On 24 October 1990, the Provisional Irish Republican Army kidnapped Patsy Gillespie, a forty-two-year-old, married father of three, and forced him to drive a thousand-pound bomb to a British military checkpoint just outside the city of Derry near the Irish border. As the vehicle approached the soldiers, the explosives were detonated remotely with Gillespie still at the wheel, killing him and five members of the King's Regiment.Footnote 1 Two other similar attacks were carried out the same day, claiming the life of an additional British soldier (though, in those instances, the involuntary bombers—unlike the unfortunate Gillespie—escaped).Footnote 2 This deliberate and coordinated use of “proxy” or “human” bombs appeared to mark a radical departure in the IRA's modus operandi, and it was widely condemned.Footnote 3 Dr. Edward Daly, the Catholic bishop of Derry, accused the IRA of “crossing a new threshold of evil.”Footnote 4 Peter Brooke, the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, declared that that they had “sunk to new levels of depravity”;Footnote 5 John Hume, the leader of the mainly Catholic-supported Social Democratic and Labour Party, described those behind the “atrocity” as “cowards.”Footnote 6
In response, the IRA pointed to the fact that Patsy Gillespie had worked in the canteen of a local army base and was therefore a “legitimate target”; his fellow victim-bombers were likewise declared to be collaborators with the security forces.Footnote 7 Yet for many people, such logic was difficult to accept. Despite two decades of brutalizing violence, there was a widespread perception that the IRA had gone too far. Significantly, the “human bomb” tactic proved short-lived.Footnote 8 The ferocious reaction to the attacks—including that from within the Catholic-nationalist community—suggested that they were seen as a breach of the unstated “red lines” that governed Northern Ireland's long conflict.Footnote 9 And in this way, the episode offers an insight into a subject too easily overlooked: the moral parameters within which the IRA conducted its self-declared “armed struggle.” It was only at the moment of their transgression that these informal, yet critical parameters became apparent.
Historians have long sought to explain such intangible constructs. E. P. Thompson, for example, examined the seemingly anarchic practices of eighteenth-century rioting and reflected on what he called the “moral economy” of the crowd.Footnote 10 His argument was that apparently spontaneous, seemingly irrational activity was in fact governed by a set of moral precepts and that these precepts in turn rested on crude but definable political principles that enjoyed wide consensus within a community.
The question with which Thompson was effectively grappling—that of how to explain political behavior—has of course been taken up by other scholars in different settings. Quentin Skinner has reflected at length on the relationship between ideology, or professed principles, and political action. As he has argued, the rationale offered by given agents to explain their deeds should be recognized as itself constitutive of those same deeds. It cannot simply be dismissed as an ex post facto justification of activities whose proper motive stems from some deeper, more truthful impulse. On the contrary, the possibilities for action are invariably framed by the prevailing conceptual system in existence. Language and ideas make possible certain forms of behavior, even as they delegitimize others.Footnote 11 Gareth Stedman Jones has similarly emphasized the extent to which language should be seen as a constitutive force that helps set the parameters for political mobilization; it is “prefigurative, not [merely] reflective” of identity and action.Footnote 12
The role of ideology and language in structuring political behavior becomes all the more important when considering the use of violence over a sustained period. The IRA survived for thirty years in the face of concerted state opposition. It killed some two thousand people. In themselves, such stark facts suggest that the IRA was possessed of a relatively robust intellectual and moral framework that legitimated its actions. Setting aside the notion that the population of Northern Ireland is somehow pathologically inclined toward violence (which is not to discount the existence of certain pathological individuals within paramilitary groups), it can be assumed that most of those who joined the ranks of the IRA accepted the legitimacy of its moral framework. To a greater or lesser extent, it was that framework that allowed them to step outside the injunctions of “normal” society: to risk prison, death, or serious injury, and to kill in the name of a cause. As Skinner has observed, it is precisely when confronted with the more extraordinary forms of political activity, which require explicit justification, that the content of the actor's principles becomes more significant.Footnote 13 It is this insight that makes an understanding of the “legitimating norms” and parameters for IRA activity so important.Footnote 14
To endeavor to explore the overarching parameters that shaped IRA violence is not to deny the presence of more localized or private motivations among many of those involved; rather, it is to accept that “violence could have been both politically and privately driven.”Footnote 15 While some of the most interesting recent reflections on the nature of conflict in civil war–type scenarios have focused more on the “micro-foundations” of political cleavages (and the “interaction” between these and macro-level analyses), it surely remains crucial to understand the master narratives produced by elites/political actors.Footnote 16 For it is precisely these narratives, to recall Skinner, that delineate permissible and prohibited parameters of action. Within Northern Ireland, the ability of the IRA to prosecute its armed struggle was critically shaped by the strength of its own legitimating framework, which set the parameters for violence. My purpose here, then, is to examine those parameters and the way in which they were applied in practice.
In so doing, I build on those scholarly accounts that have subjected the politics, ideology, and strategy of Irish republicanism to close examination, in particular the work of Henry Patterson, M. L. R Smith, Rogelio Alonso, Robert White, and Niall Ó Dochartaigh.Footnote 17 Historians have gone well beyond popular depictions of the IRA as “gangsters,” “criminals,” and “psychopaths.”Footnote 18 Richard English, for example, has produced a seminal and comprehensive analysis of the IRA in a volume that rightly accepts the group as a political and rational (which is not to say reasonable) actor with identifiable objectives and normative assumptions.Footnote 19 As Ian McBride has recently elucidated, it is now possible to identify a historiography of the IRA worthy of the name.Footnote 20
And yet, thinking about the morality of the IRA has to date been rather more limited. One of the few studies to reflect on such matters is that of Timothy Shanahan—who produced one of the most interesting (and unique) approaches to the group—which assessed the moral legitimacy of the IRA's campaign when judged against various philosophical standards, such as the “just war” theory, consequentialist rationales, and “human rights centered” value systems.Footnote 21 Though fascinating, such an attempt to assess IRA violence against what are held to be objective standards of morality is not my aim here (and arguably lies beyond the historian's remit). Neither am I attempting to explore systematically the politics, strategy, or evolution of the IRA.Footnote 22 Instead, my focus is on examining the moral framework of the IRA's campaign, both in theory and practice.
