Irish Republican Army

Split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty

The original Irish Republican Army fought a guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland in the Irish War of Independence between 1919 and 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 ended this war by granting most of the island a great degree of independence, but with six counties in the north staying within the United Kingdom as the new jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the Irish delegation in London caused an angry reaction among the less compromising elements in Sinn Féin and among a majority of the IRA. The IRA units in the remaining 26 counties (that were to become the Irish Free State) split between supporters and opponents of the Treaty. The anti-Treatyites, referred to by Free State forces as "Irregulars", continued to use the name "Irish Republican Army" (IRA), as did the organisation in Northern Ireland, which originally supported the pro-Treaty side (if not the Treaty). The majority of headquarters staff, many of whom were close to Michael Collins, supported the Treaty, but opinion among IRA volunteers was divided. By and large, IRA units in Munster and most of Connacht were opposed to the Treaty, while those in favour predominated in the Midlands, Leinster and Ulster. The pro-Treaty volunteers formed the nucleus of the new National Army.

Anti-Treaty officers called an army convention in March 1922, attended by their supporters, which reaffirmed their opposition to the Treaty. They repudiated the authority of the Dáil, claiming that its members had broken their oath to defend the Irish Republic, and declared their own Army Executive to be the real government of the country until the Republic was formally established. The reasons why volunteers chose pro- and anti-Treaty positions are complex. One factor was an evaluation of the military situation. Whereas Collins, Richard Mulcahy and Eoin O'Duffy felt that the IRA could not continue to fight the British successfully, anti-Treaty officers such as Ernie O'Malley and Tom Barry felt that the IRA's position was stronger than it had ever been. Another factor was the role of powerful personalities; where the leader of an IRA unit—for example Sean McEoin, who sided with the Treaty in County Longford—took sides, often the remainder of his command joined him. The same was also true for anti-Treaty leaders such as Liam Lynch in Cork, whose First Southern Division supported him in opposing the treaty.

In March 1922, the Anti-Treaty IRA captured the Royal Navy vessel Upnor off the coast of Cobh, County Cork, which was carrying arms.

Civil War

On the outbreak of civil war in June 1922, the government of the Irish Free State issued directives to newspapers that its Army was to be called "The National Army", and that its opponents were to be called "Irregulars" and were not to be associated with the IRA of 1919–1921. This attitude hardened as the Civil War went on, and especially after the killing of Michael Collins in an ambush in August 1922. Collins wrote to W. T. Cosgrave on 25 July 1922 that those on the anti-Treaty side were "misguided, but practically all of them are sincere". However, the subsequent government attitude under Cosgrave was that the anti-Treaty side were rebels against the lawful government, and were not entitled to recognition as legitimate combatants. Some of the officers of the new Irish Army, led by Liam Tobin, formed an association called the "Old IRA" to distinguish themselves from the anti-Treaty fighters. Some pro-Treaty IRA officers, such as Eoin O'Duffy, alleged that the "Irregulars" had not fought the British in the War of Independence. O'Duffy claimed that the Kerry IRA's sole contribution in 1919–21 was "the shooting of an unfortunate soldier on the day of the truce". In Kerry's case—which saw more Royal Irish Constabulary men killed than anywhere else outside Dublin and Tipperary—this was far from true; however, some areas such as County Sligo and County Wexford did see considerably more action in the Civil War than in the War of Independence. Other IRA men such as Florence O'Donoghue formed a group called the "neutral IRA", which tried to reconcile the two factions.

Meanwhile, the IRA in Northern Ireland maintained its links with Michael Collins; but several Northern IRA leaders joined the anti-Treaty side – Belfast commander Joe McKelvey and Commandant General Charlie Daly (both were executed by Free State forces). The Northern IRA launched a renewed military offensive in May 1922, in which it was aided covertly by both the National Army and the anti-Treaty IRA. This scheme was interrupted by the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. Many Northern IRA men then had to flee the North in order to escape internment or worse at the hands of the Northern authorities. Over 500 of them ended up in the National Army during the civil war.

The IRA had been expanded hugely in 1922, from perhaps 15,000 men before the truce with the British in July 1921, to over 72,000 by November 1922. Veterans of the War of Independence derisively termed the new recruits "truceileers". These were to divide in broadly the same ratio as the veterans; however, most of them did not take part in the Irish Civil War. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Free State had about 8,000 fighters, mostly pro-Treaty IRA volunteers. The anti-Treaty side could muster about 15,000 men but it could not arm them all. At the start of the war, they had just under 7,000 rifles, a few machine guns and a handful of armoured cars taken from British garrisons (who were under orders not to fire on IRA units) as they evacuated the country. The remainder of anti-Treaty IRA arms were shotguns (3,000 of which were confiscated after the Civil War) and other civilian weapons.

