IRA Bombings Cast a Pall Over St. Patrick’s Day

LONDON — This is a St. Patrick’s Day story about two lads who are much on people’s minds today as Ireland celebrates the wearin’ o’ the green with more disquiet than joy.

The two men, who became teenage volunteers for violence nearly a generation apart, embody the struggle of the Irish Republican Army, a shadowy brotherhood of zealots who believe that bombs speak louder than votes.

One, Ed O’Brien, is dead, blown apart last month at age 21 by a bomb he was carrying on a double-decker bus in London.

The other, Gerry Kelly, 41, shot his way out of a life sentence for bombing and is now a major figure in the quicksilver search for peace in Northern Ireland.

Eighteen months ago, the IRA suspended a 25-year war against British rule in the province, proclaiming a cease-fire later echoed by Protestants.

Last month, frustrated by the pace and direction of the Anglo-Irish peace process, the IRA ended the truce with a bang: A Feb. 9 bomb in London killed two people, wounded dozens and caused more than $100 million in property damage. There have been three smaller bombing incidents in London in the five weeks since. O’Brien died in one of them.

The stunning IRA decision to renew violence has given pause even to some supporters of the movement.

Intelligence sources say the vote to return to violence was 4 to 3 in the IRA’s governing Army Council. That may be the same vote by which the council agreed to the cease-fire that began Aug. 31, 1994, the sources say, although there have been membership changes in the interim.

Now, as peacemakers plead for a renewed truce--there is no sign of one--police and politicians alike in London, Belfast and Dublin are once again poring over well-read tea leaves. What makes the IRA tick? Who are the men behind it? Will they ever agree to play by democratic rules?

Hundreds of IRA members are in British and Irish jails. Still, the group can count on about 400 volunteers willing to pull a trigger and several thousand active sympathizers; they are a relative handful among the 60 million residents of Britain and Ireland but enough to hold two countries hostage.

The IRA’s commitment is deep-rooted and unflinching. This month, Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, the IRA political arm, quoted leaders of the movement as saying they are prepared to fight another 25 years.

They have guns enough, ample money, dogged leadership at the top from men like Kelly, willing young volunteers like O’Brien.

Hopes Grow Dim

As a window of opportunity for peace seems to be slamming shut in Northern Ireland, despite the wishes of the majority in Catholic and Protestant communities, thoughtful people are drawing grim conclusions about the future.

Adams, well received on a controversial first visit to the United States two years ago, was a virtual pariah last week, shunned by American politicians who had once embraced him.

“Perhaps they gained something tactically with the cease-fire, but the track record suggests that the IRA may never have had any confidence in politics,” said Paul Wilkinson, who heads a research center on terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “The bomb and the bullet, fraud and extortion are their way of life. There is a simple tunnel vision--that the British will be eventually worn down and they will leave.”

The Provisional Irish Republican Army sprang out of a civil rights movement by minority Northern Irish Catholics in the late 1960s.

The goal then--and now--was to drive the British from the six northern counties of the island of Ireland where Protestants are a 60%-40% majority and to unite them with the Irish republic.

Aided with training, weapons and money from states such as Libya, the IRA would eventually tie up almost 30,000 police and British army troops.

Over time, IRA bombings spread out of Northern Ireland to London and other British cities. Protestant counter-terrorists took their own toll on the streets of bloody Belfast.

In all, 3,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, by the time the cease-fire came.

Fugitive to Leader

Kelly, a child of tough, blue-collar West Belfast, came early to the cause, joining the IRA in 1972 at 18.

He got two life sentences the next year for his part in the bombing of the Old Bailey courthouse in London in which more than 100 people were injured.

Force-fed while on a hunger strike, he won the return he requested to Northern Ireland. In 1983, after 10 years in jail, he was an organizer of a mass IRA escape--the biggest in British history--from Maze Prison.

Three years later, Kelly was recaptured in the Netherlands. He fought extradition, but a Dutch court returned him to Britain on condition that he not be jailed for “political crimes.”

That erased his liability for the bombings but brought him a five-year sentence for escape; with time off for good behavior, he was released in June 1989.

Beginning in 1990, Kelly and Martin McGuinness, another republican hard-liner who is now Adams’ deputy in Sinn Fein, began three years of secret talks with the British while IRA violence, including two of its biggest bombings, continued.

Kelly has never been known to be a member of Sinn Fein. But in recent months he has formed a threesome with Adams and McGuinness in talks with the British government.

