Thirty years after the ceasefire, former IRA members believe the battle of history is being won

Thirty years ago, the world saw TV images of cavalcades in west Belfast and cheering republicans on August 31st, 1994, in the hours after the IRA declared an unconditional ceasefire.
Since then the argument about the morality – or necessity of the Provisional IRA’s military campaign – has raged.
Today, however, former IRA members believe they are winning the battle of history. They partly see the victory as coming as a result of the passage of time or because today’s younger generation is more nationalistic and sees the conflict as history but also because it does not affect their lives today.
“Young people in west Belfast, or anywhere else, don’t see me as a criminal,” says Paul Butler.
The one-time IRA man was jailed at 17 after confessing to killing a 50-year-old RUC officer John Rodgers near the Glen Inn hotel in Glengormley, Co Antrim in 1974.
The former Stormont Assembly member spoke ahead of the appearance of the band, the Wolfe Tones, before 75,000 young people at the Electric Picnic concert last weekend, but he had no doubt about the reception that the band would receive.
Tens of thousands of fans would, he knew, raucously join in with chants of “Ooh, Aah, Up the ‘Ra” when the Wolfe Tones, now in their 80s, sang Celtic Symphony. And so they did. And he believed he knows what such singing means.
Such actions are not support for violence in the future, but they do offer support for the actions taken in the past, Butler believes, even if many of the young people know or care little about the details.
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“Well, they’re obviously nationalists. Obviously, whether anyone likes it or not a lot of young people see the IRA as a kind of movement, as freedom fighters, even if they don’t think of it very often,” he said.
Next week’s anniversary is the first where the ceasefire has entered the realm of history, rather than current affairs, says Butler, who served as a councillor in Lisburn before serving a single term as a Stormont MLA from 2007.
Sinn Féin will not campaign on the IRA’s actions in the next general elections in the Republic, but “neither will Mary Lou or Michelle shy away from that history – or they won’t say that it was wrong”, he says.
But he also doesn’t believe it will be debated because “bread-and-butter issues will matter most”, says Butler, who is now in his late 60s.
For young people, the three-decade Troubles was “just something happened in the past”, he says.
“It’s a historical period. I’m not too sure how much interest they will show in it. Perhaps periodically, when they see films or documentaries or books,” he says.
“They don’t know all the ins and outs of it, in most cases, but they know that it was about getting Britain out of Ireland and ending discrimination. I think that’s the way they view it,” he says.
In his mid-20s, Butler ended up in a H-Blocks wing in the Maze prison alongside the later hunger striker, Bobby Sands, who was two years older than him. Doing The Irish Times’ Simplex crossword while in prison remains a memory, he says.
Looking back, Butler, who is musing about a memoir, is struck by the ages of those jailed.
“Everyone was so young. When I look at 25-year-olds now in west Belfast, I think they haven’t gone through the same experiences that we did,” he says.
Butler does not raise the memory of the man he killed, so The Irish Times does. He is clearly uncomfortable talking about it. A relative of the slain RUC officer contacted him a few years ago wanting to meet.
“I think it was a grandson, or something. I sent him a message back saying: ‘Look, if that’s something you want to do, yes, I’d be prepared, you know, if it helps you, but he didn’t come back.’ So, that was that, but the offer was there,” he says.
So does he ever think about the man he killed?
“I’m not saying I think about it every day of the week or that, but I know I have a past. I know that. And it was back then that those things happened,” he says.
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Six or seven years ago, Butler was invited to visit the memorial garden created to mark those killed serving in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or its successor, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
The event was an attempt at “some reconciliation, or some understanding” between people, he said.
“I asked: ‘Do you want me at this because of my past?’ And they said: ‘Yeah, that’s okay, you can come’.”
Rodgers’s name was on the memorial wall.
“Now it wasn’t just to see his name that I went. That was difficult for me. But it was probably difficult for them too,” he says.
Former IRA hunger striker Laurence McKeown, who was then not too long out of prison, was decorating his Ballymurphy home that August day in 1994 when he heard honking motorists driving up and down the Falls Road heralding the ceasefire.
But he did not join the convoy.
“I didn’t feel like cheering on the day,” he recalls. Not that he was opposed to the ceasefire. “There was relief that nobody else was going to end up killed.”
Everyone in the IRA in the years before knew of the public efforts to bring the conflict to an end, while also understanding that there were secret efforts going on, too.
