Irish Republican Terrorism and Politics

A Comparative Study of the Official and the Provisional IRA

Kacper Rekawek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136725975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This book examines the post-ceasefire evolutions and histories of the main Irish republican terrorist factions, and the interconnected character of politics and militarism within them.

Offering the first comparative study of the two leading Irish republican terrorist movements the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA (PIRA), this book presents the lesser-known Officials' political-military evolution and analyses whether they could have been role models for the Provisionals. Not only does it compare the terrorism and the politics of the Officials and Provisionals in the aftermath of their seminal ceasefires of 1972 and 1994, it also presents the Irish republican history in a new light and brings to the fore the understudied and disregarded Officials who called their seminal ceasefire twenty-two years before their rivals in 1972. In doing this, the work discusses whether the PIRA might have learned lessons from the bitter and ultimately unsuccessful experience of the Officials.

This book goes beyond traditional interpretations of the rivalry and competition between the two factions with the Officials usually seen as non-violent but unsuccessful and the Provisionals less politically inclined and mostly concerned with their armed struggle. Simultaneously, it dispels the myth of the alleged Provisional republican copying of their Official republican counterparts who seemed ready for a political compromise in Northern Ireland more than twenty years before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Finally, it comprehensively compares the Officials and the Provisionals within the identified key areas and assesses the two factions' differences and similarities..

This book will be of much interest to students of Irish politics, terrorism studies, security studies and politics in general.

1 Introduction

The two IRAs

Steve McQueen's British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and Camera d'Or winning film Hunger from 2008 reinstated the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the consciousness of cinema goers around the world. Its presentation of the infamous 1981 IRA hunger strike in the Maze Prison definitely is a ‘bold’, ‘fearless’ and ‘uncompromising’ work of art.¹ However, it is not the first British, Irish or even American popular feature film to discuss or include the IRA, or the so-called Northern Irish Troubles.² All of these hardly make any distinction between rival groups aspiring to the brand name of the IRA. Competing IRAs might be mentioned but these feature films focus on members, representatives or defectors from the dominant Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), the more militant faction of the Irish republican movement which was established in 1969/1970. Hardly anyone acknowledges that during the Maze Prison hunger strikes members of another IRA, the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA), were serving their prison sentences in different prisons both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland, and one of the original Provisional republican hunger strikers had in fact been a former member of the rival Officials (Hanley and Millar 2009: 397–9).

This situation is an illustration of a wider political and cultural phenomenon which associates Northern Ireland, the Troubles and Irish republicanism almost exclusively with one organisation – the PIRA. Despite its humble beginnings it grew to successfully claim the Irish republican tradition and heritage, and virtually took over the household brand names of the IRA and Sinn Fein (the political representatives of Irish republicanism). Nonetheless, its history started with a split from the ‘old’ IRA which is said to have drifted into obscurity, became ‘largely inactive’ (O'Callaghan 1998: 332), ‘largely dormant’ (Stevenson 1996: 276), ‘first off the stage’ (Arthur 1988: 50) or transformed into ‘communistic Official IRA’ (O'Doherty 1993: 58) or ‘Red IRA’ (Coogan 1970) and embarked on pilgrimages ‘for weekly briefings to Moscow or Peking’ (Sweetman 1972: 16–17).³ At the same time, as Provisional orthodoxy would have us to believe, the PIRA militarily engaged the British and Northern Irish security forces in a campaign for the unification of Ireland and by the late 1980s and early 1990s fought them to an alleged standstill (Bowyer Bell 1998, Coogan 1995, Taylor 1998). Theoretically, there could not have been a wider gap between the two factions of the Irish republican movement.

This work attempts to bridge this gap and for the first time present the two IRAs and their political representations in a comparative fashion while separately analysing their terrorist and political evolutions in the aftermath of the seminal ceasefires of 1972 (OIRA) and 1994 (PIRA). The book will focus on the extent to which the aforementioned evolutions actually differed and on the main issues the two Irish republican factions had to address in the aftermaths of their ceasefires. It aims to question the conventional Provisional republican wisdom that the two factions hardly had anything in common but also challenges the Official republican viewpoint which often reduces their Provisional counterparts to the role of sectarian imitators, plagiarists of the earlier developments within Official republicanism. It is true from the mid 1970s onwards direct comparison between the Officials and the Provisionals could yield little new knowledge as the two factions did their utmost to distance themselves from each other and performed different political manoeuvres with varying degrees of success (Rekawek 2009). Undoubtedly, the Provisionals proved more successful in the long term and their political representation, Provisional Sinn Fein (PSF), is now a government party in Northern Ireland and one of the opposition parties in the Republic of Ireland. Its members are also elected to Westminster and sit in the European Parliament. The Officials, on the other hand, are reduced to two councillors in the Republic of Ireland and a string of former members in positions of seniority within the Irish Labour Party (ILP), potentially the next party of government in Ireland.

