A Broad Church: The Provisional IRA in the Republic of Ireland, 1969–1980

By Gearóid Ó Faoleán

This groundbreaking book is the first to detail, with startling new revelations, just how integral the Republic of Ireland was to the Provisional IRA’s campaign at every level. The sheer level of sympathy and support that existed for militant republicanism in Southern Irish society demonstrates that the longevity of the ‘Troubles’ was due in large part to this widespread tolerance and aid.

No Irish political party was without members who aided the Provisional IRA in their early years of their campaign, as former IRA volunteers attest to in interviews and previously unpublished accounts of training camps in the Republic. Juried courts for IRA suspects were phased out as both juries and judges were regularly acquitting republicans in cases of blatant IRA activity, and juries often celebrated with or congratulated the defendants: in discussion with the British government Taoiseach Jack Lynch even named judges who were deemed overly sympathetic to the IRA.

The extent of activity, training, financing, armed robberies, demonstrations and goodwill for the IRA in the Irish Republic is rarely if ever acknowledged in Irish mainstream media or the education curriculum. A Broad Church: The Provisional IRA in the Republic of Ireland, 1969–1980 will dramatically change that view forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785372476

Gearóid Ó Faoleán

Gearóid Ó Faoleán was awarded a PhD in Modern Irish History from the University of Limerick in 2014 and currently works in scholarly publishing in London. He is a member of the Oral History Network of Ireland and The Irish Association of Professional Historians. His first book, A Broad Church: The Provisional IRA in the Republic of Ireland, 1969-1980, was pulbished by Merrion Press in 2019.

Book preview

A BROAD CHURCH

This book is dedicated to my late grandfather, Michael, for his never-ending support, encouragement and generosity.

Gearóid Ó Faoleán was awarded a PhD in Modern Irish History from the University of Limerick in 2014 and currently works in scholarly publishing in London. He is a member of the Oral History Network of Ireland and The Irish Association of Professional Historians.

A BROAD CHURCH

THE PROVISIONAL IRA IN

THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND,

1969–1980

Gearóid Ó Faoleán

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First published in 2019 by

Merrion Press

An imprint of Irish Academic Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

© Gearóid Ó Faoleán, 2019

9781785372452 (Paper)

9781785372469 (Kindle)

9781785372476 (Epub)

9781785372483 (PDF)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Typeset in Minion Pro 11/15 pt

Cover front: Photo by PL Gould/Images/Getty Images.

Cover back: Benbulbin, Co. Sligo, 1977

(photo courtesy of An Phoblacht).

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Split and Emergence of the Provisional Republican Movement, 1962–9

2. The Formation and Nature of Southern Provisional Republicanism, 1970

3. Campaign Escalation and Internment, 1970–1

4. Explosion, 1972

5. Stalemate and Peace Overtures, 1973–4

6. The Truce and Restructure, 1975–7

7. Assassination. Escalation? 1978–80

Overview

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Endnotes

Index

INTRODUCTION

The ‘Troubles’ arose primarily out of the Northern Irish state’s hostile reaction to the civil rights campaign. Secondary to this was the Irish republican perspective of ‘unfinished business’ with regard to the partition of the island. Accepting 1998 as the principal cessation of this period of violence, the number of deaths during the preceding thirty years stands at over 3,500.¹ This figure fails to adequately convey the intensity and extent of the conflict. Online resources such as Conflict Archive Northern Ireland (CAIN) and printed works such as Lost Lives personalise individual deaths. Even then, the greater number of those physically affected remains unrecorded. Twice as many civilians were shot in Derry city on Bloody Sunday as actually died, while nearly four times as many British soldiers were wounded as were killed in the 1988 IRA attack at Ballygawley, County Tyrone.² The effects of the violence continue to the present day. Since the signing of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the number of euphemistically termed ‘peace walls’ has increased in the towns and cities of Northern Ireland.³ Attempts to promote equality and the notion of a shared future have fallen disappointingly short of original intentions. The Stormont administration has not yet passed an official languages act pertaining to Irish or initiated significant reform leading to integrated education.⁴ All the major unionist parties in the state legislature have consistently opposed a truth and reconciliation commission along the much-vaunted South African-model lines.⁵ The legacy of the human cost is stark. Thirty-five million tranquilisers were being consumed annually at the height of the violence in a state with a population of just one and a half million. Twice as many women as men were dependant on these sedative drugs.⁶ While the conflict proper may have receded, the psychological and emotional damage engendered by it did not simply disappear on 10 April 1998.

