That conversation, taken with Crawley’s surprise at the lack of military professionalism within the IRA and his contention that some in leadership actively thwarted his and others’ efforts to improve the operational effectiveness of the IRA, provides new context to some of the remarks that Tony Catney made in an interview I conducted with him in February 2013.
Some of the following material has been published before, either in my academic writing or online here at TPQ and my own blog. Nearly all of the quotes are verbatim from my transcript of our conversation. Some have been very lightly edited for clarity. Commentary and analysis are my own.
Throughout our interview, TC repeatedly returned to the brutality, or “viciousness” of the IRA’s campaign after 1969, especially compared to earlier periods of republican armed struggle.
Speaking as an academic rather than an activist or supporter, this reads as an indictment of the IRA’s campaign, one that characterizes it more in terms of terrorism than as legitimate military action. But it also squares with Crawley’s expressed frustration with the inability of volunteers to effectively take on the British military in the field, despite the availability of the kinds of weapons that would have made it possible, and the unwillingness of the organization to develop the capability to do so.
The responsibility for this, TC repeatedly argued, consistent with Crawley’s story of his own experience, lies with the leadership, not the volunteers themselves.
TC’s suggestion seemed to be that the horror and brutality of the IRA’s campaign became the point, because it would make any subsequent peace, no matter how incomplete from a traditionally republican perspective, look good by comparison. This, he suggested, was in the mind of leadership from early on.
And many volunteers, TC said, himself included, went along, despite their qualms.
What made squaring the circle possible, TC continued, was the volunteers’ trust in leadership’s strategic vision and the ends it was supposedly serving. This would also, eventually, pave the way for most volunteers’ acceptance of how their armed campaign ended and what it failed to deliver.
Some of the following material has been published before, either in my academic writing or online here at TPQ and my own blog. Nearly all of the quotes are verbatim from my transcript of our conversation. Some have been very lightly edited for clarity. Commentary and analysis are my own.
Throughout our interview, TC repeatedly returned to the brutality, or “viciousness” of the IRA’s campaign after 1969, especially compared to earlier periods of republican armed struggle.
So you conduct an armed struggle in a fashion that is fundamentally different from the way in which the IRA have approached all other campaigns because the campaign from 1969 through to I think in ’94 was more vicious and barbaric than anything the IRA had been engaged in. And when you take things like Coshquin, the use of proxy bombs. It was a degree of ruthlessness that the IRA had never engaged in before.
Speaking as an academic rather than an activist or supporter, this reads as an indictment of the IRA’s campaign, one that characterizes it more in terms of terrorism than as legitimate military action. But it also squares with Crawley’s expressed frustration with the inability of volunteers to effectively take on the British military in the field, despite the availability of the kinds of weapons that would have made it possible, and the unwillingness of the organization to develop the capability to do so.
The responsibility for this, TC repeatedly argued, consistent with Crawley’s story of his own experience, lies with the leadership, not the volunteers themselves.
[I]n 35 years of armed struggle, the membership of the IRA never let the leadership down once. Anything that the leadership asked for they got. They might not have got it to the degree or as quickly as they wanted but they got it to the best of the ability of the volunteers within the IRA. What happened from 1994 onwards was a failure of leadership not a failure of the IRA. It was a failure of the people who made the decisions as opposed to the people who were prepared to honor their commitment to the liberation of Ireland and were quite prepared to do it in a different fashion.
TC’s suggestion seemed to be that the horror and brutality of the IRA’s campaign became the point, because it would make any subsequent peace, no matter how incomplete from a traditionally republican perspective, look good by comparison. This, he suggested, was in the mind of leadership from early on.
Now, if you’re someone who is sitting with a blueprint of how you want to move the thing forward, you need the period of war to be so stark and so horrific that that then becomes the benchmark that everything after that gets judged by.
And many volunteers, TC said, himself included, went along, despite their qualms.
[S]peaking as an IRA volunteer, I can tell you that I remember clearly the night of Enniskillen and the night of … and really feeling that this is a bridge too far. You know, so I mean those events – Kingsmill, although I was probably a lot younger then and it didn’t really register with me as forcefully as it should have, but when you look at things like that and then you sort of – you compare them with the basic tenants of republicanism and what you stand for, you have to – I mean it takes a massive leap to be able to square that circle. A lot of us done it and we squared that circle almost on the basis of the ends will justify the means, and boy were we wrong.
