One of the main reasons for the IRA’s success … if maiming, killing and property destruction can be described as such … has been its organisation into very small cells. It has meant that captured IRA suspects were incapable of giving too much away because they knew so little and knew so few people up the chain of command. It countered the potential for losing control that such a system had by a rigid discipline code, meting out knee-capping or death to those who misbehaved. British intelligence estimated that in the 25 years of violence in Northern Ireland and the mainland, perhaps as few as 200 IRA operatives at any one time were responsible for all the death and destruction … and average of two deaths a week and untold millions in economic damage.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary started to make inroads into the IRA in the mid-1980s, extracting the so-called super-grasses who had had enough and traded information and evidence for immunity. But it only partially stopped the IRA. The cessation of violence only came when the IRA agreed to it 17 months ago. That agreement was presented by what has been called the IRA’s political wing, the Sinn Fein. Throughout the 17 months, the British and Irish Governments and the unionist and moderate Catholic parties in Northern Ireland imagined that when Sinn Fein spoke, the IRA was speaking; that Gerry Adams was speaking for the IRA.
Last week’s bombing in London ended that.
Mr Adams and the parties who deal with him are in a terrible bind. If he is in fact the IRA’s political voice and therefore intimately engaged with its highest councils, then he must carry some personal responsibility for Friday’s bombing and that his protestations of peaceful intention are lies. On the other hand, if he cannot control or even substantially influence the conduct of the IRA, why should any party bother to deal with him?
The bind for those dealing with him to date is that they have been dealing with the wrong person. Worse, the very nature of the IRA is such that no-one can ever be sure they are dealing with the right people.
It has been apparent over the past 17 months that Gerry Adams has not been willing to meet or even negotiate the demand from the British Government that the IRA disarm. It now appears that he was not only unwilling, but that he was also unable. He could not force his IRA masters to agree to a full or partial disarmament.
Moreover, a bombing like that or Canary Wharf cannot be planned overnight. If Mr Adams has a say in and a knowledge of IRA affairs, he must have known about it for quite some time.
The exposure of Mr Adams’s weak point, however, does not mean that the British Government can escape all blame. It was tardy, it made unrealistic demands on disarmament, and it made a premature suggestion of an election. That, of course, does not excuse the appalling violence of Friday.
The British Government is now in an impossible situation. To change its stand will look like giving in to violence.
The saddest past of Friday’s violence is that it has ended a ceasefire which could have over time created an acceptance by Protestants in the north that there was little to fear from a united Ireland, especially in a changed environment of a European Community an a reformed environment in Ireland itself.