by Ed Moloney
The collapse of the Border Campaign provided a major punctuation mark in the history and development of the IRA. In the space of forty years the organization’s fortunes had ebbed and flowed. At its peak the IRA enjoyed the backing of a majority of the Irish people, and it had fought a long and bloody campaign, which had brought the British to the negotiating table. But that brief success was followed by division, civil war, and disillusionment while the numbers remaining true to the faith of Pearse and Connolly dwindled, as did public support for and even tolerance of the IRA’s activities. The two partitionist states continued to glower at each other across a heavily militarized border, but they also grew roots and developed their own legitimacy. As they did, the IRA was forced to slowly soften and even abandon its hostility to the Southern state and shift the emphasis of its conflict with the Treaty settlement to the existence of Northern Ireland. The Forties Campaign had failed miserably to shift Britain’s support for the unionist state, and then the Border Campaign had disintegrated in the face of Northern nationalist indifference. Smarting from failure and lacking any clear sense of future direction, the IRA in 1962 was at a crossroads.
REPUBLICAN ACTIVISTS surveying the scene at the dawn of the sixties would have seen little to be cheerful about. As the prisoners were released from the internment camp at the Curragh just west of Dublin and from Crumlin Road jail in Belfast, they returned to communities whose indifference to their fate was as pronounced as it ever had been. The internees and sentenced men had hoped for and some even expected popular demonstrations and protests when they were arrested, but there were none, just as there were no crowds to stage welcome-home celebrations upon their release. The depth of demoralization could be measured by the numbers who had agreed to “sign out” from prison as the Border Campaign petered out, men who had given their hated jailers written promises never to take up arms in the IRA’s cause again in return for their freedom. And of those who did not become “signees,” as they were termed, a similar number voted with their feet and refused to report back for duty. The hearths to which many of the IRA retreated after 1962 were cold and lonely places to dream of what yet might be. Few of the released IRA men, surely, could have imagined that in just seven years Ireland would be plunged into the most violent cataclysm in its history.
The 1960s were a period of change for Ireland as for the rest of the Western world. Although the Cold War still raged, other and older enmities were fading. In the United States, John F. Kennedy conquered what many feared was an overwhelming prejudice to become the first ever Catholic president. In Rome fundamental reform was under way. Under the radical leadership of Pope John XXIII the Catholic Church had opened a dialogue with the Church of England, and in 1961 the pontiff met its head, Queen Elizabeth II, whose ancestors had led the English Reformation. Religious ecumenism began to flourish.
In Ireland ancient enmities appeared to be softening too. In 1963 Lord Basil Brookeborough, the conservative, diehard defender of unionism, finally retired and was succeeded by a young Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Captain Terence O’Neill, who could trace his lineage back to sixteenth-century landowners. Despite this conventional, establishment background, modernizing reform was also on his agenda.
In both parts of Ireland the new postwar realities were beginning to make their impact. In the North old traditional industries like linen and shipbuilding were in decline, and their replacement was a matter of urgency. The Northern Ireland government was forced to turn to the outside world for new investment. The need for political stability and the requirement to present a less distasteful image to foreign investors—which in practice meant building bridges to the nationalist community—acquired a new if unfamiliar importance.
O’Neill was also aware that there was now a Labour government in London that was more likely to listen sympathetically to nationalist complaints of discrimination and human rights abuses. Slowly, gingerly, and with frequent glances over their shoulders at their own hard-line grassroots, some unionists began to reach out to Catholics.
O’Neill’s approach infuriated hard-line Protestants, but it was resented by some nationalists, who called it cosmetic, patronizing, and at times insulting. On one famous occasion he explained his approach in almost racist terms:
It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets. They will refuse to have eighteen children but if a Roman Catholic is jobless and lives in the most ghastly hovel he will rear eighteen children on national assistance…. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants, in spite of the authoritarian nature of the Church.11
Nevertheless many Catholics welcomed O’Neill’s conciliatory policies, and hope of real change was in the air. The Southern state was also in transformation. The era of de Valera ended in 1959 with his retirement as taoiseach, and he was succeeded by another, albeit younger, veteran of the 1916 Rising, Sean Lemass, who quickly discarded Dev’s protectionist economics in favor of attracting foreign investment. The era of the technocrat, North and South, had arrived.
