'Everyone Trying', the IRA Ceasefire, 1975: A Missed Opportunity for Peace?

Professor Niall Ó Dochartaigh, University of Galway, DOI:10.2307/41411794

For most of 1975 the Provisional IRA was officially on ceasefire. (1) The ceasefire constituted a major and sustained political initiative by the Provisionals, despite the fact that there was a variety of breaches and that sectarian violence escalated during this period. The fact that it was maintained for such a long period, albeit imperfectly, raises the question of why it did not provide the basis for a lasting peace. It was the first time since its establishment in 1970 that the IRA had maintained a ceasefire for more than a few weeks.

It was not until 1994 that the IRA would again maintain a ceasefire for a comparable duration. The 1994 ceasefire was a direct precursor to republican acceptance of major compromises in the comprehensive peace settlement of 1998. Why was it that the IRA ceasefire of 1975 did not provide the basis for a settlement, given that a long IRA ceasefire was a crucial element in permitting the negotiation of an inclusive peace agreement in the 1990s?

Throughout the course of the 1975 ceasefire, British government representatives held regular secret talks with a republican team that was reporting directly to the IRA Army Council. It was the only time in the conflict that such a series of meetings took place. In the wake of these talks the British government turned away from efforts to negotiate and focused its attention on the military defeat of the IRA.

Existing accounts characterize these talks as a deliberate British government ploy to weaken the IRA and argue that the talks and the ceasefire were only sustained by the pretence of the British government that it was considering withdrawal. They argue that a simplistic republican analysis of the British state, republican misreading of British intentions, and a dogmatic focus on rigid ideological goals ensured that the talks never had any prospect of delivering a permanent peace agreement. The ideological rigidity of the IRA is identified as a central reason for the failure of these negotiations.

This essay offers an alternative analysis of these talks. While acknowledging that republicans overestimated the likelihood of British withdrawal, I argue that republicans had a more nuanced analysis of British intentions than suggested by other accounts and that the IRA was seriously considering a settlement that would involve major compromise and a significant shift in the republican position. The breakdown of the talks cannot be ascribed primarily to republican ideological dogmatism.

Interpreting the Ceasefire

The fact that the ceasefire presents a puzzle is widely recognized by scholars of the period, even by those whose hostility to the IRA is strongest. From the hostile baseline assumption of republican ideological extremism and determined militarism adopted by many scholars of the period, it is difficult to explain why the IRA should have sustained a ceasefire for so long after it became clear that it could neither yield military benefits nor meet its core ideological demands.

Analyzing IRA decision-making in terms of military strategy, M. L. R. Smith comments: The ceasefire ... begs the question, why did the Provisionals, both moderates and hardliners alike, allow themselves to be ensnared in a ‘demoralising’ and ‘damaging’ truce for so long? ... they persisted even after it was clear ... that the British were not interested in talking to IRA and were busily pursuing their own political agenda with the constitutional convention.(2)

The dominant explanation in the academic literature for the lengthy IRA ceasefire of 1975 is that the republican leadership was duped by the British government into believing that British withdrawal was on the cards. Jonathan Tonge states it baldly: ‘Duped by the British government that withdrawal might be on the agenda, the IRA leadership called a cease-fire in 1974–5.’ (3) Paul Bew and Henry Patterson offer a variation on the same theme: ‘The purpose of the truce was to divide and weaken the Provisionals and to get rid of internment, as prelude to reasserting the rule of law ... the true nature of that policy was revealed in 1976.’ (4) According to this explanation, the British government strung out the talks in order to weaken the IRA militarily and politically, laying the foundation for the subsequent success of security force action against the IRA. The chief source for this explanation is the memoirs of the secretary of state for Northern Ireland at the time, Labour MP Merlyn Rees, where it is expounded at some length. (5) Many academic accounts of the ceasefire accept Rees’s argument to a greater or lesser degree. (6)

Rees’s account of a strategy of deception also finds some support in contemporary official documents, in particular the minutes of meetings of the Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland. At these meetings Rees regularly told his colleagues that government strategy during the ceasefire was directed at weakening the IRA.

Thus, at a meeting on 18 February 1975 he told colleagues that: ‘The importance of a ceasefire is that it offers us the opportunity to create the conditions in which the Provisionals’ “military” organisation and structure may be weakened. They would not find it easy to start a campaign again from scratch.’ But in the same memo Rees noted: As against this, there is the risk that the Provisionals can rest, re-supply and regroup so as to re-emerge more strongly ... They badly needed a ceasefire if only in order to reorganise after a long period of attrition and disruptions at the hands of the Security Forces. But they are not beaten. Their cohesion and discipline are remarkable. (7)

Throughout the ceasefire, the question of whether it had weakened or strengthened the Provisionals continued to be hotly contested. In May 1975, for example, the head of the British army in the North, General Sir Frank King, and his senior officers complained to Rees that: ‘The PIRA were becoming stronger every day, but the Security Forces were becoming weaker ... It would take a considerable time now to reverse the PIRA’s new-found strength.’ (8)

In one sense the jostling for advantage by both sides in the event of a breakdown is an entirely unremarkable and predictable element of the ceasefire. Rees came under intense criticism for the concessions that had been made to the IRA in order to secure and maintain the ceasefire. It is to be expected that he would emphasize, in his own defence, that his main aim was the weakening of the IRA but, even then, he was simultaneously offering the prospect of a negotiated settlement to his colleagues, aiming, he said, ‘to look for the outside chance of reaching some more substantial settlement with the Provisionals should they be sufficiently tired of violence to want to give up’. (9)

One significant variation on the theme of deception holds that the British government entered talks with the intention of ‘politicizing’ the IRA and incorporating it in the political life of Northern Ireland, but abandoned this approach when it became clear that it would lead nowhere. According to Desmond Hamill: ‘As officials explored the openings they began to realize that the Provisionals lived in a “dream world” and did not understand the facts of political life.’ (10)

This is more or less a direct restatement of the analysis presented by Rees himself, who asserted that: At the beginning of the ceasefire I had thought there was at least a chance of the Provisional IRA getting itself involved in the politics of the [Constitutional] Convention but the reports to me of the talks with the Provisional Sinn Féin had soon shown that real politics were outside its ken. (11) Rees emphasized that the British turned to deception only after it became clear that the IRA could not be incorporated in the political system.

Here, he identified republican ideological rigidity as the central obstacle to a negotiated settlement. This account has strong attractions for key figures on all sides of the political debate. For Rees and the Labour administration at the time it served to protect them from denunciation as traitors who, in order to maintain the ceasefire, were undermining a successful military campaign against the IRA. At one stage, Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell publicly accused civil servants dealing with Sinn Féin of being engaged in ‘near treasonable activities’, while Rees recorded that he himself was called a ‘traitor’ in the House of Commons. (12)

Thus, when Rees represents these talks as a successful security initiative, laying the groundwork for the subsequent reduction in violence in the late 1970s, it is partly in response to the hostile criticism that he was engaged in a misguided and even treacherous attempt to achieve a negotiated settlement with evil and incorrigible terrorists. In part, this account has taken such a firm hold because it suited the new leadership which took over control of the republican movement in the years after the ceasefire. This version of events depicted the old leadership as generally incapable and so strengthened the arguments for pushing it aside. For the new leadership of Sinn Féin and the IRA in the late 1970s, this account of a perfidious Albion and a near-fatal republican weakness confirmed the strong suspicions of many IRA volunteers that the old leadership had come close to selling them out during the ceasefire. It validated in retrospect the strong opposition to the talks that had been expressed in Derry, Belfast and South Armagh and strengthened those who had opposed the ceasefire.(13)

Some elements of this account also suit the republican leadership that called the 1975 ceasefire. For example, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, former president of Provisional Sinn Féin, argues that the British initially favoured withdrawal but moved away from this position under pressure from loyalists and the Irish government.(14)

This is compatible with the proposition that, while the British employed deception (at least during the later stages of the ceasefire), the leadership in 1975 stood firmly by republican principles in exploring a genuine opportunity for British withdrawal, unlike the leadership of the 1990s, which accepted a partitionist settlement. But, in emphasizing that republicans engaged in talks only because of the prospect of British withdrawal, this account can be used to confirm the argument that the republican position in these talks was ideologically rigid and that there was therefore no reasonable prospect of a negotiated compromise.

However, some recent work has begun to explore the weaknesses in these accounts of deception. Ed Moloney, for example, raises doubts about the claim that the ceasefire was a successful move to weaken the IRA, citing a former senior IRA member who told him: ‘I can’t understand these people who say that the truce wrecked us. In my view it strengthened us ... the cease fire was a godsend.’(15)

At the same time, John Bew, Martyn Frampton and Iñigo Gurruchaga note that the British government considered withdrawal in 1975 rather more seriously than it was subsequently comfortable to admit. (16) But even these accounts leave intact the characterization of republican ideology as an immovable obstacle to a negotiated compromise in 1975.

There are in fact strong grounds for believing that both parties to the 1975 talks entered negotiations with the genuine aim of exploring the potential for a negotiated compromise that would resolve the conflict and end violence, and that both sides were prepared to consider major compromises to that end. Contrary to the received wisdom, the talks were neither a British ploy to weaken the IRA nor the product of a deluded IRA assessment that it had achieved victory. Existing accounts of the 1975 ceasefire operate either with a very thin concept of negotiation or with none at all. To understand the 1975 ceasefire and its collapse it is necessary to bring negotiation fully back into the story and to analyze the 1975 talks as a negotiating process, tracing a number of key themes through this process and identifying some of the key factors that contributed to the failure of this initiative. Analyzing these talks as negotiations allows us to provide an alternative explanation of the end of a ceasefire that had initially promised so much.