Post-Civil War

The period immediately following the Irish Civil War saw the IRA swing towards the political left, manifest in the election of Moss Twomey to the position of chief of staff. Twomey would go on to hold the position for almost a decade and became the longest-lasting Chief of Staff of this iteration of the IRA. Under his reign, he cautiously opened the IRA up to left-wing influences in order to contrast it against the emerging right-wing stance of the Cumann na nGaedheal government.

In summer of 1925, the anti-treaty IRA had sent a delegation led by Pa Murray to the Soviet Union for a personal meeting with Joseph Stalin, in the hopes of gaining Soviet finance and weaponry. A secret pact was agreed, whereby the IRA would spy on the United States and the United Kingdom and pass information to Red Army military intelligence in New York City and London in return for £500 a month. The pact was originally approved by Frank Aiken, who left soon after to co-found Fianna Fáil with De Valera, before being succeeded by Andrew Cooney and Moss Twomey, who kept up the secret IRA-Soviet espionage relationship until around 1930–1931.

While Twomey was not an ideological Marxist–Leninist (although there were some communists in the IRA at this time, such as Peadar O'Donnell), he saw the arrangement as purely utilitarian and regarded the Soviets as "shifty" and "out to exploit us." Some republicans argued that they had lost the Civil War because they had not appealed to the social unrest in the country and had lacked any social or economic programme, which allowed communists to gain influence. Nevertheless, the IRA passed specifications of British "submarine detection sonar and aeroplane engines for bombers, military journals and manuals, and gas masks" to the Soviets and the IRA's man in the U.S., "Mr. Jones", passed "reports of the army's chemical weapons service, state-of-the-art gas masks, machine-gun and aeroplane engine specifications, and reports from the navy, air service and army" to Red Army intelligence.

In 1926, after failing to persuade Sinn Féin to participate in the political institutions of the Free State, de Valera formed a new political party, called Fianna Fáil, and many Sinn Féin members left to support him. De Valera would in 1932 become President of the Executive Council, at the head of the first Fianna Fáil government.

Also in 1926, the IRA launched a campaign in Dublin to rid the city of moneylenders. It employed largely antisemitic rhetoric, with a large number of the known moneylenders raided being Jews.

Fianna Fáil in government

When de Valera's Fianna Fáil party won the 1932 election, the IRA expected the Free State party Cumann na nGaedheal not to respect the result and prepared for another civil war. To their surprise, Cosgrave's party peacefully gave up power and instructed the police and armed forces to obey the new government.

In the first two years of Fianna Fáil government, the IRA's membership grew from a low of 1,800 to over 10,000. This can be put down to the radicalising impact of the Great Depression on the population, to which the IRA's new social radicalism (see next section) appealed. Another important factor was the formation of the Blueshirts: a quasi-fascist organisation set up by Eoin O'Duffy, originally composed of Civil war veterans of the Free State Army. The IRA and the Blueshirts both attacked political meetings and also fought street brawls against each other. While most of the fighting was conducted with fists or boots, at least one Blueshirt and one IRA man were shot dead in these clashes. IRA leaders saw in these events the beginnings of a republican revolution and the overthrow of the Free State. They were to be disappointed.

Initially, de Valera's Fianna Fáil government was friendly towards the IRA, legalising the organisation and freeing all their prisoners who had been interned by Cumann na nGaedhael. This afforded the IRA a quasi-legal status that meant Gardaí were unwilling to act against them for fear of repercussions. On his victory tour, de Valera snubbed a Garda guard of honour in Skibbereen, but saluted the IRA one. By 1935 this relationship had turned to enmity on both sides. The IRA accused Fianna Fáil of "selling out" by not declaring a republic and by tolerating the continued partition of Ireland. De Valera banned the IRA in 1936, after they murdered a landlord's agent, Richard More O'Farrell, in a land dispute and fired shots at police during a strike of Dublin tramways workers, on top of their bank robberies. However, most of the IRA's republican constituency were reconciled to the Free State by de Valera's government, which introduced a republican constitution in 1937, abolishing the Oath of Allegiance to the British monarchy and introducing an elected president as head of state. The document also included a territorial claim to Northern Ireland. By the late 1930s at the latest, most Irish people disagreed with the residual Irish Republican Army's claims that it remained the legitimate 'army of the Republic'.

