Ireland's OWN: History

 

How the Deal on [P]IRA Weapons was Done —Workers Power Global, Galway Ever since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, the Sinn Féin leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have been unconditional supporters of the "peace process". In practice that has meant the preservation of the Assembly at all costs as a power-sharing forum for pursuing the reform of the sectarian statelet of Northern Ireland. For the most part they have kept the General Council of the IRA in tow. But with this difference: the IRA refused to destroy weapons until the British army and RUC also demilitarised. For three years, the peace process has been stuck in a contradiction. The IRA saw that political concessions were only going to be extracted from the Unionists if they retained some military muscle; but the Unionists refused to carry on with the devolved power-sharing beyond a certain point "while they had a gun pointed at their head". The crisis over the summer brought things to a head as Trimble pulled the plugs on the Assembly bit by bit. Soon, Adams would have to decide whether to let the Assembly collapse and risk a return to direct rule and the end of the IRA¹s ceasefire. Then, in August, James Monaghan and Martin McAuley, two IRA engineers, were arrested in Colombia while on a visit to exchange information with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). FARC is high up on the White House list of "terrorists" and the main target of the $1.6 bn Plan Colombia. These arrests were an affront to the US administration and an embarrassment to the supporters of the IRA in Congress. Millions of dollars from rich, conservative Irish-Americans each year kept SF and IRA afloat. Bill Flynn, chairman of the Mutual Bank of America, and one of Sinn Féin¹s biggest supporters made it clear to Adams and Sinn Féin after Colombia that the only way to rescue the party's reputation in the US capital was for the IRA to disarm. "They listen to me because they know I am a strong supporter of what they are doing to unite Ireland," he told The Observer . Such was the nature of dwindling support that Sinn Féin faced having to close its Washington office. In Ireland, Adams and his supporters on the IRA's Army Council, who had never sanctioned the Colombian adventure, decided that they had to remove the obstacles within the IRA, especially Brian Keenan, who had sanctioned the Colombian trip. But it was not until the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centre that the balance of forces shifted to the extent that Adams and McGuinness could carry this out. The IRA was now more likely than ever to be labeled "terrorists", rather than "freedom fighters". At a late September meeting of the IRA, Martin McGuinness became temporarily the IRA's chief-of-staff. Over the following few weeks, the Sinn Féin and IRA leadership travelled the length and breadth of Ireland persuading key figures to back their new policy, and they won the argument. Page updated 30 Mar 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.