A History of Ireland in Song

IRA

Now some men fight for silver
And some men fight for gold
But the IRA are fighting for
The land that the Saxon stole

IRA is an acronym for Irish Republican Army, the latest in a long line of Irish patriotic organisations, from the United Irishmen through the Young Irelanders and the Fenians, dedicated to using physical force to remove the British presence from Ireland. The name itself dates from 1919, when the Irish Volunteers were so renamed (curiously, they retained their original name in Irish, óglaigh na hEireann), and the organisation has been in continuous existence to the present.

The Easter Rising

After the Easter 1916 Rising, the Volunteers were in disarray, and it seemed as though yet another generation had shot its bolt. Several factors ensured that this would not be so. Firstly, the people were incensed by the shooting of the Easter leaders. Secondly, The internment of the other Easter rebels, along with many political activists and "suspects", provided an unforseen opportunity for the planning and re-organisation of the new Irish Republican Army.

The Tan War

The rejuvenated Irish Volunteers, under the leadership the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and represented politically by Sinn Féin, began a struggle against the British. The War of Independence, sometimes referred to as the Tan war, was sparked off in 1919 when the Tipperary IRA ambused and killed two RIC men in a raid for explosives.

Civil War

The IRA split after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty into pro and anti-Treaty factions, and civil war ensued, pro-Treaty elements in the IRA became part of the Free State Army; the bulk of the IRA volunteers went with the anti-Treaty side. The Civil War saw more Irishmen killed than had died in the War of Independence.

Living with the Free State

The partition of the island politically in two ensured that the struggle of the IRA continued even after defeat in the Civil War.

The De Valera Years

The accession to power of the Fianna Fáil party under De Valera in 1932 did not bring the IRA any nearer the promised land.

War

The beginning of the Second World War in 1939 saw the old republican slogan, "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity", resurrected. Attempts to gain assistance from Germany came to little, for several reasons: the Anglophilia of von Ribbentrop, German foreign minister; the amatuerism of the IRA; and Mr De Valera's harsh measures.

The IRA undertook a bombing campaign in England — not Britain, Scotland and Wales being excepting as "Celtic" — which fizzled out after vigorous action by the authorities.

Reconstruction

The debacle that was the IRA participation in the war was a clear sign to the leadership that the whole organisation would have to be restructured before any attempt could be made to fight again.

The Border Campaign

The reconstruction after the war culminated in a renewed armed struggle against partition that became known as the Border Campaign.

Stagnation

After the failure of the Border Campaign, the IRA stagnated, and the most active minds in the organisation began a move to the Left.

The North Explodes

With the pro-British majority in the six counties unable to countenance treating the nationalist minority as equal citizens, law and order broke down, and was seen to do so on TV, live and worldwide. Westminster was forced to intervene in the form of British troops: "armoured cars and tanks and guns", in the words of the song. the IRA split under the pressure. The split occured at the Army Convention in Dublin in December, 1969. A Provisional Army Council was formed by those disatisfied by the leadership's response to events in the North. In their founding statement, they announced:

"We declare our allegiance to the 32-County Irish Republic proclaimed at Easter 1916, established by the first Dáil Eireann in 1919, overthrown by force of arms in 1922 and suppressed to this day by the existing British-imposed Six-County and 26-County states."

At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis the following January, Provisional Sinn Féin was formed after a walk out by one-third of the delegates. The first issue of the new party's paper, An Phoblacht, appeared in Feburary, and sold 20,000 copies.

The leadership of the Provisionals was initially based in the South, centred around Seán Mac Stiofáin and Ruairi Ó Braidaigh. Indeed, not only was the leadership Southern: elements of the Dublin government were almost certainly involved in arming the first batches of Volunteers, involvment which later lead to the Arms Trial. Not until the late '70s did the base of power shift towards the North, and only in '83 was Ruari Ó Braidaigh replaced at the head of Sinn Féin by Gerry Adams.

The other faction, the Official IRA, continued the armed struggle in somewhat desultory fashion for some years before "dumping arms" in 1972 — although this did not prevent them from killing Séamus Costello in 1977.

War ensued between the IRA and the British governent, a war which continued for over thirty years, with thousands of deaths, much damage to property, and a disastrous effect on the economy — the area is not of course self-sufficient, and survives only by the infusion of funds from the British exchequer, amounting to several billion pounds sterling every year. The British interned suspects in concentration camps, used torture routinely in interrogation (and was condemned by the European Commision on Human Rights for so doing), funded Loyalist terror groups, used lethal force against civilians, most notoriously on Bloody Sunday, and even successfully manipulated voting in the Southern parliament (Dáil) by planting bombs in the South on the eve of an important division. The IRA, in addition to the traditional "fighting the forces of the crown" subjected the six counties to a wave of bomb attacks, sometimes indiscriminate, and in the 70s brought the war to Britain with a series of bomb attacks and assassinations. They also used perhaps their most powerful weapon, the hunger strike, particularly in 1981, when the H Block Hunger Strike garnered much sympathy in Ireland and abroad.

By the end of the '80s, it was clear that neither side had victory in sight. Large parts of the province were effectively ungovernable in all but name, and the IRA campaign in Britain proved impossible to halt; but the IRA could not topple overall British control in the North, and the damage they inflicted in Britain was successfully held by the security forces to what Westminster judged "an acceptable level".

In 1994, the British government admitted what everyone had always known, that they'd been in touch with the IRA for years, and, prodded along by the US president (thank God for Irish Americans), finally arranged open talks between themselves, all parties in the North, and the government of the South of Ireland. These talks culminated in the Good Friday Agreement, which saw an IRA ceasefire and the entry of Sinn Féin into a limited form local self-government in the shape of the Northern Ireland Assembly. At the time of writing, the IRA continues to hold to an increasingly uneasy ceasefire, though dissident elements — the "Real IRA" — continue with a desultory campaign, notoriously at Omagh, which seemed to bring back the worst days of the IRA bombs of the 70s; and of course Loyalist terror against Catholics, who they see as synonymous with Irish nationalists and therefore unworthy of life, has never stopped.

The future of the IRA is uncertain. As Irish independence, never a reality, is now increasingly rendered irrelevant by the island's absorption in the European super-state of the EU, perhaps the long tradition of physical force in the fight of freedom has finally become an anachronism, and will be recognised as such. Time will tell.