Showing posts with label Provisional IRA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Provisional IRA. Show all posts
Brandon Sullivan & Bleakley ✍ continue their examionation of the IRA war making capacity in the 1990s.

Republican Movement Thinking at the Beginning of 1992

Before starting this piece, we did two things. The first was watched Pop Goes Northern Ireland 1992. We cannot recommend this documentary series highly enough, and urge all those interested in the conflict to watch it. The second was reading the first edition of the Irish People – We had hoped to find a copy of the IRA’s traditional new year statement, but were unable to do so. But we did find some other articles that give an idea of where the IRA was at in 1992. The War News section detailed a number of standard IRA operations: blowing up security force bases, shooting soldiers, and also causing over £50m of damage in England. This total would be dwarfed in 1992. But the issue was fascinating for what else it contained.

Two of three cartoons were against the Free State – one seemingly condemning Garda harassment, and the other, rather cleverly it has to be said, showing the “empty suits” of Fine Gael members, with one saying “as in all the other sectarian murders of Irish nationalists the real culprits are the IRA, of course!” Later on in the issue, there’s an interview with an IRA spokesperson about the Provo’s decision to dramatically cutdown on punishment shootings/beatings. And there was also an article celebrating a “spectacular Sinn Fein election victory” and details of an IPLO murder headlined “Sinn Fein Call for IPLO to Disband.” Criticism of the Southern political establishment; a tentative move towards a form of “normalisation” of crime and punishment; political success; and calls for republican dissidents to disband. This is all a far cry from one of the IRA’s “Year of Victory” statements in the 1970s.


The IRA in the North - killing

As with 1991, the first IRA killing of the year was hard to justify. On the 13th January, 22 year old nationalist, Michael “Mickey” Logue was killed with an under-car-bomb, and died in hospital of his terrible injuries. This happened in Coalisland, and the IRA apologised for the murder, saying they had been acted on “erroneous information.” A neighbour of the dead man helped get him out of the badly damaged car, later saying he'd heard “in general conversation” that "Mickey was one of the boys working on the barracks in the town." The IRA in Tyrone were still dedicated to killing those they believed were repairing the security force bases they repeatedly bombed and mortared.

Four days after Mickey Logue’s unjustifiable killing, the IRA carried out an attack that was described as “the worst attack on Protestant workers since Kingsmill.” In one sense, this is true. But the targets were not Protestants, they were those working on security force installations. In this case, the base was Lisnakelly, and the IRA believed they were targeting employees of the Henry Brothers, a company the IRA detested, and which lost a number of men. In fact, the IRA had “erroneous information again” – the eight men killed and six injured at Teebane worked for Karl Construction. But, in the IRA’s eyes, they were as legitimate a target as Henry Brothers. The firm they worked for was Karl Construction – named after an RUC member, Karl Blackbourne (aged only 19), who, with two colleagues, was shot dead by the IRA in Newry. Karl’s father, Cedric, owned the firm. Three of the casualties were part-time members of the security forces.

Was Teebane indicative of an IRA in decline? Jonathan Trigg in his book Death in the Fields: The IRA and East Tyrone quoted someone saying that Teebane was done at the behest of the East Tyrone Brigade’s OC, who decided not to tell most of his brigade “let alone Belfast.” The IRA in Tyrone had experienced losses at the hands of the security forces. Their families and the wider nationalist community had been targeted by resurgent loyalist paramilitaries. Perhaps Tyrone IRA were keen to “return the serve” or perhaps it was simply the continuation of a brutal but effective campaign against security force contractors. Cedric Blackbourne told an American journalist that “at least 30” of his workers quit in the aftermath of Teebane, but he also said the company kept on doing security force work.

On Good Friday, the IRA killed a member of the nationalist community, Brandon McWilliams. He was employed as a storeman at a UDR barracks, and was himself a former member of the Royal Ulster Rifles, and the Territorial Army. The IRA claimed he had “passed on intelligence” to the security forces, and that he had ignored repeated warnings to stop working for the UDR. Republicans killed four RUC officers, four British soldiers, and three members of the UDR. This was a significant drop in terms of security force “kills” since 1991 (19). The IRA did kill a significant loyalist figure, but the IRA were extremely active in another area: bombing.

The IRA in the North – bombing

The numbers can be interpreted in a number of ways. Had the IRA reduced the number of lethal attacks being initiated on the security forces? Or were the security forces just getting better at not being killed? Or a bit of both? One side of the IRA’s campaign which seemed most assuredly not to be in decline was bombing commercial, economic, or security force targets.

This included the biggest bomb to be exploded by the IRA in the North. Toby Harnden’s essential book on the South Armagh, Bandit Country, described the operation:

On 23rd September ... the South Armagh Brigade hijacked a van near Newry, packed it with 3,500 of explosives, drove it to Belfast and abandoned it outside the Forensic Science Laboratory in Newtownbreda ... after a coded warning had been issued, the device exploded, almost demolishing the laboratory and damaging 1,002 homes in the area, most of them on the loyalist Belvoir estate.

The target had been the forensic laboratory – specifically, items of evidence being analysed which were to be used against two South Armagh volunteers. The evidence had been locked in a vault elsewhere and was not damaged in the attack. One of the homes badly damaged belonged to hapless UVF bomber Martin Snodden. He received no compensation, on account of his murder conviction. Alongside IRA evidence would have been numerous items relating to forthcoming loyalist trials. The Knockbreda attack suggests that the IRA were as unperturbed at destroying evidence that could lead to loyalists being imprisoned as they were at damaging and/or destroying hundreds of PUL houses, and the resulting fury/backlash.
The IRA carried out scores of incendiary bombings during 1992, sometimes causing millions of pounds worth of damage. They also detonated huge car bombs, often in the heart of majority Protestant towns and villages, as well as the centre of Belfast. In their book about the UDA’s Belfast Brigade C Company, Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and 'C Company', Jordan & Lister described some of these bombings and the loyalist reaction:

In November, the UFF issued a statement responding to an IRA bomb blitz that had damaged hundreds of Protestant homes in Northern Ireland. Two months earlier, as the Provisionals stepped up their campaign in Britain with a firebomb attack on the Hyde Park Hilton Hotel, a 1,000 Ib bomb had destroyed the Northern Ireland Forensic Science Laboratory in Belfast’s loyalist Belvoir estate, wrecking 1,000 homes. In October, as IRA bombs continued to explode in central London, a 200 Ib device ripped through the commercial heart of Bangor, Co. Down, while at least 100 homes were damaged when a car bomb exploded outside a police station in another Protestant town, Glengormley. In a telephoned statement to the BBC, the UFF warned that, as of midnight on 6 November, any further bombs in Protestant areas would be responded to with attacks against ‘the republican community as a whole’. Its riposte, it said, would be similar to its action after the massacre at Teebane, a grim reference to the carnage at the Ormeau Road.

The UFF “response” was murdering three politically uninvolved nationalists in a bookies, one of them a WW2 British army veteran and former prisoner-of-war. The IRA shot and killed a UFF member, Norman Truesdale, in 1993 alleging he was involved in the triple murder.

The IRA in the North – the IPLO

The IRA effected the single most complete wipeout of a paramilitary group in the whole conflict on Halloween 1992, an event which became known as The Night of the Long Knives. According to McDonald & Holland’s book INLA: Deadly Divisions, around 100 IRA volunteers were involved in a series of operations across the city which left one man, Sammy Ward, dead, and many others wounded, sometimes with devasting “kneecapping” injuries (IRA man Gerry Bradley wrote that “over 60” volunteers took part). That the IPLO ceased to exist following the assault isn’t in doubt. But interesting questions emerge about the timing of the IRA’s operation. Three key IPLO figures had died violently in the year leading up to Halloween 1992: Martin “Rook” O’Prey and Conor Maguire were killed by the UVF (Aug 91, April 92), and former French Foreign Legionnaire Patrick Sullivan was stabbed to death by criminal elements in the lower Falls (Feb 92). Sullivan’s killing has been investigated by the Police Ombudsman. Would the IRA have risked a republican feud if these three key figures were still active? It’s hard to say. But the IRA still had the personnel and equipment to launch city-wide attacks against an ostensibly armed enemy. The Night of the Long Knives was perhaps the final large scale operation the Belfast Brigade undertook.