Thus the difference in the size and success of both factions could not be more striking. For this reason the presentation of the two factions along the lines of parallel lives may not be the most appropriate and could degenerate into an attempt to compare the biblical David with Goliath. However, focusing on the organisational frameworks of the Officials and the Provisionals, that is, looking at the two IRAs and their respective political manifestations during their post-ceasefire evolutions, could help us elucidate the degree of their similarity or difference between the two. It would capture the two factions undergoing serious and far-reaching political changes and reforms while being forced to address the issue of terrorism's prominence in their ranks. Both sets of Irish republicans struggled with this and only the Provisionals convincingly terminated their reliance on terrorism or post-terrorism in 2005, which enabled that faction further political progress. The Officials, on the other hand, never proved able to finally terminate their reliance on their IRA and as a result of this saw the downfall of their political project in 1992. However, before we can make any more assumptions we need to know how the two factions actually came into being and how they got to their respective turning points of 1972 and 1992 (the Officials) and 1994 and 2005 (the Provisionals). The rest of this chapter will address the first issue against the backdrop of the worsening political situation in Northern Ireland in the 1960s which prominently contributed to the emergence of the two IRAs and their political manifestations in 1969/1970. The following chapters will analyse the terrorist (in the eyes of the Irish republicans – military) and political developments in the two most significant Irish republican factions of the second half of the twentieth century in a descriptive manner and also discuss their differences and similarities through the means of direct comparison.

The IRA and the 1960s

The two factions, led by the aforementioned respective IRAs – Official and Provisional – emerged in 1969/1970 after a serious row and an attempted coup within the Belfast IRA. In short, both were the products of a split in Irish republican ranks. Splintering is common amongst socio-political, military or militant organisations and movements, and one might actually claim that splits define Irish republicanism. This flexible, amorphous concept which incorporates influences from a broad range of ideologies has witnessed many internal conflicts, debates and disputes. Many of these were violent, and some led to the emergence of rival republican organisations which competed for the eternal Irish republican flame. Some commentators have sardonically remarked that the split is always the first item on any Irish republican agenda and there is plenty of historical evidence to support this stance (Bishop and Mallie 1987: 60).

The political reverberations of the IRA split post the Anglo-Irish war of the early 1920s, followed by the so-called anti-Treaty IRA split in the middle of that decade, are still felt in contemporary Ireland with the representatives of Fine Gael (successors of the pro-Treaty IRA), Fianna Fail (successors of the anti-Treaty IRA, political faction) and Sinn Fein (successors of the anti-Treaty IRA, militant faction) all present in the Irish parliament.⁴ The 1930s saw the emergence of the ‘left republican’ project (the Republican Congress) which reintroduced radical left-wing political thought into the realm of the Irish republicanism and attempted to engineer political activity from the movement obsessed with ritual militancy and militarism (English 1994). In the 1940s some of the former anti-Treaty IRA luminaries, like the future Nobel prize winner Sean MacBride, followed this idea and opted for political and parliamentary activity within the political system of the state they had earlier fought to undermine (Jordan 1993). This did not change the fact that the Irish republican ‘minority of the minority’ continued to rally around the traditional Irish republican banners and sincerely believed that ‘using the old methods, the old thinking’ would lead to the unification of Ireland (Garland 2007).

Ironically enough, the conflict over whether to continue with the aforementioned militant ‘methods’ and ‘thinking’ in the aftermath of yet another failed Irish republican military effort – the 1956–1962 border campaign – effectively a series of guerrilla raids launched from the Republic of Ireland into Northern Ireland, led to one of the most profound splits in the Irish republican history (Flynn 2009). Later Irish republican divisions, those of the 1980s and the 1990s which produced the still active Continuity IRA (CIRA) and the Real IRA (RIRA), were of much lesser magnitude due to the fact that the split of 1969/1970 shaped not only the future of Irish republicanism but also that of Northern Ireland, albeit not the Republic of Ireland, and transformed the minority of a scarcely existing militant but also politicised movement into the people's champions or ‘defenders’. Moreover, the post-split events also brought worldwide fame for the more militant and seemingly more traditional Irish republican ‘methods’ and ‘thinking’.

