It was a classic Adams stratagem, one characterised by its multiple goals and a level of deceit in its implementation. At one stroke he insulated himself from criticism from the Ó Brádaigh camp and ensured that they and myself would be incommunicado, meaning that I would be deprived of their view of the world and they of my access to the print media, while Adams himself, either directly or via allies, was still able to influence how I regarded, interpreted, and reported Provisional politics.
Not long after Ó Brádaigh told me this story I confronted Danny Morrison. He denied it, but I did not believe him. It wasn’t just because by that stage I had caught Danny telling so many lies that I could believe him about nothing, but I had heard exactly the same story told about another journalist—in his case the Army Council was warned off him—from an entirely different source in the movement. There was a detectable pattern of behavior, in other words.
The real importance of this story is that it is both a metaphor for the difference between Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Gerry Adams and their brands of Irish republicanism and also a partial explanation of why Adams now leads a party that has elected representatives in four parliaments and is on the cusp of being in two governments while Ó Brádaigh heads a small group that seems destined to live out its life on the margins of Irish politics.
Adams had no compunction about deceiving his rivals, first by pretending he had been upset by and had no hand in shaping my article and second by ignoring the Ard Chomhairle decree to have no dealings with me. Ó Brádaigh and his supporters, on the other hand, felt obliged to obey the Ard Chomhairle edict. Or put another way, while Adams and his people were prepared to break the rules to advance their agenda, O Bradaigh believed in playing by the rules, even though they might damage his interests.
Another issue that graphically illustrates the difference between them was the question of their membership of the IRA. For many years now, long before the peace process, when asked by the media, Adams has routinely and occasionally angrily denied that he is, was, or ever had been a member of the IRA. When asked the same question Ó Brádaigh has simply refused to answer. Adams has lied about this matter—lied grotesquely, given all that is known about his IRA career—but Ó Brádaigh would not lie, although he would not admit the truth either. While Ó Brádaigh would often not tell the full story of an incident or issue or would dodge the matter altogether if it suited him, I never in all my dealings with him ever caught him out telling a lie. Adams, on the other hand, lied routinely, just as one inhales and exhales air, and so did his loyal lieutenants. In this respect, as in many others, Ó Brádaigh and Adams were the yin and yang of the Provisional movement.
Given this ethical difference, the outcome of the struggle for hegemony in the IRA and Sinn Fein was predetermined. Ó Brádaigh never really had a chance. While he and his allies lived by a set of rules and principles which they would not bend, the Adams group cared only about tactics, and they deployed these with ruthless zeal and efficiency. All that mattered for them was that they prevailed.
There are many possible explanations for the gulf between the two camps, but one stands out. In a very direct and meaningful way Ó Brádaigh and his supporters could trace their ideological and ethical roots all the way back to the 1916 Rising, the Anglo-Irish War, and, most important, the terrible civil war that followed the 1921 Treaty. While others, Collins and de Valera prominent amongst them, were happy to exchange principle for power, Ó Brádaigh and his colleagues came from the uncompromising wing of Republicanism for whom principles were sacred because Republicans had died and suffered for them, in Ó Brádaigh’s case, his father.
Gerry Adams had family ties to all this, but his roots were in the northern IRA, and the northern IRA was always different from the IRA in the rest of Ireland. For instance, even though the Anglo-Irish Treaty threatened to separate them from the rest of Ireland, the sympathies of the northern IRA lay with the Treaty’s co-architect, Michael Collins, because he waved a big stick at the Unionist and Protestant establishment in the north and stood up for Catholic rights.
And when the Troubles erupted fifty years later, northern activists sided with the Provisionals, not just because the left-wing constitutionalism of Goulding’s Officials offended them but because the Provisionals offered a way to defend their areas from Protestant attack and gave the opportunity to strike back violently at the state and people that had for so long discriminated and oppressed their fellow Catholics.
The northern Provisionals came in large measure from the Defenderist and, it must be said, sectarian tradition of Irish Republicanism, while Ó Brádaigh and his supporters took their politics from Pearse, Mellows, O’Malley, and Liam Lynch. It was fear and loathing of Unionism less than the wish to break the link with Britain that inspired hundreds and thousands of northern Catholics to join the Provisional IRA and to follow Gerry Adams.
When defence was the priority, principle took a back seat, and this defining characteristic of Provisional republicanism, along with the ruthless pragmatism of the Adams camp, made the peace process possible. As long as he was able to assure his followers in the north that the IRA would continue to perform its defensive role, Gerry Adams was able to persuade the IRA and Sinn Fein grassroots to abandon acres of ideological high ground, thereby advancing the peace process agenda.
So it was that the main obstacle in Adams’s path turned out not to be accepting the principle of consent—the idea that Northern Ireland would remain British as long as a majority of its population, in practice the Unionists, wished it to be so, a principle that ran like a golden thread through the Good Friday Agreement. Overthrowing the consent principle and reestablishing the right of all the people of Ireland, north and south, to determine their own future was the defining feature of the post–civil war IRA. It wasn’t accepting this that caused Adams problems but the decommissioning of IRA weapons, the instruments of defence. Accepting the consent principle happened with scarcely a murmur of protest from the ranks in the north, but it took Adams years of careful maneuvering to persuade them to accept decommissioning.
There are other examples. When Adams moved against Ó Brádaigh, he used the latter’s espousal of Eire Nua against him, knowing that the plan to create a federal Ireland in which the northern Protestants could still be a majority in the province of Ulster was unpopular with his northern supporters.
The two big splits in the Provisionals since 1969 have both been largely on north-south lines, first the exit of Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill and then the departure of the Real IRA, whose members came mostly from the southern-based quartermaster’s and engineering departments of the IRA. Both were on grounds of principle, the first because abstentionism had been breached and the second because Adams wished to accept the Mitchell principles, which implicitly endorsed the consent precept. In both instances, Adams’s pragmatism won out among his northern following. And so on, and so on.
In a very real sense, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh can thus be said to be the last, or one of the last, Irish Republicans. Studies of the Provisional movement to date have invariably focused more on the northerners and the role of people like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. But an understanding of them is not possible without appreciating where they came from and from what tradition they have broken. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh is that tradition, and that is why this account of his life and politics is so important.
Ed Moloney
New York
April 2005
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THERE ARE SO many people who must be thanked for supporting this project that I fear missing someone. I especially want to thank the respondents, who gave generously of their time and their memories. Most important, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh patiently sat for interviews, responded to letters, and spoke with me on the phone. He generously shared his time, his papers, his opinions, and access to his colleagues, comrades, and family. I also want to thank Patsy Ó Brádaigh and Sein Ó Brádaigh and their families for all of their help. It was especially helpful that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and his family let me form my own conclusions. Others would have been tempted to form them for me.
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