Most actions during the thirty-odd years of the ‘Troubles’ occurred within the Northern state. However, international actors played a crucial role which all protagonists were party to. Republican, and to a lesser extent, pro-British paramilitaries sourced armaments from abroad. British Army and IRA operations were conducted across mainland Europe. Groups and individuals in North America played a crucial role in supplying Irish republicans with money and weapons. Many of these people later helped to further the cause of peace. A great number of the ancillary events of the conflict occurred in Britain. Beginning in late 1971, England was the target of an increasing number of IRA bombings, robberies, armed robberies and gun attacks. Neither Scotland nor Wales were considered legitimate targets by the Provisional or indeed the Official republican movement.⁷

The Provisional IRA was a principal party to the conflict. Their origins lie primarily in the aftermath of sectarian pogroms in Northern Ireland during 1969, attacks which were themselves a response to the campaign of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. As the largest and most active militant republican organisation, the Provisional IRA maintained a campaign against the British state for three decades. As a result of that campaign, they were responsible for over 1,500 deaths; many hundreds of these were the deaths of civilians. Their political wing, Sinn Féin, was party to the eventual peace talks in the 1990s and is now the largest nationalist party in Northern Ireland. The Provisionals drew considerable support from areas such as west Belfast, south Armagh, east Tyrone and the Catholic areas of Derry city. Their support base also stretched across the entirety of the Republic of Ireland. Irredentist sentiment in that state persevered from the time of partition. For most of its citizens, reunification remained a considered aspiration. It was embodied in the state’s constitution. For republicans, militant and constitutional alike, the North represented ‘unfinished business’. The escalation of events from 1968 allowed for the galvanising of public opinion in that respect. Indeed, many of the founders of the Provisional IRA were from the South. For them and others, there was undisputed continuity to the Provisionals with respect to the separatist republican tradition in Ireland.

The Republic of Ireland is perhaps the most overlooked of all the theatres of the conflict during the ‘Troubles’. The largest single loss of life in one day during the conflict occurred there in May 1974, when pro-British paramilitaries exploded no-warning bombs in Dublin city and Monaghan town. Thirty-three people were killed and scores more injured.⁸ The Garda investigation was haphazard and unusually inert. Files went missing, witnesses were ignored, and seemingly crucial leads were not followed up.⁹ Relatives of the victims have dubbed it the ‘forgotten massacre’.¹⁰ Numerous other incidents occurred in the South over the course of the conflict. The largest ever IRA arms importation took place in Leinster, while one of the most infamous IRA attacks, the killing of Louis Mountbatten and several other civilians in 1979, occurred in Connacht. The shooting of a Special Branch detective in Munster in 1996 arguably signalled the beginning of the end of contemporary widespread IRA support.¹¹ The Southern state endured attacks or incursions from all parties to the conflict. Government fears that the Northern Catholic refugee crisis could lead to a Palestine–Lebanon type situation illustrates the consideration and awareness given to its effects on the state.¹² By the end of the 1970s, the Southern state had experienced bombings, kidnappings, shootings and assassinations, armed robberies, police brutality and state censorship. It was far from untouched by the ‘Troubles’. Active republicans and much of the broader population in the South contributed to the Provisional IRA’s campaign. Safe houses, training camps, arms supply routes and bomb factories existed in the Republic. Hundreds if not thousands of young men and women from that state joined the IRA as volunteers during the 1969–98 period. The state responded in a variety of ways to this. At the beginning of the conflict, an attitude and practice of toleration – even support – permeated official Ireland, whether the press, judiciary, security forces or elected representatives of mainstream political parties. After 1972, the bloodiest year of the conflict, this increasingly gave way to censorship, harsh legal measures and repression. Police brutality and forced confessions presented to juryless courts became part and parcel of the state’s campaign to defeat the IRA. These tactics developed against a backdrop of increasing lawlessness in the Republic engendered by the Provisional IRA’s actions. This included the killing of members of the state’s security forces on occasion. As the 1970s progressed, militant republican support went underground. Nevertheless, emotive events such as the deaths of IRA hunger-strikers demonstrated that sympathy or support could be reactivated.