Sources

A number of important new sources on the 1975 ceasefire have become available over the past decade, beginning with the deposit at National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2005 of Ó Brádaigh’s notes of meetings with British representatives. (17)

Under the thirty-year rule, the relevant official British records for the period were opened at the UK National Archives from 2005 onwards. These records have been drawn on intensively in a number of recent publications, but there is much more to be gleaned from them, particularly on the tensions between the Labour government and the security forces. Most recently, the quiet deposit of key IRA leader David O’Connell’s (Daithí Ó Conaill) extensive private papers at the National Library of Ireland made available an important new source, which, it seems, has not yet been consulted by scholars.(18)

The papers shed new light on O’Connell’s contacts with unionists and loyalists and his attempts to formulate a flexible negotiating position. One of the most important sources to become newly available is the private papers of Brendan Duddy, who acted as intermediary between the British government and the IRA before and during the 1975 ceasefire. Duddy played a crucial central role in these negotiations, reflected in the fact that his house was the venue for all of the regular meetings between the British government and the IRA during the ceasefire.(19) The role that Duddy played was first outlined by Peter Taylor in the late 1990s, but his identity remained secret for another decade. (20) It was only in 2008 that his role was publicly acknowledged in a BBC documentary, The Secret Peacemaker. His papers, deposited at NUI, Galway, in 2009, include his personal diaries of the negotiation in 1975 and 1976, along with a range of other primary documents from that period. (21)

The account outlined here also draws on many hours of interviews with Brendan Duddy, conducted on multiple occasions between 2004 and 2009, and on interviews with key figures involved in these negotiations on both the republican and British sides.(22) It draws, too, on biographies, autobiographies and secondary historical sources that shed light on the 1975 ceasefire.

British Policy and Republican Strategy

Many of the accounts that argue that the British government duped an ideologically rigid republican movement assume that the British government was not seriously considering an initiative that could be labelled ‘withdrawal’. They also assume that the republicans were characterized by political ‘primitivism’, to use Bew and Patterson’s provocative characterization of IRA understandings of British policy. (23)

That is, they were not viable negotiating partners, but they could be successfully deceived. It is important to begin by questioning the accuracy of both of these assumptions.

British Deception?

The narrative of British deception assumes that the British state never seriously considered a compromise solution that had a serious chance of acceptance by the IRA. This is plainly incorrect. When Labour took office under Harold Wilson in 1974, it brought to power a prime minister whose stated personal preference in his fifteen-point speech of November 1971 was for an arrangement that would permit British withdrawal through the granting of dominion status to Northern Ireland; he had even spoken of ‘finding a means of ... progressing towards a United Ireland’. (24)

As leader of the opposition, he had personally met with IRA leaders, including David O’Connell in Dublin in March 1972, and again at his country home in England in July 1972. (25) Wilson was strongly attracted to the option of British ‘disengagement’ or ‘withdrawal’ and remained an advocate of this option to one degree or another throughout the year of secret talks with the IRA.

His May 1974 speech, delivered without consultation with his advisers, (26) in which he referred to Ulster loyalists as ‘spongers’ after the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike had brought about the collapse of the power sharing executive at Stormont and the Sunningdale Agreement, provided a public indication of his distance from unionism and his distaste for continued British commitment to Northern Ireland.

His close advisers, Bernard Donoughue and Joe Haines, whose presence in government was intended to act as a counterweight to the conservatism of the civil service ‘machine’, both expressed strong support at different stages for withdrawal. In his memoir of the Wilson government, Haines stated forthrightly, ‘England has only one more role to play in Ireland, and that role is her withdrawal from it’. (27)

Wilson’s interest in withdrawal remained strong throughout 1974. In October of that year, for example, as contacts with the Provisionals intensified in the approach to the ceasefire, Wilson wrote to Rees: I have been turning over in my mind the proposal I made in my speech on 25 November 1971 [the fifteen-point speech] ... I think there is a strong case for reviving this idea at the right time ... very fundamental decisions may have to be taken, requiring the assent of the whole House of Commons. (28)

Even during the dying stages of contact with the IRA in late 1975, when the British government had supposedly moved entirely to a policy of outright deception, Wilson regularly returned to the theme of withdrawal. In September 1975, for example, Wilson summed up a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, at which withdrawal had been presented as unfeasible, in the following terms: there [were] signs that popular feeling in Great Britain was turning against the continued involvement of the Army in Northern Ireland ... Very early withdrawal, integration, and ... repartition had been shown in discussion to be unpromising but no option or scenario should yet be finally excluded from examination ... The implications of a gradual withdrawal from major responsibility for security in Northern Ireland might have to be considered, and variants of the option of withdrawal, such as the granting of dominion status to Northern Ireland, should not be ruled out in the long term. (29)

By stating that it was ‘very early’ withdrawal, rather than withdrawal itself, that was ‘unpromising’, Wilson sought to keep the door open for ‘variants of the option of withdrawal’. Just a few weeks before British representatives held their final formal meeting with the IRA in early February 1976, Wilson wrote an ‘Apocalyptic note for the record’, in which he advocated that the British government make contingency plans in case of a renewed loyalist challenge or a breakdown of control, in which case ‘The only solution ... would be one or other variety of withdrawal, most likely taking the form of negotiated independence of some kind’. (30)

The message the Provisionals were getting in the secret talks, that the long term preference of the government was for a form of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘disengagement’, accurately reflected Wilson’s persistent advocacy of this option, although it did not indicate that it was likely he would, or could, implement this option. And Wilson was not the only Cabinet member advocating various forms of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘disengagement’ in late 1974 and early 1975. When Rees was asked in August 1974 whether the British government planned to ‘disengage’, he replied: ... in the view of pulling out and let them get on with it — No. In the sense that I believe strongly that it is the people of Northern Ireland who must and will work out their own salvation — if that is disengagement, then the answer is yes. And I accept that in one sense it is ... I’m not talking about next week or the week after or even the next month.(31) Several weeks later Home Secretary Roy Jenkins stated at a government committee meeting that ‘he thought we would probably have to withdraw’. (32)

Crucially, however, these terms were attached to a range of meanings, with ‘withdrawal’ often being used to refer to the withdrawal of troops from the North. In this sense, even senior British military commanders repeatedly advocated limited ‘withdrawal’ in 1973 and 1974, to allow the British army to meet commitments elsewhere. And ‘disengagement’ was used to refer to a range of options for creating greater distance and separation between the North and the British government. Thus, when MI6 agent Michael Oatley told IRA leaders at a secret meeting in early 1975 that the British were prepared to, or wished to, discuss ‘withdrawal’ and/or ‘structures of disengagement’, he was using terms that were regularly used in discussion and advocacy around the Cabinet table and in British policy and military circles. However, even in its strongest form, as the kind of constitutional separation advocated by Wilson, ‘withdrawal’ was never synonymous with Irish reunification. The version of ‘withdrawal’ most frequently canvassed in British government circles was a form of independence that would probably leave Northern Ireland linked to Britain in some way, and which had, indeed, strong attractions for many loyalists and unionists. The fact that the British government offered to discuss ‘withdrawal’ or ‘disengagement’, rather than ‘Irish unity’ or Irish ‘self-determination’, is an indication of the care it took to choose a form of words that was compatible with the options it was willing to consider seriously. The choice of terminology indicates a careful attempt to bridge the gap between the demand of republicans for a declaration of intent to withdraw and the very real willingness of the British government to withdraw troops and ‘disengage’ from the running of the North. Prior to this point, the Provisionals had insisted that they would not end their campaign until the British made a declaration of intent to withdraw. The British statement of willingness to discuss withdrawal is best understood as a formula that was necessary to allow the IRA leadership to call a ceasefire in 1975 and enter talks, given its prior demand for a declaration of intent to withdraw. The talks held the promise for the Provisional leadership that the undoubted British interest in forms of withdrawal or disengagement might be reconciled with republican demands for self-determination and with loyalist and unionist preferences for a majority-rule parliament in Belfast. Given the extreme difficulty that republicans had had in extracting from the British even the slightest shift in their position during the secret negotiations that led to the ceasefire, it seems utterly implausible to suggest that they ever thought that this could by any stretch be deemed a certainty. The story of successful British deception has taken such a strong hold that even the most sceptical scholars of the period have not seriously addressed the question of whether the British government was prepared to make a declaration of intent to withdraw in the course of these talks with the IRA. If we accept the view that a ‘declaration of withdrawal’ was an item of faith in the catechism of a dogmatic republican movement, it would indeed seem implausible that the British government would have ever considered making such a declaration in 1975, or even have entered such a negotiation. But if we instead consider the declaration as a favoured item on a republican agenda, and therefore subject to negotiation, it becomes much easier to understand how and why the British government might have been prepared to devise a workable compromise on this point. In fact, Rees stated quite plainly to a Cabinet Committee meeting in February 1975 that he was prepared to move towards the Provisionals on this issue: The Provisionals will no doubt try to bring us quickly to discuss a declaration of British intent to withdraw. We must try to make them realize that this is in a sense an irrelevancy; it is their Protestant fellow-Irishmen with whom they must come to terms. But if the Provisionals are looking for a face-saving formula, I do not rule out the possibility that we could find a form of words which would be consistent with previous ministerial statements and not inflame the loyalists. (33)

The message is clear. A declaration of some kind was open to negotiation. Rees was willing to work towards a form of words that the Provisional leadership could point to as meeting its requirement for a declaration of intent to withdraw. It might be argued that the British government could never have found a form of words that the Provisional leadership would accept, but it is entirely unsafe to assume this. If we start with the assumption that both parties were seriously exploring the possibilities for a negotiated settlement, the issue of a declaration of intent to withdraw can then be viewed, not as an impossible and intransigent demand, but as a site of struggle and an issue for negotiation.

The Provisionals were also demanding the release of prisoners and the end of internment; they also sought radical changes to policing. Maybe they would have completely rejected a negotiated agreement that delivered on all of these issues if it did not also produce a declaration of withdrawal made in precisely the terms that they demanded. Maybe, but it seems unlikely.

Precisely because the Provisionals have been assumed to be dogmatists, the place of the declaration in these talks has been consistently misunderstood, as an always-impossible stumbling block. But it was not the rock on which the process foundered. The assessment that the secret talks were initially a genuine attempt to negotiate a settlement, while both sides simultaneously manoeuvred for advantage in the event of failure or breakdown, is supported by the fact of Wilson’s direct involvement and close interest in the talks.

