17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA

0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. Plus, to enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chatroom and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com.

0:19Welcome to another episode of The Rest Is Politics Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Gerry Adams. Well, thank you for introducing yourself. And let me say, Gerry Adams, let's describe Gerry Adams. I think Gerry Adams to some, a heroic freedom fighter leading his country to unity and peace and prosperity. To others, a figure of hate and seen as a man of terror and violence. To me, the guy that I saw very, very, very often in close proximity, particularly with Tony Blair and Bertie Hearn, who we've just bumped into, and an integral part of what became the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement.

1:00So something of enigma. It was only because we persuaded you and your government to embrace peace. And when Mr Blair changed British government policy to actually talking to Sinn Féin, imagine, I just imagine that the British government wouldn't talk to a person who had a mandate as an MP leading a political party, which had a declared publicised peace objective. But you moved before that, in a sense. Yeah, of course we did, yeah. But you can only move so far, and in fairness to you and to Jonathan and to Tony, it was only when you came in with that big majority and the new government and new kids in the block that you turned things the way they were turned.

1:49So you talked to my predecessor, a member of Parliament Penrith, and the board of Willie Whitelaw, I guess, back in the 70s. That was a long time ago. 73, 72, 73. Do you remember him? I do remember him. I do remember him. What was your sense? I mean, we're not taking you back to your youth. What was your sense of those early days, Sunningdale, Willie Whitelaw, all that period? Just to be in the context, you were part of the delegation that met Whitelaw. Yeah, I was one of the delegation. Martin McGinnis was, we were the two younger, just by coincidence, the two youngest members of the delegation.

2:20I was 23, he was 22. on reflection I think what Willie Whitelaw attempted to do was brave. You know this place was up in flames. It wasn't that long after Bloody Sunday where the British Pirate Route Regiments had shot all those people in Derry and the Stormont Parliament was prorogued. It was a unionist dominated regime. So in fairness to Willie Whitelaw what he tried to do was brave. now. It didn't last very long, you know the discussions were fair enough I had actually been involved, I had been interned without trial and I had been released and myself and another Republican called Dahi O 'Connell had negotiated out arrangements whereby those talks would take place so there was a wee bit of sensible work being done but it fell apart in weeks, like I don't even know how long it lasted And you ended up back in jail pretty quickly.

3:22I ended up back in Longhouse, well, a year later. I mean, we've learned an awful lot since. And just interestingly enough, 40 years later, for some reason, we were all in Downing Street and it lasted longer than was intended. We all missed our flights and the government arranged for us to be flown back in a private plane. And there we were in exactly the same airport. It was a military airport. That you'd been at 40 years later? Martin McGinnis and I both twigged at the same time as we were getting off the bus. He said, we were here 40 years ago. It's been amazing to be there as part of that delegation in your early 20s.

3:59And you've been at it all that time. You've been doing this all this time. And I'd like to know, we talked about you being in jail, interned. How many times have you been in jail? How many times have you been asked whether you're a member of the IRA? I know the answers that you've given every time you've been asked it. and where do you feel you are on the overall journey that you've been trying to get your whole life well there's rarely an interview that i do particularly with british journalists that i'm not asked was or am i a member of the ira why don't you just say proudly yes well because i would be telling lies and you know we can't be telling lies about these these matters now what was your question i've been doing it all this time how many times in jail well i served four and a half years in jail i was in the prison ship made stone we had a prison ship in belfast harbour which sat in sewage from its latrines and we were kept below decks that was in 1972 i was then shipped up to long cash kept there for a while released then to take part in those talks put back again, was in Belpast prison at least twice, was in the H blocks of Longcash for a very short period, and spent most of my time in the cages of Longcash.

5:22Interestingly enough, the Supreme Court in London found that my imprisonment was unlawful just last year, that I was unlawfully detained. In these descriptions of your time in Longcash and elsewhere, one often gets the impression that these kinds of internment actually built a sense of solidarity between you and other Republicans. It gave you an opportunity to get to know each other better, to do educational programs together, and that actually it built more cohesion. Is that right? Is that how it felt, that you were developing deeper bonds through internment? Well, certainly there was within the prisons, both with women prisoners in Armagh prison and within the prison I was in, there was a prison community and most famously that was expressed in the hunger strikes of 1981 where 10 men died in hunger strike.

