The Provisional IRA

From Insurrection to Parliament

Tommy McKearney

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783718726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the underlying reasons behind the formation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), its development, where this current in Irish republicanism is at present and its prospects for the future. Tommy McKearney, a former IRA member who was part of the 1980 hunger strike, challenges the misconception that the Provisional IRA was only, or even wholly, about ending partition and uniting Ireland. He argues that while these objectives were always the core and headline demands of the organisation, opposition to the old Northern Ireland state was a major dynamic for the IRA's armed campaign. As he explores the makeup and strategy of the IRA he is not uncritical, examining alternative options available to the movement at different periods, arguing that its inability to develop a clear socialist programme has limited its effectiveness and reach. This authoritative and engaging history provides a fascinating insight into the workings and dynamics of a modern resistance movement.

1

Police Batons Respond to Demand for Civil Rights

THE GENESIS OF NORTHERN IRELAND SOCIETY AND THE SIX-COUNTY STATE

Frankie and his father had mixed views about the value of their trip as they travelled towards Derry that Saturday morning in October 1968. The Unionist government had never shown any inclination to listen to reasoned argument during the 48 years it had ruled over Northern Ireland. Nor had it ever shown any inclination to treat all of its population equally. In fact, it had always displayed a robust enthusiasm for discriminating against its minority by whatever means it felt appropriate or convenient.

A determination to preserve its position had been made clear over the preceding months when the state’s armed police officers had overseen a violent eviction of squatters from local government-owned property in Caledon, Co. Tyrone. The incident had drawn considerable interest in Northern Ireland. A married couple with several young children, the Goodfellows, had finally lost patience with Dungannon Rural District Council authorities and along with Nationalist Party politician Austin Currie and members of the local Republican Club¹ occupied a house in the newly built estate. The family were natives of the area and had been on the council’s housing waiting list for years, only to be turned down once again for a tenancy. On this occasion, Dungannon Rural District Council had decided to overlook the Goodfellow family in favour of a young single Protestant girl, Emily Beattie, who worked as secretary to a Unionist-supporting local government official. As a subsequent British government inquiry noted:

Miss Beattie took possession of her house on the 13th June. She was 19 years old, a Protestant, and secretary to the local Councillor’s Solicitor, who was also a Unionist Parliamentary candidate living in Armagh. The Councillor’s explanation for giving her the house was that in effect he was re-housing her family who lived in very poor conditions; also he had expected her to be married before she took possession of the house. In fact she did marry soon afterwards … In concentrated form the situation expressed the objections felt by many non-Unionists to the prevailing system of housing allocations in Dungannon Rural District Council. By no stretch of the imagination could Miss Beattie be regarded as a priority tenant. On 18th June, within a few days of Miss Beattie taking possession, the Goodfellow family, squatting next door, were evicted with full television coverage. Mr. Currie² had protested at all levels against the allocation to Miss Beattie, and raised the matter on the adjournment in the Northern Ireland House of Commons on 19th June 1968. He received no satisfaction, and accordingly formally occupied Miss Beattie’s house with two others on 20th June, until in the presence of policemen, a few hours later they were evicted by Miss Beattie’s brother who, himself a policeman, was to become a resident in the same house.³

The squatting and subsequent eviction was such a blatant piece of discriminatory housing allocation that it provoked a 3,000-strong protest march from Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, which was planned to culminate in Frankie’s hometown of Dungannon. Unlike a more normal democratic society that had been alerted to wrongdoing among its public servants, the Northern Ireland government did not respond to the Dungannon march by ordering an investigation to be followed rapidly by correction. Instead, the minister with responsibility for security ordered the police to stop the protest march entering the town, ostensibly in case it might provoke a violent reaction from a right-wing counter demonstration organised by the Revd Ian Paisley.

There appeared little likelihood that a follow-up protest march organised for Derry to highlight similar behaviour by the local authority there, would achieve any greater success than that in Co. Tyrone. Frankie and his father were not typical of the main body of the protesters gathered in Duke Street in Derry. They were old school Republicans sceptical of the ultimate value of a totally democratic and constitutional attempt to change the fundamentals of the Northern Ireland state and society. As far as they were concerned, the Unionist regime had an unshakable commitment to retaining power at all costs and would not listen to a well-presented case for democratic reform if for no other reason than that it had never done so in the past.

As the pair moved towards the assembly point in Duke Street, they fell into conversation with others on their way to join the march that, drawing inspiration from the United States, was being billed as a civil rights demonstration. The fundamental weakness of the Stormont regime, they were saying, was its inability to accommodate democratic reform. A well-supported campaign demanding that everybody in Northern Ireland receive the same standard of treatment as people in the rest of the UK would prove impossible for a regime claiming loyalty to London to refuse. As far as Frankie and his father were concerned, this was only ostensibly a plausible argument, because the Unionist government in Belfast was not known to subject itself to so-called British standards of behaviour. More to the point, they said, what happens if the march is banned and we just go home as we did in Dungannon? Does anybody in Britain, or America, or even our neighbours in the Republic of Ireland care what happens in the northern part of Ireland?

