Peace Process

In February 1993, the British Government received, via the back-channel, a message purported to be from the IRA. It read: ‘The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close.’ This chapter elaborates the sequence of contacts that led to a secret face-to-face meeting between a British government representative and republican leaders for the first time since 1976 and that culminated in a secret IRA ceasefire offer in May 1993. It examines too the influence of the back-channel on the joint declaration by the British and Irish governments in December 1993, that helped to pave the way for an IRA ceasefire in August 1994.

Escalation

This chapter analyses how the civil rights campaign of the late 1960s gave way to escalating violence in the early 1970s as pragmatic local arrangements aimed at keeping the peace came under increasing pressure. It shows the extent of the shared interests and cooperation between the British state and Irish republicans and nationalists at this early stage and explains the bargaining failure that led to the breakdown of relationships and the closure of these early back-channels. Focusing on the role of mediators, it analyses the local networks of back-channel communication that would help to lay the foundations for subsequent high-level secret contacts.

Long War and a Policy Vacuum

The ‘Long War’ in Northern Ireland that stretched from the end of the 1975 ceasefire to the mid-1990s is conventionally understood as a battle for victory that finally ended with mutual recognition that neither side could either achieve a military victory or be defeated. Chapter Six offers a very different account. It analyses this phase of conflict not as a struggle for victory but as a phase in the process of bargaining both within and between the key parties. It provides a new interpretation of the policies of normalization, criminalization, and Ulsterization that the British government adopted, arguing they were not a well thought out strategy but were instead the outcome of political drift that contributed to renewed escalation.

The Intermediary

Chapter Three traces the initial construction from late 1972 onwards of a back-channel that linked the IRA Army Council and the British government through intermediary Brendan Duddy. When the British government imposed a ban on direct contact with the IRA after the 1972 talks, it created a new opening for mediators and intermediaries. Archival sources reveal that the back-channel was built to a great extent from the middle out by the intermediary who initiated the contact and worked to draw the positions of the two parties closer together. It contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of mediation, explaining how an intermediary, even a private individual with no organizational backing, could acquire significant independent power and influence over the interaction between the parties.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the central aims of the book: to offer a fresh analysis of the factors that sustained violent conflict and prevented a peace settlement in Northern Ireland for so long and to elaborate the distinctive features of negotiations conducted in secret. It describes the approach taken in the book and argues that violence and negotiation must be analysed together as part of a single process of conflict transformation. It sets out the value of existing work on civil wars, contentious politics, and wartime political orders in analysing negotiation in the case of Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland conflict provides a revelatory case of back-channel negotiation. It is one of the few conflicts for which there is extensive, reliable primary documentation of clandestine engagement through an intermediary, and this chapter introduces the unique sources on which the book draws. These include private papers, government archives, and interviews with Irish republicans, British and Irish civil servants, the key intermediary, and others.

1975 Ceasefire

Back-channel contacts led in early 1975 to an IRA ceasefire that lasted for much of that year. IRA representatives and British government officials now embarked for the first time since the outbreak of the Troubles on a series of regular face-to-face meetings aimed at negotiating an end to the conflict. The venue was the house of intermediary Brendan Duddy in Derry. Chapter Five offers a new explanation for the failure of a serious and sustained effort to bring a negotiated end to the conflict during the IRA ceasefire of 1975. It outlines the mutual understanding and goodwill that developed in the course of these secret talks. It shows the extent of the intra-party divisions that hindered compromise and explains how they contributed to the collapse of the ceasefire and the breakdown of talks. It argues that, in many important respects, this process was a precursor to the peace settlement of the 1990s and shared many of its key features, including a willingness by the IRA to compromise on its core ideological positions and to contemplate alternatives to Irish reunification.

The Hunger Strikes

This chapter analyses back-channel negotiations during the republican hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. Although it has ancient precedents in Ireland, hunger-striking is a modern negotiating tactic. Time was crucial to the power exerted by the H-Block hunger strikers of 1980 and 1981 and it is a key focus of the analysis here of the negotiations to end their strikes. The central concerns are the negotiating dynamics at work in the hunger strikes and the intense struggle over time that they involved. The chapter analyses how and when the deadline set by the prospect of a hunger striker dying generated movement in negotiations and the temporal strategies deployed during the approach to this deadline, focusing on the nexus of information, biological processes, and communication. The hunger strikes distilled the wider conflict, concentrating it in time and space. It became the site of a massive concentration of forces by both the British government and the IRA, and both parties understood it as a location at which the outcome of the conflict that had begun in 1969 might finally be determined. The failure to negotiate a settlement illuminates some of the deep structural pressures working against a compromise that would end the wider conflict. But it also provides glimpses of some of the underlying forces that would bring both Britain and the IRA back to the back-channel in the 1990s.

British Policy and IRA Strategy

The Provisional IRA campaign was finally ended through an inclusive negotiated peace agreement that saw it decommission its weapons and effectively disband. Much research on peace agreements emphasizes the pressure on parties to compromise when they reach a stalemate, representing them as pushed into peace. This chapter highlights instead the strategic choices made by the British Government and the IRA as they nudged towards peace. It analyses internal struggles and the importance of leadership and explains the reasons for the deep shifts in British policy and republican strategy from the mid-1980s onwards.

Contact

Beginning in late 1973, there was a step change in communication between the IRA leadership and the British government. The back-channel that hitherto had involved little more than the exchange of political thinking was used increasingly for negotiation on urgent issues including kidnappings, hunger strikes, and the legalization of Sinn Féin. Chapter Four examines the modes of reciprocal exchange and protocols for communication that developed over the course of 1974. It highlights the close involvement of the British Prime Minister and other government ministers in the exchanges and it examines the use of the back-channel to clarify the meaning of public statements. This series of exchanges in 1974 allowed both parties to test whether their interlocutors really had the authority to make commitments and the power to deliver on them. The exchanges contributed to the building of limited trust between the IRA leadership and the British government as each side learned that the other would stand by commitments, respect the integrity of protocols for communication, and not abuse contact for direct military or political advantage. This new communication infrastructure, reinforced by repeated interaction and exchanges, provided a strong foundation for the subsequent intensification and deepening of political engagement.

Epilogue

The epilogue offers a personal account of the author’s initial meeting with intermediary Brendan Duddy in Derry in 1997, their contacts over the following years, and the background to Duddy’s decision to deposit his private papers in the National University of Ireland Galway in 2009. Duddy acted as the primary intermediary between the IRA and the British government during repeated phases of engagement over a span of more than two decades. During all that time his identity was a closely guarded secret. His papers are dominated by three key periods of negotiation: the 1975 IRA ceasefire, the 1981 hunger strike, and the back-channel contacts of the early 1990s.