The two governments in Ireland were on a similar course, and it made sense for them to examine ways of improving cooperation. In 1965 the political ice cracked when O’Neill invited Lemass to Stormont and a month later made a return trip to Dublin. The journeys continued when Jack Lynch succeeded Lemass as Irish prime minister.
Throughout the continent of Europe, a wave of liberalism brought new power to the Left in a way that had not been seen since the 1930s. In Britain a dozen years of uninterrupted Conservative rule were brought to an end when Labour’s Harold Wilson swept into power on a ticket of economic modernization. In Ireland the Left made gains in both jurisdictions. The Northern Ireland Labour Party was winning seats to Stormont, while in the South the Labour Party was shedding its conservative Catholic image and beginning to talk more openly of the merits of socialism.
In Europe, as a whole, moves were afoot to dismantle economic borders and to bury old hatreds. Inspired by the American civil rights movement and the excitement brought on by an era of unprecedented sexual liberation, among other factors, the movement toward the left grew increasingly strong.
And that is certainly what Cathal Goulding discerned. Under his leadership the IRA made the most radical and determined move to the left in its history, embracing a doctrinaire Marxist analysis of Northern and Southern Irish politics that would eventually split the organization and spark the most violent upheaval in modern Irish history. The manner in which Goulding failed to take a united republican movement down his chosen path was to provide Gerry Adams with one invaluable lesson when he made his own very similar journey some twenty years later. Preventing the sort of split that destroyed Goulding’s hopes became a strategic imperative for Adams.
The greatest obstacle blocking Goulding was the immense conservatism of the Republican movement. Overwhelmingly rural and lower middle class in their makeup, most IRA members were people of a traditional Catholic outlook. This was reflected in the rituals and the ways in which the IRA was organized, many of which had changed little in forty years.
Men and women, for instance, were still segregated into separate military units, as they had been in 1916 when Patrick Pearse sent out a female Irish Volunteer from the GPO in Dublin with a white flag of surrender to present to the British army. The IRA of the 1960s, like Irish society at large, was slow to accept gender equality. The IRA had always been an exclusively male organization, and its members were the soldiers who did the actual fighting when there was any to be done. The women were organized into the Cumann na mBan (Women’s Group), with their own distinct structures and leadership. Their role was the IRA equivalent of being stuck in the kitchen and the bedroom; they carried messages and smuggled weapons and explosives and they nursed wounded IRA Volunteers. They could be useful for gathering intelligence and carrying weapons, but they di
d very little, if any, actual fighting. Nor did they play any part in the formulation of IRA policy or strategy. That was a male preserve, the privilege of the seven-man Army Council, to which Cumann na mBan was subservient.
Catholic Church ritual permeated IRA ceremonials. It was commonplace for a decade of the rosary to be said, often in Irish, at the start of IRA ceremonies, such as the annual Easter commemorations of those who were killed in the Rising of 1916 and other phases of the struggle. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective way of confirming unionist prejudices about the IRA.
Most IRA members had a simplistic set of motives for joining. They believed that only armed force could remove the British from Ireland and that people who advocated parliamentary methods had sold out the struggle. As one commentator put it, “To go into the Dail [the Irish parliament], to seize power, was not only an invitation to corruption, a tainted tactic already proven sterile, but also, and most important, outrageous immorality.”12
Their history was full of examples of IRA leaders who had abandoned physical force for parliamentarism, yet had failed to force the British out of Ireland, North or South. They viewed with suspicion, therefore, the motives of any who advocated such a course. As one account put it, “They believed no one ever went into politics except a failed revolutionary.”13 Their opposition was not just practical but almost spiritual as well.
