Workers' Liberty 29, March 1996

The ceasefire broke down because of a combination of factors. The IRA felt that they were getting nowhere with peaceful dialogue and they had to take up arms again, or in this case set off bombs. They felt that the Unionist parties had gone back into their bunkers, adopted a siege mentality of delaying and procrastinating, and also that the British government had not been as forthcoming as it should have been in entering talks with Sinn Fein. The background factor is that John Major was on a knife-edge in terms of his majority in the Commons, and he was trying to hold as much Unionist support...

There was always a fragility about the ceasefire. The breaking point came with the Canary Wharf bombing. As everyone knows John Major’s seeming rejection of the Mitchell Report’s main recommendations and adoption of what is perceived to be the Official Unionist Party’s policy of elections to a negotiating body, triggered the bombing. That may have been the final straw. But behind that the contradictions had begun to sharpen. The ceasefire was sold to the Republican rank and file on what some of us recognised at the time as an unrealistic basis: that the pan-nationalist alliance with the SDLP...

The end of the ceasefire was brought about by a shift in the balance of forces inside the Republican movement against the Adams leadership. That change has been coming during the past few months because of the lack of progress towards all-party talks. There was always a section of the Republican movement who were not keen on the new direction in which Adams is leading them, and who do not really believe that their objectives can be won in this way. Nevertheless the opponents of Adams’s policy shift had to accept that by the end of the 1980s their strategy had run up against a brick wall. The...