by Ed Moloney
TWO
The Defenders
The new Provisional IRA was led by men who represented traditional, conservative, republican values, who believed that armed struggle was the only way to rid Ireland of the British presence and that parliamentary politics was an endeavor best viewed with suspicion and treated with disdain. A majority on the caretaker Army Council, and later the Army Council elected after the first IRA Convention, had seen active service during the 1956–62 campaign, and most of them came not just from the twenty-six counties that made up the Irish Republic but from predominantly rural counties as well. Only two of the seven were from the North, from where the impetus for the new IRA had come; there was no representative from Dublin, where Goulding’s influence had been strongest. They were all men, all approaching middle age, and all Catholics, some devoutly so.
No one exemplified these characteristics better than the new IRA’s chief of staff, Sean MacStiofain. The son of an Irish mother and English father who was raised in South London, MacStiofain was forty-one years old when he attained the highest rank in the IRA. He had been involved in radical Irish politics since his teenage years and became a fluent Irish speaker. Heavily influenced by his mother’s strongly nationalistic views, he joined the IRA’s English unit in 1949, at the age of twenty-one, but later moved to Ireland and eventually settled in County Meath, where he worked for the Irish language body, Conradh na Gaeilge.
Infused with the special zealotry of the convert, he angrily resisted British media attempts in the early years of the Troubles to anglicize his name to John Stephenson, the designation on his birth certificate. His arrest and imprisonment with Goulding for the Felsted raid meant that, like Goulding, he avoided the internal warring that had plagued the IRA at the end of the failed Border Campaign and escaped blame for the fiasco of 1956–62. His decision to remain inside the organization despite the differences with the Goulding leadership, meanwhile, put him at a great advantage when the split came.
The way MacStiofain chose to express his opposition to Goulding appealed to a very broad section of dissidents, not all of whom were as directly affected by the events of August 1969 as were the Belfast men. He had two celebrated clashes with Goulding, both of which endeared him to the Catholic, conservative center of the republican movement, even though each time Goulding got the better of him.
Not long after Roy Johnston had been installed as adviser to the Army Council, MacStiofain confronted Goulding with Johnston’s past membership in the Communist Party (CP) and its Irish offshoot, the Connolly Association. The IRA’s rule book, known as General Army Orders, specifically prohibited Volunteers from joining the CP; it was the product of an age in Ireland when Sunday Mass would end with a prayer for the conversion of Russia. MacStiofain demanded that Goulding dismiss Johnston, but the chief of staff stood up to him and said if Johnston went, then so would he. MacStiofain was forced to back down.1 The new IRA commander later explained why he took such a hard line: “We opposed the extreme socialism of the revisionists [the Goulding faction] because we believed that its aim was a Marxist dictatorship which would be no more acceptable to us than British imperialism or Free State capitalism.”2
Anticommunism was to become a recurring obsession of the new IRA. The editorial in the very first edition of Republican News, the Provisionals’ Belfast weekly newspaper, set the tone. Republican News, or RN, as it became known, had been set up in February 1970 by two IRA veterans, the dissident leader Jimmy Steele and Hugh McAteer, a former chief of staff from Derry. IRA men thought of it as “the Belfast Brigade newspaper.”3 Outlining the malign influence of the Goulding supporters, RN railed against them in language that would not have been out of place in a speech by Senator Joe McCarthy: “Gradually into executive posts both in the IRA and Sinn Fein, the Red agents infiltrated,” the paper complained, “and soon these men became the policy makers. Young men and girls were brainwashed with the teachings and propaganda of the new policy makers and well-trained organizers were sent into different areas to spread the teachings of the Red infiltrators.”4 The same paper, edited by someone who many years later became a leading light in the Irish Tridentine Mass movement, later described the mission of the IRA’s youth wing, na Fianna Eireann, in simple terms: “Our allegiance is to God and Ireland….”5
