The first encounter between the British and the IRA since the abortive meeting in Cheyne Walk took place at Brendan’s house on 7 January 1975. The participants were Billy McKee and Joe McCallion, a senior IRA man from Derry who along with Martin McGuinness had been convicted in Dublin of IRA membership in 1973, and Michael Oatley in his capacity as the ‘British government representative’. This was a preliminary meeting about meetings, in which both sides set out their bona fides. Further encounters followed in Brendan’s tiny ‘wee room’ over the next few weeks, with Oatley joined by James Allan, the diplomat who operated from Laneside and was Political Adviser to the Secretary of State. So the talks could be held in absolute privacy, Brendan had sent his family off for two weeks to a three-star hotel in Torremolinos, with £100 to spend. Torremolinos in January was freezing. Meanwhile the secret talks back home in Derry were warmed on those cold winter days and nights by the peat fire in the corner, which Oatley became accustomed to tending, just as Billy McKee did in Bernadette’s house. Brendan stood in his ‘wee room’ and told me about its significance:
It’s a simple room in a simple family house. This is where it all happened. Hard as it is to believe, there was always a rush for this little chair here. There’s a notion that big things happened in the Oval Office in Washington or the Grand Hall in the Kremlin, but it doesn’t happen that way. It happens less formally and more simply. And when you get a situation where eventually somebody is dying for a cup of tea and says, ‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ and you have to ask somebody who you are not very happy about, ‘Would you like tea?’ it breaks it down. And then, of course, what happens is somebody says, ‘When you’re there, would you get a bucket of coal?’
Brendan normally absented himself from sensitive and secret negotiations once he believed his job as facilitator had been done.
Republicans always took careful minutes of meetings, and those held in Brendan’s house in the mid-1970s were no exception. I tried for a long time to get access to them, and finally succeeded in 1996. It involved a long drive across the border into a remote corner of the Irish Republic. I arrived at the seaside location to which I’d been directed, and waited. At last a car arrived, and I was told to get in. Once I was in the front passenger seat, I was told to look down, and not to make any mental note of the route we were taking. It was the same routine Brendan had followed when he went to meet the Army Council. I was told that the reason I was kept waiting at the rendezvous was so my minders-to-be could make sure I hadn’t been followed. We finally arrived at a large detached house in the country. I was made welcome, and shown into a bedroom. On the table was a red file which contained the minutes of the historic meetings. I was allowed to dictate them into my tape recorder, as annotating them by hand would have taken more time than I was to be afforded. I felt a slight tingling sensation as I read the minutes, seeing the record of history, albeit from one side. I was kept going by endless cups of tea and fruit cake brought in by the woman of the house. The minutes recorded what was said at the meetings in Brendan’s ‘wee room’ at the beginning of 1975, after which the IRA declared a ceasefire or ‘cessation of hostilities’. At the time this was, and continued to be for the next twenty years, the British prerequisite for any private face-to-face talks with the IRA. They stated that the British agreed the following on the basis of ‘a genuine and sustained cessation of violence and hostilities’:
• [In that event] the army would gradually be reduced to peacetime levels and withdrawn to barracks.
• Discussion will continue between [government] officials and representatives of Provisional Sinn Féin and will include the aim of securing a permanent peace.
• Once violence has come to a complete end, the rate of release will be speeded up with a view to releasing all detainees [from internment].
This was not a million miles from what was discussed and agreed at the secret talks almost two decades later that finally led to the Good Friday Agreement and the ‘permanent peace’ that was the aspiration inherent in those minutes from 1975. I scoured them for any sign of a reference to ‘structures of disengagement’ and British withdrawal from Ireland. I finally came across one dated 2 April 1975. It read: ‘The British government cannot say they’re leaving Ireland because the reaction would prevent that happening. The tendency is towards eventual British disengagement but it would stop if the Republican Movement [the composite name for the IRA] goes back to war.’
I was surprised that a British official would say such a thing quite so baldly. I asked Brendan if he was also surprised. He said he wasn’t. ‘I’m not an apologist for the IRA, [but] basically they don’t tell lies about things like that.’ Billy McKee was adamant that withdrawal was discussed. ‘[The word] “withdrawal” was used during the whole negotiations with Oatley and others. They said that was what they wanted, and they needed the IRA to help them so there wouldn’t be a bloodbath. I can tell you that if they hadn’t mentioned withdrawal there’d have been no ceasefire and no truce at the time.’12
The 1975 cessation lasted for almost a year, but became increasingly meaningless as Loyalist paramilitaries, suspecting a British sellout to the IRA, stepped up their campaign of sectarian slaughter, killing 120 Catholics, most of them innocent civilians. The IRA retaliated, sometimes under so-called flags of convenience,i while stepping up its attacks on London until the unit responsible was besieged in Balcombe Street before surrendering on 12 December.
By the beginning of 1976, the cessation was over. It had marked a turning point in the history of the IRA. Its former Belfast commander, Brendan Hughes, who was in prison at the time of the truce, told me it was the nadir for Republicans: ‘In the 1975 period there was a great deal of disillusionment among a lot of people in the gaol. When the ceasefire was on, the whole machine slipped into sectarianism and a lot of us were very, very unhappy with the situation.’13
The leadership that had taken the IRA into the truce was discredited. There was no ‘permanent peace’, but the IRA had largely stood down its units, rendering most of its volunteers inactive. Frustration at the lack of political progress grew, as did impatience with IRA orders to refrain from attacks. The result was disillusionment and dissension in the ranks. This was the point at which the IRA’s new leadership emerged to challenge O’Brady, Twomey and McKee and the others who supported and advised them.
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were untainted by the truce. Adams was in the Long Kesh prison camp,j and McGuinness had been released from gaol in the Irish Republic on 13 December 1974, having served nine months of a twelve-month sentence for IRA membership – his second such sentence. After McGuinness emerged he was not involved in the preliminaries to the secret dialogue with the British, or the subsequent negotiations that led to the truce. The new leadership believed that the IRA had been duped by the ‘Brits’, and vowed that it would never happen again. Brendan looks back on the period, and the failure of the negotiations and the truce, with sadness. ‘The leadership of McKee and O’Brady did everything in their power within their Republican remit to get a track going similar to the track twenty years on. The difficulty was that when the young men came along, Adams and McGuinness, they simply saw the O’Bradys of this world as being past it. They said, “We’re running this campaign.”’ And they did. Ironically, twenty years later, on 31 August 1994, the ‘new’ IRA leadership, which had remained in place over all those years, did the same as the old leadership, declaring ‘a complete cessation of military operations’,14 and finally set Northern Ireland on the road to peace.
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Although the ‘old’ leadership had been discredited, Brendan thought that Rory O’Brady, Billy McKee, Seamus Twomey and others had done all they could through Michael Oatley to try to establish a