What made squaring the circle possible, TC continued, was the volunteers’ trust in leadership’s strategic vision and the ends it was supposedly serving. This would also, eventually, pave the way for most volunteers’ acceptance of how their armed campaign ended and what it failed to deliver.
[A] common view is that the views that we had as developing IRA volunteers of leadership were so out of kilter that it made us easy prey for what came afterwards, because it was almost a line of – I mean [Gerry] Adams affectionate name was the Big Chuck – and that was an indication of the belief that he wouldn’t willingly do anything wrong.
Militarily, however, such operations had no prospects of delivering the IRA success on the battlefield, even in geographical areas where, as Crawley argues, the IRA enjoyed considerable advantages over their opponents. Moreover, TC suggested, these operations were deliberately designed not to produce such results.
[E]verything else that has gone for military opposition to the British presence has been deliberately constructed in a fashion that means it’s doomed for failure.
For TC, this was what made the March 2009 attack on Massereene Barracks, in which two British soldiers were killed and two more wounded, stand out, at least from an operational perspective. It was the first time in decades, he maintained, that IRA volunteers directly engaged the British military.
[Y]ou need to go back as far as Loughall for the last time that the Provisional IRA walked up to a barracks, occupied by armed members of the security forces, and took them on. Now, those two volunteers that walked up to Massereene had no way of knowing how much fire power there was behind that gate.
[S]o in terms of the quality of the operation, Massereene, even if you take it, if you even ignore the disjuncture from 1994 and look at the history of the Provisional IRA, the operation that was conducted at Massereene was a very clinical, calculated, well conducted military operation, more so than most of the military operations that the IRA put out after 1983 because after 1983 the standard of IRA operations was atrocious. The IRA relied more and more on bombings rather than on face-to-face encounters with the enemy forces.
After 1983 or so, he argued, the IRA turned almost exclusively to soft targets, off-duty members of the RUC and RUC reserve, off-duty UDR men, a judge on the way to mass, and so on. But this, he said, was not out of a concern by leadership to avoid losses of volunteers. Instead, he said, it could be viewed as part of larger strategy on the part of leadership to convince its own volunteers that military success was not possible.
[Some] will argue with you that part of the process of getting rid of the IRA, which people had in their head from the late ‘70s, necessitated winning the internal argument that we’re just not good enough.
Once again, this is consistent with John Crawley’s narrative in which IRA volunteers came to believe that British military vehicles and body armor were completely resistant to small arms fire, or that weapons like rocket propelled grenades were unreliable and prone to failure. Such misinformation, which leadership failed to disabuse despite some volunteers like Crawley knowing better, and saying so, became a potent argument against the operational wisdom of engaging security services directly. And it served to undermine volunteers’ own sense of what it was they were doing.
So if you constantly then give clearance for operations that fall below a standard that you would expect from a revolutionary military organization, then even if people go along with it in terms of carrying out the operations there’ll always be a wee bit in their head of like this isn’t really meeting the Brits toe-to-toe. You know, this isn’t looking into the whites of their eyes.
For TC, as for Crawley, the undermining and ultimate dismantling of the IRA’s military capability was necessary for the leadership’s political strategy to move forward. If the IRA were strictly a military institution, TC said, then it would certainly make sense to disband it once peace were achieved, just as it would make sense for the British military to likewise stand down. But, he said, the volunteer ranks of the IRA were more than that. It was an organization committed to a political project – for Crawley it’s genuine and complete Irish sovereignty, for TC it was that with a decided socialist bent – at variance with the partitionist compromises its leadership eventually settled for in the Good Friday Agreement. And as such, it was a threat to that leadership.
[The] IRA shouldn’t be seen just as a military organization. When it’s seen just as a military organization then in the interest of peace you do need to get rid of it the way in which you would need to get rid of the British army.
But the IRA is not a conventional army. It is a volunteer army and it works on a completely different basis, and for me the IRA was the embryonic form of a vanguard party, very much in the theory or the theoretical paradigm of Lenin and that’s the way the IRA should be used. You have a cadre of people who were – who had demonstrated their discipline, their loyalty, and their commitment, and for me you should keep that together. You shouldn’t throw that away. But, if you’re in a position where you actually fear that rather than embrace it then I can see how it becomes a threat rather than an aid.
For me that’s where it went for this particular leadership.
⏩Dr. Peter Trumbore is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Oakland University
