Delaying decommissioning may have won power in North but cost Sinn Féin dear in South, writes Ed Moloney
It would be no exaggeration to say that the strategy carefully crafted and implemented by Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams to underpin the IRA's move from war to peace effectively lies in ruins this week in the wake of Sinn Féin's disastrous performance in the Republic's general election.
The gap between aspiration and actuality, between the 12 to 15 seats that Sinn Féin leaders told their members they would win and the party's dismal performance on the day - losing one of its five Dáil seats and failing badly in Dublin and Donegal - is really an inadequate measurement of the disaster.
Gerry Adams's colleague, Martin McGuinness, predicted at the start of the campaign that Sinn Féin's performance would "be the story of the election". In the event he was correct but for reasons he could never have imagined.
The real index of the calamity that has overtaken the Provos is that the goal of the Adams-McGuinness peace process strategy now appears beyond their reach, thanks to this result. From the very outset of the process, the impulse to abandon the IRA's armed struggle - to decommission its weapons and structures and to accept previously heretical concessions such as the principle of consent for Irish unity and the legitimacy of the North's policing and judicial arrangements - was driven by huge electoral ambitions.
The idea was that Sinn Féin would end up with ministers sitting in cabinets in both Belfast and Dublin, where they would be ideally positioned to devise, co-ordinate and implement measures to advance Irish reunification. As a substitute for the IRA's violence, the strategy charted a theoretically impressive route to Irish unity. In the North, the strategy worked perfectly and even beyond expectations when Sinn Féin actually ended up as the dominant nationalist partner in the recently forged powersharing Executive.
In the Republic the aim was for Sinn Féin to grow sufficiently large to become a natural partner, probably with Fianna Fáil, in a coalition government.
After two elections, in 1997 and 2002, Sinn Féin appeared to be well on course, increasing the party's Dáil team from one to five and coasting on the back of Gerry Adams's growing popularity with Southern voters.
The 2007 election was scheduled as the breakthrough year when the party would become too big to ignore.
As we know now, it was not to be. Many reasons have been advanced to explain Sinn Féin's shortcomings, among them Gerry Adams's woeful performances during TV & radio confrontations with other party leaders, the disproportionate influence of Northerners and Northern thinking on party strategy and the lack of an understanding of the Republic's economy and society on the part of Sinn Féin's leadership, an inability to comprehend that partition actually has succeeded in creating two very different places.
But there is another explanation and it is that the party's hierarchy was too slick for its own good.
Gerry Adams and his colleagues could have sealed a deal with the former Unionist leader David Trimble long before the 2002 election in the Republic. All that was required was a sufficiently persuasive concession on IRA decommissioning - a list of weapons put beyond use, for instance - and Trimble would probably have survived. A powersharing government would thus have been in place for the 2002 poll and Sinn Féin well positioned to market itself as an experienced party of responsible government to Southern voters by the time of the 2007 election.
But the party leadership decided otherwise. The decommissioning issue was strung out for many more years even though an IRA Convention in 1999 had given the group's leadership the go-ahead to dispose of weaponry as they thought fit. The effect, and very possibly the intention, was to polarise Northern politics even further. David Trimble became isolated from his electorate and was eclipsed by Ian Paisley's DUP while the SDLP shrank in the shadow of Sinn Féin.
The result was that Sinn Féin became the largest nationalist party in the North. Any analysis of this period must therefore examine the possibility that this was deliberately contrived, that the Provo leadership delayed decommissioning in order to foster Sinn Féin's electoral growth.
But there were other consequences. Refusal to fully decommission meant that the war had not been totally ended and that the IRA was still operational long after its sell-by date. From that came the Northern Bank robbery of some £26.5 million (€39 million) in December 2004 and then a few weeks later the grisly cover-up of the unauthorised IRA murder of Robert McCartney in Belfast.
The evidence that these two events were a tipping point in Sinn Féin's standing with the Republic's electorate is compelling. Before the Northern Bank/McCartney murder, opinion polls showed that Sinn Féin was supported by about 12 per cent of the electorate while Gerry Adams's personal approval rating stood at 51 per cent, only two points behind Bertie Ahern. By March 2005, Sinn Féin's support had fallen to about 8-9 per cent while Adams's standing had dipped to 39 points.
Sinn Féin's support and that for Gerry Adams never recovered from the Northern Bank/McCartney episodes.
The completion of IRA decommissioning didn't reverse the trend in the Republic's opinion polls, nor did the July 2005 "end of war" statement by the IRA or even the creation of a powersharing government with Ian Paisley. It was all too late, the Republic's voters had been sickened. In the event Sinn Féin won a meagre 6.9 per cent of the vote in last week's election, evidence that the pollsters had read the electorate's mind pretty well.
It is impossible to know whether a different and better result could have been had if Gerry Adams and his colleagues had cut a deal back in 2000-2001 with David Trimble, avoided all the awful blowback from the Northern Bank/McCartney episodes and gone into this election with a record of responsible participation in government to show to the Republic's voters.
But no matter the answer, the question will linger: did the Sinn Féin leadership overreach itself in the North and thereby doom the party in the South? Sinn Féin may have to wait until possibly the general election of 2012 before it has another chance to get into government in Dublin and the list of problems now facing the party suggest it will be doing well even to be a contender.
Perhaps the most serious blow to the Provos' ambitions is a psychological one. Until last week Sinn Féin's image was of an infallible, irresistible political behemoth which gobbled up or trampled everyone in its way. The image was created and sustained by a dizzying and seemingly endless series of electoral successes, stretching back nearly a decade and a half. But that too was the party's weakness. Like a shark, Sinn Féin always needed to be moving forward, ever a threat to those around it; staying still or going backwards could be fatal. It will be interesting to watch how the DUP now interacts with Sinn Féin in the Belfast Executive or whether the SDLP's battered morale is boosted by this result.
As with the party so with its leadership, especially Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams. His ability to take the Provisional movement down a road of disarmament and huge ideological compromise was largely due to an almost mystical faith in his strategic foresight on the part of a substantial section of the Sinn Féin and IRA grassroots. Their faith, until now, had been justified by a remarkably successful track record in both the military and political fields. How they respond now to this, his first major failure, will be the story to watch in the coming months.
Gerry Adams is the most bruised casualty from the 2007 election. His place in the pantheon of Irish republican giants would have been secured had the voters performed last week as they were supposed to have done. Now all is changed, changed utterly. The former Unionist and Conservative MP, Enoch Powell, was never a friend of the Provisional movement but as an author of bon mots he was unrivalled. This week Gerry Adams could do worse than reflect on the truth of one of his best known dictums : "All political lives . . . end in failure"
• A second edition of Ed Moloney'sA Secret History of the IRA will be published in July