3PIRA
The late 1970s were not only a time of flux for the security forces. Their opponents in the Provisional Irish Republican Army – or PIRA, to use its British Army acronym – were also experiencing profound changes.
The organization was trying to regain the initiative after the collapse of the 1975 ceasefire engineered by Merlyn Rees. This began in February but broke down later in the year, as a result of the IRA leadership’s feeling that the government was not serious about concessions, and its increasing difficulty in containing the frustrations of its members in the face of a large-scale campaign of killing by loyalist terrorists. Many British and loyalist politicians had questioned the wisdom of a ceasefire, fearing it would confer legitimacy on the republicans. In fact it had caused profound problems for the IRA. The Provisionals had found themselves unable to attack the Army and police. Instead they carried out attacks on Protestants, often in retaliation for killings by loyalist paramilitaries in the bloody spasm of sectarian violence which occurred during the ceasefire.
Many of the IRA’s members drifted away during the ceasefire. Martin McGuinness, the IRA leader from Londonderry, alluded to the negative effects of the ceasefire when he commented, ‘Good operations are the best recruiting sergeant.’ The strains which arose from the deal also caused a shift in power, from the South to the North, from older to younger men. The Army Council, the IRA’s ruling body normally composed of seven senior figures, had hitherto been dominated by southerners, older men who were veterans of skirmishes against the British in the 1950s. But the people now in the forefront of the movement, in the North, became disillusioned with the southern leadership during the ceasefire and in November 1976 held the first meeting of the newly formed Northern Command. This body, while still stressing its loyalty to the IRA Army Council and ‘GHQ’ in the South was to be a vehicle for the ambitions of emerging northerners like McGuinness and Gerry Adams.
Adams, a native of west Belfast whose father had been imprisoned for his republican activities in the 1940s, was released from the Maze prison in 1976 after serving three years for an attempted escape from internment. Although even Adams’ adversaries now respect him as an astute politician, he spent many years at the sharp end of the ‘armed struggle’. According to the Special Branch, Adams had been commander of the Ballymurphy unit of the Provisionals before he was interned in 1971. He was released the following year, taking part in secret talks in London with the British government, and becoming commander of the Belfast Brigade. During his second period of incarceration, Adams and Ivor Bell, another leading Belfast Provo, are believed to have drawn up the plans for a fundamental transformation of the IRA.
The changes in the IRA were a culmination of a process which had begun in December 1969, when the IRA had split into the Provisional and Official factions. The leaders of the Provisional wing left because they believed the IRA should maintain a policy of abstentionism – of remaining outside the political process and boycotting elections.
The Officials stopped being a worry to the security forces in 1972 when they began an indefinite ceasefire. However, the committed left of the republican movement produced another breakaway faction three years later when Seamus Costello founded the Irish Republican Socialist Party. The Trotskyite IRSP had a military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army, which was to gain a reputation for ruthlessness though failing to match the IRA in competence or even rudimentary standards of discipline.
PIRA was interested less in the Marxist, utopian ideology of the Officials and IRSP, which envisaged the proletariat replacing British rule with a workers’ state, and more in the simple but potent egalitarian tradition of Irish nationalism which burned in the Catholic estates. The triumph of the northerners was marked in 1977 by the appointment of McGuinness as Chief of Staff of the Army Council, and therefore head of the IRA.
McGuinness had originally joined the Officials, but they had appeared more concerned with interminable debates on Marxist ideology than with carrying out attacks on the British state. The Officials believed in a form of republicanism which involved the entire working class, whatever its religious origin: it had even recruited a company in Shankhill, bastion of Belfast Protestantism. The Provisionals did contain a handful of Protestants, but greater efforts were made to recruit them by the Official IRA and by the INLA. The Officials’ Shankhill Company was a short-lived affair – most of its members drifted away as soon as the sectarian battle lines were drawn after the Troubles began. Only a few individuals continued to be involved with republican groups, the most important of whom was probably Ronnie Bunting, son of a scion of Ulster loyalism, who became commander of the INLA in Belfast during the late 1970s. The Provisionals, while anxious in their public pronouncements not to come over as a sectarian force, were privately more ready to accept that they did fight for a community which was, almost to the last family, Catholic.
Northerners like Adams and McGuinness had for some time realized that the tone of much republican propaganda, which implied that another week of struggle would be enough to kick the Brits out, was unrealistic. Since the breaking of the ‘No Go areas’ in 1972 and the peak of violence which followed, the conflict had changed. The willingness of both Conservative and Labour governments to hold ceasefire talks had been at the root of the republican leadership’s conviction in the early 1970s that one more ‘big push’ could bring victory. But the leadership was coming to the conclusion that Rees had never intended to make a permanent deal, rather he had used the ceasefire to buy time. And during the ceasefire the struggle had subtly changed in character. It was no longer a mass rising but instead had begun to take on the characteristics of a protracted guerrilla struggle.
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