The IRA in England

The day after (10th April) John Major’s surprise Conservative Party general election win, the IRA detonated the biggest bomb in England since World War 2 at The Baltic Exchange. It killed three civilians, wounded 91, and cost £800m (£1.73bn in today’s money) – 25% more than the cost of all of the bombs the IRA exploded in the North up until that point. A few hours later, also on 11th April, the IRA detonated a huge bomb elsewhere in London, but fortunately nobody was killed.

There were other IRA (and INLA) bombings in London in 1992. However, none were of the magnitude of the Baltic Exchange bombing. The effects of this bomb:

destabilised the market for terrorism insurance on commercial properties. Given both the potentially very high costs associated with terrorist attacks on commercial property and the high degree of uncertainty associated with predicting the frequency and severity of those attacks, many insurers had withdrawn from the terrorism insurance market. Given the damaging impact on the wider economy should commercial properties become uninsurable, government intervention was deemed necessary.

In other words, UKG was forced to become an insurer, or risk losing investment and jobs in London, because of the IRA threat.

Conclusion

It is arguable that the IRA in 1992 were less successful on their own terms than in 1991. That being said, the political and financial fallout of the bombs in London was immense.

The Chairman of the Police Federation said, in the December 1992 issue of Police Beat that “The past year has been difficult; the IRA have never been more destructive or the loyalists more murderous.” He was partially inaccurate – the IRA had never been as destructive, but loyalists had been more murderous during most of the 1970s. I couldn’t however find any calls for internment to be reintroduced. Perhaps it can be argued that the IRA was in decline in the North, but not in England.

Debate may continue as to whether that was managed decline, the result of attrition, or both.

1991 discussed here.

Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

Was The IRA In Decline By The 1990s? Part 3 ◆ 1992 – A Case Study

Bleakley and Brandon Sullivan   examine whether the loss of the arms ship Eksund in 1987 really doomed the IRA to a stalemate . . . 

Continued from Part I

Capabilities

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s sympathy for Irish republicans was made tangible in four separate shipments of machine guns, explosives, and rocket launchers to Ireland in the 1980s. However, two remaining items of heavy ordinance on the Provisional IRA’s shopping list were lost forever with the Eksund: 82 mm mortars and 106mm M40 recoilless rifles.

In A Secret History of the IRA Ed Moloney writes:

On board [the Eksund] had been military mortars that could have devastated British barracks and RUC bases throughout the North, enabling the IRA to launch damaging attacks from safe distances.

This is a problematic line for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it’s unlikely that 82 mm mortar rounds could have “devastated” British barracks and RUC bases. A typical 82mm mortar high-explosive round contains 0.42 kg of TNT. The 82mm mortar tube is intended to be transported by infantry. For comparison the IRA’s notorious “Barrack Buster” a 320 mm calibre home-made mortar projectile that debuted in 1992 could have upwards of 100 kg of explosive. Barrack Buster batteries mounted on lorries often counted several individual tubes.

Since the disaster at Newry in 1985 (when nine RUC officers were killed by IRA mortar bombs) and other attacks the British government had undertaken a costly campaign to reinforce and rebuild security installations. British Army outposts were fortified with concrete bunkers and new RUC stations were built with spaced false roofs to protect against mortar rounds.

Secondly, that phrase “throughout the North”. Twelve mortars is not a substantial quantity. There were many British Army and RUC barracks, bases, permanent checkpoints and watchtowers across Northern Ireland. It’s difficult to conceptualise how a handful of light mortars could form the backbone of a hypothetical “Tet Offensive”, especially with the inevitable attrition through combat or captured arms dumps.

Former IRA John Crawley offered his perspective on the infantry mortars:

I firmly believed that, provided the right men were professionally trained and secrecy maintained, the IRA could have attack any barracks in the North...adjacent IRA units could have used 81-millimetre mortars to destroy enemy Quick Reaction Forces and their helicopter transport on the ground. Potential helicopter landing zones in the vicinity of an IRA withdrawal could have been pre-registered for rapid mortar and machine-gun fire...

Moloney correctly notes that the range of the factory-made mortars far exceeded the IRA’s own models. A typical 82mm mortar round has a range of over 3,000 m versus a mere 250 m for the “Barrack Buster”. A trained crew could also aim a military mortar with a fair degree of accuracy, while for the IRA’s mortars hitting their intended target was usually a matter of luck.

Whether any IRA members received training on the 82 mm mortars (or M40 recoilless rifles) is unclear but they were an adaptable group; certainly there were a lot more people in Ireland familiar with the operation of infantry mortars than surface-to-air missile launchers.

As discussed in Part I, if the Eksund was unloaded in Ireland as planned it’s unlikely it would have been the catalyst for an earth-shattering redefinition of the conflict; that would have necessitated a different Provisional IRA. But if the IRA that did exist in reality got its hands on a dozen 82 mm mortars, what impact would they have had?

As irreplaceable weapons it’s almost certain their use would have been mostly confined to border areas. The cumbersome DShK heavy machine gun, another Libyan prestige weapon, was on only a handful of occasions used deep inside Northern Ireland. It was otherwise exclusively a border asset. According to long time IRA member Gerry Bradley, three separate “ops” in Belfast involving the DShK were cancelled, apparently for fear of civilian casualties.

The IRA’s engineering department weren’t going to run out of pipes or gas cylinders to convert to destructive devices. These home-made mortars were intended to be single-use weapons, detonating on a timer long after the IRA Volunteers involved had vacated the area. This suited the IRA.

An 82 mm mortar would require its crew to be at the launch site aiming and loading them. Afterwards they would need to pack up the mortar and return it to an arms hide. This is mitigated somewhat by the Volunteers being kilometres, rather than meters, away from the target.

The military mortars in the context of the IRA’s campaign should be thought of as a precision weapon rather than a tool of large-scale destruction. They could plausibly impose tactical dilemmas on the British Army in border areas. For example, permanent vehicle checkpoints might need to be built several kilometres “inland” to counter the new threat. Another response would be to dismantle checkpoints and replacement them with more flexible infantry patrols, as the British Army did with Derryard and Boa Island in Fermanagh in 1991. The ubiquitous watchtowers in South Armagh would be in danger. Theoretically the IRA could lob 82 mm mortar bombs at Crossmaglen’s helipad without even setting foot in Northern Ireland.

The other new capability promised by the Eksund was the American-made 106 mm M40 recoiless rifle. The M40 is a direct-fire anti-tank cannon firing a hefty shell out to a maximum range of seven kilometres, effective range depending on the munition type but usually falling within a mile.

The recoilless principle operates by allowing gasses from the propellant charge to be expelled from the back of the gun, resulting in a forward recoil force that counteracts the recoil from the muzzle and the projectile. This means that you have an artillery piece far lighter (and simpler) than a conventional model with felt recoil so mild it can be fired from a jeep.

These are obvious advantages for an underground guerrilla group like the IRA. No readily available source says how many they were given by Libya but a dozen seems like a good guess.

The 106 mm gun would have been a priceless asset for the IRA. Like the DShK heavy machine guns they would probably be used near the border. At over 200 kg and eleven feet in length transporting and hiding it would not be trivial, although the IRA had always shown an ability to move mortar-lorries and large bombs.

The 106 mm gun, like the 82 mm mortar, would have presented a new threat to observation towers in South Armagh and other border outposts. It could also have been used in its intended anti-armour role against RUC and British Army vehicles.

One potential target raised by both Moloney and Crawley is the British patrol vessel in Carlingford Lough. The South Armagh IRA had taken potshots at Royal Navy boats in the Lough, most recently in December 1993 when they fired two rounds from a Barret .50 rifle at Bird-class patrol vessel HMS Cygnet. Armed with a more potent direct-fire weapon they could have dealt a lot more damage, no doubt a propaganda coup for republicans.

Moloney raises another maritime scenario for the 106 mm gun: Sinking a ship (or ships) in Belfast harbour, blocking access to the sea. Sinking a single ship, let alone ships, large enough to obstruct passage into Belfast harbour, in the heart of the city, would be a significant undertaking. The loss of the 106 mm recoilless rifle involved seems a given. Had the operation succeeded it would have made great television and embarrassed the British government, but in a historical context IRA attacks on commercial and naval shipping were hardly unknown. In 1990 an IRA bomb crippled the 31,565 ton British naval vessel RFA Fort Victoria at dock, three months post-christening; she narrowly avoiding sinking after listing at 45 degrees and was stuck in Belfast harbour for two years.

