history
Maggie O’Kane in Belfast
When Cyril Ramaphosa arrived at his office in Johannesburg at 11.30am on Tuesday June 27, he ended a seven-day journey that took him across the world and into Ireland’s history books.
He is a witness to what may finally be the end of 30 years of violence, human loss and private agonies in Northern Ireland.
It is a place reserved for him and the former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, as the only two outsiders present on a warm summer’s day in Ireland when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) opened three arms dumps to them.
The journey of the two international inspectors began on Monday last week (June 19) when Ramaphosa met Ahtisaari in London.
Their movements over the next three days in the Republic of Ireland may have taken them to the south, to the slopes of the Magillycuddy Reeks and the Slieve Bloom mountains where the IRA has historically stored arms, or perhaps they tramped the County Cavan border.
What they saw was the first voluntary display of IRA weapons to outsiders. On June 26 they confirmed that they believed that the IRA weapons had finally been stored and could not be used without their knowledge.
It is a huge step – the closest the IRA will ever come to decommissioning its arms. The details of exactly what the inspectors saw when those dumps were opened are reserved for the next chapter of the history books.
Did they see what remained of the three tons of Semtex brought in from Libya to the Wicklow Coast between 1984 and 1987? Perhaps it was just a couple of the Kalashnikovs the IRA has been buying in Eastern Europe since the Bosnia war ended.
Perhaps the dump, like the one discovered by the Irish police under a farmhouse in County Laois, had its own electricity supply, air vent and heating system to keep the weapons at optimum temperature.
The IRA drove the inspectors to the dump. The vehicle’s windows were blacked out. There were no blindfolds. Ahtisaari, who ran the negotiations between Nato and Russia during the Kosovo war, and Ramaphosa are not men who travel blindfolded.
“These are international statesmen and there is trust there,” a source who spoke directly with the IRA after the operation said. “The whole basis of this operation is trust and secrecy.”
Even the inner cogs of the Irish government were unaware of what had taken place late on June 29.
“This is unprecedented, uncharted water. In 24 years in the job I haven’t seen anything like it,” said one of the men at the heart of the Dublin government.
After the inspections the dumps were sealed using one of three techniques: a wax seal, stamped by the inspectors (unlikely), an electric current run across the entrance to register interference (also unlikely), or concrete.
They will be back in three months to check that the arms have indeed been put beyond use. “You can be sure of one thing. This is as good as it is going to get. You will never see IRA arms being put through the metal grinder. They will rust in the ground but never be handed over,” said the source.
What the IRA still has to rust under the ground is about 600 detonators, six flame- throwers, a Sam surface-to-air missile, 50 rocket launchers, 20 heavy machine guns, 12 machine guns and three sniper rifles. Most of these came courtesy of Colonel Moammar Gadaffi some time between 1984 and 1987; the Armalites and 600 AK-47s also hidden are a spin-off from the Balkans.
In a small cottage along a coast road in County Donegal is a shabby single-storey cottage with its kitchen and dining room windows blocked out with white paint. It is the summer home of a 58-year-old man who, on June 19, finally issued the invitation for his foreign visitors to come and visit the dumps: Brian Keenan, once described as the “most intelligent, energetic and resourceful military operator the modern IRA has yet produced”.
He’s not been seen much around the cottage, where the garden is full of wild Donegal cotton. He has been busy, spending two years persuading the IRA to put their “arms beyond use”.
There are two important things to note about Keenan. He has always said the IRA will never decommission. But they also say that if you get Keenan’s pulse, you get the pulse of the IRA. On June 26 in the early- morning Donegal sunshine, his home looked like that of a man who had finally reached a quiet place.
As for Ramaphosa, his stint in Northern Ireland has confirmed his credentials as one of the most accomplished peacemakers in the world – and not just South Africa.