In exploring this subject, I have drawn on a variety of primary sources. On the one hand, there are the official public records of Irish republicanism as revealed by the movement's newspapers and the writings and pronouncements of senior figures such as Gerry Adams or Danny Morrison. These are valuable precisely because they constitute the IRA's attempt to render its campaign intelligible to the outside world. In addition, I have made use of internal IRA documents, including the “Green Book,” which have been brought into the public domain by investigative journalists. And finally, I mined the memoirs and oral history testimonies of former IRA members (while being aware of the often partisan nature of their viewsFootnote 23). Building upon these foundations, my goal is to disentangle the moral parameters—or the “moral logic”—that sustained the IRA's campaign throughout its “long war,” to see how such parameters were negotiated and sustained, and to suggest why, ultimately, they proved increasingly difficult to sustain.Footnote 24
I
The Provisional IRA was created in the winter of 1969–70. It was the product of a split within the Irish republican movement, prima facie caused by disagreements over ideological principles and tactics.Footnote 25 From the beginning, the Provisionals sought to situate themselves within a clear historical tradition. The first statement issued by the Provisional Army Council on 28 December 1969 declared “allegiance to the 32-County Irish Republic, proclaimed at Easter 1916, established by the first Dáil Eireann in 1919, overthrown by force of arms in 1922 and suppressed to this day by the existing British-imposed Six-County and 26-County partition states.”Footnote 26 Senior IRA leaders traced a lineage that ran from the First Dáil of 1919, through the 1921 Second Dáil, and down to the present. The authority of the Second Dáil was said to have been passed to the IRA Army Council in 1938 by those “faithful” members who refused to accept the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and the partition of Ireland.Footnote 27 And in 1969, the founders of the Provisionals went to the trouble of securing the blessing of Tom Maguire, the sole surviving member of the Second Dáil.Footnote 28
The “Green Book,” written in the mid-1970s to codify the IRA's ideology for incoming volunteers, expanded upon these ideas.Footnote 29 It thus stressed the moral legitimacy of the IRA's “armed struggle” in absolute terms. The IRA claimed the right to act on the basis of its self-ascribed status as the proper holder of governmental authority, on the putative line of descent traced back to the republic of 1916. Existing parliaments (whether in Dublin, London, or Belfast) were dismissed as usurping bodies.Footnote 30 Instead, the IRA positioned itself as the true heir of 1916, endowed with a moral right to use force in defense of the republic.Footnote 31
More broadly, the IRA built its case around key “moral moments” that suggested an imperative for the use of political violence;Footnote 32 that furnished it with what Ruairí Ó Brádaigh would later call údarás an staire—the “mandate of history.”Footnote 33 As Ian McBride has highlighted, historical narratives and acts of public memorialization have long been central to the mobilization of the Irish republican movement.Footnote 34 At the core of such narratives lay the assertion of a primordial, yet thwarted Irish “nationhood”—said to have “been an accepted fact for more than 1,000 years.”Footnote 35 This nation was imagined as the victim of “800 years of oppression” (going back to 1169), made manifest in British economic, cultural, social and of course, political imperialism. Against this, the IRA pledged “sustained resistance and implacable hostility” and, as Richard Bourke underlined, the group's violence was portrayed as intrinsically “democratic,” a legitimate response to the British violation of Irish sovereignty.Footnote 36
Furthermore, the IRA effectively invoked the marxisant notion of false consciousness when contemplating their relationship to the wider Irish people. Republicans viewed themselves as members of an enlightened elite—Jacobins, essentially—who alone truly understood the situation as it really existed in Ireland. They claimed the right, sanctioned by history, to act as a vanguard in the name of the people (eliding the fact that the majority of the Irish populace had not consented to such a right).Footnote 37 It was this ethos that an earlier leader of Irish republicanism, Eamon De Valera, had famously articulated when he stated that “the majority have no right to do wrong,” or that if he needed to know what the Irish people thought, he merely had to “examine my own heart.”Footnote 38 Entirely in keeping with such a view was the IRA's 1982 assertion that it held “a monopoly on true Irish patriotism,”Footnote 39 or Gerry Adams's 1983 claim that Irish republicans were “the guardians and the vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle in Ireland.”Footnote 40
At the heart of this struggle was the effort to complete the “unfinished revolution” of 1919–21 by bringing an end to partition and the existence of Northern Ireland. The latter was understood to be a forced, colonial imposition.Footnote 41 The “war” was said to be “morally justified” as “a campaign of resistance against foreign occupation forces and domestic collaborators.” Irish republicans saw their first task as being to “break the British connection” and described armed struggle as absolutely necessary, on the grounds that they had “no recourse to any other means.”Footnote 42 Freedom could only be obtained and maintained, it was asserted, by “armed men.”Footnote 43 As Gerry Adams put it in 1986, “I believe the use of force in the six counties is justified by the British presence . . . At the end of the day they won't be argued or talked out: a movement that wants them out will either have to use force or the threat of force.”Footnote 44 Or as a 1987 statement from the IRA leadership expressed it more starkly, “The British will only be talked out of Ireland through the rattle of machine-guns and the roar of explosives.”Footnote 45
In this way, the conscious evocation of a historical tradition blended with more contemporary, colonial-based analyses. The Provisional IRA was not merely a child of Irish history but also a reflection of the post-1945 moment of global decolonization. Oral testimony collected by Robert White highlights that key founders of the Provisionals, including Sean MacStiofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, were inspired by anti-imperialist movements in places like Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, and especially Cyprus, which further cemented their view that armed struggle in Ireland was morally justified.Footnote 46 Resistance to the British state appeared both historically legitimate and of the moment.
Finally in terms of ideological legitimation, there was another less explicit—but no less important—strand of argument that was advanced to explain the existence of the Provisional IRA. This rested on the immediate historical context in which the group emerged: namely, the 1960s civil rights protests against the treatment of Catholics within Northern Ireland and the recalcitrant, curmudgeonly response of the Protestant, Unionist-led government of the province, which led to a collapse in state authority and a surge in intercommunal violence.Footnote 47 As is clear from numerous testimonies of former IRA volunteers, many—if not most—were driven toward the IRA by their experience of state violence in Northern Ireland. This violence created an environment in which the republican historical narrative appeared relevant and credible. Volunteers were typically motivated by a desire to defend what the IRA claimed was “their” community—often conceived in highly localized fashion.Footnote 48 As Niall Ó Dochartaigh and Lorenzo Bosi have argued, a decision to join IRA, rather than being a product of ideological commitment, was often the expression of an individual's loyalty to a preexisting “collective identity” (that of belonging to the “nationalist community”), in the context of upheaval and political change.Footnote 49
The Provisional IRA thus emerged as a defensive response to the injustices visited upon Northern Irish Catholics, especially amid the tumult of 1968–1972.Footnote 50 This period provided the group with what Shanahan called a “basic moral mandate.”Footnote 51 It was a mandate shaped as much by the egregious nature of the Northern Irish state, and its failure to enact reform, as by the actual existence of the state.
