Michael Lillis writes: During March 1993 I met with Gerry Adams for two full days and one half-day in Dublin and briefly afterwards at a house in West Belfast. I had left the Irish public service in 1990, where I had served as diplomatic adviser to the taoiseach in 1982 and a negotiator of the Anglo-Irish Agreement between 1983 and ’85 and was therefore, as a private citizen, no longer subject to any official political direction. My reason for meeting Gerry Adams was not to negotiate with him or to persuade him of anything. It was simply to respond to a request to do so from my friend the brilliant journalist and activist Mary Holland. Mary was the only journalist whom I had briefed confidentially throughout the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement between 1983 and 1985, mainly because she had uniquely well-informed sources at the heart, not alone of republican and loyalist politics (including their paramilitary leaders), but the SDLP leadership (including crucially John Hume) and several key ministers and officials (including my former opposite number in the Anglo-Irish negotiations, David Goodall) at the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet and her cabinet office. It was valuable to have a sense of Mary’s ‘read’, as an exceptionally well-connected ‘outsider’ to these constituencies as the rumours about our negotiations continued to percolate. She had not once betrayed, even indirectly, the confidentiality of her conversations with me, even though the urge to do so for a journalist who was widely seen as a reliable and remarkably well-informed expert on Dublin, London and ‘paramilitary’ politics (from the leadership of the Provisional IRA across to the UDA and the UVF) must have been overwhelming. She strongly believed in the hope for peace that lay in the secret negotiations between London and Dublin which led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and she would not have written or done anything that could possibly undermine them.
In counterpart she had been willing to give me her advice and even to share highly relevant information that she had gleaned from her many sources. I give one example: in early 1985 we were fairly confident that, subject to the eventual views of the lord chancellor, Baron Hailsham, Mrs Thatcher was seriously ‘open’ to the taoiseach’s advocacy for ‘mixed courts’ between North and South as part of an eventual package. Mary told me that she had in recent days attended the obsequies for a prominent senior Tory on an exceptionally cold morning in London and was walking away from the church when a Rolls Royce had drawn up at the footpath beside her and a voice from the back seat had urged her to ‘hop in’. It was Lord Hailsham himself, enveloped in rugs and petting his Pekingese. He started to talk about the judges in the Northern Ireland courts. ‘Those men do our dirty work for us, Mary,’ he insisted. Coming from the very heart of the British judicial system, this little cameo for me sounded the death-knell for one of Garret FitzGerald’s cherished projects, as in due course the British side confirmed to us. As an aside, I might add that, despite the many efforts of subsequent years, including the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, this particular initiative never again, as far as I know, surfaced in discussions between London and Dublin.
In early March 1993 Mary had urged me to meet with Adams to answer his questions about the British method of diplomatic negotiation. She believed that Adams in particular was moving towards meeting with the British and would benefit, and possibly even be encouraged, by talking to someone who had had some experience of dealing with them at a significant level. I had no illusions either about Gerry Adams’s position as a coldly determined leader of the Provisional IRA or indeed on the other hand about the darker skills of British diplomacy, much less about my own powers as a persuader who could move Gerry Adams away from violence and onto the path to reconciliation and peace. At the same time I felt that if I could play a modest role as a respondent to questions about my own experience – and not as an advocate for any particular political approach by Gerry Adams – it might conceivably help slightly to begin to dilute the permafrost that for decades had frozen the leader of the Provisional IRA out of any level whatever of what I might call ordinary political dialogue with his adversaries. Moreover I was persuaded that, as an entirely independent non-political individual, a willingness to engage with him only on the basis of trying to answer his questions about British diplomatic method could, at worst, do no harm.
I should add that, again as a private individual, I told the former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald that I was inclined to respond to Mary Holland’s invitation on these lines. He was not happy but he did not formally try to forbid my doing so. Had he done so I think that I would have desisted.
