OCTOBER 2007

Nick Stadlen, QC, interviews Gerry Adams:

Nick Stadlen QC
Wednesday September 12, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

My topic for discussion today is the conflict in Northern Ireland. Between 1968 and 1998, the Troubles - as the periodic violence between republican and loyalist paramilitary organisations, the British government and others in NI came to be known - claimed over 3,000 lives. The violence has subsided since 1998, when the Good Friday agreement (GFA) restored self-government to Northern Ireland on a power-sharing basis.

Since May 8 2007, the Northern Ireland assembly has been led by two once intractable enemies: Dr Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist party, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein. The IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries have both long since ceased operations, and last month, the British army withdrew from the province, marking the end of its 38-year presence. No one is getting killed, and people are optimistic about the future.

But could the 30 years of violence have been avoided? In December 1973, the moderate SDLP and the Ulster Unionist party signed up to the Sunningdale agreement - an arrangement which arguably gave the political parties in Northern Ireland much of what was later on offer in the Good Friday agreement. Under Sunningdale, power in the province was to be shared by the Northern Ireland executive, with ministers from both the nationalist and unionist communities, and a cross-border Council of Ireland was created, to stimulate cooperation with the Republic.

Yet in the face of both loyalist and republican opposition, the agreement collapsed within six months. The result was another 25 years of conflict, during which thousands on both sides were killed. Was this violence inevitable, and how justified was the IRA's continued campaign of armed struggle. By signing up to the GFA, Sinn Fein explicitly accepted that there will be no united Ireland without the consent of a majority of the population of Northern Ireland, which remains predominantly unionist. Does this represent a defeat for the IRA, and the abandonment of key republican principles. If not, how do the republicans justify not accepting the similar terms on offer at Sunningdale 25 years earlier? Could the violence in the intervening years have been avoided?

To answer these questions, I'm joined by Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, and the man widely regarded as having played a pivotal role in getting the IRA to give up its armed campaign. It is a measure of how far things have changed, that we are meeting at Stormont, once dubbed a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people.

Nick Stadlen: When did the IRA decide that it could not achieve a united Ireland by armed struggle?

Gerry Adams: Well, when did it decide? That's a very hard question to answer. I suppose it wasn't so much that it decided that it couldn't achieve a united Ireland by armed struggle, it was more that it embraced an alternative way forward. And then secondly, and I'm not speaking for the IRA here, the use of armed actions were never about building the united Ireland, they were always about protesting or standing up to British policy, or British strategy, so there are two separate parts, I suppose, to any situation which involves armed struggle. One is the armed struggle itself which is a destructive phase, and then there is whatever follows that, which is hopefully building a more constructive phase. But if you then put into the centre of all of that, that sidewards to the armed actions was coming a developing thought process within Sinn Fein and then later with the IRA, which was: "there's another way to do this, and that you only use armed actions because there's no alternative so if we can develop an alternative would you be prepared to look at that".

NS: But when you say "this", the "this" was always, so far as the IRA was concerned - and also Sinn Fein, ending the union and bringing an end to British occupation, as it was described, of Northern Ireland.

GA: Yes, but a united Ireland is a united Irish people. There is the core of republicanism in terms of its development, going back 200 years, to break the connection with England. As Wolfe Tome said, the never-ending source of all our political evils. And what it means, to replace the name of Irish man and Irish woman, to unite Catholic and Protestant at the centre. So there are the particular circumstances I think of Irish history, there is the fact that there was conflict going right back to the first conquest of the island, and you know, in more recent, modern times for every decade for perhaps the last hundred years, even though some of it might have been quite small, isolated, armed actions. There were also the high points - the Black and Tan war, the 1916 rising, the partition of Ireland and so. So that when the civil rights struggle developed in the 1960s, and was crushed as cruelly as it was, the instinct because of the tradition and the strength of the physical force tendency, was almost for republicans faced with armed aggression was to go back looking for armed ways of resisting or combating that. And for the 70s, I suppose, republican strategy was dictated by armed actions, as opposed to political and other considerations. And then the situation became quite quickly militarised. And then you had that lengthy stalemate which went on, we know, for almost 30 years.

NS: But if you look at the main distinction between the SDLP in the 70s and 80s, and the IRA - and also Sinn Fein, the main distinction was that the IRA and Sinn Fein took the line that any settlement that does not involve the British occupation ceasing and the union ceasing is not acceptable, and if necessary armed struggle is a justified form of achieving that goal.

GA: Yes, except that wouldn't be the main difference between republicans and the SDLP. The SDLP is, essentially, a six-county party, it's a Northern Ireland party, it's a social democratic party, its tendency was to bring about a social democracy in this statelet, in this region. It doesn't pretend to be a republican party, it doesn't pretend to be even a nationalist party, even though a lot of its support clearly comes from the nationalist section. So it isn't that that was the main difference between Sinn Fein - or indeed the IRA - and the SDLP. And at the same time of course, you're right, that republicans generally stand for an end to British rule in Ireland and saw armed actions as a way to bring that about, and ruled out any other approach. And that's why in terms of developing the strategy, that we also developed a notion of strategic compromises, and in many ways the need to accommodate - defined as in the Good Friday agreement, some process where there can be a level playing field. Which brings you back to your first question: a level playing field to do what? A level playing field, from our point of view, to pursue republican objectives democratically and peacefully and from a unionist point of view, for them to pursue the maintenance of the union through democratic and peaceful methods as well.