In the past few years new evidence of this has emerged, although the evidence is patchy because key records have not been released. Three files on Northern Ireland in the British Prime Minister’s office covering the early months of 1975 have been withheld from release, unusually for this file series. It seems certain that they relate to these talks. It has only recently become clear that Wilson was directly involved in the management of these contacts from a very early stage and that he carefully concealed them from other members of his government. Thus, when Oatley began his secret contacts with the IRA in 1974 and 1975, Wilson himself provided the authorization, and knowledge of the contacts was limited to Oatley, Wilson and a few senior civil servants, including the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Frank Cooper. Initially not even Rees was informed. (34)

According to one of those centrally involved, Wilson told Cooper, when he (Wilson) was approving these contacts with the IRA, that Cooper need not bother Rees with it because Rees had enough on his plate already. (35) The secret contacts with the IRA thus originated as an initiative with the direct personal sanction of Wilson, initially bypassing not only the Cabinet but even the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Ó Brádaigh papers show that, according to the British representatives, Wilson was personally consulted on the details of the 1975 ceasefire arrangements. This seems entirely plausible. These terms were so sensitive that it is unlikely that Rees could have endorsed them without Wilson’s direct support. It may be that in agreeing these ceasefire terms, Wilson had stretched the British state to a position that went beyond what the security forces would accept.

Given Wilson’s long-standing advocacy of forms of withdrawal, there seems little doubt that he was open to an outcome from these talks that went further than simply attempting to get the IRA quietly to accept the constitutional status quo. It emerged from the MI5 archives in 2009 that Wilson insisted that the Director General of MI5 report directly to him and to Rees on these talks and that he was not to report to Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. (36) This despite the fact that normal procedure was for MI5 to report to the Home Secretary.

These scattered pieces of evidence strongly suggest that Wilson looked on the talks with the Provisional leadership to a great degree as a personal initiative and that he maintained his interest in these talks primarily because of their potential to secure a negotiated peace settlement that would facilitate British disengagement and the withdrawal of troops, rather than as a ruse to weaken the Provisionals in preparation for a renewed drive for military victory. The extent to which Wilson was willing or able to implement a policy shift in this direction was, however, an entirely different matter.

Republican Strategy

A key element in the argument that the IRA was deceived is the suggestion that republicans took British talk of withdrawal as an indication that they had won the war and were now negotiating the terms of British surrender. As Smith puts it: ‘The Provisionals fell into the trap of believing that they had forced Britain into the ceasefire, and were, consequently, in a position to exact everything they wanted.’ (37)

However, the British government and army assessed at the time that ‘hardliners’ in the IRA were persuaded to a ceasefire primarily on the basis that it would provide a much needed respite for an organization under intense pressure from the British army. (38) This picture of an organization under such pressure that even its hardliners calculated that the risks of a ceasefire were worth trading off for the benefits of a respite cannot be reconciled with the picture of an organization that believed it was in a position to exact everything it wanted from the British government.

The former overestimates the importance of IRA weakness in motivating the ceasefire while the latter is plainly incorrect. Bew, Frampton and Gurruchaga come closer to a convincing explanation for the truce when they argue that it was prompted by two factors: the IRA’s appreciation of its own weakness, and ‘optimism that the British were wobbling and that political success was within reach’.(39)

This constitutes an advance on Smith to the extent that it attaches due importance to the fact that the IRA was aware of its weaknesses, but the description of IRA ‘optimism that the British were wobbling’ is problematic. Why stop pushing if your opponent is wobbling? This version has some explanatory power, of course, but it leaves intact the problematic assumption that the IRA felt it was on the verge of victory. Some senior republicans assessed in 1974 that it was now in the British government’s interests to withdraw and that it was seriously considering a form of withdrawal.

But this assessment did not derive primarily from a sense of IRA victory. O’Connell, for one, was quite explicit that it was the success of the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike in May 1974 that had transformed the political landscape. The strike demonstrated to the IRA that there was a growing mutual alienation between Ulster loyalists and the British state. It assessed correctly that this had produced strong pressures for withdrawal in Britain. If the IRA analyzed that the British were seriously considering withdrawal, it did not interpret that as meaning that it was on the verge of achieving a united Ireland, merely that there was a new political climate in which the possibilities for a negotiated solution seemed promising.

British, loyalist and republican aims might be more easily reconciled in the context of British disengagement, but it equally raised the prospect of civil war and a loyalist Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on the Rhodesian model. When Ó Brádaigh stated in 1974 that they would work with the British government to avoid a Congo-style situation, he was implicitly acknowledging that British withdrawal could lead to civil war and the establishment of a new loyalist state, rather than the reunification of Ireland. When O’Connell was asked in the same year how he could guarantee that there would not be a Protestant backlash if Britain declared its intention to withdraw, he replied, ‘well nobody can give an absolute guarantee that the Protestants will not go for a backlash, nobody could do that’. (40)

Most importantly, it indicates that the republican leadership was acutely aware that ‘withdrawal’ and ‘disengagement’ were not synonyms for Irish reunification. If some republican leaders wrongly assessed the likelihood that Wilson’s preference for withdrawal would prevail, or underestimated the countervailing pressures against such a move, they shared this assessment with many outside the republican movement.

The Irish government also regarded British withdrawal as a distinct possibility and made strenuous diplomatic efforts to influence Wilson away from this policy, while loyalists escalated their armed campaign with the same aim. (41) The Provisionals were like everyone else in assessing withdrawal as a possible outcome that could be advanced and shaped by the efforts of various parties. It might be objected that the republicans nonetheless entered talks only because they saw an opportunity to achieve their rigidly defined ideological goal: Irish unity.

The assumption is that this was never possible and that therefore this goal constituted an insuperable obstacle to compromise; that it would have led to the breakdown of talks sooner or later. However, the Provisional leadership had been working steadily over the previous few years to reformulate this goal in a way that sought to reconcile it with unionist and loyalist aspirations. The political distance they had already travelled was in itself a measure of their willingness to move away from simplistic demands. The Éire Nua (New Ireland) policy of the Provisionals, announced in late 1971 and associated most closely with O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh, proposed a federal structure that would leave strong powers in the hands of a unionist controlled nine-county Ulster parliament.

Often characterized as a fantastical document reflecting the detachment of the Provisionals from reality, it is much better understood as an attempt to reconcile unionist desire for majority rule in the North with both the Irish republican demand for self-determination and the British readiness to withdraw from Northern Ireland, as expressed by some mainstream British political figures and supported by British opinion polls. That this new territorial policy constituted a serious move to render Irish national territory divisible in a way that would reconcile unionist concerns with republican ideology is illustrated by the surprisingly positive response from mainstream unionist figures from several points on the political spectrum.

It was the prospect of a strong majority-rule Ulster parliament in an Irish context that prompted Desmond Boal, a key ally of Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Ian Paisley, to declare his support in early 1974 for a united Ireland with an autonomous northern parliament, if Britain was indeed seeking to ‘disengage’. A Guardian journalist noted that ‘oddly enough’ it had similarities with Éire Nua. (42)

In early 1973, John Taylor, a powerful mainstream figure in the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), advocated an independent Ulster that would include all nine Ulster counties. This position echoed Sinn Féin proposals to the extent that it would end British sovereignty of Northern Ireland and create a new unit covering all of the province of Ulster. Taylor’s proposal was welcomed by Sinn Féin’s Comhairle Connacht in the west of Ireland, where Ó Brádaigh was based, indicating that significant elements in the party regarded unionist interest in independence from the UK as a step towards a compromise solution. (43) The Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the loyalist paramilitary organization, similarly expressed interest in further exploration of these ideas and advocated independence for Northern Ireland partly because it promised to provide a way to reconcile loyalist and republican aspirations. Writing in the Irish Times in 2009 about the failure of Irish nationalists to lay out a vision of the place that unionists might have in a united Ireland, former loyalist political activist David Adams argued that the Éire Nua policy of O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh ‘remains the only serious bid by any strand of nationalism or republicanism to address the issue at all’. (44)

Certain key loyalists and unionists recognized the IRA proposals for what they were: an attempt to reconcile republican and unionist positions. They did not regard the republican leaders as rigid ideologues. Keeping Northern Ireland in the UK was not the irreducible and eternal core of unionism, even of the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) variety. In the late 1940s, for example, the election of a Labour government in Great Britain generated substantial interest within the UUP in the possibility of dominion status as a means to escape the ‘socialist’ policies of the new government. (45) This would have placed Northern Ireland in the same family as New Zealand, Canada and Australia, opening the path to full independence. The existence of significant support for dominion status in certain circumstances makes it clear that there was room for compromise on the constitutional status of the North. Crucially, Ó Brádaigh’s biographer comments: ‘What was important for Ó Brádaigh was that Éire Nua and Dáil Uladh might be a basis for continued dialogue and a resolution to the conflict.’ (46)

Analysts of the republican movement characterize the Éire Nua policy as no more than a reformulation of the rigid ideological demand for Irish reunification. But this is to insist on ideological rigidity in the face of clear evidence of flexibility. Éire Nua was a negotiating position aimed at moving republicans closer to northern unionists and to the British government. The policy reflected a readiness to consider major shifts in traditional republican thinking on territorial arrangements for government in Ireland, and an acceptance of unionist regional dominance in the North.

Nevertheless, commentary on this period continues to focus on the Provisionals’ demand for a British declaration of intent to withdraw as a rigid ideological position that formed the central obstacle to any compromise settlement. It is necessary to understand the significance of the term ‘withdrawal’ for these talks, not as a restatement of republican dogma, but as a central feature of the attempt to reformulate republican objectives.

The fact that republicans chose the terminology of ‘withdrawal’ or ‘disengagement’ rather than the reunification of Ireland is no trivial matter. An early version of IRA demands provides an indication of how O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh sought to adopt a flexible bargaining position at an early stage. In October 1971 O’Connell spoke in favour of a Sinn Féin resolution to formulate the key demands of the Provisionals in the following terms, calling on the British Government to: 1) Acknowledge the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without let or hindrance. 2) Announce a date for the withdrawal of British armed forces from Ireland. 3) Declare a general amnesty for all political prisoners and for all on the wanted list.

