*
IRA chiefs became increasingly concerned at the effectiveness of the interrogation process coupled with the introduction of longer terms of detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. At a trial in Dublin in 1978 the court heard extracts from an internal IRA paper which had been found in the possession of Seamus Twomey, a leading Provisional, when he was arrested. It stated that, ‘The three- and seven-day detention orders are breaking volunteers and it is the Republican Army’s fault for not indoctrinating volunteers with the psychological strength to resist interrogation.’
Twomey’s paper also discussed the inefficiency of the IRA’s command structure and the need for reorganization. It was precisely this restructuring which Ivor Bell and Gerry Adams had already been addressing themselves to in the Maze.
Volunteers had, until then, been grouped into companies. These usually contained ten to thirty people rather than the ninety or a hundred which is normal in armies. The companies were grouped into battalions, containing volunteers (the active terrorists) and auxiliaries. The auxiliaries were a sort of ‘Dad’s Army’ combination of older men and younger ones who lacked the experience for incorporation into active units. It was intended that auxiliaries should be available for protection of the nationalist community in the event of a major sectarian conflict and to carry out less sensitive tasks in the meantime. In Belfast and Derry battalions were grouped into brigades.
Using military terminology to describe its units was part of the Provisionals’ attempt to root themselves in the tradition of insurrectionary republicanism which had won independence for the South, the Republic of Ireland, nearly sixty years before. Then, the IRA had deployed an extensive military force, organized in a conventional way. Sinn Fein propaganda always attempted to paint the Provisionals as soldiers fighting a struggle akin to that of the French resistance in the war, and following in the tradition of the armed republicanism which made possible the formation of the Republic of Ireland. Perhaps because of this, the organization has maintained a higher degree of control over its members and been capable of more ambitious operations than other paramilitary groups.
However, this organization led to several problems. The most important was that far too many people knew who was who in their local IRA infrastructure, exposing the organization to informers. In addition, maintaining the administrative structure of companies required the recruitment of too many unreliable people and kept a large number of those who could be trusted tied up with organizational work rather than operations.
Under the reorganization the people who actually carried out acts of violence were to be regrouped into cells. The IRA drew on the example of urban guerrilla movements in Latin American countries, which had used cells to great effect in the 1960s. Instead of a gunman knowing the identity of his superior commanders, explosives experts, quartermasters and members of other units, he would in future have contact only with the three or four other members of his own cell. The IRA called its new groups Active Service Units (ASUs). Only the ASU commander would have contact with the next level of authority.
The IRA cut away the company level of command and eliminated many battalions too. It was left with brigades in Belfast and Derry, although the term continued to be used by groups elsewhere. There were smaller units in south Armagh, Newry, east Tyrone, mid Tyrone, west Tyrone, north Down, north Antrim and north Armagh, as well as across the border in Donegal and Monaghan in the Republic. It was intended that only the commander and possibly his adjutant or assistant should know the full details of a forthcoming operation. They would order ASUs to complete various tasks with different groups observing the target, hijacking vehicles and actually carrying out the attack.
Brigadier Glover, in his report Future Terrorist Trends, noted that, ‘By reorganizing on cellular lines PIRA has become less dependent on public support than in the past and is less vulnerable to penetration by informers’. It was not that the intelligence services could not find informers, but rather that the knowledge available to any one volunteer was dropping significantly. The identity of many IRA men and women was still widely known in the tightly-knit communities of west Belfast’s Turf Lodge or the Creggan, but the reorganization meant that people were less aware of what they were actually up to.
Transition from ‘one more push’ to ‘long war’, and from companies to cells, together with the stepping-up of convictions based on confessions, meant that IRA membership shrank. Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, in their authoritative book The Provisional IRA, estimated the number of active members to have gone down from about 1000 in the mid 1970s to around 250 ten years later. The drop happened despite the release of many men being held on short prison sentences which had been predicted by Brigadier Glover in his report. He had believed that the expected release of 761 republican and loyalist paramilitaries in the three years after his report was completed in 1978 would fuel the terrorist campaign.
The Brigadier’s own estimate of the Provisionals’ strength was a high one. He believed them to have 1200 active members. This contrasted with public pronouncements by the Army which usually stressed the small size of the organization but also shows that Army intelligence was slightly behind in understanding the slimming down which reorganization would bring. By the mid 1980s some Army officers were suggesting there were as few as fifty active IRA members, which appears to have been a deliberate underestimate. I estimate that the Provisionals’ strength remained between 250 and 350 active members – meaning those with the means and prepared to kill – during the decade after the reorganization.
What is beyond doubt is that the Army Council of the IRA used the reorganization to remove many members whom they considered to be hot-headed, disloyal or prone to break under interrogation. The ones who remained were a mixture of types. There were those like Mary Farrell, later
