The IRA and Armed Struggle

Rogelio Alonso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134221585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The IRA is one of the oldest terrorist organizations in the world and conducted a ferociously violent campaign for almost thirty years. Now deeply enmeshed in the Northern Ireland peace process, Rogelio Alonso asks why one of the bloodiest terrorist movements of our time decide to swap weapons for the ballot box?

Based on over seventy interviews conducted with former and existing members of the IRA, Alonso also provides a rigorous evaluation of the personal and political consequences of the IRA's campaign of violence. The analysis of these interviews radically challenges the dominant academic analysis of Irish terrorism. This book includes a strong criticism of the armed struggle constructed around the discourse of those who waged it and answers the question faced by many armed revolutionary movements: 'Was the war worth it?'

Translated from the critically acclaimed Matar por Irlanda and available in English for the first time, this is a provocative and new approach to understanding the IRA. It is essential reading for readers and researchers with an interest in Irish politics and history, terrorism and political violence.

1
APPRENTICESHIP

‘I didn’t know why I wanted a united Ireland’

Understanding the terrorist mentality

At the end of February 1972, the newspaper Republican News published on its front page the photographs of six IRA activists who had died some days earlier. Right in the middle of the page, under the headline, ‘They died so that we can live’, was the very young face of David McAuley, a ‘volunteer’ of Fianna Éireann, the youth wing of the IRA. Despite being only fourteen, McAuley was acclaimed as a member of the organisation after having died ‘accidentally’ while using a firearm.¹ What could have caused such a young person to enter into a group that allowed him to handle lethal weapons? Was he really, as the republican term ‘volunteer’ suggests, recruited of his own free will? If this child had survived the Troubles and was asked today what led him to become a member of the terrorist group at such a young age, the chances are that his motivations would be very similar to those of a large number of his republican peers. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of activists took such a crucial decision during their adolescence or even earlier, what does this tell us about the true intentions used to rationalise their participation in acts of violence and their membership of an organisation like the IRA, which claims that such acts are both necessary and effective? Were they capable of assessing the real significance of their decision to join and its consequences when they became activists? Are other motivational factors underestimated when an interpretation is adopted which is much more acceptable for the individual and the group image?

The questions posed in the last paragraph try to answer the vital question: Why does someone join a terrorist group? The study of motivations is of great importance for the analysis of political violence and its causes. However, once an individual has participated in illegal acts on behalf of a terrorist organisation, abandoning such activities becomes more difficult regardless of his or her original reasons for becoming a member.² It is thus important to examine not only the initial reasons for joining but also those that ensure continued membership and the use of violence. Great care must be taken when attempting to understand an activist’s motivations; membership of a terrorist group is frequently the result of manipulation through various incentives and subtle pressures. These are stronger during childhood and adolescence, a particularly vulnerable stage of an individual’s personal development, when reality is perceived very differently. Thus, when studying why certain individuals become members of a movement, it is necessary to examine the recruitment process. This approach enables us to discover that the recruitment process is determined to a great extent by structural proximity, availability and affective interaction with other members of the movement, such factors normally being more important than ideological reasons.

In his study of the motivations of various activists and sympathisers of the Irish republican movement, Robert White stressed how important it was for the perpetrators of violence to explain, in their own words, the reasons for their behaviour.³ Other sources, such as personal memoirs, also provide us with the narrative interpretations of terrorists and, without doubt, these help us to understand their motivations. Yet as Cordes has indicated, when analysing such sources we must bear in mind that in order to understand the terrorist mind we must know the rationale, and the mechanisms of denial.⁴ My own research into the republican movement suggests the existence of a group mentality which results in the ideological convergence of its members and their adherence to an accepted ‘official explanation’ of their conduct. In my view, this is logical given the nature of the social group in question, and appears to be consistent with the dynamics of other groups, including not only those that use violence and operate in a clandestine manner. It is true that, contrary to what some authors have argued, it is not possible to establish a general ‘terrorist personality’; such an approach overlooks the heterogeneous nature of the different organisations involved in terrorist violence. However, we can identify parallel dynamics with those who use similar tactics and who often give similar reasons for their actions.⁵ For example, the following features are fairly common among violent groups that have been active in Europe: the use of violence with the declared intention of achieving certain political ends, a refusal to use the word ‘terrorism’ to describe their actions, and the need to justify their cause through mechanisms of rationalisation and justification that also contribute to maintaining group cohesion. This involves activists using processes such as the transference of guilt and the diffusion of responsibility. In addition, the fact that many activists are recruited at a particularly vulnerable time in their life, between childhood and adolescence, would facilitate certain very specific behavioural patterns, some of which are shared by individuals that belong to other radical movements in the rest of Europe.⁶

