This is the Past by Patrick Radden Keefe

 

Pages 298-300

 

Dolours Price’s aspirations for a writing career had not amounted to much. She never did publish her memoir. But for a time, she went back to school, enrolling in a law course at Trinity College, in Dublin. To the young students in the program, Price cut an unusual figure, an older eccentric who wore brightly colored hats and would sit in lectures with her head cocked quizzically to one side. She didn’t raise her hand before offering her own interjections, and she took pleasure in amiably heckling the lecturers . . .


Price clung to her acid wit. She could seem, at times, to marinate in it. But there were signs, also, the she was haunted. She felt as though she spent a great deal of time rummaging around in her own head, coming up with bits and pieces of her own past. She was troubled by her experiences as a young woman – by things she had done to others, and to herself. Many of her old comrades were suffering from PTSD, flashing back to nightmarish encounters from decades earlier, waking with a start in a cold sweat. From time to time, when Price was driving her car with her sons in the back seat, she would glance in the rear view mirror and, instead of Danny or Oscar, see her dead comrade Joe Lynskey staring back at her. One day, during a lecture at Trinity on political prisoners, Price stood up in a fury and began to rattle off names of republican hunger strikers, before storming out of the classroom. She never came back.

To Price, The Good Friday Agreement felt like an especially personal double cross. ‘The settlement betrayed what she had been born into,’ her friend Eamonn McCann recalled” It had a more intense and deep-seated effect on Dolours than it did on many other people.’ She had set bombs and robbed banks and seen friends die and nearly died herself, in the expectation that these exertions would finally achieve the national liberation for which generations of her family fought. ‘For what Sinn Fein has achieved today, I would not have missed a good breakfast,’ she said in an interview with Irish radio. ‘Volunteers didn’t only die,’ she pointed out. ‘Volunteers had to kill as well, you know?’

There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury’, a notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done in wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct. This sense of grievance was exacerbated by the fact  that the man who steered republicanism on the path to peace was her own erstwhile friend and commanding officer, Gerry Adams. Adams had given her orders, orders she had faithfully obeyed, but now he appeared to be disavowing the armed struggle in general, and Dolours in particular. It filled her with a terrible fury.

At a republican commemoration in Country Mayo in 2001, she stood up an announced that it was ‘too much’ for her to listen to people say that they had never been in the IRA. ‘Gerry Adams was my commanding officer,’ she exclaimed. This sort of outspokenness was not welcomed by Sinn Fein, and on more than one occasion, stern men came to tell Price to quiet down.. But I Sein Fein  had a conspicuous devotion to message control, this only intensified Price’s anger. As the IRA moved toward a peaceful strategy during the 1990s, various armed splinter groups had formed, some of which were committed to further violence. Price occasionally attended meetings of these groups, but she was not a joiner. “What are you going to get out of going back to war?’ she would ask them.


pages 376- 379

In some other political party, in some other place, the arrest of a politician in a cold-case investigation involving the notorious murder and secret burial of a widowed mother of ten would more than likely mean the swift end of a political career. But Gerry Adams was a special case. Even as Sein Fein had thrived as a political party, not just in Northern Ireland but in the Republic and achieved stature and influence beyond the most ambitious imaginings of its leaders, the party’s fortunes still seemed tied, inextricably, to those of its charismatic president. Sinn Fein had plenty of young, polished representatives who, having grown up after the worst of the Troubles were over, bore no compromised taint of paramilitary violence. This new cohort did not lack for ambition. But they were unwilling, or unable, to shuffle the old men of the IRA off the stage. When it emerged that Adams  had effectively covered for his pedophile brother, nobody in his party breathed a word, in public, that was less than supportive. Sinn Fein still retain an unmatched capacity to project the appearance of a unified front, and the leadership now argued that the arrest of Gerry Adams was nothing short of an attack on the party itself.

