Field Day review
50
‘Everyone
Trying’, the IRA
Ceasefire, 1975:
A Missed
Opportunity for
Peace?
Niall Ó Dochartaigh
Introduction
1
At this point the Official
IRA was still a significent
political force and a serious
claimant to the title of
‘IRA’. For ease of use,
however, the Provisional
IRA will simply be referred
to as the IRA hereafter in
this essay.
British soldiers arrest an
anti-internment demonstrator,
Divis Street, Belfast, August
11 1975. Photo: Keystone ©
Getty Images
For most of 1975 the Provisional
IRA1 was officially on ceasefire.
The ceasefire constituted a
major and sustained political
initiative by the Provisionals,
despite the fact that there was
a variety of breaches and that
sectarian violence escalated
during this period. The fact that
it was maintained for such a long
period, albeit imperfectly, raises
the question of why it did not
provide the basis for a lasting
peace. It was the first time since
its establishment in 1970 that the
IRA had maintained a ceasefire
for more than a few
Field Day Review 7 2011
51
Field Day review
weeks. It was not until 1994 that the IRA
would again maintain a ceasefire for a
comparable duration. The 1994 ceasefire
was a direct precursor to republican
acceptance of major compromises in
the comprehensive peace settlement of
1998. Why was it that the IRA ceasefire
of 1975 did not provide the basis for a
settlement, given that a long IRA ceasefire
was a crucial element in permitting the
negotiation of an inclusive peace agreement
in the 1990s?
Throughout the course of the
1975 ceasefire, British government
representatives held regular secret talks
with a republican team that was reporting
directly to the IRA Army Council. It was
the only time in the conflict that such a
series of meetings took place. In the wake
of these talks the British government
turned away from efforts to negotiate
and focused its attention on the military
defeat of the IRA. Existing accounts
characterize these talks as a deliberate
British government ploy to weaken the
IRA and argue that the talks and the
ceasefire were only sustained by the
pretence of the British government that it
was considering withdrawal. They argue
that a simplistic republican analysis of
the British state, republican misreading
of British intentions, and a dogmatic
focus on rigid ideological goals ensured
that the talks never had any prospect of
delivering a permanent peace agreement.
The ideological rigidity of the IRA is
identified as a central reason for the
failure of these negotiations.
This essay offers an alternative analysis
of these talks. While acknowledging that
republicans overestimated the likelihood of
British withdrawal, I argue that republicans
had a more nuanced analysis of British
intentions than suggested by other accounts
and that the IRA was seriously considering
a settlement that would involve major
compromise and a significant shift in the
republican position. The breakdown of
the talks cannot be ascribed primarily to
republican ideological dogmatism.
52
Interpreting the Ceasefire
2
The fact that the ceasefire presents a
puzzle is widely recognized by scholars
of the period, even by those whose
hostility to the IRA is strongest. From the
hostile baseline assumption of republican
ideological extremism and determined
militarism adopted by many scholars of
the period, it is difficult to explain why the
IRA should have sustained a ceasefire for
so long after it became clear that it could
neither yield military benefits nor meet
its core ideological demands. Analyzing
IRA decision-making in terms of military
strategy, M. L. R. Smith comments:
The ceasefire ... begs the question, why
did the Provisionals, both moderates
and hardliners alike, allow themselves
to be ensnared in a ‘demoralising’ and
‘damaging’ truce for so long? ... they
persisted even after it was clear ...
that the British were not interested in
talking to IRA and were busily pursuing
their own political agenda with the
constitutional convention. 2
The dominant explanation in the
academic literature for the lengthy IRA
ceasefire of 1975 is that the republican
leadership was duped by the British
government into believing that British
withdrawal was on the cards. Jonathan
Tonge states it baldly: ‘Duped by the British
government that withdrawal might be
on the agenda, the IRA leadership called
a cease-fire in 1974–5.’3 Paul Bew and
Henry Patterson offer a variation on the
same theme: ‘The purpose of the truce
was to divide and weaken the Provisionals
and to get rid of internment, as prelude to
reasserting the rule of law ... the true nature
of that policy was revealed in 1976.’4
According to this explanation, the British
government strung out the talks in order to
weaken the IRA militarily and politically,
laying the foundation for the subsequent
success of security force action against the
IRA. The chief source for this explanation
3
4
M. L. R. Smith, Fighting
for Ireland? The Military
Strategy of the Irish
Republican Movement
(London, 1997), 133.