Of course, these two issues were far from irreconcilable; historical determinism mingled with a context-specific sense of injustice. Leaders like Gerry Adams argued that it was the colonial, “artificial and illegal” nature of Northern Ireland that made it inherently “irreformable.”Footnote 52 This was why, Adams averred, “armed actions” became “a necessary form of struggle.” “By its very nature,” he insisted, “British rule cannot be just or peaceful and, while this is so, revolutionary struggle will continue to strive to overthrow it.”Footnote 53
Nevertheless, the fact that there were, in effect, two distinct lines of legitimation—one rooted in a historicist, anticolonial ideology and the other in contemporary sociopolitical realities—implicitly raised certain questions. If conditions within the “irreformable” state could in fact be improved (as later happened), then what would this do to the moral basis upon which the IRA's armed struggle was being waged? Might not the implicit bipolarity of the IRA's legitimating framework suggest one reason why by the early 1990s the group found itself to some degree compromised—at a moral level—and therefore inclined to accept the parameters of the developing peace process, even though this seemed unlikely to deliver a truly “republican” outcome—at least as traditionally conceived? At a minimum, the gap between immediate political context and ideological objectives might explain why a critical mass of IRA volunteers were willing to endorse a peace settlement that fell some way short of the Irish Republic.Footnote 54
Beyond such speculation, we might usefully distinguish between the motivations of the individual volunteers and the legitimating framework of the organization that they joined. Evidently, many members of the IRA were imbued with a belief that in a context of state “repression,” the war came to them;Footnote 55 but the war that they then fought was shaped fundamentally by the ideological heritage of Irish republicanism. It was upon the latter foundation that the moral parameters for armed struggle were principally erected. This was why the IRA invested such effort in “ideological reproduction” through the institution of the “Green Book.”Footnote 56 Even then, as will become clear, such parameters were not absolute and inviolable. Instead, they were subject to a process of ongoing contestation and de facto negotiation.
II
The IRA's campaign of violence was driven by the belief that its members were engaged in a morally legitimate war. Eamon Collins, a critical former member of the organization, described how the ideology of Irish republicanism allowed him to “supplant the Catholic morality” that had hitherto held him back from “engaging in violence.”Footnote 57 Similarly, in his memoirs, the former IRA member turned informer Sean O'Callaghan recalled, “I believed that I was a soldier in an army fighting in a just cause and that people being killed was an inevitable consequence.”Footnote 58 It was this conviction that allowed O'Callaghan to shoot dead a Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch detective inspector—an act of which he wrote, “As far as I was concerned I had done no wrong. I had not committed a crime, a sin. I had no reason to feel guilty. After all, I was fighting for a righteous cause.”Footnote 59
Imbued with this sense of self-righteousness, the “Green Book” called on the IRA's volunteers to prosecute a “guerrilla” strategy” involving “hit and run tactics against the Brits,” alongside strikes at “the soft economic underbelly of the enemy.” The aim was to wage a “war of attrition” that would make Northern Ireland “ungovernable except by colonial military rule” and end in Irish “national liberation.”Footnote 60 But what did this mean in practice?
The purpose here is not to consider the manifold forms of lethal violence practiced by the IRA (which were legion). Nor is it to deny that most actions perpetrated by the group were, like the conflict as a whole, intensely local in inspiration and conduct.Footnote 61 As James Bowyer Bell commented, the IRA's central leadership was, for the most part, “engaged in oversight, not command.”Footnote 62 Lower level commanders were largely left to decide how the war would be implemented in tactical terms. Nevertheless, it is clear that their options were not boundless, that there were limits and rules. That being the case, it is useful to consider how the parameters of the acceptable—in terms of IRA operations—were negotiated and understood, to ask why some actions were considered more prestigious than possible alternatives while others were considered off limits altogether.
According to the “Green Book,” the preferred “category” of targets for the IRA was what it called “establishment” enemies, which was to say, “all those who have a vested interest in maintaining the present status quo in politicians, media, judiciary, certain business elements and the Brit war machine compromising the Brit Army, U.D.R. [Ulster Defence Regiment], R.U.C. [Royal Ulster Constabulary] (r) [reserve], Screws [prison wardens], Civilian Searchers.” Within this classification, soldiers were manifestly the top priority, closely followed by other members of the security forces.Footnote 63 Of these, the “Green Book” stated euphemistically, though quite plainly, “The cure for these armed branches of the establishment is well known and documented.”Footnote 64
The British Army was seen as the IRA's number one enemy, and from the beginning the organization celebrated successful attacks on soldiers.Footnote 65 Maria McGuire, who was close to the IRA leadership in the early 1970s, later recounted their discussions over how many troop deaths would be required to bring about a British withdrawal. Initially, the chosen figure was thirty-six; subsequently, this was increased to eighty. In each instance, IRA calculations were based on parallels drawn with other anti-imperialist struggles—in Palestine, Cyprus, and Aden. The belief held that when a certain number of military casualties had been reached, the British would be forced to initiate negotiations leading to their withdrawal from Northern Ireland.Footnote 66 Attempts to kill soldiers (and other members of the security forces) thus fitted with the IRA's analysis as to the conflict's colonial nature, from which flowed the moral and strategic logic of the campaign. As Rachel Kowalski has stressed, the primary injunction placed on volunteers was to “kill the uniform” that upheld British rule in Ireland.Footnote 67
Beyond this focus on soldiers, the “Green Book” stated that “the overtly unarmed branches of the establishment are not so clearly identifiable to the people.” The task for IRA volunteers in such cases was “therefore to clearly [and publicly] identify” their enemies, before weighing up both whether they could be targeted and in precisely what way. Here, it is interesting to note that the “Green Book” stated, “Execution . . . is not the only way of making this category of establishment enemy ineffective: we can variously expose them as liars, hypocrites, collaborators, make them subjects of ridicule etc.”Footnote 68 Through such words, it becomes possible to see the IRA leadership urging its members to wage a calibrated armed struggle.
