“He has never been as specific as this in public,” said Ed Moloney, whose history of the IRA was published last year. According to Moloney, while Adams has talked before about the aim of the peace process being “the end of armed groups” in Ireland, he has never spoken in such direct terms concerning the IRA’s fate.
Since the beginning of the peace process, Adams, along with other prominent republicans, has spoken often about the goal of “taking the gun out of Irish politics.” But in republican-speak this was always translated into a vision of the British army sailing up Belfast Lough as part of the overall settlement. That is, the understanding was that if the British took their guns out of Irish politics, there would be no need for the IRA’s.
Adams outlined his party’s goals in an interview with the Sunday Business Post, which traditionally has been favorable toward the republican view.
Adams told the paper: “Part of our effort was to get the IRA to go away. Part of our endeavor — and it is unprecedented — is to bring an end to physical force republicanism. When I say that we want to bring an end to physical force republicanism, that clearly means bringing an end to the vehicle of physical force republicanism.”
Adams did go on to explain, when asked how this might come about, that “the answer lies with the taoiseach and the [British] prime minister and the Unionist leadership.” Clearly, he sees the dissolution of the IRA as coming about in a certain political context — in this case, the full implementation of the Good Friday agreement. Republicans argue that this can only come about through the holding of fresh elections and the setting up of a new Assembly in Belfast. The British suspended the last one a year ago after allegations that the IRA was engaged in a massive spy ring, gathering information about politicians and government officials.
Sinn Fein, along with the Irish government, has been pressing for new elections since the spring. But the British have been reluctant to declare a poll date without a significant gesture from the IRA to meet London’s demand that all its paramilitary activity must come to an end. However, the British remain cautious about seeing Adams’s statement in the Sunday Business Post as a “portent” of a dramatic move from the IRA. Sources close to the peace process in Ireland — both North and South — continue to insist that they have received no concrete indication that the IRA is about to disband. Last week, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said categorically that his government had so far “no solid grounds” for believing such a move was imminent. This is in contrast to the Irish government’s attitude last spring, when expectations were raised that the IRA was ready to perform an “act of completion” — disbandment — in order to facilitate elections. Until almost the last minute, even as it was becoming ever clearer that such a move was not on the cards, Dublin still held out high hopes that it would go ahead.
Meanwhile, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, David Trimble, fresh from series of meetings with Adams, which he has described as “pleasant,” has been deliberately refraining from saying anything that might make Adams’s position more difficult, according to a reliable source.
Even if there is no immediate followup from the IRA to Adams’s interview, his remarks will still be seen as among the most significant in the history of the republican movement. From 1919, when the modern IRA was born, through its many crises and transformations, no republican leader has ever before stated so categorically that its purpose now was to go out of business for good.
“Everybody knows where this is going — cohabitation with unionism,” said a source who has been close to the peace process since its inception. “Paramilitary activities are the problem. Remove that log from the river and other things will flow.”
In reference to Adams’s remarks, he added, “It proves that those who said that things were genuinely shifting [within republicanism] were correct.”