Ex-Provo says Adams will disband IRA

Saturday October 19, 2002 17:26

by Gerry

Ex-Provo says Adams will disband IRA

Ex-Provo says Adams will disband IRA
Rosie Cowan, Ireland correspondent
Saturday October 19, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,815172,00.html

Gerry Adams is already psychologically winding down the IRA, a leading republican writer and former Provo claimed yesterday.

Although the Sinn Fein president said his supporters were furious at Tony Blair's call for an end to the IRA, Anthony McIntyre said Mr Adams was well aware that that was one of the main objectives of the Good Friday agreement he signed in 1998.

Mr McIntyre, who turned his back on violence years ago but opposed the agreement, insisted that the Sinn Fein leader was powerful and pragmatic enough to persuade the Provisional movement that disbandment was the easiest route to full implementation of the accord.

"Mr Blair's given them the red card, they knew it was coming, and it's just a matter of time before they get off the pitch," said Mr McIntyre.

"The structures of the IRA hierarchy will be stood down, and although the members will be reassured they will always be IRA volunteers, they will form some sort of veterans' association, which might even be recognised by the British and Irish governments."

Republican sources and security experts said Mr Adams was the most influential member of the seven-strong ruling IRA army council, and even though some of its members are viewed as hawks, they reckon he could win them over.

"Basically, it's 7-0 to Adams," said Ed Moloney, journalist and author of the recently published A Secret History of the IRA. "He manoeuvred them into ceasefire and decommissioning. There is no turning back."

Mr Adams gave a fairly predictable public response to the prime minister's impassioned argument that republican paramilitarism could no longer be used as a political bargaining chip and was driving unionists away from the agreement rather than guaranteeing nationalist rights.

He said it was the wrong approach at wrong time, just days after Mr Blair suspended the power-sharing Stormont assembly. The government decided this was the least damaging option when David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, threatened to quit after the discovery of an alleged IRA spy ring at the heart of the Northern Ireland office.

The Sinn Fein leader stressed that he would not walk away from the peace process but insisted now was not a time for deadlines.

David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader who faces his party conference in Derry today, took some comfort from Mr Blair's speech. But hardline colleagues, like South Antrim MP David Burnside, dismissed it as "totally vacuous and empty."

But Mr McIntyre said although Mr Adams recognised how the IRA could destabilise unionism to republicans' benefit, he also realised it was destabilising the Stormont institutions.

"There has been a long-term psychological dismantling process, a transfer to a commemorative culture, marked earlier this year by the Tirghra [Irish for patriotism] event in Dublin where volunteers' families were given the equivalent of a retirement carriage clock," he said.