Deniable Contact by Niall Ó Dochartaigh

Author:Niall Ó Dochartaigh [Ó Dochartaigh, Niall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192647641
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

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 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.

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