1994 ceasefire: 10 years on - Deaglán de Bréadún, who covered the lead-up to the IRA ceasefire for The Irish Times, recalls the fevered atmosphere.
Ceasefires don't come easy. And they don't always last. August 1994 was the month of the sceptic. If you said at the time the IRA was going to call a ceasefire that would still stand after 10 years, nobody would have believed you.
Few believed, in fact, that there would be a ceasefire of any description. A Sinn Féin conference in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, on July 24th failed to endorse the Downing Street Declaration, which had been seen as containing concessions to republicans when it was adopted by the two governments.
The immediate reaction in most quarters was that this meant the IRA had no intention of calling off the war.
The government of the day was an uneasy marriage of convenience between Fianna Fáil and Labour, with Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach. The Government press secretary, Seán Duignan, recorded the following exchange in his diary at the time: "Albert says: 'You think it's gone, too, Diggy.' I say nothing, shrug. He says: 'So, I'm in a minority of one'."
Looking back on it now, it is clear the importance of the Sinn Féin conference was greatly overestimated. Despite the closeness of the relationship, Sinn Féin was not, in fact, the IRA, and did not take decisions for the military element of republicanism. The Letterkenny event was mainly about reassuring the republican base that there would be no compromise on fundamentals.
There was a whole other game going on and a very long game too, which had little to do with party conferences in Letterkenny or anywhere else.
The security situation had reached stalemate. The IRA could launch what were called "spectaculars" in the heart of London which were extremely disruptive, but only a few diehards still believed the British army could be driven out of the North. Besides, there was the awkward and uncomfortable issue of one million Protestants who wished to remain in the UK.
For their part, the British had failed to wipe terrorism from the face of the land. True, there had been some security successes. But even if was correct that the IRA had only a few effective units left, their technology and expertise still gave them the capacity to cause chaos and mayhem.
Key republican leaders had read the signs: not so much the writing on the wall as the bright and shining alternatives available.
Calling off the war would allow Sinn Féin to be invited into the broader nationalist family with Dublin, the SDLP and Irish-America. Senator Ted Kennedy, patriarch of the Democratic Party in the US, had bought into the peace process: he must be given much of the credit for creating the political conditions whereby President Bill Clinton was able to grant a US visa to Gerry Adams at the start of the year.
His sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, as US ambassador in Dublin, was also playing a key role and she was instrumental in securing another visa, for IRA veteran Joe Cahill, who died last month. Getting Cahill to the US to reassure the traditionalists became a major issue in the last days before the ceasefire.
Ten years on, there is a danger of believing all the moves were inevitable, and it was only a matter of the pieces falling into place. Not so.
For example, not everybody in the SDLP was overjoyed at the trend of events. At a famous meeting of the party on August 18th, 1994, senior members expressed grave reservations about the situation, complaining that the party leadership was operating in tandem with Sinn Féin, but with no certainty that the IRA would do the decent thing. John Hume, who had been continuously vilified by elements in the Dublin media, responded that peace must come before party political considerations.
Likewise, there were tensions within the Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition and Albert Reynolds also had his media critics, who were concerned that he would settle for a short-term IRA cessation where a permanent one was required.
Indeed, this whole issue of permanent versus temporary hung like a cloud over the entire month of August.
At a meeting between Reynolds and a group of prominent Irish-Americans in Dublin on August 25th, he made clear that he was not interested in a short-term ceasefire, for six months or anything else.
In the end, the problem was sidestepped when the IRA declared a "complete" cessation without specifying its duration.
Another issue hanging over Reynolds was the outcome of the Beef Tribunal. Allegations of favouritism and political misconduct in relation to the beef industry had been made against him, but the long-awaited final report turned out to be a damp squib and quashed any allegations that he had acted from improper motives. However, premature leaking and spinning of the report's contents on behalf of Reynolds in July caused severe problems between the two parties. Some opposition figures even suggested that the IRA ceasefire itself was deliberately timed to wipe the Beef Tribunal off the front pages.
It's a little too Machiavellian to be credible, perhaps, but Reynolds certainly benefited in terms of political and public prestige from his achievement. Nobody realised at the time that, a mere 11 weeks later, he would be forced out of office by another alleged scandal involving the paedophile cleric, the late Brendan Smyth.
August was also a month of misinformation, disinformation, or no information at all. Journalists, even some who had cultivated republican contacts over the years, were left in the dark. Eventually, specific information began to seep out.
The two main Dublin broadsheets broke the news on August 25th, specifying when the ceasefire would start. Going home that night after writing the story for The Irish Times, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even listen to the late-night news on the BBC World Service. I could only tune into some rock station and, as the guitars jangled and drums pounded, I reflected that this was it, it was all over. Faces of people I had known, victims of the Troubles, flashed before my eyes. Most of them were young and all of them still had a lot to offer when they died.
I also felt a sense of euphoria and boundless possibility, imagining a future where Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter embraced one another and agreed to forget the past. Ten years on, it seems a little naïve, and yet we have just enjoyed a decade of comparative peace. Ceasefires don't come easy, and neither do political settlements, but at this stage it looks, on balance, as if there's no going back.
Deaglán de Bréadún is Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland published by Collins Press, Cork