So it “wasn’t a huge surprise”, he says, that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had persuaded enough of the seven-member IRA army council to agree to the ceasefire.
“Yet when it happened it was a surprise. There were no feelings of high rejoicing; there wasn’t anything negative about it,” he says.
“It was a confused and confusing time and stayed that way for quite some time,” he says, adding that he “had developed the idea” by then that the IRA’s campaign had “probably run its course”.
There were still pockets of unease, he said. He remembers one difficult community meeting in Clonard in west Belfast where a group of elderly men sat at the back of the hall.
Each of them had memories of Catholic families burned out of their homes at the start of the Troubles, said McKeown, who was jailed in 1976 for an unsuccessful ambush upon the RUC.
“They spoke very emotionally at the end of it. They weren’t looking for the IRA to be back at war, but they were more or less pleading that the community would not be left defenceless as it had been. It showed how memories were so strong,” he says.
McKeown, who has since forged a life as a playwright, would have been the 11th man to die in the 1981 H-Block hunger strikes, if his mother Margaret had not intervened.
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On the 69th day of his fast he told her when she came to the H-Blocks that he must be allowed to die. She replied: “You know what you have to do, and I know what I have to do.”
The following day he fell unconscious. His mother gave instructions that he be fed intravenously. Two years later, he was given compassionate leave to go to her funeral in Randalstown, Co Antrim.
Later, McKeown studied for an Open University degree in sociology when in jail and earned a Queen’s University Belfast doctorate for a thesis called “Unrepentant Fenian Bastards”.
So it is no surprise when he says he has no regrets about the long IRA campaign of violence or that it was justified.
“I think we were right to do it,” he says, “and right to call a ceasefire”.
The contrary argument is that the civil rights campaign, the SDLP’s peaceful politics, together with demographic change, would have left Northern nationalists roughly where they are now, minus 30 years of conflict and 3,700 deaths. McKeown disagrees.
“I don’t think we would be where we are today without the armed struggle. Unfortunately, so many people died. I still don’t see a generosity on the part of unionism to engage with all the issues that nationalists had,” he says.
“I do not see any point where unionism voluntarily would give any concessions; everything had to be fought for. Hopefully that is changing now.”
Michael Culbert did not join the 1994 ceasefire celebrations either. In October 1993, he had been released after serving 16 years for passing on information that led to the murder of RUC photographer Millar McAllister at his home in Lisburn near Belfast in 1978.
Culbert remembers being delighted on hearing the news, that there would be “no more killings, no more people going to the prisons, no more people holding weapons or explosives”.
Today he is the director of the ex-republican prisoners’ support group Coiste na nIarchimí. He is also involved with former loyalists and former British soldiers in an education project examining and giving their individual perspectives on the Troubles.
Given that he had been one of 400 so-called “Red Book” prisoners, who were deemed high security risks, Culbert had not believed that he would be released until “the conflict was over”.
Prison rules had begun to relax well before his 1993 release.
“There were signals all over the place. It was dead obvious that something was coming. That is not with reflection, that was the view then,” he says.
Some republicans objected, but he believed that politics was by then the only route, a course justified by everything that has happened since, notwithstanding Sinn Féin’s recent poor local and European elections in the Republic.
Even though many will object to his view, he insists the IRA’s campaign was justified.
“I meet a lot of Americans. I ask them, what are you going to do when the Russian paratroopers arrive in Ohio?” he says.
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“Why did the Brits try to stop the Germans coming over in 1940? What’s the big deal about the Germans arriving? But we Irish, we are criminals for opposing British rule in Ireland? Most countries are okay for defending their borders, but we have had a fait accompli for several centuries. If it was wrong centuries ago, it is still wrong today. I would say I was definitely involved in an anti-colonial struggle.”
He believes that some things were not properly understood, especially the views of a million unionists.
“We weren’t overly thinking of their views, that this is their home. It is only with hindsight I am looking at that,” he says.
Like Butler, he is asked about the man killed by his actions, Millar McAllister.
“I have often thought back. What can you say, the awful stuff that happened, the killing etc,” he says.
“As far as I am concerned there was a war on. How can you talk about this without sounding cold? I don’t know, but I really am not cold. I was a participant in the struggle.
“I was a member of an armed group. I don’t want that to sound vicious. It is awful that anybody died, it really is, but the British were not going to give – that is my firm view.”