Ira

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IRA.

THE WILDERNESS YEARS
THE NORTHERN IRELAND CRISIS
NEW STRATEGIES IN THE 1980S
THE PEACE PROCESS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Probably the longest-lived insurgent organization in Europe (and perhaps the world), the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has been in continuous existence since the Declaration of Independence by the first Irish separatist parliament, Dáil Éireann, in January 1919. In the Irish language, its title is Oglaigh na hEireann, or Irish Volunteers, and the title of its individual members is "Volunteer." This reflects the fact that the IRA grew out of the Irish Volunteer movement originally founded in November 1913. The aim of this first movement, to put pressure on the British government during the crisis over the proposed Home Rule legislation, was not necessarily a warlike one. The Volunteers could be seen as a pressure group in the form of a citizen militia. But from the start, they were closely connected with a still older organization, dedicated to removing British rule by armed action. This was the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), founded in 1858 in the wake of the great Irish famine of the late 1840s and the failed Young Ireland rebellion of 1848. These "Fenians," or "physical force men," as they often were called, were dedicated to the simple proposition that Britain could not be influenced by the force of argument, but only by the argument of force. Their deep aversion to politics and politicians, whom they always suspected of readiness to compromise or sell out the cause of independence, was to be directly transmitted to the IRA in succeeding generations.

But although the republican objective—to "break the connection" with Britain—remained unambiguous and unchanging, the physical force method had to be adapted to the situation in the twentieth century. The key moment was the Easter Rising of 1916, when a minority of the Irish Volunteers, led by a secret IRB group, seized and defended positions in Ireland's capital, Dublin. The IRB had always been committed to open insurrection rather than terrorist violence, but to have any prospect of success it needed to choose a strategic moment. World War I seemed to offer such a moment of British weakness. In fact, the insurrection was crushed within a week. But its leaders, executed by the British government, became republican martyrs, and, just as importantly, their successors—most notably Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy—abandoned the insurrectionist strategy when they set about rebuilding the Volunteer organization in the aftermath of the rebellion. The violence that began in 1919 was on a smaller scale, with local forces choosing their own targets and timing: guerrilla warfare, in other words. The most active IRA units, those in the southwest, built up their stock of weapons by stealth, and only began to try attacks on significant targets, such as Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) posts, after at least a year of preparation. Attacks were preceded by a public boycott of the RIC, an armed semi-military police force portrayed by nationalists as a British "army of occupation" (though its rank and file were entirely Irish). At the same time a republican "counter-state" was established, with a parliament—the Dáil Éireann, elected at the British general election of 1918 on an abstentionist ticket—which issued a unilateral declaration of Independence in January 1919, and set up shadow ministries and judicial agencies.

This political-military guerrilla insurgency conferred a high degree of legitimacy on the IRA, which by 1921 was in a position to negotiate a formal truce with the British authorities (11 July 1921) as a prelude to extended political negotiations for an Anglo-Irish Treaty (6 December). The reception of this treaty, however, shattered the unity of the republican forces, and defined the political stance of the IRA thereafter. The 26-county Irish Free State created by the treaty was denounced as a British puppet state, largely because of the oath of allegiance to the British Crown that had to be taken by its ministers and members of Parliament. The treaty also accepted that the unity of Ireland, which had been taken by all nationalists as natural, if not God-given, could not be maintained in face of Ulster resistance. "Partition" gave the other six counties in the northeast their own devolved government, as Northern Ireland. On these two key issues, sovereignty and unity, a large part of the IRA rejected the Dáil's formal approval of the treaty (January 1922) and returned to armed action (June 1922). The year of civil war that followed was more destructive in life and property than the five years of Anglo-Irish war that preceded it. The anti-treaty IRA lacked sufficient popular support to wage a guerrilla campaign, and eventually conceded defeat in May 1923. There was no truce or surrender; instead there was a "simple quit" as the "irregulars" (as the Free State government called them) simply halted operations and dumped their arms.