6:17There were hundreds of men imprisoned. So there surely was a bond developed and most of it is reflecting back on it apart from the hunger strikes will reflect back on the funny things that happened and the crack. On the crack, Jerry, this is an unfair question, but the cliche we have about West Belfast is very, very outspoken, flamboyant people. And you often have a reputation for being quite sort of controlled in your language and quite almost politician-like. Is that right that you're, compared to many of your neighbors, you'd be seen as somebody who's more careful with words? I'm very dull.

7:04the ones that you are not is dull nobody ever goes out with me, I'm no use but you're pretty careful with your words well for what it's worth you know when I make as many mistakes as anybody that talks as often as I have to talk but I try to you know you're talking to too many you're talking to so many audiences so here I'm talking to people I presume in Britain so I'm trying to give an outline but anyway the point I'm making is you have to be, and I want to stress I make as many mistakes as anybody, what we're trying to do here is unprecedented, right? We have, by dint of the Good Friday Agreement, a peaceful way to end the union with England.

7:46So to do that, we have to persuade people who are for the union with England to vote for United Ireland. So we all the time have to be trying to make sure that we don't defend them or that what we're saying can be persuasive and that we can convince them. So that's an utterly democratic, peaceful strategy, that approach. When did the thinking develop? And so you said you talked about it being Tony Blair, but long before that you were starting to think about different ways of bringing to the history. The first thing that I wrote on this was in 1976 from Long Cash. And it was around the time of the peace people here in Ireland and the Peace People was formed when the British Army shot the driver of an IRA getaway car, shot him dead, and the car correered out of control and ploughed into a family who were out walking, and children, the Maguire children, were killed.

8:45So the Peace Women and that entire sort of phenomenon arose out of that awful incident. And I then reflected on that in a little pamphlet, which I wrote. And it started to probe at what is peace and how do you get peace and so on. So that was 1976. And how important were your discussions with Father Alex Reid? Well, Father Alex Reid was a redemptorist priest and he and Father Des Wilson lived in West Belfast. So they knew what was going on in the neighbourhoods and they knew all of the aggression. And the whole line from the British and from the Irish government was, this was criminality, this was gangsterism.

9:26we have to smash it, we have to subdue it, and so on. So he and I were talking, and there was a huge amount of condemnation of the IRA from the Irish government, from the Catholic Church hierarchy, and so on. And I said, if these folks want the IRA to stop, why don't they come up with an alternative? So he went away, and he tried to get an alternative. and in the course of that he developed some principles which I think are fundamental to any peace process you got to talk you got to listen out of that arises all sorts of other little things you can't decide who you're going to talk to you know if you're going to talk to you can't decide that Martin McGuinness can't be in the delegation you know if you're going to talk to the DUP you can't decide that Ian Paisley can't be in there so on so there's all sorts of little very good bullet points that would enforce or reinforce any negotiating position.

10:22So what was the essence of his position? Treat people with respect, talk to people, find a way forward and look for an alternative. And he was just central to that. And he was also tenacious. And was the alternative he was always looking for a peaceful one? Yes, of course. But you were at the time operating a dual track strategy. Well, we weren't operating any dual strategy. The fact is there was a war going on and it was being conducted by the different protagonists, the British forces, their surrogates and within loyalism and then the Irish Republican army. But something changed in the overall thinking.

11:01When I came out of prison, a group of us started to try and reboot Sinn Féin. Now, Sinn Féin was an honourable organisation and did lots of good work, but it wasn't a political organisation in the sense that we now see it. So we, and it's very hard to organise politically when you're underground. It's very hard when you're, Sinn Féin was banned at the time. So it's very hard to do the type of open political work that you would be used to, Alistair. If you're, you know, if a meeting like this would be raided, you know, in the old days, we would have all ended up in a long case because this would be an illegal assembly.

11:39So that was happening. So you had the efforts to try and get a peace process, the efforts to try and build Sinn Féin as a relevant radical political party and the ongoing war. All right, Gerry, Rory, let's take a quick break. Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce. We thought we would join you for a moment, completely uninvited. We are not going to stay too long. Unless you want us to, of course. We're here to tell you about our brand new show. The rest is science. Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar. And then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all.

