did not know any details of the promised ceasefire. There had been rumours that it would be limited in duration, or that the IRA would go on to what they called a "defensive posture", an idea based on the South African model which the Irish Americans had come up with.
They discovered, however, when they met Albert Reynolds and Minister for Foreign Affairs Dick Spring in the Taoiseach's office that Reynolds was taking an all-or-nothing attitude. The meeting was quite tense. O'Dowd recalled how he thought the hostile body language between the two Irish leaders betrayed tensions which foreshadowed the break-up of the Fianna Fail-Labour coalition that winter. The Taoiseach insisted on the group taking a blunt message to Sinn Fein in Belfast. Dublin wanted a permanent cessation of violence, he said. That was the only basis on which Sinn Fein could become involved in the political process. No reserving the right to defend nationalist communities. No limits of six months or a year. It had to be an all-out IRA ceasefire or nothing.
"I could see all their faces looking at me around the table," Reynolds said. "And Bill Flynn said nothing. And Chuck Feeney said nothing. Niall O'Dowd and Bruce Morrison I think were a bit taken aback with the ferocity of the opposition to a limited ceasefire."
... Reynolds insisted that he did not know there would be a total cessation at that time, though O'Dowd left convinced, that the Taoiseach was even then working out the final wording of the ceasefire announcement with Sinn Fein intermediaries.
Bill On the hundred-mile drive to Belfast next day, Flynn took the wheel. Barry sat beside him.
"The whole time we were talking about how to get these guys to agree to a complete cessation," Barry recalled. Their reception in Belfast was not universally welcoming. The fact that the Americans had come at the invitation of Sinn Fein rankled with some SDLP members and the unionists. To many people they were identified with Sinn Fein. "Some Sinn Fein members would make the same mistake," said O'Dowd. "We would have to tell them to back off."
In the Wellington Park Hotel near Queen's University, before going to Sinn Fein headquarters, O'Dowd gave each a copy of the document he had drawn up for the IRA and asked them in turn what they thought Gerry Adams would tell them. Chuck Feeney, with his instincts for the deal sharpened by high-level international business, predicted confidently that it would be a total cessation of violence. But they were split down the middle. They decided that the best approach was to ask straightforward questions, such as "When will the ceasefire start and for how long?"
... A Sinn Fein driver, who had gone to the wrong hotel, eventually came to pick them up. They arrived through a crush of media at Connolly House to find Gerry Adams waiting for them with Martin McGuinness, Mairead Keane, Lucilita Bhreatnach and another official. O'Dowd guessed Bhreatnach was the attractive woman who collected the document in Dublin's Middle Abbey Street. He was impressed at how relaxed and in control Adams was as they sat round a large wooden conference table in a wood-panelled room with a television suspended above a curtained window. As a press photographer took pictures, Feeney stayed outside the door, only coming in when the cameraman had gone. The billionaire was so camera-shy, he engaged a photographer to take pictures when he met people on private visits to Ireland - with instructions never to develop the film.
"It was the biggest media scrum I ever saw in my life," said O'Dowd. "We had to battle our way in. We were very tense, jumpy and nervous. People were shouting questions. We were hot and sweaty when we got in. Then Adams came into the room looking so cool. Better than I had ever seen him. So calm. I knew something had happened. He had made a decision and a good one."
ILL Flynn and Bill Barry later went to the American embassy, a five-minute walk from the Berkeley Court Hotel, where the US ambassador, Jean Kennedy Smith, had called the embassy staff together in the rotunda to make the announcement of the ceasefire. It was a triumphant moment for her after the internal battles over the Adams visa. The two men drank a glass of champagne with her.
Flynn would not admit to being emotional. "It's a curious thing, one you will not understand, but O'Dowd was in tears, I wasn't," Bill Flynn told me later in New York. "To me that IRA decision was the most natural thing in the world. I looked on it as another good business decision. You know, in my business, we celebrate great victories, and then we'll have a Martini, and then we'll go back to work the next day.
It was when he talked to his relatives in Co Down, he said, that he realised what it really meant to them and to their teenage girls and sons
Six weeks later on October 13th, the combined loyalist military command announced its own ceasefire in Belfast. The statement was read to the press in a community cent re in north Belfast by Gusty Spence, who as a member of the UVF had served a murder sentence for the shooting dead of a Catholic barman in 1966, but had long since espoused the cause of peace.
He and his comrades offered "the loved ones of all innocent victims over the past 25 years abject and true remorse", a note of apology which caught people in Northern Ireland by surprise. Bill Flynn came over for the announcement, serving a similar purpose for the loyalists as the full Irish-American peace group had for Sinn Fein. He offered one piece of advice: not to change the one sentence in which they apologised.
"I wish the IRA had said that," he told them.