THE WILDERNESS YEARS

For the next thirty years, the irreconcilable republicans became increasingly marginalized. Sinn Féin/IRA candidates fought the 1923 election on an abstentionist ticket, but in 1926 the most substantial politician on the anti-treaty side, Eamon de Valera, decided to set up a political party—Fianna Fáil—that would be prepared to enter parliament. Since this would involve taking the oath of allegiance, his move split the republican movement. While Fianna Fáil quickly became a party of government, and de Valera was in power from 1933 to 1948, the IRA continued to give allegiance to the few surviving members of the "Second Dáil," elected in 1921. Its only intervention in domestic politics was the assassination of the minister for justice in 1927. In the early 1930s, under the inspiration of Peadar O'Donnell, it experimented with socialism, but at the end of the decade it returned to violence. Under the leadership of Sean Russell it launched, for the first time, an avowedly terrorist campaign in Britain. In 1939 a bomb explosion in Coventry, and the discovery of the IRA target list (the so-called S Plan), led to draconian antiterrorist legislation by both the London and Dublin governments. Many IRA men spent the duration of World War II (called "the Emergency" in Ireland) in internment.

The final throw of the traditional physical-force strategy was the "border campaign" launched in December 1956. Attacks on targets such as the BBC transmitter in Londonderry were intended to undermine partition, and trigger the collapse of the six-county state. Hundreds of IRA men were involved in sporadic operations, but there was little public support for them among northern nationalists. (Though the IRA gained two new martyrs when Fearghal O'Hanlon and Sean South were killed in an attack on a police station.) The campaign was eventually abandoned in 1962. In an atmosphere of détente between northern and southern governments, the IRA appeared to be an irrelevant relic of past obsessions. It was taken over by modernizers who tried to remodel its thinking from simple armed action to a more progressive, Marxist conception of revolutionary struggle. Ironically, perhaps, after half a century of unavailing effort, it was caught out by the sudden upsurge of popular agitation in the late 1960s. The Northern Ireland civil rights movement was much more than another IRA front organization, but it was the fact that Loyalists saw it as such that sparked a growing sequence of communal riots and street clashes through 1968 and 1969, eventually provoking British military intervention.

THE NORTHERN IRELAND CRISIS

The return of the British army restored the IRA's primary target and vindicated its long-standing critique of the 1921 settlement, but the IRA was in no state to take advantage of this, either ideologically or organizationally. Not until a group of traditional physical-force men, including Billy McKee, Joe Cahill, Seamus Twomey, and Daithi O Conaill, once again split the movement by creating the "Provisional" IRA (PIRA) in January 1970 did it return to armed action. Once it did so, the effects were spectacular. Through 1970, and especially in 1971, the PIRA—the "Provos" or "the Ra"—intensified its attacks on British troops as well as on the police. The first British soldier was killed in 1971, triggering a sequence of provocation and vengeance culminating in the clash in Derry city on 30 January 1972, "Bloody Sunday," when an ill-controlled military response to a riot killed fourteen civilians. The pressure on the Northern Ireland police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its auxiliary force, the "B" Specials, drove the British government to reform the security forces. Finally in March 1972 the Northern Ireland Parliament was prorogued, and direct British rule restored. The clock had been forced back to 1919; this looked like the most dramatic republican success since 1921.

In military terms the PIRA made significant advances at this time, with the introduction by its Belfast Brigade of the Armalite rifle (which would become its trademark weapon) and the discovery of the "car bomb" (produced by the use of fertilizer-based explosives, which were so heavy that they could only be taken to their target by motor vehicle). These two developments pointed in different strategic directions, one to an engagement with the British army, and the other to indiscriminate terrorism. In 1972 and 1973 both were pursued, but the most destructive results followed the planting of car bombs, notably on "Bloody Friday" (21 July 1972). Here the intention was to give warnings, but so many bombs were planted that the security forces were overwhelmed. The hostile public reaction showed that "terrorist" attacks had to be carefully calibrated if they were not to be counterproductive. More impressive perhaps was the effective creation of IRA liberated areas like the Bogside ("Free Derry"), where the security forces could not operate and the republicans operated as a kind of rival governing authority.

