A Short History of the IRA: From 1916 Onwards

By Brendan O'Brien

An accessible, clearly-written account of the IRA from 1916 to today. It covers the origins and history of the organisation, its aims, the political and military thinking which has driven its activities, and the major personalities who have shaped the direction of the movement down through the years.
The relationship with the Irish and British governments is examined, as well as the effects of the major bombing campaigns and the 1981 hunger strikes. It also explains the radical shift in thinking which led to the IRA seeking a political way towards the goal of Irish unity rather than pursuing the entrenched 'Brits Out' policy at the point of a gun.
The background to the IRA ceasefire, and the many factors which contributed to its ending are looked at, as well as the prospects for a lasting peace in one of the world's most troubled arenas.
With a new chapter that brings us as far as 2018 this book has everything you need to know about the IRA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788491167

Brendan O'Brien

Brendan O’Brien reported on Northern Ireland as RTÉ’s senior current affairs reporter beginning in 1974, and he made three major documentaries about the IRA. He won many awards for investigative journalism, including European Journalist of the Year 1998 and the Amnesty International Award 2001. Since retiring from RTÉ he has lectured extensively on the Northern Irish conflict and peace process. He is the author of The Story of Ireland, a children’s book illustrated by Cartoon Saloon; The Long War: The IRA and Sinn Féin; and the revised and updated edition of A Short History of Ireland (by the late Breandán Ó hEithir). He lives in Wicklow with his family.

Book preview

Chapter One

Creating the Dream

1916

The original leaders of the Irish Republican Army would be astonished to find now, a century later, there is still no thirty-two county Irish Republic. The received wisdom of the 1920s was that the new artificial construction, the Border dividing Ireland into the six-county Northern Ireland province of the UK and the twenty-six county Irish Free State, would wither with time. With it would wither Britain’s last vestiges of power in Ireland. Yet the unthinkable was happening. Crossing a new millennium another generation of IRA activists was fighting the same fight. The Partition of Ireland and British jurisdiction over Northern Ireland had become more, not less, embedded over the years and gained more, not less, enduring nationalist acquiescence. Looking beyond the 2000s, an independent unitary Irish state, ruled from Dublin, was widely regarded as a remote and impossible dream. For a great many would-be Irish republicans, even the dreaming had stopped.

Yes, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 rekindled hope. But Óglaigh na hÉireann had been forced to accept unthinkable compromise, despite being more entrenched than at any stage since the 1920s. The modern IRA, re-constituted in December 1969 and on the offensive for most of the time since August 1971, had sustained the longest-ever unbroken armed resistance against British rule in Ireland. Yet they had not achieved their goal. When the Army Council confidently declared a unilateral cessation of military operations in August 1994 to enter round-table negotiations, they received no guarantee of winning the Republic. They had neither been victorious nor had they been defeated. Not to be defeated by overwhelming British forces during almost a quarter of a century of armed action was in itself regarded as a major success. But with no victory in sight ambitions had become chastened. The unambiguous demand for a British withdrawal from Ireland had been replaced by the language of compromise. And the fact that the IRA had effectively come to recognise the legitimacy of the southern state, for so long regarded as an illegal puppet regime, was a very real manifestation of their failure.

When the IRA’s cessation of violence broke down in early 1996, most of the volunteers and local commanders were happy to be back in action, back at the British, ready as always to finish the business. One more push and the British would be forced to ‘face their responsibilities’, as it was now ambiguously put in Army Council statements. The resumption of armed struggle, however, reopened old divisions over politics and armed force; divisions which had bedevilled modern Irish separatists ever since Pádraig Pearse publicly proclaimed the still-elusive thirty-two county Irish Republic around noon on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916. That was, in effect, the time and date when the Irish Republican Army was born.

THE EASTER RISING

The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, as begun by Pearse’s proclamation, was not a neat and tidy affair between a newly formed Republican Army and the British forces. In the first instance, it was not so much a rising, more an attempted military coup, secretly plotted by a handful of mainly unknown men. The self-proclaimed Army of the Republic was at first an uncertain collection of dedicated militarists; primarily Irish Volunteers supported by the Irish Citizen Army and even smaller groups like the Hibernian Rifles, all under the command of the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

This was no cohesive fighting force welded together over time with a disciplined structure and ideology. Some were separatists but not republicans. The Irish Volunteers, founded in 1913, was a broad church numbering close to 200,000, few of whom were armed and most of whom in 1914 followed the lead of John Redmond, moderate leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in pledging Ireland’s support for Britain in the Great War against Germany. Those Volunteers who dissented from Redmond’s call numbered just over a thousand under Chief-of-Staff Eoin MacNeill. And even when the Rising came in 1916 it was started against the wishes of MacNeill, who correctly argued that it would end in military disaster and public hostility.