Determining which factors motivate members of terrorist organisations is undoubtedly complicated. One way of explaining the reasons that lead to joining a group that advocates violence consists in treating this as the result of a logical and rational decision that involves defining certain strategic objectives which such action attempts to achieve. At the same time, instead of presenting violence as an intentional choice that has been selected from a series of alternatives, it is also possible to argue that purely psychological factors are much more relevant.⁷ Another factor which should undoubtedly be taken into account is the socio-structural proximity of the individual to the movement in question and the interaction with other group members. Ultimately, through studying an organisation like the IRA, one realises that no single theory adequately explains why people joined it, a combination of causal factors providing a more accurate picture.

As has already been mentioned, youth is a dominant feature in the sociological profile of those who decided to join the Irish republican movement. This is repeatedly reflected in court reports concerning those accused of being involved in terrorist acts over the years. For example, in 1975 up to 70 per cent of republicans prosecuted were under 21 years old. Further, 63 per cent were between 17–21 years old. In 1979, 53 per cent of those accused were under 21 years old, and the number of those between 21–25 years old was also very high. The same picture can be found in the period from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s.⁸ Perhaps this explains the weakness of the ideology of most young activists. Ideology is taken to mean here a collection of shared ideas, based on certain values which leads them to define their personal situation as unjust. For this they blame an enemy, which, in turn, provides them with a justification for their actions. Thus, republican ideology demands an end to the partition of Ireland. This situation has been imposed on the Irish people by the enemy, Great Britain, against whom the republican movement’s armed struggle is seen as fully justifiable. Therefore, the real importance of this series of beliefs must be correctly assessed when examining the reasons given by the activists for joining the movement and for subsequently using violence.

In the sample used for this book, it was clear that recruitment usually coincided with a process of indoctrination, which often began in Fianna Éireann. Further, the social learning process which leads to a young person joining a group like the IRA sometimes takes place within the family, as well as in a particularly violent context resulting from the constant street confrontations, or even through the mass media. Whatever the sources that feed the process which ultimately leads to violence,⁹ a significant percentage of republicans admit that what they describe as their ‘politicisation’ largely took place when they were in prison. An IRA activist describes this process of indoctrination in the following terms: ‘I think it was giving direction to all the militarism. That you weren’t psychopaths, that what our people were doing had a specific aim. This is what the armed struggle was all about; we weren’t just going to kill people for killing sake. This is what we are going to bring about – this is a step on the road to this here.’¹⁰

As will be explained in more detail below, this politicisation confirmed the correctness of the decision to kill, a decision that had already been taken. This is an important consideration if we bear in mind that in many cases the period of time between the recruitment of an individual and the commission of violent acts was very short. As the testimonies in the next section show, the close relationship between factors such as age, ideology, and the way in which recruitment took place is particularly important in analysing and understanding the motivations of those who joined a clandestine organisation like the IRA.

