Irish Republican Army Research Articles

KILLING AND BLOODY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1920

21 November 1920 began with the killing of fourteen men in their flats, boarding houses, and hotel rooms in Dublin. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) alleged that they were British spies. That afternoon British forces retaliated by firing on a crowd of supporters at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing twelve and injuring sixty. The day quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Much has been made of the afternoon's events. The shootings in Croke Park have acquired legendary status. Concern with the morning's killing has been largely limited to whether or not the dead men were the spies the IRA said they were. There has been little or no consideration of the men who did the killing. This article is based on largely unused interviews and statements made by the IRA men involved in this and many of the other days that came to constitute the guerrilla war fought against the British forces in Ireland from January 1919 until July 1921. This morning's killings are a chilling example of much of what passed for combat during this struggle. Bloody Sunday morning is used here as a means to explore how generally young and untrained IRA men killed and how this type of killing affected their lives.

The McCartney Sisters' Search for Justice: Gender and Political Protest in Northern Ireland

The murder of Robert McCartney in Belfast in January 2005 sparked a campaign by his sisters and partner to bring his murderer(s), allegedly members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, to justice. The article examines the gender politics of this campaign. It explores how the campaign simultaneously reflected and contested traditional ideas about women's subjectivities and roles in ethnically divided societies. Furthermore, the article highlights how the ideologies of masculinity and femininity acted as political resources for the campaigners in their struggle with the Irish republican hierarchy.

A Work in Progress: The United Kingdom’s Campaign Against Radicalization

Abstract : The United Kingdom (UK) has ample experience of terrorism. Over three thousand people were killed during the thirty-year long campaign by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) for a united Ireland. However, the death toll from a single attack never exceeded twenty-nine and the British public developed a certain stoicism in the face of intermittent bombings in London and other British cities. Like other European separatist groups, PIRA sought to establish legitimacy and broaden support by largely restricting its killings to representatives of the British government, members of the security forces and collaborators. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians were generally avoided and warnings were often sent to the British authorities before bomb attacks on civilian or infrastructure targets. When suicide bombers struck the London transport system without warning on 7 July 2005, killing fifty-two people and injuring over seven hundred, it marked a stark departure from PIRA s methods and highlighted the fact that the UK faced a terrorist threat far more ruthless and dangerous than anything that had preceded it. This paper examines the problem of countering ideological support for terrorism (CIST) in the UK. For convenience, the American acronym CIST is used in the paper, although this is not a common term in the UK. Instead, British officials and commentators normally refer to understanding and combating radicalization. The paper is structured into five parts covering: the ideology of Islamist terrorism; the sources of radicalization; the motivation and background of UK terrorists; British government policies to address radicalization; and the barriers to effective implementation of CIST measures.

The role and effectiveness of intelligence in Northern Ireland

This article examines the role and effectiveness of counter-terrorist intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. Specifically, it examines the methods of gathering intelligence as well as how the information was used, while also addressing some of the wider moral and legal implications of intelligence activities for a liberal democratic society. It argues that British intelligence was ultimately very effective but at the price of employing some highly dubious methods. ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once’.1 Statement by the Provisional Irish Republican Army

Passive Sponsors of Terrorism

Defeating radical jihadists today requires all states to act aggressively against them – an exceptionally difficult challenge. Some states aid terrorist groups by being passive as terrorists operate on their soil. The experiences of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan vis-à-vis al-Qaeda, as well as the US tolerance of Provisional Irish Republican Army activities during the 1970s and 1980s, are instructive. These cases suggest that passive support usually occurs due to strong popular support for a terrorist group's cause, a perceived lack of a direct threat to the regime, and limited costs to the government for tolerating these activities. Halting passive support is difficult and requires new policies and a new way of thinking about the problem of state support for terrorism.