This rapid ascent into headlines did not happen accidentally. Nowadays, more than forty years after the foundation of the PIRA, one could even claim that given the political turmoil in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, the emergence or the re-emergence of Irish republican militarism was hardly a surprise. The pro-unionist Northern Irish press constantly brought news of the IRA drilling along the border and fears of yet another military campaign on behalf of the Irish republicans did not seem baseless (Patterson 1989: 96). Nonetheless, the IRA had not been the gravest threat to the existence of Northern Ireland or perhaps the preservation of the state along the same political, social, cultural and economic lines. Its place was taken by political and social unrest and, consequently, an inter-communal conflict, which began to engulf the state at least from 1964 onwards (Purdie 1990: 26–9). That is not to say that the IRA had not contributed to this threat, but in the 1960s it certainly lacked both the capacity, coordination and will to resume fighting in Northern Ireland in the mould of the futile 1956–1962 border campaign.

The aforementioned threat to Northern Ireland was both internal and external, but had little to do with the IRA frontiersmen of unionist lore. Internal because there had been no prolonged, serious non-Northern Irish involvement in it and external due to the fact that its emergence was closely co-related with events of international, if not global, magnitude. It was no coincidence that the demands for civil rights and political reform in Northern Ireland flourished simultaneously to similar campaigns around the globe. These reached their crescendo in 1968 when Martin Luther King was killed in the United States, Paris yet again saw an attempt to abolish the French government from the top of the barricades and Soviet bloc troops marched into Prague to terminate Dubcek's ‘socialism with a human face’. At the same time, civil rights marches were taking place in Northern Ireland but the successful campaign for political reform there led to the outbreak of a considerable amount of violence in that part of the United Kingdom, and was a prelude to thirty years of further conflict.

Before we move on to explore the background of the Irish republican split, which had cataclysmic consequences for the next three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, and the emergence of two Irish republicanisms, some space must be devoted to the aforementioned political and social unrest of the 1960s. In fact, it had been no ‘ordinary’ unrest due to the special circumstances it had been started in. It is true that it primarily resulted from a clash between the proponents and the opponents of what was called the civil rights movement. This movement, a plethora of groups and tendencies, united or coalesced around the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), was founded in 1967, had a seemingly non-sectarian appeal and was inspired in its tactics and strategy by the American Civil Rights Movement (Wright 1988). It might have eschewed violence but its provocative tactics and some of its loosely affiliated allies seriously offended and scared off many of the more liberal minded Protestants who could have sided with the reformists (McCann 1974: 35). In its short history, Northern Ireland hardly saw serious political reform and any attempt to ‘rock the boat’ was associated with subversives intent on destroying the state from within. The role of republican fifth column was ascribed to Northern Ireland's perennial unionist bogeyman – the IRA – allegedly numbering thousands of members and running hundreds of training camps along the border with the Republic of Ireland but in reality consisting of ‘few groups of local activist visionaries … [numbering less than] 200’ (Johnston 2006: 185–6).

Viewed from this perspective, the NICRA with its reformist demands for civil rights for the dispossessed and the disenfranchised Catholic minority, might have been regarded as the IRA in disguise. Such views were strengthened by the fact that there had indeed been serious Irish republican influence behind the civil rights campaign and an Irish republican presence in the upper echelons of the NICRA (plus IRA stewards at its marches) (Purdie 1990: 149). In fact, to a certain extent the civil rights movement was the brainchild of the Wolfe Tone Societies (WTS), the Irish republican think tank or the ‘Fabian Society to the Republican Movement’ (ibid.: 123). The Societies, which were founded around the bicentenary of Wolfe Tone's birthday in 1963 by the Irish republicans,⁵ were meant to provide both the IRA and Sinn Fein with the influx of political ideas from ‘individuals from a wide range of principled radical and pragmatic groups’ (Sinn Fein 1970a: 13). It was the WTS, although a similar idea had also been earlier endorsed by the Irish communists (Purdie 1988: 34), which stood behind the idea of the civil rights campaign and found a more than receptive audience in the leadership of the then IRA. As the border campaign clearly demonstrated, the republican movement (effectively the IRA plus a rump Sinn Fein) had little support in the Republic of Ireland and it was in no position to successfully challenge the political status quo in Northern Ireland. To achieve the latter aim, an internal, Northern Irish, political force had to appear and attempt a deep socio-economic reform of the state. The apolitical Irish republican movement, with Sinn Fein illegal in Northern Ireland, had no capacity to achieve this but was all in favour of a civil rights campaign for the most part organised by forces untainted by the Irish republican label.

In the minds of the then IRA leaders, the civil rights activists' genuine desires to see the internal reform of Northern Ireland and their own wish to see the state collapse converged, due to the fact that Irish republicans regarded Northern Ireland as unable to exist without its alleged founding pillar – discrimination against nationalists (English 2004: 89–92). In other words, by republican logic, the Protestant dominated Northern Ireland was incapable of reform, as this would effectively spell the end of the state. If this could be achieved without a single shot being fired, through the series of anti-discrimination measures supported by NICRA, then there was absolutely no reason for the IRA of the 1960s not to endorse this course of action. However, what this superficially shrewd political analysis evidently failed to take into account was the fact that there was much more to Northern Ireland than outright discrimination and sectarianism aimed at the Catholic minority.