In Northern Ireland, the IRA's main role was to try to defend the Catholic community during outbreaks of sectarian rioting. For this reason Peadar O'Donnell, a left-wing IRA leader who was opposed to the Catholic nationalism of many IRA members, said disparagingly that "we don't have an IRA battalion in Belfast, we have a battalion of armed Catholics".

Seán Russell's rise to Chief of Staff

Seán MacBride was disliked by many members of the IRA who were distrustful of his inclination toward politics, and he soon came in to open conflict with the IRA's Quartermaster-General, Seán Russell, who prepared a bombing campaign in England in spite of MacBride's disapproval. MacBride had Russell court-martialed for misappropriating IRA funds, resulting in the latter's demotion within the organisation.

When the next army convention was called, MacBride was ousted and Tom Barry elected Chief of Staff. Barry began preparations for a large-scale invasion of Northern Ireland, establishing camps where hundreds of IRA men were trained, creating detailed maps containing the locations of army and police barracks, and importing Thompsons with the help of Clan na Gael. However, the plan was cancelled just days before it was scheduled to be executed as a result of revelations that the plans had been leaked, becoming common knowledge in Dublin, and that the Belfast Brigade had been infiltrated by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Afterwards, Tom Barry resigned as Chief of Staff, being succeeded by Mick Fitzpatrick.

Seán Russell left Ireland for the United States without permission from the IRA leadership, meeting Joseph McGarrity of Clan na Gael, who pledged monetary support to Russell's cause, while in Ireland, his supporters Peadar O'Flaherty and Tom McGill travelled the country, sounding out support for Russell, and had the IRA's commanding officer in England replaced by Jimmy Joe Reynolds, who favoured a bombing campaign.

Growing frustration by younger members of the IRA at the organisation's inactivity under Fitzpatrick's leadership led to Seán Russell's election as Chief of Staff at a General Army Convention of the IRA in April 1938, in spite of Barry's protests against the idea of a bombing campaign and Russell himself being forbidden to attend the convention. Barry and many leading members of the IRA opposed to the campaign subsequently resigned.

Russell's tenure as Chief of Staff would signal both a tactical and ideological departure from the Twomey, MacBride and Barry period. Russell eschewed the left-wing tendencies of the 1920s and 30s IRA and pushed for a more "militarist" approach.

Ideological shift

The IRA that emerged from the debacle of the Republican Congress would be inspired primarily by a conservative, strictly nationalist political outlook and was increasingly influenced by radical right-wing ideas based on Catholic social teaching such as corporatism, distributism and even the fascist ideology of Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, which sent books, journals and posters to IRA internees imprisoned in the Curragh. Tarlach Ó hUid, the editor of the IRA newspaper War News, and Gearóid Ó Broin, a member of the IRA Army Council, became members of Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, and the IRA Adjutant-General, Tomás Ó Dubhghaill, expressed his approval of the party in a letter to its leader Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin.

Anti-Semitic sentiments also began to be expressed, including satisfaction at the 'cleansing fires' of the Wehrmacht driving the Jews out of Europe, and accusations towards the Irish government of being dominated by "Jews and Freemasons". Seamus O'Donovan denounced Britain and the United States as being "centres of Freemasonry, international financial control and Jewry". In 1939 O'Donovan became increasingly enamoured of Nazi ideology and visited Germany three times 'to discuss potential agents, the supply of arms in the event of war, [and to collect] radio sets and courier communication.' In 1942 he wrote an article arguing that Ireland's future lay in an alliance with a victorious Germany.

The IRA began to reconcile with their erstwhile opponent Eoin O'Duffy, who met in the summer of 1939 with several IRA figures and Eduard Hempel. A year later, IRA officers approached O'Duffy and asked him to join the organisation. While O'Duffy did not take up the offer, he was later invited to join Moss Twomey and Andrew Cooney in protesting the basing of American troops in Northern Ireland.

In 1940, prominent members and supporters of the IRA established Córas na Poblachta, which, among its objectives, called for the "destruction of the Masonic Order in Ireland" and the "reversal of the cultural conquest of our country by England", not excluding "the employment of compulsion" to that end. Many far-right figures joined the party, including Ó Cuinneagáin, who lead the party's youth wing, Aicéin, until its independence was terminated in 1942, while Córas na Poblachta took on a strongly anti-Semitic and pro-German character.

The IRA's ideological shift was noted by other organisations at the time. In 1940, the Communist Party of Ireland, which had been close to the IRA in the 1930s, published an article in its official newspaper for Northern Ireland The Red Hand that openly questioned if the IRA had become a pro-fascist group. Similarly, in September 1939 upon the outbreak of World War II, socialist republican and former IRA Army council member George Gilmore wrote an appeal pleading with the IRA to dump arms until the war in Europe was over and denounced them for flirting with fascism by seeking aid from Germany.

