One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  As their talks with the British government dragged on without agreement, the Provos began to fear that their negotiating partners were taking them for a ride.46 In October 1975, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh maintained his conviction that British withdrawal was ‘now inevitable’, but warned that the IRA would ‘renew the struggle’ if he turned out to be wrong.47 Without a deal they could present as some kind of victory, Ó Brádaigh and his comrades were in danger of being supplanted by a younger generation of militants, already straining at the leash. To compound their difficulties, they now faced competition from a rival movement that was ready to continue the war.

  Up for Grabs

  The alliance between Seamus Costello and Seán Garland soon broke up over the question of armed struggle. Costello wanted the Official IRA to resume its campaign, but found himself isolated in the leadership: both wings of the movement expelled him in rapid succession. A crushing majority of delegates voted down the last attempt by Costello’s supporters to have him reinstated at Official Sinn Féin’s party conference in December 1974.48 In effect, once Costello lost the battle for influence at the summit, the game was up. Although the Officials had abandoned guerrilla warfare as a tactic, the culture of their movement was still rigidly hierarchical, with power concentrated in the hands of the OIRA’s Army Council. If Costello had won the argument at that level, it might have been his opponents who were obliged to break away. In his absence, the Officials quickly reverted to their old reformist strategy.

  Costello launched his new vehicle, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), at the beginning of 1975, with an ideological platform that distinguished it from both of the existing factions. The main point of contention between Costello and the Officials was the right approach to adopt towards the unionist population. According to the IRSP leader, his former comrades believed there was ‘no hope of achieving national liberation until such time as the Protestant and Catholic working class in the North are united’ – a far-fetched prospect, in Costello’s view, since ‘the British presence in Ireland is the basic cause of the divisions’.49

  That put him on the same ground as the Provisionals – as did his commitment, aired more discreetly, to wage war on the British Army. But Costello saw the Provos as an essentially conservative force: ‘Many of them would accept a theoretically independent state, with no significant change being made in the social and political structures.’50 He was also committed to building up the IRSP as a legal party that would contest elections and take any seats it won, unlike Provisional Sinn Féin.

  The IRSP’s platform attracted support from many OIRA Volunteers in the North who had opposed the ceasefire. Ronnie Bunting, one of Costello’s leading supporters in Belfast, came from a middle-class, Protestant background and stood out for his unique personal trajectory: his father Ronald had been the main organizer of the Burntollet ambush in 1969, but Bunting Jr graduated from People’s Democracy to join the Official IRA and became an active combatant with a reputation as a skilled marksman. In Derry, the majority of OIRA members lined up with Costello.51 The Ranger Best controversy in 1972 had left a legacy of bitterness among local activists, who accused Cathal Goulding of hanging them out to dry when they were under attack. There had also been a strong Trotskyist influence among the Derry Officials, and the pro-Soviet line that the movement’s leadership had started to peddle helped smooth their passage towards Costello.52

  It wasn’t merely disgruntled Officials who found Costello’s blueprint attractive. People’s Democracy and another far-left group, the Socialist Workers’ Movement, considered joining the new party. The IRSP’s most important recruit from this milieu was the former civil rights MP, Bernadette Devlin – now generally known by her married name, McAliskey. She had lost her Mid-Ulster seat at the 1974 general election, but remained a high-profile figure whose involvement gave the new party some real political heft. McAliskey argued that Costello’s movement was needed to fill a space left vacant by the established groups: ‘The Provos are concentrating on getting rid of the British in a military campaign without any policy on the class war. And the Officials now have no policy on the national question.’53 At the IRSP’s first public meeting in Dublin, attended by 500 people, she described the party as ‘an attempt to create a revolutionary socialist alternative to 800 years of failure’.54

