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Six counties
A
brutal guerrilla war ensued during which the Westminster politicians
showed that they were the ‘moral’ equal of those they called
terrorists by recruiting mercenaries who terrorised the populace in
an effort to frighten support away from the IRA. The tactic had the
reverse effect but eventually, as now, British ministers sat down
with the ‘terrorists’. Under threat, an unsatisfactory peace deal
was negotiated which divided Ireland into the 26-county Irish Free
State and the 6-county state of Northern Ireland.
This
‘solution’ split the IRA and resulted in a bloody civil war
between Free State forces – armed by the British – and a rump of
the IRA who were dubbed ‘Irregulars’. The latter, the ideological
antecedents of the present Provisional IRA, were defeated and they
and their followers glumly pronounced that both the new governments
on the Island of Ireland were ‘illegal’ and a betrayal of the
holy grail of ‘The Republic’ as proclaimed by the new-born IRA in
the insurrection of 1916. Dail Eireann, the legend went, had
transferred its executive authority to the Army Council of the IRA
and, thenceforth, any group claiming to be the rightful heirs of the
1916 Declaration of the Republic could grandiosely claim to be the de
facto government of Ireland.
The
political leader and, then, icon of the defeated Irregulars was Eamon
De Valera. Despite being the main architect of the politics that
resulted in the Civil War ‘Dev’, as he was known, was a pragmatic
politician who realised the absurdity of further military adventures
against the Free State. In 1926 he formed a new political party,
Fianna Fail, to challenge the party in government, Cumann na
nGaedheal (later, as now, Fine Gael) and in 1932 Fianna Fail won an
outright victory at a general election and De Valera became
Taoiseach. It was a bad day for later incarnations of the IRA, for
despite having created the genre of dissident Republicans, Dev, who
held power until 1948, proved a bitter, even vicious, enemy of the
IRA.
The modern IRA
It
is important to take this brief look back at the history of the IRA
because it raises an important question. Following the Civil War in
1922, the split within the movement and then the desertion of De
Valera, the organisation never regained any real political influence
in Ireland until 1970 and the establishment of yet another breakaway
movement, the Provisional IRA.
The
IRA admitted in 1962 that the Northern Catholic nationalists had not
supported its brief, inglorious ‘border campaign’ but what were
the new material conditions that brought about general Catholic
support for the Provisional IRA after 1970? And what lessons may it
have for the future, both in Northern Ireland and in Great Britain
which is now facing a terrorist threat of an even more menacing kind?
The
IRA’s 1962 decision to pursue a constitutional campaign based on
social issues paradoxically fused with an aspect of the new mood of
northern nationalists who had earlier rejected the IRA. Generally,
after the war and the benefits of some UK social reforms,
nationalists were becoming increasingly reconciled to acceptance of
the northern state. In 1965 Britain and the Republic of Ireland
signed a Free Trade Agreement and after this the few nationalist
politicians in the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont accepted
the role (and the salaries) of Her Majesty’s Opposition. But, if
they were going to be loyal then they wanted the apparatus of
religious discrimination and vote-rigging to be dismantled.
What
happened was that the Republicans managed to tap into this mood.
Unionist politicians and fascist-type bigots like the hot-gospeller
Ian Paisley, were to claim that the subsequent Northern Ireland Civil
Rights Movement was a creature of the IRA but it wasn’t this
simple; in fact it was established by a younger, more active genre of
nationalists, products of the 1944 British Education Acts, and it
resulted in a coalescing of anti-Unionist factions including the IRA
in its Republican Clubs incarnation.
Taking
its cue from the American Civil Rights campaign, the new movement
adopted the name Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA)
and proceeded to use the same tactics of massed demonstrations and
protests in pursuit of its demands. The Unionist Prime Minister,
Captain Terence O’Neill, was not averse to granting the basic
demands of the NICRA and had he been able to do so it is likely that
Catholic nationalist anger would have been defused and the violence
of the following thirty years avoided but Paisley was rousing old
anti-Catholic bigotries in the unionist community – and,
incidentally, using that bigotry to forge a political career that
would bring rewards well beyond his modest Bible-thumping talents.
Faced
with government bans, NICRA turned to civil disobedience and the
government ordered the armed police, which the Unionists had
traditionally used as their private army, to use force against
‘illegal’ demonstrations. Television pictures showing the police
(RUC) attacking non-violent marchers were flashed around the world
much to the discomfort of the British government which was the
ultimate authority in Northern Ireland.
Events
were hurrying towards a bitter sectarian pogrom. Protestant
loyalists, assisted by the B Specials (an exclusively Protestant
paramilitary auxiliary police force) torched Catholic homes; some
ex-IRA men went to the Dublin leadership of the IRA to seek arms to
defend the Catholic ghettoes in Belfast and Derry and were told that
IRA arms would not be made available for sectarian warfare. In
Belfast, Republican dissidents were appalled at this response; the
‘communist’ leadership was denounced by much of the rank-and-file
and the Provisional IRA was born, leaving two IRA’s –the
Official IRA and the Provisional IRA, both claiming to be the
executive heirs of the only legitimate Dial Eireann. Extreme Catholic
conservatives within the Irish government, fearful of the
consequences of ‘communist’ influences, helped to procure arms
for the new PIRA
Pawns in a game
The
rest is the story of the brutal conflict that became Northern
Ireland’s ‘Dirty War’. Now the IRA is standing down its foot
soldiers. There were three sides to the war: the British Army/RUC,
the Provisional IRA and the various Protestant paramilitary
organisations. As a first step in accounting, we can say that none
can claim victory. It is always the working class that make up the
pawns in armies, legal and illegal, and the end of a war never brings
them victory. The other thousands who died were just the innocent
victims of those who were at war.
Ironically,
Paisley’s strident anti-Catholicism played a major role in
galvanising the Catholics into open rebellion. ‘No truck with
Dublin’ has been his war cry but his hard-line bigotry has now
brought about a situation of virtual joint authority between London
and Dublin in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Paisley, whose fight
for Ulster went only as far as throwing snowballs at Jack Lynch when
he visited Stormont as Irish Taoiseach, is obliged to discuss policy
with both the British and Irish Prime Ministers.
On
the other hand, the Provisional IRA, whose war aim was to end
partition, drive out the British and abolish the state of Northern
Ireland have succeeded only in establishing a claim to be part of the
political administration of the state they set out to abolish!
Eventually
the politicians on both sides will have to reach an accommodation to
work the structures of government established by the Good Friday
Agreement. The salaries and the expenses are good and the leaders can
write of a finish to a satisfactory war.
But
what have the workers across the infamous religious divide got? As so
many times before, they have simply been used as pawns.
RICHARD
MONTAGUE
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