After PIRA failure, Adams eyes Cabinet posts

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Monday September 05, 2005 20:46 by Al1

IN 1970 when Sean MacStiofain, the IRA chief of staff, led some angry Sinn Fein delegates out of a Dublin hotel, Gerry Adams, then aged 21, remained in his seat at the party's Ard Fheis.

IN 1970 when Sean MacStiofain, the IRA chief of staff, led some angry Sinn Fein delegates out of a Dublin hotel, Gerry Adams, then aged 21, remained in his seat at the party's Ard Fheis.

Adams, however, has disputed this version of events, much as he disputes his past IRA membership. It does seem that he refused, initially, to follow the dissidents. Three months later, however, he changed his mind.

He joined the breakaway provisional republican group, which was unhappy with the OIRA's Marxist tendencies, with its willingness to contest elections, and its lack of interest in the armed struggle as the only means of achieving Irish unity.

The walkout created a split in republican ranks, and the Provisional (Provisional Sinn Fein/PIRA) movement was the by-product of the row. Last Thursday, 35 years later, he led the Provisionals back to the same hotel from which they had made their historic exit: now Jurys (formerly the Intercontinental).

He did so, leading a party and a movement with changed policies, and a very different message to that of 1970, when the Provisional IRA was formed.

The Provisionals were the self-proclaimed new guardians of the republican faith, the inheritors and upholders of the physical force tradition. And they built an alternative Provisional IRA to challenge, and replace, the Official IRA.

Provisional Sinn Fein/PIRA favoured abstentionism, rejected politics and despised the parliamentary path. Above all it favoured the armed struggle to achieve Irish unity by force, and without consent.
It waged a campaign that lasted a quarter of a century. The Provisional IRA was responsible for half of all the deaths in the conflict.

Last week saw the final repudiation of the original Provisional position: the armed struggle. In 35 years Gerry Adams and Provisional Sinn Fein/PIRA have travelled full circle in their odyssey.

Last Thursday, they returned to the hotel from which the Provisionals made their historic departure, by rejecting policies they have since come to embrace: like, left-wing politics, partition, consent to Irish unity, and the primacy of parliamentary politics.

Last week, the circle was completed with the Provisionals' solemn declaration of their final farewell to arms. What, many in the Provisional movement might now well wonder, was it all about?

To the Provisionals in 1970, the parliaments in Dublin and Belfast were puppet parliaments. They were institutions to be overthrown by PIRA force as it pursued a united Ireland by military means, without the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland. That, and the removal of the British presence, was the imperative driving the movement as it pursued its goal by bomb and bullet for the next quarter century.

To the Provisionals in 2005, Leinster House and Stormont are parliaments they fully recognise and for Provisional Sinn Fein to take their seats in, with a view to sharing power either in a Northern executive or in a future coalition government in Dublin.

The Provisionals have come to accept partition, and the legitimacy of British rule in Northern Ireland.

For Adams, it has been the triumph of failure, where PIRA paramilitary failure has been turned and exploited to Provisional Sinn Fein political advantage; but at great human cost, both in lives sacrificed and lives.

At 4.15pm on Thursday, as Adams began his press conference, the PIRA had finally gone away, just 15 minutes earlier. P O Neill's final script for the occasion was a piece of political theatre worthy of inclusion in a Jury's Cabaret act. After 35 years, the war, officially and finally, was over, with a whimper, not a bang, with final surrender of weaponry to follow.

The PIRA, after thinking about disarmament since 1994, took 11 years to make its mind up, to surrender arms. An active paramilitary organisation would, it seem, become a passive old boys club, with a title, but with no defined role.

Will the PIRA statement work, and will the Northern Ireland executive be restored, with Provisional Sinn Fein sharing power with the DUP? Only time will tell, and the IMC reports in October will indicate the pace of progress being made. The most optimistic scenario, that an executive could be restored by next June, seems farfetched.

Certainly, if the DUP emulate the tactics employed by Provisional Sinn Fein/PIRA, taking 11 years to concede the war is over and to abandon violence, and by taking seven years to meet the final surrender of weaponry terms of the Good Friday Agreement, then a new executive may never be formed.