  McAliskey set out her rationale for joining Costello’s movement in a series of articles and interviews. She disagreed with the reformist approach of the Officials – ‘you cannot democratize an artificial state which is set up in the face of democracy’ – and accused them of promoting a ‘false unity’ with working-class Protestants on economic issues, ‘at the expense of asserting the true nature of the British role in Ireland’.55 For McAliskey, the IRSP was important because it had ‘discovered the problem of twentieth-century Republicanism – the relationship of the national struggle to the class question’. No revolutionary movement could be successful unless it combined the struggles for national independence and social emancipation: ‘The place for those socialists who think they have a constructive answer is inside the party.’56 The IRSP’s first policy statement declared its readiness ‘in principle’ to contest Northern Ireland’s Convention elections in 1975. McAliskey was sure to be the main candidate, and most observers expected her to win a seat for the party in Mid-Ulster.57

  Having come to the IRSP from outside the republican tradition, McAliskey had no place in the leadership of its military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). In other respects it was hard to distinguish between the two organizations. Costello became the INLA’s first chief of staff, with men like Ronnie Bunting and Derry’s Johnnie White at his side. He wanted to keep the INLA under wraps until it had carried out several attacks on the security forces, allowing the group to make its public debut in a blaze of glory.58 But Costello’s rhetoric and reputation gave his opponents every reason to think he would be making preparations for war. As McAliskey tactfully observed: ‘Given the people who are within our organization, it would be ridiculous to suggest that we see the Socialist Republic being brought about by force of moral argument.’59

  A briefing for the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) expressed alarm about the IRSP’s potential to attract support with its blend of Marxism and nationalism – ‘a combination greatly more in tune with international revolutionary movements than the monoplane dogma of either the Officials or the Provisionals’. Furthermore, the extended Provo truce had created a political vacuum that Costello might be able to fill: ‘The Republican protest elements are at this moment in a period of disorientation where the goals have either been met or have drifted into the distance. This considerable corpus (which of course has never been numerically tested as a distinct electorate) is basically therefore up for grabs.’60

  The fact that the Provisionals had now called a ceasefire sharpened the hostility of the Officials to Costello’s new movement, and they were determined to prevent their former comrades from launching a fresh insurgency. Billy McMillen suggested that a programme of punishment beatings was the best way to keep a lid on the IRSP; he also ordered that anyone who tried to take OIRA weapons would be killed.61

  As soon as the Officials launched their crackdown in Belfast, the violence began spiralling out of control. OIRA members drew first blood in February 1975 by shooting an IRSP supporter, Hugh Ferguson. At Ferguson’s funeral, Costello accused the Officials of ‘running away from the fight’ but denied that the IRSP had a military wing.62 He repeated that denial when his supporters hit back by killing an OIRA Volunteer, Sean Fox.63 After the deaths of Ferguson and Fox, it was open season. On 1 March, IRSP members from Belfast travelled to Dublin without seeking Costello’s approval and tried to kill Seán Garland.64 Garland lived to tell the tale, despite being shot six times, cementing his reputation as the OIRA’s hard man. The IRSP’s Ronnie Bunting survived another assassination attempt the following week.65

  Terror gripped Belfast’s Catholic ghettoes as attempts at mediation proved
fruitless and the feud ground on. The IRSP leadership did its best to avoid coming clean about the INLA’s existence. After the killing of another supporter in April, an IRSP spokesman claimed that a hitherto unknown group calling itself the ‘People’s Liberation Army’ had offered to protect its members.66 This attempt at subterfuge fooled nobody. Meanwhile, the party’s maiden conference decided not to contest the Convention poll that was due to be held in May 1975 and called for a boycott instead.67 On 28 April, Costello’s supporters took the vendetta to a new level by gunning down the OIRA leader Billy McMillen in West Belfast. Cathal Goulding gave the oration at McMillen’s funeral, which proved to be the Official IRA’s last great show of strength.

