The IRA, 1968-2000

An Analysis of a Secret Army

J. Bowyer Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136333156
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Based on thousands of interviews over 35 years with the leaders and members of the Republican movement and the IRA itself, as well as the Irish, British and Americans involved in the Troubles, the focus of this study is on the workings of an organization involved in armed struggle.

CHAPTER ONE

The Irish Arena

THE IRISH STAGE

The formal arena of any armed struggle is what the military call the battlefield, a matter of terrain and weather, and for the shrewd, especially with the rise of people's wars, includes political and cultural conditions as considerations. In most military campaigns the physical plays a major, often a predominant, role. Battles are fought over civilians, through cities, between big battalions, by those who neither know the local language nor care about the customs of the enemy but rather seek the high ground or a killing box.

In an insurrection or a rebellion the terrain remains but the historical and cultural factors, more elusive, more difficult to chart, matter more. The more unconventional, the more covert the struggle, the more these factors matter. In Ireland at times, it seems that these are all that matter. The lanes off the Falls Road in Belfast or the unapproved roads along the border are always overshadowed by history and dreams. Everyone on the island becomes a player, has a role, displays assumptions and agenda. The Irish terrain is rarely considered as an arena. Ireland is simply there, so that what matters most is not the hills or even the border but the Irish — and all the Irish are not even on the island.

The battle in Ireland and elsewhere involves everyone, even and especially those who do not want to be involved; the English family in Leeds or the old Irish farmer in Cork. There are no innocent people, no one is isolated. An armed struggle involves everyone's assumptions about the intangibles. The arena is shaped by perception more than geography or institutions. The Irish arena is part found and part made and seldom static, hard to map, difficult to assess, different for all those who see the countryside through special spectacles. And everyone wears special prescription lens, has a particular perception of the reality of the arena.

In an armed struggle this perception of the involved is the crucial factor. The battle map is not simply construed from the entire physical and demographic milieu that forms the stage, but from ideas. In Ireland there are ideas about history and reality. There are unstated assumptions. There are the habits and totems of the tribe. There are roles sought and roles found. All this moulds those who fill the stage, may shape the very size of the stage and always imposes on the action.

This is not special to Ireland of the Troubles. In every battle arena each actor has a heritage, a mix of traditions and attitudes, languages and shared or disputed premises and propositions. The physical arena is real enough but history shapes its meaning. History as written by rebels authorizes physical force — from a ditch if need be. And the culture of the times too may authorize such force, even as it generates general outrage at murder from a ditch. Often this strange landscape of legitimacy is hardly noted nor long remembered by the man waiting in ambush or his victim or the audience, but it is far more important than the ditch.

Such a landscape is the really important arena, the one that depends on perception. Such perception, that of the gunman, that of Irish constituency, even that of the victim, provides the setting for conflict, often channels the action. And that action moves. Mountains can seldom be moved but perception is never static. So the Irish arena is a flux but often one with known currents, now strong, now cold, intermittent but tangible.

The stage for an armed struggle is rich with resonances, restrictions, rationalizations, opportunities, contradictions, especially contradictions, as well as implacable reality. Much of this reality is, of course, really real, not imagined by the committed but found on ordinance maps and on the budget's bottom line, and much is not in dispute. Reality is not so easy to adjust. The actors' views cannot change the furniture of the stage, cannot change the historical and cultural factors at will, change the arena simply by desire or in the service of a dream.

In any armed struggle the physical terrain may actually be opened to some tangible adjustment; a new road here and a watch tower there, this forest defoliated and that province brought into the battlefield. What really matters — perception of that reality — can be adjusted. The mountains may not be moved by faith but much of the arena is constantly being reflowed by those with varying faiths; now the mountains become irrelevant and later impenetrable. Thus just as the hills must be climbed by the guerrilla, so too must the institutions of man and the legacy of history be considered — the perception of the challenge of each hill.