‘A romanticised concept of the IRA’

The first of these testimonies is that of a volunteer born in 1961 who initially joined the IRA’s youth wing at the age of thirteen. Three years later, having become a member of the Provisional IRA, he was arrested and, due to his age, sent to a juvenile detention centre, where he stayed for thirteen months until in 1979 he was sentenced to ten months’ imprisonment. He began to serve this sentence in Long Kesh prison, located on the outskirts of Belfast. The socialisation process during the decisive years of his childhood and adolescence was of fundamental importance in his decision to join, both his family and the frequent street confrontations being crucial factors, as the following text explains:

I come from a very strong republican family on my mother’s side. My mother’s uncles would have been involved in the IRA as far back as the 1930s and 1940s. I was brought up very much under the influence of my grandmother, my maternal grandmother who also came from a very staunch republican family, which remains a staunch republican family today. My mother was forced to work because of the size of the family when we were quite young so my grandmother was responsible for looking after us at a very early stage and she was full of stories about Ireland, about Irish republicanism and about her brothers and her family who had been members of the republican movement for many decades. So I would say that my grandmother was perhaps the biggest influence in republican terms in my life and my interest in republicanism came from her. And I’m speaking here about a very instinctive thing, it’s not something that I was consciously aware of, but no doubt those stories and those anecdotes about republican history had some impact in my formative years. (. . .) My entry into the struggle at that very young age would have been instinctive, it would not have been based on any sort of real understanding of the politics or the issues. I joined a Fianna group close to where I live. At that time the conflict was very intense and rioting was a daily occurrence on the streets, so as a young lad of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I would have been involved in many of the riots that were occurring in local areas, the, the so-called no go areas had just been breached by the British army but there was still an awful lot of resistance to any British army presence, RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] presence, in nationalist areas, and I would have been involved in the opposition to that presence which largely involved throwing stones, bottles, petrol bombs and whatever else came to hand.¹¹

In his socialisation process, this republican points out the importance of Fianna, which he joined at a young age and where he started his ideological indoctrination: ‘The purpose of the youth organisation, Fianna Éireann, was to prepare young men to progress into the ranks of the IRA at a later stage, so there would have been a certain amount of education within the Fianna Éireann, although it wasn’t anything comprehensive or it wasn’t very sophisticated. It would have focused very heavily on the republican tradition within Irish history. Apart from that our main job would have been selling the likes of the Republican News, acquiring resources within a particular area for our own group and for the IRA mainstream active service units, providing some sort of backup for the local IRA. The Fianna, quite often, was a source of scouts for the IRA, they would watch the area for local volunteers, they would inform volunteers if the Brits were in the area, they would ensure that the area was safe for local volunteers to move about either individually or with weaponry and they would play a very peripheral role in some IRA operations.’¹² John Nixon, another ex-member of the republican movement who, prior to joining the Official IRA, also joined the youth wing of the group, explains the activities which 15- or 16-year-olds carried out in Fianna: ‘I was first introduced to the use of weapons. Along with other members and circle of friends we went to different camps and stuff like that there down south. We learnt about explosives then and weapons training.’¹³

In the opinion of volunteer Albert, for most of his fellow members the republican tradition was not the main reason that they joined the IRA. In his own case, both events on the ground and ideological reasons influenced his decision: ‘I was also largely influenced by events on the ground, but I was very susceptible to those events because of my background, so I think there was a little bit of both. I certainly had an influence, a republican influence from within the family, it made me susceptible to joining.’¹⁴ It is interesting to note how this activist refers to the ‘instinctive’ nature of his motivations and the lack of any ‘real understanding’ of the political situation despite the intensity of a conflict which meant that ‘you were fighting in the streets every day’. Such statements are particularly important and very typical of the attitude of this generation of republicans, as is shown by the testimony of Anthony McIntyre, a former member of the Provisional IRA who was born in 1957 and who spent seventeen years in prison:

Very early in the conflict or even prior to the conflict I had been told by my father about the IRA. We never knew where it was and we didn’t know anybody in it. This was prior to 1969. My father used to tell me about it fighting the B Specials [a police unit] and he would tell me about the IRA carrying out the Raglin Street ambush on a B Special tender. Raglin Street was in the Lower Falls. So my father used to tell me about these things and they were always things that I remembered, and about Rocky Burns getting killed by the RUC and about the IRA killing an RUC member called Pig Maneelly. So these are all things that when I grew up developed in my mind. My dad told me one time about serving time with Joe Cahill in the prison. The problem with that was that my Da didn’t tell me that Joe Cahill was serving time for killing an RUC man. And my dad was serving his for stealing two soda farls. So my father would have romanticised things very much.