In 1972 the PIRA also embarked on the first of several attempts at negotiation with the British government. The breakdown of this was followed by a major British military operation to reoccupy the so-called no go areas in July 1973, and new legislation to create juryless courts (the so-called Diplock courts) that would convict republicans on the basis of evidence from informers. Despite this, another and more lengthy cease-fire was arranged in 1975. When this in turn broke down, it was followed in 1976 by a more aggressive British policy of "criminalizing" IRA prisoners. The withdrawal of their political status provoked increasingly intense protests by IRA internees in the Maze prison (formerly called Long Kesh internment camp). At the same time the PIRA was reorganized on the basis of small cells, like urban guerrilla or terrorist groups, rather than the IRA's traditional quasi-military units. This cellular structure was more resistant to penetration by British agents, and it also tightened the control of the PIRA's central authority, the Army Council. The PIRA announced its determination to intensify the armed struggle by its simultaneous assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten and killing of eighteen paratroopers in an ambush on 27 August 1979.

For the future, the key development of this period was the contest for control of the republican movement between the established leadership group of Ruairi O Bradaigh and Daithi O Conaill, and a group of challengers led by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The former committed themselves to a radical political program, Eire Nua (new Ireland), advocating a federal structure in which Ulster would have its own parliament, Dáil Uladh. This was aimed at reassuring Northern Unionists that they would be able to defend their interests (though, as critics of the plan pointed out, no such guarantees had ever looked like overcoming unionist fears in the past). The program also embraced a mild agrarian socialism, echoing the IRA's Saor Eire (Free Ireland) project of the early 1930s, which appealed to the rural communities over the border that provided the PIRA with sanctuary and assistance. Possibly the Eire Nua program was too sophisticated and imaginative for an organization with the uncomplicated ideology of the Provisionals. In any case it was opposed by O Bradaigh's emerging rival Adams, who had the prestige of a decade as commander of the Belfast Brigade and latterly as head of the Army Council to back up his remarkable talents and ruthless determination. In 1982, the program was decisively rejected by Provisional Sinn Féin.

NEW STRATEGIES IN THE 1980S

The IRA now embarked on a new political-military course signaled in 1981 by the formula "the ballot box and the Armalite." The long struggle between the prisoners and the government reached a climax that year with the hunger strike led by Bobby Sands. The failure of the hunger strike was a heavy blow to traditional republican morale, and its eventual effects were to accelerate the move toward politics. Shortly before his death in 1981, Sands stood for election in the Fermanagh–North Tyrone constituency. Some republicans may have believed that if he became an MP he would have to be released from prison, but even though he was not, Adams was able to pursue the parliamentary strategy, and was himself elected MP for West Belfast in 1983. He also finally replaced O Bradaigh as president of Sinn Féin. The effect of the Sinn Féin political strategy on the British and Irish governments was noticeable: in 1985 even the staunchly unionist Margaret Thatcher was persuaded of the need for a formal Anglo-Irish Agreement, probably the most significant political development since 1921. The PIRA went on to plan a large-scale military offensive (modeled on the Tet offensive of the Viet Cong), involving the acquisition of big arms shipments from Libya, but at the same time Adams launched an attempt to construct a common nationalist front with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) under John Hume.

The capture of a significant Libyan arms shipment—150 tons of munitions, including mortars and 106 mm cannon—at sea in November 1987 was a significant blow to the plan for a large-scale offensive. But the Hume-Adams talks that began in 1988 were an interesting alternative—a clear recognition that the IRA had little prospect of driving the "Brits out" by force alone. For the new leadership, if not yet for the rank and file Volunteers, the question of the validity of the traditional strategy clearly reasserted itself after two decades of armed struggle. The Provos' original raison d'être, "defending" Catholic communities against loyalist and police assault, was no longer convincing: IRA actions tended to endanger rather than protect them. Their larger strategy had always been problematical. Military victory had never been on the cards, and the hope that the IRA could raise the cost of British "occupation" high enough to persuade British public opinion to demand a "withdrawal" was based on a deep-rooted misreading of British motives. A tendency for the Sinn Féin leadership to distance itself from "botched" IRA operations now became more noticeable than before, and the announcement by the British minister for Northern Ireland in 1990 that Britain had "no selfish strategic or economic interest" in holding on to Northern Ireland was received as being more significant than the platitude it was. The equally platitudinous Downing Street Declaration of 1993, in which the British and Irish prime ministers announced that if terrorists abandoned violence they would be admitted to the political process (a proposition that had always been self-evident, in fact), was also greeted as momentous. Sinn Féin was animated by a sense that some real political reconstruction was possible.