NS: But if you look at some of the things said by republicans in the 70s and 80s - even as late as 1990, both yourself and Martin McGuinness included: for example Martin McGuinness in 1985: "Our position is very clear and will never never change. War against the British rule must continue until freedom is achieved." Now, the war against the British has ended but has freedom been achieved, in the sense of a united Ireland?

GA: No it hasn't, and we wouldn't pretend that it has, and the struggle continues in a different mode. And thankfully that is the case because whatever differences of opinion and whatever needs to be done in the time ahead no one is getting killed.

NS: In a Brownie article, which is attributed to you in May 1976, you wrote that "there's only one time to talk of peace, and that's when the war has been won, not while it's raging. The time to talk of peace is when the British have left Ireland." Now you started talking about peace a long time ago, long before Britain left Ireland.

GA: Yes and that was the right thing to do. I started exploring a written exploration of the whole business - the possibilities - of peace as far back as 1976 and 1977. And it's quite an interesting experience because you cannot judge anything except in the time that it occurred. We can be revisionist and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time. So even to start discussing the issue of peace and what peace is, and how you get peace, and so on, was, in a time of daily conflict, with quite serious outrages on an ongoing basis, and where the communities from which republicanism receives its most support there were communities under military occupation - you know, the Guardian eloquently carried the surreal circumstances of those times. So it's understandable to me with hindsight why the issue of peace being raised and argued out would be seen as something just daft or silly or even treacherous, but it was and remains the right thing to have done.

NS: But it raises the question of whether the IRA campaign, between the rejection of the Sunningdale agreement in 1973 and the settlement of the Good Friday agreement in 1998; whether that gap that the IRA campaign during that period of 25 years with 3,000 or so lives lost was justified, given that there is, objectively speaking, very little progress towards a united Ireland if you compare the provisions of Sunningdale, and the power-sharing executive then, and the provisions of the Good Friday agreement?

GA: Well, I think there were quite substantive and substantial differences. First of all, it's important to agree with you, and it's a very obvious point. We don't have a united Ireland, that's clear. Partition still exists, British jurisdiction continues, though in a much diluted way - but the British parliament still claims sovereignty over this part of Ireland. So in all of those issues you have it clearly. But in terms of the detail, the institutional and other requirements, the status of the constitution, the equality agenda, and more particularly the inclusive nature of this current process, then there have been sizeable differences between what was on offer in '74 and what we negotiated out in more recent times. Now if you ask me: "Would it have been better that a gradualist approach had been taken in '74, that there had been some other initiative taken?", it just isn't possible to answer that question because, again, dealing with the reality at that time, British policy was about repressing republicanism; British policy in the last decade, or so, has been about trying to find some accommodation with republicanism. And that is the part of the jigsaw which allowed and which created the space for the type of compromises which underpin the Good Friday agreement.

NS: But if you focus on specifically the issue of a united Ireland, which is after all has been what the IRA campaign has been all about - it has not been about power-sharing within the six counties - arguably you could say that the Good Friday agreement has gone backwards from a republican point of view in the sense that Sinn Fein has explicitly signed up to acknowledging that there can be no end to the union without the consent of the majority in Northern Ireland, and that it is legitimate for that consent to be withheld if that is the majority view.

GA: Well, first of all the Good Friday agreement isn't a six-county arrangement, in all of its architecture, it's an all Ireland arrangement. The Irish government has now, with the constitutional re-arrangements, a dedicated role in the affairs of the north. The structure of the assembly is interlocked, interdependent, upon the All Ireland Council of Ministers and the other various all Ireland bodies. And while it is short, as I am quite willing to concede, because we didn't try to sell this to people on the basis that this was a united Ireland, we were very straight and clear about that, it is an all Ireland arrangement. And you're going to see more, I think, in the time ahead - given the end of British direct rule - you're going to see more of a focus, particularly as the economy in the south, if it continues, more and more focus on all Ireland matters, because it just makes sense, in an island this size, with only 5 million people. To have duplication or competitiveness between two sectors is ridiculous. The business sector has long recognised Ireland as a single economic unit, that makes sense. Take any sector, agriculture, it makes sense. Energy, it makes sense. Health, it makes sense. Go through any of the issues which are societal needs, they're all best served by harmonisation or reconfiguration or cooperation. Even the DUP, in fairness to them, recognise - they may describe it as good neighbourliness - but they recognise that it makes sense to cooperate with the rest of the island of Ireland. And that's the future. The future isn't about integration with Britain. The future isn't about strengthening the union. The future is about strengthening the all Ireland nature of all of these matters.

NS: But that would have occurred in any event, and arguably would have occurred a lot earlier - that perception of the economic interests of cross-border business and so on, cultural connections - that would have occurred much earlier if there had not been 30 years of an IRA campaign, wouldn't there?

