SAOIRSE32

The Sunday Times
December 14, 2008

I was looking forward to the council meeting on December 1. Our plans to reorganise Croydon’s schools were proving controversial and I knew it would be tough but I believed passionately in what we were doing.

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There were a lot of protesters in the public gallery. Halfway through the meeting one stood up to ask me a question. He first addressed me as “Councillor McGuire” and then pretended to correct himself and said, “Sorry, Councillor Gatland”.

I wondered if I had heard him correctly. He said something about a book, but he was mumbling and it was hard to make it all out.

Nobody on my side knew what he was talking about but I did. I knew my secret was out.

Feeling numb, I did my best to carry on. At the mayor’s Christmas drinks party afterwards I went through the motions. No one asked me anything about what had been said. I got home at 11pm, my mind buzzing. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. About 3am I made a cup of tea and took the dogs for a walk around the block.

In the morning everything was still going round and round in my mind. I had no one to talk to about it as none of my political colleagues knew about my past. My husband Mervyn, who did know and had always encouraged me in my political career, had died four years ago.

At about 10.30 I called the council leader, Mike Fisher. I told him I had belonged to the Provisional IRA and had been known as Maria McGuire, my name before I married. I offered to resign from my position in the council cabinet.

Clearly shocked, he just said: “Let me think about this.” He called back so quickly that I suspect the only person he consulted was the council’s chief executive. He told me he was withdrawing the Conservative whip and put me under pressure to resign as a councillor “because things could get very nasty”. He also said: “I always regarded you as a friend and I am very disappointed.”

Shortly afterwards the council issued a statement confirming that I had resigned from the cabinet. I think they all panicked. But I had panicked, too. I had resigned because I didn’t want to damage or embarrass my colleagues and I wanted to do the right thing.

Later I felt I should have done things differently. I should have told Mike Fisher and the council that I needed to talk to them. I should have shown them the book I had written, To Take Arms, and explained the context. Yes, I had belonged to the Provisional IRA for a year. Yes, I had gone on an arms-buying trip to Holland. But then I quit and wrote the book to explain why I had become disillusioned with the IRA, and I took a huge risk in doing so.

I should also have said: look at Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, both of whom helped to run the IRA. If they could make such a profound political transition, surely I could, too? I had never killed anyone and I had never been to prison. McGuinness was helping to govern Northern Ireland and I was just a Croydon councillor.

Besides, it was all more than 30 years ago. I couldn’t say I was a different person now because, as I was then, I have always been utterly committed to what I am doing and I give it my all. But I feel I have made an enormous political journey, too.

I belonged to the Provisional IRA for just a year. I joined in 1971, when I was 23, because I felt strongly about the way the people of Ireland were being treated. You have to remember what awful things were happening to the country and the people I cared deeply about. It was the time of internment and – in January 1972 – Bloody Sunday in Derry. Brought up in Dublin, I shared the IRA’s aims of wanting to end British rule in the north, using selective force if necessary, and I wanted to see a united Ireland.

I worked with all the senior figures in the Provisional leadership at that time: Dave O’Connell, Sean and Ruairi O Bradaigh, Sean Mac Stiofain. I attended meetings and liaised with the media, drafting our press statements and briefing journalists. In September 1971 I went to Amster-dam with O’Connell on an arms-buy-ing mission, which ended in failure when O’Connell’s cover was blown.

I had an affair with O’Connell: I was infatuated with him, as he probably was with me. He represented Irish republicanism and I’m not embarrassed about any of that – it was part of me at that time. In Ireland I carried a gun in my hand-bag. It was given to me as protection because of the feuds and assassination attempts within the IRA, but this was rather ludicrous because I hadn’t had any weapons training and didn’t know how to use it.

I was heartened when the IRA declared a truce in 1972. It had been killing British soldiers and detonating bombs that slaughtered innocent civilians, although it always claimed that was a mistake. But the truce broke down and there were more civilian casualties, which left me deeply troubled.

Feeling there were no moral grounds for continuing the military campaign, I decided to defect. Previously I had believed passionately in what I had done; now I believed just as passionately that I should explain why I had defected, which was how I came to write the book.

Looking back, I was idealistic, committed, but young emotionally and I always saw things in black and white. I was quite egotistical and didn’t reflect on how my actions would impinge on other people, particularly my parents. They suffered when I joined the IRA and they didn’t know where I was. They suffered again when I came to England to write the book. But I was foolish and arrogant and I thought it was important to tell my story. If I had thought about all the consequences then maybe I wouldn’t have done it. But you can’t see 35 years ahead.

Colin Smith, a British journalist, helped me to come to England. Another journalist, Peter Gillman of The Sunday Times, helped me to find somewhere secret to live. We were only too aware how the IRA treated those it considered traitors. Mac Stiofain had warned that if I returned to Ireland I would be court-martialled and executed. Peter, Colin and I all met a senior man in Special Branch and it was clear that he was taking seriously the threat of revenge.

Peter’s wife Leni arranged for me to stay with her parents at their home in south London. Her mother was Irish, her father was Liverpool Irish, and they were very kind to me. I stayed indoors during the daytime but Leni’s father felt I needed to get out and so we went for walks after dark when it seemed safer. Despite the IRA’s threats, I don’t think I felt frightened. I think I was more fatalistic, feeling that if they were determined to get me, they would.