In his speech, O’Connell referred repeatedly to the withdrawal of British troops, rather than the withdrawal of British sovereignty, and stressed the goal of ‘self-determination’ rather than reunification. O’Connell was laying out a set of positions that did not foreclose on compromise across a range of areas. It is notable, too, that in separating the two issues of ‘withdrawal’ of troops and ‘self-determination’, the leadership made it much easier to claim advances on either in any future settlement.

A withdrawal of troops could be hailed as progress towards the achievement of Republican objectives even if it wasn’t accompanied by the ending of British sovereignty, while an ‘acknowledgement’ of the right of self-determination would represent progress even if troops still remained. (47)

An undated typescript entitled ‘Draft policy document’ in the papers of O’Connell, which can be dated to the early 1970s, shows how far the Provisional leadership was considering stretching its position towards loyalists and unionists in that period. The status of the document is unclear, but the language and substance point strongly towards it being a draft by the Provisional leadership rather than an external document.

It outlined key positions on ‘self-determination’ that went to the very limit of the possibilities for a republican leadership. At several points the references in the draft to a ‘claim’ are crossed out and replaced with the word ‘right’ in phrases that refer to the ‘right of the Ulster Protestant people to self-determination’. British refusal to recognize Irish sovereignty in Ulster [Northern Ireland] is criticized as ‘in effect, a refusal to recognize the right of the Irish nation (and its consequent duty) to provide for the self-determination of Ulster Protestants within Ireland and within the Irish national state’.

That is, a British recognition of an Irish right to self-determination would open the way for an Irish recognition of an Ulster Protestant right to ‘self-determination’. The document provides an indication of the logic that underlay IRA proposals for a federal Ireland. The document also stated that the new Ulster parliament ‘would accord to the Ulster Protestants the right ... of forming an exclusively Protestant (provincial) government’. That is, unlike a solution in the UK context, a federal solution in an Irish context would permit majority rule in the North. The statement in the draft that ‘the absorption of Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland is out of the question’ echoes the public rhetoric of both O’Connell and Ó Brádaigh in the early 1970s. (48)

In early 1972, for example, O’Connell told a public meeting in Monaghan that ‘we seek [loyalist] co-operation to build a new Ulster ... the politicians of the south will talk about a united Ireland. Republicans reject the politicians’ concept of a united Ireland’. (49) In June 1974, in the wake of the UWC strike, O’Connell gave an interview that publicly declared how focused key figures in the IRA leadership were on negotiation. In this interview O’Connell repeatedly stressed steps forward, rather than ultimate goals, and characterized a declaration of intent to withdraw primarily as a device that would facilitate the ending of the IRA campaign and the opening of inclusive negotiations in an atmosphere of peace: [I]f we get a declaration from the British Government coupled with an amnesty and moves towards a lasting political solution, we have a termination to the war between the British forces and ourselves. Now surely it would be recognized that this is one hell of a positive step forward, a climate would evolve within which there is a duty on us as republicans to negotiate the peace with the loyalists of Ulster. (50)

O’Connell went on to say: ‘Once that happens we have a termination of the conflict, then we’re into a new climate where all political proposals, the proposals of [William] Craig, Paisley, the [Ulster] Workers’ Council and so forth can be put together.’ That is, the Provisionals would end their campaign before any final determination on the future of the North had been made and while Britain was still the sovereign power, and would then negotiate a settlement with unionists and loyalists. The emphasis on a declaration of ‘withdrawal’ needs properly to be understood here as an attempt to provide an opening for negotiations with unionists while maintaining consistency with republican ideology, rather than as a dogmatic demand.

Another characteristic feature of this interview is O’Connell’s concern to avoid committing to positions that the Provisionals might subsequently have to compromise on in negotiations. When asked what IRA policy was, for example, he replied in terms that avoided the rhetoric on a united 32-county republic and said instead: ‘Our policy, or aims are pretty well known. Basically we seek an integration within our country.’

Invited to set a time limit for British withdrawal, O’Connell declined. This is emphatically not to say that O’Connell was prepared to yield on all of these issues, but rather that the Provisional leadership was attempting to formulate its position in a way that opened rather than closed doors, that increased the possibilities for compromise. If a time limit was not an essential element in a British declaration, for example, it opened the possibility of compromise on a form of words that indicated that Britain would abide by any agreement made between nationalists and unionists, combined with a withdrawal of troops.

This concern to avoid committing to positions that would constrain the leadership in negotiations is reflected, too, in the terms in which the IRA phrased a ceasefire statement on 2 January 1975: A permanent peace will be established only when the causes of the war are courageously examined and eradicated ... The peace enjoyed over Christmas can be made permanent if the British Government proves its sincerity by pursuing a reasonable and responsible policy. Peace with justice is the universal demand of all our people, and the responsibility for granting same rests with the British Government.( 51) The statement nowhere mentions either withdrawal or a united Ireland.

Once again, this is not to say that either goal had been abandoned. Nonetheless, there is a calculated use of an alternative rhetoric, highlighting ‘the causes of war’ and the demand for ‘peace with justice’. If the Provisionals were ideological dogmatists, we might argue that they simply felt no need to state the obvious. But if we take the Provisionals seriously as negotiators, this statement exhibits a clear concern to minimize commitment in advance of formal negotiation. It might be objected that all of these Provisional attempts to reformulate the issue of withdrawal were irrelevant because the ending of British sovereignty remained a ‘red line’ issue for the Provisionals and therefore an immovable obstacle to compromise. But the Provisionals’ reformulation of withdrawal is much more important for the trajectory that it indicates than for the content.

Their proposals indicated a willingness to sign up to a negotiated compromise that would fall far short of the visions and hopes of their own supporters. No-one can say with certainty what compromises the Republican leadership would have accepted in 1975 but it is entirely unsafe to assume that their stated position represented their minimum demands. Republican proposals represented a negotiating position. As such, they were not an accurate guide to the settlement that Republicans would consider minimally acceptable. Duddy, who played a pivotal role in these negotiations as intermediary, is insistent that the Provisionals were working determinedly in 1975 for a compromise settlement. Asked whether the talks failed because of republican rigidity, he replied: It’s the very opposite in fact ... the Provos were — too simple a phrase but it comes close ... they did not want this war to continue. It didn’t mean that they were demoralised or that they had run out of war materials ... Anybody who was involved, Ó Conaill, [Seamus] Twomey, [Billy] McKee, Ó Brádaigh, [Brian] Keenan, you name them, wanted an honourable settlement. (52)

Significantly, Duddy refers to both ‘moderates’ and ‘hardliners’. The IRA entered talks neither because it was duped into believing it had beaten the British, nor because it thought it was on the verge of achieving a united Ireland, but because it assessed that there was potential for a negotiated compromise agreement that would be acceptable to the republican movement as a whole and because it was actively seeking a principled agreement that would allow it to end its campaign. Ironically, this eagerness for a peace settlement may provide an important part of the explanation for the failure of these talks. The clear signs of republican willingness to compromise may have led the British to believe that the IRA campaign was effectively at an end and that the organization was so keen to reach a settlement that it could accept anything.

Phase One: ‘Everyone Trying’

The initial phase of the negotiations that opened in January 1975 was characterized by high levels of commitment on both sides and by significant concessions by the British government in response to the ceasefire. This included the establishment of incident centres, the opening of regular formal talks to be held in secret, agreements for the return of IRA prisoners in Great Britain to jails in Northern Ireland, and orders to British army units to scale back their activities.

The seniority of the British representative involved, Michael Oatley, was an indication of British commitment at this initial stage. Oatley was one of the most powerful figures in the British administration in Northern Ireland, part of a small and tight inner circle. The concessions made by the British at this early stage were substantive enough that, by Duddy’s account, O’Connell told Ó Brádaigh that the Provisionals had got more than he expected in the negotiations for ceasefire terms. (53)

There is also substantial evidence that the British initially pursued an agenda of major changes in key policy areas, including police reform and reorganization, and the early release of prisoners. These concessions and the initial efforts to implement policy changes were enough to generate intense resistance within the Intelligence services and the military. The ceasefire agreement had been negotiated by MI6 agent Oatley, but according to one of those centrally involved, it was determinedly opposed by a senior MI5 agent, Denis Payne, the Director and Coordinator of Intelligence Northern Ireland.

Important senior military figures were appalled at the ceasefire conditions and there is a note of something close to open rebellion in some of the records from the period. ‘If the current ceasefire ends, our problems will be over’ was the opening line of a planning document sent by army headquarters in Lisburn to the NIO, as the NIO began to tie down the ceasefire in February 1975. (54) Senior army figures, and in particular General King, the GOC, made it quite clear that they saw no value in attempts to negotiate a settlement and expressed a direct preference for continuing until the IRA had been militarily defeated. There were rumours of this dissent at the time but it is only with the release of contemporary records in recent years that its character and extent have become evident.

For example, at a meeting on 2 May 1975 to discuss reductions in military activity, the GOC was recorded as telling Rees that ‘HQNI and all battalion commanders were becoming increasingly worried by ... the current level of violence and by the government’s overall policy which appeared to be striving to facilitate the achievement of the PIRA’s aims’. (55) If we make the reasonable assumption that the notes of such meetings have a tendency to minimize evidence of conflict, this is an exceptionally strong statement of military dissent, coming close to the accusations of treachery being made in the public domain.

At a further meeting with senior military commanders ten days later, King told Rees that ‘Political agreement with the IRA ... was a chimera’ and advocated that ‘the only viable solution’ required a return to the ‘treadmill of violence’ (turning a favourite phrase of Rees’s back against him) and the defeat of the IRA. (56) Rees later said of General King: ‘You have never played at politics and I have never played at being a soldier; that’s why we have got on so well.’ (57) It is only now that we have access to the official documents from the period that we can see that Rees was actually inverting the position. Reading Rees ‘upside-down’ might be a more fruitful strategy for extending our understanding of the dynamics of the ceasefire than engaging with his account head-on. On the ground, some British military commanders resisted instructions to adopt a lower profile, to the extent of directly disobeying orders. (58)

Within weeks, the failure to rein in the army sufficiently was endangering the ceasefire and in mid-March Duddy wrote in his diary: [Rob, the British representative,] told me that some of the BA [British Army] officers were convinced that the ceasefire would not hold. Therefore, they were not fully co-operating in easing off. I said they would be right but for the wrong reason as the Rep. Movement really wanted an on-going peace. But couldn’t be expected to hold their position if BA did not begin to pull back. (59) British officials at the NIO instructed the military at this early stage that they should treat the ceasefire as permanent, and made persistent and detailed requests for reductions in British army activity. They faced strong resistance from the highest levels of the military to these requests. At the same time, the leadership of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the police force whose members were drawn overwhelmingly from the unionist majority, directly rejected British government entreaties to restrain RUC action in order to protect the ceasefire. Instead, it actively extended RUC patrolling and activity into nationalist areas where police had been unable to patrol before the ceasefire. In late 1974 Rees had written to Wilson that ‘The army is the only real arm of government on which I can depend in a crisis in the province’, (60) thereby expressing his doubts about the willingness of the RUC to implement British government policy.