New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism

New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism. By Barry Cooper. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 264p. $44.95.Barry Cooper argues that a characteristic of modern terrorism is the rise of “new political religions” that claim to be engaged in spiritual conflicts that transcend the political realm and that involve waging spiritual warfare in order to realize an idealized spiritual kingdom on this earth. Thus, in order to understand contemporary terrorism, Cooper states, one must look at the “spirituality that terrorists experience as central to their own activities” (p. 7), while recognizing that religious terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and Japan's Aum Shinrikyo, do not operate within the frameworks of cost-benefit analysis that political terror groups have generally espoused (p. 55). He further contends that religious terrorists groups are on a continuous treadmill of violence that is self-generating and will never cease (p. 12), leading him to advocate extreme measures (negotiation not being one of them) to counteract it. Here he seems not to consider that similar arguments were once advanced to suggest that political terrorists were equally bound up in a cycle of violence from which they could not escape, yet there are many examples (the African National Congress and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example) that have disproved such perceptions.

The Role of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom in Securing the State Against Terrorism

The horror of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to worldwide condemnation. All parts of the world mourned the victims of the attacks with a sense of shared loss that was heightened by the fact that many of the victims were of nationalities other than American. Allies rushed to the support of the United States, and NATO promptly declared that the attack on the U.S. could be considered an attack on the entire nineteen-nation alliance. But while the U.S. chose to hike defense spending and intensify its efforts on homeland security, the effect on European countries was somewhat different. The terrorist attacks constituted a watershed in threat perceptions in the U.S., but to a large number of European countries the threat seemed less novel. Terrorist activities within national borders are not new to many states in Europe. Indeed, the continent’s history is scarred by a relatively large number of terrorist activities and groups, including the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque separatist organization Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Greek far-left group November 17 Organization, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and the Red Brigades in Italy, to name but a few. Europeans did recognize that the “new terrorists”—that is, transnational Islamist terrorists—posed the threat of mass casualties, and were generally uninterested in bargaining or other modes of formal conflict resolution. But European governments also had more experience than the U.S. with terrorism, and they tended to see the new terrorism more as a continuation of old forms of terrorism than did the U.S. At least initially, for instance, European officials were less inclined to think that terrorists would use weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Furthermore, the U.S. was perceived—justifiably—as the prime target of Al Qaeda and the transnational Islamist terrorist movement over which it loosely presides. Therefore, threat perceptions did not change as dramatically in Europe, and the sense of an urgent need to boost homeland security was not as strong as that prevailing in the United States. For most European governments, existing counter-terrorism measures were seen as basically adequate, although some adjustments were made to deal with the perceived threat of terrorism from WMD. Yet because the proportion of Muslims in European populations—especially in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom— is far higher than it is in the U.S., and Muslim populations are generally less integrated, the challenges in terms of technical counter-terrorism (intelligence collection through surveillance and penetration, pursuit by police and/or special operations forces) in Europe are in some ways greater than they are in the U.S. However, falling military

Informers and the Battle Against Republican Terrorism: A Review of 30 Years of Conflict

The efficacy of using informers in the battle against terrorism is evident from their use against successive Irish republican organisations over the past 300 years. This paper is primarily concerned with the role of informers in combating the Irish Republican Army (IRA) over the last three decades and draws on material published by the republican movement, the security services, former informers and intelligence operatives, and interviews with actors from both sides of the conflict. Whilst the potential value of using informers in the battle against terrorism is beyond question, a review of the Northern Irish experience does present an opportunity to examine some of the key themes emerging in an area often ignored by those outside the intelligence community.

Drug use and drug markets in the context of political conflict: The case of Northern Ireland

The focus of this article addresses drug use and drug markets in Northern Ireland against the backdrop of the most recent Irish political conflict, e.g., 1969 to the present. Between 1969 and 1999, a total of 3289 individuals had died and more than 40 000 were injured as a result of the Northern Ireland political conflict. Extrapolating the data to Britain, comparable figures would reflect 111 000 fatalities and over one million injured (Hayes and McAllister, 2000). This paper describes how the nature of the Northern Ireland political conflict contributed to low levels of drug use in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1994, the cessation of military operations by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and subsequently by mainstream Loyalist organizations led to the possibility of widespread political and social change. Use of certain drugs, namely heroin, appeared to increase from the mid-1990s, although the effects of political conflict on drug use are less clear during the post-ceasefire era.

