The painfully slow process of moving the IRA away from its armed struggle began in earnest in the late 1980s. Gerry Adams, with the support of Martin McGuinness and a number of other IRA and Sinn FΘin instigated a series of debates about the possibility of pursuing their goal of a 32-county, democratic, socialist republic - not through the gun and bomb but through the subversive use of politics.
Their object was to force the withdrawal of the British government through the tactical use of armed struggle while usurping the political institutions in the Republic and in Britain and Northern Ireland.
Leading Provisional republicans have continued to promulgate this line to IRA members and the Sinn FΘin faithful up to very recently. At the beginning of this summer, senior republican figures were still telling internal audiences that there would be no IRA decommissioning and that the "movement" was still on course for taking power in Ireland.
The message was necessary to assuage their constituency that the years of "sacrifice" and "struggle" and the cause of the IRA "martyrs" were not in vain. It was particularly necessary to repeat the message in the past few years, as the 32-County Sovereignty Movement and Republican Sinn FΘin were attempting to assume the mantle of the rightful successors to the "Men of 1916".
Adams and McGuinness were, according to senior Garda and Government sources, both at risk throughout this process. If they failed to prove their unarmed tactics were working they could have faced a revolt within the IRA which, for them, could have had potentially fatal consequences.
This week the two men finally reached their goal when they oversaw the first act of decommissioning in the history of the IRA and the return of two Sinn FΘin ministers to government in Northern Ireland. Within the next few months the party will embark on its most ambitious electoral challenge to the political status quo in the Republic.
The key to this week's breakthrough on decommissioning on Tuesday and, the next day, the start of the dismantling of British army posts in south Armagh, lay not in protracted political negotiations here or in London, but across the Atlantic.
The crucial events which led to the choreographed announcements took place on Monday, August 6th, in Bogota, Colombia, and on September 11th in New York and Washington.
The arrests of the three republicans in Colombia marked one of the biggest disasters for the history of the republican movement. Investigations by the FBI, Colombian police and RUC Special Branch indicate that at least 10 and probably 12 IRA figures have visited Colombia since the mid-1990s. All stayed in areas in the south of the country controlled by the FARC guerrilla force.
FARC is a highly sophisticated and wealthy army with 15,000 members who are better equipped and trained than much of the Colombian army. In the past decade, while the Colombian authorities backed by the US administration were battling the country's powerful cocaine cartels in Cali and Medellin, FARC has grown rapidly in strength.
The guerrillas are responsible for bombings, murder, kidnapping, extortion, and hijacking, as well as guerrilla military action against Colombian political, military, and economic targets. It has kidnapped and executed US citizens, including three US Indian-rights activists. FARC was second only to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group on the US government's list of American terrorist enemies.
FARC is a serious threat in that it is a left-wing, insurgent army trying to overthrow -US democracy, and is a major supplier of cocaine and heroin.
FARC denies it is involved in the drugs trade. However, UN aid agencies and US administrations have stated otherwise. The guerrilla army both controls drug production and supply and "taxes" other producers. It is believed that by the late 1990s this was providing FARC with around $500 million in income.
It was the money and the left-wing tendencies that attracted the chief of staff of the IRA, a Belfast man in his fifties, to encourage the relationship with FARC after introductions were made through a similarly minded republican figure from Dublin.
The relationship developed from fraternal exchanges on the political fringes of both organisations to the point where the IRA chief of staff agreed to send his top arms engineers to help FARC develop a version of the IRA's deadly "barrack buster" mortar.
Agents for FARC are involved in drugs-for-guns deals in a number of Central American countries, including Mexico. There are suspicions that FARC may have put up the money for a shipment of arms the IRA bought in Florida in 1999 before this operation was uncovered and stopped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Evidence given to the FBI suggested that a large sum of money, possibly $200,000 was given to the gun smugglers by a Belfast IRA man who travelled to Florida from Mexico. The IRA arms buyers in Florida were certainly big spenders and acted in a remarkably amateurish fashion.