We might characterize RUC conduct in early 1975 as a direct fulfilment of Rees’s fears. Chris Ryder’s sympathetic account of RUC reaction to the ceasefire paints an extraordinary picture of deliberate and concerted sabotage of the British government’s efforts to secure the ceasefire: [RUC Chief Constable Jamie] Flanagan was one of the first to recognize the inherent dangers [of the ceasefire]. He ignored hints to soft-pedal and not endanger it by police action. Checks were actually stepped up in west Belfast to see that cars were taxed and insured — the chief constable’s way of emphasizing that police operations could not be turned off and on like a tap. He also opposed so-called ‘Incident Centres’. (61) The diary of the intermediary for these early months contains repeated references to the problems with the RUC and identifies the failure to deal with policing as a central threat to the negotiations.

Duddy’s diary also indicates, as does some of the material in the UK National Archives, that the British initially made serious attempts to resolve the issue of policing nationalist areas in a conciliatory way. In late July 1974 Rees had written to Wilson proposing the establishment of an unarmed local ‘Community Patrol Service’ that would allow nationalists to take part in policing at local level without joining the RUC, but he records that the following day the proposal was ‘forcibly’ rejected by the RUC chief constable.(62) Despite this setback, Rees repeatedly emphasized the need to make policing acceptable to nationalists and identified policing as a central obstacle to the resolution of the conflict.

In early 1975 the British made renewed efforts to make changes to policing that might pave the way for a compromise acceptable to nationalists. Ryder notes that the British government ‘were indeed tinkering with various ideas to replace the RUC or create acceptable mechanisms for community policing to work alongside it’ and reports the ‘angry’ reactions of police chiefs in west Belfast to British efforts to make a start on this without consulting the RUC. (63) Having failed to circumvent the RUC, the NIO tried another route to create movement on the policing issue, and in early May 1975, Frank Cooper wrote to the GOC: ‘Would it be practicable for the army’s basic contribution [in Derry] to consist entirely of military police ... Are there areas of Belfast, which could in the same [manner] suggested for Londonderry, be handed over to military police?’ (64)

Cooper was seen by many at the time as the man who really ran the North, the man who steered government policy there and who steered Rees. The fact that the Permanent Under-Secretary took it upon himself to write several times to the GOC in early 1975, asking in detailed terms for reductions in military activity and changes to policing that would help to bed down the ceasefire, indicate the seriousness of the effort the NIO made at this early stage. It also indicates its recognition of the centrality of policing and the dangers to the ceasefire if major changes to policing were not implemented.

Two examples from Duddy’s diary indicate the recurring emphasis during these early weeks on both police reform and control of the police: Fri. 28/2/75 Serious problem beginning with RUC ... British fumble RUC issue. I stressed need for police service separate from politics. Fri. 14/3/75 ... we had a 2 hr block on the RUC. I explained that N.I. was not ‘ordinary’ and that there was every historical likelihood to suggest that the RUC would wreck any ceasefire. All agree the RUC was a major problem and it was left.(65) A day or two after this ‘2 hr block’ on the RUC, Rees asked the RUC Chief Constable to ease off. Ryder notes that Chief Constable Flanagan ‘ignored hints’ that he ease off and perhaps this was one of the occasions on which he did so.

Rees’s diary entry on 16 March 1975, just after this meeting, expressed disappointment with the outcome: ‘If only I was in a position to assure the Provisional IRA, not that anyone who has committed a crime would not be chased, but that those who had never done anything would not be chased.’ (66) This might be understood as an oblique admission that he had been unable to convince the RUC to refrain from arresting IRA members for offences committed before the ceasefire. It invites the observation that a stronger figure than Rees, backed by a stronger government with a more secure parliamentary majority, might not have been so easily rebuffed on an issue that so directly threatened the IRA ceasefire and the negotiations.

Hamill writes: ‘According to the police, who were watching with some interest, there was a constant stream of directives to [HQNI at] Lisburn instructing the Army to “go soft”. The police, however, felt that they themselves were able to carry on as usual with no undue, overt influence from Stormont.’ (67) That is, the RUC was well aware that the army was under instructions to hold back in order to secure the ceasefire but resisted and ignored the more hesitant and nervous attempts of Rees and the NIO to get the RUC to do the same, while also resisting efforts to create a policing agency acceptable to nationalists. It is instructive to contrast this with the clear acknowledgement during the peace process of the 1990s that RUC activity levels had to be restricted in such a way as to sustain the IRA ceasefire, even though this generated resentment and anger among some senior RUC officers. (68)

Ongoing pressure from the RUC and the British army made it extremely difficult for the republican leadership to restrain local units from what those units characterized as defensive or retaliatory action and strengthened ‘spoilers’ within the republican movement. This in turn made it more difficult for the British government to argue for a more generous response to the ceasefire. A sharp intensification of loyalist sectarian killings, aimed at disrupting the talks and preventing a British agreement with the Provisionals, also made it virtually impossible for the IRA leadership to restrain IRA members on the ground from retaliating and from carrying out sectarian killings.

In addition, the ceasefire provoked the Conservative Party to move away from bipartisanship on Northern Ireland for the first time since the outbreak of violence in 1968. The concessions made to secure the IRA ceasefire came under intense criticism in the British parliament and in the media and there were mutterings of appeasement and even treachery. Within weeks of the ceasefire announcement, powerful and numerous forces within the state were working against attempts to secure it.

Given its narrow majority in the House of Commons, the Labour Party was in a weak position to resist these forces. By late March the talks with the IRA appeared to be on the verge of collapse. On 1 April, Duddy recorded in his diary: The ceasefire is in great danger. The British just don’t understand and their machine is impossible to move. The Brits can’t make dramatic gestures and I am only realizing that the B[ritish] Army is simply incapable of changing and Rees is not strong enough to tell them just where to get off. The more I find out about the ‘B[ritish] system’ the more hopeless it gets. (69)

At the end of March 1975 the British representative had phoned Duddy: ‘Rob phoned very depressed. No progress and not likely to get any. I said War and he said Yes.’ (70) In advance of a formal meeting two days later between British and republican representatives, Duddy pressed for movement by the British to bed down the ceasefire with little success: ‘BD Insisted that B[ritish] must move. Rob said it was hopeless. It would just be war ...’ (71) In addition, ‘Rob’ indicated that he would not make any attempt to conceal this from the republicans: ‘Told me he was going to be tough with the Provos, “telling them a few facts of life”. Meeting started at 8pm. [James] Allen and Rob ... O’Bradaigh and McKee.’ (72) Duddy’s terse account of the meeting is unequivocal: Rob talked for 2 Hrs. Provos ‘shocked into silence’. McKee said it was probably the last ‘meeting’.(73) This account is confirmed by Ó Brádaigh’s notes, which state that the British representative told the Provisionals that a declaration of intent to withdraw was ‘totally and absolutely’ out of the question because it would lead to an escalation of violence.(74)

The argument that the IRA ceasefire lasted so long because of successful deception by the British sits uneasily with these accounts of this meeting and the evidence of the struggle between the NIO and security force commanders. They tell a quite different story, of a British government that could not pin down the ceasefire to a great degree because of strong resistance within its own security forces. Phase Two:

‘The Breaking of the Truce’

Republicans maintained their ceasefire after this meeting for a number of reasons. In the first place, there continued to be enough advantages to this period of respite from conflict to secure the assent of Army Council members who were sceptical of the initiative. In the second place, the republicans assessed that it would be to their political advantage to allow the Constitutional Convention to be seen to fail on the mistaken, but not entirely unfounded, assumption that this failure would impel the British to return to considerations of withdrawal. From a relatively early stage the republicans suspected that the British were seeking to back away from negotiation altogether, and that they were simply talking enough to maintain the ceasefire while having no clear policy on how the negotiations might lead to a settlement. The intermediary repeatedly assessed that the British were overconfident about the ceasefire because they believed the Provisionals would be extremely reluctant to return to their campaign. In May, for example, Duddy recorded: ‘Had 1 hr talk with O’Bradaigh. I insisted that British were playing it very fine. Betting that the PAC [Provisional Army Council] did not want to break the ceasefire and would back down. It’s a game they might lose.’ (75)

At the same time Duddy was applying pressure to the British by insisting that their assessment was incorrect and that if they did not move, the ceasefire would break down, telling the British representative:

I again said that the ceasefire was breaking and that the British were listening too much to their minor officials saying that the Provos desperately wanted the peace to hold and could ‘accept’ anything. I said ‘No.’ (76)

This suggests that another key reason for the failure of the negotiations was a British assessment that the IRA was extremely reluctant to return to its campaign and that it was no longer important to attempt to incorporate them in a negotiated settlement. By early June 1975, at which stage the republican leadership held out relatively little hope for a successful outcome to the negotiations, Duddy discussed the situation with Ó Brádaigh: We discussed at length what we thought the British position was. 1. Real fear of a Loyalist take-over. 2. Simple slowness due to London remoteness. 3. Keep the Rep. on the long finger, hoping they will fade away. 4. Let the truce slide away and it’s easier to blame the Provos turning public opinion and thus hold the Loyalists from going over the top. We decided on this last one. (77)

Only the second of these options is compatible with a IRA belief that withdrawal was inevitable or a ‘belief that they had literally beaten the British in battle’ and that they could ‘hammer home their advantage’ in the talks.(78) It emphasizes again that the republicans were knowingly manoeuvring in a complex and difficult negotiating process, assessing that Britain had strong interest in disengagement but also aware that this did not for a moment guarantee that Britain would conclude an agreement with them. When the Provisionals applied pressure to the British shortly after this, in an attempt to revive the talks, the message they formulated showed little evidence of ideological rigidity, outrageous expectations, or a sense of victory.

