State Papers: Adams and McGuinness anger at Britain’s failure to deliver on demilitarisation and on-the-runs

A note of a meeting between Mr. Adams and the Downing Street Chief of Staff at Dublin Airport on July 28, 2000, outlines how the republican leadership were dissatisfied with the lack of movement on a right-to-return for republican activists who had been wanted by the British authorities.

The meeting followed a first inspection of IRA arms dumps by Martti Ahtisaari and Cyril Ramaphosa, which confirmed weapons were secure and was referred to at the time as an important ‘confidence-building measure’ (CBM).

While Mr. Powell discussed the situation with Mr. Adams, the Sinn Féin President ‘launched into a long diatribe’, the memorandum states.

"He and McGuinness had been totally discredited with the IRA membership. They had got the CBM on the basis that the OTRs would be allowed to return.

"This was a matter of good faith. Now we were reneging on our promise. It did not matter why. It would simply mean that they could not get a further CBM or anything else on decommissioning on that basis,” the communique that was destined for the desk of Prime Minister Tony Blair records.

Mr. Powell told Mr. Adams, and Gerry Kelly, who was also present, that the best way he could see of dealing with OTRs was that ‘they returned to NI, went to prison but got out after a few hours and their cases were then considered by the Sentences Review Body’.

Mr. Kelly said there was ‘no chance that it would work', that ‘the escaped prisoners would simply tell them to F-off’ and that ‘they were not going to surrender to the British authorities’, the document reveals.

Two days before the Dublin meeting, Mr. Kelly and Alex Maskey had breakfast with Secretary of State Peter Mandelson at Hillsborough and conveyed similar concerns.

“Sinn Féin complained about the slow pace of progress on OTRs, normalisation and inadequacies of the Policing Bill. With the IRA having delivered on its CBM, Adams and McGuinness' credibility was being undermined by the failure to deliver on clear commitments made to them,” a missive from Jonathan Stephens, Associate Political Director at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) relates.

Mr. Mandelson protested that he was 'delivering Patten bar a few linguistic technicalities’ but said he ‘had more sympathy with Sinn Féin on OTRs - an issue which he recognised had to be resolved but posed some real legal difficulties which could not be ignored’.

"Gerry Kelly said that republicans, far from being triumphalist, feared that with the IRA CBM already delivered, HMG was now reneging on its own commitments: only three out of a list of 30 OTRs had been resolved; there was no visible progress on demilitarisation and the Policing Bill was a disaster.

"All this undermined the credibility of Adams and McGuinness who had persuaded the IRA to undertake its CBM on the strength of the Prime Minister’s commitments to them,” the note states.

Mr. Kelly asked Mr. Mandelson if he had 'stopped dealing with Martin McGuinness'.

"The Secretary of State said certainly not; he always enjoyed discussing education issues with the Minister of Education,” the memo adds.

State Papers: Irish diplomats reported ‘extremely difficult’ meeting with ‘aggressive’ Martin McGuinness over policing