IRA:
is it really the end of “the armed struggle”?
“The
leadership of Oglaigh na h’Eireann has formally ordered an end to
the armed campaign. This will take effect from 4pm this afternoon.
All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms” (Extract from IRA
statement of 28 July)
So
the IRA has given up the gun for the ballot box – but not for the
first time.
In
1956 it was reluctantly pushed by its young activists to begin a
‘Border Campaign’. Within a few months the campaign had
deteriorated into cutting down a few telegraph poles and issuing
grandiose statements about the activities of their commandos. Away
from the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic this new
phase of the interminable ‘troubles’ was hardly noticed.
Everybody but the IRA knew their campaign was going nowhere.
Internment, both in the north and in the south, emaciated the
movement and inevitably internal disputes in the internment camps
began to fester among the volunteers.
It
took the IRA’s Army Council five more years before it announced the
formal termination of the Border Campaign but at last, in 1962,
Oglaith na hEireann, the Irish Republican Army, issued what was as
near as possible a notice of surrender. It admitted that it had not
achieved the necessary support from the nationalist (Catholic)
community in Northern Ireland; in fact it castigated the nationalists
claiming that they had sold ‘their heritage for a mess of pottage’
– a reference to the scheme of welfare capitalism introduced in
Britain after the war and extended to Northern Ireland.
Henceforth,
the IRA was taking the gun out of Irish politics – the IRA
spokesperson, the legendary ‘P O’Neill’, actually said that –
and would confine its activities to political campaigns on social
issues.
Behind
the scenes a coterie of Leninists had defeated the death-or-glory
boys of traditional Republicanism and took control of the IRA’s
Army Council. This element saw the IRA as the nucleus of a political
movement that would use the atrocious political and social conditions
in the North as a catalyst for uniting workers who traditionally
opposed one another on religious grounds. The Rosary brigade, those
for whom republicanism and Catholicism were synonymous terms, were
appalled by this ‘rank communism’ and left the movement.
The
IRA then transformed itself into ‘Republican Clubs’ in
furtherance of its plans. Up to then, the Unionist government had
claimed to accept the right of republicans to use constitutional
means to achieve a united Ireland. Such a claim did not represent a
political threat to Unionism, which, at the birth of the state in
1921, had helped demographically tailor the territory of Northern
Ireland to ensure that they had a two-to-one majority based on the
religious topography of the six north-eastern counties of the ancient
Province of Ulster. Despite this guarantee, they immediately banned
the Republican Clubs.
Traditionally,
the IRA had based its claim to use physical force on the results of
the elections of 1918 which was the last general election held in
Ireland before the country was arbitrarily divided by the British
government. Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, won an overall
majority in that election and established the first Dail Eireann
which was effectively banned by the British.
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