“Tactical use of armed struggle”: the IRA’s purpose in Irish Republican strategy, 1969–2005

THE IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMYʼS «GREEN BOOK»: POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC GOALS OF THE ORGANIZATION

On February 9, 1996, after a seventeen-month cease-fire, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) set off a bomb in East London. Less than a week later, the London police found and destroyed a bomb that the IRA had left in a telephone booth in the West End. A few days later, another IRA bomb went off on a doubledecker bus. The British government, under the leadership of John Major, asserted that it would have no official contact with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, until the paramilitary activities stopped. The government also deployed 500 additional troops in Northern Ireland. In October 1996, the IRA detonated two bombs at the British Army's headquarters in Lisburn, bringing the violent conflict back to Northern Ireland for the first time since the cease-fire. On May 1, 1997, Tony Blair was elected Great Britain's prime minister. His election brought a renewed sense of optimism and good will to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Responding to Blair's overtures, including his warning that “the settlement train is leaving, with or without them” (Hoge 1997a, A7), the IRA announced on July 19, 1997, that they had “ordered the unequivocal restoration of the cease-fire” (Clarity 1997c, 1). Soon thereafter, Sinn Féin was invited to participate in the peace talks, which reconvened on September 15, 1997.

On February 9, 1996, after a seventeen-month cease-fire, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) set off a bomb in East London. Less than a week later, the London police found and destroyed a bomb that the IRA had left in a telephone booth in the West End. A few days later, another IRA bomb went off on a doubledecker bus. The British government, under the leadership of John Major, asserted that it would have no official contact with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, until the paramilitary activities stopped. The government also deployed 500 additional troops in Northern Ireland. In October 1996, the IRA detonated two bombs at the British Army's headquarters in Lisburn, bringing the violent conflict back to Northern Ireland for the first time since the cease-fire. On May 1, 1997, Tony Blair was elected Great Britain's prime minister. His election brought a renewed sense of optimism and good will to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Responding to Blair's overtures, including his warning that “the settlement train is leaving, with or without them” (Hoge 1997a, A7), the IRA announced on July 19, 1997, that they had “ordered the unequivocal restoration of the cease-fire” (Clarity 1997c, 1). Soon thereafter, Sinn Féin was invited to participate in the peace talks, which reconvened on September 15, 1997.

‘The Armalite and the ballot box’: Sinn Fein’s electoral strategy in Northern Ireland

This article examines the interaction between the Irish political party, Sinn Fdin, and the paramilitary group known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It argues that the relationship between Sinn Féin and the IRA turns the conventional Clausewitzian understanding of political control of the military on its head. Rather, in the Irish republican movement the military has had the dominant role in devising military and political strategy and Sinn Féin's role has been to support the movement's military campaign. The article traces the stresses that this relationship has had on the political development of militant Irish republicanism from its modern emergence in 1916, and then examines the consequences these have for the future of Irish republicanism and the peace process in Northern Ireland.

This study provides a cross-national exploration of the media and public responses to the 2002 Irish Republican Army (IRA) statement of apology for the hundreds of non-combatant deaths caused by them over the past 30 years. The study explored responses to the statement in national, regional, and local news papers across the United States, England, and Northern Ireland. It was hypothesized that relational closeness to victims of the IRA campaign would affect attitudes toward the IRA apology, as would geographical closeness to the political violence in Northern Ireland; also within Northern Ireland there would be differences in attitudes toward the statement due to the ethnopolitical orientation of the newspapers' intended readership. The results broadly supported these hypotheses, with the U.S. print media being generally more positive and the English print media more negative in attitude toward the statement of apology. Also, among responses in England, those areas that had suffered directly from IRA violence tended to have the most negative reactions of all. In Northern Ireland, newspapers with a predominately Catholic readership responded to the IRA apology generally positively, whereas newspapers with a predominately Protestant readership responded generally negatively. The results illustrate difficulties facing peace processes in settings of ethnic violence and the complexity of responses to apology and forgiveness of relevant publics within and outside actual conflict areas.