12:18You know how banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas? Yeah, what is that about? So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a banana apocalypse. And now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires. Wow. Banana candy is actually the ghost of a long extinct banana. So if you like scratching the surface, thinking a little bit deeper. Or weirder. Yes, definitely that too. You can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

13:01This is a program largely about politics and the way that politics works and how you compromise. And I wanted just a second to touch on Terence O 'Neill and your experience, the 60s, and how he failed. Was there an opportunity there that was lost? And how was that lost? Well, I was only a kid, but I remember meeting with his children in Australia. They moved to Australia. I remember meeting them subsequently. And they said that he was always bitterly disappointed that he hadn't done more. What was your impression of that, though, as a young man growing up in West Belfast? Did you have any sympathy for what he was trying to do or was he seen as the enemy?

13:39It's difficult to answer that with the benefit of all the time. I was involved in housing agitation and we had formed a housing action group in West Belfast because people were being held and were being housed in dreadful conditions and there weren't enough and a lot of so on and so on. If I'd asked you about him then, the Gerry Adams of 1967, 68, and I'd said, what do you think about this guy, Terence O 'Neill, what would your answer have been then? That he should have just given in on the civil rights demands. They were very moderate. They were very, very modest, you know. But I guess, but can we not see the political problems he faced?

14:16I mean, in the end, even the small movements he tried to make brought him down, didn't they? The first time I was arrested was for selling a newspaper. The newspaper was banned. And as part of the public defense of the Special Powers Act, we decided to take an initiative and go out in public and sell the newspaper. The Sinn Féin organization rebranded itself as Republican clubs and held a meeting. And the Republican clubs were banned the next day. So at a human level, I can have some sympathy with Terence O 'Neill, but what they were being asked to do was simple, reasonable and modest. And the government in London was complicit in all of this.

14:58You see, I don't think you can understand anything about Irish affairs unless you see it in the context of English involvement in Irish affairs. So this state is a partitioned, and those days it was an apartheid state. That has changed as a result of a work of a lot of very, very good people. So Terence O 'Neill, of course, he has responsibility and he may have done his best in his own way. But the London Parliament is, by its own claim, the sovereign Parliament. So how could London preside over a situation where a section of people within the British state was being treated on the basis that people were being treated?

15:38Let's talk about a bit of London then. Thatcher in a word, Major in a word. Blown the word. Thatcher was actually talking to Republicans through a back channel while she was making arrogant denunciations and saying she would never talk to Republicans. That happened during the first hunger strike, it happened during the second hunger strike, and then it happened subsequently. But what did you make of them all? What was your character assessment of those three leaders? Well, let me deal with the easy one, if I can use that term, first. Tony Blair made a difference. You know, I would grievously disagree with his adventures in Iraq and other foreign affairs issues, but on this issue he made a huge difference, and Alistair and Jonathan and the team that were in at that time made a difference, so he deserves great credit.

16:32John Major was handed a peace process on a plate and didn't accept it. Now, arguably, he was a minority government, he didn't, he was dependent on union support and so on. But, you know, there's this thing, and I hope this doesn't sound racist, this thing which I describe every so often as the English disease, which when it comes to Ireland, these senior people are just totally oblivious of the needs, the rights, the demands, the aspirations of Ireland. You don't think John Major did accept that you had some legitimate claims in the area of equality and human rights? Well, he may have, but what did he do about it?

17:08John Hume and I came up with what became known as the Hume-Adams Agreement and the Taoiseach of the day, the Irish Prime Minister of the day, Albert Reynolds gave that to John Major and the Downing Street Declaration arose out of that but the Downing Street Declaration and both John and I made this point it didn't go far enough it didn't deal with the core because what we needed was all of these equality guarantees and human rights protections, but we also needed the constitutional issue resolved. Back to this business about an alternative. So now there is an alternative, Rory. Now, if the people here want, they can vote to leave.