In 1994 the IRA in South Armagh shot down two low-flying British Army helicopters using mortars. It’s possible the 106 mm cannon could be co-opted for a similar role, especially considering its accuracy and flat trajectory relative to the IRA’s home-made mortars.

Precedents

This is ultimately all speculation, but there are two new capabilities that the IRA introduced in the early 1990s that provide a potential blueprint of the strategic and tactical impact the 82 mm mortars and 106 mm recoilless rifles might have had.

The high-powered Barret .50 rifle, which can penetrate body armour with ease, was first fired at the British Army in Northern Ireland in early 1990. However it wasn’t until August 1992 that the sniping campaign began in earnest. From late 1992 until the end of 1993 the IRA killed six British soldiers and three RUC officers in single-shot sniper attacks, all bar one in South Armagh.

The campaign imposed difficulties on the operational manoeuvrability of British security forces in South Armagh, not to mention the effect on morale. A British Army intelligence officer, Patrick Mercer, recounted a meeting discussing the sniper threat:

We’re all sat around talking then suddenly the Major-General, Commander Land Forces, said “I can’t believe it. I’m sitting here with a bunch of highly-paid and clearly bright, able people talking as if I was a Second-Lieutenant, dealing with a sniper. What have we come to?” And everybody sort of had a nervous laugh. “But this is the point isn’t it? Two or three expert gunmen can hold the British Army, the RUC, and the British government to ransom, by every so often killing or wounding a small number of men but in a particular style.”

The sniper campaign coincided with a significant escalation in the IRA’s mortar campaign via the introduction of the new “Barrack Buster”. Specifications varied, but broadly mortars in this class contained upwards of 100 kg explosives per projectile, effectively a flying car bomb.

IRA mortar attacks in Northern Ireland in the years leading up to 1993 were largely ineffective, compared to the series of devastating attacks in the mid-1980s. However the introduction of the Barrack Buster at the end of 1992 signalled the beginning of more destructive and injurious mortar attacks.

In January the IRA carried out a mortar attack on Clogher RUC barracks, landing in the car park and leaving several police officers with minor injuries. In February the IRA mortared XMG Crossmaglen, damaging the base and hospitalising a civilian worker. In March there was a mortar attack on Bessbrook base, damaging over thirty houses in the village. That same month the IRA struck at Keady RUC base, killing a civilian contractor operating a crane and seriously injuring three others. In April the IRA lobbed a mortar bomb at Crossmaglen again, injuring three British soldiers.

As mentioned previously, in 1994 the IRA in South Armagh used these mortars to shoot down two low-flying British Army helicopters.

This is far from an exhaustive list but should give a flavour. The IRA’s pride in their new artillery was evidenced by a live-fire demonstration for journalists in a border Sitka forest in March 1993.

The menacing sniper and mortar campaigns along the border, particularly in South Armagh, made the IRA a more dangerous factor in the region than they had been for some time. Author Chris Harnden described this period as the “zenith” of the South Armagh Brigade.

However viewed in a broader context this did not alter the military-political trajectory of the IRA. The British government were no closer to acceding to the IRA’s public demand of withdrawal. The road to the 1994 ceasefire was well advanced. The extent to which equipment as much as expertise played a role can be debated; three of the lethal sniper attacks in South Armagh in 1993 involved a regular 7.62mm rifle rather than a .50 weapon.

Had the IRA gotten its hands on the 82 mm mortars and 106 mm recoilless guns there could well have been more “spectaculars”, more pressure on the British Army in border areas, and more morale boosts for the republican movement. Conversely, surface-to-air missiles and flamethrowers from Libya were used once or twice before being relegated to bunkers in the South and that may have been the fate of the Eksund weapons.

Either way a greatly changed high-level strategic calculus for both sides was unlikely to emerge.

Conclusion

The Eksund, following the earlier Libyan shipments, would have presented a significant further boost to the IRA’s arsenal and enabled it to carry out some new kinds of operations, and provided a greater pool of arms for regular actions.

The idea, however, that receiving the Eksund’s weapons would have somehow had a transformative effect on the IRA’s training, tactics, and organisational structure, or changed the nature of the conflict altogether is hard to substantiate. Perhaps republicans would have had bigger arms dumps to use as leverage during the unending peace process-era decommissioning crises. Maybe dissident republicans would be better armed because there was more materiel floating around to fall into their hands.

The organisation would have been on the same path it was in our timeline, with a leadership who had long decided on a political strategy steering the movement to the 1994 ceasefire followed by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and an end to the campaign on the terms of constitutional nationalism, rather than traditional republicanism. 

Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

The Eksund And The IRA's War-Making Capacity Part 2

Brandon Sullivan & Bleakley ✍ In IRA terms, it can be argued that 1991 was a successful year, and forms part of an evidence base which challenges the notion that the IRA was in decline in the 1990s.

Looking at the first two months of 1991 in terms of IRA operations gives a flavour of the capabilities and capacity of the IRA. I picked January and February pretty much at random, though I was aware of the unusual nature of the Downing Street mortar attack.

Two Months in 1991

The first IRA killing of 1991 was squalid. On the 21st January, five men in combat fatigues surrounded a car containing a 63 year old creamery worker named Thomas Edward Cullen Stephenson. One of the men opened fire, and Stephenson was killed. He had left the RUC two years previously, having served for 14 years. His wife took her own life a year after being made a widow. Former DUP First Minister Arlene Foster knew Mr Stephenson and described the “shockwaves through the community” following the shooting. The IRA claimed Mr Stephenson had been seen operating an RUC checkpoint, and that both he, and another man in the car who managed to escape, had been identified as RUC members.

Shortly after Cullen Stephenson’s killing, on the 7th February, an IRA unit drove a van into central London. The rear windows had duct tape which, when lined up with landmarks, created a crude yet accurate aiming mechanism for the mortars contained within it. Senior Met Police officer Peter Gurney is quoted in Toby Harnden’s excellent book Bandit Country as saying:

that the range and angle of firing had been worked out using scale maps and photographs before a reconnaissance run had been carried out. If the van had been just five degrees out then the Prime Minister might well have been killed.

That same day there was a bomb attack on an army barracks in Belfast. A few days previous, a UDR base had been severely damaged in a bomb attack.

There were three attacks on British army aircraft in the first two months of year. The first, at the end of January, was a helicopter being struck by an IRA bullet. The most serious attack resulted in a Lynx helicopter being shot down on the 15th February, with an internal MOD report saying it was "by a stroke of luck" that there weren’t fatalities. Another attack, two days afterwards, resulted in the helicopter’s mission being aborted.

Bombing London

As well as the Downing Street mortar attack, there were at least three other IRA attacks in England, including a bomb attack on an army base. The IRA decided to attack London’s transport system for the first time since 1976. The plan seems to have been one bomb to go off several hours before rush-hour to act as a statement of intent and capability, and then with real bombs and hoaxes to paralyse the city. A bomb at Paddington station went of with no casualties around 4am. At 7am, an IRA member stated in a telephone warning that “We are the Irish Republican Army. Bombs to go off in all mainline stations in 45 minutes.” The security forces did not evacuate all stations, which was the IRA’s intention. An IRA bomb at Victoria station resulted in one man being killed, and 38 injured. This, along with hoax warnings, caused chaos and terror across London. The IRA released the following statement:

The cynical decision of senior security personnel not to evacuate railway stations named in secondary warnings, even three hours after the warning device had exploded at Paddington (Station) in the early hours of the morning was directly responsible for the casualties at Victoria. All future warnings should be acted upon.

There were at least 85 IRA operations in January and February 1991, with targets ranging from the British Prime Minister John Major to a retired judge. Commercial targets were bombed, as were law courts, and indeed train stations in the North. Interestingly, at least two businesses publicly declared that they would no longer provide goods/services to the security forces as a result of IRA threats and/or actions.

Across the Barricades: The IRA & Loyalist Paramilitaries

The IRA relentlessly attacked those they claimed were involved in loyalist paramilitary attacks against nationalist/republicans in 1991. Ten men were killed, whilst others escaped the attacks, sometimes with serious injuries. On the very day that the Combined Loyalist Military Command announced a ceasefire, an IRA unit raked a garage with machine-gun fire. The garage, the IRA said, was being used by the Mid-Ulster UVF. This is possible. Two IRA targets, Leslie Dallas (shot dead in 1990) and Keith Martin (wounded in 1991) were Hot Rod racers, and frequented garages in that particular area: Dallas owned the garage where he was shot dead.