So coming into 1969 and I was maybe eleven, twelve, I had an idea what the IRA was. I had a romanticised concept of the IRA and the IRA was something that defended Catholics and killed or shot at B Specials and RUC type people. 1969, the outbreak of the troubles in 1969 I was living in a mixed area on the Lower Ormeau Road – we lived in 23 Baggot Street. And in 1969, when the troubles broke out, it was always said that there was an absence of IRA weaponry. But what I recall was that a man named Jimmy Martin, in August 1969, brought a Sten gun to our home in 23 Baggot Street and left the Sten gun with my father who was to use it in the event that the area was attacked by loyalists. My sister Dolores told me all about this because my Da didn’t want me knowing in case I told all my mates that we had a gun. She knew and my ma knew. So, this was the sort of idea that I grew up with: that the IRA gave guns to people to protect areas. And we were very young. There had been gun battles, there had been people killed, the RUC had shot people, they had shot a child – Cornelius Rooney, was it? Or Patrick Rooney, in Divis flats. So that was all helping to shape my consciousness and from that time I was very pro republican without knowing what republicanism actually was.

(. . .) 1971 I would have been, I was interested in IRA bombs going off, and you know when the first soldier was shot dead on, I think the 5th or 6th of February 1971. I was very interested in all types of IRA activities and I was very anti-British, very anti-loyalist but it was a young youthful thing. (. . .) Sometime in the Spring of ’71 I joined Na Fianna Éireann and it was the Official Na Fianna Éireann because there was no Provisionals in our area or at least we didn’t know there were. But we left and didn’t stay in it all that long, left and throughout all that time I was involved in rioting, keeping watch for IRA people doing favours, for Provisionals or Officials – anybody that wanted us to do anything. (. . .) When I turned sixteen, shortly after I turned sixteen, I applied to join the Provisional IRA and I joined the Provisional IRA about . . ., in the Autumn of 1973 and was immediately operational.¹⁵

Like volunteer Albert, McIntyre confirms that Fianna, which he joined first, was totally subordinated to the IRA. In addition, he shows the speed with which, as occurred with many other activists, there was a rapid movement from a situation in which he had ‘a romanticised concept of the IRA’, seeing oneself as ‘very pro-republican without knowing what republicanism actually was’, to the commission of crimes in the name of the republican cause. As McIntyre indicates, straight after joining the organization at the age of sixteen he began to take part in all sorts of operations: ‘bomb attacks, gun battles, sniping, arson, robberies, hijackings, whatever we did’. These factors are very important when examining the path followed by this volunteer after joining the IRA, which led him to serve many years in prison until he was released in 1992. This same person, who was capable of committing the type of crimes that he mentions, allegedly in order to obtain a political goal, then summarises the reasons for his behaviour, revealing an ideological immaturity that was very common among activists: ‘I remember when I was arrested in 1974 and the RUC were transporting me from Donegal Pass to Town Hall Street to be charged. And an RUC man said to me “why are you a republican?” I said, “to unite Ireland”. I was growling at him. He said “kid, why do you want to unite Ireland?” I just stopped talking and I realised then that I stopped talking because I didn’t know why I wanted a united Ireland, but I was going to be stubborn with him.’¹⁶

‘Fuck, somebody has given me a gun, this is great’

Youth appears to be one of the main reasons that membership of the IRA was perceived as being an ‘emotional’ experience. This is clear from the testimony of Gerard Hodgkins, born in 1959, who was sentenced to fourteen years in prison before he had reached the age of eighteen. After admitting that ‘I wouldn’t have got in...