Peter and I wrote my book in about three weeks. Afterwards I knew it was time to move on. Peter and Leni asked a friend, Mervyn Gatland, if I could stay at his home in Croydon. I had no idea what would happen after that, but I wasn’t thinking very far ahead.

Mervyn did think ahead, however. He struck me as gregarious and energetic – someone who knew what he wanted. I sensed that he had fallen in love with me before we even met. He had read about me and seen my photo, and that was it. He gave me love and support and pestered me to marry him. In 1977 I agreed.

Through all this time I was still trying to get back on my feet. My disillusion with the IRA, believing passionately in what it did and then believing just as passionately that it was wrong, proved to be quite traumatic. An outbreak of sectarian killings in Northern Ireland left me horrified. I wondered if there was anything I could have done to alter events. It all affected me quite badly. I had periods of depression which worsened after two miscarriages.

Looking back, I feel I was also very self-absorbed. Two things helped me to change. First, banal though it may seem, we acquired a dog. I have been in love with dogs ever since. Second, Mervyn became ill with a degenerative lung disease and prostate cancer. Just as he had protected me, I wanted to do the same for him.

Politics also entered our lives. Croydon is sometimes disparaged as boring and mundane – but I liked it just because it was so normal in comparison with my previous life. Mervyn, whom I had regarded originally as very left-wing, moved across the spectrum and joined the local Conservatives. When he started taking me to political functions I noticed how few women held important positions. I had always regarded myself as a feminist and was interested in women’s equality. In ideological terms I find it hard to say where I fit in, but I always admired Margaret Thatcher as a strong woman who was determined to succeed.

I hardly ever thought about my past. Certainly I never attempted to contact anyone from my days in the IRA, nor had they got in touch with me. I think I developed an ability to dissociate myself and so I pushed it all to one side. I never even felt I was leading a double life. Only a few of Mervyn’s friends knew about my past, or so I thought, and we never talked about it. I believe he stopped thinking about that part of my life, too, cutting himself off from it as I had.

I went back to Ireland for the first time in the late 1980s. My parents had stayed in touch with me, always telling me they supported me. I was happy to see them at home in Dublin and to feel normal for a time. But otherwise everything felt strange, part of what I was pushing away. I went again last summer and walked around my primary school. It was lovely but still strange.

I took an interest in what was happening politically in Ireland such as the Good Friday agreement and the Omagh bombing, both in 1998. But I didn’t dwell on any of it. While I admired the politicians on both sides working on the peace process that, too, was part of the Ireland I was pushing away while I tried to get on with my life here. Mervyn became chairman of our local Conservative ward and wanted to stand for Croydon council. I felt I had ideas, energy and talents that I wanted to use and decided to try to become a councillor, too.

At some point I was required to complete a form that asked whether I had ever done anything that could embarrass the Conservative party. I said no. It all seemed so long ago and it was hard to connect it with the person I had been. I didn’t want it all brought up again. I don’t feel I lied about my past; I just didn’t disclose it. It certainly did not occur to me that I would ever be in such a high-profile position in the council that someone would want to damage me.

Ironically, when our local ward came to select its candidates for the 2002 election, I was chosen and Mervyn wasn’t. He was very angry, feeling the local party had stabbed him in the back, and he left to join the Liberal Democrats. But he always supported me and when I was elected to the council he told everyone how proud he was of me. When I sat in the council chamber for the first time I felt at home.

By then Mervyn was very ill. A single-lung transplant had given him a brief new lease of life, but the steroids he was taking made him angry and volatile and then he developed lung and skin cancer. He had enormous courage but I knew just how much he was suffering. I think I could only cope by dissociating myself, just as I had distanced myself from the past.

He died in 2004. Because he was so well known locally, a lot of people were at the funeral and I wonder now just how many of them knew about my past.

I took over Mervyn’s gardening business and devoted the rest of my energies to politics. I became opposition education spokeswoman and when the Conservatives took power in Croydon in 2006, Mike Fisher asked me to become cabinet member for children’s services and adult learning. I know it was a rapid rise but I felt ready to take the responsibility and once again pushed thoughts of my past to one side.

I felt that many children in Croydon were not getting the education they deserved and this was contributing to gang culture and knife crime. We pursued a policy of closing or amalgamating several schools and setting up academies, in line with government policy. The Labour group opposed what we were doing, however, and I suppose that I made too many enemies. Someone decided to use my past against me.

I am still trying to make sense of what happened in the aftermath of that council meeting on December 1. For several days I was shaking and crying and couldn’t get warm. I suppose I was in shock. My parents rang me and said they supported me. I was grateful for that, because I have really put them through it.

At first many of my former cabinet colleagues shunned me but now they are trying to call me again. I sense they have regrets about the way this was handled. I have had a number of private conversations with party figures who have offered their backing.

I have had numerous other messages of support, some from people in Ireland who were part of what I left behind, some from people here who had not known about my past. I was very heartened when David Trimble said it was absurd to condemn me for my past in light of the reconciliation that has led to peace in Northern Ireland.

Whatever happens, I intend to remain as a councillor, with or without the Conservative whip.

My days are no longer packed with meetings and so I have had time to reflect on whether I should have done things differently. Maybe I should have been braver and disclosed my past much earlier.

In many ways the revelation has come as a relief. I think I had suppressed everything for so long and that’s why I was in shock. It was difficult for me to accept who I was. Now I feel I can piece myself together again and deal with that part of my past I had buried. At last I can be the person I really am.