Overnight, a team of artists painted a new mural on the Falls Road, depicting the smiling Adams alongside the words PEACEMAKER, LEADER, VISIONARY. At a rally to unveil the mural Martin McGuinness announced that the arrest was ‘politically biased’ He cited upcoming local government and EU elections in the coming week and suggested that the timing of Adam’s humiliation was designed to hurt Sinn Fein’s electoral prospects. McGuinness blamed ‘an embittered rump of the old RUC’ that still persisted in the police department and now was out to ‘settle old scores at whatever the political cost.’ With Divis Tower visible in the distance, hundreds of supporters milled around, holding placards that read DEFEND THE PEACE PROCESS, RELEASE GERRY ADAMS, above a photo alongside Nelson Mandela.

While McGuinness delivered his remarks, a great bear of a man stood at his elbow. The man had close-cropped gray hair, a high forehead, and a knit brow, and he stood chewing gum, holding the script from which McGuiness was reading. It was Bobby Storey, a long time IRA enforcer who was known affectionately, in republican circles, as Big Bobby. Given all the rhetoric about how Gerry Adams was getting antagonized for being such a peacemaker, Big Bobby  was a discordant presence at the occasion.

Storey had joined the IRA as a teenager, in the early 1970s, and ultimately served twenty years in prison. After the peace process, he became the chair of Sinn Fein in Belfast, but he was often described as the IRA’s top spymaster. In fact, he was reputed to have been the architect of the break-in at the Castlereagh barracks, in 2002. Storey was also widely believed to have been involved in another heist, the Northern Bank robbery, in which thieves made off with twenty-six million pounds. It was the largest bank robbery in the history of the United Kingdom at the time. And it was the timing of the heist that proved most significant: the bank was robbed on December 2004, years after the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA no longer needed money to but weapons. In fact, at the time the robbery happened, the group was giving up its weapons, the decommissioning process overseen by Father Reid was at that point almost complete. For the critics of Sinn Fein, the robbery solidified the impression that the IRA had morphed into a mafia organization. ‘Call me old fashioned if you like, but there used to be standards,’ Dolours Price wrote in the aftermath of the robbery. ‘The War is over, we are told . . . .so what is all this money needed for?’

Big Bobby was a close confident of Adam’s. But he had the mien of a thug. Standing in front of the mural, he took the microphone and bellowed about the arrogance that might prompt authorities to ‘dare touch our party leader.’ His indignation rising, Storey shouted, ’We have a message for the British government, the Irish government, for cabal that’s out there.’ Then he said, ‘We ain’t gone away, you know.’

To anyone in Belfast who heard those words, the echo was unmistakable. Storey was quoting, quite intentionally, one of the most famous sound bites of the Troubles: the moment, nineteen years earlier, when Adams was interrupted during a speech by heckler who shouted, ‘Bring back the IRA!’ and Adams responded, ‘They haven’t gone away, you know.’ Hearing those words from Big Bobby, Michael; McConville felt a chill. The McConville children had been pushing to get access to the Boston College tapes, and had felt gratified by the arrest of Gerry Adams. Yet here was what seemed like an unambiguous threat.


Mackers, too, saw pure menace in the remark. ‘He didn’t mean Sinn Fein hadn’t gone away,’ he said. ‘He meant the IRA.’ To the people who had participated in the Belfast project, the message was clear. “I don’t even care about Sinn Fein and the political process. I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck,’ Ricky O’Rawe said. ‘All I care about is the truth.’ Yet Storey was informing those who might tell their tales that they had crossed not only Gerry Adams, but the IRA. To O’Rawe the city suddenly felt unsafe. The IRA itself itself wouldn’t necessarily need to sanction some actions against him. With rhetoric like Storey’s, it could be some kid, heeding the call to arms, looking to please the leadership, itching to earn his spurs.


Pages 383-385

In the fall of 2015, Theresa Villiers, the secretary of state  for Northern Ireland, released a report about paramilitary activity, which had been by the PSNI and British intelligence. ‘All the main paramilitary groups operating during the period of the Troubles remain in existence,’ the report announced, specifying that this included the Provisional IRA. The Provos continued to function, albeit in ’much reduced form,’ and still had access to weapons. Big Bobby Storey was right: they hadn’t gone away.