Numerous books have been published on various facets of the ‘Troubles’ and its organisations, though far more works exist on republican than pro-British paramilitaries. In terms of fiction, Patrick Magee identified some 480 novels directly dealing with the conflict, with over 200 more works of prose.¹³ Specialist books address issues ranging from the IRA’s bombing campaign in England to their links with organisations and émigrés in the USA.¹⁴ Of the considerable body of academic literature on the IRA, much has an almost exclusively Northern focus. Only a small number of books focus on the South, and there are limitations to each. The authorised biography of Martin Ferris, for example, suffers from the subject’s inability to discuss IRA activities which are not already in the public domain.¹⁵ The book does not refrain from bluntly discussing several controversial issues, however, such as the ill-treatment of prisoners by Portlaoise prison warders. The late Sean O’Callaghan’s biography suffers from the opposite issue to Ferris’. It is presented as an ‘exposé’ of the IRA written by a self-described former commanding officer of that organisation’s Southern Command.¹⁶ In a series of articles for The Irish Times, Vincent Browne exposed the lack of cohesion in O’Callaghan’s accounts over the years. Some of his claims were magnified out of proportion while others simply disappeared or were eventually refuted by their own author. This includes an admission of murder.¹⁷ Other, more revealing accounts tend to have a local focus, including histories of republicanism in Leitrim, Kildare and east Cork which also cover pre-‘Troubles’ periods.¹⁸ In a study of the Republic of Ireland’s internment of republicans during an earlier period, John Maguire noted that the issue represented ‘an obvious research gap in the historiography of twentieth century Ireland’.¹⁹

This observation applies to many themes regarding militant republicanism. As noted, there are many works that focus on specific subjects. However, the history of the IRA – particularly in the Republic of Ireland – is far from definitively documented. No published study specifically details the role of the IRA in the South during the conflict. This is a major omission. One reason for this is the general lack of recognition about how integral the Southern state was to the longevity of the Provisional IRA’s campaign. The island-wide organisation of the IRA ensured that the South would be exploited to the full to help prosecute the campaign in the North. Many IRA volunteers from the Republic served prison sentences in Northern Irish prisons during the conflict and vice versa.²⁰ To understand just how organised the Provisionals were as a cross-border organisation, the hunger-strikes in Portlaoise prison during the 1970s give some indication. Of the dozens of participants who took part in those hunger-strikes, there were men from every province. Most of the counties on the island were represented.

In her people’s history of the English Civil War, Diane Purkiss noted one historian’s reference to that conflict as ‘the war of the five peoples’: English, Scots, Irish, Welsh and Cornish. The assertion was that each saw the war differently. Purkiss went further, arguing that one could as easily refer to it as a war of two million people, each with his or her own perspective shaped by ‘national or regional identity or religious conviction or social and familial tradition or, simply, personality, luck and experience’.²¹ The implication for the study of other conflicts or periods is obvious. But while Purkiss and her fellow early modern scholars are bound by written sources – albeit researching a period of increasing democratisation of the written word – those researchers who focus on the twentieth century are at a greater advantage. Historians seeking to construct a narrative ‘from below’ of more recent times have the benefit of being able to acquire new sources by interviewing witnesses or participants. The role of oral history in historiography remains contentious. Questions abound regarding its validity, reliability and relevance; yet the undue weight given to the written word as a reliable source is also being re-evaluated.²² This is fed, in part, by the realisation that the written word and orality are not entirely at odds; the relationship between the two is less dichotomic than congruous. Rather than existing separately, many written sources stem from orality.²³ As this book will discuss, the enforcement of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act in the Republic of Ireland in the early 1970s ensured that no member of Provisional Sinn Féin or the IRA could speak on television or the radio. Thus, they could not provide a counter-balance to the assertions and opinions of their opponents and detractors.²⁴