  The IRSP issued a statement denying responsibility and pointing the finger at British intelligence, but that cut no ice with Goulding, who denounced McMillen’s killers as ‘enemies of the people, allies of imperialism as surely as if they wore the uniform of the British Army’.68 A few days later, the Official IRA tried to kill Seamus Costello after a meeting in Waterford. The IRSP leader survived, and the clashes in Belfast gradually fizzled out thereafter; but the OIRA Army Council never retracted the capital sentence it had imposed on Costello after McMillen’s death.69

  In the meantime, Costello tried to pick up the pieces following the IRSP’s disastrous introduction to the political stage. Bernadette McAliskey made no attempt to conceal her frustration at the erratic behaviour of the party’s unacknowledged military wing. She now posed some searching questions about the organizational culture in which Costello had been immersed since his teens. McAliskey saw a basic contradiction between working-class politics, which required ‘mass organization on an open basis’, and the top-down, conspiratorial nature of republicanism, ‘more alien to the factory workers of Belfast and Dublin than some would have us believe the philosophy of Marx and Lenin to be’.70 With her allies on the IRSP’s national executive, she pressed for the movement’s armed section to be made subordinate to its political leadership.

  Costello had every intention of building up the IRSP as a serious organization in its own right, but he wanted the INLA to retain separate structures of command. The dispute came to a head at the end of 1975 when McAliskey and her supporters – including the INLA’s adjutant general, Johnnie White – resigned en masse from Costello’s party. The IRSP accused the defectors of failing to recognize ‘the vital link between the national liberation struggle and the struggle for socialism in Ireland’.71 Costello phrased the charge ambiguously to avoid making any direct reference to the INLA. Soon afterwards, a statement in the party press claimed credit for a string of gun and bomb attacks on ‘enemy personnel and installations’ that had resulted in three deaths.72 The group that was to be Costello’s most enduring legacy had finally made its public debut.

  And Then There Was One

  Just as Costello was preparing to draw back the veil on the INLA, his former comrades faced a battle for survival. Believing that the split and Billy McMillen’s death had left the Officials defenceless, the Provo leadership in Belfast decided it was time to finish them off for good. On the night of 29 October, OIRA members came under attack throughout the city.73 Over the next fortnight there were more than 100 incidents as the movements traded blows. The Officials came off worse, with seven of the eleven deaths during the feud. But they survived the onslaught and managed to score a few hits of their own. The OIRA’s victims included the chairman of the Falls Taxi Association, which had strong Provo connections. After his death, taxi drivers threatened to block the Falls Road, ramping up the pressure for a truce.74

  The violence they had initiated in Belfast was extremely damaging for the Provos. A tightly knit community, already terrorized by the loyalist assassination campaign, now had to endure another fratricidal conflict that cut across ties of friendship and family. Journalists described a mood of ‘near hysteria’ in West Belfast during the clashes, with ‘groups of youths no longer standing at corners, a curfew more effectively in operation than ever attempted by the British Army, [and] the familiar process of intimidated families on the move’.75 The Northern Ireland secretary Merlyn Rees seized the opportunity to announce that he was scrapping special-category status for paramilitary prisoners, who would now be dealt with as common criminals.76

  One motivation for the Provos in starting the feud had been to give their Volunteers an outlet during a prolonged truce that was clearly going nowhere. In January 1976, the Provisional IRA formally called time on the experiment and announced that it was going back to war. The announcement came weeks after the massacre of ten Protestant civilians by gunmen in Kingsmill, claimed by the ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’, but generally assumed to be the work of the Provisionals.77 For a movement that claimed to be strictly non-sectarian, Kingsmill represented a moral nadir. There could hardly have been a less auspicious moment to start the new Provo campaign.

  For the Officials, the events of 1975 proved to be a watershed. Having already lost part of their membership to the IRSP, they now embarked on a political course that put paid to any ambitions of winning support in Northern Ireland. The first stage in this mutation was a shift in their attitude towards the Provos. There had been many bitter polemics since the split, and even violent confrontations that left both factions mourning lost comrades. Throughout it all, the Officials had continued to argue that Britain’s ruling class was the main enemy, however foolish and misguided their rivals might be. In 1972, when the Provisionals accused OIRA members in Belfast of betraying their comrade Martin Meehan to the Army, the Officials responded with a furious denial, putting their ‘respect and esteem’ for Meehan’s ‘soldierly qualities, courage and dedication’ on record.78 After the ‘pogrom’ of 1975 – as the Officials immediately dubbed it – there would be no more tributes paid to the courage and dedication of leading Provos.