THE PEACE PROCESS

The next five years saw Sinn Féin move an unprecedented distance toward both political participation and a modification of the republican demand for Irish "reunification." The acceptance that Northern Ireland might remain as a political unit (as McGuinness put it in 1994, unity might be compromised by the will of the Irish people) paved the way for participation in all-party talks in 1997. Sinn Féin accepted the 1996 Mitchell Principles, drawn up by U.S. President Bill Clinton's special envoy, Senator George Mitchell, including the commitment to decommission IRA weapons in some unspecified manner. After the signing of the 1998 Belfast Agreement (also called the Good Friday Agreement), the IRA eventually agreed in principle to put its weapons "beyond use," and accepted international inspection of some of its arms dumps. In July 2002 it even issued a guarded apology for the killing of "noncombatants" over the previous thirty years.

Such concessions, however, were asking a lot of a body that had never admitted any ambiguity in its fundamental beliefs or contemplated the possibility that its armed campaign might be unjustifiable. The dispute over the abandonment of abstentionism had already provoked one split, leading to the creation of the "Continuity IRA." And now in 1997 came the breakaway of the "Real IRA" under the leadership of a former chief of staff, Micky McKevitt. But whereas former breakaway groups had been able to outflank the existing leadership (as the Provos themselves had), this time the Adams-McGuinness leadership proved able to maintain its position. It was helped by the Real IRA's disastrous debut operation, the Omagh bombing (15 August 1998), in which twenty-nine people and two unborn babies were killed, producing the fiercest public condemnation since the 1970s. This kind of terrorism seemed a barbaric throwback to a country that had at last, after a quarter century of virtual civil war, sensed a return to normality. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States would further reinforce this pressure to keep the peace process going. When Martin McGuinness joined the new Northern Ireland executive as minister of education in 1999—a development that would have seemed incredible on both sides of the unionist-republican divide only a few years earlier—it looked as though the momentum of the peace process was unstoppable.

But the issue of arms decommissioning remained intractable. The IRA rejected demands for public scrutiny that it saw as equivalent to surrender (and indeed the unionist leader Ian Paisley demanded that the IRA "wear sackcloth and ashes"), though it did accept an international commission headed by a Canadian general, John De Chastelain. The organization was still carrying a load of historical baggage that could not easily be discarded. For thirty years the IRA had acted as a semiformal police agency in its communities, and a tradition of "punishment beatings" went on (and still goes on) long after the cessation of "military" operations. More perniciously, the organization had financed itself by becoming a kind of criminal mafia, and extortion and robbery also went on at the same time as the republican movement negotiated to reenter power-sharing governments. At Christmas 2004, insiders and the police attributed the biggest bank robbery ever carried out in Northern Ireland to the IRA, and a major IRA money-laundering operation was also uncovered. Shortly afterward, a particularly gruesome murder outside a Belfast bar provoked a major public protest led by the victim's sisters. The IRA took the unprecedented step of expelling the killers, but its offer to shoot them deepened the sense of a new crisis in the republican movement.

Nevertheless, the summer of 2005 witnessed what republicans saw as an epochal moment, the IRA's announcement on 28 July that it had formally ordered the termination of the armed campaign. This was followed two months later by a statement from the independent arms decommissioning body that the IRA had put its weapons beyond use. However impressive it was to republicans, however, Paisley's DUP held that this step had been far too long delayed to create confidence and that the alleged decommissioning (though witnessed by two churchmen, one Catholic and one Methodist) would not be believed unless it could be seen on film. Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted that the failure to deliver decommissioning had "become a major impediment to moving forward the peace process," but argued that there was no longer any barrier to peace. It remained clear, though, that it would take some time to convince unionists of this.