At the public level, this outlook was captured by the readiness of republican spokespeople to speak of “legitimate targets” (with the obvious implication that there were also “illegitimate” targets). Internally, it was accepted that “all our enemies are not the same and therefore there is no common cure for their enmity.” The key was to categorize their opponents and then “suggest cures for each category.” Out of this process emerged the “patterns and rules” that framed the IRA's campaign. As Bowyer Bell observed, the reality of the “secret army” was that it operated through an internally held “consensus” as to what was acceptable—and that the resultant “parameters of action” proved “remarkably stable” throughout the conflict.Footnote 69
A key factor delimiting those parameters was the organization's reading of what “the people” were prepared to tolerate. Discussion of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in the “Green Book” is highly illuminating in this regard. This party posed a real problem for the IRA—by its very existence, challenging the claim that Irish republicans spoke for the Catholic-nationalist population of Northern Ireland. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it was described as “collaborationist and thus an enemy of the people.” Despite such language, however, there was no explicit suggestion that members of the party should be killed. According to Sean O'Callaghan, some senior IRA figures were, at various points, prepared to countenance the murder of prominent members of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, including John Hume.Footnote 70 At no stage, though, was such violent action taken. At a lesser level, the “Green Book” did suggest that party members might be made “subjects of ridicule by tarring and feathering.” But, again, this did not occur. Clearly, it was recognized that such a step would have been utterly unpalatable to the Catholic-nationalist community of Northern Ireland.Footnote 71
What this example underscores, then, is the extent to which the possibilities for conducting operations were constrained by the likely reaction of “the people”—principally, the community that the IRA wished to represent. And on this point, the “Green Book” was unambiguous. Volunteers were urged to be conscious that their aim was “not only to kill as many enemy personnel as possible, but of equal importance to create support.” For this reason, “the rule of thumb” for all IRA actions was that they had to be able to “explain by whatever means we have at our disposal why we bomb, why we punish criminals, why we execute informers etc.”Footnote 72 The “Green Book” was quick to insist, “We do not exclude taking an action which does not completely fill the criteria of this analysis on how to conduct the struggle,” and the IRA reserved the right to “step outside these general terms of reference.” Even so, the whole thrust of the discussion was to impart the idea that there existed a line between the permissible and the impermissible, that there were restraints and rules that defined “a proper conduct of the war.”Footnote 73
In this regard, it is revealing too that some operations, which might have been imagined acceptable when viewed from an ideological perspective, could at certain moments be ruled out of bounds by the IRA. In the view of the authors of the “Green Book,” “tactics” were to be “dictated by the existing conditions.” And they gave as an example a time when the otherwise ideologically correct action of killing British soldiers was deemed improper: “In September 1969 the existing conditions dictated that the Brits were not to be shot, but after the Falls curfew [a heavy-handed, military-imposed curfew in west Belfast, which alienated many Catholics] all Brits were, to the people, acceptable targets. The existing conditions had been changed.” Again, a critical disciplining factor here was an assessment of how the IRA's support base would react. In a context in which the British army had yet to antagonize the Catholic community in Northern Ireland (and had actually been welcomed as an alternative to the Royal Ulster Constabulary), it was judged inappropriate for the IRA to attack them.
That such conclusions were grounded in a reasonably accurate appraisal of community attitudes can perhaps be gauged from events early in the conflict, when Irish republicans were heavily censured for their actions. One important incident came in March 1971, when three young British soldiers (aged seventeen, eighteen, and twenty-three) were shot dead by the IRA in north Belfast, having been lured out of the city on the pretext they were going to a party. A public outcry ensued and, partly as a result, the Provisional IRA was forced to publicly and “categorically” deny responsibility for the act.Footnote 74 Significantly, even some committed IRA volunteers, such as Dolours and Marian Price, looked askance at such “honey-trap” killings on the grounds that “soldiers should be shot in their uniforms.”Footnote 75
Elsewhere, perhaps the starkest illustration of the way in which concerns about communal reaction could shape IRA activity was the fate of the so-called disappeared. During the early 1970s, the IRA in Belfast was responsible for the murder and secret burial of a dozen individuals accused variously of acting as informers or of having betrayed the organization. The highest profile of the disappeared victims was a young mother of ten children, Jean McConville, who was “executed” for allegedly passing information to the British security services.Footnote 76 Historically, the IRA had been clear that the punishment for informing was death; during the course of the Troubles, it killed tens of individuals for allegedly engaging in such activity. Usually, their bodies were dumped in ritualistic fashion—hooded, hands bound, and left by the side of the road—as a warning to other would-be traitors.Footnote 77 Yet in the case of McConville and the other disappeared, IRA leaders opted to hide the bodies, seemingly because they were worried about how the nationalist community in Belfast would respond. Ironically, of course, this short-lived policy became a major scandal in its own right, a millstone around the necks of those involved. Indeed, it is striking that when some of the individuals connected to the McConville killing later broke their silence about the incident, they remained largely unrepentant, claiming that the woman deserved to die; expressions of regret were reserved for the manner in which her body was disposed.Footnote 78