After the collapse of the
Sunningdale agreement
and the power-sharing
executive in 1974, the
British government held
elections in May 1975 to a
Constitutional Convention
that was intended to make
proposals for the future
government of Northern
Ireland. The Provisionals
boycotted the election
and the convention. The
unionist parties at the
convention ultimately
recommended a return
to unionist majority rule,
modified only by the
inclusion of the SDLP in
all-party parliamentary
committees. This proposal
was rejected by the British
government, which then
prepared to settle into a period of extended direct rule.
J. Tonge, Northern Ireland:
Hotspots in Global Politics
(Cambridge, 2006), 48.
P. Bew and H. Patterson,
The British State and the
Ulster Crisis: From Wilson
to Thatcher (London,
1985), 87.
‘Everyone Trying’
29 May 1974: Secretary of
State for Northern Ireland,
Merlyn Rees at 10 Downing
Street for an emergency
meeting. ©Getty Images.
5
6
M. Rees, Northern Ireland:
A Personal Perspective
(London, 1985).
See Smith, Fighting for
Ireland; Bew and Patterson,
The British State and the
Ulster Crisis; P. Dixon,
Northern Ireland: The
Politics of War and Peace
(Basingstoke, 2001); P.
Neumann, Britain’s Long
War: British Strategy in the
Northern Ireland Conflict,
1969–98 (Basingstoke and
New York, 2003); and J.
Tonge, Northern Ireland:
Conflict and Change
(Harlow, 2005).
is the memoirs of the secretary of state for
Northern Ireland at the time, Labour MP
Merlyn Rees, where it is expounded at
some length. 5 Many academic accounts of
the ceasefire accept Rees’s argument to a
greater or lesser degree.6
Rees’s account of a strategy of
deception also finds some support in
contemporary official documents, in
particular the minutes of meetings of the
Cabinet Committee on Northern Ireland.
At these meetings Rees regularly told
his colleagues that government strategy
during the ceasefire was directed at
weakening the IRA. Thus, at a meeting
on 18 February 1975 he told colleagues
that: ‘The importance of a ceasefire is
that it offers us the opportunity to create
the conditions in which the Provisionals’
“military” organisation and structure may
be weakened. They would not find it easy to
53
Field Day review
start a campaign again from scratch.’ But in
the same memo Rees noted:
As against this, there is the risk that the
Provisionals can rest, re-supply and regroup so as to re-emerge more strongly
... They badly needed a ceasefire if only
in order to reorganise after a long period
of attrition and disruptions at the hands
of the Security Forces. But they are not
beaten. Their cohesion and discipline are
remarkable.7
Throughout the ceasefire, the question
of whether it had weakened or strengthened
the Provisionals continued to be hotly
contested. In May 1975, for example, the
head of the British army in the North,
General Sir Frank King, and his senior
officers complained to Rees that: ‘The PIRA
were becoming stronger every day, but the
Security Forces were becoming weaker ...
It would take a considerable time now to
reverse the PIRA’s new-found strength.’8
In one sense the jostling for advantage
by both sides in the event of a breakdown
is an entirely unremarkable and predictable
element of the ceasefire. Rees came under
intense criticism for the concessions that
had been made to the IRA in order to
secure and maintain the ceasefire. It is to
be expected that he would emphasize, in
his own defence, that his main aim was the
weakening of the IRA but, even then, he
was simultaneously offering the prospect
of a negotiated settlement to his colleagues,
aiming, he said, ‘to look for the outside
chance of reaching some more substantial
settlement with the Provisionals should they
be sufficiently tired of violence to want to
give up’.9
One significant variation on the
theme of deception holds that the British
government entered talks with the intention
of ‘politicizing’ the IRA and incorporating
it in the political life of Northern Ireland,
but abandoned this approach when it
became clear that it would lead nowhere.