17:55How do you, at a human level, deal with the question of death and victims and meeting families of people who lost loved ones. How have you, over time, thought about how did you think about it in the 70s? How do you deal with it now? If a mother stops you in the street and wants to raise the horrors of what her family went through, how do you deal with that as a person? I have met many, many, many families of victims of the conflict, including victims of the IRA. and not all victims or not all victims' families respond the same way. Some are the very, very best peacemakers, very, very best pioneers for peace.

18:40Some are still hurt. Some have been fractured and never recovered. So I try to deal with all of this in a very respectful way and listen. You've got to listen. And I try to do that. Now, I come from a community. I have two family members were killed. I was shot myself. I'm advised that there's a live death threat against me at this time. My home was bombed twice. So it isn't an academic thing. I know what it's like to attend a funeral or to be at a wake house. So the big thing is that now all of that has ended. So we can't undo it. And obviously if people have resentments, that's fair enough. That's their right.

19:27How do you feel about the legacy bill and what they're trying to do with that? I think it's shameful. Just quickly explain what the legacy bill is to listeners because not everybody's aware of it. The bill that our government has brought forward tried to deal with some of the outstanding issues of violence at the time. And the idea is to effectively have an amnesty? Well, what they're doing is they're defending their own operatives. Now, I mean, there are two issues to this. First of all, there was an agreement, the Stormont House Agreement. The British government were partly to that. They've torn it up.

19:55They brought in this new bill. It's at the behest of Northern Ireland veterans. It's at the behest of right-wing Tories and others who are from that little Englander mentality. And they have just torn it up because they don't want to see British operative soldiers, police officers going through that process. but every single political party here is against what they're doing. Does every party are against what they're doing? There are elements of the Tory party who are against what they're doing. It's just terrible stuff. I noticed you didn't actually answer about Thatcher really, apart from that.

20:34When the Brighton bomb happened, would you have been happy if the entire cabinet had been wiped out? Hobbiness is not a term, or hobby is not a term that I would use. Would you have welcomed their demise? I don't want to get into that type of, come back to what Rory observed, that type of rhetoric. The fact is, there was a war. Margaret Thatcher was notorious, not just for her proceeding over the deaths of the hunger strikers, which could have been easily resolved by very simple improvements in the prison regime, but also because she was up front and she was being the iron lady and she was masquerading as somebody who was indomitable and so on and so forth.

21:21So there would be very few tears shed for Margaret Thatcher in Republican Ireland or in many villages in Wales or in working-class neighbourhoods in Scotland or England itself. But it's done. It's over. It's gone. All of that's in the past. You were against the hunger strikes. Yeah, yeah. And yet they became an incredibly powerful symbol, if you like, of what you were trying to do at that time. Just talk us through your thinking on that. First of all, we were trying to do what I have described earlier, to build a Sinn Féin party, and also to try and develop, within Republicanism, a peace strategy.

22:06So we were trying to do that. And there's a war going on at the same time. and that was incredibly challenging. So if you like hand the entire struggle over to prisoners with such high stakes and then particularly when the first hunger strike ended and the first hunger strike ended in some contention where the prisoner in charge was told that there was a deal on its way and he agreed to end the hunger strike and then that was seen as a sign of weakness by the Thatcher regime and a sign of weakness by elements within the prison system. And despite valiant efforts by Bobby Sands to make that work, it didn't work.

22:47So my thinking and the thinking of others was that we couldn't have a repeat of what happened the first time. It was strategic and it was tactically something. And also, these are our friends. I mean, I talked about being in prison. I was in prison with some of these folks. You know, these are our friends. And it ended up, as you know, famously, I mean, a watershed in Irish political struggle. Jerry, I just come back. I mean, I joined the British Army in 91, and my first barracks, Clive Barracks, had been blown up by the IRA two years earlier in 1989. So I was living next to a building. Where were you?

23:22In Shropshire, Turnhill in Shropshire, Clive Barracks in Shropshire. And I was listening to your answer on the Brighton bombing. And I guess some listeners will feel like me a real disquiet with your answer because they'll feel, you know, amongst those people killed were just wives of Tory MPs going to a Conservative Party conference, going to bed in a Brighton hotel and they get blown up. That it isn't what most people think of as a war when I guess maybe this listeners will feel that these weren't legitimate combatants. Well, maybe I could take that from the families, but I couldn't take it from a former British soldier.