Gerry Adams dismissed the report as ‘nonsense’. But in the view of rank and file Provos, the IRA’s Army Council – the seven- member leadership body that for decades directed the armed struggle- continues to control not just the IRA, but also Sinn Fein, ‘with an overarching strategy. Secretly, behind the scenes, the army was still calling the shots. The report was careful to indicate that the organization was no longer engaged in violence, and now had a ‘wholly political focus.’ Even so, as one columnist in The Irish Times suggested, it seemed to reinforce ‘the notion of men and women in balaclavas running the political show.

Nearly two decades had passed since the Good Friday Agreement, and Northern Ireland was now peaceful, apart from the occasional dissident attack. Yet the  society seemed as divided as ever. The borders between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods were still inscribed in the concertina wire and steel of the so-called peace walls that vein the city, like fissures in a block of marble. In fact, there were more peace walls than there had ever been at the height of the Troubles. These towering structures maintained some degree of calm by physically separating the city’s populations, as if they were animals in a zoo. But the walls weres still tagged with rune-like slurs –K. A. T.,  ‘Kill all Taigs,’ a derogatory term for Catholics, on the one side; K. A. H., for ‘Kill All Huns,’ a reference to Protestants, on the other.

The center of Belfast seemed bustling, almost cosmopolitan. It was dominated by the same chain stores – Waterstones, Caffe Nero, Kiehl’s – that you would find in any other small, prosperous European city.  The local film production facility, Titanic Studios, had become famous as the place where the television show Game of Thrones was filmed. There was even a popular tourist attraction, the Troubles Tour, in which ex-combatant cabdrivers guided visitors to flashpoints from the bad years, decoding the ubiquitous murals that conjured famous battles, martyrs, and gunman. The effect was to make the Troubles seem like distant history.

But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighborhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90% of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated elementary schools. Bus stops in some parts of Belfast were informally designated Catholic or Protestant, and people would walk an extra block or two to wait at a stop where they wouldn’t fear being hassled. Hundreds of Union Jacks still fluttered in Protestant neighborhoods, while Catholic areas were often decked out with the tricolor, or with Palestinian flags – a gesture of solidarity but also a signal that, even now, many republicans in the North regarded themselves as an occupied people. For a time, the American diplomat Richard Haas chaired a series of multiparty negotiations about unresolved issues in the peace process. But the talks foundered, in no small measure, over the issue of flags. Tribalism and its trappings remained so potent in Belfast that the various sides could not agree on how to govern the display of regalia. When the Belfast City Council voted, in 2012, to limit the number of days that the Union Jack could be raised above City Hall, protestors tried to storm the building, and riots erupted throughout the city, with unionist demonstrators throwing bricks and petrol bombs.

In light of this ongoing discord, the  Villiers report made one fascinating observation. ‘The existence and cohesion of these paramilitary groups since their cease-fires has played an important role in enabling the transition from extreme violence to political progress,’  it asserted. This was a  counterintuitive finding, and a subtle enough point that it was overlooked in the storm of press coverage that greeted the report. The continued existence of republican and loyalist outfits didn’t hurt the peace process – but helped it. It was because of the ‘authority’ conferred by these persisting hierarchies that such groups were able to ‘influence, restrain and manage’ their members, the report maintained, noting that there had been only ‘limited indication of dissent to date,’ which were quickly dealt with ‘by the leadership.’

To Brendan Hughes or Dolours Price or Marian Price or Anthony McIntyre, Sinn Fein’s tendency to brook no opposition seemed self-interested, illiberal and cruel. But perhaps, as the  Villiers report appeared to suggest, it was only through such ruthless discipline and the insistence that Irish republican must be a monolith, with zero tolerance for outliers –that Adams and the people around him had managed to keep the lid on a combustible situation, and prevent the war from reigniting.