Page 6
Contents Page Previous page 5 Next page 7
 In 1956 the IRA of the time, under pressure from a competitor terrorist group in Ulster, were prematurely pushed into inaugurating a ‘Border’ campaign. The name defined the strategy: volunteers, largely from the south but augmented by others from traditional heartlands of northern republicanism, would confine their campaign to attacks within the general vicinity of the Border. Belfast, especially, was to be avoided lest the touch paper of inter-religious violence should be ignited. The first IRA operation was a raid for arms on the British army barracks in Armagh. It was well-planned and brilliantly executed and on a Saturday afternoon, while soldiers carried out their duties in a relaxed mood, the IRA moved stealthily among them loading military ordinance onto trucks. Not a sound was heard and certainly not a funeral note, for the raiders were away with their booty before an embarrassed military establishment raised the alarm. It looked as though this undoubted success had exhausted the strategic genius of the IRA. A similar move against a military barracks in Omagh several weeks later ended in a fire fight in which several of the raiders were captured. After that it was all down-hill and after a while abortive attacks on well-protected police stations gave way to chopping down telegraph poles and issuing grandiose communiqués. It was, from an IRA standpoint, a pathetic period of military attrition that ended in a spectacular statement from them in 1962. The statement was effectively one of surrender to the political realities of the time. The IRA castigated the Catholic nationalists of Northern Ireland for denying them any meaningful support and angrily accused them of ‘selling their heritage for a mess of pottage’ – a reference to the social welfare package introduced by the UK government and, ironically, legislatively imposed on the Unionist government of Northern Ireland. That event, that statement which should have had extraordinarily significant implications for all the people of the North, and especially so in the light of subsequent events, has been expunged from history by the opposing political interests in Ireland, north and south, because all those interests were complicit in the events that followed. Significantly, the IRA statement did not say it was abandoning the political struggle; it said it was giving up armed struggle and would henceforth pursue a constitutional struggle for the achievement of civil rights and an ending of religious discrimination. There had not been any significant sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland since 1935. Demand for the implements of war between 1939 and 1946 had brought relative prosperity to shipbuilding, aircraft and engineering produce and largely removed the sore of job discrimination during those years. With growing unemployment religious discrimination was returning but its effects were being mollified to some extent by the new social welfare legislation. The traditional
|
Contents Page Previous page 5 Next page 7