During the early days of the Northern Ireland peace process, Gerry Adams was filmed addressing a gathering outside Belfast city hall. A clip on the internet is both short and grainy. From the crowd, a man can be heard shouting: “Bring back the IRA.” Grinning broadly, Adams replies into his microphone: “They haven’t gone away, you know.”
As Sinn Féin, which Adams led for 35 years, becomes an increasingly popular political force in Ireland, both south and north, many will be puzzling over the extent to which the Provisional Irish Republican Army still wields power within the party.
Sinn Féin was, after all, the IRA’s political wing throughout the Troubles. An IRA strategy paper co-authored by Adams, and seized by the Irish police in 1977, directed that “Sinn Féin should come under army organisers at all levels … [it] should be radicalised (under army direction) and agitate about social and economic issues.” One chief constable in Northern Ireland put it more succinctly a decade later: “They’re two sides of the same coin.”
Here, Aoife Moore examines whether the IRA still has a hidden hand within the party, one that may well lead the next Dublin government and is now the biggest in the north, in terms of local seats. The answer – perhaps unsurprisingly – is that while the gunmen are “receding into history”, they still have not quite gone away.
Long after the Good Friday agreement brought the conflict largely to an end, Moore writes, local Sinn Féin meetings in the north would be interrupted by a dozen or more known IRA men who would troop into the hall and sit at the back in complete silence. Decisions were conveyed to senior party officials without debate. “It was clearly an army thing,” says one. “You were told and never questioned it.”
While the IRA’s ruling body no longer calls itself the army council, one leading figure quoted in the book acknowledges that it is still “consulted and kept in the know” on planned political strategy.
“For many of the older members of Sinn Féin, such consultations are how things have always been done,” Moore says. “For newer staff, it’s an uncomfortable reality. It’s rarely discussed openly, but it is how the party operates, whether they like it or not.”
This is a painstakingly researched book, informed by countless inside sources. Moore, an award-winning political journalist, ranges far wider than an examination of the secret army’s lingering influence within the party, which was for many years its subordinate partner in the violent pursuit of Irish unity.
Leading figures in the party are studied closely. The late Martin McGuinness is portrayed as a man whose transformation from IRA commander to peacemaker was not only sincere, but also possibly came as a relief. His role in beginning to move Sinn Féin away from an anti-abortion stance rooted in Catholic teachings – after a conversation he had with a young woman from a unionist background who had travelled from Belfast to London for a termination for foetal abnormality – suggests compassion as well as pragmatism.
Adams, the man who defined republicanism in his own image and then played a critical role in slowly bringing the Troubles to an end, is presented as a more difficult figure. Conciliatory, but also manipulative; charming, yet without real warmth. Even McGuinness is said to have appeared intimidated by him on occasion. Adams’s repeated denial that he was ever in the IRA has done little to encourage trust.
His patience and foresight are also impressive. “Gerry sees everything a hundred miles down the road,” says one source – hence the title of the book.
The party itself is characterised as secretive and controlling, strictly hierarchical and a place where bullying can go unchecked. This may be true of many political parties but, says Moore, it remains difficult for Sinn Féin to be a “normal” party when its role for so many years was to support and sustain the violence of the IRA.
It also faces the unusual challenge of campaigning in two jurisdictions. In the south, it has captured votes by offering leftwing alternatives to the two parties that have dominated political life, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – particularly over the country’s housing crisis. In the 2020 general election it won the most first-preference votes but remains in opposition. Next time, by fielding more candidates, it may be in a position to lead a coalition government, although it remains unclear who its partner might be.
In the north, nationalism rather than socialism has been the key to modest increases in support, and it has become the largest single party largely as a result of the DUP’s post-Brexit woes.
Adams, now 74, has anointed new leaders. In Dublin, Mary Lou McDonald, a privately educated former thinktank researcher, is now party president and leader of the opposition. In Belfast, Michelle O’Neill, who hails from a republican family, is vice-president, and would be first minister at Stormont had the DUP not collapsed the power-sharing administration.
The two women have overseen Sinn Féin’s best electoral performances of modern times, and it may be, Moore concludes, “that the whiff of sulphur that continues to hang around Sinn Féin has been completely priced in by the electorate”. Nevertheless, polling suggests that voters in the north are not at all ready to vote for a united Ireland. The long game is far from over.
Ian Cobain is the author of Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island (Granta)
The Long Game: Inside Sinn Féin by Aoife Moore is published by Sandycover (£17.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