The only parliament to which they gave allegiance had by the 1960s long since disappeared. That was the Irish parliament of 1921, the so-called Second Dail, the last gathering of representatives chosen in a pre-Treaty, all-Ireland, thirty-two-county election. The Second Dail had a Sinn Fein majority elected on a platform of support for the 1916 Easter proclamation of independence, and republicans regarded the mandate as almost sacred. Although the Second Dail later voted narrowly for the Treaty, it became an article of faith among the recalcitrant IRA that no other parliament, no other government, could claim the legitimacy bestowed on that parliament. After the Treaty was endorsed, the Second Dail ceased to exist as far the IRA was concerned, and its partitionist successor, the Northern parliament at Stormont as well as the new parliament in Dublin, was regarded as illegal.
The rump of the Second Dail, those surviving TDs who had voted against the Treaty, were deemed to be the only legitimate government of Ireland, but they were dying off, year by year. In 1938 the dozen or so survivors passed on their authority to the IRA’s Army Council to safeguard until all the people of Ireland could again freely choose their own government. To the outside world it may have looked absurd, but it was on this basis that the IRA leadership framed its claim to be the sovereign government of Ireland.
Because of this, one of the most hallowed principles of traditional republicanism was the refusal to recognize or take seats in either Stormont or the Dail. It followed that any republican who betrayed this principle was implicitly recognizing the Treaty and by so doing betraying the Irish people and all those IRA men and women who had laid down their lives in the fight to free Ireland. The logic of all this was that republicans had to deny legitimacy to the other institutions of the state as well. Republicans refused, for example, to ask either police force in Ireland for permission to parade or raise funds. IRA standing orders forbade prisoners from entering a plea in criminal courts—that was the same as recognizing the state—although an exception was made when IRA men faced a capital charge. Abstentionism was the defining characteristic of Irish republicanism, and it was written in legal stone in the constitutions of both the IRA and Sinn Fein. Any IRA or Sinn Fein TD or MP who took his or her seat in a partitionist body or even suggested discussing the idea would be liable to automatic dismissal or expulsion.
These were the uncomfortable realities that faced Goulding and the small number of radical advisers and confidants he had gathered around him. And it was the left-wing background of this coterie that produced the first signs of internal unrest. With the IRA laid low after the Border Campaign, Goulding had turned to new men and new ideas for inspiration. There was already a sentiment in favor of moving leftward. IRA prisoners in the North’s largest jail, Crumlin Road in Belfast, had produced a journal called Saoirse (Freedom) under the editorship of a young County Cork militant called Daithi O Conaill, which had published an article, “Quo Vadis Hibernia?” (“Whither Ireland?”), advocating involvement in social and economic agitation.14 Not for the first or last time prison was a crucible in the development of IRA politics.
The move to the left accelerated in 1963 when two radical intellectuals put their stamp on the movement. One was a young computer scientist called Roy Johnston, who had returned to Dublin from England, where he had been prominent in the Communist Party of Great Britain–linked Connolly Association. The other was Anthony Coughlan, a young lecturer at that most Anglo-Irish of bastions, Trinity College, Dublin, who had been national organizer of the Connolly Association in Britain.
The Connolly Association members had been urging on the IRA what they called “a new departure” prior to the 1962 cease-fire. Long before Johnston and Coughlan were able to exercise direct influence over Goulding, their program had been spelled out. One chronicler of the period wrote, “[The IRA was] advised to work through a broad alliance for the displacement of the Unionist regime and for political democracy in the North and for social progress… in the South. They were also advised to end their abstentionism and seek to work through parliamentary institutions.”15
Johnston, who was quickly appointed to the IRA’s Army Council by Goulding as a sort of political adviser cum commissar, was the inspiration for the establishment of a debating society named after the eighteenth-century Protestant founder of modern Irish republicanism, Wolfe Tone. With branches in the main universities and in Belfast and Dublin, the Wolfe Tone clubs discussed and advanced the Connolly Association’s agenda. Left-wing veterans like Peadar O’Donnell and George Gilmore re-emerged from obscurity to contribute to the debate.