On the 9th of April, the IRA shot Derek Ferguson dead. Ferguson worked for Henry Brothers, a construction firm that specialised in renovating and repairing security force bases, but the reason that the IRA gave for his killing was his alleged membership of the UVF. The IRA said they had spotted Ferguson in a car that was used in a loyalist attack. Ferguson was a cousin of the wretched DUP MP Willie McCrea, and was an associate of Leslie Dallas. Contemporaneous media reports named Dallas as a leading UVF member.

Another attack was on former UDR member, David Jameson. Jameson’s brother Richard, a “UVF Brigadier”, would infamously be shot dead in a loyalist feud. David Jameson had convictions for arms offences, and was deeply involved in repairing and building security force bases. He survived the attack, though he lost a leg.

There were at least 20 attacks on named members of the PUL community, who the IRA said they had under surveillance and whom they planned to kill. These were not random assassinations, although that is not to say all of those targeted were responsible for what they IRA said they were.

Meanwhile, the War News section of Republican News continued to publish the details of businesses which had publicly said were now no longer supplying goods and services to the security forces.

Conclusion

None of this means that the IRA were anywhere close to victory. But neither were they in significant operational decline. Twice in 1991, the RUC police federation via their magazine Police Beat called for internment to be, at the very least, seriously considered. Others in the security establishment were even more pessimistic about the IRA’s decline. A “senior security source” had this to say about the IRA at the end of 1991 (Fortnight magazine):

The IRA terrorists are better equipped, better resourced, better led, bolder, and more secure against our penetration than ever before. They are absolutely a formidable enemy. The essential attributes of their leaders are better than ever before. Some of their operations are brilliant, in terrorist terms.

Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

Was The IRA in Decline by the 1990s? Part Two ◆ 1991 – A Case Study

Bleakley and Brandon Sullivan ✍examine whether the loss of the arms ship Eksund in 1987 really doomed the IRA to a stalemate . . . 

Fate

1 November 1987.

Somewhere above the Hurd Deep, off the coast of Brittany, France.

The former grain hauler Eksund. Fifty years old and showing her age. Onboard: 150 tonnes of arms destined for the Irish Republican Army, courtesy of the ever-generous Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. A weight of weaponry equal to all the IRA had received from Libya in four earlier shipments of the preceding two years.

When French customs officials boarded the stricken vessel they discovered that the IRA men had tried to scuttle the ship and its deadly cargo. For them, secrecy was paramount. The British government couldn’t be allowed to discover that that IRA now had a large arsenal of modern military hardware.

According to journalist Ed Moloney in his seminal work A Secret History of the IRA the paramilitary group were planning to launch a massive offensive inspired by the Viet Cong’s famous “Tet Offensive” of 1968. In strict military terms Tet was a failure yet is credited with shifting US public opinion towards demanding a withdrawal from Vietnam.

In Moloney’s telling, the success of this offensive relied on the Eksund and its precious cargo arriving in Ireland undetected. The arms aboard the Eksund and the element of surprise were supposedly the two the key ingredients if the IRA hoped to pull off a startling escalation of a conflict that had by then settled into something resembling routine.

Moloney’s central hypothesis is that the dominant personalities within the IRA, conniving with the British, scuppered the Eksund venture to avert an escalation of the conflict many IRA members hoped for, thus saving the Peace Process and setting the stage for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Is this possible?

Variants of this account have been circulated by different authors. Were the IRA prepared for a large-scale military offensive that would have totally changed the dynamic of the conflict? Could the arms carried by the Eksund really have made that a reality? What capabilities could this weaponry have offered to the IRA, in any case?

Revolutionary Toolkit

Firstly it’s important to ask, what was the Eksund actually carrying on that fateful journey in late 1987?

The answer isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Virtually every source gives a different inventory. Media illiteracy on the subject further muddles the picture e.g. claiming one-hundred and twenty missile launchers were seized when they really meant their ammunition. However after combing through various books and newspaper articles here’s a preliminary list:


  • x 1,000 AK-47 type rifles.
  • x 10 7.62mm general-purpose machine guns
  • x 10 12.7mm DshK heavy machine guns
  • x 1,000,0000 rounds of 7.62mm and 12.7mm ammuntion
  • x 430 Soviet-type grenades
  • x 10 RPG-7 rocket launchers
  • x 120 RPG-7 warheads
  • x 2,000 electric detonators
  • x 4,700 fuses
  • 9 K32 Strela-2 surface-to-air missile launchers
  • 9 K32 Strela-2 missiles
  • 2 tonnes of Semtex plastic explosive.
  • x 12 82mm infantry mortars
  • x 106mm M40 recoilless rifles
  • LPO-50 flamethrowers
  • Submachine guns

An impressive catalogue. These were the arms that the IRA’s offensive supposedly hinged on. They can broadly be separated into two categories we’ll label Quantities and Capabilities.

Quantities

There’s an old saying in the military world: Quantity has a Quality of its Own.

However in the case of the IRA circa 1987, this arguably had ceased to be the case. Four Libyan deliveries in 1985-1986 had left the IRA with upwards of 1,300 AK-47 type rifles, forty 7.62mm general-purpose machine guns, twenty-six DShK heavy machine guns, and five tons of Semtex, amongst a swathe of other munitions. The only weapons systems not previously delivered to Ireland in some number that were aboard the Eksund were the 82 mm mortars and 106 mm recoilless rifles.

Were formations of IRA members sitting in camps in Donegal and Monaghan, trained in small-unit tactics and large-scale offensive action, waiting with bated breathe for the extra 1,000 AK-47s on the Eksund? Did the IRA’s fortunes really rest on having fifty general-purpose machine guns rather than forty, or thirty-six DShK heavy machine guns rather twenty-six? Before the Libyan donations the IRA had perhaps two heavy machine guns and a handful of general-purpose machine guns.

The IRA by the time of the Eksund’s loss had vastly more guns than they ever had before or indeed would ever need for the tempo of their campaign. Dumping more AK-47s into the organisation would not have transformed the IRA into an army capable of carrying out large-scale, synchronised operations, as former IRA Volunteer John Crawley in his book The Yank explained:

It’s a crude mechanistic view of war to believe that equipment alone is the answer. Training would have to reach a hitherto unimagined level, not just in terms of weapons and tactics but also advanced operational planning. We’d have to change our organisational culture.

Crawley knew what he was talking about. A former member of the US Marines most elite unit, Force Recon, in his compelling memoir The Yank he recounts that he personally drew up the list of types of weapons in 1984 that the IRA would later receive from Libya.

Frankly, there’s no evidence that the IRA was undertaking this sort of far-reaching transformation at the time of the Eksund’s seizure. A handful of Volunteers were sent to Libya for training on specific weapons but that’s a far cry from what would have been needed. The challenges in retraining and building a new knowledge base in an armed formation were exemplified in 2023 by the Ukraine’s failure to form new army units capable of acting in concert to breach layered Russian defenses.

Having seven ton of Semtex rather than five tons, along with the detonators and fuses, would have no doubt been a boost to the IRA’s engineering department. But it’s a stretch to hypothesise that those extra two tons of plastic explosive were the war winning special sauce the IRA needed.

Flamethrowers: The IRA received ten Soviet-made LPO-50 flamethrowers from Libya. One was seized in Belfast in 1988, another in Derry in 1989. The first outing of the IRA’s flamethrowers was in a famous assault on a border base near Rosslea in Fermanagh in December 1989. That attack was probably the one occasion where Libyan weapons were used near as envisioned by IRA men like John Crawley. It was also the flamethrower’s last outing and they were relegated to arms dumps through the IRA’s final 1997 ceasefire (one was found by Gardaí in County Meath in 1994).

RPGs. Again, the IRA would certainly have appreciated an extra dozen RPG-7 launchers but that surely wouldn’t have enabled the group to prosecute a very different sort of armed campaign then they had up to then. The 430 hand grenades likewise would have been helpful but the IRA improvised and continued to develop their own line of homemade grenades, culminating in the coffee jar bomb.