GA: Well, I don't know how you can make that assumption. I certainly wouldn't make that assumption. One of the benefits of the peace progress hasn't just been in the north, but with the popularisation of republicanism and nationalism throughout the entire island. So partitionism, you know, because there are two states on the island and partitionism after 90 years can be quite ingrained in both states, where increasingly you can see there's a more popular view, particularly in the south, on all of these matters which wasn't there perhaps since the early 70s, and, you know, Thatcher's old maxim that this place is as British as Finchley is just seen to be a total nonsense, and other assertions at that time, mostly during the Tory regimes but also, remarkably, also during times when Labour was in charge, that you couldn't even have affairs here articulated in the British House of Parliament, that the international community couldn't have a say, or even shine a light on lots of issues here because these were internal matters for the government of the United Kingdom, so in many, many ways a lot of those assertions have been set to one side. And its clear that the trajectory, slow and so on as it is, is moving in an all Ireland direction. Would that have happened anyway? I think not but that's a matter for argument.

NS: But it has not caused by the IRA campaign, is what I was putting. Not that it wasn't caused by the peace process.

GA: Well, this isn't, you know, hopefully a debate about the IRA and what was caused by the IRA. That's another issue. What I'm talking about is Sinn Fein's stewardship and Sinn Fein's involvement and the merits of the propositions which we have been involved in. The IRA has contributed to those by taking the initiatives that it has taken to facilitate the process. I mean, the IRA wouldn't be claiming that it had caused this or caused that or caused some other dimension, but one arguably could say that unless there had been, and it went on too long and you know there are all sorts of factors involved in that, but on to people here to use, you know, a dramatic metaphor: get off their knees, no one was listening, nobody paying any intention in positions of power to the gerrymandering and discrimination that was going on here. Often I think to myself, 30, 40 years is a long time in a person's life but in history it's just a blink, and there is a huge difference in this society of the 1960s, when I was a teenager, and now. Now, did it justify all that went in between? Well, that's another and quite profound question, we are where we are.

NS: That's really what I would like to explore with you, just exactly that question, whether what went between is justified when you compare, for example, what was on offer in the Sunningdale agreement in 1973 and what the republican movement has accepted in the Good Friday agreement.

GA: Well, you can only - at the risk of scaring the unionist horses - you can only make that judgment at the end, and the end in my view will be a united Ireland. And we now have a way of bringing that about which, in my certain view, and for certainly over the last over 30 years, it was always going to have to be down to the people of the island of Ireland working that out. I don't think, if you look at the mechanics of the republican philosophy and so on, that it ever deviated from that firm view; that it's a united Irish people, a united island of Ireland, the unity of Catholics and Protestants at the centre which will bring it about. And I've said this numerous times, I don't want a Catholic Ireland, I don't want a Catholic united Ireland, I don't want an Ireland in which we reverse the situation so that those who are currently unionists would end up in the position of those who were nationalists in the six counties had to endure for so long. We want an entirely new Ireland, we want one in which unionism feels that they have ownership, that they have a stake, that they are part of it, and that's going to take more compromises by republicans in the time ahead, because that means setting aside even some of the notional, or romantic, or traditional concepts of what shape a united Ireland would be.

NS: Well, could we just look at one or two of the provisions of the Good Friday agreement, specifically in the context of a united Ireland. First you have the change in the Irish constitution, articles 2 and 3, which was profound, because the old article 2 said that the national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, and laid claim to the right of the parliament and government of Ireland to exercise jurisdiction over the whole territory, ie including the six counties. Good Friday agreement, that went, and Sinn Fein signed up to that, you then look at...?

GA: OK, well let's deal with that first.

NS: Let's deal with that first.

GA: OK, well first of all it was always meaningless. I never felt in any way secure. When was it ever used? When, in any of the issues of discrimination and injustice that existed here, did it make one iota of difference? It was set aside, but in exchange for that there was devolution, from Dublin, to a secretariat of the Irish government which has been sitting in Armagh city since then, that the Irish government has a presence in the north, instead of this rhetorical assertion and a constitution which was meaningless, they have an actual presence in the six counties and have had since the Good Friday agreement.

NS: But that is paralleled, isn't it, by the British-Irish council that was going to exist in Sunningdale as long ago as 1973?

GA: No, the Irish secretariat in Armagh is an outreach of the Irish government, it is Irish government civil servants in offices in Armagh, I think they're now actually in Belfast city centre. The Sunningdale agreement, when these ideas where first suggested, there was complete uproar, and yet since the Good Friday agreement you have had, in my view, a much better involvement by Dublin, in the way that I've just described, where they have, as of right, and as the British government has agreed and as all of those parties which were sent to the Good Friday agreement, have agreed, the actual involvement, the presence of Irish government officials here in this part of the island. The issue about BIC, this is the British Irish Conference, is put up almost in terms of an alternative, not to the secretariat, but to the All Ireland Council of Ministers, which is a different matter entirely.

NS: Let's look at the constitutional position within Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein endorsed the commitment of both the British and Irish government's to recognise the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by the majority of the people of the north, whether they prefer to continue to support the union with Great Britain or sovereign united Ireland, and again, Sinn Fein accepted that the right of the Irish people to self-determination to bring about a united Ireland is subject to the agreement and consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland, which currently is to maintain the union, and Sinn Fein accepted that that was legitimate.

