Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (6 page)

The IRA’s failure or inability to defend Nationalist Belfast from Loyalist assaults in August 1969 was only part of the story why, in the winter of 1969–70, the organisation fractured into two rival, bitterly divided factions. A more comprehensive explanation can be found in the twists and turns that the IRA’s journey took in the two decades or so that followed the end of the war in Europe. After the debacle of the English campaign of 1939 and the Northern IRA’s disastrous outing in 1942, the IRA had painfully and slowly reorganised. By 1956, it was ready once again to resume armed struggle against the Northern Ireland state but the campaign that followed was largely confined to the border counties and, for reasons that have yet to be adequately explained, never took off in Belfast. The absence of IRA activity in Northern Ireland’s major city was a fatal weakness, but what really doomed the Border Campaign, as it was called, was the Northern Catholic population’s lack of enthusiasm for the IRA’s methods and war aims. Politically isolated and geographically confined, the IRA was easily suppressed by the Belfast and Dublin governments, which interned scores of activists on either side of the border. By 1962, after six years of desultory, often bungled attacks, which had barely dented the Northern security forces, the campaign fizzled to halt.

In the 1960s the Republican pendulum swung once again towards political and constitutional methods. Under the leadership of a new Chief of Staff, a Dublin veteran and contemporary of Brendan Behan called Cathal Goulding, the policies of the organisation moved distinctly leftwards, with the goal now a republic that was socialist in nature. Economic and social agitation replaced armed struggle as the favoured modus operandi and the military side of the IRA was run down. The organisation also moved
towards accepting the hated Dublin and Belfast parliaments, which traditional Republicans had deemed to be illegal, and pressure grew, mostly from the top, to abandon the policy of refusing to take seats in the two assemblies if elected – an unlikely eventuality but one to which the Goulding leadership aspired. Ending abstentionism was the logical outcome of broadening the movement’s support base, but for traditional and doctrinaire Republicans this was the road to hell. The IRA leadership also modified its stance on partition, or rather how to end it. While once the accepted goal was to force British withdrawal, now the aim was to reform the North, to democratise it in preparation for the sort of working-class unity necessary for the transition to socialism.
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Again this was anathema to conventional Republicans even if many of them happily participated in the civil rights marches and demonstrations that were the principal manifestation of the change in emphasis.

The IRA leadership, based almost entirely in or near Dublin, badly misjudged the North’s capacity for reform. For as long as most people could remember, the Unionist establishment had resisted any rapprochement with Catholics and Nationalists, viewing them as a fifth column in league with the Irish government or the IRA to end Northern Ireland’s link to Britain. The Nationalist rejection of the IRA’s 1956–62 campaign was an opportunity to reach out to Catholics but it seems not even to have been considered by the government of the day. Nevertheless, social, political and economic changes were under way that demanded that a different, more cordial approach be taken to the Catholic minority. The crusty, unbending Brookeborough had been replaced as prime minister by Captain Terence O’Neill, who inherited an economy whose best years were behind it. The decline of traditional industries such as shipbuilding and linen created a need for foreign investent but luring such companies to Belfast and Derry required more than generous grants and tax breaks; any shortfall in political stability could be a great deterrent and so O’Neill extended a hand of friendship, albeit tentatively, to Catholics. He was a mildly reforming, if sometimes patronising, moderniser, whose modest
overtures to Nationalists and diplomacy with the government in Dublin drove O’Neill’s hardliners from a state of unease to alarm and then to virtual rebellion. When impatient Nationalists launched the civil rights agitation in late 1968, up stepped a figure from another century, the Reverend Ian Paisley, a fundamentalist preacher and determined foe of all and any religious or political ecumenism, to lead and voice opposition to all this. As 1969 unfolded, the opposition to civil rights became increasingly violent; slowly but surely, O’Neill’s political base crumbled and the North inched towards the edge.

So it was that by the time the Orange marching season reached its climax in July and August 1969, Northern Ireland was set to explode. The IRA leadership in Dublin, its faith in the theory of working-class unity unfazed by the growing sectarian reality on the streets, had failed to prepare for the eruption. When it came, and the Loyalist mobs, B Specials and RUC went on the rampage in Catholic Belfast, there was little or no resistance. The IRA had few weapons and minimal planning had been made for such an eventuality. This for sure was the catalyst for the split in the IRA that followed but Goulding’s real mistake was that he had made one more enemy than he and his allies could handle. Goulding’s move to the left made sense in Dublin and one or two other urban areas where there was a recognisable working class but not in the rural heartlands of Republicanism. In those areas, the West and South-West in particular, the IRA’s activists and supporters were more likely to be small farmers, shopkeepers, small businessmen, schoolteachers and the like. The leadership’s Marxism, the accompanying dismantling of the IRA’s essentially Catholic rituals, the threat to ditch abstentionism and the gradual abandonment of armed struggle were not just an abomination to such people. Together they spelled another impending betrayal, just like that of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. The Southern conservatives had support in Belfast for sure, but essentially the group that emerged from the split, the Provisional IRA, was an alliance of rural, Southern conservatives and Northerners, angry and ashamed at the failure of August 1969.

