Pol35 The Brendan Duddy Archive, NUI Galway

The James Hardiman Library

The Brendan Duddy Archive

National University of Ireland Galway

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Pol35/69

We know the Provisionals fear we may be stringing them along, January 1975

In early 1975 British officials and Republican representatives secretly negotiated the terms of an IRA ceasefire that came into force in February and lasted for most of that year. Most accounts of the ceasefire argue that the British duped the IRA into calling a ceasefire and strung them along in order to weaken them militarily. This message, sent by the British in late January, contains the striking line ‘We know that the Provisionals fear that we may be stringing them along’. It indicates not only that the IRA was aware of this danger even before the ceasefire, but that the British were also aware of this fear on the part of the IRA. The final line reads ‘We are not at this stage able to meet Mr. David O’CONNELL [emphasis in original] himself. But we assume that he is now personally directing the dialogue. Is this so?’ O’Connell was a wanted man at the time. It indicates that even though the British felt it was too sensitive to talk to him directly, they wanted to be reassured that this key figure was personally directing the talks and that the Provisional negotiators had his support. If there was to be a settlement and a permanent end to the IRA campaign his support was essential.

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Pol35/68 (1)

A letter from the IRA to the British Prime Minister, January 1975

The formal and courteous tone of the letter, addressed personally to the British Prime Minister of the time, Harold Wilson, is striking, indicating the desire of the Provisionals to behave in a properly diplomatic way during these contacts. But the letter is striking too for the emphasis on securing ‘an honourable and permanent end to this conflict’. Given the emphasis on the word ‘permanent’ after the IRA ceasefire of 1994, it is interesting to note that the word appears three times in this short message. There is no reference to Irish reunification or the political goals of the Provisionals but the emphasis is placed instead on their ‘sincerity to explore every avenue to secure’ a ‘permanent’ end to the conflict. Duddy’s personal diary for the period indicates intense and prolonged negotiation between the two sides over the twelve points included in this letter.

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Pol35/68 (2)

A letter from the IRA to the British Prime Minister, January 1975

Pol35/68 (3)

A letter from the IRA to the British Prime Minister, January 1975

Pol35/73 (1)

Don’t call us, we’ll call you, February 1975

A telephone message from the British as both sides negotiated terms in early February for an IRA ceasefire. ‘Point no. 1’ was the Provisional request that their members have ‘Freedom of Movement’ during the Truce. The note, in Brendan Duddy’s handwriting, indicates that this point was ‘under heavy discussion’ at the British end, indicating the difficulty it was causing. It finishes with a familiar formula, ‘We will ring you. Don’t ring us’.

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Pol35/84

A letter from the British Prime Minister to the head of the IRA, April 1975

In March 1975 Brendan Duddy took a huge risk by sending a letter to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson that he said was a personal letter from key IRA leader David O’Connell. The letter appealed for a more generous cooperative approach on the part of the British government. Wilson had personally approved the contact with the IRA and Duddy felt that Wilson was the only person who could shift the position of the British state and push a more generous response to the IRA ceasefire. Duddy was severely reprimanded by the IRA but succeeded in generating a formal typed response from the British which did not have the tone of a personal response. It is in the Duddy archive. He refused to deliver it, regarding it as too negative. This document is the second version of the message. It is transcribed in Duddy’s hand and takes a more personal tone in parts, finishing with a direct personal appeal to O’Connell from Wilson, ‘I trust that the leadership that you have shown [during] this difficult period, will be sustained thus enabling a…permanent [end] to this conflict’. Deleted words suggest a degree of negotiation on the precise contents of the message. Thus the word ‘just’ has been deleted from the phrase ‘just and permanent’, presumably because it conceded too much to the Provisional emphasis on peace with justice.The tone is quite accommodating, stressing that “We understand your present problems. We have difficult problems too. The machinery of government does not make for simple choices”. While the text on which the letter was based was undoubtedly drafted primarily by civil servants and concedes little ground, the very fact that it concluded on this personal note and that Duddy was instructed to pass it on as a personal message to O’Connell from Wilson indicates a willingness to take a chance and to address O’Connell directly. O’Connell and Wilson had secretly met face to face in Dublin in 1972 when Wilson was leader of the opposition. The sensitivities around contact of any kind between the British Prime Minister and the man who was effectively the political head of the IRA at the time make it all the more remarkable that such a message was ever composed. The N.P. annotations at the side, indicating where a new paragraph should begin, provide an indication that the message may have been dictated over the phone because of the sensitivity of the contents.