GA: Well, it has always been the case that we need to get consent or assent, you won't get a united Ireland unless the vast majority of people assent or consent to be a part of that. But there's no veto. What has been removed is the veto. The Government of Ireland Act 1920, gave a veto to unionism which was clear and succinct. What you have now is almost, from the British point of view almost like a couple deciding that they're going to divorce.

NS: But isn't what replaced the Government of Ireland Act - again, Sinn Fein signed up to this in the Good Friday agreement - exactly the preservation of the unionist veto? Because the British government agreed to legislate to declare that Northern Ireland shall not cease to be part of the UK without the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland voting in a poll. What's that if it isn't a veto?

GA: And also agreed to legislate for a united Ireland if that be the wish ...

NS: Certainly, but that ...

GA: So you have the doing away of a unionist veto, and you have a recognition clearly of the legitimacy of two different political claims or objectives or aspirations, or loyalties. In other words, the constitutional issue has been compromised on by everybody in this situation as part of that overall charter, which is essentially what the Good Friday agreement is, an overall charter.

NS: Well, you say it's a compromise but in fact it's a defeat for republicanism isn't it, because you've got to distinguish between the position of the British government saying: even if Northern Ireland votes for a united Ireland we won't allow it - well that's never been on the cards for a very long time, on the one hand, and on the other hand ...

GA: Well with respect it has been on the cards ... when you say "a very long time" tell me when.

NS: Well in 1990, Peter Brooke, in his famous speech about neutrality, "Britain has no strategic self-interest in Northern Ireland", and indeed you can arguably take it all the way back to Harold Wilson sending soldiers in in 1969 which were sent in to protect the catholic civil rights marches ...

GA: With respect, to uphold and support the civil authorities, in other words the unionist authorities ...

NS: well ...

GA: ... in suppressing the civil rights marches.

NS: Well, if you look back - it's a long time ago, but if you look back at the chronology of what occurred in August 1969, would you not accept that initially the army came in as a reaction to the fact that there was brutality by the B specials of the RUC in relation to the civil rights marches?

GA: Not at all, I was there. They were brought in in support of the civil power. They were run in their initial until the collapse of Stormont by Stormont unionist ministers. They stood by while the pogroms occurred, particularly on the second night of the pogroms, where a number of streets torched, and arsonists including B specials and RUC officers torched neighbourhoods ... that's like saying the British troops were sent into Cyprus or into Kenya or into elsewhere in peace, that's like the reason why they're in Iraq at the moment [laughs], these are all spurious reasons. The fact is if a Labour government at that time had embarked on a deep-rooted strategy of reform, not only would you have avoided a conflict, but arguably we would now be in a united Ireland because the whole raison d'etre of this statelet was to allow unionism to be top dog. That was the psyche of the unionist ruling class, whatever about working class unionist who, in my view, benefited not a jot from the union. But certainly, instead of going for the military option - because once you go for the military option you go for the security option and you're on the road to repression, and it was only a short period - this isn't just about Ireland, it has happened everywhere, where instead of dealing with the causes of the conflict, instead of trying to give people their rights and to protect those rights and defend those rights and create conditions where people can feel a sense of ownership, the repressive option was reached for. Whatever the intentions were.

NS: Well the intentions are very important, aren't they, because you're saying that the achievement, from your point of view, of the Good Friday agreement, is that the British veto has gone, but what I'm suggesting to you is that the British veto, should at any time in the last 30 years the majority of people in Northern Ireland had wanted a united Ireland, would never have been exercised.

GA: I know, but the likelihood in a situation where Sinn Fein, for example, was a banned organisation, where internment was used as a matter of course, where the Special Powers Act, which Vorster of South Africa at one point said he envied, that he wanted - this is a man who was one of the founding fathers of the apartheid system - arguably, he said, that the Special Powers Act was something that needed to be in place. So you cannot have a situation where this was a political slum of the so-called United Kingdom, and people were subjected to dreadful conditions of both poverty and deprivation and disadvantage. The island itself was partitioned, but within this part of the island conservatism, in both parts of the island arguably as a result of partition, conservatism ruled, but in this part it was institutionalised in the law. The place we're doing this interview in Stormont was a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people.

NS: Indeed, if you're talking about the 40s, 50s and 60s, but once the civil rights movement started, the civil rights marches, the British army came in 1969, that changed, and in 1973 you get the British government offering Sunningdale. Surely from then on, the real obstacle to a united Ireland from a republican point of view was not the British government, the real obstacle was the fact that a majority of Protestants in the north were vehemently opposed to it, and still are?

GA: Well, there have been two historical and contemporary difficulties in terms of those who want a united Ireland, or arguably even those who want a peaceful dispensation. One was British policy in Ireland and two was the unionist veto. The British policy in Ireland has changed dramatically. It has changed dramatically as a consequence of the last 30 years, we could argue about when that change started.

NS: When do you think it started?

GA: Well, in terms of its inclusivity, it didn't start, and was not embraced fully, until Blair came into Number 10 Downing Street. Perhaps Major would have done it, but he didn't, and you know, with respect to him he was given a peace process on a plate, and we're told because of his minority position in the House of Commons and so on and so forth ... so they're all judgments you have to make in terms of judging a person. I'm not so much concerned with judging a person as just making the statement that the inclusivity, the willingness to embrace an accommodation or to explore the possibility of an accommodation with the republicans was not pursued until Tony Blair came into Downing Street.