More generally, what all such episodes reveal is the extent to which the IRA's moral parameters were framed both by ideology and by the group's own understanding of what the community would accept. The construction of a framework for armed struggle was not a one-way process flowing inexorably from declared political principles. Rather it was open to a form of implicit negotiation between the IRA and the community in which it operated and for which it claimed to speak. The IRA saw itself as “the people's army.” After the fashion of Mao Zedong, leading Provisionals imagined themselves to be “the fish” swimming in the “water” of the local community.Footnote 79 But as scholars have shown, Catholic-nationalist attitudes toward the IRA were complex. It has been estimated that between one-third and two-fifths of Catholics gave some level of support to the IRA but that the picture fluctuated according to events.Footnote 80 Danny Morrison effectively acknowledged this when he told the academic Robert White, “The IRA relies on public support and has to carry out operations within a perception by our supporters of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable . . . What the IRA is trying to do is walk a tightrope, and it's trying to maintain a very dignified and civilized and limited form of guerrilla warfare.”Footnote 81
III
Within the IRA's moral framework, the group attached particular significance to a proscription on the killing of innocent civilians, as was illustrated by the “Green Book's” discussion of Bloody Friday, which can usefully be compared to earlier republican responses to that operation. On 21 July 1972, the IRA detonated twenty-two bombs in Belfast in just over an hour, killing nine people and injuring well over a hundred. At the time, An Phoblacht was resolute in its defense of the IRA, claiming that it always sought to minimize the risk to civilians and harbored “no wish to cause the death of any innocent civilian.” The newspaper pointedly raised the question of why the police had not cleared the areas where the bombs exploded, despite being given warnings, and suggested that “the only conclusion one can come to” was that “the authorities, seeing that they were failing to beat the people and the IRA[,] callously allowed civilians to remain in the danger areas intending to use the resulting injuries and deaths as propaganda in their war against the struggle for liberation.”Footnote 82 By contrast, the “Green Book,” written several years later, offered a different analysis. While still blaming the British in part, it also accepted that the operation had been a “mistake” that risked undermining communal support. The episode was held up as a warning to volunteers—one that demonstrated the importance of being careful in selecting operations.Footnote 83 Such critical appraisal was shared by several of those involved. Gerry Bradley, a member of the IRA's Third Battalion in Belfast who participated in the bombing campaign, believed that the civilian deaths turned a “brilliant” operation into a “disaster.”Footnote 84 Brendan Hughes, who was the Officer Commanding of the IRA's Belfast Brigade, and as such the man directly responsible for Bloody Friday, later insisted there was “no intention to kill people that day” and claimed to have “a great deal of regret” about that the outcome.Footnote 85
The recollections of Bradley, Hughes, and others highlight that the desire to avoid the death of “innocent civilians” was not merely iterated for public consumption but rather was shared by many volunteers. In similar vein, the memoir of Shane O'Doherty recounts at length the “passion” and “ecstasy” he felt at joining the IRA, yet also tells of the “panic” and “terror” he experienced during his first bombing operation when he feared there would “most definitely be a lot of innocent casualties.”Footnote 86 Later, O'Doherty says he even stepped away from the IRA for a time after a young girl was shot during an attack on an army base, an event that “rocked” him to his “foundations.”Footnote 87 Other former IRA members have also stressed their view that the organization did not deliberately intend to kill civilians.Footnote 88
And yet the stark fact remains that the IRA was throughout its campaign prepared to countenance operations that led to the near-inevitable death of civilians, both in Ireland and in Britain. With regards to the latter, the IRA took its war to “enemy soil” from 1973 onward, and its volunteers carried out a number of high-casualty bombings, most notably with the no-warning attacks on public houses in Guildford, Woolwich, and Birmingham in late 1974.Footnote 89 These attacks received almost no coverage in the IRA's own media outlets—an indication perhaps of some unease with what was being done.Footnote 90 And Ruairí Ó Brádaigh later disavowed the Birmingham bombings in an interview with Robert White.Footnote 91 Nevertheless, the logic behind such operations was elucidated in a November 1974 interview given to ITV's Weekend World by senior IRA leader Daithi Ó Conaill. When asked about the bombing of a coach carrying off-duty army personnel and their families earlier in the year (which killed twelve people, including three civilians), Ó Conaill was adamant that it was a “military target.” The IRA had, he insisted, “warned civilians not to frequent places where military personnel are known to have established haunts,” and he promised that they would continue to “strike at economic, military, political and judicial targets.”Footnote 92
In Ireland itself, meanwhile, attacks were also undertaken even when they meant the inevitable death of civilians. A clear example in this regard was the 1979 targeting of Lord Mountbatten with a bomb that also killed three others: the eighty-three-year-old Lady Brabourne and two teenage boys.Footnote 93 The “execution” of “soldier” Mountbatten was glorified in An Phoblacht/Republican News, which called it a “discriminate operation” for which there would be no apology.Footnote 94 The murder of Mountbatten came the same day as a double-bomb attack on paratroopers at Warrenpoint, County Down, which claimed the lives of eighteen soldiers. News of the collective death toll from these operations was reportedly met with “euphoria” by IRA prisoners.Footnote 95 Furthermore, the ethos that made such attacks legitimate for IRA members was outlined by Sinn Féin member Jim Gibney when he talked about the need to preserve “a liberation morality,” thereby to ensure “that you don't end up in a situation where you are . . . so morally contained that you may as well go home and lock the door and stay in the house.”Footnote 96
Views of this kind highlight something else important about the case being argued here, for the contention is not that the IRA was full of reluctant, self-flagellating volunteers who wrestled endlessly with their consciences. Such an assertion would, in the first instance, be unverifiable; secondly, it seems to fly in the face of many descriptions of IRA members.Footnote 97 Of course, there were those who were profoundly affected by their involvement in killing, many of whom later became deeply critical of the IRA, but equally, there were many who were not.Footnote 98 Yet all of this is of secondary relevance for present purposes. Instead, what matters is to note that the IRA as an organization held a clear view of what constituted a “legitimate target.” As has been suggested, the process for identifying those who might fall within that category was elastic—but not infinitely so. Ultimately, there were some deaths for which no justification was possible.