Identity and The Terrorist Threat

Many analysts would agree that terrorism is an ever-changing phenomenon. However, like all forms of human behavior, there are certain sociological and psychological elements of terrorism that remain constant. One such element is that of identity, which can serve to both inform and influence terrorist behavior through individuals' perceptions of themselves and their environment. This article relies on symbolic interactionism and five of its organizing concepts—symbols and objects, acts and social acts, meaning, role-taking and role-making, and the emergence of the self—to create an interpretative model for understanding terrorist behavior through identity theory. The conceptual framework is then used to examine the creation and maintenance of identities within three terrorist groups: the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Hamas, and the Tupamaros. Although these groups do not account for all of the terrorist attacks in the world, they do represent three diverse forms of terrorism (i.e., national, religious, and revolutionary) from three distinct regions of the globe (the West, the Middle East, and Latin America). Therefore, understanding their behavior through the identity prism can help to shed light on other terrorist groups—those that currently exist and those that have yet to emerge. Implications are proposed for the areas of law enforcement, public policy, research, and the model's general utility in assessing other forms of human behavior.

The Balcombe Street and Iranian Embassy Sieges

ABSTRACT This paper will examine two hostage negotiation episodes and compare how each situation was handled in relation to the eventual outcome. Both examples are of approximately the same duration, handled by the same police force and featured terrorist organizations as the hostage taking parties. Despite all their similarities, the two events had radically different outcomes. In December 1975, four members of an Irish Republican Army [IRA] active service cell were involved in a running gunfight with members of the Metropolitan Police force in central London. As the terrorists made their escape they found themselves in Balcombe Street, still firing at officers pursuing them. Seeking a place to resist the growing police presence, the four men entered an apartment complex and forced their way into number 22b, occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Mathews. It was the start of a six-day siege that would end with the capitulation of the IRA men without bloodshed. On April 30th, 1980, six armed revolutionaries of the Demo...

Prisons and the Education of Terrorists

Prison reformers have long been aware that the cellblock is a school for criminals, the shadow campus where the petty offender graduates into organized crime. Yet strangely, the same insight has for the most part eluded jail keepers in countries now targeted by Islamic terrorists. The usefulness of prisons as universities for terrorists, however, has not escaped Islamic radicals. They have become increasingly sophisticated in their operational methods, especially in devising ways of recruiting and training those who spearhead their assaults. Last spring’s devastating train bombings in Madrid, the mishandling of which led to the electoral defeat of the sitting Spanish government, illustrate the phenomenon. A principal conspirator, Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras, a Spanish mineworker, was not religious or politically aware when he was jailed in 2001 for a drug offense. Incarcerated in the same prison was Jamal Ahmidan, a young Moroccan living in Spain, also convicted of a petty crime. Once in prison, however, both the nominally Christian Trashorras and the nonobservant Muslim Ahmidan enthusiastically embraced radical Islamic fundamentalist beliefs and were recruited into an al-Qaeda–linked Moroccan terrorist group, Takfir wa al-Hijra. The imprisoned Ahmidan quickly gained a leadership position in the cellblock, and on emerging from prison both men were absorbed into an extensive and well-organized radical Islamic organization that trafficked heavily in drugs to support its terrorist activities. Later, Ahmidan led the cell that carried out the Madrid bombings, while Trashorras supplied the explosives and helped plant the 13 backpack bombs that killed 191 people and injured hundreds of others on four Madrid trains crowded with early-morning commuters. The use of prisons as a means of recruiting new members into terrorist organizations while providing advanced training to existing members is hardly a new phenomenon. For more than 30 years, European countries have been beset by a variety of nationalist and leftist terrorist groups, some of them highly sophisticated organizations with large rosters of combat and support personnel. Two groups in particular stand out: the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or Provos, which has waged a sustained campaign to achieve a united Ireland, and the Basque Euskad Ta Askatasuna (ETA), which first fought against the Franco government and now battles Spain’s democratic government in its quest for Basque autonomy. Both are classic paramilitary terrorist organizations, with integrated command structures and a high degree of group cohesion, characteristics that persist in a prison setting. Leftist revolutionary groups were organized differently. The Red Army Faction in West Germany, Action Directe in France, and the Red Brigades in Italy, which were active from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, eschewed the paramilitary model and relied instead on a looser cellular structure, with collective decisions guided by charismatic leaders. Targeted governments countered with extensive antiterror legislation and intern-