An hour later, as the police riot squad began to viciously beat the marching demonstrators, it seemed to Frankie that his fears and scepticism were well justified. Perhaps it even appeared to the RUC men carrying out the beating that everything was as it should be within their perceived remit, as they lashed out at those that dared defy the ruling authority. The Catholic minority, they believed, tended to get out of control from time to time. Those given responsibility for protecting the state were, they understood, called upon from time to time to administer the type of punishment and retribution that would remind the minority that they remained in Northern Ireland on sufferance of the province’s political ruling class – the Unionist Party.

All might well have been as normal in Northern Ireland that Saturday if a camera crew from RTÉ⁴ in Dublin had not turned up unexpectedly to cover the event and subsequently broadcast around the world, scenes of unrestrained police violence in a part of the United Kingdom. Among those being beaten by the police was a Westminster MP, Gerry Fitt. Amazingly, at the time, Unionism and its police force did not recognise the damage it had inflicted upon itself. Only a truly reactionary ruling clique could be so unaware of the message it was sending to the rest of the world, but that was what the old Unionist regime was – a backward-looking group, more typical of the nineteenth-century era of empire than of 1960s Britain. The scenes of state brutality on that October day in Derry were a public manifestation of the nature of the Northern Irish state and just as important, much of what was wrong with Northern Irish society.

Northern Ireland was an anomaly, an aberration and a relic of empire. Constitutionally, it was an integral part of the United Kingdom yet, alone among the regions, it had its own parliament and one in which, by custom and practice, central government neither interfered nor advised. This arrangement meant that London had a duty of care for an area over which it did not exercise control and held final responsibility for an administration that could and did practice governance of a kind that was far from the norm in other parts of the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland’s ruling class at the time was a mixture of businessmen, retired military officers and landed aristocrats. The Government of Ireland Act established Northern Ireland as a political entity in 1920 and for the following 53 years, its government was composed almost exclusively of Unionist Party members. Their method and style of governing during that period had been established by practice during the previous century, when an unwritten and perverted form of social contract between a Protestant elite and a Protestant working class had evolved and developed in the aftermath of the turbulence of the revolutionary 1790s. In order to wean Northern Irish Presbyterians away from supporting the type of democratic Republicanism that had caused them to come out in open insurrection against the Crown and the local ruling class at the end of the eighteenth century, the Northern Irish establishment practiced systematic discrimination in favour of Protestant workers and the rural poor. This did not mean that all Protestants became wealthy or even comfortable. What it did mean was that they received first refusal on what little was available in terms of employment, housing and local government influence.

As part of this process, there existed a regular practice of visiting ‘disciplinary violence’ on the Catholic population if they showed any sign of questioning the status quo.⁵ Andrew Boyd, writing in Holy War in Belfast, pointed out that ‘Of the 3,000 workmen in the Belfast shipyards at that time [1886], not more than 200 were Catholics. Most of the others were Orangemen who believed that if Ireland got Home Rule the Catholics would persecute the Protestants. This is what Randolph Churchill meant by the “Orange Card”.’⁶

The demands of capitalism, which required a compliant and cheap workforce, ensured that Northern Irish society did not become exclusively Protestant. A significant Roman Catholic minority in the North East acted as a reserve army of labour, filling vacancies at boom times and holding down wages at other periods. As a result, labour costs in Northern Ireland remained lower than in Britain. Unsurprisingly, this source of cheap labour alienated Protestant workers. Coupled with their ancient fears of Papacy, this led to a situation of deep and growing hostility between two groups who would surely, under different circumstance, have found common cause in the pursuit of improvements in working conditions.

Ongoing hostility between the two groups of workers in Belfast created a situation where Protestant working-class areas became redoubts of Unionism and opponents of any move towards home rule in Ireland. Violent Protestant working-class opposition to Home Rule served a twin purpose for the ruling establishment. On one hand, it raised the spectre of widespread civil disturbance in the event of Home Rule being enacted without the dominant political class having to dabble in illegality. On the other hand, it established one of the unspoken rules of life in Ulster: the Catholic residents of Belfast and surrounding districts were to be held hostage to the ‘good behaviour’ of their co-religionists elsewhere in the province.