NS: Let's come to ...

GA: There were other arrangements, we can go back further to when Ireland was partitioned, and when whoever the king at the time - I think it might have been George - came here, a council of Ireland was contained in the proposition at that time, so you could follow in your thesis argue that in 1920 or 1922 British policy had changed, but British policy clearly had not changed and again it's no accident that partition was used in other colonies at other times, and, you know, bringing military forces in to divide and conquer. And partition had been a mark of British colonial rule much wider than Ireland.

NS: But the fact is, looking at the position in the Good Friday agreement, the unionist veto as you described it, is not only entrenched it's subscribed to by Sinn Fein.

GA: Well, I've already answered that question. In my view, there was always the need for republicans to seek the assent but not to award a veto. I mean, some people have argued here ...

NS: Well a veto surely is that unless the majority of people in northern Ireland vote for a united Ireland in a poll, it won't happen? Surely the IRA position, and indeed the Sinn Fein position during the 30 years of the campaign, was that the Irish people have a right to self-determination and it's not dependent on the agreement of a majority in the north?

GA: Well, that is the fundamental assertion in terms of national self-determination and it's one to which I continue to subscribe. So therefore this becomes one of the core compromises in terms of trying to develop an accommodation because never does a British government act in anything other than what it perceives to be its own self-interest. But even if you got a British government to declare that it would leave Ireland tomorrow morning, republicans have always argued. I mean, what the IRA argued for was a declaration of an intent to withdraw, that's what the IRA argued for in its time, and that, I think, was explicit recognition that there had to be a process of transition. You have to find an accommodation, if you had a united Ireland tomorrow and it became the six counties for the last 70 years on an all Ireland stage, it wouldn't be worth anything because you would have a disaffected minority who would use the same methods as republicans used, so what you have to do is build a new Ireland in which unionism, as I've said before, finds a sense of agreement. The Good Friday agreement, for those of us who want a united Ireland, gives us a bridge or a mechanism to do that, and from the unionist perception, from the unionist point of view, they don't want to go down that road then they can say no.

NS: But just, for example, giving a quote from an interview you gave in the Morning Star from 1986, you say "nationalists would never support an internal solution to Northern Ireland".

GA: And we haven't ...

NS: Well, in so far as you have accepted, explicitly, that the union will remain for as long as the majority population [of Northern Ireland] wishes it to remain, why is that not an internal Northern Ireland solution?

GA: Because Ian Paisley will lead in the next month a delegation of ministers from this assembly to meet with the Taoiseach, with ministers from the parliament in Dublin, and they will discuss matters in both jurisdictions, and not a British minister within sight of the place.

NS: But that's still not Irish self-determination as republicans ...

GA: But I've already conceded that, you see we're coming at this from slightly jagged ways. I'm recognising, quite clearly, that the Good Friday agreement is a compromise, it's an accommodation, it couldn't be anything else. The seismic shifts in republican theology, if I can use that term, was to argue for a negotiated settlement, in a series of documents which we brought through our Ard Fheis - Scenario for Peace was one such document. We argued for a negotiated settlement, and explicitly arguing for a negotiated settlement means that you're prepared to settle for less than your objectives at that time. You continue to pursue your objectives. And your thesis would be entirely correct if I was sitting here and saying to you: well it's over, I'm quite happy here, we've spent our lives in struggle and we now have a modernised six-county state with equality and other necessities, legislatively and otherwise, totally pinned down. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that's good enough, that's what we should always have had, let's now work on that. But our objective of a united Ireland remains and we continue in a different mode of struggle to try and achieve that, and no one's getting killed as part of that process, either by the British or by republicans or by unionists. And it's not an accident that most of my meetings today have been with unionist constituents over matters that are of concern to them.

NS: You describe it as a compromise and accommodation, but from the point of view of the fundamental republican principle for which the IRA fought for 30 years - namely Irish self-determination without a unionist veto, it's a defeat isn't it, rather than a compromise?

GA: Well, you're talking about objectives as opposed to principles. I mean we shouldn't get confused between strategies, tactics, objectives and principles. The objective is a sovereign Ireland where the people are in charge. The objective is an end to the union with Britain, the objective is a 32 county Irish Republic. You know, these are objectives. A united Ireland, for example, at the risk of compounding some of these matters, while a united Ireland would be a very democratic, legitimate and just outcome, because arguably Ireland should never have been divided in the first place, it's what type of united Ireland. You know, we in Sinn Fein have never been about nationalising poverty, perpetuating dole queues or unemployment or bad housing or inequality. It will be better for the people, it is social and economic as well as political.

NS: But all over the United Kingdom, all over the world, all over Europe there have been issues of unemployment, of discrimination, of bad housing. People have not, by and large, thought that in some way justifies an armed struggle in which large numbers of people have been killed, including civilians.

