Fighting for Ireland?

The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement

M.L.R. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134713967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fighting for Ireland? is the first in-depth account of the evolution of Irish Republican strategy. It is highly topical in the light of the faltering peace process and the growing speculation over the IRA's next move: further violence or a new non-violent strategy? This new, updated paperback edition is essential reading for those who wish to disentangle the complex issues and motives behind IRA violence.
M.L.R. Smith challenges many assumptions about the IRA, pinpointing the organisation's successes as well as its missed opportunities. He demonstrates the tension the movement has experienced between ideology and strategic reality regarding the use of force, illustrating how doctrinal purity has sometimes hampered the IRA in the pursuit of its goals. Contrary to the Irish Republican movement's vigorous and assertive public face Smith uncovers an organisation characterised more by a sense of chronic insecurity than by certainty and continuity.

1 The Irish republican military mind

The evolution of a strategic tradition

The true cultural and psychological origins of republican strategic thinking stretch back to the outer reaches of Irish history, and even to mythic prehistory. It is impossible to do justice to even a fraction of the republican movement’s rich historical inheritance in a single volume. So, the intention of this analysis is to analyse schematically the evolution of a number of ideological themes within the republican tradition which have a bearing upon the employment of the movement’s use of armed force.

Modern republicanism draws its inspiration from a tradition of conspiracy which centres on a number of rebellions, most notably the revolts of the United Irishmen in 1798, the Young Irelanders in 1848, the Fenians in 1867 and, most importantly, the Easter rising of 1916. Although the movement claims this heritage of revolt to represent a direct line of succession with the modern era, it would be wrong to speak in terms of a clearly defined republican strategic legacy. For example, it is doubtful whether those like the United Irishmen or the Young Irelanders considered themselves republicans in any consistent sense. As is so often the case, interpretations of history are used to support political positions in the present.¹ Indeed, this is the process in which we are interested for the purposes of this chapter. We are not concerned here with the exact nature of the events as they unfolded but with perceptions of the past and the effects they have on the republican movement’s strategic analysis.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH BRITAIN—THE COLONIAL ANALYSIS

‘British soldiers and British administrators have never brought anything but death, suffering, starvation and untold misery to the people in this country. They will never bring anything else until they get out.’² These sentiments, expressed in one small Provisional Sinn Fein (PSF) publication in the 1970s, capture the emotional core of republicanism. Wolfe Tone, one of the figures in the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798 and hailed in the modern era as the founding father of the republican tradition, declared: ‘From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and England as the curse of the Irish nation.’³ From this assumption, later republicans would claim, Tone concluded that England was the ‘party solely responsible for all the ills afflicting Ireland’.⁴ It is the root rejection of British, or more particularly English, influence in Ireland which remains the most distinguishing feature of republican thinking. Why should this be so? To comprehend republican practice of the military instrument it is necessary to understand the reason for this perception as the answer provides the intellectual basis upon which the movement has sought to define relevant strategies.

The republican view of the relationship between Ireland and Britain was stated forcefully by Provisional Sinn Fein in 1988 during a series of meetings held with the main constitutional nationalist party in Northern Ireland, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). ‘British interference in Ireland’, PSF exclaimed, ‘has and continues to be malign because its presence has and continues to be based on its own self-interests.’⁵ The history of British involvement in Irish affairs is seen in terms of Britain’s attempts to use its power systematically to drain Ireland of its human and material resources through underdevelopment, restricted markets, famine and emigration, and the imposition of alien institutions. The present situation in Northern Ireland is deemed to play a key role in Britain’s continuing imperial design. Republicans see the province’s existence as an artificially manufactured political arrangement to preserve British domination of the whole island. One republican writer compared it to a robber, who, having broken into someone’s home and ‘while leering at the householder, he tells you, look get on with your own business, I am occupying only one room’.⁶ In this way, republicans allege that the British presence distracts and divides the people and disfigures all aspects of political and social life in Ireland. It prevents the emergence of a mature class-based polity, retards economic progress and distorts social and cultural values, thereby leaving the British in the North, and their neo-colonial business allies in the South, to carry on making their mint out of the exploitation of the Irish people.⁷

The notion of colonial subjugation is the strongest theme in Irish republican nationalism. The contention that Ireland remains at the mercy of an exploitative foreign power, with all the attendant suffering it causes, forms the central hypothesis of republican political analysis. In Wolfe Tone’s opinion, the ‘bane of Irish prosperity is the influence of England’. ‘I believe’, Tone went on, ‘that influence will be ever extended while the connection between the countries continues.’⁸ It was this impression of the fixed nature of British interests in Ireland that convinced the United Irishmen that they could never be masters of their own destiny. The movement’s 1797 constitution proclaimed:

We have no National Government; we are ruled by Englishmen and the Servants of Englishmen, whose Object is the Interest of another country, whose Instrument is corruption and whose Strength is the Weakness of Ireland.⁹

The republican diagnosis of Ireland’s predicament was straightforward. Echoing the words of Tone, an article in the republican newspaper, An Phoblacht, declared that ‘Ireland would never be free, prosperous or happy until she was independent and that independence was unattainable while the connection with England lasted.’¹⁰ The consequent belief that the British have no moral right to govern or have any influence in Ireland provides the basis of republican strategic thought, as it helps to define both the political object to be gained and the military goal with which to achieve it. The political object as described by Tone was ‘to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils and to assert the independence of my country’.¹¹ The demand for independence only became entrenched in republican philosophy after the emergence in the midnineteenth century of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenians. The IRB was established by a small group of nationalists to coordinate conspiratorial efforts in Ireland. Unlike the United Irishmen and the Young Irelanders before them, who had initially tried to work within the constitutional process but had felt pushed into rebellion as an act of desperation, the IRB from the outset repudiated British rule and dedicated itself to conspire against Britain as a first resort.¹² Since the time of the Fenians the aim of complete British disengagement from Ireland has remained the foremost goal of the republican movement. In the view of the present president of PSF, Gerry Adams, ‘British withdrawal is a necessary precondition if we are to secure the basis upon which peace can be built in Ireland.’¹³

The military objective by which Irish republican violence would seek to expel the British is an altogether more problematic affair. Part of the answer as to how and where to apply violence in republican strategy was supplied by the conciseness of the movement’s analysis in clearly identifying the enemy. ‘British imperialism’ is cast as the general shape of the threat to Ireland¹⁴ and the British government, as the main regulator of imperial policy, as the central authority to be coerced. Daithi O Conaill, a founder member of the Provisional IRA, made this point explicit in 1974 when he declared that ‘the British Government… hold[s] the key to peace and war’.¹⁵ The clear belief of such a statement was that attacks on the symbols and structures of British authority would be able to alter governmental attitudes towards Ireland.

By the late nineteenth century a pattern of republican-nationalist military activity was beginning to emerge in a form which in certain ways would be recognisable today. For instance, one of the first major acts of political assassination was carried out in May 1882 by a group calling itself the Invincibles when they murdered the Secretary of State for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under-Secretary, T.H.Burke, in Phoenix Park in Dublin. The motives for the murders remain obscure and similar acts were not repeated for many years. The Invincibles were a shadowy nationalist grouping, seemingly comprised of ex-Fenians, but whose immediate political origins appeared to reside more in the land agitation campaigns of the time.¹⁶ However, some years afterwards one minor figure in the Invincible conspiracy, P.J.P.Tynan, explained the rationale for the murders as the ‘removal’ of those who upheld Britain’s ‘illegal and alien administration’ and described political assassination as a ‘species of guerrilla warfare’ to be employed so that ‘these ferocious offices should be kept vacant by the continual suppression of their holders’.¹⁷

Besides the Phoenix Park murders, the 1880s also saw the outbreak of Fenian dynamiting campaigns in England. The bombings began in January 1881 and concentrated mainly on targets like military barracks and public offices. The Byzantine nature of republican politics at the time makes it difficult to fathom the precise purpose of the bombings as they were undertaken by rival factions of the American arm of the Fenian movement, the Clan-na-Gael, though the original intention was apparently to distract Britain from a general insurrection in Ireland.¹⁸ The bombings continued intermittently with little effect until 1887. Nevertheless, the depiction of British colonialism as the main adversary in Ireland’s fight for independence had been pressed to its logical military end. Along with the assassination of important figures in the British establishment, ‘bringing the struggle to the enemy’s backyard’¹⁹ was to become a mainstay in republican military doctrine because it was through these means that the movement could hope to gain the greatest influence over British policy.

The strength of republican analysis is that it presents a powerful and easily comprehensible argument. Yet its strength in this respect is also its main theoretical weakness. The image of complete British culpability risks promoting tunnel vision as it narrows the scope of republican analysis by excluding a multiplicity of other factors which might also have some bearing on the Irish context and affect strategic calculations accordingly. For example, the main reason for Ireland’s relative economic underdevelopment probably owes less to British domination and far more to the simple geographical fact that Ireland is an isolated part of Europe bound to be disadvantaged because it is caught inescapably in a structural relationship where wealth gravitates towards the more densely populated heartlands of the continent. The republican perspective would tend to rule out, at least as a primary factor, any such interpretation of Ireland’s predicament and place the blame squarely on British influence. The pitfall with any mono-causal explanation is that it can rigidify thinking to a degree where the analysis itself is elevated to a point of dogma.²⁰ If this happens it may well create an unstable intellectual platform on which to base assessments of the value of military force. In the extreme, this can lead force to be applied out of blind hatred, where violence is seen not in functional terms but purely as a means of striking a righteous blow against an enemy perceived to be responsible for centuries of oppression. The lack of a wider consideration of influences may make the process of strategic formulation inflexible and unself-critical, unable to take account of changing circumstances, thereby guiding and reinforcing other inaccurate or outmoded assumptions which may flow from a highly restrictive analysis.