And so I met with Gerry Adams on three successive days at Mary’s house in Ranelagh, formerly the home of Thomas MacDonagh, the poet and leader of the 1916 Rising executed with the other leaders by the British. Although on the first day of our exchanges, neither Gerry Adams nor I asked Mary to withdraw, she did so, leaving Gerry Adams and me alone with each other. During the first quarter of an hour we spoke in Irish. His Irish was quite fluent. Mine was perhaps even more so. The only difficulty we confronted was that I spoke the dialect of West Cork, whereas his dialect was a Belfast version of the Donegal Gaeltacht. Communication was possible but not easy, so we reverted to English.
I had told Mary that I would have to make a statement of my own abhorrence of the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence at the outset and I asked her kindly to ensure that Gerry Adams understood that this was a condition of my involvement in the exchanges with him.
I spoke briefly though in strong terms of my outright rejection of the Provisional IRA’s twenty-year campaign of violence, of its complete lack of legitimacy or justification, how it had destroyed the lives and hopes of an entire generation and of the shame and revulsion that it caused me as an Irish person. Gerry Adams listened calmly without interruption or response.
I then moved on to the issue of the modalities and strategies of British negotiation and tried to respond to a series of questions he posed to me. It was clear that he had given serious thought to these issues and had previously read a good deal about them. It was clear, for example, that he had seriously considered the compelling book on negotiation ‘Getting to Yes’ by Roger Fisher and William Ury, or had been in discussion with someone who was familiar with its analysis. I tried to keep my answers at the level of theoretical abstraction. My main point was to emphasise a point developed by Clausewitz on the priority of winning the result above winning the argument as a strategic and tactical objective in negotiation.
After a few hours, however, his questions turned to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, in the negotiation of which I had been involved for a number of years. I was comfortable to discuss the background to the negotiation of this treaty, mainly because I knew that Hume had repeatedly used the terms of this Agreement to argue that the Agreement, particularly in Article 2 (C) which provided for British active support for Irish unity in the event that a majority in Northern Ireland desired such a settlement, removed even from a republican viewpoint any justification for continuing their campaign of violence and once and for all ended the hitherto impermeable Unionist veto. I did not seek to preach at him in these terms but continued to cite the simple text itself, how it had been agreed and its profound historic significance. I also cited the provisions of the Agreement on the ground-breaking role of the Irish government for the first time in Northern Ireland and strong and detailed support for power-sharing as evidence that it was possible to work for progress through negotiation with a British government , even one led by Mrs Thatcher. This was the one point in these lengthy exchanges, the mention by name of Margaret Thatcher, where Gerry Adams showed an emotional response, which was hardly surprising.
The discussion continued throughout a second day and only concluded at lunchtime on the third. By then it was clear to me that he was determined to find a way to negotiate with the British and even the Irish government. He did not express this desire in precisely those terms but his intense curiosity and controlled but unmistakeable enthusiasm throughout left me in no doubt that he hoped to move to a negotiating strategy which obviously would not be compatible with continuing the IRA’s campaign of violence. I should add that we did not discuss this aspect either as it was outside the question-and-answer framework which had been the agreed basis of our exchanges.
By this time our relationship had become less formal and I would say more friendly. In no sense did he try to persuade me of the justification for the IRA’s campaign of violence, any more than I had tried to persuade him to abandon that campaign. But, without returning to my opening statement, we each knew exactly where the other stood.
At this time I was trying quite separately in my new job to advance several aircraft leasing campaigns on behalf of GE Capital in Latin America, one in Colombia and the other in Paraguay. I remember driving to Belfast in Mary’s car and engaging in frantic mobile phone calls with a Colonel Maldonado of the Paraguayan air force on the terms to conclude the lease of an elderly DC10-30 aircraft which Maldonado and I finally concluded just when Mary and I arrived at Gerry Adams’ a ‘safe house’ in West Belfast. As it happened it was not possible to continue my dialogue with Adams that day because of local security concerns, which were exacerbated by a series of loyalist murders in the area. I saw enough to confirm that Gerry Adams was a genuinely popular figure in that neighbourhood.