GA: And I wouldn't argue that any of those injustices would justify armed struggle. Armed struggle was justified in the context of British occupation and in the absence of any alternative way forward. Once you have an alternative way forward then armed struggle becomes redundant. And that's what precisely happened in the situation here. Once an alternative way forward was developed; was it developed by governments, was it developed by churches, was it developed by the media, was it developed by the pillars of society, no it wasn't. The broad acquiescence was to, or support for, processes of pacification, processes of counter-insurgency operations. You cite 3,000 people being killed and that is true. A huge amount were killed by the IRA and that is true also. A huge amount were also killed by the British and by other forces set up by the British as death squads or acting in collusion with British agencies. The history of all that is still one which the British government is not prepared to lift the lid on yet, it still becomes, whether it's the case of Pat Finucane, one of the more famous cases, or the suppression of reports, the Stalker/Sampson report, you know, where we have independent verification, though the detail has not been publicised, of administrative collusion by British agencies, by the British government, in the killing of citizens. So the conflict is never engaged or waged by one element.

NS: But this never started in 1969 as a conflict between British military imperialism and an oppressed catholic minority in the north, did it? It started with loyalist pogroms - for want of another word - against Catholics, first of all the civil rights marches and then more generally; and the conflict between the IRA and the army developed after the army was sent in in 1969.

GA: Well, first of all, this was part of the United Kingdom, but you have to open your mind to the fact that it was acceptable in part of the United Kingdom that people could be discriminated against on the basis of their religion; that people could be denied houses on the basis of their religion; that people could be denied employment on the basis of their religion, even though they may have been perfectly qualified to have all sorts of jobs ...

NS: But you've accepted that those matters did not justify, would not have justified, a military campaign on the part of the IRA in which people were killed?

GA: Yeah but I've also dealt with, if you reflect back on one of my earlier answers, once you get into a situation where a British government employs its forces to uphold the status quo, then given the nature of Irish history, given the tendency of the physical force tradition within republicanism, and given that soldiers do what soldiers are trained to do. I don't blame the individual British soldiers, they were sent in here, they were trained to kill, that's what they were brought in, that's what they were armed up to do, and that's what they very quickly got into the business of doing. Had exactly the same thing happened in London or Middlesex or Suffolk or anywhere else if they had an army of occupation then English people would respond in all sorts of different ways. Some would collude, some would acquiesce and some would resist. And some would resist passively and some would resist by using physical force, so you have to see this almost as a continuum of the last 100 years, this is an age-old problem which starts with English government involvement and interference in Irish affairs in the first instance, which works its itself through the opening decades of the last century to the partition of Ireland and then to the political slum that existed in this part of the island and which was allowed to fester and become just a something that was ... and unionists, sensible unionists would tell me this quite often, that the bubble was bound to burst. One person who I have developed a lot of respect for from the unionist side told me that he used to tell his colleagues, and he's a long-standing unionist, that there was going to be a reaping of the whirlwind, because in his place of employment he saw Catholic lecturers who actually trained and educated others being set aside in terms of promotion when it came to those jobs, and he said to me that he just knew that people wouldn't and couldn't endure that type of indignity and disadvantage and discrimination.

NS: But accepting that, I come back to my point about the Sunningdale agreement. In 1973 you have the SDLP who were taking exactly the line that you have just been talking about, for ending discrimination for Catholics within Northern Ireland. What was on offer was a power-sharing executive, an elected assembly, power-sharing between the unionists and the nationalist communities, and some kind of British-Irish governmental council ...

GA: Well you can't compare them, I mean you have some of it before you - the detail, the safeguards, the guarantees, the overarching interdependent mechanisms of the Good Friday agreement are well in advance of what was being offered up in Sunningdale.

NS: Well, guarantees of what? What has been guaranteed from a Republican point of view in the Good Friday agreement, from the point of view of a united Ireland, that was not guaranteed or on offer at Sunningdale?

GA: Well, we're talking about rights-based legislation. That the equality provision, section 75, is at the core, and permeates every single clause of the Good Friday agreement.

NS: But we've already agreed, haven't we, that you accept that that kind of issue never justified and would not have justified 30 years of an IRA campaign?

GA: No, if you go back and reflect on what I was saying when I was talking about unemployment and disadvantage, and you were telling me that there were lots of other places in Europe that also suffer from those type of difficulties, and that wouldn't justify in my view ... but this is Ireland, this is the part of Ireland which is under British rule which upholds ... it isn't like unemployment in Liverpool or in London, this is unemployment as part of a mechanism to contain a section of the population. But more importantly, and this is of key importance, and it's something that John Hume used to speak about. He said: "I disagree with the IRA, but the IRA think they're right. They think they're right. Whatever I think, they think they're right." And that's the reality which has to be dealt with, and you know, I repeat myself: in the context of a partitioned Ireland, in the context of a continuum of Anglo-Irish history, the strength of the physical force tendency within Irish republicanism, the historic brutality of British rule in Ireland, and 60 years of unionist misrule, where we had an Orange state which simply excluded, broadly speaking, anyone of a different view, it would have needed the type of approach which Tony Blair took 10 years ago to be taken by the government which was there in 1968 or 1969.

NS: You say that John Hume said that the IRA say they're right, what I'm asking you is, do you think they were right? Looking at it ...