The truth of this naturally raises the question of how the IRA dealt with the numerous instances in which it was responsible for the deaths of civilians. To cope with such scenarios, the group's leaders adopted various approaches. One was simply to deny any involvement.Footnote 99 Another was to engage in what Maurice Tugwell called “guilt transfer”—to admit responsibility but to claim that the reason for the deaths lay ultimately with the British, either in an immediate sense because they had responded inadequately to a warning, or more generally because their “injustices” were the root cause of the conflict.Footnote 100 A third approach for dealing with civilian deaths was to acknowledge culpability and issue an apology. This was the path chosen after the 1983 Harrods bomb, when the IRA publicly expressed “regret” while claiming that the operation had not been “authorised”; the group also promised that “steps” would be taken “to ensure there will be no repetition of this type of operation.”Footnote 101 Gerry Adams insisted it had been “an accident” and that the IRA did “not want to kill civilians.”Footnote 102 More generally, in 2002, the IRA issued an apology for the deaths of “non-combatants” throughout its campaign.Footnote 103
Irrespective of whether the IRA opted for denial, “guilt transfer,” or apology, however, the underlying import of all this was that the IRA was again acknowledging a critical red line beyond which its “armed struggle” could not go. The open endorsement of indiscriminate attacks, designed to produce mass civilian casualties, was something that its supporters—and many volunteers themselves—would not accept. Indeed, every IRA operation had to be explicable to concentric circles of members, supporters, and sympathizers. Actions had to be locatable within the IRA's own moral framework, which had to operate both as a cadre ideology and across the wider nationalist community. The consequences of failing on either front were serious. With regards to the latter, potentially sympathetic audiences might turn against the IRA. A failure to convince IRA volunteers themselves, meanwhile, risked the IRA's own organizational cohesion. The truth of this is underlined by Eamon Collins's memoir, for it was the willingness of some of his fellow IRA members to disregard what he perceived to be their own rules (by killing a former, as opposed to present, member of the Ulster Defence Regiment) that bred Collins's first real disillusion with the group.Footnote 104 And it was this growing skepticism that set the stage for his transformation into first “supergrass” and then public critic of his former comrades.Footnote 105
The reality, therefore, was that the IRA had, to some degree, to play by the rules it had set itself or risk the collapse of its own legitimacy—both internally and among wider constituencies. With regards to the latter, Collins again provides useful insight: when asked whether or not the IRA might target the families of security force members, his view was that this would not occur because the “present-day IRA sought to avoid any operations which had obviously sectarian overtones [emphasis in original],” and a “non-combatant” Protestant family could not be justified. The IRA, he noted, “tried to act in a way that would avoid severe censure from within the nationalist community; they knew they were operating within a sophisticated set of informal restrictions on their behavior, no less powerful for being largely unspoken.”Footnote 106
Collins's testimony on this issue is also valuable because it highlights the question of sectarianism and debates over the extent to which the IRA was prepared to engage in the targeting of Protestants as Protestants. This is a subject that has generated much disagreement among scholars.Footnote 107 Throughout the conflict, the group maintained that it was vehemently opposed to such actions. At the same time, it was repeatedly blamed for a number of more-or-less nakedly sectarian attacks. One of the most notorious of these incidents came in January 1976 when nine Protestant workmen were executed outside the village of Kingsmills by a group calling itself the “South Armagh Republican Action Force.” This was widely understood to be a front name for the local IRA. The group's leaders immediately denied any involvement, and an editorial in An Phoblacht declared that the “tradition of the Republican Movement [was] one of anti-sectarianism.”Footnote 108 Few were convinced.
Interestingly, some republicans at the time seemed open to the idea that the IRA should actively embrace such attacks. One article in An Phoblacht noted that while the “main ethical principle” of the IRA campaign had been to try to avoid killing “ordinary civilians,” they now faced the difficult question of how to stop loyalists killing Catholics indiscriminately. The author argued that it was impossible for republicans to maintain a ceasefire in the face of this aggression and suggested “physical-force actions—of killings, to be precise—as a means of deterring the British gangs from their indiscriminate slaughter of the Irish people.”Footnote 109 Clearly, such views belonged very much to the fringe of the movement. A reply a week later insisted that a policy of “massive retaliation against innocent non-combatants” could “not be justified, morally, politically, strategically, or tactically.”Footnote 110 But the fact that the original piece had been published in the first place was surely significant. As Northern Ireland appeared to slide ever closer to complete social breakdown and civil war in the mid-1970s, some within the IRA found it hard to abjure retaliatory attacks against both loyalist paramilitaries and the Unionist community more generally. In addition, the rise in this period of a younger generation of leaders (foremost among them Gerry Adams), steeped in the realities of Northern Irish communal divisions and influenced by new left thinkers like Michael Farrell, brought a new, more abrasive tone toward Protestant Unionists who were judged irredeemably reactionary and inclined toward “Orange Fascism.”Footnote 111
The allegation of sectarian intent was one that the IRA struggled to refute, especially in the face of a comprehensive British state counterterrorism strategy, which from the mid-1970s sought to “Ulsterise” the conflict. This saw the regular British Army withdrawn from the frontline, and the mainly Protestant and Unionist Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment given primary responsibility for dealing with the IRA. In the decade that followed, the range of security techniques available to the state—from observation posts to electronic surveillance innovations to new forms of protective equipment for troops—expanded dramatically and were deployed in order to “contain” the IRA's campaign. As a result, the group found itself facing a conundrum. Attacks like that at Warrenpoint in August 1979, which killed multiple British soldiers, remained rare throughout the conflict—and became increasingly so. As Marc Mulholland points out, it was only in South Armagh that soldiers continued to be killed on duty with some regularity.Footnote 112
Against this backdrop, however much the IRA might argue that its enemy was “British imperialism,” the reality was that by the mid-to-late 1980s, most of its intended targets were locally born Protestants.Footnote 113 And while these people were often members of the security forces, many of them were attacked while off duty. Kevin Toolis's account of the IRA provides one typical (and strikingly unglamorous) example: the February 1992 attempted murder of Eric Glass, a forty-nine-year-old dog warden and part-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment.Footnote 114
Periodically, the IRA attempted to reassert the legitimacy of such operations. In 1983, for instance, an IRA spokesman claimed that it was, “a euphemism to talk of off-duty or part-time UDR men or RUC men. They are never off-duty. They are armed all the time and if they came upon IRA Volunteers they would attack them, whether they were on duty or not. We cannot allow an armed organisation which is ranged against us to go undeterred because of the sensitivities of the loyalist population.”Footnote 115 But arguments of this kind were difficult to sustain, particularly as the conflict dragged on.
Moreover, the category of “legitimate target” seemed to inflate in the period after 1985, when the IRA began systematically targeting construction workers and other civilians involved in providing services to the security forces. As one British agent working inside the IRA later stated, even milkmen and toilet cleaners were now considered “fair game.”Footnote 116 Eamon Collins's account similarly highlights the IRA's readiness to stretch the concept of a legitimate target considerably.Footnote 117 Yet such operations were manifestly harder to justify to the nationalist community than more “straightforward” attacks on British soldiers. Thomas Hennessey has noted that in a revealing 1988 interview with the Observer, Gerry Adams came close to admitting as much when he acknowledged that the British had effectively managed to “reduce the violence [in Northern Ireland] to Irish people killing each other.”Footnote 118 Such a situation posed a fundamental challenge to the ideological framework upon which the IRA justified its campaign.
