Papers show Blair’s demilitarisation demands

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair demanded Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams betray former comrades who had joined the breakaway Real IRA, according to British state papers held in London.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, the revelation is contained in a memo of a telephone call between Blair and the 26 County Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in December 2000.

Blair was setting out his position on “security normalisation” to remove Crown Force spy towers and another installation from near the border in South Armagh, and said Adams’s “co-operation against the Real IRA” was a necessary part of quid pro quo arrangement.

The memo was centred on Blair’s horse-trading for IRA decommissioning in connection with British demilitarisation and other peace process concessions.

He offers to “move” on two of the border towers and an observation installation known as a super-sangar.

If weapons were destroyed, the note said, “we would put to Adams a proposal for a selective amnesty on OTRs [IRA Volunteers ‘on the run’ from British prosecutions]” and give Sinn Féin access to House of Commons facilities.

Mr Blair also told the Taoiseach that “the IRA was still procuring arms, training and targeting and he made it plain to Adams that this could not continue if we were going to normalise the security situation.

“We would also require their co-operation against the Real IRA.”

It followed a top level meeting on the peace process involving Blair, Cabinet Ministers and top Crown Force officials.

The ‘Secret and Personal’ note of what they discussed recorded Mr Blair saying the IRA needed “to move things forward by committing themselves to concrete over their dumps” and “although it was not a crude trade-off, to [decommission] they were looking for steps from us on normalisation.”

‘DON’T TELL AMERICANS’

Amid discussion of what was described as an American idea for the formation of an international group of “counter-terrorism experts”, it was insisted that the functions of the spy masts should not be disclosed to the Americans, who were to be educated instead on the threat from the Real IRA.

It warned of the importance to the Crown of “the matrix of towers” and said that an increased deployment of the RUC/PSNI was “impossible without technological superiority and surveillance of roads”.

Blair “said that he understood that there was an issue about the extent to which we disclosed information, even to the Americans, about the functions of the towers…On the other hand, both the (US) President and the Taoiseach understood the security constraints under which we operated. In principle, binding them into a clearer understanding of the dangers we faced was a good idea.”

MI5 INTERVENTION ON INQUIRIES

Another confidential memo from Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, conveyed the British hostility to nationalist calls for public inquiries into collusion allegations.

After a meeting with MI5, Powell said Blair “made clear that he would not agree to full public inquiries” and was “not attracted” to the alternative of giving the Policing Board a power to initiate its own investigations into past events.

He went on: “The Prime Minister wants to avoid this exercise leading to unwelcome full-scale public inquiries, particularly in the Finucane case, where there is an awkward security dimension which he has discussed with the Director General of the Security Service.”

This came despite Blair telling the Finucane family months earlier that MI5 bosses would be “out of a job” if they had targeted people for murder.

Belfast defence lawyer Pat Finucane was murdered by an MI5-operated loyalist death squad in 1989 as he sat down to dinner in his home. His family continues to campaign for a full public inquiry and a number of related legal proceedings are ongoing.

Urgent Appeal