It appears they spent large sums of money on lavish lifestyles before rushing out and trying to bulk-buy handguns at arms bazaars to meet their shipment deadlines. Arms dealers in the US must report all multiple arms purchases to the federal authorities and a dealer who had sold the IRA figures 11 handguns blew the whistle.
The Sinn FΘin leadership was able to pass off the Florida events as a fiasco and, with friends in Washington in the Clinton administration, they escaped retribution. The district attorney in Florida who prosecuted the IRA gang later said he had received a call from a senior White House figure interested to know if there was any way to quash the case.
However, the administration of President George Bush has adopted a less accommodating attitude to Sinn FΘin.
Washington viewed the IRA's involvement with FARC with grave concern. Mr Bush's director of counter-terrorism, Francis Taylor, described FARC as the "most dangerous terrorist group" in the western hemisphere. He pointed out that not only had FARC welcomed the September 11th attacks on the US, but it had reiterated its calls for the murder and abduction of US citizens. Mr Taylor said the IRA had been training FARC in explosives to conduct urban terrorism and that this was a matter of grave concern. In his view, he told the US Congress on October 10th, the IRA posed a threat to Americans.
According to senior Garda sources, the pressure that came from the US - delivered in very clear terms to Sinn FΘin by Mr Bush's special envoy to Ireland, Richard Haass - led directly to the IRA's decision to decommission.
The exposure of the Colombian connection, followed by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, threatened to cripple Sinn FΘin financially. Over this period from August to September Sinn FΘin lost its self-assurance. Its spokesmen were unable to field direct questions about the events in Colombia, saying none of those arrested were members of Sinn FΘin - until this week when Gerry Adams admitted that one of the three was, in truth, the Sinn Fein representative in Cuba.
Then in an astounding move the party's weekly newspaper, An Phoblacht/Republican News, launched an attack on the US in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks. An editorial denounced the "militaristic and aggressive policy pursued by US governments" in the Middle East and Central America which, it said, had led to "the deaths of many thousands of innocent people".
The Irish Echo, a New York based newspaper, reported last week that the editorial has "caused consternation among many Irish American supporters of Sinn FΘin". Sinn FΘin has raised millions of dollars in the US and runs the largest and richest political/electoral machine in Ireland. The cash donors in the US are vital to the party's future political prospects in Ireland.
An estimate of the income derived from the US is difficult to quantify. Its fund-raising wing, Friends of Sinn FΘin, has unofficially indicated to Irish-American journalists that it has raised more than $5 million since 1995.
Here the party does not admit to any such substantial earnings. Sinn FΘin told the Public Offices Commission in Dublin, which was set up to monitor earnings by and donations to political parties, that it received only $44,926.02 from the US last year. It is understood that the party told the electoral office in Belfast that it spent only £18,000 sterling on its general election campaign this year.
The financial pressure on Sinn FΘin in the aftermath of Colombia and September 11th was almost immediately evident. Since it began serious fund-raising in the US in 1994, it opened an office in Washington. At the end of last month it was forced to close its office on Capitol Hill. In a statement it said it was consolidating in the Wall Street office of the Friends of Sinn Fein organiser, the prominent Irish-American lawyer, Larry Downes. Not coincidentally, a White House official told the Irish Echo journalist that President Bush and his staff were developing a "get-tough" approach to the IRA.
Sinn FΘin has been desperately trying to regain lost ground and sympathy in the US and sent Martin McGuinness to New York to pave the way for the Novembers 1st visit by Gerry Adams to attend the Friends' annual fund-raising dinner at one of the city's most prestigious Manhattan hotels. Previously these fund-raisers have reputedly earned the party US $500,000.
In the end, it seems, US money and not political persuasion or coercion on this side of the Atlantic brought about the divorce of the Provisional republican movement from the IRA's so-called armed struggle.