The family or the tribe is real, imposes bounds and an agenda on all within the arena. What is seen on the television or heard in the pub adds up, changes the total flux. The historian may try to be scientific and the patriot committed but none can deny the events, only explain them. There is always an actual text, often an agreed text, at least a chronology. Few dispute the dates anymore than the mountains are denied as real. There also exists — in theory — an Ireland just beyond touch, an Ireland shaped by past generations, rich in detail, singular and universal, a creation of the mind available to all with the proper tools: some assume these to be scientific, scholarly instruments, precise, amoral, effective, and others art's lyres available only to poets and true believers. Everyone knows that there was once another Ireland that bestows experience, example, rationalization, and access to the concerned. The faithful often deconstruct it and build their own reality, but they must use real bits. Reality can only be remodelled not razed.

In the Irish armed struggle, the key has for generations been a special militant Republican view of reality that has been based on an analysis of history. The volunteers, astute or simple, old or young, look at the arena and come to three vital answers to the crucial questions: What is wrong? What must be done? What is to come? The British are the problem. The armed struggle is the means. The Irish Republic will be the solution. These are the three great insights. For the rebel all arena reality is shaped to these conclusions. Reality becomes an answer to these questions. History becomes grievance, the present latent with promise, the future a certainty. And so is formed the Republican arena with real mountains and conjured meaning.

The other actors have various answers, have their own assumptions about their own roles and rights, their own Ireland: not only Irish Republicans rely on strip mining the past to rationalize present policies. The Irish nationalists are apt to agree that the British must go and that a united nation is the goal, perhaps even a Republic as imagined, but few any longer approve of physical force or the armed struggle — it has cost too much and put too much at risk. All those dedicated to war or politics, all the responsible and concerned, all the ambitious have views that shape the past and look to the future. Those others, the voters, the congregations and marchers, the sometimes participants in events, the watchers and commentators are shaped by perception even as they assume their world is real, history's only heir. Ireland as arena is thus rich, manifold, contradictory. All arenas, not simply Ireland, are conglomerates, layered, various, largely shaped by perception even if ordered by the tangibles.

In Ireland the everyday people, not without importance, seem almost a part of the landscape. They focus on their own rounds, find satisfactory explanation in a private world of jobs sought, matches attended, daily rounds, exams passed, and films seen. Even if they are not replete with ideas or ambitions, they are vital components of the whole, supply constituencies, tolerate or deny, benefit or at times react. For Mao they were the ocean for the guerrilla, but in Ireland they play a different role. These, the people, the Irish, scattered on the island and in the Diaspora, mostly without great commitment or articulated assumptions, collectively supply the cultural medium for all. A great many of these people are touched by, a few attracted to, the Provisional IRA's struggle, not often or not to any great effect; but they are on the stage, often crowd the stage.

Within the general arena, a composite of individual perceptions and intractable data, the IRA rebel must adapt to this reality of the other Irish, adapt the dream, adjust to effect the form of the underground, the movement's programme and the priorities. The cultural arena composed of everyone's perceptions is recognized as vital. This flux of ideas and attitudes, rationalizations and assumptions, is not neutral; for there is constant adjustment, even by those with little interest in the armed struggle.

Those most involved in the armed struggle, the gunmen and politicians, those responsible for order or for chaos, must read their environment, both the maps and the hearts of the people. For the IRA the reading is crucial -often the movement has had no other assets but the imagined power of that reading. The IRA perception discounts visible assets in contrast to the power of the dream: history and justice will triumph over the orthodox army or the power of sterling. So the tangible is bought at discount while sold by the authorities at a mark-up. And nearly everyone until too late is inclined to believe that history, their Irish history, imperial history, or world history, the times and tides, favour them, not just the bold or the brutal. And in the case of the Republicans, history adjusted to the imperatives of the dream.

Republican reality is thus imposed out of necessity. It is a process not unknown to the loyalist paramilitaries and many Unionists as well, who have long invented for present, largely psychological, purpose their past and even some of their enemies’; but unlike the Republicans their future is to be merely the imagined past made actual. The Unionist looks back to the future. The loyalist kills to prevent not to achieve, to deny, to counter power.