Soviet-made Strela-2 surface-to-air missiles. Popularly known as “SAM-7.”These were the great hope for republicans in the 1980s and in theory could have been a game changer in border areas, where the British Army was almost totally dependent on helicopters to resupply outlying outposts. However, in actual fact the Strela-2 turned out to be a damp squib for the IRA. It wasn’t until July 1991 that the IRA actually tried taking down a helicopter. In what was either a technical or training issue the missile failed to lock on and landed harmlessly on the ground. The attempt was not repeated; the IRA tried to pass it off as an RPG-7 attack. Gardaí found a Strela-2 thermal battery and grip stock in the same County Meath bunker as the flamethrower in 1994.

It’s been suggested that the capture of the Eksund alerted the British Army that the IRA was in possession of heat-seeking missiles and led to the installation of countermeasures on helicopters. This should be weighed against the famous leaked British intelligence document Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends raising the possibility as far back as 1978. Indeed, a British pilot interviewed in 1979 in the wake of the leak said counter-measures had been available for “six or seven years”. Even if the IRA had the element of surprise, and successfully used a Strela-2 missile to shoot down a helicopter, surely there was no reason the British military couldn’t add flare dispensers to their helicopters at short notice.

Point is, all of these portions of the Eksund cargo simply added to the quantity of weapons the IRA had already received from Libya and were unlikely to represent a game changer.

According to Moloney, the earlier Libyan shipments were placed in dumps to be held in reserve, and it was the Eksund delivery that was to fuel the “Tet offensive.” However if the IRA was truly prepared for a large ground incursion it seems plausible that organisation would have been able to improvise and use the large stocks of Libyan arms already in Ireland.

The surprise factor of losing the Eksund is also perhaps overstated. The IRA already had a close shave when informant-driven intel saw Gardaí uncover a large hide of Libyan weapons in 1986. In January 1988 a huge dump of Libyan arms were found hastily buried on a Donegal beach.

The IRA’s so-called “Tet Offensive” was unlikely to materialise, at least in the spectacular fashion popularly imagined. The reasons were multi-faceted and would probably justify a few articles in their own right. What did emerge in the summer of 1988 was still politically impactful but not at the level of, say, IRA units across Northern Ireland overrunning British bases. The Eksund arms should be examined in that context.

In part II we’ll examine the Capabilities lost aboard the Eksund and whether they really could have changed the course of history . . . 

Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

The Eksund And The IRA's War-Making Capacity

Seamus Kearney ✍ recalls visiting Brendan Hughes In Divis Tower twenty years ago. 

The Dark

After my brother Michael was cleared from any suspicion that he was a paid informer, on 28th January 2003, the IRA Leadership not only cleared him but continued to meet me in a series of clandestine meetings until September of that year.

I had been informed by the IRA Leadership that Freddie Scappaticci had been involved in the court martial and subsequent execution of my brother, but had not played a central role, which I accepted. However, in May 2003 a journalist, Greg Harkin, appeared at the front door of Freddie Scappaticci 's house, in the Riverdale area of West Belfast, and accused him of being a British agent with a codename, 'Stakeknife'.

I was still meeting the IRA Leadership at the time, so raised my concerns with them at our next meeting, underlining that if true, then Michael had been interrogated by the British more so than the IRA. My concerns were dismissed and I was told by the two IRA staff officers that Scappaticci was "innocent until proven guilty".

Before the IRA investigation commenced in October 2001, I had deliberately organised and set up a secret strategic 'think tank' of 5 former IRA soldiers, which included myself, with a 6th man in place designed to be a ' spearhead'. The role of this 6th man was to coordinate and impress upon the IRA Leadership the need to commence an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the execution of Volunteer Michael Kearney, on the 12th July 1979. He succeeded in carrying out that task and hence the unprecedented IRA investigation came about as a result.
 
After meeting the IRA Leadership in May 2003, I then reported back to my own group and discussed the current situation. To confuse matters further, all shades of the Republican Movement were informing their base that Freddie Scapppaticci had been the victim of a gutter press with a sinister British Intelligence motive to undermine the Peace Process. Incredibly, people who I had earlier thought were intelligent and free thinkers, were accusing me of being a 'dissident', which I was not, and for attempting to 'smear a hard working Republican from Riverdale, the victim of an anti Republican media campaign'.

A member of my own group then suggested that I settle the matter and arrange a meeting with Brendan Hughes (The Dark), who had particular knowledge on the IRA 's Internal Security Unit (ISU), as he was in charge of GHQ Intelligence, which overseen the workings of the Internal Security Unit. I was informed that Brendan took on this role after his release from prison in November 1986.

Consequently, a few weeks later, in June 2003, after climbing the stairs of Divis Tower, I appeared outside the small flat, at the top of the tower, and rapped the front door, eager with anticipation.
When the door opened I met my old comrade with a smile on his face and we embraced. When I entered his living room he motioned me toward his sofa, with the words: "be careful what you say in here, because a bug was discovered recently under that sofa". I automatically asked, "was it RUC Special Branch?" But he replied, "no, Sinn Fein!". With a puzzled look upon my face we moved on with the matter in hand.

I told him that my brother Michael had been cleared by the IRA Leadership and he became emotional, a common trait of his, hugging me and wiping a tear from his eye. He said, "that is fantastic news and well done to you for staying the course and showing such loyalty to your dead brother". I informed him that the publicity would come later in the year, as I was still meeting the Army Leadership with a view to agreeing a text for a public statement - and the official statement had to be agreed by the IRA Army Council. The IRA had wanted to release their own statement, but I disagreed and had come up with a novel idea of a joint 'Army/Family Statement', which seemed to have caught their interest and attention.

He enquired about my mother and I was happy to tell him that she was still alive, which brought a sigh of relief from him, as we both understood how poignant and important that was in the scheme of things.

We then discussed the current media speculation concerning Scappaticci and the confusion from all sides. When I informed him that my brother Michael had been interrogated by Scappaticci, he replied:

Seamus, your brother was interrogated by a British Military Officer, not a member of the IRA. Standing over your brother was an enemy officer, the only thing missing was the fact that Scappaticci wasn't wearing his British Army uniform, complete with his riding crop.

At that moment it was my turn to become emotional and I began to weep uncontrollably. Brendan then got up out of his chair and sat beside me on the sofa, with his loving arms wrapped around me, with him repeatedly saying, "I know, I know, what a horrible war. So much pain, too much pain".

After sitting together for what seemed like ages, he returned to his seat opposite mine and began to explain: 

I believe that whole unit was infiltrated. When I took charge of GHQ Intelligence I realised that the Internal Security Unit had been compromised and voiced my concerns to the Leadership, but they dismissed them, accusing me of being in jail too long and being paranoid. After the Joe Fenton case, when I specifically ordered Freddie Scappaticci and that other enemy agent in the Special Boat Service, to bring Fenton to me across the border, they failed to do that. They both had Fenton executed in February 1989, rather than bring him to me for in depth interrogation. When I asked Scap why he shot Fenton out of hand, rather than bring him to me, he came off with some feeble excuse about the need to execute Fenton because of Brit activity in the area. I never believed that for one second. But I finally realised that that whole unit was rotten and full of enemy agents. I got scared and resigned from the Army after that. I had nothing more to do with them from February 1989.

When I asked Brendan the names of those involved in the Internal Security Unit he got up and opened a drawer, taking out a sheet of paper and a pen. I watched as he wrote the names of the British agents down on paper, and then handed the paper to me. I studied the names, five names in total, and then asked about the mechanics of the Internal Security Unit and its role in the war.

He explained to me that the plan to execute my brother, as in other subsequent cases, would have been hatched in Castlereagh by RUC Special Branch and the military. The decision to release my brother Michael, instead of charging him, would have triggered a chain of events from Castlereagh to the streets of West Belfast, to Dundalk and finally to a lonely border road. Freddie Scapatticci could not have operated on his own, that was impossible, so he needed others in the ISU to cooperate or at least acquiesce in his endeavours to satisfy his British masters.

The personnel inside the Internal Security Unit should have been rotated, as is standard procedure in any army, but the enemy agents were allowed to remain in situ, as was the case with Scap and his Special Boat Service superior, who both remained in position from Autumn 1978 to at least 1990. That was simply incredible, Brendan explained.
 
