Denis Bradley, former vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, discusses the secret line of communication between the British government and the IRA that played a crucial role in the peace process.
The former priest, who played a key role in the peace process , reflects on the backchannel that enabled dialogue between the IRA and UK government Denis Bradley , former vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, in Derry city. Photograph: Joe Dunne for The Irish Times
Most people would accept that however McGuinness might indicate an IRA willingness to parley, it would not be through such words. Still, those were the words that ended up in front of prime minister John Major.Irish in Britain: ‘Many of the men are dead because they killed themselves working ...
When it did he writes that Fred, who may have been acting without full authority, delivered a “tour de force” exposition that included a “journey through Anglo-Irish history”, culminating in his requiring a two-week ceasefire from the IRA to get peace talks under way. Of course, it didn’t run smoothly thereafter. Major’s Tory government had a slim majority and he was fearful of upsetting the nine Ulster Unionist Party MPs whose votes could keep him in office. The British response to the IRA overture therefore was dilatory and tantamount to rejection.
Bradley notes too how the level of IRA violence in Derry, where McGuinness’s writ ran, diminished considerably around that time. “It’s said that Derry went on ceasefire about three years before everyone else went on ceasefire.” In any case Peace Comes Dropping Slow is a different work to Ó Dochartaigh’s in that, as a player, it is written, as he says, “from the inside out rather than the outside in”. He writes with a philosophical depth and a graceful style that puts one in mind of the great Reading in the Dark, by fellow Derry writer Seamus Deane.
He had a happy childhood, his mother running a guesthouse in Buncrana, his father driving a bus for the then Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway Company. He was youngest of a family of eight, his sister Frances dying in childhood. Much of his work in Derry was in the largely working-class Long Tower parish. While a priest he also worked as a counsellor and set up shelters for the homeless and treatment centres for alcohol and drug addiction.
Bradley was a curate during the worst of the Troubles and much of his parish work was dealing with “the litany of killings” in his small neighbourhood, or trying to prevent killings. There are a number of such stories in the book that, like his account of Bloody Sunday, may haunt the reader as they haunted the priest.
Soon after that killing he was approached to speak to another distressed young man. “He spoke very quietly and hesitantly and told me that he had set the bomb,” he recalls. “He had made bombs before, he continued, but he didn’t think they had killed anyone. I sat with him for an hour, talked and drank a cup of tea. He was very shocked and emotional, but then so was I. I have no memory of what we talked about; I think there were long silences when we just sat and said nothing.
He likes Pope Francis but worries about elements in the church who don’t and want to take the church back to a more conservative place. He feels too that the absence of faith is creating a societal malaise. “I think that’s beginning to be seen. If you are living in a world that is free of the transcendental it’s a weird, weird, weird world.”
Fifteen years on, legacy remains unresolved, with the latest legislation from the British government rejected by the Irish Government and most parties. Bradley says that if the British and Irish governments, acting in unison, had grasped this problem it could have been resolved years ago, and still could be settled.
Denis Bradley Northern Ireland Peace Process Backchannel British Government IRA
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