Among IRA veterans, quiet acceptance of peace declaration

BELFAST -- A few hours after he became the human face of the Irish Republican Army on Thursday, Seanna Walsh walked into the bar at the Felons Club in West Belfast and ordered a pint.

There were no cheers, no rounds for the house. Walsh said he was asked to do a job, and he did it. His job was to read a recorded statement announcing an end to the IRA's 35-year armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Walsh is what his former comrades-in-arms call ''sound," an IRA veteran who did his ''whack," or prison term. In fact, Walsh did several of them, beginning when he was 16, when he robbed a bank to help ''the cause." Walsh has spent 21 of his 48 years in Her Majesty's prisons, some in the same cell with his good friend Bobby Sands, who led the 1981 hunger strikes in which Sands and nine other republican prisoners starved themselves to death demanding political status.

It was because of his impeccable republican credentials, and his credibility among former and current IRA members that Walsh was chosen to be the first IRA man since 1972 to represent the organization without wearing a black mask. Like many IRA veterans who killed without remorse and spent much of their lives in prison without complaint, Walsh is ready to step aside and let a movement always led by gunmen now be led by politicians.

Since the IRA called a cease-fire in 1994, IRA veterans like Walsh have played a large role in dictating just how much ground the IRA would give in negotiations to end the conflict. They gave Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, the backing he needed to sign the compromise in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that accepts that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority living there votes otherwise, dashing the republican tenet that it was an illegitimate state that had to be overthrown.

IRA veterans like Walsh sold the idea of scrapping weapons to skeptical IRA members for whom guns hold a mythical allure. More recently, Walsh and a cadre of senior, influential IRA veterans backed the idea of formally ending the IRA's war against the British, the IRA's use of violence and intimidation to control its own neighborhoods, and even the bank robberies for the cause that first made Walsh eligible for membership at the Felons Club.

Still, as Walsh and other IRA men stood in the front bar at the club, watching Adams on television describe the IRA's ''standing down" as an act of courage and confidence, there were no whoops or cheers.

''Celebration is not the right word. Milestone is more like it," said Liam Shannon, 57, a former IRA prisoner, looking around the club. ''There's a quiet emotion here, emotion tinged with sadness. It's the end of an era."

There seems to be an acceptance, grudging or not, that the fighters have had their day. The only cheer that went up in the Felons Club on the day the IRA called it quits was when the Irish premier, Bertie Ahern, appeared on the television and said that the prospect of Sinn Fein one day being a coalition partner in an Irish government was now possible.

Despite the skepticism that greeted the IRA's announcement, especially from the loved ones of some of the 1,700 people killed by the IRA since 1969, Shannon said most IRA members accept that their goal of a united Ireland must be achieved through politics. They make no excuses for waging war, he says, but they realize Irish unity is only possible after a sustained period of peace.

''Look around this place," he said. ''There's a lot of realists."

And yet idealism is literally on the walls. The club is lined with the images of those who have killed and died for Ireland. The portraits include Padraig Pearse, who was executed after leading the 1916 Easter Rising.

In the lounge, two men belted out rebel songs accompanied by a guitar and banjo, standing beside portraits of Sean Savage, Dan McCann, and Mairead Farrell, IRA operatives who were killed by British commandos in Gibraltar in 1988, during a wave of violence on all sides that led Adams to begin secret talks that many trace as the start of the modern peace process.

Mythology and memory run deep here. But Shannon and other IRA veterans say they are ready to move on.

Danny Morrison already has. Morrison was the IRA activist and Sinn Fein strategist who famously coined the republican movement's credo of seizing power with a rifle in one hand and a ballot box in the other. He spent much of the 1990s in prison, after being caught by police in the process of interrogating a suspected IRA informant.

''Danny was the last face you saw before they put the hood over your head," said Sean O'Callaghan, a disgruntled IRA leader who turned against his former comrades.

But since his release from prison, Morrison has become a successful columnist, novelist, and, most recently, playwright. On Friday night, Morrison's play, ''The Wrong Man," had its local premier before an invitation-only audience at the Conway Mill complex in West Belfast. There were several senior IRA figures in the audience, including Bobby Storey.

The play, about two IRA men balancing duties to their families and the cause, contains a gripping scene of IRA men interrogating one of their own who is suspected of informing. It is hauntingly realistic and lyrical at the same time. The IRA members and their police interrogators are made to seem similar in their heavy-handed quest for information -- a parallel that seemed shockingly honest in this particular setting.

Storey politely declined to talk about the play. But even some of the IRA's most dedicated fighters seem prepared to debate their violent past even as they launch what they describe as a peaceful ''new mode" of their struggle.

As Morrison and a group of IRA veterans waited for a taxi, Seanna Walsh, who had watched the play, joined them.