Gerry Adams' comments about strength of the IRA in 1998 'sound deluded' says former top policeman

Norman Baxter was one of several people reacting to a lengthy interview given by the former Sinn Fein president to the Press Association (PA) news agency, in the run-up to next week’s 25th anniversary of the Good Friday deal.

The interview, with senior PA reporter and former News Letter journalist Jonny McCambridge, was published on Monday.

Init, Mr Adams said the notion that the IRA found itself unable to sustain its campaign by the time of the 1998 deal was “total nonsense”.

“The support was still there, and the capacity was still there,” said Mr Adams.

He went on to add: “From our point of view, the alternative to republican violence was to have a mechanism which people could utilise in a peaceful and democratic way, that gave us huge strength to argue with physical force republicans that they should cease, and that’s what happened in the end…

“Bobby Sands, Mairead Farrell, they didn’t have this type of a mechanism.”

The 1998 deal opened up a pathway which “was like a new phase of the struggle” he said, adding that “the first acid test is thousands of people are alive who may otherwise be dead”.

Mr Baxter meanwhile said “the reality was somewhat different”.

He was working in the RUC’s internal investigations unit at the time of the 1998 deal, and had spent time as staff officer to an assistant chief constable (ACC) covering the IRA heartlands of Co Armagh and Co Down.

“Particularly in rural areas, IRA activists were living in homes where they'd put in steel doors and metal gates on their stairways to stop loyalists breaking in,” said Mr Baxter (who later went on to the PSNI’s counter-terror branch, and attained the rank of ACC himself).

"They were living in absolute fear, so there was pressure within the volunteers themselves. That was a reaction to the loyalist campaign, because it had picked up from the early ‘90s, and they were carrying out attacks on suspected IRA members in their homes.

“So the volunteers themselves had come to the view that they weren't being protected by the organisation.

"Secondly, the Catholic Church put significant pressure on Sinn Fein that the IRA's claim they were defending their communities was nonsense in the light of some of the atrocities they'd carried out.

"And then they were so heavily infiltrated by informers that they were aborting multiple times more operations than they were able to carry out. They'd lost the capacity to carry out operations.

"It was infiltration at two levels: one, reporting on their terrorist operations, but the second and even more dangerous infiltration was people who were placed at strategic levels who were guiding them towards a ceasefire and political settlement.”

Against this backdrop, the claim that the IRA could still maintain its campaign sounds “quite deluded,” said Mr Baxter.

As to the idea that republicans had “no mechanism” to pursue their aims prior to 1998, “that's nonsense as well, because there's always a democratic choice; the SDLP didn't go down the road of violence”.

VIEW FROM FORMER IRA CONVICT:

Meanwhile, former IRA convict Anthony McIntyre, who was jailed for killing a UVF man in 1976, questioned Mr Adams’ claim that the 1998 deal ushered in a new era of republican “struggle”.

"It's very very clear: the Good Friday Agreement is the absolute rejection of the IRA's methods of uniting Ireland – unity by coercion,” he said.

"In the IRA campaign, the objective stated was a British declaration of intent to withdraw. Now, that wasn't achieved.”

Mr McIntyre recalled that the British government had run a referendum in 1973, offering nationalists the chance to re-unite Ireland via the ballot box, and that a key plank of the 1998 agreement was that a similar referendum could be held in the future too.

"The British terms for getting out of Ireland were that it'd be only with the intent of majority of people in the north,” said Mr McIntyre.

"The British brought the IRA round to those terms – the IRA settled up on British terms."The Good Friday Agreement was an internal settlement [that is, internal to the UK, at the expense of Irish input].

"The unionists had to settle for the wallpaper of that settlement to be much less orange and somewhat more green. But it was still an internal solution.

"The Good Friday Agreement was a British declaration of intent to stay on the same terms they'd previously stayed.”

He said Mr Adams’ version of events is “spin”, because “unity by consent was there from 1973”.

He added: “Was it worth one death? The difference between the Good Friday Agreement and the Sunningdale Agreement [of 1974, which sought to establish power-sharing government]?

"I think what happened was [Adams] is a very skilful politician and he managed what I think was the failure of the IRA campaign quite well.”

Mr Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA, and has never been convicted of involvement in IRA violence.

However, he has also declared (in 2019) that “I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will until the day I die”.