According to Desmond Hamill: ‘As officials
explored the openings they began to realize
54
that the Provisionals lived in a “dream
world” and did not understand the facts of
political life.’10 This is more or less a direct
restatement of the analysis presented by
Rees himself, who asserted that:
At the beginning of the ceasefire
I had thought there was at least a
chance of the Provisional IRA getting
itself involved in the politics of the
[Constitutional] Convention but the
reports to me of the talks with the
Provisional Sinn Féin had soon shown
that real politics were outside its ken.11
Rees emphasized that the British turned
to deception only after it became clear
that the IRA could not be incorporated
in the political system. Here, he identified
republican ideological rigidity as the central
obstacle to a negotiated settlement.
This account has strong attractions
for key figures on all sides of the political
debate. For Rees and the Labour
administration at the time it served to
protect them from denunciation as traitors
who, in order to maintain the ceasefire,
were undermining a successful military
campaign against the IRA. At one stage,
Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell publicly
accused civil servants dealing with Sinn
Féin of being engaged in ‘near treasonable
activities’, while Rees recorded that he
himself was called a ‘traitor’ in the House
of Commons.12 Thus, when Rees represents
these talks as a successful security
initiative, laying the groundwork for the
subsequent reduction in violence in the
late 1970s, it is partly in response to the
hostile criticism that he was engaged in a
misguided and even treacherous attempt to
achieve a negotiated settlement with evil
and incorrigible terrorists.
In part, this account has taken such
a firm hold because it suited the new
leadership which took over control of the
republican movement in the years after the
ceasefire. This version of events depicted
the old leadership as generally incapable
and so strengthened the arguments for
7
Memo on IRA ceasefire
from Merlyn Rees to IRN
(75), Cabinet Committee
on Northern Ireland,
18 February 1975, CAB
134/3921, UK National
Archives.
8 ‘Force levels and the
ceasefire. Note of a meeting
held at 2.15pm on Friday,
2 May 1975’, CJ4/839, UK
National Archives.
9 Memo on IRA ceasefire
from Merlyn Rees to IRN
(75), Cabinet Committee
on Northern Ireland, 18
February 1975.
10 D. Hamill, Pig in the
Middle: The Army in
Northern Ireland, 1969–84
(London, 1985), 177.
11 Rees, Northern Ireland,
248.
12 Rees, Northern Ireland,
243, 245.
‘Everyone Trying’
13 E. Moloney, A Secret
History of the IRA
(London, 2002), 138,
142–44, 169–70.
14 T. P. Coogan, The Troubles
(London, 1996), 259.
15 Moloney, A Secret History
of the IRA, 141, 177.
16 J. Bew, M. Frampton, and
I. Gurruchaga, Talking to
Terrorists (London, 2009),
57–58.
17 The Ruairí Ó Brádaigh
Papers at the Archives,
James Hardiman Library,
National University of
Ireland, Galway, POL 28.
pushing it aside. For the new leadership
of Sinn Féin and the IRA in the late
1970s, this account of a perfidious Albion
and a near-fatal republican weakness
confirmed the strong suspicions of many
IRA volunteers that the old leadership
had come close to selling them out during
the ceasefire. It validated in retrospect the
strong opposition to the talks that had
been expressed in Derry, Belfast and South
Armagh and strengthened those who had
opposed the ceasefire.13
Some elements of this account also suit
the republican leadership that called the
1975 ceasefire. For example, Ruairí Ó
Brádaigh, former president of Provisional
Sinn Féin, argues that the British initially
favoured withdrawal but moved away
from this position under pressure from
loyalists and the Irish government.14 This
is compatible with the proposition that,
while the British employed deception (at
least during the later stages of the ceasefire),
the leadership in 1975 stood firmly by
republican principles in exploring a genuine
opportunity for British withdrawal,
unlike the leadership of the 1990s, which
accepted a partitionist settlement. But, in
emphasizing that republicans engaged in
talks only because of the prospect of British
withdrawal, this account can be used to
confirm the argument that the republican
position in these talks was ideologically rigid
and that there was therefore no reasonable
prospect of a negotiated compromise.