In early June the republicans refused to meet with the British because of lack of progress in the talks and instructed Duddy to send the following message: 1. The leadership of the RM [Republican Movement] is very dissatisfied with the lack of progress. 2. The holding of political hostages. 3. There is no truce with sectarian murderers. 4. The RM question the wisdom of holding meaningless talks. 5. HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] could answer this through me, or directly to Ruairi and Co. providing they, i.e. the British, meant business. (79) This was one of several key moments at which the Provisionals might have demanded a declaration of intent to withdraw but did not. It does not suggest a movement negotiating with a defeated enemy or pressing on the fine details of British withdrawal. Rather, it suggests a leadership seeking minimal concessions from the British that will permit it to maintain a ceasefire, setting an extremely low threshold for the continuation of talks. They threatened to withdraw from talks on specific issues that made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to maintain support for the ceasefire within the IRA. In this case they sought action in two areas: the release of internees and action to deal with loyalist assassinations. These are not the rigid demands of a movement characterized by an ‘essential primitivism’ but the understandable positions of a leadership involved in a negotiation process that is increasingly opposed by its own rank and file, which faces intensified RUC pressure, ongoing arrests of members facilitated by the ceasefire, intensifying loyalist assassinations and continued British military pressure. It is an attempt to stay in negotiations.

While the Provisionals intermittently urged the British to make a declaration of intent to withdraw, they did not at any stage make this a condition for continued talks.

Phase Three: Final Efforts

After June 1975, British representatives in these talks had little to offer to the republicans except reassurances that disengagement remained the long-term intention of the British government. Regardless of their intent at this stage, the British were politically unable to make the minor concessions that would have allowed the republican leadership to sustain the ceasefire. With all other means of sustaining the ceasefire gone, this emphasis on analysis was the one option left to the British but it was not a simple matter of deceiving the republicans.

The continued emphasis on withdrawal also reflected the ongoing direct input of Wilson into this channel of communication and his continuing advocacy of withdrawal as late as January 1976. The repeated emphasis that British representatives placed on Wilson’s views suggests that, to a certain degree, they too misjudged the level of influence Wilson could exert and, consequently, the likelihood of a withdrawal of some kind. This emphasis by British representatives on Wilson’s personal involvement is reflected in the intermediary’s diary.

At an early stage Duddy records that: ‘The whole position is beginning to drift, as the British don’t seem to appreciate that they have a ceasefire at all. Rob phoned. He seemed to think that ‘Wilson’ would make everything OK. I doubt it.(80)

This is not to say that the prospect of British disengagement was not centrally important to these talks. Duddy repeatedly told British representatives that withdrawal was crucial to securing a settlement and British representatives intermittently emphasized that the British state wanted to disengage and that withdrawal was inevitable. Thus, Duddy recorded in late May 1975 that ‘Rob’ told him that ‘… everyone now agrees with your thinking, though don’t expect to see it in print. It is inevitable that the British are going…’ (81) Duddy records that he spoke in turn to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh the following day: ‘I explained the 6pm call. Almost impossible because what I am saying is that Ireland is soon going to be free. O’Br. was equally quietened.’ (82)

It is tempting to take this sequence as clear and straightforward evidence that the Provisionals remained in talks because the British fooled them into believing they were withdrawing. But later on that same day Duddy spoke again to ‘Rob’ to attempt to get progress in the talks: I insisted on a Thursday meeting explaining that … progress would have to be made and seen to be made otherwise the PAC would have no option but to prove they are not bluffing … Rob went on the phone [to his superiors]. Answer — No. I insisted. Time 7pm. He went mad. He banged the table. Fucked. Swore. Phoned and re-phoned. Still the answer — No. (83) Duddy subsequently relayed this refusal to Ó Brádaigh: Saw O’Bradaigh in Dungiven … Told him. He was disappointed. I was disgusted. We are both frightened of going back to war. (84)

Thus, barely twenty-four hours after the British representative had emphasized the long-term British desire to withdraw, the British had refused to make a minor concession aimed at advancing the negotiations and both the intermediary and Ó Brádaigh were contemplating the prospect of the renewal of conflict. Less than two weeks later Duddy wrote in his diary: I decide I must tell O’Bradaigh that the British have decided:- 1. It’s easier to fight the Rep. and thus prevent a Prod. paramilitary UDI… 3. The Provos are too anxious not to break the truce and will take anything. (85)

It seems to have been clear to the Provisionals at every stage of these talks that a long-term British desire to withdraw was entirely compatible with a refusal to make concessions to the Provisionals and a willingness to resume the conflict with the IRA. In October 1975, Duddy told the British that the Provisionals would accept a loyalist-controlled majority-rule Northern Ireland in return for a private British declaration of intent to withdraw. At a crucial meeting to discuss the British response it became clear to Duddy that the British had rejected the proposal and that they had no alternative to propose. He responded angrily: I said, ‘... The Provos know fine well that the British can’t publish a Dec. [laration] of Int.[ent] Also, that you, D[onald] M[iddleton,] can’t present them with a signed piece of paper. In fact, they know that a “Dec. of Int.” doesn’t exist, can’t exist. It’s a myth, a gesture, a feeling, a hand across the table. The Irish need affection, not your most careful consideration.’(86)

He was castigating what he saw as the British failure to work with Republicans as partners. He was effectively arguing, as he did throughout the negotiations, that they should be taking what theorists of negotiation refer to as an ‘integrative’ or ‘problem-solving’ approach rather than focusing on points of detail. From this perspective, the declaration of intent was primarily a device, a way for the British to move towards the Provisionals and towards a negotiated settlement. Thus, when Middleton told him in December 1975 that the British were planning to offer a form of devolved government to unionists, Duddy records in his diary that he asked for the details in order to pass them on to the Provisionals and said: ‘Excellent, excellent ... first bit of common sense in years. Include the Provos and you have the beginnings of peace. Leave them out of the mix and we will ensure failure.’ (87)

This is not to say that the Provisionals would have accepted these British proposals. Duddy was reiterating the point that the crucial element in any settlement was to include the Provisionals in its negotiation. As the ceasefire broke down in late 1975 Duddy repeatedly urged the British to develop a concerted policy to reach a negotiated settlement. In August he recorded that Middleton had told him he was about to meet Rees and that he asked Duddy what he should say. According to Duddy’s account in his diary, he told him: ‘Tell him to stop worrying, the truce will hold. Violence will subside. DON’T PANIC — PRODUCE A POLICY.’ (88)

Republican representatives did not insist on a declaration of withdrawal during these talks. Rather, they applied pressure for British movement on everyday practical matters that would allow the IRA to maintain the ceasefire. The Provisionals remained in talks as long as they did at least partly because they sought to provide the British government with an opportunity to develop a policy that would lead to an ‘honourable settlement’.

‘Withdrawal’ was seen as providing a shared interest that could form the basis for such a settlement.

Understanding a Failed Negotiation

Standard accounts of the 1975 ceasefire claim there were no negotiations to speak of, simply a republican misunderstanding encouraged by British officials. The position adopted by the Provisionals at the outset of the talks is characterized as non-negotiable. But if we accept instead that the republican leadership was consciously and actively involved in negotiation, with the expectation that the outcome would involve a modification of its position, we need to consider how some of the key findings of the literature on negotiation might be applied to the 1975 talks. One of the simplest and most important points to make is that positions change in negotiations. Negotiation is, after all, ‘the process of combining conflicting positions into a joint agreement’. (89)

If we treat the opening position of republicans as immutable, we must assume that the Provisionals expected that the British government, William Craig, Paisley and the loyalist paramilitary organizations would adopt the policies of Provisional Sinn Féin. Despite the complete implausibility of this proposition, it is the implicit assumption underlying most accounts of the 1975 ceasefire. Given that both Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell had repeatedly stressed that any solution could emerge only from negotiation between nationalists and unionists and that Provisional policies such as Éire Nua were a starting point for negotiation, it is entirely reasonable to assume that they had an expectation that the republican position would have to be modified. The fact that republicans assessed a British willingness to disengage does not indicate that they expected there would be no need to negotiate. It was clear from the tortuous weeks of negotiation before the ceasefire that they would have to fight for every single inch of ground within these talks.

The elaborate structural arrangements that the republicans made for these talks indicate how seriously they took the prospect that the British would use the talks to divide them and pave the way for their military defeat or would induce them to agree to a settlement that would split the movement. They took these talks seriously as part of a negotiation process whose outcome was not predetermined but dependent on factors both within and outside the negotiating room. Secondly, participants in negotiation ‘need to reconcile the stand [they] take in a negotiation or an agreement with [their] past words and deeds’. (90)

However willing a party is to compromise or to concede, it will be concerned to do so in a way that maintains consistency with its previous positions. Parties seek also to negotiate on a principled basis, not bargaining away their core values but seeking a settlement that maintains these. We would expect, therefore, that republicans in 1975 would seek a settlement that could be reconciled with the principle of self-determination and that addressed their stated demand for withdrawal. This did not mean that they were ideologically rigid, inflexible or irreconcilable. Thirdly, the earlier a party is involved in a negotiation process, the greater its sense of ownership of, and commitment to, the eventual outcome. The more it can regard the final settlement as a joint project of which it is an author, the more likely it is to agree to it. (91) Regardless of the final outcome of negotiations, republicans were far more likely to sign up to and defend an agreement in whose making they had been involved. Conversely, there was little likelihood that republicans would sign up to an agreement from the negotiation of which they had been excluded.