On 31 August 1994, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) announced a ceasefire. Over the previous two-and-a-half decades, it had waged western Europe’s most lethal and enduring insurgency, claiming the lives of over 1,700 people. The IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ had been a key driver of ‘the Troubles’ that beset Northern Ireland; its decision to end the campaign of violence was likewise integral to an emergent peace process. Almost from the moment it was declared, commentators and historians have debated the IRA ceasefire. Why did it happen? What did it mean? Which side had blinked first in the long war between the British government and the IRA? In seeking to answer such questions, an emerging trend within the historiography aims to advance an understanding of the conflict that foregrounds IRA flexibility, as juxtaposed to British intransigence. On this reading, it was the British refusal to engage in dialogue and offer the IRA an ‘honourable’ settlement that prevented a peaceful resolution as far back as the early 1970s; conversely, it was the British decision to shift course in the late 1980s that paved the way for peace. The problem, however, is that such a narrative represents a fundamental misreading of what happened. For this reason, the present article examines several recent, important contributions to the literature on the IRA and the peace process, as part of an effort to revisit the question of why it was that the IRA decided eventually to end its self-declared ‘long war’.

The emergence of the political party Sinn Féin as an electoral force, and its gradual displacement of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as the primary vehicle for Provisional Irish republicanism, was an indispensable precondition for the peace process that brought an end to the long-running Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. Unsurprisingly, this process has been a subject of close academic scrutiny, with much attention focusing on the dramatic, early breakthroughs made by Sinn Féin, particularly in the years 1981–1983. By contrast, the mid-to-late 1980s are often represented as something of a fallow period for the party, when its initial, seemingly meteoric rise stalled. Within this narrative, the 1985 local elections are typically passed over relatively quickly. Yet this article makes the case for revisiting those elections, seeing them as marking a somewhat under-appreciated political earthquake in Northern Ireland. It does so on the basis that first, the elections laid bare the ambiguities and tensions arising from the Irish republican movement’s ‘Armalite and Ballot box’ strategy. And second, the consequences of the 1985 elections proved decisive in reshaping both Irish republicanism and the wider political landscape of Northern Ireland.

This article investigates the impact of British informers and agents on Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) military strategy and British counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland between 1976 and 1994. The importance of this topic was highlighted by revelations in 2003 and 2005 concerning two senior republicans who had both been working for British intelligence for decades. While acknowledging other important factors, various authors believe that these intelligence successes were vital in containing the IRA, and significantly influenced that organization to end its military campaign in the 1990s. Yet after cross-referencing new interview material primarily with memoirs from various participants in the Northern Ireland conflict, this article reveals that the nature of many rural IRA units, its cellular structure in Belfast, and the isolation of the IRA leadership from the rest of the movement, prevented it from being damaged to any considerable extent by informers and agents. In fact, by the 1990s the resilience of the IRA was a crucial factor encouraging the British government to include Provisional Republicans in a political settlement. The IRA’s military strength by the 1990s also points towards the prominence of political factors in persuading the IRA to call a ceasefire by 1994. The role of spies in Northern Ireland and the circumstances in which the state permitted negotiations with paramilitaries such as the IRA, are key considerations for those interested in other recent and current conflicts.

The most outstanding feature of the historiography of the South African counterinsurgency campaign between 1966 and 1989 is that very little indeed has been written about South African counterinsurgency. Most publications about the South African military at the time focus either on the nature of the military or on the war in Namibia and Angola in general. At the same time, writers have been very careful to write about the role of the South African military in the counterrevolutionary campaign against the African National Congress (ANC) and other revolutionary movements within South Africa (SA) at the time. It is possible to argue that this is a reflection of changing political sentiments within South Africa. However, a whole range of factors, as would be clear from this discussion, are influencing this reality.