At exactly 2pm that day Brendan Hughes suddenly stood up and told me he had to leave. When I asked him the reason why the Republican Movement were muddying the waters and confusing the issue with regards Scappaticci, the Dark replied:

Damage Limitation. Seamus, Freddie Scappaticci shot his bolt in January 1990 after the Brits hit the house in Lenadoon and rescued Sandy Lynch. They were too eager to capture the 'Lord Chief Justice', than rescue Sandy Lynch. They weren't interested in saving Sandy Lynch, too eager to capture their main prize, and as a result compromised all three British agents in that house, including Scap, his big mate from the SBS and that other agent who brought Lynch to the house in the first place. Your focus should be on the honour of the IRA and the oath you gave when you joined Oglaigh na hEireann. For those who compromised or were British agents, whether with RUC Special Branch or Military Intelligence, you should give them no quarter, whether certain people want to cover for them or not. Your loyalty should be to the Army, not the British Army .

Brendan and I then shook hands and I gave him a final hug, thanking him for his honesty and time. I returned to my own group and informed them of developments, whereupon we came to the conclusion that Michael and his story would not be straight forward and our journey toward truth and justice would be a long one.
Seamus Kearney is a former Blanketman and author of  
No Greater Love - The Memoirs of Seamus Kearney.

Stakeknife ✏ A Meeting Of Minds

Brandon Sullivan ✍ The Newsletter reported Gerry Adams saying that " … the IRA could have continued forever, because it had the base of support that it had, and it had obviously the capacity."

The article noted that “Anthony McIntyre rejected the claim: 'quoting him: it could have gone on forever as a tradition but not as an effective fighting force …': the IRA was:

diminishing due to an inability for its political wing to reach beyond a certain ceiling; penetration and surveillance; war weariness; dwindling enthusiasm within the community for the never ending conflict and threat from loyalism.

Reg Empy and former RUC Special Branch officer William Matchet supported this analysis, with Matchet saying that:

They were rapidly running out of their most precious resource - volunteers. Even the last properly functional ‘brigade’ in South Armagh was, with the sniper team, caught red handed by the SAS in an intelligence-led operation. And this ‘brigade’ was crucial to planting bombs in London.

He further claimed that the IRA “could not have gone on another 18-months never mind forever.”

The arguments central to rejecting Adams' claim that the IRA couldn’t have continued coalesce about Anthony McIntyre's analysis: capped political clout; war weariness; loss of nationalist support; and loyalist violence.

Political Support

It is true that Sinn Fein supported stalled at one MP and around 10% of the vote, with one former Secretary of State deriding Adams as the “10% man.” But it is also true that at the height of the IRA’s campaign, in the 1970s, there was no MP, and no 10% of the vote. Sinn Fein did not do electoral politics until the 1980s.

There are a number of questions to consider.

  • If the IRA was active in any way, would Sinn Fein’s electoral support be capped?
  • If the IRA had the capacity to fight a war that could be described as “clean” or “cleaner” within nationalist Ireland (limited civilian casualties, hard focus on prestige British targets), could Sinn Fein have increased their share of the vote?
  • Did the IRA need political support to continue?

I think the answers to these questions are:

  • Yes, it would be capped. Contrary to many unionist’s beliefs, the nationalist electorate did not give Sinn Fein votes when the IRA was active.
  • Perhaps, but not to any significant degree. See above for reasons.
  • No, it needed logistical support, and had an embedded support network that I think could have continued indefinitely.

War weariness/loss of nationalist support

This is an interesting one. Security force and loyalist excesses created an inbuilt amount of support within nationalism for the IRA. By the 1990s, “normalisation” had had some success, the army was on the streets less and less, and, whilst the RUC was still hated by many within nationalism, there were significant reforms. The UDR remained unreformed, however, and its continuing targeting by the IRA probably increased its support base within nationalism.

An RUC man described the post-1994 IRA as prosecuting a “pathetic, grubby little war” and I think he was right. War weariness arguably came about in part because of the deteriorating quality of the IRA’s operations.

The security forces inarguably had the upper-hand in the 1990s. But they also did at points in the 1980s, and the IRA regrouped and seized the initiative. I’ll talk more about the IRA’s resurgence in targeting loyalists, but I think it’s also important to note that far from being a moribund organisation, the IRA was still carrying out multiple operations a day on many occasions, and had manged to bomb the centre of an economically rejuvenated Belfast repeatedly and severely. This probably led to weariness in many nationalist quarters, but not all. And the killing of loyalists such as Joe Bratty were applauded across nationalism.

I think that at any time in Ireland, support for armed republicanism is simply one security force and/or loyalist atrocity away.

Few nationalists would have opposed targeting the UVF, UDA, or the Parachute Regiment. Significant support could still be found for attacks on the RUC and UDR. The Provisional IRA, I think, if they dedicated themselves totally to an offensive could have continued, and perhaps it would have created a momentum of harsh security force reactions, and a spiral of violence would have occurred.

There was also the ugly spectre of sectarian extremists staging a coup within the IRA or INLA and having started up indiscriminate and deliberate murder of Protestants. I think that we came closer to this in the early 1990s than many would like to acknowledge.

Whilst there may have been an undeniable nationalist thirst for peace, there would have remained a strong desire for vengeance and offensive action. Infamously, this could be seen at the rally where in response to a nationalist shouting “bring back the IRA” Gerry Adams replied “they haven’t gone away, you know.”

Penetration and surveillance

As I noted above, the security forces had seized the initiative. A sniper team had been captured in South Armagh, for example. But the expertise and weaponry remained in South Armagh, and, had they wanted to, I think they could created more. Whilst researching another article, I found an newspaper report stating that:

Crack SAS troops have been sent from Ulster to brief army officers at Sandhurst on a former American Marine turned IRA assassin they have nicknamed '"Goldfinger'.

The SAS had apparently analysed the tactics employed by the sniper teams, lecturing army officers on: 

how the sniper picks his targets and positions the 'shoots' and revealed tell-tale signs of where and how he was trained. In every murder so far, the killer has fired with the sun at his back with the victim walking straight towards him” (Sunday Life, 22.08.93).

A welcome addition to TPQ, Bleakly, analyses the IRA of the 1990s here, and far better than I could.

In Johnny Adair’s autobiography, he noted that his units operated in an extremely hostile environment. He had to contend with aggressive security force surveillance and operations, pressure from rival loyalists, and, not least, determined republican attempts to kill him.

The IRA operated with numerous competing restraints: totally dedicated, professional, hugely resourced and motivated security force entities, a support base which was conditional on the outcome of IRA operations (ie would diminish with civilian casualties), and as noted in the article, the loyalist threat.

Bleakly noted that “A lot of IRA attacks failed or were aborted in the 1990s, but a lot succeeded also.”

Gerry Bradley noted that whilst the RUC and army had excellent equipment, so too did the IRA. I read a commentator once say that drones would have rendered the IRA ineffective in Tyrone and South Armagh. I think it’s equally plausible that the IRA could have adapted drones to deliver drogue bombs against military targets. Perhaps the undoubted intelligence and ingenuity of the IRA’s engineering department would have moved away from IEDs and into cyber warfare.

Does this seem farfetched? So does a small group of men with limited resources repeatedly laying waste to the City of London financial district.

Loyalist violence

It’s interesting that people talk of the penetration of the IRA, but not the UDA and UVF. Steve Bruce reported that statistically more loyalists than republicans went to jail for murder. At the risk of incensing some commentators, the RUC were achieving success after success against loyalists. Recent studies have revealed a range of “collusive behaviours” which benefited loyalist paramilitaries, and it’s obvious that republicans were the security forces main target.

But why does nobody consider the hundreds of UVF men swooped in the 1990s, and the fact that Adair and his C Company were off the streets and into jail prior to the IRA ceasefire?

Republicans were killing more loyalists than loyalists were killing republicans in the run-up to the 1994 ceasefire. They had seized the initiative. I haven’t read a single analysis which suggested loyalism was close to defeat.

Why not?

If a simple sectarian murder tally was sufficient to deliver a knockout blow to the opposing community’s paramilitaries, then surely that would have happened in the 1970s? And, if this was the case, wouldn’t a republican group have embarked on a sectarian killing spree? I think there was probably a reservoir of support for this, at least as much as there was a desire for capitulation.

Did sectarian murder intimidate the nationalist population? Of course. Did it create pressure on the IRA to stop? I don’t think there’s any evidence for this, and in fact evidence to suggest the opposite.

Had the IRA not killed a large number of loyalists in the 1990s, perhaps that might have been different, but they did.

Conclusion

Had the IRA not called a ceasefire in 1994, their campaign would have ebbed and flowed, suffered setbacks, regrouped and hit back. I think sectarian war, particularly in Belfast, might well have happened. Who knows what tactics the IRA might have devised in more modern circumstances.