The political program developed by Johnston and Coughlan was borrowed directly from a former Soviet leader, none other than Joseph Stalin, who had died a decade before. Called the “stages theory,” it mapped out a rigid, dogmatic path to Irish socialism in which Ireland would pass through three distinct phases before reaching the goal of a workers republic.
The first would be the creation of a normal liberal, parliamentary democracy in the North, which would be achieved through agitation on civil rights issues. The employer class in the North would cooperate with this, since it was in its economic interests to do so, and, Johnston predicted, there would be growing working-class Protestant and Catholic cooperation and unity as workers realized how much their interests coincided. In the second phase, revolutionary links would stretch across the Border as radicalized and increasingly united Northern workers would make common cause with their Southern counterparts, who themselves were being radicalized by Sinn Fein agitation. The third phase would be revolution and final victory.
It followed that clinging to abstentionism was an absurdity. How could Sinn Fein hope to relate to the social and economic problems of the Irish working class, Johnston and his allies asked, as long as it refused to address those problems in the only forums available to Irish workers, their parliaments and governments? The people accepted the partitionist arrangements, and so should the IRA, they urged.
The “new departure” had implications for the IRA and the direction of its armed struggle. Gradually the emphasis of its activities shifted to economic and social agitation and away from the traditional goal of waging war against Britain. The IRA and Sinn Fein became involved in rural cooperatives, and in Dublin they set up a housing action committee that staged sit-ins to highlight poor living conditions and overcrowding.
A campaign was launched against foreign ownership of mining and fishing rights. The IRA organized illegal “fish-ins” on exclusive salmon runs in the west of Ireland and offered manpower to help striking workers. Foreign landowners, mostly Germans, were targeted and buildings torched. In Li
merick the IRA burned a bus transporting strikebreakers to an American-owned company. In Kerry a foreign-owned lobster boat was sunk.
Some twenty years later Roy Johnston explained the reasoning behind the leftward shift: “The idea was that if links could be cultivated between the movement and the people, the roots would be firmly in the ground and a principled, political stand would be made, even in ‘illegal assemblies’ such as Leinster House [the Dail] without automatic corruption.”16
While all this naturally alarmed the Fianna Fail governments of Sean Lemass and his successor Jack Lynch, the implication was that the need to wage armed struggle against Britain had moved farther and farther down the IRA’s list of priorities. That meant downgrading the IRA itself, and when the split finally came there were bitter accusations from his critics that the Goulding leadership had deliberately run down the organization, dismantling command structures, discouraging or diverting promising recruits, scaling down training, and—worst of all—diminishing the IRA’s stores of weapons.
The logic of the “stages theory” was that if Northern Protestants were going to cooperate in the democratization of their own state, then the idea that Catholics needed arms to defend themselves against the Protestants was nonsense. Weapons acquisition, once a priority for the IRA, was virtually abandoned. Money that would have been earmarked for this was devoted instead to political activities.
The last defining characteristic of the Johnston-Goulding strategy was the notion that all this could best be achieved if the IRA and Sinn Fein cooperated and perhaps even merged with similarly minded, progressive political parties. It was the classic broad-front strategy so beloved of left-wing groups: Johnston and his associates called it the National Liberation Front (NLF), a term with echoes of the Vietnamese resistance then beginning to radicalize American youth. The other members of the NLF, at least those mentioned most often as candidates for partnership, were the Communist Party of Northern Ireland, its Southern counterpart, the Irish Workers Party, the Connolly Association, and the Connolly Youth Movement. It was this proposal which fixed the notion in conservative, dissident minds that the IRA was being slowly taken over by godless Marxists.