Kelly is the Man Who Never Speaks. He listens and takes notes. He denies published reports that he is the IRA liaison and a key member of the Army Council.

McGuinness, for his part, denies reports that he resigned from the council last year--or that he was ever a member.

Most IRA leaders live in the Irish republic, often in border areas. They meet in homes, restaurants and pubs. Irish newspapers say security police there lost track of many senior leaders during the 17-month, 10-day cease-fire.

“The Army Council meets fairly regularly, every two or three weeks, like a board of directors,” said Kevin Toolis, author of “Rebel Hearts,” a new book on the IRA.

Too much weight should not be given to the council alone, Toolis warned in an interview: “Just as governments have Cabinets, Kitchen Cabinets, chiefs of staff and so forth . . . even those without formal rank have enormous weight within the organization.”

Membership in the military IRA and the political Sinn Fein “is not mutually exclusive,” Toolis said. “The nearer you get to the top, the closer together the two organizations become.”

Chief of staff, the IRA’s most important post, is said by British specialists to have been recently filled by a longtime “hard man” named Sean “Spike” Murray.

He was jailed in 1982 for ferrying two beer-keg bombs into Belfast and is said to have devised a human bomb strategy in which civilians, under threat of death to their families, are strapped into cars carrying explosives and forced to drive at police and army checkpoints.

Window of Peace

By most accounts, the IRA declared its 1994 cease-fire not from any abandonment of purpose but because Adams persuaded hard-liners that they could win their struggle to unite Ireland peacefully.

This belief brought hope to Northern Ireland.

Tourism and the economy spurted. A visiting President Clinton toured Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast in December, extolling peace and warning that there is no room for violence at democracy’s table.

Senior British officials said privately that they saw a 75% chance that the peace would continue, despite any political breakthrough. But behind the scenes, momentum for new violence grew.

War Over Guns

The British government insisted that the IRA surrender at least a token part of its arsenal before Sinn Fein would be allowed to join other parties to chart the political future for Northern Ireland. The IRA refused.

In January, a commission headed by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell drove around the arms obstacle by suggesting that the arms “decommissioning” could take place simultaneously with a peace conference. The British agreed. But Prime Minister John Major proposed elections before talks to decide who would attend.

The IRA denounced that as another intolerable precondition to talks; Sinn Fein draws 12% of the vote in Northern Ireland, 2% in the Irish Republic.

“The IRA didn’t want the ballot box because leaders know the real clout internationally comes from the fact they’ve been an armed organization,” Wilkinson said.

The Irish government, accused by British hard-liners of having in effect served as the IRA’s lawyer, now laments that during the peace, “a great part of the republican movement continued to think in militaristic terms.”

Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, in a tough speech earlier this month, observed: “Throughout the cease-fire, the IRA continued to train volunteers, continued to target people, continued to single out individuals for potential assassination, continued to tolerate punishment beatings and banishments and continued to develop new weapons.”

Officially, Sinn Fein remains committed to peace, McGuinness told The Times.

“Sinn Fein is ready to redouble our efforts along with all other interested parties and the aid of Irish America to reconstruct conditions necessary to move to substantive peace negotiations,” he said. “All we ask is for all other parties to come to the table on the same basis and to stop creating obstacles and laying down preconditions.”

For its part, the IRA continues to infiltrate “clean recruits” into England, young volunteers without police records to join self-contained “active service units” made up of a handful of agents each.

Mostly they are unskilled men in their 20s who work at odd jobs, collect unemployment and wait for a call to arms.

A New Call to Arms

In mid-December, intelligence sources say, the Army Council decided to resume violence.

A stolen truck that would later carry a huge cargo of plastic explosives was sent on a dummy run to London.

By then, O’Brien, a former altar boy from the market town of Gorey in the Irish republic, was in place.

Said Toolis: “The council met Friday afternoon and a final vote was taken. There’s an old phrase in Ireland: ‘Get your retaliation in first.’ Three hours later, the bomb went off in London’s Docklands.”

The following Thursday, a bomb was defused in a telephone booth in London’s theater district. On Sunday, Feb. 18, O’Brien died on the double-decker bus. Another IRA device, a small “postcard bomb,” exploded in London without injury near midnight, March 8.

Back home in Ireland, O’Brien’s family said it had no inkling of his IRA involvement.

But the Republican News said in a hero’s obituary that O’Brien joined the movement in 1992 and the next year “volunteered for active service in England, in spite of being warned that arrest or death faced him.”

The family begged for no IRA presence at O’Brien’s funeral. But some well-known figures came anyway, standing off by themselves.