These views persisted well into the 1970s when more and more IRA members found themselves in jail, where debates on left-wing politics became more frequent. Those who espoused such views would be hounded. One former prisoner can recall a member of the IRA jail staff sending a priest to see him because he had been spotted reading a book by James Connolly.6 The 1916 leader, badly wounded in the Rising and then strapped into a chair and executed by a British firing squad, was in the pantheon of IRA martyrs, but he had been a Marxist and trade union leader as well. The Provisionals’ rivals in the Official IRA revered Connolly, and so any Provo Volunteer who showed an interest in his writings automatically came under suspicion. Even as late as 1975 the leadership had a knee-jerk attitude to left-wing politics. When some IRA inmates of Long Kesh internment camp started dabbling with socialism, an order was issued, according to the former Belfast IRA commander Brendan Hughes, to burn all Marxist books.7
MacStiofain regarded men like Roy Johnston as godless atheists who were more interested in undermining the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland than in ending British occupation of the North. When Johnston wrote a letter to the Sinn Fein paper the United Irishman criticizing the practice of reciting the rosary at republican commemorations, calling the practice “sectarian,” MacStiofain, then living in County Kerry in the deep southwest of Ireland, stopped the offending issue from being circulated and sold, for fear that the letter would be used against the IRA by its enemies. Interfering in the distribution of the United Irishman cost MacStiofain his place on the Army Council, the automatic consequence of a six-month suspension from the IRA imposed by Goulding as punishment.
MacStiofain’s tilts against Goulding earned him plaudits south of the Border, but in the North the way to the hearts of the hard men in Belfast was by a different route. Throughout the eventful and threatening year of 1969 MacStiofain liaised closely with the dissident Northerners and shared their concerns that the increasingly demilitarized IRA would be unable to defend Belfast’s Catholic areas. At one point, according to his own account, he went behind Goulding’s back and secretly supplied guns to some Belfast units.8 A shrewd if somewhat uncomplicated tactician, MacStiofain realized that the engine of the upcoming war would be in Belfast, and throughout his IRA career, until his fall in 1972, he strove to ensure that his relations with the Belfast IRA were always the best.
Two other figures dominated the new Army Council, both then in their thirties and both Southerners who had distinguished themselves during the Border Campaign. Ruairi O Bradaigh, a schoolteacher from County Roscommon in the west of Ireland, was chief of staff at the end of that campaign. He had written the famous IRA statement ending the campaign and ordering IRA units to dump arms, conceding that lack of popular support from Northern nationalists had dealt the IRA the final blow. O Bradaigh inherited his republicanism from his father, who had been badly shot up by the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1919 and who died when O Bradaigh was only ten. O Bradaigh’s military credentials were impeccable—he had led an arms raid in England that netted five tons of British army hardware—but he was not as opposed to political activity as others were. In 1957 he was one of four Sinn Fein members elected to the Irish parliament on an abstentionist ticket, and throughout his career with the Provisionals he favored selective and tactical electoral interventions. In 1970 he became the first president of Provisional Sinn Fein, and as the custom was that Sinn Fein always had one seat on the Army Council as of right, O Bradaigh automatically qualified.
The other major personality was Daithi O Conaill from County Cork, also a schoolteacher by profession. Unlike Sean MacStiofain, his new chief of staff, O Conaill did not mind if people used the English form of his n
ame, and most Provisional associates and the media called him Dave O’Connell. Like O Bradaigh’s, his military record was beyond criticism. He was interned by the Dublin government early on in the Border Campaign and was incarcerated in the Curragh camp in County Kildare, once the British army’s headquarters in Ireland, and there he met O Bradaigh. In 1957 the pair devised a successful escape plan, and they went on the run together. When O Bradaigh became chief of staff, he chose O Conaill to be his director of operations. It was the start of a long and close relationship.