As republican newspapers had a limited readership, there was a forced reliance on mainstream print media; those such as the Irish Independent which, in a 1983 editorial, called for Sinn Féin to be proscribed.²⁵ Due to decades of official and unofficial censorship, oral history must be utilised to gain a fuller understanding of the ‘Troubles’. This does not mean that oral testimony should be accepted unquestioningly. As the noted social historian Alessandro Portelli warned, oral history is never objective.²⁶ Portelli did, however, add that non-objectivity ‘of course applies to every source, though the holiness of writing often leads us to forget it’.²⁷ The controversy over Peter Hart’s historiographical legacy is a reminder of how heated a subject the role of oral sources can be regarding conflict in twentieth-century Ireland.²⁸ Ideally, all transcripts and the identities of interviewees are made public where academic research is concerned. Things are rarely that simple, however. Many interviewees fear legal, professional or social censure should their accounts be made public, yet these people do not wish their experiences to pass unrecorded. Anonymity is often a necessity. In such instances, limited access is better than no access at all.²⁹ The legal implications of oral testimony for historical projects is a major concern where the recent ‘Troubles’ are concerned. Much of the early research for this book took place during the Boston College controversy.³⁰

Ultimately, any work seeking to detail the ‘Troubles’ – or any particular aspect of it – which does not rely to some extent on interviews with participants, will have gaping holes in its narrative. Restrictions and caveats may demand application and, truly, no history may ever be said to be definitive. However, this work is not intended to be definitive, merely an attempt to fill some of the many gaps – quite a few deliberate – in our understanding of the ‘Troubles’. In particular, it is intended to better our understanding of the role and experiences of Southern republicanism. These accounts are sorely lacking from nearly all published works on the conflict.³¹ The failure to sufficiently record the views of republicans has led, for example, to largely unchallenged and erroneous assertions of their pursuit of a romanticised Gaelic Ireland. Such misinterpretations betray a failure to understand or acknowledge the realities in response to which young men and women became involved in the IRA during the 1970s, or indeed the 1990s. Academics who bought into this analysis were berated by the US historian John Bowyer Bell in particular. As he succinctly put it, such researchers found the empirical approach of gaining knowledge on ‘terrorist’ groups to be too disconcerting, preferring instead to work from behind the steel doors of the academy.³² Employing Irish and British government records, interviews and numerous other primary and secondary sources, this book aims to provide as comprehensive a view as access currently allows for. It documents the Provisional IRA in the Republic of Ireland during the 1970s. It casts light on its structure and activities, its support base and its impact on broader Southern society. This study provides the first comprehensive historical analysis of the Provisional IRA in the context of the South. Both the history and historiography of conflict on this island during the twentieth century remain incomplete. A number of important under-researched themes are addressed here.

A Note on Terminology

Terminology is a political minefield where the politics of Ireland are concerned.³³ The local term for Derry city – ‘stroke city’ – is now likely to gain acceptance further afield given the appeasing title of ‘Derry-Londonderry’ during the 2013 UK City of Culture festivities.³⁴ Although recognising that specific terminology can indicate political sympathies to some, the following terms are used interchangeably throughout this work: ‘the North’, ‘Northern Ireland’ and the ‘Six Counties’; ‘the South’, ‘Republic of Ireland’ and the ‘Twenty-Six Counties’. Some other terms require explanation. Unless quoting from an interviewee or other source, ‘murder’ is not used to describe deaths that occurred during the conflict. No consensus exists on many of the deaths in this conflict. Emotive and subjective terms such as ‘terrorist’ are also avoided. ‘IRA member’, ‘volunteer’ and ‘militant republican’ are all used interchangeably for narrative purposes. The term ‘republican’ describes those who adhere to the 1916 Proclamation which asserted the indefeasibility of the republic and the legitimacy of using armed action to uphold it. ‘Nationalists’ are all those others who aspire to a united Ireland but do not necessarily support violence.