This article examines the English and Welsh Catholic Church's reaction to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacks on London during the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. English Catholic bishops vociferously condemned these attacks yet regularly faced criticism for their perceived inaction. Letters published in secular and religious newspapers, and also sent directly to English Catholic bishops, reveal a dismayed public who called for religious retribution in the form of excommunication. I argue IRA attacks on English soil fell into a ‘grey area’ of Church condemnation: a Catholic bishop would not comment on events outside his own nation. No Irish Catholic bishop had excommunicated an IRA member, so for an English bishop to do so would have been setting a precedent. However, the IRA’s shift to a bombing campaign in England had allowed English bishops to comment on the conflict in Northern Ireland. Subsequently, statements and actions by English bishops would directly impact on how Irish bishops could mediate the conflict in Northern Ireland. Provisional IRA attacks on London specifically garnered international press attention and greater focus on the reactions of the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, amplifying the English Catholic Church’s response more broadly. This article highlights the evolving relationship between Irish and English bishops, from one of mutual anger to one of mutual understanding, through an examination of three attacks: the Old Bailey bombing (1973); the Harrods Bombing (1983); and the London Docklands Bombing (1996). Drawing on seldom discussed archival material, religious papers, and correspondence, this article elucidates the entangled relationship between English and Irish Churches, suggesting that such a complicated relationship, at times, hindered the Irish Catholic Church’s ability to mediate the conflict and aide the peace process.

The Northern Ireland peace process emerged from ‘behind the scenes’ when contacts between the British government and Sinn Féin were revealed in November 1993. On 31st August 1994, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) declared a ceasefire and in April 1998 the Good Friday Agreement achieved a power-sharing accommodation based on the moderate political parties. By 2003, the hardline Democratic Unionist Party was electorally dominant among unionists and Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, among nationalists. Remarkably, in May 2007, the ‘hardline’ parties agreed to share power. The Northern Ireland peace process appears to represent an apparently successful case of two democratic governments—the British and Irish—negotiating with ‘the enemy’ to achieve a power-sharing accommodation. This success has led to various actors with competing political agendas claiming to have discovered ‘the lessons’ of Northern Ireland for other areas in conflict. The Labour government's ‘Orthodox’ interpretation suggests that it is always, or nearly always, a good idea to talk to the enemy. More recently, an ‘orthodox Neoconservative’ interpretation of the peace process has argued that Northern Ireland is the exception which proves the rule that it is almost never right to ‘talk to terrorists’ or ‘negotiate with evil’. These contrasting interpretations of the ‘Northern Ireland model’ are used by analysts and policy-makers to advocate talking or not talking to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the ‘Sunni’ militias in Iraq, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The ‘orthodox Neoconservative’ interpretation of the peace process argues that the IRA were defeated, partly due to the efficacy of the ‘dirty war’, and in negotiating the peace process British governments did not compromise core values and democratic norms. This article argues that this account of the peace process is inaccurate and that the ‘lessons’ derived by Neoconservatives from the peace process are flawed.

This book examines the grass-roots relationship between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the civilian population during the Irish Revolution. It is primarily concerned with the attempts of the militant revolutionaries to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent among the local populations in which they operated, and the actions or inactions by which dissent was expressed or implied.Focusing on the period of guerilla war against British rule from c. 1917 to 1922, it uncovers the acts of ‘everyday’ violence, threat, and harm that characterized much of the revolutionary activity of this period. Moving away from the ambushes and assassinations that have dominated much of the discourse on the revolution, the book explores low-level violent and non-violent agitation in the Irish town or parish. The opening chapter treats the IRA’s challenge to the British state through the campaign against servants of the Crown – policemen, magistrates, civil servants, and others – and IRA participation in local government and the republican counter-state. The book then explores the nature of civilian defiance and IRA punishment in communities across the island before turning its attention specifically to the year that followed the ‘Truce’ of July 1921.This study argues that civilians rarely operated at either extreme of a spectrum of support but, rather, in a large and fluid middle ground. Behaviour was rooted in local circumstances, and influenced by local fears, suspicions, and rivalries. IRA punishment was similarly dictated by community conditions and usually suited to the nature of the perceived defiance. Overall, violence and intimidation in Ireland was persistent, but, by some contemporary standards, relatively restrained.