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

Since the start of the Northern Ireland conflict in 1969, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has been committed to a military campaign to achieve a British withdrawal from the province. The adoption of a parallel electoral strategy in the 1980s and 1990s represents a fundamental change of tactics. This article outlines the background to this change, and analyses the electoral success of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. Using survey data collected over four decades, the results show that Sinn Fein’s electoral support has come mainly from previous non-voters and new voters, at a time when the Catholic proportion of younger voters has been increasing. The net effect has been to increase the overall nationalist and republican vote, with no decrease in the Social Democratic Labour Party vote. The personal influence of Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, together with public support for the IRA’s military campaign, helps to account for Sinn Fein’s mobilization of these voters. The strategy of pursuing parallel military and electoral campaigns has paid major political dividends for Irish republicans.

Between stability and collapse: Internal and external dynamics of post‐agreement institution‐building in Northern Ireland1

Introduction On 14 October 2002, the then British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Dr. John Reid, announced the suspension of devolved government in Northern Ireland as of midnight the same day by an order made under the Northern Ireland Act 2000. Unlike the previous two suspensions, on 11 August 2001 and 21 September 2001 which were only ‘technical’ 24-hour suspensions to allow the political parties in Northern Ireland to resolve a deadlock over the decommissioning of weapons in possession of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Fein’s membership in the Executive this latest suspension, similar to the very first one on 11 February 2000, had no time limit attached to it.

The IRA's foreign links

On 28 July, a Bogotá court will resume the trial of three suspected operatives of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on charges of training Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas in their campaign against the government. Combined with speculation about the provision of assistance to Palestinian terrorist groups, the trial has raised questions about the full extent of the IRA's international activities. Moreover, there are concerns about what such activities might signify for the future of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Indeed, in extending its international links, the IRA appears to be motivated primarily by the need to secure funding and maintain its capabilities - objectives informed by the assumption that it needs to prepare for a possible return to violence.

Death in the Afternoon: The Croke Park Massacre, 21 November 1920

21 November 1920 was the first “Bloody Sunday” in modern Irish history. On that Sunday afternoon, fourteen people were killed or fatally wounded when police fired into the crowd at a Gaelic football match in Dublin’s Croke Park. The causes of the Croke Park massacre have been debated ever since. Some say the massacre was a reprisal for the killing and wounding of soldiers and police by Irish Republican Army assassination squads earlier that morning. The police were looking to revenge their dead and wounded comrades and opened fire on the crowd without provocation. Others disagree: the plan, they say, was merely to stop the match and search the crowd. When the security forces arrived at the park, they came under fire from insurgents in the street; the police fired back in self-defense, and innocent bystanders were killed and wounded, either in the gun battle, or the stampede that followed. More than eighty years later, new documents may finally resolve the debate over the Croke Park massacre. In the days after Bloody Sunday, two military courts of inquiry were held: their proceedings were held back by the government, but have now been released at last. When these proceedings are combined with evidence from other contemporary sources, the causes of the massacre become clear. The police did not go to Croke Park seeking revenge: they really were planning to round up the crowd, and search for weapons and wanted men. Once they came to the park, however, a few shots were fired—not by rebel pickets but by the police themselves. Spectators panicked and fled. Police panicked and started shooting indiscriminately. Their officers restored order after less than two minutes but they were too late. Nine people were dead, another five were dying, and dozens more had been injured.