IV
In trying to modulate its activities so as not to violate certain moral parameters, the IRA had to consider audiences that reached beyond either its internal membership or the nationalist community of Northern Ireland.Footnote 119 For one thing, sympathizers in the Republic of Ireland had long provided successive iterations of the IRA with political as well as logistical assistance. The Provisionals were no different in this regard.Footnote 120 Indeed, a core objective for Gerry Adams and other leaders who came to dominate the IRA from the mid-1970s was to tap more effectively into southern Irish support.Footnote 121 And there is no question that the reaction of potential supporters in the republic was a key consideration for the IRA throughout the conflict. Alongside this, another crucial audience for the IRA was that of its international sponsors—from those in Irish America through to certain radical governments such as that of Mu‘ammar Qadhafi in Libya.
On the one hand, efforts to nurture these different constituencies reinforced the IRA's own value hierarchy, as outlined above. As Sean O'Callaghan explained, most external supporters—whether in southern Ireland, Irish America, or Libya—“wanted you to kill soldiers.”Footnote 122 In addition, the IRA was alert to the idea that there were certain things that would-be benefactors would not stomach. One obvious one was military action within the Irish state. Adams was thus adamant that while “armed struggle” was “necessary” in the north, it had “no role to play in the 26 counties.”Footnote 123 This restriction was reflected in the IRA's General Army Order No. 8—first issued in 1954 and reaffirmed thereafter—which prohibited “military operations” against the forces of the “26 counties.”Footnote 124 Its continued importance is attested to by Raymond Gilmour, the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch agent who infiltrated the IRA in Derry, who claims that, when attending a training camp in the Republic of Ireland, he and his comrades were specifically reminded of the injunction against “military action” in the south.Footnote 125
As ever, there were moments when such restrictions were honored in the breach. For one thing, they certainly did not inhibit the IRA from using territory south of the border as a base for launching attacks across into Northern Ireland—much to the embarrassment of the Dublin authorities and Irish security forces.Footnote 126 Moreover, there were moments when IRA violence was targeted against the Irish state. One of the more notorious examples was the March 1974 murder of Fine Gael senator Billy Fox. In the immediate aftermath, the IRA denied being involved “in any way” in the killing—but five men who were accused of being members of the organization were later found guilty of the crime.Footnote 127 Two years later, a similar pattern was evident—of IRA denial, but a widespread belief in their culpability—after the killing of Garda Michael Clerkin by a booby-trap bomb near Portlaoise in October 1976.Footnote 128 Even so, these killings remained exceptional, rather than typical, forms of IRA activity.
Furthermore, it seems clear that concerns over southern reactions also reinforced reservations about certain kinds of IRA activity within Northern Ireland. Again, incidents bearing a sectarian imprint were particularly problematic. In the view of Sean O'Callaghan, the group's leaders became ever more conscious of the unpopularity of operations like the shooting of off-duty policemen or bombings that killed civilians.Footnote 129 An awareness of the need to discriminate between different types of operation was discernable in Gerry Adams's periodic calls for the IRA to be “controlled and disciplined.” In the mid-1970s, he had stated that “Republicans must ensure that our cause and methods remain within the bounds of our consciences.”Footnote 130 A few years later, he insisted that the IRA had “for some time been adopting more discriminating tactics” and “been a bit more refined” in its approach.Footnote 131 And in 1989 he called on IRA volunteers to be “careful and careful again.”Footnote 132
What such comments attested to, once more, was the IRA's recognition that it had to avoid violating the parameters that framed its “armed struggle,” as determined informally by the audiences to which it appealed. Often, this moral framework may have been identifiable only at the point of transgression, but its existence helps explain both the actions of the IRA and the reason why the group secured sufficient support to maintain its long campaign.
V
There was one further audience to which the IRA was attuned in the prosecution of its long war that needs to be mentioned: the British. To understand the importance of this dimension, it is worth recalling the vision held to by the IRA leadership, as regards a possible endgame for the conflict. The “Green Book” stated that the conflict was undertaken “not with the hope of physically driving them [the British] into the sea but nevertheless expecting to effect their withdrawal.”Footnote 133 As to how that withdrawal might actually be realized, some kind of negotiating process was always envisaged. Niall Ó Dochartaigh has underlined that this desire for negotiation was an element of continuity within IRA strategy throughout the conflict—and ultimately it set the stage for the peace process and compromises of the 1990s.Footnote 134 As early as 1971, Sinn Féin's newspaper, Republican News, declared that the IRA's campaign would continue “until Britain is forced to sit at the conference table” with Irish republicans.Footnote 135 In the later words of the senior republican and former IRA member Danny Morrison, “The objective was to eliminate every option that the Brits had, until they were forced to come round to talking to republicans.”Footnote 136 The aim, stated baldly, was to get into negotiations with the British—ideally without having to end the IRA's armed campaign in the process. The attitude of the IRA's leadership, as presented in the mid-1980s, was that, “if and when the situation presents itself, for negotiating a settlement . . . the IRA's attitude will be that it will talk and fight at the same time.”Footnote 137
The vista of possible negotiation, however, both encouraged and constrained IRA options. On the one hand, the aim of the “armed struggle” was to “sicken” the British into withdrawing from Ireland.Footnote 138 It was seen as providing republicans with a “veto,” by which they could “keep the pot boiling” in Northern Ireland, thwart British attempts to solve the conflict, and “fight their way to the negotiating table.”Footnote 139 At the same time, though, there appears to have been a recognition within the IRA leadership that here too the violence had to be kept within limits; there was always the danger that the IRA might go too far and put itself beyond the pale, creating a situation in which no British government would countenance negotiations. Again, Sean O'Callaghan offers a fascinating insight into some of the debates that were had internally: “You have the almost complete lunatic thing of, you know, Ivor Bell wanting to poison milk going into [the] police, going into army barracks . . . or Gerry Tuite wanting to go down to Eton and kill a whole load of pupils . . . which the IRA were never going to go for, for the simple reason that they kind of understood that there was always the possibility of negotiations here—and that certain things were going to push you so far off the planet [that the British would never engage].”Footnote 140
Of course, none of this meant a reluctance to authorize operations that inevitably caused outrage. One could point to the killing of Lord Mountbatten, the murder of leading politicians such as Ian Gow as well as the British ambassadors to Ireland and the Netherlands, or the later massive truck bombings in Manchester and central London, as evidence of their capacity for “spectacular” strikes against the British “establishment.”Footnote 141 To that, of course, one must add the near-miss assassination attempt on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in October 1984. Interestingly, though, according to O'Callaghan, the organization's Army Council was divided over whether or not to approve that attack. In the end, those in favor won the debate—but only just—having successfully argued that it would not become an insurmountable obstacle to future talks. As O'Callaghan later recalled, “There was sort of a feeling that Thatcher was . . . incredibly unpopular in southern Ireland . . . incredibly unpopular in Irish America . . . on balance, it will put back the Brits talking with you, but as Adams was saying to me, you know, ‘she wouldn't talk with us, and our base wouldn't tolerate it either . . . so we're all treading water until she goes’ . . . so in that sense, Thatcher was a peculiar one . . . I mean, would Blair, all those years later, have been completely constrained by it [i.e., her murder]?”Footnote 142
An answer to that question lies beyond the scope of this article, but as an aside it is perhaps worth remembering that the IRA also came close to killing Thatcher's successor, John Major, when it fired mortars at Downing Street in 1991—yet it was Major who would oversee the first stages of the peace process. Thus, the IRA's calculation that the killing of a British prime minister—particularly one as polarizing as Thatcher—might not have prevented future talks was perhaps not altogether unreasonable. Certainly, none of the IRA's attacks on the British “establishment” generated the same level of disquiet within the group's various communities of support as other, more contentious operations.