World War II

In January 1939, as the United Kingdom prepared for a possible war with Germany, the IRA Army Council declared war on the UK. The IRA Sabotage Campaign or "S-Plan" began a few days later. Under it, IRA operatives based in Britain attacked infrastructure, with a view to weakening the UK's war effort.

Following the German invasion of Poland, the Irish government declared its neutrality on 2 September, along with a state of emergency for the duration of hostilities between the Allies and Germany.

On 23 December 1939, IRA members stole almost the entire reserve ammunition store of the Irish Army from the Magazine Fort in Dublin's Phoenix Park. This became known as the "Christmas Raid" in IRA folklore. The RUC found two and a half tons of the stolen ammunition inside County Armagh on 2 January 1940. The next day the Irish Minister for Justice, Gerald Boland, at an emergency session of the Dáil, introduced the Emergency Powers Bill to reinstate internment, Military Tribunal, and executions for IRA members. It was rushed through and given its third reading the next day creating the Emergency Powers Act. It was later used to execute at least six IRA volunteers in Ireland between 1940 and 1944. Peter Barnes and James McCormick, who had been arrested in England shortly following an IRA bomb that exploded in Coventry on 25 August 1939 (see 1939 Coventry bombing), resulting in the deaths of several uninvolved English civilians, were executed on 7 February 1940. Republican publication An Phoblacht did not deny their mission in England and IRA membership but maintains that they were not involved with the Coventry bombing.

In July 1940 the IRA issued an open letter stating that if "German forces should land in Ireland, they will land...as friends and liberators of the Irish people". Readers were informed that Germany desired neither "territory nor...economic penetration" in Ireland but simply wanted Ireland to play its part in the "reconstruction" of a "free and progressive Europe". The Third Reich was also praised as the "energising force" of European politics and the "guardian" of national freedom. When George Bernard Shaw retorted that the Nazis were anti-Catholic, the IRA responded that Hitler's and Mussolini's support of Franco in Spain proved their pro-Catholic credentials.

By 1941, the IRA numbered fewer than 1,000 members, many of whom were imprisoned. Most of its able political organisers had left in the mid- to late-1930s and its "natural constituency" had been appropriated by Fianna Fáil.

Post-World War II

Following World War II, the IRA still existed but its numbers had been severely depleted. Some IRA units remained in the Irish countryside; however, they were cut off from any sort of command structure and bitterly demoralised. Out of touch with Dublin, and with other units, IRA members became fewer and fewer. In 1945, one of the first attempts was made to create a centre in Dublin. The meeting consisted of Sean Ashe, Micksy Conway, Tony Magan, Willie McGuinness, Bertie McCormack and a few others. They did not know who else would help, nor who had been in the Army. The problems were evident but no one had ready answers. The loss of all the GHQ staff and their records had left Dublin as isolated from the country as the country was from Dublin. Even though there was a lack of information and manpower, the obvious first step was to get some sort of unit going in Dublin. The next step was to resurrect the Army Executive and through it, the legitimate structure of the IRA. One of the first acts of the re-formed IRA was to call a "ceasefire" with the United Kingdom on 10 March 1945. It was a declaration met with indifference at best and bemusement at worst by most of the world, who at this point considered the IRA a dead organisation.

Clann na Poblachta

In 1946 a new political party called Clann na Poblachta was formed in Ireland by former Chief of Staff Sean MacBride. Several of the leading members were also former left-wing IRA members and the party itself espoused itself as Republican. However, many of the militarists left within the IRA were not eager to support any political party which recognised the legitimacy of Dáil Eireann, and indeed, the IRA banned its members from joining the Clann on the basis that they were not going to be an abstentionist party. Nonetheless, they watched with curiosity as to how this party would fare. At first hopes for Clann na Poblachta were high, with some believing it would challenge Fianna Fáil in the Dáil. However shrewd electioneering by De Valera meant that the Clann did not become the great power they had hoped to be. They did, however, manage to enter government in 1948 as part of the coalition which made up the Government of the 13th Dáil. Unfortunately for the Clann, that government's run proved to be somewhat disastrous and permanently dented their support. In each subsequent election, the Clann received less and less support until it dissolved as a party in 1965.

The failure of Clann na Poblachta reinforced the IRA's doubts about the ability of left-wing political parties to wrestle power out of the hands of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and helped spur the IRA towards traditionalism in the 1950s. However, their initial success did help convince the IRA they would have to marry their military tactics with political tactics.

