On centennial, Sinn Fein weighs cost of IRA violence
By Kevin Cullen and Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff | March 27, 2005
DUBLIN -- For half of Sinn Fein's 100 years, Miceal de Faoite has been a loyal member, dedicated to the party's goal of an independent, united Ireland.
De Faoite weathered years of irrelevance as the party's military wing, the Irish Republican Army, petered out in the 1950s. He was outraged by the British crackdown on the Roman Catholic civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, but was heartened when the long-dormant IRA rose to defend Catholic nationalists, seeing them as heroes defying the British empire.
In 35 years of armed conflict, as the IRA fought the British security forces to a bloody stalemate, de Faoite would not have dreamed of criticizing the IRA. But now, he and other republicans -- hardline nationalists who believe force is justified to remove British influence from Ireland -- are saying openly what for them was once unthinkable.
''It's time for Sinn Fein to break from the IRA," said de Faoite, a 65-year-old construction company executive from the southern city of Tipperary. ''Politics is the only way to go now. That break should be made."
De Faoite spoke as Sinn Fein (pronounced shin fane) gathered in Dublin this month for its annual conference, in its centennial year, not far from the post office where the rebels who inspired today's IRA staged the ''Easter Rising" of 1916.
Breaking from a mythologized past that so deeply informs the republican movement's violent, revolutionary identity has proved difficult. But a series of recent events -- and perhaps the passage of time -- have conspired to make this 100th anniversary of Sinn Fein not as much a year of celebration as one of deep soul-searching.
Never has the IRA been under such pressure, in Ireland and the Irish diaspora, especially in the United States, to forsake the violence that has been its hallmark.
Over the past decade, the IRA has stopped shooting police officers and British soldiers, and, aside from a spectactular attack in London in 1996, it has stopped planting bombs, allowing the peace process in Northern Ireland to effectively end what had been Europe's most intractable conflict.
But the IRA has refused to disband, and its members have continued to engage in armed robberies while dispensing vigilante beatings, shootings, and expulsions to dissidents, petty criminals, and those who defy the IRA's iron-fisted control of republican neighborhoods.
A review by The Boston Globe has found that police forces on both sides of the border implicate the IRA in the killings of at least 39 people since its historic cease-fire in August of 1994.
After a $50 million bank heist in Belfast on Dec. 20 that authorities attributed to the IRA and the barroom murder on Jan. 30 of a Catholic man, reportedly by IRA members, a growing number of Irish nationalists have begun to say that the IRA itself poses the biggest threat to political and social normalcy in Northern Ireland.
The Irish government, which had followed a policy of ''constructive ambiguity" about the IRA's continued existence, no longer accepts that the IRA can remain in business until there is a final settlement in Northern Ireland.
A decade ago, in Washington, acceptance of Sinn Fein, and especially of its leader, Gerry Adams, was crucial in convincing republicans that they would be treated as equals in the political process once violence was put aside. Now, many of those who enthusiastically helped Sinn Fein into the mainstream, including US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, have concluded that the IRA has become an albatross around Sinn Fein's neck.
But even more significantly, so have a growing number of Irish republicans, who have long viewed the IRA not as criminals but as their defenders.
Last month, when the sisters of Robert McCartney, who was stabbed and beaten to death by IRA men, defied the code of silence in neighborhoods like theirs in the Short Strand section of Belfast, hundreds of friends and neighbors stood with them.
IRA leaders met with the McCartneys and offered to shoot two IRA members and two other men involved in the murder. The sisters rejected the offer, saying they wanted the suspects to be investigated by the police and tried in the courts. In doing so, the McCartney sisters and their supporters were rejecting the IRA's raison d'être: the protection of Catholic nationalists from forces loyal to Britain.
Paisley's missed chance
The current crisis facing Sinn Fein was almost avoided in December, when a half-dozen parties were tantalizingly close to an agreement to restore the Northern Ireland assembly, which had been suspended in October 2002 over allegations of IRA spying.
Under a complex arrangement brokered by the Irish and British governments, the Democratic Unionists, the largest Protestant party led by the fundamentalist Rev. Ian Paisley, would agree to share power in the assembly's executive branch with Sinn Fein, which represents most Catholic nationalists.
In addition, the IRA would agree to scrap more of its weapons and allow two clergymen, one Catholic, the other Protestant, to witness this act.
Also as part of the accord, the Irish government would release a group of IRA prisoners who had killed a police officer; the British government would dramatically scale down its already shrunken military presence in Northern Ireland; and, perhaps most significantly, Sinn Fein would agree to sit on the civilian board that oversees the police.
Getting Sinn Fein on the policing board would effectively mean the end of the IRA, because it would amount to acceptance of the legitimacy of the police in Northern Ireland, thus removing justification for the IRA's existence. The republican prohibition against any people from its community joining the police would be lifted.
The elaborately choreographed December agreement would have closed the circle of conflict in Northern Ireland, where the IRA was reborn in the 1960s, mainly because the overwhelmingly Protestant police had not protected Catholics from Protestants.
But Paisley, a divisive figure throughout the 35-year conflict known as ''the Troubles," threw a wrench in the carefully laid plans, demanding photographic evidence of IRA disarmament. The IRA rejected this as an attempt to humiliate it.
Adams and Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, met with the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to say that Sinn Fein and the IRA could not do the deal. In separate interviews, the other two Irish government officials at that Dec. 6 meeting, Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern and Justice Minister Michael McDowell, said that after a three-month lull, the IRA then resumed punishment shootings and beatings. This reinforced the Irish government's view that Sinn Fein and the IRA are inextricably linked, and that violence can be turned on and off like a tap.