Ideologically, the small Irish Citizen Army, formed by the revolutionary socialist trade union leader James Connolly, was a group apart. Connolly had far more radical ambitions than people like Pádraig Pearse and the traditionalist Roman Catholic Hibernian Rifles group, connected with the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Alongside this collection of disparate organisations was a new political grouping called Sinn Féin, meaning ‘Ourselves Alone’. At the time Sinn Féin was more separatist than the Irish Parliamentary Party but, in proposing a dual monarchy for Britain and Ireland, was not republican.

Where there was cohesion was within the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the main driving force behind the attempted military coup. The IRB was a dedicated, secretive body formed in March 1858, first called the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, avowedly republican and militaristic with support among the immigrant Irish in the emergent United States, where it was known as Clann na Gael.

Despite these uncomfortable combinations, a single military group had come together, acting within the terms of the decision adopted on 9 September 1914, by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, to strike against Britain at some time during the war which had just begun. When it came to it, the bulk of Irish separatists were unwilling to take up arms against what was then their own legal government at a time of war. Many had enlisted and were dug into trenches in foreign fields, fighting Britain’s fight. In addition, the Liberal government in London had developed a policy of Home Rule for Ireland. The fuse of armed resistance to British policy came not from republicans demanding more but from the Ulster Volunteers demanding less. Formed in 1912 these Unionists were pledged in blood to fight against Home Rule, a pledge backed in part by elements in the British Conservative Party and in the British Army. Still, some measure of independence for Ireland, albeit under the Crown, was a probability at war’s end. Given the electoral strength of Redmond’s Irish Party, the advocates of Home Rule, it seemed a majority of Irish people would have been content with that.

It was virtually unimaginable that the 1916 Proclamation declaring Ireland a republic, read on that ordinary Easter Monday to a bemused and disinterested Dublin population outside the General Post Office, would in time become the bedrock of 20th century Irish republican ideology. Headed ‘

POBLACHT NA HÉIREANN: THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND

’, it read:

Irishmen and Irishwomen: in the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of manhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisation, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.

We declare the right of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished that right nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby declare the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State; and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare and of its exhaltation among the nations.

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.

We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity or rapine. In this supreme hour, the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.

Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government: Thomas J Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, PH Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett.

It seemed a preposterous and outrageous statement: these seven men claiming to be the Provisional government of a new Irish Republic, attempting to overthrow the might of the British Empire in an open battle. In any event, by the time the Proclamation was read out the seven signatories knew that defeat was inevitable. They would not have the arms to do the job as planned. A German arms ship, the Aud, destined for the insurgents, was intercepted by the British off the southwest coast days before the Rising. This led Eoin MacNeill, a reluctant and late supporter of the secret plot, to send orders for the operation to be called off. Those who proceeded, particularly Pearse, were engaged in a blood sacrifice, intent on adding another glorious chapter to the story enshrined in the Proclamation, passing on the flame to another generation. As for leadership, Pádraig Pearse was more a political romantic than a military strategist.

The aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising: British forces hold a Dublin street against the insurgents.

Still, the insurgents put up a real fight, though the action was confined to Dublin. Only tiny and sporadic support came from the country. Using vastly superior military might the British forces crushed the insurrection to unconditional surrender at 3.30pm on Saturday 29 April. One of the last groups to hold out was the company of Irish Volunteers at Bolands Bakery on the outskirts of the city under the command of Eamon de Valera.

When it was over, much of central Dublin lay in ruins and many of the city’s working-class slum areas were damaged by stray overfire. The people were not amused by the antics of the insurgents, their seemingly farcical Proclamation and their extraordinary claim to be the Provisional government of the country. Political and press reaction was hostile in the extreme.

Two Republican prisoners from Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, being escorted to Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, under heavy guard and accompanied by a British Army officer and RIC sergeant in 1916.

In that atmosphere the British government, with a real war on its hands to the east and not wanting a weakened western flank, decided on the toughest of reprisal measures. Under the new command of General Sir John Maxwell, the government’s military response was to crush both the spirit and the flesh of this fledgling militant Irish republicanism. The leaders would be executed, hundreds of others would be given penal servitude, hard labour and deportation. Executions and deportations had proven effective in quelling past Irish military adventures: 1798 – Theobald Wolfe Tone; 1803 – Robert Emmet; 1848 – Young Irelanders; 1867 – Fenians. Then, the rebels and their cause had failed to stir the broad public conscience and life carried on as normal. It would be the same this time.