O Conaill was a hands-on commander and fought in Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, where he was badly wounded by the RUC. Confined to Crumlin Road prison, Belfast, he appears at first glance to have been an unlikely candidate for leadership of the Provisionals. In jail he had edited the Saoirse magazine, which had first floated the idea of IRA involvement in social and economic agitation, and after the campaign he became interested in the cooperative movement, often a route into left-wing politics. But his time in Belfast jail had also convinced him that the removal of partition had to be the republican priority, and he believed strongly in the need for armed struggle. The job he undertook with the new IRA emphasized that; he was the Provisionals’ first quartermaster general, charged with rearming the organization and giving it the sinews to fight the impending war against the British.
The remaining four Army Council members were also veterans of the 1956–62 campaign: Sean Tracy from County Laois; Leo Martin from West Belfast, who was OC of the Northern IRA; Patrick Mulcahy from Limerick; and Joe Cahill from Belfast. At a second Convention, held in September 1970, Billy McKee joined the Council. The presence of three Northerners on the Council, all Belfast men, serves to dispel the myth that the Provisionals were Southern-dominated from the start and that it was not until Adams and his allies captured the Army Council in the late 1970s that the Northern voice was allowed to be heard at the IRA’s highest levels.
The first Provisional leaders were sure of the rightness of their cause and the reasons for breaking with the Officials. The initial statement from O Bradaigh’s breakaway Sinn Fein in January 1970 listed five reasons for splitting with Goulding: his recognition of the Irish and British parliaments; the move to embrace extreme socialism; illegal internal disciplinary methods; the failure to defend Belfast; and the policy of defending the Northern parliament at Stormont.9 The list demonstrated that the Provisionals were essentially a coalition of differing grievances; for some, Marxism was the major problem with Goulding, and for others the military rundown of the IRA. One characteristic of the new IRA above all others that united the coalition—the glue that held it together—was a distrust of politics, parliamentary politics in particular, and an unshakable belief in the correctness of armed struggle.
The early Provisional leaders were determined that they would not stray down the path of parliamentary reformism trod by other nationalist and republican leaders. Each previous generation of freedom fighters had been betrayed, they believed, by leaders seduced by the siren call of parliamentary politics. They would be the exception. For this reason they defined the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA in simple and traditional terms. The military wing, the IRA, was in charge, and Sinn Fein would obey and be subservient to the Army Council. That was the case in the South and also in the North, where, according to one veteran party activist, Sinn Fein was secondary to the IRA from the outset: “Sinn Fein was the poor relation. It wasn’t worth bothering about. Sinn Fein in the 1970s was an organization without clout; it supported the ‘campaign’ and held lofty ideas of a united Ireland but nothing else. The IRA was boss.”10
As the war intensified and more and more Northerners joined up, the antipolitical nature of the Provisionals intensified, as one of the Provisionals’ founding members recalled:
When the resistance began, Northerners came in droves, and they were reacting to events for a number of years. The Northern guys were quite slow to be politicized. They looked down on Sinn Fein and dismissed it saying, “We’re Army men,” I shared a cell with them in Mountjoy, and that was their view. They were quite happy sitting in their cells reading the Sun or the Mirror boasting about operations. They were purely militaristic—hit, hit, keep on hitting.11
Whereas the first IRA commanders were Southerners, the foot soldiers in the war, the Volunteers, came overwhelmingly from the North and at first mostly from Belfast, where the attempted loyalist pogroms of August 1969 had taken place. Many IRA units elsewhere in the North, in republican heartlands like Tyrone, Armagh, and Derry, were slower to take sides in the republican split; in some cases months went by before they decided whether to follow Goulding or MacStiofain. The Provisionals were born in Belfast and sustained by the city’s bitter sectarian politics.