1

The Split and Emergence of the Provisional Republican Movement, 1962–9

It is widely accepted that ‘Operation Harvest’, the IRA’s border campaign of 1956–62, was a strategic disaster. Politically as well as militarily, the republican movement offered little innovation or relevance to the realities of the period. ¹ Following the campaign’s abandonment, the reconstituted IRA leadership understood that a major re-evaluation was needed if the republican movement was to have any hope of survival. ² Under new Chief-of-Staff, Cathal Goulding, this re-evaluation and concurrent reorganisation was nearly complete by the end of the 1960s. Tensions in Northern Ireland, which had been escalating throughout the decade, derailed any chance of a smooth internal revamping and presaged a split resulting in the formation of the Provisional and Official IRA and Sinn Féin. The subsequent conflict known as the ‘Troubles’ and several internecine republican feuds aggravated tensions, making consensus on the causes of the split unlikely. A broad generalisation is that the Provisional republican movement was a marriage of conservative or doctrinaire Southerners and militant, but apolitical, Northerners. A preponderance of media commentators sympathetic to the Official republican movement ensured that this interpretation remains popular to the present day. ³ The reality is far more nuanced. The Provisionals were a broad church, united by a common belief that military force was necessary to ensure a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Those who supported the Provisional IRA in the South would, in time, range from communists to orthodox militarists, cultural nationalists to apolitical young men. Shortly after their formation, Provisional Sinn Féin published a document outlining their reasons for the split entitled Where Sinn Féin Stands. The contents of this document offer an important insight into the motivations of Provisional Sinn Féin and can be used to test the veracity of its claims and determine who the Provisionals really were. This chapter examines the 1969–70 split with reference to this document, to help understand the motivations linked to the significant overlap in leadership of the two organisations – Sinn Féin and the IRA – and their common principles. The five headings under which the Provisionals outlined the incompatibility of recently adopted policies with orthodox republicanism were: (1) Recognition of parliaments (2) A formal alliance and extreme socialism (3) Let down of the North (4) Abolition of Stormont (5) Internal methods. ⁴ While the document is open to charges of self-serving bias, the Provisionals remained consistent in citing these causes. ⁵ For the sake of this study, an understanding of the formation of the Provisional republican movement contributes to an understanding of those who supported, assisted or joined the Provisional IRA in the Republic of Ireland during the ‘Troubles’.

Quo Vadis Hibernia?

Of the reasons outlined for the split, those of ‘a formal alliance’ and ‘extreme socialism’ are perhaps the most misunderstood. In large part, this is due to subsequent black-and-white portrayals of the split. The Provisionals were painted as apolitical, sectarian and primarily fixated on militarism.⁶ The formal alliance refers to the National Liberation Front (NLF). This concept was proposed in the Sinn Féin party document ‘Ireland today’, published in March 1969; this was a constructively intended critique of the republican movement up to that date.⁷ The document chastised the republican movement for not building on the electoral victories of 1957 and noted that ‘opportunities presented by mass unemployment in the fifties, and land agitation in the midlands, were passed over’.⁸ A recurring theme was the need for political participation and the benefits of a leftward shift in that regard. The document recognised the republican movement as being in competition with the Southern state’s Labour Party which was then attracting a ‘steady trend of young radicals’ that might otherwise have joined the republican movement ‘were [we] more credible’.⁹ In analysing political, class-based trends ‘Ireland today’ assigned numbers to sections of the population. Such calculated divisions represented a radical shift from Irish republican norms where support traditionally transcended class. In Where Sinn Féin Stands, the Provisional movement noted that the leadership of 1969 wished to cooperate with the small Dublin-based Irish Workers’ Party, and subsequently with the wider labour movement. This cooperation was to be formalised into an alliance, the aforementioned NLF.¹⁰ Concerns about this alliance were not simply or uniformly about left-wing politics, as will be discussed. For some republicans, the notion of a broad front with any organisation that did not subscribe to the fundamental principles of republicanism would inevitably lead to a dilution of the movement.¹¹ For others, grave concerns existed regarding the ideologues behind the push. Where Sinn Féin Stands claimed that a number of people joined the movement post-Operation Harvest who possessed distinctly left-wing views, but no militant republican tendency or inclination.¹² Though not actually naming individuals, subsequent accounts indicate that the document appears to direct particular ire at Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston, two returned émigrés who influenced the new direction.¹³ That Johnston was chosen to lead the IRA’s newly established Education Department – set up to deal with new recruits – was concerning, given his previous involvement in the Communist Party of Great Britain. Where Sinn Féin Stands says of the results of this placement that ‘for four or five years many young people came into the republican movement without knowing many of the basic tenets of Irish republicanism’.¹⁴