But far from repeating itself, history took a dramatic turn. This time, Britain’s crushing and ruthless measures failed even on their most justifiable military level, that of keeping her western flank quiet in time of war. Irish nationalism was stirred like never before. From 3 May 1916, fifteen leaders were executed, including all seven signatories to the Proclamation. A severely wounded James Connolly was shot by firing squad while tied to a chair. De Valera’s life was spared on the grounds that he was a foreign, American, citizen. In terms of the effect on militant Irish republicanism, the British miscalculation was immense. It proved the catalyst for the merging of the disparate fighting forces into a broadly supported Irish Republican Army allied to a new political force in the land, Sinn Féin.

Chapter Two

Fighting for the Republic

1916–1921

The reorganisation of militant Irish separatism was not automatic. Nor did it follow immediately on the heels of the 1916 executions and imprisonments. The centre had been taken away and time was needed. But in historical terms the re-grouping was exceptionally swift, as though bypassing the gap of a generation. Within two years the obscure new organisation called Sinn Féin, with its strange theories about national self-reliance and headed by its aloof new President, Éamon de Valera, had swept aside the long-established Irish Party in a tidal wave of electoral support for a defiant separatist parliament (Dáil Éireann) in Dublin.

The Irish Volunteers had been skilfully re-shaped into a people’s fighting force with a popular mandate, emerging as the Irish Republican Army, the army of the Republic as declared by Dáil Éireann. The principal architect of that military re-shaping was the dynamic and enigmatic Michael Collins. This new chapter began on 25 October 1917, with a Sinn Féin Árd Fheis (annual conference) combined with an undercover Army Convention. At those meetings Sinn Féin ditched its dual monarchy policy and the Irish Republican Army (still called the Irish Volunteers) began taking a unified shape with a new command structure under Chief-of-Staff Cathal Brugha and his deputy Richard Mulcahy, with Collins as Director of Organisation.

In this valley period between 1916 and 1918 the forging of unity among Irish separatists ebbed and flowed. Sinn Féin won and lost a series of by-elections. The party ran on a policy of abstention, that is, not taking their seats in the Westminster Parliament if elected. This policy was in large part designed to act as a substitute for armed action. The majority of Irish people was still more willing to support political struggle than military rebellion.

But the British government again assisted the militarists. In early 1917 the new British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, enraged moderate Ireland by seeming to make the prospect of postwar Home Rule for Ireland conditional on the introduction of conscription in Ireland during the war. Conscription was the major emotive point of departure for most Irish people. Volunteering to fight for Britain was one thing. Being conscripted into the British Army was quite another. Linking conscription to Home Rule was intolerable. Lloyd George’s manoeuvres resulted in massive anti-British disaffection and waves of recruits for Michael Collins. It was a high price paid by the Liberal government, normally a friend of Irish Home Rule, since World War I ended in November 1918 with America’s vital assistance to Britain and without the need for conscription in Ireland.

FINDING A ROLE

All this time the IRA were reorganising but not fighting. Support at street level and on the crossroads was high, in sentiment at least. There was still no certainty of another round against the British. Quite the opposite. Sinn Féin was sweeping up the sentiment, and the physical force men were in the background, biding their time.

The general election of December 1918 appeared to justify Sinn Féin’s preference for political abstention rather than military rebellion. They had a prodigious victory. Out of 105 Irish seats, Sinn Féin on a republican ticket won seventy-three, the Irish Parliamentary Party, which was still advocating Home Rule under the Crown, won six. It was a stunning turnaround though the ‘first past the post’ electoral system masked the fact that, where voters had a choice, about a third of the nationalist or separatist electorate had voted for the old Irish Parliamentary Party. (The votes cast were: Sinn Féin 485,105; Irish Parliamentary Party 237,393. No votes were counted in twenty-four constituencies where Sinn Féin candidates were returned unopposed.) The Unionists, mostly in the northern province of Ulster, having resisted Home Rule by threat of force, won twenty-six seats with 315,394 votes, further copper-fastening the emerging divide on the island. Furthermore, although the voting system had given Sinn Féin a landslide of seats, they had won a minority of votes cast on the island as a whole. It was a