THE NATIONALIST VANGUARD AND APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

One obvious corollary of the republican movement’s colonial analysis is the cultivation of an idealised alternative to the despoliations of British rule. Emphasis on asserting Ireland’s cultural achievements has played a major part in the development of this theme in republican ideology. The Young Irelanders were significant in this respect as they believed that cultural rejuvenation was a prerequisite to substantiate any claim for independence. Through the promotion of Irish culture and history the movement sought to build a distinctive and integrated national identity.²¹ In the pages of the Young Ireland newspaper, The Nation, under its editor and intellectual mentor of the movement, Thomas Davis, Ireland’s claim to autonomy was advanced through the portrayal of a vigorous, self-reliant and disciplined cultural inheritance capable of resisting the corrupting values and oppression of foreign intervention. Davis announced:

And now, Englishmen, listen to us! We tell you, and all whom it may concern, come what may—bribery or deceit, justice, policy or war—we tell you, in the name of Ireland, Ireland shall be a Nation!²²

It was in the early years of the twentieth century, against the background of an upsurge of interest in Gaelic culture, that the concept of Irish nationality was further enhanced within the republican tradition through the writings of Patrick Pearse. Pearse’s visions of nationhood were quasi-religious. He rejected the view that independence was something to be decided empirically in terms of economic viability, ethnic homogeneity and the ability to maintain sovereignty. The Irish nation he believed to be a mystical entity, a unified whole embracing all men and women in Ireland, something ‘holy in itself.²³ ‘Freedom’ in Pearse’s view, was conceived as ‘a spiritual necessity’ which ‘transcends all corporeal necessities’.²⁴

There is no doubt that the belief in Ireland as a single political unit which can only attain ‘true justice, peace and happiness’²⁵ with the overthrow of British rule remains the object of devotion within the modern republican movement. The intensity with which this goal is held has endowed republicans with a strong sense of conviction in the correctness of their motives and intentions. The impression is one of a nationalist vanguard that sees itself as the embodiment of the true spirit of Ireland’s destiny. Intellectual elitism has been a notable feature of the republican tradition. The Young Irelanders, for example, saw their role as that of tutors to the masses in order, in Davis’ words, to ‘spiritualise and nationalise them with higher and nobler aims’.²⁶ Tom Garvin suggests that after the Irish civil war in 1923 this strand of moral elitism bred a particularly puritanical republican persona which saw the Irish people as a largely impassive mass who had been deflected from following the true path to freedom by British and Irish Free State propaganda.²⁷ Such attitudes were detectable in republican rhetoric around this time. For example, in 1926 the Sinn Fein leader, Eamon de Valera, expressed the hope that after the damage caused to republican unity by the civil war the movement ‘would receive back all those of the rank and file who had been misled in the recent years’. He continued: ‘Republicans must be prepared to recognise that error is a human failing and make the necessary allowances.’²⁸ In a similar vein, one republican advocate writing in the early 1970s reminded his readers that, as one of the ‘minority revolutionary movements’, republicans were ‘fighting against conservative odds to keep the real needs and most urgent social and political problems before the people’,²⁹ Implicit in these sorts of statements is a disposition which regards the bulk of the people as rather guileless, capable of being manipulated and unable to determine their ‘real needs’. Deviation from the republican line results not from differing perspectives and analyses but from ‘human failing’. The debasement of those who do not follow the republican course is mitigated only by the prospect that they will return to the fold having seen the futility of the alternatives and having finally recognised their own gullibility. In the recent past, the republican movement has had occasion to proclaim openly that the IRA ‘has a monopoly on tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface to the paperback edition
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction—developing a strategic approach to the Irish republican movement
• 1 The Irish republican military mind—the evolution of a strategic tradition
• 2 Transitions in Irish republican strategy—the development of the military instrument from the Easter rising to the civil war
• 3 Political control versus the autonomous military instrument—Irish republican strategy from the civil war to the 1970s
• 4 The military ascendancy—the Provisional IRA on the offensive, 1970–1972
• 5 The erosion of Provisional IRA strategy, 1972–1977
• 6 The evolution of PIRA’s total strategy, 1977–1983
• 7 A continuing military enigma—the contradictory dynamics of the total strategy, 1983–1990
• 8 Ending the isolation? Ending the violence?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index