The Hillsborough Agreement required regular meetings of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. However, against the background of intergovernmental cooperation and Sinn Fein political involvement (Adams was reelected for West Belfast in the 1987 British general election in which the Unionists won nine seats, the DUP and the SDLP three each, and one seat by another), there was an intensification of violence. Aware of a planned assault on a police barracks in Loughgall, County Armagh, the British army ambushed the attackers and killed eight IRA members in May 1987. One innocent passerby was also killed. On November 11 an IRA bomb killed 11 at a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. In November John McMichael, the leader of the loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association, was assassinated. In March 1988 the SAS killed three IRA members in Gibraltar. At their funeral in Belfast a fanatic loyalist gunman killed three mourners. A few days later two British soldiers, out of uniform, turned mistakenly into the route of the funeral procession of those victims and were murdered by mourners.
The following August an IRA bomb in Ballygawley, County Tyrone, killed eight British soldiers. In February 1989, loyalists, possibly in collusion with some in the security services, killed Patrick Finucane, a Catholic solicitor who had acted as a defense attorney for republican defendants. In September of the
Children involved in the rioting in West Belfast, Northern Ireland
(H. Davies/Exile Images)
Same year, an IRA bomb killed 10 Royal Marines in Kent in England. In February 1991 an IRA mortar actually hit 10 Downing Street, the residence of the prime minister. Almost a year later, an IRA bomb killed eight workers in a van in Teebane, County Tyrone, who were working for the security forces. The same month loyalists killed five Catholics outside of a bookmaker's shop on the Ormeau Road in Belfast. In March 1993 an IRA bomb killed two children in Warrington, England. The following October another IRA bomb killed 10 on the heavily Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast and a week later a loyalist bomb killed seven in a public house in Greysteel, County Derry.
During this period political and police efforts continued. In December 1987 the Dail passed legislation allowing extradition in accord with the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism, although the Irish attorney general retained the right to determine whether or not IRA suspects should be extradited to the United Kingdom. In January 1988 the Irish Supreme Court ruled that extradition to Northern Ireland should not be refused solely because the defendant claimed political motivation. However, the following December, the Irish attorney general refused to extradite to Northern Ireland an IRA member, already extradited to Ireland from Belgium, because he harbored doubts about the prospects of a fair trial. Along the same lines, the Irish Supreme Court in March 1990 ruled against the extradition to Northern Ireland of escaped IRA prisoners who feared retaliation by prison officials.
As troubling to nationalist and republican circles as the Irish refusal to extradite on certain conditions may have been to unionists, the British government's decision in January 1988 not to prosecute RUC members for allegedly complicity in earlier shoot-to-kill incidents proved as disconcerting. However, the decision of a British court in October 1989 to quash the sentences and to release four prisoners convicted of the 1975 Guildford pub bombing raised hopes of progress. A similar decision in March 1991 resulted in the release and the quashing of the sentences of six who had been convicted of a 1975 bombing in Birmingham. Also significant, the report of the Stevens inquiry that suggested collusion between the Ulster Defence Regiment and loyalist paramilitaries was released in May 1990.
In 1991 the Ulster Unionist Party agreed to participate in a series of threetiered talks, among the political parties in Northern Ireland, between the British and Irish governments, and between the northern political parties and the Irish government. This was the first departure from the unionist refusal to have anything to do with the Irish Republic following the signing of the Hillsborough Agreement. However, the talks, which began in April and were chaired by an Australian, Sir Ninian Stephens, ended without conclusion in July. The next April, in the British general election, in which the Conservatives under John Major won, Gerry Adams lost his seat for West Belfast to the SDLP candidate, Dr. Joseph Hendron.
The SDLP leader, John Hume, had met with Gerry Adams in January 1988 and had continued a dialogue with him in an effort to bring Sinn Fein in from the cold and into the constitutional democratic process. Some in the SDLP feared that Hume was liable to create a process that would result in the SDLP being overwhelmed by Sinn Fein in the "nationalist-Catholic" community, but
Hume remained convinced that if the talks contributed to peace they were worth the effort. Finally, in April 1993, both men issued a statement calling for the achievement of Irish unification by democratic means and indicating a respect for the unionist identity. The month after, Mary Robinson made the first visit by an Irish head of state to the queen of England, followed the next month by an official visit to Belfast, where she had a brief exchange of words with Gerry Adams. That December the Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, and the British prime minister, John Major, issued a Downing Street Declaration on Northern Ireland in which the British government asserted it had no strategic or economic interest in the continued connection with Northern Ireland and that the status of the province was to be determined by the wishes of its population, while the Irish government acknowledged that any unification of the island was dependent upon the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland. They called for a meeting of a Forum for Peace and Reconciliation to be established to work toward the democratic and peaceful resolution of the problems of the province. In a sense the ball was placed in Sinn Fein's court to accept constitutional procedures and renounce violence, in which circumstances its case would have a better chance of being heard.
In February 1994 President Bill Clinton of the United States granted, against the advice of the State Department and the CIA, a 48-hour visa to Gerry Adams to participate in a forum on Northern Ireland sponsored by an American foreign affairs group, which had extended invitations to all Northern Ireland political parties. Adams came, as did John Hume and John Alderdice of the Alliance Party. The Unionists and the DUP refused to participate in a conference that included Sinn Fein, even thought participants appeared successively, rather than simultaneously. In doing so, they lost the media advantage to Sinn Fein, as Adams had a field day answering easy questions on American national television. His ability to go to America, which had been encouraged by the American ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, and her brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, strengthened his hand in persuading the militants in his camp, and the leadership of the IRA, that the time had come to suspend the armed campaign, especially in view of increasing loyalist violence against nationalists and Catholics. The following August the IRA proclaimed a ceasefire. Adams was subsequently given an unrestricted visa to make a triumphal visit to the United States in September. The next month several loyalist groups proclaimed a cease-fire.
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