The great promise of the 1975 talks was that they constituted an attempt to negotiate a compromise that included the republican movement, whatever shape that agreement might take. Subsequent attempts to resolve conflict that excluded republicans from the process were predicated on the expectation or hope of their eventual marginalization and defeat, before the British returned in 1989 to an attempt to repeat the approach of 1975. Intra-organizational bargaining, in which competing factions and agencies within an organization struggle to shape that organization’s negotiating position, (92) provide much of the explanation for the failure of the 1975 talks. Both the British state and the republican movement were complex organizations that encompassed a range of preferences and interests and a range of attitudes to negotiation.

The republican leadership leading these negotiations faced ongoing and intense pressure from more militant sections of the leadership and from local IRA units to end the ceasefire and was severely constrained by these pressures. Rees acknowledged these constraints on the republican leadership when he wrote in an internal memo in late 1975 that ‘until recently the IRA have managed to hold their ceasefire with a considerable degree of discipline ... it is unlikely that the IRA can hold their ceasefire for much longer, even if they wish to’. (93)

For its part, the British government was hindered in instituting police reforms, scaling back military activity and releasing internees throughout 1975 by intense internal resistance. The attempt at compromise did not founder primarily because of the ‘intransigence of the IRA — and its refusal to give up “armed struggle” until its aims had been achieved’. (94) It foundered to a great extent because intraorganizational struggles in the British state and the intensification of loyalist violence meant that the British government was unable to ease the pressure on republicans to the degree necessary for the IRA leadership to maintain the ceasefire.

In late 1975, Duddy recorded in his diary: ‘I told the British that the Provos had really no choice. They had backed peace, but the corridors of power had ensured that no progress was possible.’ (95) Thirty-five years later he reiterated the substance of this analysis: ‘The British government decided as the boat was coming forward they couldn’t get on it — let’s say they had good reasons for it — and they turned the boat onto the left-hand shore. Prior to that, that boat was going straight ahead.’ (96) None of this is to suggest that the British government capriciously or carelessly rejected a simple and obvious peace settlement. As the Provisionals recognized, British decisions were shaped by the reality of loyalist violence and the threat of its intensification, the intensity of Unionist and Conservative hostility to any settlement with the IRA and direct resistance by senior military and police figures to the scaling back of military activity and to the reform of policing.

Reaching a compromise settlement with the IRA that involved concessions on sensitive issues such as policing and prisoners would have required intense struggles with these multiple forces and held the danger that loyalist violence might escalate uncontrollably. It would have been extremely difficult to manage all of these forces. This is not, however, the same as saying that the process collapsed because of ideological rigidity and intransigence on the part of the Provisionals. Throughout the ceasefire, both sides manoeuvred to avoid blame for its breakdown and in its aftermath an official narrative of republican intransigence was promoted in order to attach the blame for the failure of talks and for renewed violence to the Provisionals. One Foreign Office official wrote in August 1975, ‘If the ceasefire breaks down, our immediate aims will be: (a) to minimise the danger to the civilian population and to the Security Forces’, and ‘(b) to ensure that all blame for the breakdown and consequent events lies on the IRA’. (97)

The ‘normalization’ and ‘Ulsterization’ policy that the British government adopted in the wake of the ceasefire brought with it a vigorous renewal of visions of IRA defeat and military victory for the state. (98) It aligned the British state with the preferences of the unionist majority to a degree scarcely imaginable only a year previously. In early 1976, Andy Tyrie, the head of the UDA, met with British officials after Wilson had made a hardline speech that indicated that he was turning away from an accommodation with the IRA. Tyrie told the British officials that: He thought that the Security Forces should now be given a free rein to demolish the Provisional IRA ... Mr Tyrie thought that the wheel had now turned full circle, from the use of the B-Specials, through Mr Whitelaw’s soft line approach, to the mobilisation of the UDR and the introduction of the SAS.

It appeared that the Security Forces had at last recognised who the enemy was and was going on the offensive. Criminalization, marginalization and demonization of the Provisionals were key components of the new departure. The history of co-operative contacts with the Provisional leadership and joint efforts to reduce and end violence fatally undermined the newly reinvigorated official narrative of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.

The argument that the ceasefire had been aimed at weakening the IRA retrospectively assimilated this failed attempt at compromise to the policy of seeking military victory. It represented the talks with the IRA as a crucial step on the road to that military victory. No deal with the Provisionals had been possible because of their ideological rigidity and their impossible demands, the argument went, but talking to them had been justified on the basis that it was aimed at laying the groundwork for their eventual military defeat.

The 1975 ceasefire period has been represented so frequently as a disaster and a failure for the IRA that it has become almost impossible to think of it in terms of disaster and failure for the British government. But if we accept that the IRA called a ceasefire in January 1975 with the determined intention of bringing a permanent end to its campaign, and that the movement was committed to negotiating a compromise with unionists and loyalists, it seems quite perverse to argue that the collapse of this ceasefire and the subsequent two decades of renewed violence somehow represent a positive achievement of any kind for the British state.

If we accept, too, that the British government strenuously sought to make substantial changes to policing and to restrain security force activity in 1975, and that it was prepared to move towards the IRA position on a declaration of intent to withdraw and on prisoner releases, this looks very much like a serious and determined peace initiative that failed. It failed to a great extent because of active opposition to government policy by powerful forces within the British state and the intensification of loyalist violence. It looks very much like a missed opportunity for peace.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Niall Ó Murchú, Mick Ruane and Siniša Malešević for their helpful comments on an earlier draft and to Garbhan Downey and Eamonn Downey for all of their help. Many thanks also to Dióg, Fergal and Deirdre O’Connell. Particular thanks go to Brendan Duddy for making his private papers available and for his willingness to talk extensively about the period over several years and to Rúairí Ó Brádaigh and the anonymous interviewee. Thanks to Tom Hennessey, John Bew and Tony Craig for generously sharing their knowledge of the relevant archival sources and of the period and to Lorenzo Bosi, Tim Wilson, Ian McBride, Kevin Bean, Maria Power, Sandra Buchanan, Paul Arthur, Paul Dixon, Peter McLaughlin and Katy Hayward for discussion and comments on the topic on various occasions. Many thanks to Vera Orschel and Kieran Hoare of the NUI Galway archives, to John Cox and to Louis de Paor. This research was supported by funding from Galway University Foundation grant number RNR 560.

Footnotes

1. At this point the Official IRA was still a significant political force and a serious claimant to the title of ‘IRA’. For ease of use, however, the Provisional IRA will simply be referred to as the IRA hereafter in this essay.

2. M. L. R. Smith, ‘Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement’ (London, 1997), 133. After the collapse of the Sunningdale agreement and the power-sharing executive in 1974, the British government held elections in May 1975 to a Constitutional Convention that was intended to make proposals for the future government of Northern Ireland. The Provisionals boycotted the election and the Convention. The unionist parties at the Convention ultimately recommended a return to unionist majority rule, modified only by the inclusion of the SDLP in all-party parliamentary committees. This proposal was rejected by the British government, which then prepared to settle into a period of extended Direct Rule.

3. J. Tonge, Northern Ireland: Hotspots in Global Politics (Cambridge, 2006), 48.

4. P. Bew and H. Patterson, The British State and the Ulster Crisis: From Wilson to Thatcher (London, 1985), 87.

5. M. Rees, Northern Ireland: A Personal Perspective. (London, 1985).

6. See Smith, Fighting for Ireland; Bew and Patterson, The British State and the Ulster Crisis; P. Dixon, Northern Ireland: The Politics of War and Peace (Basingstoke, 2001); P. Neumann, Britain’s Long War: British Strategy in the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1969–98 (Basingstoke and New York, 2003); and J. Tonge, Northern Ireland: Conflict and Change (Harlow, 2005).

7. Memo on IRA ceasefire from Merlyn Rees to IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 18 February 1975, CAB 134/3921, UK National Archives.

8. ‘Force levels and the ceasefire. Note of a meeting held at 2.15pm on Friday, 2 May 1975’, J4/839, UK, National Archives.

9. from Merlyn Rees to IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 18 February 1975.

10. D. Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969–84, (London, 1985), 177.

11. Rees, Northern Ireland, 248.

12. Rees, Northern Ireland, 243, 245.

13. E. Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London, 2002), 138, 142–44, 169–70.

14. T. P. Coogan, The Troubles, (London, 1996), 259.

15. E Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, 141, 177.

16. J. Bew, M. Frampton, and I. Gurruchaga, Talking to Terrorists (London, 2009), 57–58.

17. The Ruairí Ó Brádaigh Papers at the Archives, James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway, POL 28.

18. Daithí Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS130. O’Connell used the Irish form of his name, Daithí Ó Conaill, in his official capacity, but was generally known to family, friends and colleagues by the English form.

19. See N. Ó Dochartaigh, ‘“The Contact”: Understanding a Communication Channel between the British Government and the IRA’, in N. Cull and J. Popiolkowski, eds., Track Two to Peace: Public Diplomacy, Cultural Interventions and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland (Los Angeles, 2009), 57–72; N. Ó Dochartaigh, ‘Together in the middle: Back-Channel Negotiation in the Irish Peace Process, Journal of Peace Research 48, 6 (2011); and N. Ó Dochartaigh and I. Svensson, ‘The Exit Option: Mediation and the Termination of Negotiations in the Northern Ireland Conflict’, International Journal of Conflict Management (forthcoming).

20. P. Taylor, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein (London, 1998); see also, P. Taylor, Brits: The War against the IRA (London, 2001).

21. The Brendan Duddy Papers at the Archives, James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway, POL 35.

22. Details of interviews: Brendan Duddy, Derry, interview dates include 11–13 May 2009, 27–29 July 2009, 13–16 October 2009 and 26–27 November 2009; Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Roscommon, 2 December 2009; unattributable interview with former British official, 7 October 2008.

23. Bew and Patterson, The British State and the Ulster Crisis, 88.

24. Coogan, The Troubles, 156.

25. Taylor, Provos, 124–31; J. Haines, The Politics of Power (London, 1977),132–33, 146.

26. 26 Coogan, The Troubles, 207.

27. Haines, The Politics of Power, 115.

28. Harold Wilson to Merlyn Rees, 22 October 1974, Prem 16/151, UK National Archives.

29. Minutes of IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 24 September 1975, CAB 134/3921, UK National Archives; emphasis added.

