A History of Ireland in Song

Provisional IRA

The latest in a long line of Irish patriotic organisations, among them the Young Irelanders and the Fenians, dedicated to using physical force to remove the British presence from Ireland. The Provisional IRA, now usually known as simply "IRA", was formed in 1969 when the IRA split under the pressure of the renewed national struggle in the six counties. The split occured at the Army Convention in Dublin in December, 1969. A new, "Provisional", Army Council was formed by those disatisfied by the old 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.

Meanwhile, 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. War ensued, 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 bombings and assassinations. They also used perhaps their most powerful weapon, the hunger strike, most notably 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 of 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.

A History of Ireland in Song

Provisional IRA

Further Reading