An explosion in 1981 in the Mansion House would have wiped out key republicans, writes Gerry Moriarty
In Northern Ireland, 1981 was one of the most pivotal years of the Troubles.
It was the year of the H-Block hunger strikes, a year when almost 120 people died in the conflict, a year when the then so-called "young Turks" of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were beginning to wrest control of republicanism from the old guard of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Daithí Ó Conaill. It was also the year of the Armalite and the ballot box.
If the bomb which the UVF said it planted in the Mansion House in Dublin 25 years ago had exploded then key republican players such as Adams, McGuinness, Morrison and others - who, however belatedly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, began engaging with a real peace process - could have been erased from recent history.
Mr McGuinness, at a press conference in west Belfast yesterday, said he did not know whether or not a bomb was planted in the Mansion House. He wasn't perturbed about the matter either way.
"To be quite honest, 20-odd years on I am not going to be fixated on any of that," he said.
Curiously Mr McGuinness didn't figure in The Irish Times reporting of the weekend Sinn Féin ardfheis at the end of October that ran into Sunday, November 1st, 1981.
Perhaps that was because he was more viewed as being on the paramilitary side of republican affairs at that period. The political lead at the conference was taken by the likes of the then president of Provisional Sinn Féin Mr Ó Brádaigh, vice-president Mr Adams and one of his key strategists, Danny Morrison, the then director of publicity for the party.
The divisions between the two camps, the northern perceived hardliners and many of the southern delegates, were quite apparent even then.
These divisions were to culminate at the ardfheis five years later with Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness taking over control of the organisation from Mr Ó Brádaigh and Mr Ó Conaill, who left to form Republican Sinn Féin. The united focus at the time remained the crude policy of Brits Out but Mr Adams and his supporters ensured that whatever about the misgivings of some delegates, Sinn Féin was going to build on the electoral success already achieved as a result of the hunger strikes.
Under the northerners' influence, Mr Ó Brádaigh's long-advocated federal Ireland policy was to all intents and purposes swept aside. There was also opposition to calls to contest local elections on the strength of the support generated by the strikes. It was through the actions of the IRA not Sinn Féin politicians that republican ambitions would be achieved, some traditionalists argued.
But Mr Morrison helped ensure the motion to compete in local elections in the North was easily carried with his promotion of a dual strategy.
"Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box?" he asked delegates, then following up this line with a famous or infamous quote, "But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand, and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?"
The 1981 ardfheis marked the beginning of the long, slow republican shift from paramilitarism to politics.
Had the Ulster Volunteer Force achieved what it claimed it set out to do 25 years ago - "wipe out" the Sinn Féin leadership - not only would there have been widespread carnage in Dublin's Mansion House, but the course of modern Irish history could also have been radically altered.