Those in power at the centre need neither vision nor perception, need convince no one. They have books and maps, records and, if need be, the capacity to enforce their interpretation. In Irish matters those in London or Dublin cannot dismiss the reality of Unionist fears or the mortar bombs landing on Heathrow, but they also must take account of the cost of social service and find reasoned accommodations to all the lethal fears and dreams loose in Ireland. Westminster measures out Ireland in minute papers and flow charts, compromises urged and negotiating formulas suggested. Few in London, few in Dublin, can imagine an alternative reality, another legitimacy. The IRA may be more effective and more sophisticated but is as unrealistic as the Ulster Volunteer Force. For the legitimate all such gunmen are the mob, the mob as conspiracy, the mob as threat. Their Ireland, real or proposed, is a nightmare. And so the seeming moderation of Sinn Féin is suspect.

In London, in any case, very few care greatly about Ireland, assume justice is British and history advocate. Ireland is not so much nightmare as inconvenience. Even the charms of a peace process have been lost to old quarrels and new confrontations — interrupted from time to time by sectarian murder and choreographed riots. In Dublin the last generation has been an accelerated course in deconstructing patriot history, advocating new directions, shaping a new Ireland and one not without reality — a tangible Ireland if less than perfect. There is new money, a new young Ireland focused on Europe, a conviction that the peace process must be made to work so that real, everyday life can go forward. Dublin's Ireland is newly minted and still an aspiration but increasingly visible in the Republic, in the 26-counties.

Those deeply involved in Northern Ireland, however, find their assets not in recognition or responsibility but in precedent and presumption. They live within another arena. And so few in those six-counties are free of the dreams, traditions, the power of the past that Dublin and London wish gone. By necessity the everyday in the six-counties must live too amid dreams and fancies, live on a stage filled with irregular armies, exist within an arena not of choice but all too real.

For most nationalists a generation ago the Ireland of Seán Lemass and Captain Terrance O'Neill was well past any armed struggle. There was no need, no prospects, no takers. There was no point in any nationalists North or South saying ‘no’ to a tolerable reality that only time could adjust. The Unionists might be fearful and certainly the loyalists were — always fearful that the arena might still be ripe, that the IRA might still be the monster. In 1962, at the end of the IRA's limited border campaign, it appeared that at last reality had sterilized the Irish arena. Romantic Republicanism was dead and in the grave.

Then came the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and Stor-mont's hard response that began to erode civil order in the province culminating in the pogroms of August 1969. Dublin GHQ was interested but predicted neither the pogroms nor even then imagined a role for the IRA that would lead to a campaign. The traditionalists and hard men saw the arena differently. They wanted only a change — and suddenly found one a generation early Ireland was ripe for an armed struggle, a campaign. So the seven men who met around the table to establish a provisional IRA in the winter of 1962 knew, had known since August, that Ireland, unexpectedly, was ready and their traditional reading was valid.

The others, various nationalists, North and South, Dublin GHQ, the radicals and the conventional, were seized on defence, on London's responsibilities, on protest and programmes, on peripheral matters. The Provisional IRA godfathers and their faithful knew that objective reality was shaped to allow defence, provocation, and an IRA campaign. They undertook the provisional leadership of the real Republican movement that would surely respond as expected to opportunity. In this the Provos were right enough to begin, to pursue an armed struggle — all that militant Republicans had ever wanted. And the arena was ripe. The Official IRA was wrong and the agitators and radicals were wrong and most commentators and nearly all of the responsible were wrong — all wrong, and for the first time in living memory the gunmen were right.

What mattered not at all was the terrain, the size of the battlefield, the reality of the grievances that could be counted out by statistics, or the checklist in counter-insurgency manuals. What mattered was that the Army Council caught the tide while others sought to divert it. The IRA assumptions matched objective reality.

The Provisional saw the opportunity to turn aspiration into process, the dream into reality. The dream did not lead to victory, not even, not especially after a generation, but rather to a protracted and complex campaign. This was in 1970 all the IRA wanted and this they achieved. In large part the campaign was a result not of the correlation of forces but of the Republican assumptions about the nature of the arena. What mattered was what the Provisional IRA assumed mattered: the mix within the arena favoured Republican aspirations and assets.