Priests and Peace : the Role of the Redemptorist Order in the Northern Ireland Peace Process

The Catholic Church in Ireland - and the hierarchy in particular - strongly condemned the military campaign of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. However, within the Church, there was also a parallel strategy of engagement with republican leaders. This latter strategy was primarily pursued through the Redemptorist Order in Belfast where there existed a belief that the Catholic Church had a responsibility wider than just condemnation of the Republican Movement. This article examines the role of the Redemptorist Order based on interviews with Fr Alex Reid, the main architect of its strategy, and through access to private documents prepared as the Irish government first became involved in the peace process in the late 1980s. The article concludes that the Redemptorists made a significant political contribution to establishing and developing the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Kevin Barry, the Incident at Monk’s Bakery and the Making of an Irish Republican Legend

Kevin Barry remains a popular figure in Irish republican folklore, as a victim of British injustice and a martyr for Ireland. As a member of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army, he had taken an active part in a surprise attack on a British army ration party at Patrick Monk’s Bakery on 20 September 1920, which resulted in the deaths of three young British soldiers and Barry’s capture. After being tried by court–martial, convicted and then executed for the murder of one of the three young soldiers, he became the subject of a propaganda campaign directed by Sinn Fein in the world press to characterize the British as brutal, merciless and uncivilized in comparison with IRA fighters like Barry, who were portrayed typically as young, courageous and gallantly devoted to their cause. Yet Barry had been captured in the civilian disguise of a guerrilla fighter rather than as a uniformed soldier, with flat–nosed ammunition in his pistol, and in circumstances where both ballistic evidence and eye–witness testimony proved his culpability beyond any doubt. While these were factors that could and should have been used to challenge Sinn Fein’s propaganda initiatives, the British failed to mount any semblance of a counter–propaganda campaign. The reasons for and the consequences of this mute response on the British side are issues explored in considering how Kevin Barry became and still remains a figure of legend among Irish nationalists.

PIRA Lessons Learned: A Model of Terrorist Leadership Succession

In the global war against terrorism key questions need to be asked concerning how Al Qaeda is reorganizing and who will be leading it. In the absence of, at the very least adequate open source data, how can we answer these vital questions and predict the next evolution of this deadly menace? One possible solution is to study the emergence and evolution of leadership within another terrorist organization. Based on an analysis of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, it is assessed that there have been at least two and possibly three distinct generations of leadership in that group. It is important to note, however, that although these three generations have emerged sequentially, they may well all be in positions of power at the same time. These generations are designated as; early or founding leaders; follow-on and continuity leaders; and embryonic leaders. Such analysis will not tell us whom the new and emerging leaders of Al Qaeda actually are but it might help us to frame the right questions to ask our intelligence collectors.

The Origins and Early Years of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition

, women in Northern Ireland were virtually absent from national political life. Rarely did the major parties in either the nationalist or the Unionist community grant women a meaningful voice in policy decisions, or serious leadership roles in the formal political process. During its fifty-year existence, only nine women served in the Northern Ireland Parliament (Stormont). Of the eighteen Northern Ireland MPs elected to the United Kingdom Parliament at Westminster in June, , three are women; only three others have ever sat at Westminster since the creation of Northern Ireland in . No Northern Ireland woman has yet been elected to the European Parliament. Gender discrimination in Ulster’s political life derives from several sources. From  to , Northern Ireland was ruled directly by the British government, the result of unrelenting civil and sectarian strife known in the province as the “Troubles.” A quarter of a century of sectarian violence certainly discouraged many women from trying to enter the formal political system, as public officials were frequently targets for both the Irish Republican Army and for Protestant paramilitaries. More important, polarization between the two communities bred mutual suspicion between Catholic and Protestant women, undermining their potential for collective political action.1 During the s and early s, women channeled their civic energies into community-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and avoided traditional political mechanisms. As one activist put it, “ What passes for politics in Northern Ireland is limited and the base for formal political participation is very narrow, structured as it is by both community divisions and violence.”2 Northern Ireland was, as one activist described it, an “armed patriarchy.” 3 Constance B. Rynder