However, some recent work has begun
to explore the weaknesses in these accounts
of deception. Ed Moloney, for example,
raises doubts about the claim that the
ceasefire was a successful move to weaken
the IRA, citing a former senior IRA
member who told him: ‘I can’t understand
these people who say that the truce wrecked
us. In my view it strengthened us ... the
cease fire was a godsend.’15 At the same
time, John Bew, Martyn Frampton and
Iñigo Gurruchaga note that the British
government considered withdrawal in
1975 rather more seriously than it was
subsequently comfortable to admit.16
But even these accounts leave intact the
characterization of republican ideology
as an immovable obstacle to a negotiated
compromise in 1975.
There are in fact strong grounds for
believing that both parties to the 1975 talks
entered negotiations with the genuine aim
of exploring the potential for a negotiated
compromise that would resolve the conflict
and end violence, and that both sides were
prepared to consider major compromises
to that end. Contrary to the received
wisdom, the talks were neither a British
ploy to weaken the IRA nor the product
of a deluded IRA assessment that it had
achieved victory. Existing accounts of the
1975 ceasefire operate either with a very
thin concept of negotiation or with none at
all. To understand the 1975 ceasefire and its
collapse it is necessary to bring negotiation
fully back into the story and to analyze the
1975 talks as a negotiating process, tracing
a number of key themes through this process
and identifying some of the key factors that
contributed to the failure of this initiative.
Analyzing these talks as negotiations allows
us to provide an alternative explanation
of the end of a ceasefire that had initially
promised so much.
Sources
A number of important new sources on
the 1975 ceasefire have become available
over the past decade, beginning with the
deposit at National University of Ireland,
Galway, in 2005 of Ó Brádaigh’s notes of
meetings with British representatives.17
Under the thirty-year rule, the relevant
official British records for the period were
opened at the UK National Archives from
2005 onwards. These records have been
drawn on intensively in a number of recent
publications, but there is much more to
be gleaned from them, particularly on the
tensions between the Labour government
and the security forces. Most recently,
the quiet deposit of key IRA leader David
O’Connell’s (Daithí Ó Conaill) extensive
55
Field Day review
private papers at the National Library of
Ireland made available an important new
source, which, it seems, has not yet been
consulted by scholars.18 The papers shed
new light on O’Connell’s contacts with
unionists and loyalists and his attempts to
formulate a flexible negotiating position.
One of the most important sources
to become newly available is the private
papers of Brendan Duddy, who acted
as intermediary between the British
government and the IRA before and during
the 1975 ceasefire. Duddy played a crucial
central role in these negotiations, reflected
in the fact that his house was the venue
for all of the regular meetings between the
British government and the IRA during
the ceasefire.19 The role that Duddy played
was first outlined by Peter Taylor in the late
1990s, but his identity remained secret for
another decade.20 It was only in 2008 that
his role was publicly acknowledged in a
BBC documentary, The Secret Peacemaker.
His papers, deposited at NUI, Galway, in
2009, include his personal diaries of the
negotiation in 1975 and 1976, along with
a range of other primary documents from
that period.21 The account outlined here
also draws on many hours of interviews
with Brendan Duddy, conducted on
multiple occasions between 2004 and 2009,
and on interviews with key figures involved
in these negotiations on both the republican
and British sides.22 It draws, too, on
biographies, autobiographies and secondary
historical sources that shed light on the
1975 ceasefire.
British Policy and Republican Strategy
Many of the accounts that argue that the
British government duped an ideologically
rigid republican movement assume that
the British government was not seriously
considering an initiative that could be
labelled ‘withdrawal’. They also assume
that the republicans were characterized
by political ‘primitivism’, to use Bew and
Patterson’s provocative characterization
56
of IRA understandings of British policy.23
That is, they were not viable negotiating
partners, but they could be successfully
deceived. It is important to begin by
questioning the accuracy of both of these
assumptions.