GA: Oh, I do think the IRA were right. I've been critical of aspects, I don't think the IRA got everything right in terms of all the things that they did, but I think in terms of the broad principle of the right to use armed struggle, I think they were entitled to use armed struggle. The use of the armed struggle then is a different issue. It was long my view that the only way we were going to get an end to conflict, and as part of that to armed struggle, was to develop an alternative, and that's what I consciously and quite premeditatedly and deliberately sought to do, and that is the genesis of the situation where we now find ourselves. We have a peace process which has not, and could not, have delivered the primary objectives of republicanism at this stage of its development, that being an end to British rule on the island of Ireland. But which has opened up the ability of previous combatants to actually reserve their own positions on the constitutional issue and then argue democratically and peacefully to try and change that issue by working on a range of other matters, and being legislatively and constitutionally protected in terms of their rights.

NS: Can I explore this question of the justification of the military campaign? You, for example, [at one of the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis], publicly embraced the Balcombe Street bombers, and described them as "our Nelson Mandelas".

GA: If you missed what I said, and once again stated, my view is that I think the IRA campaign was justified.

NS: Well ...

GA: ... and incidentally those Balcombe Street bombers as you describe them, and there's a programme on that, were held for 24 years in prison, sometimes for years in solitary confinement; and the treatment of Irish political prisoners in those prisons, historically, and I'm sure it's the same for those detained at the moment - not Irish republicans but people from other viewpoints - has been the most brutal and repressive regime, not least for their families, for people travelling from here in Ireland to visit their loved ones ...

NS: I'm sorry, the Balcombe Street bombers four, at their trial they admitted to placing the Woolwich and Guildford bombs, they killed somebody in one of the restaurant bombs, innocent civilians in England were killed by them. How can you justify that?

GA: Well I'm not trying to justify that ...

NS: ... Well ...

GA: I mean I've already said that I think that while the IRA in principle were right I don't agree with everything the IRA has done.

NS: Well then why did you describe them as "our Nelson Mandelas"?

GA: Because they served 24 years in prison.

NS: But the implication to an outside reader of a remark like that is that you admire them as freedom fighters and that you regard what they did, like Nelson Mandela, as justified.

GA: Well, with respect, with respect, I do admire them as freedom fighters, and secondly, Nelson Mandela was part of an armed conspiracy. Nelson Mandela defended the use of arms, in his situation, was a leading exponent and would now, even today, if you went and interviewed him, defend the use of arms. Now do you agree with Mandela?

NS: Well, there was a difference, wasn't there, between blowing up electricity pylons and planting bombs in Harrods or ...

GA: Well, with respect, I mean if you agree with Mandela then you end up, in a strange way, in the same position as me, that you think that he was justified but that you don't agree with everything that he did.

NS: Well, as I understand what you're saying, you think that the placing of bombs in circumstances where either they were targeted at civilians or where it was predictable that civilians would be killed was ...

GA: No I don't ...

NS: You don't think that's justified?

GA: No I don't, and one of the marks of the IRA campaign, unlike any other guerrilla organisation - I know that people were killed as a result of IRA operations, particularly some of the incidents that you have described - but, however inadequate, the IRA had a policy for all of its campaign of giving warnings about the bombings. Now, it strikes me that we could have again one of these almost theological discussions. The fact is that the IRA has ceased its armed campaign. The fact is the IRA has in the same tenacious way that it pursued its armed actions also diligently worked to support and to defend and encourage a peace process. So this wasn't a mindless group of terrorists. This was a group of people who took up war, and war is not nice - there's no nice war - but it was prepared when there was the opportunity to sue for peace to sue for peace, and it did so on the basis that there was the potential for another way to move forward, and it sustained that, and it sustained that through many, many, many difficulties, and to the point that it formally ended its armed campaign and also put its weapons beyond use under the tutelage of an international commission. So we can poke through the embers of the last 30 years, and in fairness I'm not very interested in doing that. I think the other questions that you put are much more interesting questions, and you can only be clearly understood by a listener or by a reader if it's said in the context that this is an ongoing process, this is a journey, it's a journey which has not ended yet.

NS: I'll come to the journey going forward in a moment, just one more question on this point. You say that the IRA gave warnings, if I give an example of Lord Mountbatten on his pleasure boat off the coast of Ireland, where a 15-year-old boy was killed, that was something where you said that "what the IRA did to Mountbatten was something which he had been doing all his life to other people, and with his war record I don't think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation". How would you apply that to the 15-year-old boy who was on the boat?

GA: Well, obviously, obviously, I don't for one second defend or justify the killing of the 15-year-old boy, and with respect while I couldn't obviously clearly predict what Mountbatten would have thought, I was almost killed on a number of occasions. I don't embrace that, but I'm philosophical about it, you know, I take up a position, it's an unpopular position with people who have a different view, so they try to kill me. Lord Mountbatten, I think I was true in what I said, would not have been surprised, but I don't for a second justify the fact that others died ...

NS: But what about him? He was a retired, elderly man, he wasn't a combatant in any sense, in any war against Irish republicanism ...

GA: ... I know but we could, we could pick out any number of the 3,000 people who were killed and you could build a case that they should not have been killed and arguably that is the far better proposition; that there should never have been conflict in Ireland and that no one should have been killed in the last 30 years or even before that, that's the far better proposition than picking out one or two examples.