“Dissident” Irish Republican is a generic term used to describe activists who disagree with the political and military direction taken by the two lead organizations of the Irish Republican Movement, that is “Provisional” Sinn Féin and the “Provisional” IRA – the Provisionals. “Dissidents” reject the term and argue that it is the Provisionals who have dissented from traditional republicanism. During the Irish War of Independence era (1916–1923), Irish Republican Army (IRA) rebels complemented by Sinn Féin politicians and members of Cumann na mBan, a women's organization, established an all‐Ireland revolutionary parliament, Dáil Éireann. The British did not recognize this parliament and it was disestablished in 1922 when Dáil Éireann representatives ratified by a slim margin the Anglo‐Irish Treaty. The treaty confirmed the partition of Ireland and the creation of separate parliaments in Belfast for Northern Ireland, which remained a part of the United Kingdom, and Dublin for the quasi‐independent Irish Free State (later, the Republic of Ireland). A minority of activists remained committed to the all‐Ireland Dáil Éireann, rejected the Dublin and Belfast parliaments, and held fast to the claim that Irish people have the right to include armed struggle in their collective action repertoire as they pursue a reunited Irish Republic. And these activists maintained the IRA, Sinn Féin, and Cumann na mBan. A key reason the “Provisionals” split from the leadership of the republican movement in 1969/1970 was that the “Officials” endorsed taking seats in the Belfast, Dublin, and London parliaments.

Conflict in the Green Island has begun in the twelfth century, when Ireland came into the United Kingdom’s possession. It takes place between two antagonistic groups: Republicans (mostly native Catholics), and unionists, or loyalists (mostly the influx of Protestants). The dispute nowadays concerns the national identity of Northern Ireland. The Republicans opt for joining the territory of the Republic of Ireland, while unionists and loyalists want to stay with the Crown. Native inhabitants of the islands have been dominated politically, economically and educationally. They have fought time and again to achieve independence or unification with the Republic. Uprisings erupted (in 1641 – created anti-English, 1916 – Easter Rising, 1972 – Bloody Sunday), treaties were signed and the agreement (1973 – joint Stormont elections, the creation of the Council of Ireland, peace agreement in 1984, 1985 – an agreement and formation of the International Peace Conference (of the British – Irish relations), 1993 – the Downing Street Declaration, 1998 – Friday Agreement); despite the legislative obstacles (1652 – Act of occupation, 1691 – Treaty of Limerick, 1801 – Act of Union, 1922 – Special Powers Act, 1936 – Act of public order, direct rule, 2000 – Great Britain suspended the autonomy of Ireland). Republicans fought on the side of Irish Republican Army (IRA), which ceased its activities after the Agreement. Following the split, due to the signing of agreements, Republicans created Real IRA (RIRA), Provisional IRA (PIRA) and Continuity IRA (CIRA). Similar independent organizations are Irish Republican Army National – Liberation (INLA) and a fraction of the GHQ (INLA – GHQ). Some activists are still active in paramilitary capacities (eg. the 2009 RIRA attack). As well ascarry out criminal activities. Loyalists and Unionists were divided from the beginning (or rather never became united). Antagonistic attitudes towards the Republicans are shared by Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) and the Red Hand Defenders (RHD) Ulster Defence Association / Ulster Freedom Fighters (UDA / UFF) and the Orange Volunteers. Most of them are still active. In addition to the fight against the Republicans, these groups are also fighting amongst themselves. They work in the underground, whichwell in the basement, results in criminal activities. The conflict in Northern Ireland continues and seems difficult to solve. The society remains divided and the British law so far offers no solution, although hopefully one will be found in the future. Let us hope that there is no solution.