Bending Sinn Féin to the leadership's will has not always been easy and has sometimes required patience and guile, writes Ed Moloney.
It is now nearly 25 years since the IRA in south Armagh forcibly abducted a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment and, in an extraordinary irony, set in motion events that will in all likelihood culminate tomorrow in a decision by Sinn Féin's ard-fheis to accept and recognise the policing, criminal justice and prison systems of Northern Ireland.
The soldier's unthinkably terrifying ordeal at the hands of the IRA's most ruthless unit sent the Belfast-based Redemptorist priest Fr Alec Reid hotfoot to the door of the Provisional movement's de facto leader, Gerry Adams, in what proved to be a vain effort to save the soldier's life. Whether Fr Reid arrived too late or his intercession was always doomed, we will never know; the unfortunate soldier, Sgt Thomas Cochrane, was interrogated, shot dead and his corpse dumped a few days later near the Border.
Although the Redemptorist priest failed to save Sgt Cochrane's life, the dialogue with Gerry Adams that followed, starting in November 1982, marks the beginning of what became the peace process. Fr Reid knocked at Adams's door at a distinctly opportune moment. In its first, non-hunger strike electoral outing under the Sinn Féin label, the IRA's political wing had just days before won five seats to the now forgotten Prior Assembly at Stormont.
A viable, and potentially more advantageous political alternative to violence had opened up for the Provo leadership. Within a short time Gerry Adams and Fr Reid had designed the building blocks for what would become the IRA's ceasefire, the Good Friday agreement and all that has followed.
It has been a long and twisting journey between that tragic event in south Armagh and the gathering of Sinn Féin members at the RDS tomorrow, but with the benefit of hindsight a number of conclusions can be drawn from that trek about the way the Provisional movement under the Adams leadership conducted and conducts its business.
One is that virtually every policy initiative and stratagem, both military and political, proposed by that leadership and adopted by both wings of the movement since the early 1980s was conceived and implemented in order to ensure that, eventually, tomorrow's meeting could happen.
Another is that it has always been much easier to manoeuvre, cajole and otherwise propel the IRA down the desired road than Sinn Féin. The IRA during the period of the peace process was much smaller than Sinn Féin, never more than 400 to 500 members, all of them known to the leadership, many promoted by it and their status and wellbeing dependent upon unfaltering loyalty to that leadership. It was and is a disciplined military outfit whose orders come from an army council that Adams and his allies had dominated since the late 1970s. Shaped by that leadership, the IRA of the peace process was one with little patience for internal democracy - dissent was stamped out ruthlessly.
One way or another the IRA was always easier to control and, apart from one short-lived rebellious bout in 1996, was invariably amenable to the will of Adams's leadership. The failure of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, British premier Tony Blair and their various advisers to understand this, and to realise that IRA decommissioning could, had they insisted, have been delivered much earlier than it was, led directly to the collapse of such middle ground as there was in the North, to the eclipse of the SDLP and Ulster Unionists by Sinn Féin and the DUP.
By no means untainted by authoritarianism, Sinn Féin was nonetheless a different creature. Larger and more diverse than the IRA, it was a place where debate and dissent could and did exist, where political ideas were challenged, often by people who saw themselves as guardians of the republican conscience and ideology. Bending Sinn Féin to the leadership's will was more difficult.
No better example of this can be found than in the Provisionals' rejection of the federal Ireland policy of the Ruairí Ó Brádaigh/ Daithí Ó Connail leadership. A prerequisite to winkling the two men out of leadership positions, and eventually out of the Provisionals altogether, Éire Nua was binned by the army council in 1979 but it wasn't until 1982, just before Gerry Adams succeeded Ó Brádaigh as president of the party, that Sinn Féin was persuaded to ditch the policy.
Sinn Féin's stubborn resistance to the IRA's diktat at times meant that when it came to ensuring that the party toed the line, unconventional methods were adopted.
A startling example of this came with the passing of a key 1986 ardfheis decision to drop abstentionism in the 26 counties, a vote that forced Ó Brádaigh's departure and gave the infant peace process credibility in government circles.
None of us in the media noticed at the time, but mysteriously the number of delegates suddenly doubled for that one meeting. The previous year the ardfheis had defeated a motion saying abstentionism was not a principle but a tactic, by 181 votes to 161, a total of 342 votes. Any attempt to change party policy on the issue seemed doomed.
But the next year, 1986, the vote went dramatically the other way. A leadership motion to drop abstentionism in Dáil elections was won by 429 to 161 with some 38 abstaining, shading the required two-thirds majority by just 11 votes. That was a total of 628 votes, nearly twice the number voting 12 months before. The following year, however, the number of delegates voting settled back to its normal 350 mark and even in 1998, when the Good Friday agreement was endorsed it was the same total, with 331 for and 19 against.
So where had the extra 300 or so votes come from in 1986? The passage of time eventually loosened enough republican tongues for the truth to emerge. The IRA had arranged for the creation of over 100 ghost cumainn that were all duly registered at Sinn Féin's headquarters, whose bureaucracy was by then safely under the army council's control. Although none of the new branches had any members, they were entitled to send two delegates each to the 1986 conference, which they duly did. According to republican sources these were really army council delegates, loyal IRA members committed to dropping abstentionism no matter what Sinn Féin thought. In such a way was history made and the peace process made possible.
There was similar sharp footwork at the May 1998 ardfheis which approved the Good Friday agreement, but this time it was the British and Irish governments, not the IRA, which choreographed the steps. A first ardfheis was held in mid-April, but the mood was decidedly hostile to the accord and its unexpected centrepiece, a new Assembly at Stormont. One sample of delegate views showed only 44 per cent favoured the deal, well below the two-thirds needed. Wisely, the Adams leadership stayed its hand.
A second ardfheis was held three weeks later, but this time delegates arrived to discover that 27 well-known IRA prisoners held in Irish and British jails, including the notorious Balcombe Street gang, had been specially released for the event. The effect of their presence was to remind delegates that if they failed to endorse the deal these prisoners would return to jail and spend many more years behind bars. Not surprisingly the Good Friday agreement was approved by 94.5 per cent of the ardfheis.
It would be surprising if the Sinn Féin leadership resorted to such Tammany Hall-style tactics tomorrow. For one thing, they are probably unnecessary. After all, the Sinn Féin of 2007 is the party of Mary Lou McDonald, not Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. This record of chicanery is nonetheless one reason why some view the prospect of the Sinn Féin leadership entering government in either part of Ireland with less than unalloyed enthusiasm.
But it also shows that Gerry Adams and his colleagues never go to an ardfheis on a matter of importance unless they are pretty sure what the result will be.
Ed Moloney is author of A Secret History of the IRA