NS: Well, what I'm trying to link this to is Sinn Fein and IRA policy, because Sinn Fein in 1973 explicitly rejected the Sunningdale agreement and described it as a way of simply seeking to perpetuate British colonial rule. But if you take somebody like Father Denis Bradley, [who] said that "the republican movement settled in the Good Friday agreement for the same things that were achievable in 1974, the difference between the Good Friday agreement and 1974 was 20 years of violence and so many people killed in between". Can you quarrel with that as an analysis?

GA: Well I think we've spent the last 50 minutes quarrelling with that type of assertion, I think in quite - if I may say so - cogent terms.

NS: Well let's move forward, if we can. The history of the IRA and of republicanism is full of examples of where there have been splits where one group has made peace or entered politics: de Valera, Collins, de Valera leaving the IRA, the Officials and the Provisionals, the INLA, the continuity IRA, the Real IRA. How confident are you that this commitment to peace on the part of the IRA will stick and is enforceable?

GA: Well I don't know what you mean by enforceable?

NS: That the IRA will enforce it, if necessary?

GA: How will it do that?

NS: Well, my question is how confident are you that ...

GA: Well, I think, I think that the proof of the pudding, if I can use an awful metaphor, is in the eating. The IRA has been, and the people listening to this might be surprised to know it, has been on cessation for the last 10 years. In fact, this is 2007, first called a cessation in '94. That broke down a year or so afterwards. So there has been, for all of that time - you know, there have been some people killed in the course of that including the Canary Wharf bombing, but for all of that time, the IRA has been on ceasefire or on cessation. And that's the proof of it. I think that's part of it, and I know it's my responsibility to answer your questions, I think that what your questions miss is an understanding of republicanism in terms of a political philosophy, or republicanism just seen as a physical force movement. So republicanism as a philosophy has always been for peace, always. How that would be described in republican terms would be in terms of a rights-based society on the island of Ireland, a republican form of society free from British rule. Republicanism, for at least the last 100 years of its existence, and indeed for the last 200 years mainly manifested itself in armed uprisings, not because they were in some way maniacal but because there was a British government which refused to allow a rights-based society to develop on the island of Ireland, because it claimed Ireland as its own as one of its territories, and so on. So when you come right through all of that history and you come to the point where the IRA embraces a peace process in the way that it has done, it clearly did so after thoughtful deliberations, thinking that was the best way forward; wasn't wedded to abidance simply for the sake of it; felt - and people can disagree - that it had no option other than to use armed actions in the circumstances which existed previous to the alternatives which had been developed, and has wholeheartedly embraced and encouraged the process since. So I don't think there's any doubt that the way is over from the Irish republican situation and where we had for most of my adult life a long war we're now going to have a long peace. Part of the challenge facing me and others like me is to convert that long peace into a society which reflects the core principles of Irish republicanism, as I know them, but which can also do so in a way that people who are currently unionist can feel that they can embrace it. And you know, I had a meeting today with some unionist people and I reminded them that Irish republicanism was founded by Protestants. And that great radical tradition of progressive Protestantism, that they came up to the mark and they stood by their Catholic neighbours, and they saw virtue with ending the connection with England because that was the fair and just, so that's the challenge facing us in the time ahead. And to finish the interview, yes we haven't got a united Ireland, and yes, British involvement still continues in Irish affairs, and yes, Ireland is partitioned; but we don't have conflict, and we have an agreement, which does have, from everybody's point of view, flaws and problems and challenges in it - I mean, unionists will find the same shortcomings as a republican or strong nationalist might find, but it is an accommodation, and the beauty of it is that it brings about the potential for a level playing field and allows those of us who want to move to the day when we have an end to British rule the ability to do that, because we're not banned, we're not being thrown in internment camps, we're not being shot, our homes aren't being raided, the police aren't stopping us every five steps along the road, and all of those things are for everybody's benefit. And no one's being killed.

NS: You said that a united Ireland could be achievable by 2016, the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising ...

GA: Well I didn't quite say that. A colleague of mine said that and then when I was asked the question I said: "But if we don't get it, don't blame us". Because it will not happen inevitably, it will only happen if we continue to pursue proper strategies, and if we're able to develop the political strength and the political support ... if we're able to create the political conditions to bring that about, and I think that we have got the ability to create those conditions, but I wouldn't be precious about it's going to happen at such and such a date.

NS: Within your lifetime?

GA: Absolutely, please God.

NS: And what does Sinn Fein have to do in order to bring that about? What are you doing to try to bring that about?

GA: Well, we need to develop alliances with people of like mind, we need to build on the sensible, practical measures that are required just in terms of a single island project, you know, people who are strongly unionist can understand the merits of Ireland as a single economic unit, because that's prosperity and everybody wants some taste of prosperity. And people who have health problems can understand that if there's a better health resource south of the border - or for that matter north of the border - that it should be equally open to people wherever you live in the island of Ireland. And there are all those other measures, and then of course there's unionist outreach, and we're involved in a huge amount of unionist outreach, which is a slow business, where we proactively listen to unionist concerns and argue back and forth and try to evangelise the republican creed or gospel to people who have strongly unionist views. And I find that the more you get away - which is a very understandable trait - the more you get away from the people who are politically committed to grass-roots unionism the more open they are to these ideas.