24:01People in my house weren't combatants. People in my street weren't combatants. Well, I mean, I feel I was a legitimate combatant. I mean, I wouldn't have taken it to person if you'd had a shot at me. But I never went to war. You came to me, you know. You came in in carcass. But in retrospect, you don't feel there was a distinction between kind of wives of MPs going to a conference and somebody like me? I think, including, let me say this, the deaths of British soldiers or RUC officers, I think all those deaths are to be regretted. It's a regrettable part of our history. And clearly, civilians, for them to be killed, it doesn't matter whether it was accidental or not, that's even more regrettable.

24:51and thankfully we're now out of all of that and we need to learn the lessons of it because what's happening in Palestine now? What's happening in the Sudan? What's happening in Iraq? What's happening in Ukraine? What happened here? It's not that long. I lived 30 years under military occupation. How long were you in the British Army? Very short time. There you go. You were very smart. You've had a pretty remarkable political success. Your political strategy. has got you to a position where if the institutions are up and running, Sinn Féin would be running the show, first minister. You've got Mary Lou MacDonald on the brink of becoming T-shirt, possible.

25:31Do you not think there are lessons? You mentioned some of these other struggles going around the world. Do you not think there are lessons for other organizations that are involved in sometimes violent struggle from your political strategy? And I wondered if you thought that, what you thought those might be. Well, first of all, we have been successful. politically, but we still haven't got our main objective, which is to end the union with England, and obviously that will be assisted if Sinn Féin continues to grow in strength. I think that our list is not just for other people in struggle, but for other governments.

26:05See, it takes two to tango. So it took, as I said before, the leadership of Tony Blair, on the one hand of Bertie O 'Hearn, on the other hand of President Clinton, as well as John Hume and all the folks involved, as well as those of us who were in Republican leadership. And Martin McGinnis has gone to many of these conflict zones and talked to people. And we can't preach to them. It's not up to us to dictate what they should do. Jerry, how did Ian Paisley come on site? I'd love to understand the politics of this. It seems to me from a distance that his political interests, his party, he could have had a future in just remaining obdurate and refusing to join in because there would have been many unionists that would have celebrated him.

26:52First of all, and I have commended David Trimble, who was the first minister from the unionist position. But it was up and down with David and it wasn't tenable and he couldn't get his own party in order. So we decided that we would try and get Ian Paisley into that position. Now, we were in the Northern Assembly with him, so we were across the chamber, and we were moderating our differences in that way. And we advised the two governments. I advised Tony Blair that we were going to try and do something with Ian Paisley. It took over 18 months, close to two years. The method that we'd advised was to remove every obstacle he put up so that at the end of it he would have no option but to decide to go in or not.

27:40And we thought he would decide to go in because, one, he wanted to be in that position of power. And two, we noticed across the chamber that he was listening to some of the things that we were saying. That there was a sort of, I'm not saying there was an accord, but you had a sense of relationships sort of being developed. and it would take me too long to describe all the perambulations to get all of that in place but he did famously go in with Martin McGuinness It feels like a sort of miracle presumably something that in the late 60s, early 70s you would never have been able to imagine No, but neither would they have been able to imagine a Republican like Martin McGuinness being in the same position so sometimes people can surprise each other in a good way and it comes back down to the divisions in Ireland are very artificial as are most divisions between human beings and it's a bit of a cliche but a lot of people have much much more in common than they may think so Ian at the ripe old age of whatever age he was came in and did a decent job and cheered people up and Martin worked with him and I think Martin made a sterling contribution to the whole struggle and to the whole peace process but in fairness to Ian Paisley he did very, very well.

29:01And we were talking there, understandably, about the number of people who had been killed. There have been half a million people born in this statelet since the Good Friday Agreement. So unless they had personal family connection to conflict, they have no memory. You walk about here, all these young kids, they have no memory of it. They're living in a totally conflict-free zone. So that's the great... You know, if you want an achievement, there's lots of achievements, but that's the big singular achievement of those young people. And also that there are people now out there who would otherwise be dead if the conflict had continued.