Mick Clifford: Rewriting history is an insult to the dead

Thousands of people are alive today because of the peace brought about by the Good Friday Agreement, former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has said. Picture: PA

WHAT was it all about? This week Gerry Adams reflected on the many benefits of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). Mr Adams has been doing the rounds for the last week or so, both here and in the USA, as part of the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the agreement. He correctly receives credit for moving the Republican movement away from violence to the point where Sinn Féin were integral to the signing of the agreement. But what exactly was the previous 30 years of killing and dying about? Surely at this time when there is cause for celebration at two and a half decades of peace, there should be some acknowledgment of the reasons why nearly 3,700 people had to die before the agreement was arrived at.

A survey published in the Sunday Times last week suggested that young people are not fully informed, and often not informed at all, about the Troubles. Into that vacuum, a narrative is growing that the Provisional IRA was primarily engaged in defending its community. In one poll Martin McGuinness was the figure most associated with the peace process. Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill said a few months ago that there was “no alternative” to the violence. Adams has often referred to the period of conflict as “the response”, inferring that the IRA was merely responding to the violence being perpetrated on the minority tradition by loyalists and the British army.

The reality is that from the mid-1970s the conflict was primarily about the IRA’s attempt to violently impose a 32 county socialist Republic on the island. The sectarian state had been dismantled by then. There was a blueprint on how to advance in the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974. Seamus Mallon famously called the Good Friday Agreement “Sunningdale for slow learners”. Certainly, there was opposition to Sunningdale from the unionist and loyalist traditions, but people like John Hume and Mallon saw it as the way in which equal rights could be fully achieved.

The Provos had different ideas. As far as they were concerned, unity had to be pursued through violence to the bitter end. “Brits out” meant a united Ireland. This was the focus of the Republican “struggle”.

In his interview, Adams said that the Good Friday Agreement provided a stepping stone to a united Ireland.

“The pathway which opened up, it was like a new phase of the struggle. Bobby Sands, Mairead Farrell didn’t have this type of a mechanism,” he said, nodding towards two of the martyred volunteers in republican mythology. “Some people are campaigning for the right to referendums, the principle has been conceded here. We have it, it’s a matter of when.”

So the armed struggle, as Adams would term it, was all about attempting to achieve a united Ireland. Were all those deaths worth the effort?

Bobby Sands died on hunger strike in 1981. Surely he had no idea that his fight for freedom would eventually yield an agreement that long-fingered unity to some far-distant future, only possible through a democratic vote of the people in the North in the first instance. If he had known that would he have sacrificed his life for it?

Mairead Farrell was shot dead by British forces in highly controversial circumstances in Gibraltar in 1988. She and two comrades were en route to plant a bomb in a public square on the Rock where a British army band was due to play. There is every possibility that more human beings, including civilian adults and children, would have died violently had the mission been successful.

By then Adams and McGuinness knew that the fight in which the Provos were ostensibly engaged was over. History records that negotiations on how exactly to bring the conflict to a close were already tentatively being explored. The Republican leaders had accepted that the idea of the IRA killing their way to a united Ireland simply could not succeed. Yet volunteers like Farrell were still sent out to kill and die on the basis that they were fighting to free their country.

The killing continued. In October 1990, Patsy Gillespie was strapped to a bomb in Derry while his family were held hostage, and told to drive into a British army checkpoint. Gillespie was not a combatant. He was a Catholic father of three who worked as a cook in an army base in a city that was economically deprived. As a result of his employment, and his struggle to put food on the table for his children, he was considered a “legitimate target” by the IRA.

He was blown to bits along with five soldiers in an action that would be applauded by groups like the Taliban. It is inconceivable that Martin McGuinness, at the very least, was not forewarned about the operation in his hometown. Far more likely he either acquiesced or directed it. This outrage was committed at a time when McGuinness and his fellow leaders in the Republican movement knew that the rhetoric about “Brits out” was a sham.

None of this is to suggest that Republicans were solely responsible for the longevity of the killing. British political and military leaders often stupidly, and sometimes brutally, played into the Provos hands 

The tactics deployed by the crown served to alienate a large section of the nationalist community and collusion with loyalist killers was tantamount to a state murdering its own citizens. Yet it would be erroneous, and an insult to the dead, maimed, and bereaved to deny that the Republican movement was in the driving seat of the violence, certainly from the mid-seventies on. When they stopped killing, the killing, for the greater part, stopped.

Adams is entitled to credit for his skill in bringing most of the Republican movement along with him to the negotiating table. McGuinness is entitled to be remembered as somebody who in the latter stages of his life did what he could to improve the lives of others in the North. But saluting them primarily as peacemakers is a gross distortion designed to corrupt the factual narrative of history. They did take risks, but others who were willing to negotiate with them while the killing continued took far greater risks. Hume, Mallon, intermediaries like Brendan Duddy and Fr Alec Reid, and a whole collection of British and Irish politicians may not be TikTok celebrities, or even known to a younger generation, but the long arc of history will properly acknowledge what they did to save lives.

So let’s celebrate the peace but don’t insult the dead by retrospectively pretending that the killing was about something it was not. One day there will be a united Ireland. When it does happen it will be despite, not because of, the long campaign of killing which was devoid of any morality.