In spite of the deep and obvious hostility between sections of the Belfast working class throughout much of the nineteenth century, the ruling elite in the city could not be absolutely sure of the permanency of this situation. Worryingly, from their point of view, was the very real evidence of the working class finding common cause. Their worst fears appeared to have been realised in 1907 when Liverpool trade unionist James Larkin organised dockworkers and carters in the city and called a general strike. If the sight of thousands of Protestant and Catholic workers joined in unity frightened the ruling order in the early days of the strike, the refusal thereafter of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC⁷) to protect strike-breakers drove them to panic.

Significantly, the ruling class found it necessary (not to mention possible) to have the regular British Army called in to regain control of the city. Equally significant and with little justification, the British Army sent a cavalry patrol on to the Catholic Falls Road resulting in a confrontation that led to the death of three residents and the wounding of many others. The inevitable riot that followed was quickly deemed a Fenian⁸ uprising by the Unionist press and propagandists. Protestant workers, believing the press reports, withdrew support for the strike and thus ended an opportunity to overcome divisions within labour ranks in Belfast.

The ruling class was relieved by the collapse of the 1907 strike but undoubtedly realised the risk to their position posed by any diminution of the prevailing order in Ulster. These fears were not assuaged in 1919 when 40,000 Belfast engineering workers went on strike for a shorter working week.⁹ When the Six-County state was established a few months later in 1920, Unionist founding fathers were greatly concerned about the possibility of working-class unity. This was very evident in July 1920, when a coordinated assault was launched on Belfast’s Catholic workers. Over a brief few days, 11,000 Catholic workers were evicted from their places of work in what was the beginning of a calculated drive to subdue that section of society. Significantly, at the same time and by the same forces of reaction, approximately 1,850¹⁰ Protestant trade union activists were expelled from their workplaces in order to ensure that there would be no effective element within the workforce attempting to overcome sectarianism and unite Belfast’s working class. The lessons of 1907 and 1919 had not been forgotten by the Unionist hierarchy and measures were put in place to reduce the possibility of working-class unity recurring in the new Northern Ireland. With hundreds of people killed in civil disturbances and thousands more forced to flee their homes, there would be no early reconciliation. The bloody events surrounding the northern state’s foundation guaranteed that Unionism’s wealthy ruling elite would remain in charge for decades afterwards.

The new Northern Ireland state was built upon a society that had developed its divisive characteristics throughout the nineteenth century and was governed by a local ruling class sharply attuned to playing the sectarian game to its own advantage. This, coupled with a fear of their southern neighbours and a nagging suspicion of the intentions of the government in London, meant that the new state and its government were aggressive but edgy, arrogant yet unconfident.

Northern Ireland’s governing class believed that their state would only survive as a separate entity if its Protestant population remained unified and politically committed to the union with Great Britain. Any dilution of the bond between working-class and ruling-class Protestants would risk the future of the state. At a distance of only 13 years after Belfast’s 1907 general strike and at a time when Bolshevism was undermining old certainties across Europe, Northern Ireland’s founding fathers felt it necessary and prudent to reinforce well-practised tactics of discriminatory behaviour in order to retain the loyalty of a majority within the working-class and rural poor. By granting privileged status to one section of the population, the ruling Unionist Party enjoyed a comfortable majority that it would not have had if normal class politics had prevailed in the region.

At the time of Northern Ireland’s foundation in 1920, the government of its first Prime Minister James Craig wanted an army to protect the new state. Central government in London refused to allow the raising of a second army within the UK and was unwilling to have its regular force ‘sub-contracted’ out to a regional parliament. James Craig was forced therefore to retain the old RIC practice of a police force acting also as an armed militia for the defence of the state. To guarantee the loyalty of its new police force, now known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the Northern Ireland government quietly ensured that recruits were overwhelmingly Protestant and Unionist. The full-time regular force was backed up by an exclusively Protestant, 20,000-strong, armed reserve officially named the Ulster Special Constabulary but widely known as the ‘B Specials’, who were less tightly controlled, were often undisciplined and offensive and were on occasions willing to use lethal force to curtail the Catholic population.

A system of control through discriminatory practices that had begun in the immediate aftermath of the foundation of Northern Ireland was adapted and refined in the years that followed the Second World War. Britain’s post-war Labour government had introduced sweeping social reforms that led to increases and improvements in the social welfare system. Programmes of state-funded social housing, free health care and education and improvements in benefits to the unemployed altered the nature of Britain and of Northern Ireland.

With local government being responsible for the provision of social housing and central government providing social security for the unemployed, the Unionist leadership feared that its carefully crafted and balanced system of structural discrimination would be endangered. As the programme was being rolled out in Britain, the Stormont regime worked to ensure that its grip on local government would not be threatened. Its local government agencies initially stalled as best they could the implementation of the package and thereafter allocated houses and other assets on a sectarian basis.

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