Rapprochement with Sinn Féin

In 1947 the IRA held its first Army Convention since World War II and a new leadership was elected, primarily consisting of the "three Macs", Tony Magan, Paddy McLogan, and Tomás Óg Mac Curtain. The "three Macs" believed that a political organisation was necessary to help rebuild the IRA. IRA members were instructed to join Sinn Féin en masse, and despite the IRA's small numbers following WW2, they were successfully able to fully take over the organisation. This coup d'état of Sinn Féin was made possible due to the weak state of Sinn Féin itself; the party had become a shell of its former self in the decades following Éamon de Valera taking the bulk of the membership with him when he split to form Fianna Fáil in 1926. Paddy McLogan was named Sinn Féin president in 1950, with fellow IRA member Tomás Ó Dubhghaill named vice-president, signalling the IRA's complete control of the party's apparatus.

Ideology of the post-World War II IRA

Under the new IRA leadership, Sinn Féin began to advocate a corporatist social policy inspired by the Papal Encyclicals of Pope Pius XI, with the aim of creating a Catholic state, and opposed parliamentary democracy, advocating its replacement with a form of government akin to Portugal's Estado Novo, but rejected fascism as they considered a fascist state to be too secular and centralized. Writing in 1955, Matt Merrigan, the Dublin-based trade unionist, described the leadership of the IRA as "petty-bourgeois and fringed with fascists".

Border campaign

Beginning in the 1950s the IRA started planning for a renewed armed campaign, and in 1956 recent recruit Seán Cronin, who had considerable military experience, drew up a plan codenamed Operation Harvest.

The border campaign, as it became known, involved various military columns carrying out a range of military operations, from direct attacks on security installations to disruptive actions against infrastructure. The campaign received, initially, significant support from the south. Support increased massively after the deaths of Seán South and Fergal O'Hanlon in the Brookeborough Raid. In the Dáil Éireann elections held in 1957, Sinn Féin fielded 19 candidates and won four seats, and almost won a couple more in tightly contested elections. One of the four new Sinn Féin TDs would be future IRA Chief of Staff Ruairí Ó Brádaigh.

However, internment without trial, introduced first in Northern Ireland and then in the Republic of Ireland, curtailed IRA operations and ultimately broke morale. Eighteen people in total were killed during the campaign, of whom seven were members of the RUC and eight were members of the IRA itself. The campaign was on the whole a failure. It petered out in the late 1950s and was officially ended in February 1962.

1960s: Marxist tendency and the 1969 split

In the 1960s the IRA once more came under the influence of left-wing thinkers, especially those such as C. Desmond Greaves and Roy Johnston active in the Connolly Association. In parallel, the position of Chief of Staff became dominated by three left-wing members: Sean Cronin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Cathal Goulding.

Following the failure of the border campaign, the IRA and its allies undertook a serious review of themselves. By 1962 there were two factions in the Republican movement; the "Curragh" faction consisting of older IRA men who had served prison sentences together in the Curragh who favoured traditionalism and now controlled Sinn Féin such as Paddy McLogan, and a faction of younger, left-wing IRA members such as Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Cathal Goulding who now controlled the IRA Army Council following post-Border campaign elections. The Curragh faction wanted to publicly declare that Sinn Féin had no part in calling off the Border campaign. They were told in stark terms they were to do no such thing, as, besides the fact this would undermine the IRA's decision to end the campaign, Sinn Féin would never have had any influence in the decision regardless, as only the IRA Army Council had the authority to begin or end campaigns. Furthermore, it was made clear by the IRA that, as far as they were concerned, Sinn Féin answered to the IRA, and not the other way around. This hardline stance by the IRA alienated the Curragh faction and many of them, including McLogan and Tony Magan, resigned from Sinn Féin in protest. In September 1962 Cathal Goulding succeeded Ó Brádaigh as IRA Chief of Staff and Tomás Mac Giolla was elected president of Sinn Féin at the ard fheis in October, leaving the new guard now in control of both Sinn Féin and the IRA.

The move to a class-based political outlook and the consequent rejection of any stance that could be seen as sectarian—including the use of IRA arms to defend one side, that side being the beleaguered Catholic communities of Belfast in the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969—was to be one of the factors in the 1969 split that led to the Provisional IRA wing of the republican movement, with the latter subscribing to a traditional Catholic/nationalist analysis of the situation while the Officials subscribed to the Marxist view that internal strife among the working classes served only the interest of capital. The Irish Department of Justice had noticed the tensions in March 1969 and advised the Dublin government to use them to fragment the IRA.