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1975 Cease-fire

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Pol35/125 (1)

Man overboard, Hunger Strike codewords, 1981

The document provides a set of codewords for use in telephone conversations between Brendan Duddy and British representatives during the hunger strike of 1981. Conversations were coded to prevent them being understood by intelligence agencies that might be monitoring them. Only a handful of people on either side knew of these contacts and it was as important to keep them secret from the intelligence agencies as it was to keep them secret from the public. This is one of three sets of codewords in the Duddy papers that are associated with this period and this was not the code used during the intense contacts in July 1981.

Pol35/125 (2)

Man overboard, Hunger Strike codewords, 1981

A certain mordant humour is evident in the code, which appears to be in the handwriting of a British official. Mutiny is listed as the code for hunger strike but the codeword that follows immediately afterwards ‘Man Overboard’, is simply listed as ‘obvious’. The code also provides an oblique indication of attitudes to various parties. Thus, RNLI is indicated as the codeword for ‘do-gooders’, indicating a sceptical attitude to third–parties seeking to intervene in the dispute. The concern to maintain secrecy is reflected in the fact that sometimes the codes lead to other codes. Thus, 2nd mate is the codeword for ‘Tom’ which in turn is a codename for one of the British officials involved. The names of two ‘Greek Tycoons’, Onassis and Niarchos, are listed as codewords for ‘Mc’ and ‘A’. It seems possible that they refer to two particularly prominent Provisional Republicans.

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Pol35/166 (1)

The Red Book, July 1981

For more than a hundred pages this hardback notebook full of to-do lists and measurements and rough calculations follows the hurried, irregular rhythms of everyday life; family, business, work, learning. And then, abruptly, the rhythms of everyday domestic life give way to an urgent clipped syntax that belongs to a very different realm:

"Clothes = after lunch tomorrow and before the afternoon visits. As a man is given his clothes he cleans out his own cell. Pending the resolution of the works issue which will be worked out…."

Pol35/166 (2)

The Red Book, July 1981

It is the first of thirty five urgently packed pages that provide Brendan Duddy’s fractured, hastily written and sometimes despairing contemporary account outlining the detailed progress of the secret negotiations between the IRA and the British government to end the Republican hunger strike of 1981. The notebook records an intense and accelerating series of phone calls between Duddy and the British government representative stretching across July 1981 aimed at achieving a negotiated settlement of the hunger strikes.

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Pol35/166 (3)

The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/166 (9)

The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/166 (19)

The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/167 (1)

Transcript of The Red Book 1981

This transcript of the Red Book was originally created in 2001 by a relative of Brendan Duddy’s in consultation with him. Question marks were inserted where there was uncertainty about how to interpret the handwriting.

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Pol35/167 (2)

The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/167 (3)

The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/167 (4)

The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/167 (5)

The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

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The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/167 (8)

The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/167 (9)

The Red Book, July 1981

Pol35/176 (1)

Five demands, July 1981

These hurried scribbled notes in Brendan Duddy’s handwriting of a telephone message that probably dates to some time in July 1981, outline British proposals for a change in the regime in the H-Blocks in return for an end to the hunger strike: ‘Clothes at 12. Visits on Tues. Parcels next Monday… ‘. The words ‘Sincere = YES’ seem to indicate that the British were emphasising that their proposal was being made in good faith, although caution is necessary in interpreting these rough notes. Some of the notes seem to refer to Republican demands while others refer to British proposals and it can be difficult to disentangle the two. Strikingly, it also appears to state that there will be a new governor to replace the governor under whose regime the previous settlement had collapsed.