I returned to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, to sign that deal with the Paraguayan national airline LAPSA. While there I had a phone call from John Hume who said he needed to see me as a matter of great urgency. We arranged to meet in Terminal 1 at Heathrow early in the morning two days later. I flew from Asunción to São Paulo in Brazil and onwards to arrive in Heathrow early as arranged.
John was, as always, friendly, though clearly somewhat agitated. He told me that he was involved in a crucial negotiation with Gerry Adams which he believed might lead to a ceasefire by the Provisional IRA. He had learned somehow that I was involved in a discussion with Adams and was very concerned that this could be or could become a source of confusion and could even disrupt the prospects for the success of his own efforts. I was generally aware that John Hume had been in dialogue with Gerry Adams for some time, but did not have any inkling that those discussions were close to a breakthrough or to an IRA ceasefire. I gave him a brief but succinct account of my own exchanges with Adams, emphasising that they were simply an exercise in responding to his questions about my own earlier dealings with the British in the run-up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. John gave me an account of the key issues he was seeking to resolve with Adams, notably on the definition of Irish ‘self-determination’, which later became central to the Downing Street Declaration and he showed me some texts he was working on. I assured him that this matter was never touched on in my own question-and-answer sessions with Gerry Adams, who perfectly understood that I represented no one except myself. He asked me to desist from my conversations with Gerry Adams. Without the slightest hesitation I said I would do so immediately, but that I would, unless he objected, send a message to Gerry Adams through Mary Holland saying that I was terminating our exchanges in order to avoid any possibility of confusion. He agreed to this and we parted on the best of terms.
I have kept a few of my notes for the message in Irish that I sent to Adams through Mary Holland when I arrived in Dublin later that very day. I did not mention the name of John Hume or the matter of ‘self-determination’ in my message (this in case my letter were intercepted) but I did say that I understood that important conversations were taking place involving priests and other religious and that progress was being made. I said that I had been asked to desist from my conversations with him, Gerry Adams, so as to avoid any confusion arising and I had agreed to that request. I added that I urged him to make every possible effort to ensure success in those other discussions. I finished by saying that, in spite of the enormous differences between us, I had concluded that he was a serious and able person and that perhaps in the future it might be possible for us to meet again.
Through Mary Holland I received a reply in Gerry Adams’s handwriting dated Belfast, 2 April 1993. I have kept the original. The first paragraph was in Irish and the remainder in English:
Dear Michael
I have received your letter and I am grateful to you for it. At the same time I regret your message because I think our discussion was very useful. One matter does not interfere with the other. Therefore I would like to continue.
Michael, whatever else you may have been told our discussions can only assist efforts to find a settlement, or a process which aims to do so. Nothing is jeopardized by our discussions. On the contrary they are beneficial, not least because some of my associates, who are privy to what is being attempted, are pleased that we have met. For our discussions to end, at the behest of someone else, whose reasons for doing so are unclear, would not be well received. It will not cause great impact but you know how important goodwill is and how nuances and little things can affect perceptions.
There you are!! I must say that our discussions have been of benefit to me, personally and politically. No possible harm can come from such exchanges only good. Excuse this scribble. My writing is almost as bad as yours.
Slán
Gerry
PS: The castle above is not my Áras. (Note: referring to a design on his notepaper). This is the only paper at hand!’
That was the last communication I had with Gerry Adams.
Michael Lillis was diplomatic adviser to the taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, in 1981 and one of the negotiators of the Anglo-Irish Agreement between 1983 and 1985. He was the first Irish joint secretary at the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in the ‘Bunker’ at Maryfield, Belfast from 1985 to ’87. Subsequently he was involved in aircraft leasing in Latin America and is co-author with Ronan Fanning of Scandal and Courage: the Lives of Eliza Lynch (1992).
8/12/2024