The events of that summer persuaded a group of former IRA stalwarts to mobilise against the Goulding leadership. They were men who had been involved in the 1940s and the 1956–62 campaign but who had quit in disgust over the direction Goulding had taken or had been expelled when they protested. In the autumn of 1969 they rejoined the IRA and then met to discuss what should be done about the Belfast Command, then headed by Goulding acolytes Billy McMillen and Jim Sullivan, and to formulate a plan of action. They were led by Brendan Hughes’s boyhood hero Billy McKee and included figures whose names had been legend in bygone years: Jimmy Steele, Joe Cahill, John and Billy Kelly, Jimmy Drumm and Seamus Twomey. They were joined by a Southern Republican, Daithi O Connail (Dave O’Connell), who had been imprisoned in Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail during the Border Campaign and had got to know many of the Belfast men, and by Gerry Adams junior, the only serving member of the Belfast IRA at the meeting. Adams had a foot in both camps; he admired Goulding’s politics and favoured dropping abstentionism but disagreed with the leadership’s sanguine view of Unionism. Although he took part in the rebels’ meeting, it would be quite a while before Adams decisively plumped for the anti-Goulding side.
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A month later, the dissidents forced McMillen to separate the Belfast IRA from the parent body until the larger argument was settled. The various divisions in the IRA were distilled into a single issue: whether or not to recognise and participate in the parliaments established by the Treaty settlement. An IRA Convention, a delegate conference of the IRA’s grassroots, was called for December 1969 to discuss the matter and as is often the case with such events, the leadership had ensured beforehand that the bulk of the chosen delegates would be on their side of the argument. The dissenting minority, led by another veteran of the 1956–62 campaign, Sean MacStiofain, walked out to form a separate, rival IRA. The legal niceties dictated that the new IRA’s ruling bodies, an Executive and an Army Council appointed by the Executive, could be chosen only at a Convention and until the new IRA convened one of its
own Conventions, a provisional Executive and Army Council would fill the gap. When news of the split was leaked, the Irish media, searching for something to call the rebels, seized on the term ‘provisional’ and so the Provisional IRA was born. The IRA from which they had parted became known, just as predictably, as the Official IRA.

The Provisional IRA was conceived in the angry, charred back streets of Catholic Belfast and that bestowed on the new group a puissance that had been denied its predecessor during the Border Campaign. But it would mean that the engine of the IRA, which would drive it for the next three decades or so, was the city’s unrelenting sectarian politics, itself a metaphor for the state. Right from the outset, the North’s politics would shape and colour the Provisionals’ violence and ideological direction until, eventually, the North and Northerners would dominate the entire organisation. From its Belfast core, the Provisionals would expand outwards, outgrowing and replacing the Officials in Counties Armagh and Tyrone and in Derry City, areas that would be among the IRA’s key battlegrounds in the coming years. But what is striking from Brendan Hughes’s account of these first months is just how fragile the infant Provisional movement was and how it could easily have been swallowed up and destroyed by the much larger Official IRA, had the cards fallen the other way. To describe the politics and motivation of its founder members as undeveloped and unsophisticated would be an understatement, while another key feature of the early IRA was that its leadership, North and South, was drawn overwhelmingly from the IRA of the late 1930s through to the 1956–62 campaign. It was older, more conservative or Catholic in social outlook, was wedded completely to the primacy of the gun and had an immovable view that politics, that is parliamentary and electoral politics, were the refuge of the scoundrel and the traitor.

The first Belfast Commander was Billy McKee, a veteran and former Commander of the Belfast Brigade’s D Company in the 1940s. He was famous for his Catholic piety and was said to attend Mass daily. A contemporary once joked that in those early days he
would allow only ‘altar boys’ into the IRA, an exaggeration for sure, but a comment that captured the centrality of his Catholic faith in all aspects of his life. His deputy, the Belfast Adjutant, was Proinsias MacAirt, or Frank Card as the British Army insisted on calling him, a veteran of the 1940s and the Border Campaign. Alongside them in the city were other famous names, people such as Jimmy Steele who had escaped from Belfast jail in 1943 and would soon launch the Belfast Brigade weekly newspaper,
Republican News
, the Drumms, Jimmy and Maire, the politically active members of the Hannaway and Burns families, activists who had drifted away or been purged during the Goulding years. The first Provisional Army Council was peppered with similar figures. Three stood out: MacStiofain, who was the new IRA’s first Chief of Staff, had been arrested and jailed along with Goulding during an ill-fated arms raid at Felsted, Essex, in 1953; Ruairi O Bradaigh, a County Roscommon schoolteacher who had been Chief of Staff during part of the Border Campaign and was interned at the Curragh Camp, in County Kildare; and Daithi O Connail, a County Cork schoolteacher, who had taken part in a famous raid on Brookeborough RUC station during that campaign and was later shot and wounded in County Fermanagh by the RUC.

The recruits at rank-and-file level were a different matter:

Hughes joined D Company of the IRA in Belfast, a unit that historically had played a central role in the city’s past disturbances and which it would again do during the modern Troubles. D Company’s operational area embraced most of the Lower Falls Road district which, until the construction of modern public-housing estates in Ballymurphy, Andersonstown and Turf Lodge in the post-war years, was where most of the city’s Catholic population had always lived. At first the Provisionals were dwarfed by the Official IRA and there were sufficient members and new recruits to fill only one battalion in the Brigade area. Only later, when Catholics flocked to its ranks, did the Provisionals expand to three, and at one point four, battalions in Belfast. D Company was eventually put under the control of the Second Battalion and became not just the largest single IRA unit in that area but in all of Belfast. Such was its record of ambushes and bombings that it was dubbed ‘the dogs of war’ or just ‘the dogs’. But at the start, and for many months, D Company was tiny – only twelve members – and it shared its base of operations with the headquarters of the Official IRA, a recipe for bloody rivalry. At the beginning there was training and very little military activity but efforts were made to demonstrate to ordinary Catholics that the protection that had been missing in August 1969 was now available.