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Pol35/176 (2)

Five demands, July 1981

1981 Hunger Strike

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Pol35/266 (1)

A hell of a battle, IRA ceasefire offer, May 1993

In 1993 there was a political storm when it was revealed that John Major’s government had been secretly communicating with the Provisional Republican leadership through Brendan Duddy. Both Sinn Féin and the British government released their own accounts of these contacts, including messages exchanged between the two sides. The Duddy archive includes these messages, all of which were received by him as faxes, typescripts or written notes, but it also includes a ’narrative’ record of these contacts that Duddy dictated every few days during the most intense contacts in spring 1993. Sinn Féin’s account of the contacts in 1993 provided some short paraphrased extracts from this narrative but this is the first time the full text has been seen. In this extract, dictated on the evening of 14 May after a meeting in London with British officials, Duddy outlines these officials’ account of the British position. The officials paint a picture of struggle, of a ‘hell of a battle’ in which civil servants urged a resistant Secretary of State, Sir Patrick Mayhew, to respond positively to a secret IRA offer of a ceasefire.

Pol35/266 (2)

A hell of a battle, IRA ceasefire offer, May 1993

It also indicates the struggles at this intersection as Duddy, codenamed June as he was in the 1981 contacts, pressures the British to respond to the offer by the following Tuesday. Duddy also declines the offer of a meeting the following Monday with the head of MI5 in Northern Ireland [‘James’] and John Chilcott, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the NIO, because he suspects it is a delaying tactic. Having pressured the British at this meeting to make an early response to the IRA ceasefire offer, that same evening Duddy advises ‘Walter’ [Martin McGuinness] that the Provisionals should consider suspending the IRA campaign without waiting for a British response in order to facilitate a positive British response. It provides evidence of his efforts to create movement at both ends by urging both sides to stretch themselves closer to the position of the other party.

NÓD

Pol35/266 (3)

A hell of a battle, IRA ceasefire offer, May 1993

1993 Contacts

NEW: The 1981 Hunger strike documents now include the full text of the 'Red Book' outlining in detail the progress of the secret negotiations between the IRA and the British government to end the Republican hunger strike of 1981. They also include a transcript of the text.

The selected documents are taken from the three main periods during which Brendan Duddy secretly acted as an intermediary between the British government and the IRA. The first was in the early and mid 1970s when Duddy acted as intermediary during a series of contacts over the release of hostages and the ending of hunger strikes. This contact culminated in the long IRA ceasefire of 1975 during which British government and Provisional Republican representatives held a series of formal meetings in Duddy’s house in Derry. The archive includes his diaries of negotiation in 1975 and 1976 as well as many handwritten and typed messages exchanged between the two sides.

In 1980 and 1981 Duddy acted again as intermediary during the Republican hunger strikes. In July 1981 he began to record these contacts, conducted by telephone, in a red hardbound notebook, the ‘Red book’. The handwritten formal messages that were dictated to Duddy over the phone are interspersed with sparse personal comments and notations indicating how these contacts sometimes stretched through the night and indicating the intensity of the tensions at this negotiating intersection.

Between 1990 and 1993 Duddy was again active at this intersection after a new Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Sir Peter Brooke, made the decision to try to incorporate the Provisionals in a political settlement, an effort continued by his successor Sir Patrick Mayhew. Duddy was called upon again to take up the role of intermediary and his archive includes the messages passed between the two sides as well as his own contemporary ‘narrative’ of the intense contacts of 1993. The selected documents highlight the secrecy and tension involved in this communication and negotiation and add significantly to our understanding of this crucial interface between the British state and the IRA.

Dr. Niall Ó Dochartaigh