British Deception?
The narrative of British deception assumes
that the British state never seriously
considered a compromise solution that
had a serious chance of acceptance by
the IRA. This is plainly incorrect. When
Labour took office under Harold Wilson
in 1974, it brought to power a prime
minister whose stated personal preference
in his fifteen-point speech of November
1971 was for an arrangement that would
permit British withdrawal through the
granting of dominion status to Northern
Ireland; he had even spoken of ‘finding a
means of ... progressing towards a United
Ireland’.24 As leader of the opposition,
he had personally met with IRA leaders,
including David O’Connell in Dublin in
March 1972, and again at his country
home in England in July 1972.25 Wilson
was strongly attracted to the option of
British ‘disengagement’ or ‘withdrawal’
and remained an advocate of this option
to one degree or another throughout the
year of secret talks with the IRA. His May
1974 speech, delivered without consultation
with his advisers, 26 in which he referred
to Ulster loyalists as ‘spongers’ after the
Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike had
brought about the collapse of the powersharing executive at Stormont and the
Sunningdale Agreement, provided a public
indication of his distance from unionism
and his distaste for continued British
commitment to Northern Ireland. His
close advisers, Bernard Donoughue and Joe
Haines, whose presence in government was
intended to act as a counterweight to the
conservatism of the civil service ‘machine’,
both expressed strong support at different
stages for withdrawal. In his memoir of
18 Daithí Ó Conaill Papers in
the Seán O’Mahony Papers,
National Library of Ireland,
MS130. O’Connell used
the Irish form of his name,
Daithí Ó Conaill, in his
official capacity, but was
generally known to family,
friends and colleagues by
the English form.
19 See N. Ó Dochartaigh,
‘“The Contact”:
Understanding a
Communication Channel
between the British
Government and the
IRA’, in N. Cull and J.
Popiolkowski, eds., Track
Two to Peace: Public
Diplomacy, Cultural
Interventions and the Peace
Process in Northern Ireland
(Los Angeles, 2009),
57–72; N. Ó Dochartaigh,
‘Together in the middle:
Back-Channel Negotiation
in the Irish Peace
Process, Journal of Peace
Research 48, 6 (2011);
and N. Ó Dochartaigh
and I. Svensson, ‘The
Exit Option: Mediation
and the Termination
of Negotiations in the
Northern Ireland Conflict’,
International Journal of
Conflict Management
(forthcoming).
20 P. Taylor, Provos: The IRA
and Sinn Fein (London,
1998); see also, P. Taylor,
Brits: The War against the
IRA (London, 2001).
21 The Brendan Duddy
Papers at the Archives,
James Hardiman Library,
National University of
Ireland, Galway, POL 35.
22 Details of interviews:
Brendan Duddy, Derry,
interview dates include
11–13 May 2009, 27–29
July 2009, 13–16 October
2009 and 26–27 November
2009; Ruairí Ó Brádaigh,
Roscommon, 2 December
2009; unattributable
interview with former
British official, 7 October
2008.
23 Bew and Patterson, The
British State and the Ulster
Crisis, 88.
24 Coogan, The Troubles, 156.
‘Everyone Trying’
Future Prime Minister James
Callaghan whispers in the ear
of the serving prime minister
Harold Wilson during the
Labour party conference in
Blackpool, 29 September
1975. Photo: Frank Barratt/
Keystone/Getty Images.
25 Taylor, Provos, 124–31;
J. Haines, The Politics of
Power (London, 1977),
132–33, 146.
26 Coogan, The Troubles, 207.
27 Haines, The Politics of
Power, 115.
28 Harold Wilson to Merlyn
Rees, 22 October 1974,
Prem 16/151, UK National
Archives.