Prime Minister Ahern, who has made resolution of the conflict his top priority, was furious at what he saw as the cynical use of violence. His fury, and that of his top ministers, grew two weeks later when an armed gang took the families of two bank executives hostage and then forced the bankers to help them cart off $50 million from a Belfast bank.
The military precision bore all the hallmarks of the IRA; and the chief constable in Northern Ireland accused it of the action. But more damaging to the republican movement, Bertie Ahern blamed the IRA, and said he believed that Adams and other Sinn Fein leaders had known the IRA had planned the robbery, even as Sinn Fein was negotiating with the Irish government.
Adams was uncharacteristically shaken, challenging the police to arrest him if Ahern's allegations were true. The Irish government would not back down from its hard line. In an interview, McDowell said the government's assessment was based on electronic surveillance and intelligence developed by the Irish, not the British, police. And he voiced publicly what many Irish diplomats have said only privately in recent years.
''The IRA does not accept the legitimacy of the republic, and all of Sinn Fein still believes that the powers of government of the Irish Republic are vested in the IRA," he said.
Danny Morrison, a former IRA and Sinn Fein figure who coined the republican movement's twin-track strategy of seizing power with an Armalite rifle in one hand and a ballot paper in the other, said critics who focus on the recent outcry against the IRA do not acknowledge the massive shift the movement has made over the last decade -- from accepting that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority living there votes otherwise, to giving up weapons for the first time in history.
''The peace process has seen the whole republican family shift to electoral politics," he said. ''The problem is that everything we were promised hasn't happened. So the complete shift is stalled."
Behind the scenes, what Bertie Ahern was demanding was a bold, new gesture from the IRA, an unconditional declaration that it was standing down as a paramilitary organization, according to several high-ranking Irish officials.
In Washington, where he was snubbed by Kennedy and President Bush, Adams said the McCartney murder was being used to smear Sinn Fein. He said much of the criticism of his party was politically motivated by those who fear being overtaken by Sinn Fein, which since the 1998 Good Friday agreement has quickly risen in Northern Ireland but has had more modest success in Ireland.
Dermot Ahern, the foreign minister, scoffed at Adams's assertion. Noting that Sinn Fein holds just five of 166 seats in the Irish parliament, he said. ''We have no fear of fighting them in a democratic arena."
But Dermot Ahern said his party and others see the IRA's criminal acts as giving Sinn Fein a distinctly unfair advantage when it comes to funding future political operations.
Since 1995, when Bill Clinton lifted a ban on its fund-raising, Sinn Fein has raised about $7 million in the United States, according to reports filed with the US Justice Department by Friends of Sinn Fein, the party's American support group. State Department officials privately admit that fund-raising could be banned again if the US government decides Sinn Fein has not done enough to get the IRA to stand down.
But while the republican movement has always seen the United States as an important fundraising source, US political influence has been coveted more. And, according to Kennedy, the influence that opened doors for Sinn Fein is in jeopardy because of the IRA's continued existence.
After a murder, a campaign
When the IRA men who brutalized Robert McCartney were finished with him outside Magennis's pub in Belfast, the 33-year-old forklift driver's face had been mangled, an eye had been gouged out, and his stomach had been sliced open.
McCartney's sisters went looking for answers. As they say in Belfast, even the dogs in the street knew that IRA members had killed McCartney. But when the sisters approached Alex Maskey, the Sinn Fein representative for the area, Maskey was dismissive, according to the sisters.
Paula McCartney, who said she has supported Sinn Fein and who had lauded the IRA for protecting neighborhoods like hers, said Maskey's response to her brother's murder was to help orchestrate, or at least condone, youths throwing stones at police who had come to investigate the murder. The sisters responded, in turn, by mounting the most high-profile, damaging, international campaign against the IRA in years, taking their case all the way to the White House.
''If our complaint had been taken more seriously from the beginning" by Sinn Fein, ''this might not have all happened," Paula McCartney said.
Maskey, a former boxer and IRA prisoner, embodies the republican odyssey from revolutionary politics to the mainstream. In 2002, he became the first republican mayor of Belfast, and the first mayor to unfurl an Irish tricolor in an office long a bastion of Protestant unionist power.
Inside the delegates' lounge at the Sinn Fein conference, Maskey disputed the McCartney family's assertion that he had rebuffed them.
''They went through an awful trauma," Maskey said. ''So I can understand very much that there is a lot of emotion there."
A week later, Maskey was sitting in Locke-Ober, the venerable Boston restaurant, as guest of Boston businessmen who belong to a philanthrophic group called the Irish American Partnership.
When Sinn Fein was founded in 1905, the only Irishmen inside Locke-Ober were in the kitchen, washing dishes. But now Maskey and his wealthy hosts sat in a private dining room, tucking into salmon and sipping fine wine.
The businessmen consider Maskey a friend, and their group has contributed money to schools and other organizations in his district.
But, on this night, they made it clear that they were deeply troubled by the IRA's actions, and by the fact that the IRA remains in action.
Joe Leary, who heads the Irish American Partnership, said he believes Maskey got the message.
''We're going to have to leave some people behind," Leary quoted Maskey as telling them.
Brian Feeney, author of ''Sinn Fein: A Hundred Turbulent Years," said he doubted that Sinn Fein would do anything dramatic before the British general election, which is expected in six weeks.
But like many others, Feeney said Sinn Fein is at a crossroads. The gun and the ballot box, he said, cannot continue to coexist.
''It is the biggest turning point in their history," Feeney said.
Globe correspondent Jim Cusack contributed to this report.
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