“They haven’t gone away, you know”

“They haven’t gone away, you know” began as Gerry Adams’s answer to a heckler in 1995 and returned nearly two decades later in Bobby Storey’s speech as an unmistakable warning. Repeated across changing political circumstances, the phrase suggested that the IRA had not simply disappeared into the peace process; the 2015 report on paramilitary activity gave that implication renewed, official weight.

The phrase and its first appearance

In the summer of 1995, Gerry Adams addressed a rally in Belfast in the manner of a politician, wearing a crisp summer suit and consulting cue cards. During a pause in his prepared remarks, someone in the crowd shouted, ‘Bring back the IRA!’ The audience cheered. Adams chuckled, smiled, leaned into the microphone and replied, ‘They haven’t gone away, you know.’ The line was concise enough to become a famous sound bite, but the scene gave it a double edge: it could register as a joke, while also refusing the suggestion that the IRA had already vanished.

That ambiguity belonged to the wider unsettled aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement sought a power-sharing settlement and provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners, but it established no truth-and-reconciliation process through which people could give an account of the conflict in exchange for legal immunity. Unlike the South African model, there was no general mechanism for such an exchange. The conflict had ended in stalemate rather than a clear victory, and Northern Ireland had no formal process for deciding how to understand or commemorate the violence. Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he had ever been in the IRA further suggested to many that candid testimony remained unsafe.

There were limited exceptions to the absence of an agreed reckoning. Martin McGuinness acknowledged his membership of the IRA and his role as second-in-command in Derry in the early 1970s while giving evidence to the inquiry into Bloody Sunday, in circumstances where he would receive immunity from prosecution. Separately, 1999 legislation intended to help recover the bodies of the disappeared offered limited amnesty to people who voluntarily provided relevant information. These narrow provisions did not create a general route to truth-telling or resolve how responsibility for the conflict should be addressed.

An echo becomes a warning

The Belfast Project emerged against this background as a secret oral-history undertaking. Its organizers aimed to preserve former paramilitaries’ accounts for future generations, with interviews kept confidential until after participants’ deaths unless they consented to earlier release. The project’s premise was especially vulnerable to the political conditions the 1995 phrase seemed to name: participants would describe crimes, while no broad immunity arrangement protected people who spoke. The possibility that authorities might seize the recordings made secrecy central to the project rather than a matter of convenience.

In May 2014, at a rally, Bobby Storey stood beside Martin McGuinness, holding the script from which McGuinness was reading. Storey had joined the IRA as a teenager in the early 1970s, served twenty years in prison and, after the peace process, become chair of Sinn Féin in Belfast. He was also widely described as the IRA’s top spymaster. In a speech defending Gerry Adams, Storey warned the British and Irish governments and others that they could not touch the party leader. He then declared, ‘We ain’t gone away, you know.’

The wording deliberately recalled Adams’s 1995 exchange. To Michael McConville, whose family had sought access to the Belfast Project tapes and welcomed Adams’s arrest, Storey’s words sounded like an unambiguous threat. Mackers likewise understood the reference as pointing to the IRA, not merely Sinn Féin. Ricky O’Rawe, who had participated in the project, said that truth was what mattered to him; nevertheless, Storey’s statement made him feel that Belfast had become unsafe. The fear was not only of a direct order from the leadership: O’Rawe believed that militant rhetoric might embolden an individual seeking to prove himself. In this setting, the old phrase no longer sounded like a politician’s wry reply. Its repetition made it a warning to people considering whether to speak.

What the peace settlement left unresolved

The phrase’s force also came from the absence of a settled framework for dealing with past crimes. Under the Good Friday Agreement, prisoners held at the time could be released, and future sentences for conflict-related crimes were capped at two years. But the agreement created no general mechanism for granting amnesty in exchange for testimony, and the Troubles had never been formally declared a war. The many unsolved killings therefore remained open criminal cases in which former paramilitaries and soldiers might still face prosecution. The limited amnesty for information about the disappeared did not change that general condition.

The consequences appeared in a fragmented system of investigations and prosecutions. Decades-old cases were pursued through inquests, police investigations and special government inquiries rather than through one agreed process. By 2018, the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s legacy unit had a backlog of nearly a thousand cases. Its work could be accused of bias, while limited resources and the demands of present-day policing constrained what investigators could do. The unresolved past was not merely a memory invoked by the phrase; it remained active in legal cases and in arguments over who would be held accountable.

Official confirmation and continuing ambiguity

In autumn 2015, Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers released a report produced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and British intelligence. It stated that all the main paramilitary groups active during the Troubles remained in existence, including the Provisional IRA, which continued to function in much reduced form and still had access to weapons. Gerry Adams dismissed the report as nonsense. It nevertheless gave the phrase’s implication a new basis: the organization had not gone away.

The report also said that, in the view of rank-and-file members, the IRA Army Council continued to control both the IRA and Sinn Féin through an overarching strategy. It stressed that the organization was no longer engaged in violence and had a wholly political focus. Those qualifications mattered, but they did not erase the political dispute over whether an armed organization still exercised influence behind the scenes. Thus the phrase’s meaning shifted with each return: in 1995, a sardonic acknowledgment of persistence; in 2014, an apparent warning to those seeking the truth; and in 2015, an expression seemingly confirmed, while also complicated, by an official account of a reduced, politically focused organization that retained weapons. Its repetition made the peace process’s central uncertainty audible: an end to widespread violence had not, by itself, settled what remained of the IRA or how Northern Ireland should reckon with its past.