Johnston’s own account of the period is notable for the offhand disdain in which he held militancy.¹⁵ Gearóid MacCárthaigh, an IRA volunteer since the 1930s, was a particular opponent of Johnston’s new position. Johnston himself recalled ‘a somewhat unfriendly encounter with him (MacCárthaigh) in Cork, which was set up by SmacS (Seán MacStiofáin – first Chief-of-Staff of the Provisionals), as a sort of verbal ambush’.¹⁶ According to MacCárthaigh, the events surrounding this encounter were symptomatic of the concurrent secret machinations within the movement. Although MacCárthaigh was Commanding Officer (O/C) of the IRA in Cork city at the time, he had not been officially informed of the Army Council’s decision to elect Johnston as Director of Education. Rather, he had been unofficially informed by a high-ranking dissenter.¹⁷ According to MacCárthaigh, he and Seán MacStiofáin approached Johnston in a public house in Cork city shortly before the June 1966 Bodenstown commemoration. Producing a pistol, he gave Johnston an ultimatum to be out of the city by midnight. Following the Bodenstown commemoration, MacCárthaigh was summoned to a meeting by acting Chief-of-Staff, Seamus Costello, who demanded to know why he had threatened a member of General Headquarters (GHQ).¹⁸ MacCárthaigh replied that he had no way of knowing Johnston was a member of GHQ as nobody had officially relayed that information to him. Following Costello’s order that, in future, he was to obey any directive given to him by Johnston, MacCárthaigh resigned from the IRA.¹⁹

While advocates and opponents of a leftward shift in republican ideology often conflate socialism and communism, there is an important distinction to make regarding the IRA. The former had a long and fluid history in the organisation. Opposition to the latter was entirely in keeping with Irish republican ideology. Membership of the IRA was not open to members of communist organisations. This was a long-held policy that had nothing to do with opposition to leftism and everything to do with fundamentally conflicting ideologies. Communism was internationalist whereas Irish republicanism was about asserting the sovereignty of the Irish nation. Hostility to communism was therefore inevitably widespread within the movement. Despite this, Goulding did little to assuage fears among republicans regarding collaboration or potential alliances. That he reportedly travelled to Belfast several times as Chief-of-Staff to meet with Communist Party members without initiating any contact with the IRA leadership there caused real concern and anger.²⁰ Furthermore, leading Communist Party member Betty Sinclair was scheduled to deliver the Easter 1966 oration in Belfast until opposition to the prospect caused her to withdraw.²¹ As a young man travelling to Bodenstown from Kerry in 1966, Sean O’Callaghan recalled older men muttering about the movement seemingly ‘turning communist’.²² Here, as in other circumstances, terminology and meaning can become blurred, making it difficult to discern the true motives behind various outward displays of opposition. For example, at the 1965 Sinn Féin ardfheis, there were motions from Kerry opposing support for strike action.²³ Whether this was anti-leftism or simply anti-Roy Johnstonism is difficult to determine. The previous year, Johnston had advocated for trade union infiltration by the republican movement.²⁴ Radical or leftist action was not un-welcome among IRA volunteers in the South during the 1960s. In 1968, for example, a large US-owned trawler was blown up by republicans while docked in Connemara. According to media reports there had been a long-running enmity between this trawler, its sister ship and the local small fishermen.²⁵ The IRA also became involved in an extended dispute at the Ei Electronics factory in Shannon, County Clare, burning out buses used to transport ‘scab’ workers from Limerick city, and reportedly issuing