Reconstruction of the conflict: IRA foundation in the British military assessments

Abstract

The paper examines the views of the British military on the process of becoming one of the first paramilitary organizations in the history - the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Special attention is paid to how the British military was one of the first to try to explain this new phenomenon. The paper analyzes the reasons for the British military’s rejection of such concepts as «guerrilla warfare», «Irish rebels», etc. The main reasons that formed the views of the British military on the IRA as a criminal group and a «gang of murderers» are investigated (the need for counter-propaganda against the Irish and some British media of the time; the fundamental atypy of both the Anglo-Irish conflict and the Irish Republican army; the weakness of the British military intelligence in Ireland, whose employees were later able to approach the answer to the question of the IRA origin). The methodological basis of the paper, which helps to understand the British military’s misunderstanding of the IRA phenomenon, is the theory of the Irish historian P. Hart, who argues that the insurgency as a whole always has three ways of development: passive waiting, defense and attack. It is the choice of one of the three paths that determines what form the conflict will take and how power relations in paramilitary groups will be redefined.