30. Harold Wilson, ‘Apocalyptic note for the record — for strictly limited circulation. No. 10 only and Sir John Hunt’, CJ4/1358, UK National Archives.

31. NIO Press notice, 13 August 1974, ‘Mr Merlyn Rees says not a “pull-out”’, FCO87/177, UK National Archives.

32. John Hunt to Harold Wilson, ‘Northern Ireland: future trends of policy’, 3 December 1974, Prem 16/158, UK National Archives.

33. Memo on IRA ceasefire from Merlyn Rees to IRN (75), Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland, 18 February 1975.

34. J. Powell, Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland (London, 2008), 68.

35. Unattributable interview with former British official, 7 October 2008.

36. Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London, 2010), 626.

37. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, 130

38. Hamill, Pig in the Middle,178.

39. Bew, Frampton and Gurruchaga, Talking to Terrorists, 54.

40. ‘Verbatim transcript of item on BBC television programme Midweek’, 4 June 1974, Prem 16/148, UK National Archives.

41. G. FitzGerald, All in a Life: An Autobiography (Dublin, 1991), 259, 271.

42. D. Brown, ‘Unionist Renounces Integration for a United Ireland’, Guardian, 7 January 1974.

43. Blatherwick in British Embassy, Dublin, to Bone, Republic of Ireland Dept, FCO, 15 January 1973, FCO87/211, UK National Archives.

44. D. Adams, ‘Nationalists Must Set Out a Vision for Unity’, Irish Times, 3 December 2009.

45. Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, The State in Northern Ireland 1921–1972: Political Forces and Social Classes (Manchester, 1979), 118–23.

46. Ó Brádaigh: The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary (Bloomington, 2006), 213.

47. ‘Daithí Ó Conaill’s speech on Resolution 31’, 29 October 1971, MS 44, 165/6, Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland.

48. ‘Draft policy document’, undated, MS 44, 172/6, Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland.

49. ‘Oration by Daithí Ó Conaill — Monaghan, 2 April 1972’, MS 44,165/6, Ó Conaill Papers in the Seán O’Mahony Papers, National Library of Ireland)

50. ‘Verbatim transcript of item on BBC television programme Midweek’, 4 June 1974.

51. ‘Statement by the Provisional IRA on 2 January 1975’, FCO87/446,UK National Archives.

52. Brendan Duddy, personal interview, 26 November 2009.

53. Brendan Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 8 February, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

54. ‘Military conduct of 1975’ by Lt. Col. C. L. Tarver, attached to letter from Brig. C. P. Campbell, HQNI, to J. B. Bourn, NIO, 17 February 1975.

55. ‘Force levels and the ceasefire: note of a meeting held at 2.15pm on Friday, 2 May 1975’. Top secret. CJ4/839, UK National Archives.

56. ‘Force levels and the ceasefire: note of a meeting held at 2pm on Monday, 12 May 1975’. Top secret. CJ4/839, UK National Archives.

57. General Sir Frank King: Obituary, The Times, 2 April 1998.

58. Hamill, Pig in the Middle, 179.

59. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 15 March, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

60. Rees to Wilson, 28 October 1974, Prem 16/151, UK National Archives.

61. C. Ryder, The RUC, 1922–2000: A Force under Fire (London, 2000), 130.

62. Rees, Northern Ireland, 117.

63. Ryder, The RUC, 1922–2000, 130.

64. Frank Cooper, PS at the NIO, to Gen. King, GOC, 1 May 1975, CJ4/839 634, UK National Archives.

65. Duddy, 1975 diary, entries for 28 February and 14 March, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

66. Rees, Northern Ireland, 223.

67. Hamill, Pig in the Middle, 179.

68. See M. Mowlam, Momentum: The Struggle for Peace, Politics and the People (London, 2002); and J. Holland and S. Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows (London, 1996).

69. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 1 April, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

70. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 31 March, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

71. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 2 April, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62

72. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 2 April, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62

73. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 1 April, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

74. White, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, 235.

75. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 14 May, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

76. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 15 May, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

77. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 12 June, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

78. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, 134.

79. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 4 June, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

80. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 24 March, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

81. 1975 diary, entry for 20 May, Duddy papers, POL 35 4/62.

82. May, Duddy papers, POL 35 4/62.

83. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 21 May, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

84. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 21 May, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

85. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 2 June, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

86. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 27 October, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

87. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 11 December, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

88. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 12 August, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62; original emphasis.

89. I. W. Zartman, ‘Conflict Resolution and Negotiation’, in J.Bercovitch, I. Zartman and V. Kremenyuk, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Resolution(London, 2009), 322–39, 324.

90. R. Fisher, W. Ury and B. Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement without Giving In (London, 1991), 29.

91. Fisher, Ury and Patton, Getting to Yes, 27–29. R. E. Walton and R. B. McKersie, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An Analysis of a Social Interaction System (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 281–351.

92. McKersie, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An Analysis of a Social Interaction System (Ithaca, NY, 1991),

93. 281–351.Rees, ‘Draft: security policy: note by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland’ CJ4/1780,UK National Archives.

94. Bew, Frampton and Gurruchaga, Talking to Terrorists, 49.

95. Duddy, 1975 diary, entry for 21 November, Duddy Papers, POL 35 4/62.

96. Brendan Duddy, personal interview, 27 November 2009

97. ‘Draft memorandum: The ending of the ceasefire: HM Government’s aims and the means to achieve them’, G.W. Harding, Republic of Ireland Dept of the FCO, 19 August 1975, Prem 16/158, UK National Archives.

98. ‘Ulsterization’ involved the replacement of British troops by a greatly expanded and militarized RUC and the locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment, both of them overwhelmingly Protestant in their composition. Normalization involved minimizing the disruptive effects of the conflict by reducing violence and in particular by securing urban commercial zones. The allied policy of ‘criminalization’ removed special category status for paramilitary prisoners and sought to treat the IRA as a criminal problem.

99. ‘Note of meeting held at Laneside with UDA representatives, 19 January 1976’, Prem 6/960, UK National Archives.

Comment

Jeffrey Dudgeon

Below is the dubious conclusion to Niall O Dochartaigh's long article about the 1975 ceasefire. I, however, only have a memory of a patchy period of reduced IRA murder. 

He writes: "If we accept, too, that the British government strenuously sought to make substantial changes to policing and to restrain security force activity in 1975, and that it was prepared to move towards the IRA position on a declaration of intent to withdraw and on prisoner releases, this looks very much like a serious and determined peace initiative that failed. It failed to a great extent because of active opposition to government policy by powerful forces within the British state and the intensification of loyalist violence. It looks very much like a missed opportunity for peace."

Peace!

Why on earth would the British state, indeed any state, accept a proposal for its dismemberment when a majority of the area in question's residents were opposed?

This is crazy Irish nationalist thinking that takes no account of the UK's interests nor even considers that Protestant opinion counts beyond a concern over 'loyalist violence' that would have to be suppressed. By whom?

Can he not recognise that the emergence of the UDA was a direct result of foolish British initiatives like the July 1972 negotiations with the IRA at Cheyne Walk?

In truth, the IRA was thinking and acting like 'armed Hibernians' as Bernadette McAliskey described them.

It took another 20 years for them to change course and spend the political capital their violence had garnered.

Even then, they went places and made concessions they never expected to make.

That's politics. There was none on offer in 1975.

Niall Ó Dochartaigh

My reply to Jeffrey Dudgeon's response:

While high levels of violence persisted during the 1975 IRA ceasefire - partly because loyalists sought to pressure the British government not to compromise - the British government nonetheless regarded this as a significant and sustained ceasefire by the IRA. 

The British government was willing to explore the ending of UK sovereignty (through independence or dominion status) because key figures in the administration thought it might provide a basis for a settlement: meeting the republican demand for the ending of British sovereignty in a form that loyalists and unionists might be able to accept. They weren't alone in thinking this in the mid-1970s.

I don't agree that in the early 1970s the political leadership of the IRA and Sinn Féin were "thinking and acting like 'armed Hibernians'". I discuss the evidence at length in my book 'Deniable Contact: Back-channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland' (OUP 2021). It traces the continuities between the political approach of the Provisional Republican leadership of the 1970s and that of the 1980s and 90s. Chapter 5 of that book presents an updated and more concise version of my essay on the 1975 ceasefire.

Brian Walker

 A fascinating- and exhausting- analysis by Niall. It shows that the pre-Adams IRA leadership were capable of more flexible thinking than " Brits Out".The post hoc British explanation for the ceasefire as only designed to divide and weaken the IRA is unconvincing. The public explanation at the time  was as good as any: that after the collapse caused by the UWC strike, it was a punt by the British government to create a breathing space to try to find a way ahead which rather surprisingly,  the IRA accepted.

At the time, there was a fairly widespread  belief that something was afoot in the ruins following the strike. While there was little confidence in the ceasefire with its incident centres and hot lines holding for long, why else did it happen?  Try anything, including a short lived Constitutional Convention, shades of 1917? 

Wilson's United Ireland aspirations and his luke-warm support for powersharing were well known.  It was part of a Tory project for the governance of Britain that had spectacularly failed. His ' spongers" speech had an incendiary effect on the loyalists. Intrigue was part of his political style, at times bordering on fantasy.  "Britain's frontier lies on the foothills of the  Himalayas" and his attempts to negotiate a ceasefire in Vietnam were earlier examples. 

His secret talks with the IRA when in opposition in 1971 were strongly condemned by successive  Dublin governments for lack of preparedness and consultation. British withdrawal in the form of a deal with the Provos would have left them holding the baby and, in the inevitable loyalist response, raised the spectre of civil war.

The complete absence of any idea of democratic accountability in the whole affair stimulated fantasy thinking on both sides. Wilson had neither the stature nor the ruthlessness to do a de Gaulle in Algeria.

A Provo offer of a loyalist dominated state in the North would hardly have endeared them to the SDLP and the nationalist population.

The result was greater than ever distrust leading to the bombastic " military" policy of Roy Mason and before long, the decisive ascendancy within republicanism of the young Northern leadership, shorn of Dublin illusions. Ceasefire and disarmament deals had to go hand in hand with  comprehensive political negotiations involving all parties- a  lesson it took another twenty years to learn.