But, having said all that, there was undeniably an historical moment when the drive for an end to violence happened.

I am glad the PIRA stopped. But they stopped rather than were stopped.
 
⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys. 

Could The IRA Have Continued Forever?

The Fenian Way ✒ concludes his exchange with Anthony McIntyre on the inferences to be drawn from John Crawley's book which detailed systemic shortcomings within the IRA.

AM: In assessments of how a former revolutionary body became compliant with British designs to secure an internal solution, the issue of infiltration invariably comes up. A Sinn Fein supporter who I was chatting with recently, in defence of the current strategy contended that the war was lost due to informers, and he flagged up the Castlereagh files in support of his belief.  Apparently, according to whispers emerging from within the Provos, the IRA intelligence people have managed to unveil 500 on the Special Branch payroll. That is a lot of people working for the RUC. How accurate it is and to what level the penetration went, I do not know. Against that, the former head of Belfast Special Branch when interviewed by me claimed “Belfast Special Branch never had 500 informers. I will not tell you how many but it was not even half that number.” These things are always difficult to tie down. Nevertheless, three of the commenters seem to agree that agents played a huge role in the defeat of the IRA.

Peter: How much of a hand do you think the British had on the tiller? Is there any possibility that members of the A/C were MI6 agents? Or is it more likely that they were agents of influence, with both parties steering the conflict in the same direction?  The Adams/MMG relationship with the British - there clearly was one, but was it coercive or did they just use each other to get what they both wanted? Was political power the goal or a reward?

Cam: Why would structural change be possible when the agent is in control?

Martin: Could it have been possible that the British with hundreds of years of colonialism and counter insurgency experience - and with the placing of well-placed traitors in the high positions in the army - could the internal security’s freeroll in all army matters have been conceived by the Brits and then introduced as having come from those leaders - military geniuses who were in fact never geniuses at all?

AM: Is all of this much too simplistic, and in its stead are there other factors more worthy of consideration?

TFW: Basically there are two types of agent, the one who infiltrates to thwart and frustrate military operations, capture volunteers, interfere with equipment, set up ambushes etc.: the other who infiltrates to influence policy and direction, turn the compromised - like Donaldson, advise government on political approaches and so on. I don’t subscribe to the view that members of the Army Council were British Agents in either of those senses. I do believe that because of the longevity of certain members on the Army Council, and their willingness to accept an internal settlement, it was in the interests of British Intelligence to keep them there. They were unconscious assets! Their political point of view was encouraged and, to a large degree, developed, not least of the hardman image deliberately fostered around Martin McGuinness and then, in its next phase, the brilliant negotiator. The question I would pose now, given what has transpired and settled for, were they ever republicans to begin with or just nationalists reacting to civil rights abuses? So the notion of leading ‘republicans’ being turned by British spooks to explain the acceptance of an internal settlement, the endless subterfuge within ‘Internal Security’, the John Le Carré route, set against the notion that they were northern nationalists to begin with, content with equality of treatment within the Six Counties - which satisfies Powell’s observation? Occam’s Razor certainly champions the latter.

AM: The upcoming comment does not go so far as to level any accusation of being agents at the leadership, but it does open the way for a view that some leaders were perhaps assets in that they had to have been aware of exactly what British state strategy was. And this is reinforced by the second and third comments.

Suil eile: Was it that easy for the British Govt to reinvent themselves as the benevolent peacemakers while maintaining the status quo? It's a fairly slick move but surely the Republican leadership was aware what they were at?

Gavin Casey: It has been often stated that the British identified Adams and McGuinness as people 'they could do business with.' The British business model has forever been founded upon exploitation. So I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that when the Brits said this, they really meant people they could exploit.

Pete Trumbore:
Surely some of the issues that you and TFW are raising were visible to some higher up the ladder than the volunteers in the field?

TFW: Matters are never obvious when they transpire over a decade and particularly within a clandestine organisation like the IRA. The British knew a settlement was possible with Adams and McGuinness but they had to be sure they could take the IRA with them, or at least the bulk of it. Given the low intensity of the campaign the British could absorb anything the IRA could inflict on them irrespective of how spectacular republicans believed certain operations to be. The Long War was actually, from the British perspective, the Long Peace, and the British prevailed. It wasn’t a question of the British re-inventing themselves; it was more the case of the British stepping into the role that the stance of the IRA leadership allowed them to fill.

AM: On the issue of a military strategy we see the emergence of diverging views from commenters, particularly when the emphasis in on attacks in England vis a vis attacks against British troops in Ireland.

Christy: I don’t think any amount of new weaponry like AKs would have made much of a difference - the point of guerrilla warfare is to strike at high prestige and economic targets and not the defences they put up around those targets - like soldiers or cops. I think the IRA mindset was aspiring to replicate the Vietnamese approach of sending body bags back to the US. I think a better approach from an IRA perspective would have been to bring their war directly to the British elite and never let them feel safe.

Terry:
The Luftwaffe bombed every major city in England, not to mention the attacks on Belfast, over an 8 month period resulting in deaths of 40,000 people. In one period the bombed London for almost 60 consecutive nights. And yet they still won the Battle of Britain and ultimately the war. Do people really believe a few guys from South Armagh with mixes of sugar and fertiliser (I am jesting but you know what I mean) would somehow have any impact on the British establishment?

TFW: To the British, IRA operations, either in Ireland or Britain were an ever-decreasing irritant because they knew the endgame would be on their terms and within a finite timeframe. The viability of military operations is not just the calibre and frequency of them but the political intent behind them. When you consider a military campaign devoid of strategy being led by a leadership whose intent was an internal settlement, throwing AKs at it as some form of solution entirely misses the point. New leadership, republican leadership, was necessary to give effect to any military campaign with clear political objectives behind them.

AM: Here, Christy thinks a focus in England would have had an impact, but Terry argues that it would have been severely limited. How are we to strategically evaluate the possible impact? I think there is a danger that it becomes binary, an either/or choice. Either way, neither would view an upskilling in volunteers nor an increase in the availability of AKs, as being of much consequence. 

There is another way of looking at it, one that detects a sense a fear at the heart of leadership, which our exchange thus far has not given much consideration weight to. It suggests that the leadership was  concerned that the IRA would be defeated if it went into the field in the way that you and John Crawley think was possible.

Alex: Fundamentally, I believe the leadership feared the real possibility of a defeat for the IRA on the battlefield. Such an outcome would have left them bankrupt going into a future negotiation.

TFW: The question regarding potential defeat is interesting because it opens up a number of scenarios around such a possibility but, more pointedly, to the relationship between armed struggle and the electoral/negotiations strategy. Those promoting the latter required the demise of the former to justify the departure. Defeat of the IRA was never going to manifest itself, no more than a military defeat of the British army was. But the only price the Adams leadership could exact from the British in return for accepting an internal settlement was the appearance of a military stalemate. To give it another description, Adams and McGuinness surrendered the IRA and sold it as a victory.

AM: Your emphasis on the sovereignty question has prompted some reflection: The following four comments – explicit in the second and third and implicit in the first and fourth - suggest that the North-South divide within the Movement might have compromised the attachment to sovereignty as a core concept. I am taking a liberty here and presuming Steve R’s rural/urban divide might also reflect the North South one. This is based on my own understanding that the IRA in rural communities was more comfortably within a traditional republican paradigm whereas those in Belfast and Derry fit more into the category described by Dolours Price as sixty niners. The hostility of the rural republicans was against partition per se whereas the enmity of their city counterparts was more against the effects of partition.

Brandon Sullivan: the motivation of a typical volunteer was most probably, pre-imprisonment anyway, less political purist and sovereign nationalist and more, as Ed Moloney put it, in the Defenderist tradition . . . The IRA existed for sovereign reasons, but was propelled by a swelling within its ranks of those without a considered political allegiance to sovereignty. I think this explains in part why an internal settlement didn’t cause widespread splits.

TFW: Astute and to the point!

Martin: When the Republican Army split from a one nation army to a northern/southern command structure was that in fact not an admission that they accepted partition?

Mick Hall: why did the army council etc. gradually seep north from Dublin until almost all of the departments were based and controlled in the six counties by northerners. Was this a fatal flaw as far as sovereignty was concerned?

Steve R: How big was the difference in opinion between the clannish border volunteers compared to the urbanites?