29 Minutes of IRN (75),
Cabinet Committee on
Northern Ireland, 24
September 1975, CAB
134/3921, UK National
Archives; emphasis added.
the Wilson government, Haines stated
forthrightly, ‘England has only one more
role to play in Ireland, and that role is her
withdrawal from it’.27 Wilson’s interest in
withdrawal remained strong throughout
1974. In October of that year, for example,
as contacts with the Provisionals intensified
in the approach to the ceasefire, Wilson
wrote to Rees:
I have been turning over in my mind
the proposal I made in my speech on
25 November 1971 [the fifteen-point
speech] ... I think there is a strong case
for reviving this idea at the right time
... very fundamental decisions may have
to be taken, requiring the assent of the
whole House of Commons.28
Even during the dying stages of contact
with the IRA in late 1975, when the
British government had supposedly moved
entirely to a policy of outright deception,
Wilson regularly returned to the theme of
withdrawal. In September 1975, for example,
Wilson summed up a meeting of the Cabinet
Committee on Northern Ireland, at which
withdrawal had been presented as unfeasible,
in the following terms:
there [were] signs that popular feeling
in Great Britain was turning against
the continued involvement of the
Army in Northern Ireland ... Very
early withdrawal, integration, and ...
repartition had been shown in discussion
to be unpromising but no option or
scenario should yet be finally excluded
from examination ... The implications
of a gradual withdrawal from major
responsibility for security in Northern
Ireland might have to be considered, and
variants of the option of withdrawal,
such as the granting of dominion status
to Northern Ireland, should not be ruled
out in the long term.29
57
Field Day review
By stating that it was ‘very early’
withdrawal, rather than withdrawal itself,
that was ‘unpromising’, Wilson sought
to keep the door open for ‘variants of the
option of withdrawal’.
Just a few weeks before British
representatives held their final formal
meeting with the IRA in early February
1976, Wilson wrote an ‘Apocalyptic note
for the record’, in which he advocated that
the British government make contingency
plans in case of a renewed loyalist challenge
or a breakdown of control, in which case
‘The only solution ... would be one or other
variety of withdrawal, most likely taking the
form of negotiated independence of some
kind’.30 The message the Provisionals were
getting in the secret talks, that the longterm preference of the government was for a
form of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘disengagement’,
accurately reflected Wilson’s persistent
advocacy of this option, although it did
not indicate that it was likely he would,
or could, implement this option. And
Wilson was not the only Cabinet member
advocating various forms of ‘withdrawal’
and ‘disengagement’ in late 1974 and early
1975. When Rees was asked in August 1974
whether the British government planned to
‘disengage’, he replied:
... in the view of pulling out and let them
get on with it — No. In the sense that
I believe strongly that it is the people
of Northern Ireland who must and will
work out their own salvation — if that
is disengagement, then the answer is yes.
And I accept that in one sense it is ... I’m
not talking about next week or the week
after or even the next month ...31
Several weeks later Home Secretary Roy
Jenkins stated at a government committee
meeting that ‘he thought we would
probably have to withdraw’.32 Crucially,
however, these terms were attached to
a range of meanings, with ‘withdrawal’
often being used to refer to the withdrawal
of troops from the North. In this sense,
even senior British military commanders
58
repeatedly advocated limited ‘withdrawal’
in 1973 and 1974, to allow the British
army to meet commitments elsewhere. And
‘disengagement’ was used to refer to a range
of options for creating greater distance
and separation between the North and the
British government.
Thus, when MI6 agent Michael Oatley
told IRA leaders at a secret meeting in early
1975 that the British were prepared to,
or wished to, discuss ‘withdrawal’ and/or
‘structures of disengagement’, he was using
terms that were regularly used in discussion
and advocacy around the Cabinet table
and in British policy and military circles.
However, even in its strongest form, as
the kind of constitutional separation
advocated by Wilson, ‘withdrawal’ was
never synonymous with Irish reunification.
