The IRA Factor : Making Peace in Northern Ireland Is a Treacherous Affair

John Le Carre, call your agent.

The Cold War may be over, but the world of espionage, devious conspiracies and double-crossing motives is alive and well back home in that misbegotten patch of your native heath, the province of Ulster in the United Kingdom.

This week’s plots and counterplots surpass anything in fiction. According to one version, someone in the Irish Republican Army leaked a document to their archenemy, the Ulster Unionists, proving that the IRA had been involved in secret talks with the British government for the past nine months.

Another version says the leak came from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, long accused of partiality toward the Unionists. Irish sources suspect the leak came from the Privy Council in London, and Ireland’s Prime Minister Albert Reynolds accused “dark forces”--a barely veiled reference to British intelligence.

Whatever the source, the Ulster Unionists in turn leaked it to a liberal newspaper, The Observer, which exploded the story last Sunday. This nearly sank the government of Britain’s Prime Minister John Major, who had just told the House of Commons that the very thought of talks with IRA terrorists “churns my stomach.”

The problem is: which IRA, which Ulster Unionists, which British Intelligence and which British government are we talking about? There are factions here, civil wars within each tribe.

The secret talks between Britain and the IRA have been openly discussed in Belfast and Dublin for weeks, and help explain the latest murderous campaigns. An IRA bomb that went off early at a fish shop, beneath what had once been a meeting room for Protestant extremists, led to 27 deaths in October, as Protestant killers began gunning down Catholics almost at random. They tried to force the IRA back to open war, but so far, in spite of intense provocation and internal anguish, IRA discipline has held.

After what happened earlier this year, that is a distinct improvement. On March 20, the day after the British government sent its first secret reply to the initial IRA overtures about talks in exchange for an unannounced cease-fire, a bomb went off in a northern English shopping center at Warrington, killing two children and wounding more than 50 civilians.

“It is with total sadness that we have to accept responsibility for the recent action,” IRA deputy leader Martin McGuinness then told the British government. “The last thing we needed at this sensitive time was what has happened.”

In short, McGuinness could not restrain some of his own men.

There are many who want to reach some kind of peace agreement in the ranks of the IRA, Ulster Unionists and British and Irish governments. There are some who don’t, and some who have different objectives altogether--including Conservative members of Parliament who act as if their main concern is how to replace Major.

There are four important facts to bear in mind, guideposts that help make sense of this maze.

The first fact is universal combat fatigue. The British Army, and the British government, know they cannot eliminate the IRA as an organized urban guerrilla and terrorist force, capable of inflicting dreadful damage for decades to come.

In turn, the IRA--now some 600 or so hard-core active combatants and tens of thousands of more or less weary North Irish and Catholic sympathizers--knows it cannot bomb the British out of Ireland.

The second fact is the weakness of Major’s government, with a narrow majority of some 17 seats in the House of Commons. His majority is even more perilous, because his poll rating is barely above 20%, and because of a rump of Tory rebels.

Some are passionate Thatcherites, itching for revenge against the man who replaced her. Others (often they overlap) are passionate anti-Europeans--who nearly brought Major down once this year.

Three months ago, Major was only able to pass the Maastricht Treaty on European unity because he made a deal with the Ulster Unionists. He promised them an effective veto on any change in Northern Ireland, in return for their nine votes, which gave him a majority of one on the debate over Maastricht. They now hold his political fate in their hands.

The third fact is the dirty little secret of Britain’s long history in Ireland: the strategic dimension. Every time Britain has fought for its life, against King Philip of Spain in the 16th Century, against Napoleon nearly 200 years ago, and against the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s Germany twice this century, Britain’s nightmare has been the Irish back door.

With the coming of submarine warfare, British ports and air bases in Ireland became crucial to winning the battle of the Atlantic. And throughout the Cold War, both British and U.S. strategists understood that the only way the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could wage and survive a conventional war would be to fight the U.S. convoys across the Atlantic through the teeth of Soviet submarine wolf packs.

With Irish bases, NATO could provide land-based air cover, and a shorter convoy route. Without the Royal Air Force base in Northern Ireland, a bloody killing ground could open in mid-Atlantic.

But the Cold War is over. The strategic nightmare has receded. As Britain’s then Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Brooke, conceded in 1990, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, Britain had “no selfish, strategic or economic interest” in continuing its presence in Northern Ireland.

It costs some $3 billion a year, a constant drain on the army, and a constant strain on the democratic and judicial fabric of a country fighting a dirty counterinsurgency war without sinking entirely into the gutter of death squads, torture and naked repression. At times, British security forces have come miserably, shamefully, close to that.

The latest battle in the centuries-old war began 25 years ago, with a brutal police attack on a civil-rights march in the town that Catholics call Derry, and Protestants still insist is Londonderry.

Since then, more than 3,000 people have died in Northern Ireland’s latest round of The Troubles. Put this into perspective. During that period, more than 5,000 died in Northern Ireland traffic accidents. The total death toll in 25 years of Britain’s dirty war is rather less than last year’s homicides in New York and Los Angeles alone.

The worst feature of it all is that we are getting used to what British governments have called “an acceptable level of violence”--to the bomb alerts, the special prisons, the dubious legal procedures, the way that Catholic and Protestant thugs alike are becoming local institutions of organized crime.

The fourth key fact is that--recognizing we must not be allowed to get used to this constant corrosion of our democracies--the British and Irish governments are trying honestly and honorably, and against all the tides of history, to work together to find some solution.

We all know what it is. It involves a form of joint sovereignty of London and Dublin over Northern Ireland, while acknowledging Dublin’s role as a government with some rights and responsibilities for the island as a whole. It must include democratic safeguards for the Catholic minority in the North, and the Protestant minority in the island of Ireland as a whole.

It must also include a wide degree of autonomy for Northern Ireland as a province, while softening some of the rigorous definitions of tribal sovereignty through the broader concept of the European union, of which British, Southern and Northern Irish are all joint citizens.

This may just happen. We may be witnessing the prologue to that miracle embodied in the IRA’s apologetic message to the British government after the Warrington bomb--”All we can think of at this time is an old Irish proverb, that God’s hand works in mysterious ways.”

Last week, almost the entire British Parliament, after some huffing and puffing over secret talks and government white lies, supported Major’s gamble on dialogue with the IRA. The only exceptions were the three members of the radical Unionists led by Ian Paisley. Even the IRA has said the talks must go on.

The outbreak of hope, of common sense, with most of the IRA and the Unionists agreeing we cannot go on like this, remains desperately fragile. It is still hostage to the Tory rebels; to the barely restrained hard men of both sides who want to abort peace with bombs, and to the political weakness of a desperately unpopular prime minister.

The Cold War may be over, but its dark rules live on in Derry’s streets and Westminster’s conspiratorial corridors. Le Carre’s world still lies in wait, the knife gleaming wickedly beneath the cloak, as the dense black clouds over Ireland finally begin to break.