This does not mean, however, that the political, social and economic reality of this ‘statelet’ had much in common with Western European democratic standards: ‘it is now largely uncontroversial to note that Northern Ireland was a deeply flawed entity prior to the outbreak of violence in 1968–69’ and that ‘despite the formal adherence to democratic practices … a condition of inherent political equality between the two communities existed in Northern Ireland’ (Bew et al. 2009: 21). The Catholic minority, of which only a fraction could have been described as ‘Irish republican’, suffered from different forms of social, political and economic discrimination, mostly in the fields of housing, employment and antiquated electoral practices, including a rate payers' franchise at local government level, which favoured the property owning Protestants. All of this plus a ‘complacency generated by almost half a century of one-party Unionist rule … committed to maintaining the union with Great Britain’, the highly statist character of the Northern Irish economy, general lack of interest in all matters Irish in London and the Republic of Ireland's lack of capacity to both economically or politically absorb the Six North-Western counties of the island of Ireland, completed the background to the grim reality of life in Northern Ireland for the majority of its Catholic inhabitants (Andrew 2009: 602).

Nonetheless, Northern Ireland, contrary to some opinions (Farrell 1980), had not been a quasi-apartheid state nor did it much resemble the US deep south: ‘Blacks [in the US] were subjected to far more dramatic inequalities than were Catholics [in Northern Ireland]’ (Wright 1988: 165). At the same time, many social groups and even whole social classes in different Central and Eastern European countries suffered much more direct and violent discrimination on behalf of the state than the Northern Irish Catholics (Courtois et al. 1999). The lack of inter-community strife in Northern Ireland between 1935 and the 1960s could either be used as a proof or a counterproof of the discrimination theory because one could claim that the discrimination was so dire that no outbreak of popular resentment, violent or strictly political, would have made any difference in the highly sectarian and repressive reality of Northern Ireland: whereas it could also be argued that the absence of turmoil and violence equalled the lack of discrimination.

The truth, which has already been the subject of a heated academic debate, seems to lie somewhere in the middle of the two extreme positions.⁶ It certainly is an exaggeration to invoke the South African parallel but we should not forget that under the notorious Special Powers Act the Northern Irish government could take almost any course of action it saw fit to maintain law and order in the province (Parliament of Northern Ireland 1922). The long and dark shadow of the IRA allegedly either drilling in the border hills or infiltrating the province's institutions from the outset effectively meant that this excessive and ‘siege like’ piece of legislation was primarily aimed at the non-cooperative members of the Catholic community. In addition to this, prior to the 1960s hardly any effort was made to seriously and comprehensively engage the Catholic minority in pursuit of the alteration of its political apathy, non-cooperation and, sometimes, most notably in the case of republicans and their supporters, abstentionism.

According to an orthodox version of events, the Northern Irish status quo was to continue into the 1960s when

the first generation to benefit from the 1949 Education Act had graduated from university, and the newly educated ‘Catholic’ working class articulated [their] grievances … Having obtained the right to free education, they were now to use that education to demand other rights.

(Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association 1978)

This alleged ascent of newly assertive Catholics coincided with the factual change at the top of the Official Unionist Party, the state's actual party of government, when Terence O'Neill succeeded Lord Brookeborough in 1963. The new prime minister soon gained the reputation of a moderniser who tried to reach out to the province's minority community and sought a breakthrough in frozen relations with the Republic of Ireland. However, in the eyes of the modern biographer of the civil rights movement, O'Neill's image as an ardent reformist had in fact been nothing more than a public relations charade (Prince 2007). The prime minister was ‘strong on gestures and bold statements’ but failed to offer substantial political, social and economic change to the amenable section of the Catholic minority and at the same time alienated his own party and community which began to swing towards the less consensual positions embodied by the hard-line Reverend Ian Paisley (Purdie 1990: 9–37).

In reality, O'Neill was outflanked from the right by the anti-consensual Paisley who emerged as the champion of the Protestant masses, and from the left by the NICRA. Its protest marches often led to clashes with Paisley's supporters and with the local police force, an oddity in a province with extremely low crime rates and only ‘seasonal bitterness’ between the communities (Taylor 2000: 45). That is not to say that there was no potential for an outbreak, or perhaps a reemergence of a sectarian conflict between the two communities. This potential was only made more apparent by O'Neill's rhetorical balancing act between the pro- and the anti-reformist demands, his alleged presidential and aloof style which often got him into trouble with the unionist base and his botched management of the investment drive aimed to transform and modernise North...