The version of ‘withdrawal’ most frequently
canvassed in British government circles
was a form of independence that would
probably leave Northern Ireland linked
to Britain in some way, and which had,
indeed, strong attractions for many loyalists
and unionists. The fact that the British
government offered to discuss ‘withdrawal’
or ‘disengagement’, rather than ‘Irish unity’
or Irish ‘self-determination’, is an indication
of the care it took to choose a form of
words that was compatible with the options
it was willing to consider seriously. The
choice of terminology indicates a careful
attempt to bridge the gap between the
demand of republicans for a declaration
of intent to withdraw and the very real
willingness of the British government to
withdraw troops and ‘disengage’ from
the running of the North. Prior to this
point, the Provisionals had insisted that
they would not end their campaign until
the British made a declaration of intent
to withdraw. The British statement of
willingness to discuss withdrawal is best
understood as a formula that was necessary
to allow the IRA leadership to call a
ceasefire in 1975 and enter talks, given its
prior demand for a declaration of intent to
withdraw.
30 Harold Wilson,
‘Apocalyptic note for
the record ­— for strictly
limited circulation. No. 10
only and Sir John Hunt’,
CJ4/1358, UK National
Archives.
31 NIO Press notice, 13
August 1974, ‘Mr Merlyn
Rees says not a “pull-out”’,
FCO87/177, UK National
Archives.
32 John Hunt to Harold
Wilson, ‘Northern Ireland:
future trends of policy’,
3 December 1974, Prem
16/158, UK National
Archives.
‘Everyone Trying’
33 Memo on IRA ceasefire
from Merlyn Rees to IRN
(75), Cabinet Committee
on Northern Ireland, 18
February 1975.
The talks held the promise for the
Provisional leadership that the undoubted
British interest in forms of withdrawal or
disengagement might be reconciled with
republican demands for self-determination
and with loyalist and unionist preferences
for a majority-rule parliament in Belfast.
Given the extreme difficulty that
republicans had had in extracting from
the British even the slightest shift in their
position during the secret negotiations
that led to the ceasefire, it seems utterly
implausible to suggest that they ever
thought that this could by any stretch be
deemed a certainty.
The story of successful British deception
has taken such a strong hold that even
the most sceptical scholars of the period
have not seriously addressed the question
of whether the British government was
prepared to make a declaration of intent
to withdraw in the course of these talks
with the IRA. If we accept the view
that a ‘declaration of withdrawal’ was
an item of faith in the catechism of a
dogmatic republican movement, it would
indeed seem implausible that the British
government would have ever considered
making such a declaration in 1975, or
even have entered such a negotiation. But
if we instead consider the declaration as a
favoured item on a republican agenda, and
therefore subject to negotiation, it becomes
much easier to understand how and why
the British government might have been
prepared to devise a workable compromise
on this point. In fact, Rees stated quite
plainly to a Cabinet Committee meeting
in February 1975 that he was prepared to
move towards the Provisionals on this issue:
The Provisionals will no doubt try to
bring us quickly to discuss a declaration
of British intent to withdraw. We must
try to make them realize that this is in a
sense an irrelevancy; it is their Protestant
fellow-Irishmen with whom they must
come to terms. But if the Provisionals
are looking for a face-saving formula,
I do not rule out the possibility that
we could find a form of words which
would be consistent with previous
ministerial statements and not inflame
the loyalists.33
The message is clear. A declaration of
some kind was open to negotiation. Rees
was willing to work towards a form of
words that the Provisional leadership could
point to as meeting its requirement for a
declaration of intent to withdraw. It might
be argued that the British government could
never have found a form of words that the
Provisional leadership would accept, but it
is entirely unsafe to assume this.
If we start with the assumption that
both parties were seriously exploring the
possibilities for a negotiated settlement,
the issue of a declaration of intent to
withdraw can then be viewed, not as an
impossible and intransigent demand,
but as a site of struggle and an issue for
negotiation. The Provisionals were also
demanding the release of prisoners and
the end of internment; they also sought
radical changes to policing. Maybe
they would have completely rejected a
negotiated agreement that delivered on all
of these issues if it did not also produce a
declaration of withdrawal made in precisely
the terms that they demanded. Maybe,
but it seems unlikely. Precisely because
the Provisionals have been assumed to be
dogmatists, the place of the declaration
in these talks has been consistently
misunderstood, as an always-impossible
stumbling block. But it was not the rock on
which the process foundered.