TFW: The structure of the IRA, and Sinn Fein, did project a partitionist mindset with the Northern element viewing itself as more important than the south. It may well be the case that southern opposition to any moves towards an internal settlement ranked much less than any Six County counterpart hence the thrust of the GFA was geared toward their approval first and foremost.

AM: Elevating in importance the Army constitution has invited the following observation which I think might miss the point you are making but is there a strategic relevance to what is said? The comment seems to suggest that by delaying the break until 1997 and the leadership’s snubbing of the Army Executive and constitution, that the opportunity was missed by not having parted company in 1986. In the intervening years did the leadership not strengthen its grip on the entire movement to such a point that its position was unassailable from within?

MDB: I cannot understand how centering fidelity to the IRA constitution, the constitution of a secret army and therefore by definition secret, is any less esoteric … I am trying to understand the point of view those who see a decisive break over that issue and not the other … If the Republic was the objective, then 1986 should have been the breaking point not 1997.

TFW: This completely misses the point. Of course loyalty is to the objective but that can equate to nothing more than having the Proclamation over the mantlepiece as a measurement of it. The struggle upon which that loyalty is pursued requires a code of conduct as a form of self-regulation to ensure the struggle itself cannot undermine the ultimate objective. As outlined in the exchange once the leadership began to remove itself from that self-regulatory process their intent became clear and not merely speculative.

AM: you have identified what you think was the framework of an alternative strategy. While the next question preceded you outlining that alternative, it nevertheless has relevance to any ideas that imply the development of a dual power type scenario.

Donal O Coisdealbha: The key question is what basis would the alternative political power have had?

TFW: The pursuit of the military strategy as outlined in the previous exchange vis a vis undermining policing and criminal justice creates a vacuum that needs to be politically filled. In such circumstances all such political acts are expressions of Irish sovereignty. The political power basis is established by the struggle itself. It has to be built around a realistic strategy to achieve attainable goals.

AM: the next question is based on what I have described as the supposed impossibilist goal of the IRA achieving a united Ireland.

Henry Joy: "Structurally, the balance of political forces on the island was too strong to be toppled by the IRA. Ideologically, there was a far stronger commitment to the unity only by consent principle than there was support for unity by coercion." I wonder what TWF makes of your analysis ?

TFW: The majority of people on the island favour unity, this is denied through coercion. The consent argument works both ways. When we remove ourselves from the binary view of things political opportunities arise. This is the essence of how effective alternatives can be devised without any loss of principle or legitimacy.

AM: They favour unity but oppose the IRA methods of achieving unity. On what grounds can republicans pursuing armed struggle point to the majority support on the island for unity as something that gives right to an armed struggle while ignoring the majority support for peaceful means? Are armed republicans not open to the charge that they have an instrumentalist view of what the majority feel – use it when it suits but ignore it when it doesn’t? Do we not end up in a situation where the only rights the Irish people have are the rights the armed struggle lobby assign to them? And is the IRA violation of the right of the people of Ireland to be free from an armed struggle for Irish Unity not on a par with the British and unionist violation of the right of the Irish people to unity? Do we not end up cherry picking from the rights tree?

TWF: But the key point here is the British denial of that majority support through a coercive support for the minority view which dovetails with British interests in Ireland. In the aforementioned strategy IRA methods are not solely concerned with achieving the final goal but to undermine the built-in imbalance of unionist consent against nationalist consent managed by the British. To resolve that would negate the need for armed struggle. For all the hype of the GFA securing equality, a unionist vote has a triple lock guarantee that it will prevail over a nationalist vote. In essence there is no such thing as majority support in a political arrangement that perpetually disregards it.

AM: On the matter of armed struggle paradigm is there space for dissent from armed struggle within it? The following observation comes form a man who in all conscience could no longer support armed campaigning but who was told to be silent or leave.

Des Dalton: I resigned from Republican Sinn Féin when it was made clear to me that my view that continuing to support a largely non-existent armed campaign was serving only to continue to fill jails and possibly worse was not open to any debate and if I continued as a member I would have to remain silent on this issue.

TFW: Armed struggle is not a republican obligation, never has been, never should be. The right to engage in it is tempered by two practical realities; firstly our right to wage it does not automatically equate to it being right to do so. Secondly, the right to wage it, again, does not automatically equate with the ability to do so. Both criterion would have to be in play if the option of armed struggle is to be on the table. If you discharge a right in an irresponsible fashion, you cause irreparable damage to that right. Dalton’s position and actions are mature, pragmatic and correct. The points you (AM) raised concerning rights, support and armed struggle are pertinent to the stance that Dalton faced within RSF.

AM: Some have argued that the internal solution only really came on the after the big arms shipments from Libya arrived and the IRA was not up to the task of using them. The next question challenges that.

John Crawley: A narrative has been spun that in the mid-1980s the IRA were planning a so-called ‘Tet Offensive’ with the vastly enhanced military capacity they acquired from Libya. Leaving aside the glaring omission that the IRA were not trained or organised to carry out combined armed military manoeuvres of this scope and sophistication the narrative continues that the seizure of the Eksund arms shipment in November 1987 forced a re-think on behalf of the IRA leadership. If that were the case, what is TFW’s opinion on the fact that in the second week of May 1987 (according to Ed Moloney) Gerry Adams sent a letter to Charles Haughey via Father Alec Reid outlining IRA terms for ending the armed struggle? This was six months before the Eksund was captured.

TFW: The ‘Tet Offensive’ was an over-dramatized description of the expectation of an increase in military operations as a result of the Libyan shipments. The glaring omission pointed out by John regarding combined military operations is certainly pertinent but the expectation of an increase in operations was equally valid given the amount of munitions involved. That this didn’t materialise has absolutely nothing to do with the capture of the Eksund. At this juncture the IRA was never better armed in its entire history but equally, as the letter referenced by John proves, it was led by people whose minds were already made up regarding an internal settlement. In his book John makes the point that it’s not simply the role of leadership to supply such weaponry but also the proper training and direction of its use. This did not happen and wasn’t going to happen even if the Eksund arms were successfully landed.

AM: Finally, much has been said either in our discussion or via the comments about the deception routinely practiced by the leadership. The next comment suggests that this is much too simplistic, that people knew what was going on even if they pretended not to. One way of reading this is that after years of armed struggle the IRA had clocked up too many miles and was no longer roadworthy: it had simply hit burn-out.

Sean Bresnahan: I don’t buy the idea that it was all chicanery by Adams and McGuinness. People went along with it when the hard truth is that what was happening was there to be seen. They accepted that strategy, which you rightly have styled as the ‘long wait’. That is exactly what it was and all it was ever understood to be. With fluff and guff attached, for sure, but the fundamental remains.

TFW: Let me put it this way, some people actually believed that decommissioning was an exercise in freeing up dumps to get ‘better gear’ in. When all those people paraded down the Falls Road after the first ceasefire was announced they genuinely believed that something significant was going to be announced by the British. The cult of personality led to a critique system based on the premise that ‘if it’s alright for Gerry and Martin it’s alright for me’. As referenced in a previous exchange, the need to be relevant trumped the need to be right, and in an environment where blind loyalty was the key to retaining position what was obvious didn’t matter. I agree with the point that it wasn’t all chicanery by Adams and McGuinness, it didn’t have to be, the irreplaceable mindset was more than willing to play its part.

AM: On that I think we have reached the end of the road. From the people I have talked to and for those commenting it has been a worthwhile venture. Is there anything you want to add to close the entire exchange?

TFW: Central to my review of John’s book, and the subsequent exchanges with yourself, has been the observation of Johnathon Powell as to how he and Blair were astonished at how much the ‘republican’ leadership conceded in return for so little from the British. To my mind, any objective analysis of that period must commence with the veracity of that observation and work back through a lineage of events which explains it.

My own conclusions, from my experiences at leadership level, is that the Powell observation can only be explained by the inescapable fact that elements of the Movement’s leadership, most notably Adams and McGuinness, were not republicans, but northern nationalists content with equality within the Six Counties. When you cut through the hyperbole, the intrigue and the need to demonise, common sense must prevail.

I hope that both John’s book, and his qualified and professional opinions, and these exchanges with yourself, promote this common-sense approach, not least, because common sense is also required to address that other pertinent observation; where does Irish republicanism go from here? Many thanks!

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

In Quillversation 🎯 IRA Surrender Sold As A Victory