THE ARENA ANALYSED

The Mix

The real arena, then, is reflected in the mind of the involved; an image partly physical but mostly shaped by perception. It is an environment descended from history, moulded by present forces, part real, part illusion, partly visible and so tangible. The material stage for any armed struggle holds a special combination of history and culture, a vulnerability, an aura of possibility.

Even in August 1969 not many outside the core of the radical Irish Republicans were so bold or so foolish as to imagine Ireland ripe for an armed struggle. The few potential IRA rebels assumed that since there had been irregular campaigns in the past there could be ones in the future. The crucial factor was not the size of the island, the litany of grievance, the misery of the Northern nationalists but the potential toleration for armed action. Was the arena of the Irish mind ripe? Certainly it was not when 1969 opened but obviously so by the end of the year: obvious that is to the Provisional IRA, who wanted not only an armed defence but also an armed struggle. No map could indicate such considerations. Subsequently, considerable analytical effort has been focused on the nature of the arena during 1970 — after that when the campaign was irreversible the involved have tended to read the flux as authorization for special pleading — rationalizations for compromise or killing or persisting or doing nothing at all. What has intrigued analysts has been a review of the precipitating conditions — and in retrospect how these might have been adjusted.

By 1972 the Provisional IRA had moved from defence to provocation, and on to the campaign — as planned. By then conditions changed, so that in Northern Ireland the arena generated various loyalist paramilitary organizations. With historical precedents but no living tradition, the loyalists found unity of organization more difficult than unity of purpose. Efforts to shape a conventional mass movement foundered and ultimately loyalists who insisted on action chose the gun over politics, the covert over convention. It was the first real loyalist effort from the bottom up so that as in the case of the Provisionals the men of no property came into their own. These loyalists were on stage to stay, for they had found the arena congenial. Splintered, quarrelling, often corrupt, the loyalists without a dream but often with recourse to the gun persisted because their tradition embodied the same fears. The orthodox Unionists, in fact, deployed all manner of means from conventional politics, through a general strike, to armed agitation, not always to advantage. At the same time their arena tolerated, perhaps encouraged, sectarian murder; not an armed struggle but a vigilante campaign.

Most rebels believe that there is room in a specific rebel niche for only one species to survive. Their movement is fit to survive; no other. The loyalist paramilitaries quarrelled over spoils and precedents and matters of person, but generally were one on policies: sectarian violence deployed to ease communal anguish. The Provisionals, beneficiary of a revealed truth, had more serious matters to consider. The Provos did not admit that the people were not with them — only that they would not join the armed struggle. As soon as possible, the IRA was provocative by intent thus assuring the support and toleration of their Northern constituency in their role as the defenders of last recourse. It was a role made easier by the policies of the security forces and the limits of practical politics to answer psychological nationalist grievances. As long as fear of renewed pogroms and the resentment at security harassment continued the IRA could wage a campaign indefinitely — and so inspire a loyalist backlash.

The IRA Army Council watched potential nationalist rivals closely, co-opted or intimidated, maintained a consensus. The arena of the Provos — or that of the loyalist paramilitaries — is a matter of perception, assumption, and the real. Few can predict the future exactly — which door will be open to the man on the run — only that mostly doors will be open. That is the real. The orthodox recognize the reality of the armed struggle — the bombs and the bodies — but often not the nature of the arena. Gunmen were often considered criminals or mad, their dream mere rationale to murder, their campaign a refusal to accept reality, compromise, or the good will of others. The conventional and conservative assumed only the demented or the wicked would kill with so little hope of success. The IRA, however, from the first felt success was sure — history vindicated the strugg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface
• Introduction: The Nature of the Armed Struggle
• 1. The Irish Arena
• 2. Analysis and Reality
• 3. Ideology: The Dream Structured
• 4. Recruitment
• 5. Individuals
• 6. Organization
• 7. Command and Control
• 8. Maintenance
• 9. Communications
• 10. Deployment
• 11. Intelligence
• 12. Campaign
• 13. The Enemy
• 14. Endgame
• Epilogue
• Sources
• Index