The assessment that the secret talks were
initially a genuine attempt to negotiate a
settlement, while both sides simultaneously
manoeuvred for advantage in the event of
failure or breakdown, is supported by the
fact of Wilson’s direct involvement and
close interest in the talks. In the past few
years new evidence of this has emerged,
although the evidence is patchy because key
records have not been released. Three files
on Northern Ireland in the British Prime
Minister’s office covering the early months
59
Field Day review
of 1975 have been withheld from release,
unusually for this file series. It seems
certain that they relate to these talks.
It has only recently become clear
that Wilson was directly involved in the
management of these contacts from a
very early stage and that he carefully
concealed them from other members
of his government. Thus, when Oatley
began his secret contacts with the IRA in
1974 and 1975, Wilson himself provided
the authorization, and knowledge of the
contacts was limited to Oatley, Wilson and
a few senior civil servants, including the
Permanent Under-Secretary at the Northern
Ireland Office (NIO), Frank Cooper.
Initially not even Rees was informed.34
According to one of those centrally
involved, Wilson told Cooper, when he
(Wilson) was approving these contacts with
the IRA, that Cooper need not bother Rees
with it because Rees had enough on his
plate already.35 The secret contacts with the
IRA thus originated as an initiative with the
direct personal sanction of Wilson, initially
bypassing not only the Cabinet but even the
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
The Ó Brádaigh papers show that,
according to the British representatives,
Wilson was personally consulted on the
details of the 1975 ceasefire arrangements.
This seems entirely plausible. These terms
were so sensitive that it is unlikely that Rees
could have endorsed them without Wilson’s
direct support. It may be that in agreeing
these ceasefire terms, Wilson had stretched
the British state to a position that went
beyond what the security forces would accept.
Given Wilson’s long-standing advocacy
of forms of withdrawal, there seems little
doubt that he was open to an outcome from
these talks that went further than simply
attempting to get the IRA quietly to accept
the constitutional status quo.
It emerged from the MI5 archives in
2009 that Wilson insisted that the Director
General of MI5 report directly to him
and to Rees on these talks and that he
was not to report to Home Secretary Roy
Jenkins. 36 This despite the fact that normal
60
procedure was for MI5 to report to the
Home Secretary. These scattered pieces
of evidence strongly suggest that Wilson
looked on the talks with the Provisional
leadership to a great degree as a personal
initiative and that he maintained his
interest in these talks primarily because of
their potential to secure a negotiated peace
settlement that would facilitate British
disengagement and the withdrawal of
troops, rather than as a ruse to weaken the
Provisionals in preparation for a renewed
drive for military victory. The extent
to which Wilson was willing or able to
implement a policy shift in this direction
was, however, an entirely different matter.
Republican Strategy
A key element in the argument that the
IRA was deceived is the suggestion that
republicans took British talk of withdrawal
as an indication that they had won the
war and were now negotiating the terms
of British surrender. As Smith puts it:
‘The Provisionals fell into the trap of
believing that they had forced Britain into
the ceasefire, and were, consequently, in a
position to exact everything they wanted.’37
However, the British government and army
assessed at the time that ‘hardliners’ in the
IRA were persuaded to a ceasefire primarily
on the basis that it would provide a muchneeded respite for an organization under
intense pressure from the British army. 38
This picture of an organization under such
pressure that even its hardliners calculated
that the risks of a ceasefire were worth
trading off for the benefits of a respite
cannot be reconciled with the picture of
an organization that believed it was in
a position to exact everything it wanted
from the British government. The former
overestimates the importance of IRA
weakness in motivating the ceasefire while
the latter is plainly incorrect.
Bew, Frampton and Gurruchaga come
closer to a convincing explanation for the
truce when they argue that it was prompted
34 J. Powell, Great Hatred,
Little Room: Making
Peace in Northern Ireland
(London, 2008), 68.
35 Unattributable interview
with former British official,
7 October 2008.
36 C. M. Andrew, The
Defence of the Realm: The
Authorized History of MI5
(London, 2010), 626.
37 Smith, Fighting for
Ireland?, 130
38 Hamill, Pig in the Middle,
178.