Some of those outside Belfast were repelled by the Provisionals’ simplistic politics. Typical of this category was the Derry republican Mitchel McLaughlin, who stayed with the Officials for several months before joining the Provisionals, later rising to become a key Adams aide and advocate of his peace strategy. “At the time of the split,” he once told an interviewer, “I actually stayed with the Official Republican Movement. Mainly because of their politics which undoubtedly were more progressive than the more kind of nationalistic rhetoric that I was hearing [from the early Provisional leaders].”12 Gerry Adams and the Ballymurphy unit were not the only IRA members to hesitate before taking sides in the split. Not surprisingly, many were waiting to see who came out on top, and so what happened in Belfast was crucial. When Belfast republicanism went over to the Provos, as it did during the crucial year of 1970, many of the rural units followed, and soon if angry young Northern Catholics wanted to hit back at either the loyalists or the British army, they knew they would find a warm welcome in the Provisionals.
The IRA before August 1969 was an organization kept going by family tradition. Membership was passed from father to son, mother to daughter, but the recruits who flocked to the ranks of the Provisionals were a new breed, motivated by an atavistic fear of loyalist violence and an overwhelming need to strike back. Known as Sixty-niners, they joined the IRA literally to defend their own streets, were resolved that the near-pogroms of August 1969 would never be repeated, and were ready, if the opportunity arose, to retaliate. They joined the Provos because the Officials had failed to defend their communities in the way that was expected, and they automatically associated the Officials’ obsession with politics with military weakness and betrayal. From the outset abhorrence of politics and the requirement for defense and armed struggle were just different sides of the same coin.
Typical of the new Provisional IRA Volunteer was Bernard Fox, an apprentice coach-builder from the Falls Road who joined the IRA in 1969, when he was just eighteen years old. He is now a senior figure in the leadership and was named in 2001 in the British media as a senior figure in the Provisional IRA’s GHQ staff. In 2006 he was appointed to the Army Council. He spent nineteen years in prison, either jailed or interned, for IRA activity. His motive for signing up was straightforward, as he once explained in a newspaper interview after the peace process reforms had secured his release from prison: “I was almost shot in a gun attack at Norfolk Street. I came away wanting a gun. It was survival. You wanted to protect your own people… my family and myself. When the barricades went up I wanted a gun so I approached this fella who was in the IRA and asked for gun and he said: could I shoot a British soldier? At that time I hadn’t the idea that it was the British government’s fault….”13
Brendan Hughes from the Lower Falls Road district, a figure who later became an IRA legend, was similarly affected by the violence of August 1969. “At that time it was simply ‘Here we are being attacked by Loyalists, by B Specials, by the RUC, by the British army,’ and there was a need to hit back,” recalled the former Belfast commander. “I mean I was in Bombay Street the morning after it was burned out, helping people out, and I went to the bottom of the Falls Road and seen all the burnt-out homes. I had relatives in Bombay Stre
et who were burnt out, and I felt the desire to get back at these people who were doing it.”14 Micky McMullen, a former long-term IRA prisoner, came under similar pressure but managed to resist it: “Up to 1969 there was nothing, but August 1969 was the turning point. I became involved in community defence you know and stuff like that, helping families to move after they had been burned out. At that time a lot of my friends would have been trying to join the IRA and the rationale would be just to get stuck into the ‘Orangies’ you know. It was a defence thing but something stopped me from getting into that.”15
Fox, Hughes, and McMullen and the many hundreds who followed them into the Provisional IRA in the first years of its existence were part of a Northern Catholic tradition that went back nearly two hundred years, when another armed uprising had very nearly ended British rule in Ireland. The United Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798 is celebrated as the moment when modern, secular Irish republicanism was born, but it also coincided with the birth of sectarian politics in Ireland and left a scar that would mark Northern society for centuries to come.
The United Irishmen were mostly Presbyterians whose determination to sever the link with England had been partly inspired by the American and French revolutions but which was also forced upon them by the penal laws, harsh anti-Catholic measures that also penalized Protestants who were not members of the established Anglican Church in Ireland. The leader of the United Irishmen, the Dublin-born lawyer Theobald Wolfe Tone, defined his objectives in heady language that inspired future generations of Irish freedom fighters: “To break the connection with England… and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To… substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter—these were my means.”16