eaten it all.’ Brendan told her not to worry: ‘He’s not here for the dinner.’ The visit was no accident – Brendan had carefully planned it. Oatley and McGuinness settled down to talk, as Oatley remembers: ‘I’d never met McGuinness before, and I was considerably impressed by his intelligence and firmness of manner. I thought him very serious and responsible, and I didn’t see him as someone who actually enjoyed getting people killed. I found him a good interlocutor. It was rather like talking to a middle-ranking army officer in one of the tougher regiments, like the Paras or the SAS.’23
Brendan watched the two of them – traditional enemies on opposite sides of the dinner table. Oatley had no brief to do what he was doing or say what he was saying, while McGuinness had a strictly limited brief from the IRA – to listen, and that was all. Brendan couldn’t believe what he was seeing and hearing. ‘It was like a couple wanting to get together to enter a courtship. Dignified. Friendly.’ As well as business, there was small talk about McGuinness’s passion for fishing: he had only ever crossed the Irish Sea once, for a two-week fishing trip to Scotland. It was all part of breaking the ice. Then Oatley confronted McGuinness with the harsh reality that although the IRA had killed a lot of people, and continued to give the government a hard time, it had achieved nothing tangible. ‘Clearly the government was willing to go on forever, if necessary, with a policy of containment, but if the IRA wished to pursue a political course, there might be things the British government could do to help.’ In other words, there was a military stalemate, with neither side capable of winning and neither side prepared to give in. The alternative was politics. Brendan recalled: ‘I’d never seen Martin interested in politics in my life. He held his own with Michael, and put forward his points of view. Michael very firmly told him, “You’ll not beat the Brits, you’ll not drive them out of here, and really and truly, would it not be better to find a better way?”’ Brendan was profoundly impressed by McGuinness, who had clearly travelled a long way since delivering beefburgers to his chip shop: ‘I’d known him for twenty-five years, and this was someone I’ve never seen before. I’m watching McGuinness emerging.’
This landmark meeting set the scene for what was to happen over the following decade and beyond. The British were going to have to talk to the ‘terrorists’ once again, but this time with the IRA recognising what the realistic limitations of such talks were: a complete cessation of violence, no sell-out of the Protestant majority, and no breaking of the Union. Most other things would be up for discussion.
Oatley returned to London, and briefed the Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, John Chilcot, who was destined to become one of the architects of the subsequent peace process. McGuinness said that if the British wished to appoint a successor to Oatley when he retired, the Republican movement was ‘morally and tactically obliged not to reject their offer’.24 A week after the Derry dinner, Michael Oatley retired and departed the scene. On 7 February 1991, with Oatley scarcely gone, the IRA staged a mortar attack on Downing Street and came perilously close to wiping out the British Cabinet, now chaired by the new Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, who a few months before had emerged to seize the crown after the coup that toppled Mrs Thatcher. As with most insurgent organisations, fighting went hand in hand with talking, the aim being to pile on the pressure in the hope of entering negotiations from a position of strength. Neither Major nor Chilcot was surprised.
Brendan was in London on his way back from a trip abroad on the day Downing Street was mortared, and although he too wasn’t surprised by it, he was ‘pretty fed up with the divergence of, on the one hand, trying to talk peace and, on the other, trying to bomb London’. Oatley had called Brendan while he was out of the country and told him that there was someone who would take his place, and that he’d like to introduce him. But he never did. By now matters were out of his hands. The new Director General of the Security Service, MI5, Stella Rimington, took the view that if it was advisable to renew the contact with Brendan, the officer who did so should be from MI5, not MI6. The anomaly of the involvement of Britain’s foreign intelligence service in a domestic conflict had probably only arisen because Michael Oatley had established his relationship with Brendan back in 1973, when MI6 ran intelligence operations in the province. Rimington had support for the new initiative to resuscitate Brendan’s role from John Major and his Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, and John Deverell,o MI5’s Director and Coordinator of Intelligence (DCI) in Northern Ireland.25 Now the back channel had mainstream political support.
On his return to Derry, Brendan received a phone call from a man who said he was interested in bringing employment to the city and thought that Brendan, as President of the Chamber of Trade, might be able to help. He talked of creating a hundred jobs. Brendan said he was too busy. The caller said it would only take half an hour, but Brendan still said no. The man rang back repeatedly, and eventually Brendan gave in and said he would see him: ‘My purpose was to get him in, be polite and get him out again.’ When the visitor arrived, ‘He was very nice, very soft, very gentle.’ He said he represented a company called Euro Assets. Brendan was beginning to switch off when the man suddenly reached into an inside pocket, pulled out a letter and handed it to him. ‘I looked at it, and it was from Peter Brooke, the Secretary of State.’ The letter praised Brendan for all his efforts over the years, and expressed the hope that he would continue them, now working with the bearer of the letter, who became known as ‘Robert’. ‘Robert’ was a former MI6 officer who had been seconded to MI5 and tasked by Stella Rimington to carry on where Michael Oatley had left off. ‘I knew that John Major and Peter Brooke wouldn’t be sending over someone to talk to me unless it was the beginning of the beginning. I knew. People talk about the wonderful work that Tony Blair has done. Wonderful, everybody knows that. But John Major is the guy who really took the courage in his hand and did this – and after the IRA tried to kill him.’
And the IRA kept on sending John Major the military message with increased ferocity. The day after his unexpected general election victory on 9 April 1992, the City of London was rocked by a huge explosion at the Baltic Exchange. Three people were killed in the blast, which caused £800 million worth of damage, eclipsing at one stroke the £600 million that had been the total cost of the damage in Northern Ireland since the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969.26 As the daunting sweep-up operation began, Major reshuffled his Cabinet and gave the job of Northern Ireland Secretary to his old friend Sir Patrick Mayhew, who had been Attorney General since 1987. Mayhew thought he was being summoned to Downing Street to be given the sack, and decided to put a brave face on it, picking a fresh camellia and sticking it in his buttonhole to make the blow more fragrant. He was astonished but delighted when he was offered the job. ‘I didn’t say any of the solemn things that people are supposed to say on these occasions,’ he told me. ‘I simply said, “Whoopee!”’27
Mayhew carried on where Peter Brooke had left off, sending barely coded messages to the IRA in speeches, advance knowledge of which was fed to the IRA via Brendan. The key speech was made on 16 December 1992 at Coleraine:
It is not sensible to believe that any British government will yield to an agenda for Ireland prosecuted by violent means . . . provided it is advocated constitutionally, there can be no proper reason for excluding any political objective from discussion. Certainly not the objective of a united Ireland through broad agreement freely and fairly agreed . . . in the event of a genuine and established cessation of violence, the whole range of responses that we have had to make to that violence could, and would, inevitably be looked at afresh.28
The IRA’s apparent response to this message came just over two months later, on 22 February 1993. John Major was working at his desk on, as he told me, a ‘pretty miserable, dreary, dark day’, when his Private Secretary came in with a piece of paper on which was written a message. The Prime Minister was told it came from the IRA. It read:
The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to an end.