  Tomás Mac Giolla insisted that a clear line now had to be drawn: ‘No spurious arguments should be made about Provisional fascists and sectarian bigots being part of the anti-imperialist struggle when in fact they are part of the anti-republican and anti-working-class struggle.’79 An intense loathing developed between the two movements that made any form of cooperation inconceivable. Another lethal feud erupted in 1977 to keep that hatred simmering. There could be little doubt now who the Officials considered their main enemy to be.

  This made it easier for an intellectual faction within their movement to push for a drastic ideological turn. The driving force behind this shift was Eoghan Harris, a television producer at the Irish state broadcaster who had been a supporter of Cathal Goulding since the 1960s. Harris helped organize a specialized unit known as the Industrial Department, that functioned as an in-house think tank. Goulding had a high opinion of Harris and supported his projects, although Seán Garland took a more jaundiced view.80

  The Industrial Department took up the ideas of a tiny Marxist–Leninist group called the British and Irish Communist Organization (BICO), whose principal ideologue, Brendan Clifford, had launched a ferocious assault on the tenets of Irish nationalism.81 BICO’s so-called Orange Marxism was so accommodating to the Unionist position that it earned the praise of Enoch Powell and exercised a strong influence on William Craig’s Vanguard lieutenant, David Trimble.82 The platform crafted by Harris helped attract several young intellectuals, including the historians Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, who dismissed the struggle against British rule as a chimera and a barrier to the development of class politics.83

  Such ideas soon began to influence the movement’s public stance. While the Officials were still formally committed to the goal of a united Ireland, their policy documents now simply called for a restored local assembly, with a Bill of Rights but no compulsory power-sharing.84 As Bew and Patterson acknowledged, many nationalists found it hard to distinguish this blueprint from the programme of the Ulster Unionist Party.85 There was little chance of the Republican Clubs expanding or even preserving their base among working-class nationalists with such arguments,
and the movement’s support in the Catholic ghettoes began to wither away. South of the border, its prospects appeared to be much brighter, and that was where the Officials directed their energies. Official Sinn Féin became Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party in 1977, then simply the Workers’ Party five years later. In public, the Official IRA ceased to exist; in private, it soldiered on as an unacknowledged fund-raising division that could also protect members in the North from intimidation by the Provos.86 The Workers’ Party positioned itself as a hard-left scourge of the southern political establishment and began to reap the electoral benefits. By the early 1980s, it had three seats in the Dáil.

  If Seamus Costello had stuck with the Officials, he would almost certainly have become one of their first TDs. However, when he stood for the IRSP at the 1977 general election he was the lowest-placed candidate, with half of his previous vote. Two years after its launch, the IRSP had little substance as a political force on either side of the Irish border. The feud with the Officials crippled Costello’s new party before it had time to cohere. After Bernadette McAliskey’s departure, it never had the chance to run a candidate of her stature in the North again.87 The INLA, on the other hand, was a far more significant threat to British interests, but the indiscipline that had been apparent during the feud still dogged the group, and Costello had to spend much of his time trying to preserve its fragile unity.88

  In October 1977, that time abruptly ran out. An OIRA hit man took revenge for Billy McMillen’s death as Costello sat in his car on Dublin’s North Strand. On hearing of his death, members of Wicklow County Council decided to adjourn the monthly meeting in a show of respect for their late colleague. One of the councillors, a Fine Gael TD, paid tribute to Costello as ‘a person of exceptional ability who had more than left his mark on the various bodies, both local and national, with which he involved himself’.89 There could be no arguing with that. As the movement founded by Costello lurched from one crisis to another over the following decade, his supporters became increasingly fixated on their lost leader, dreaming of what might have been.