VI
In the wake of the 1981 hunger strikes that saw the death of ten IRA prisoners, Irish republicans moved to enter the electoral arena with the development of Sinn Féin as a serious and credible political party. This step has often been heralded as a key milestone leading inexorably toward the peace process, on the basis that it made the IRA susceptible to electoral pressures, and the group curtailed its violence as a result. Senior Irish republicans were clearly aware of the contradictions created by the “Armalite and Ballot Box” strategy—even as they continued to insist that these were manageable.Footnote 143 In 1984, for example, Danny Morrison referred to the “unpalatable” reality that “perhaps” it was “not entirely possible to totally harmonise the relationship between armed struggle and electoral politics.” The IRA, Morrison conceded, had “the potential to electorally hurt Sinn Féin.” Still, he went on to argue that there was “very little room for the IRA to lower its range, so to speak.” The IRA had to do, he said, what the IRA had to do, and republicans would “just have to live with the fact that there's always going to be this apparent contradiction.”Footnote 144
In truth, the post-1981 focus on the ballot box simply made explicit an underlying and enduring reality of the IRA's campaign: that it was, to a significant degree, always reliant on the ability of Irish republicans to retain a “constituency” composed of different audiences—internally within the nationalist community of Northern Ireland, across the broader Irish nationalist “family,” and internationally. The level of support enjoyed by the IRA was at each turn dependent on the capacity of republicans both to rationalize their actions in accordance with declared political principles and set them within an informal moral framework. And this process was, as described, subject to an unstated but continual process of negotiation.
On numerous occasions, the IRA conducted operations that seemed to transgress the boundaries of the permissible. Yet periodic violations of its own strictures were perhaps inevitable for an organization like the IRA, which was effectively engaged in a battle of political will with the British state. As noted, the declared intention of the armed struggle was to “sicken” the British and force withdrawal. To this end, as John Horgan has stated, the IRA's use of violence required a constant capacity to innovate and surprise their opponents. Habituation was to be countered; the existence of a normal level of violence—of a kind implied by the existence of even informal red lines for the campaign—was a serious problem for the IRA.Footnote 145
To return, then, to the fate of Patsy Gillespie: what this episode demonstrated was the IRA's attempt to balance the competing impulses it faced. The use of the proxy bomb tactic has to be understood against the backdrop of the IRA's aforementioned decision to broaden the category of “legitimate target” to include anyone who collaborated with the security services in any way. It was this shift that allowed for the kidnapping of Gillespie on the somewhat tendentious basis that he worked in the kitchen of the local army base. (Even more tenuous was the justification offered for the coercion of his fellow Newry-based “proxy” bomber John McEvoy, who owned a petrol station and was accused of serving security force members.Footnote 146) After a period in which the IRA had struggled to target the British military, the 1990 “human bomb” attacks produced the highest death toll of soldiers in a single day for more than two years, and, tellingly, the IRA boasted that it had “devastate[d] the myth of containment.”Footnote 147
To some extent, it would seem that the organization saw these operations as a calculated gamble: liable to produce criticism but worthwhile for the tactical gains that might accrue. As Sean O'Callaghan commented, “The benefit of it was that they had extended the range of attacking military and police installations . . . Perhaps they knew the community wouldn't hack it, but they would do it once and [the] security forces would always have to allow for it in the future.”Footnote 148 Viewed from this perspective, the IRA's use of “human bombs” can be understood as the deliberate violation of its own moral code for tactical advantage; it was not an attempt to transform the established moral parameters of the campaign. Indeed, the uniqueness of these events—and the condemnation they generated—actually demonstrated the enduring validity of those parameters.
Moreover, the resort to such desperate measures was indicative of the problems that the IRA faced by the early 1990s. By that time, the IRA seemed unable to fight the war that its ideology demanded. As Brendan O'Leary notes, there were effectively two parallel conflicts being waged in Northern Ireland: “First, a war of national, ethnic, and communal assassination” between Catholic-Nationalists and Protestant-Unionists, and second, “a guerrilla and counterinsurgency war” that pitted the IRA against the British state.Footnote 149 Irish Republicans found themselves unable to escape the former, and increasingly incapable of changing the dynamics of the latter, with its campaign subject to ever-tighter containment. Ultimately, the IRA leadership came to accept that the escalation of violence required to alter this situation—both in quantitative and qualitative terms—was either unpalatable or unachievable. The IRA's inability to consistently reconcile its activities with its own political and moral principles helped push its leaders toward a different approach. Faced with the choice of doing more of the same, or seeking an alternative, they opted finally to end the “long war.”
