A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  What prospect Gerry Adams did have of upward economic mobility came courtesy not of the Northern Ireland government or the Catholic Church but was due to huge political changes across the Irish Sea in postwar Britain. At the end of the war with Nazi Germany, Britain’s voters turned against Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party with such determination and numbers that what happened approached a social revolution.

  The Labour Party was swept into power on a platform of social equality that included the nationalization of railways, utilities, heavy industry, and coal and the provision of a free national health service. Arguably the most radical social measure was in the field of education, where college education was thrown open to working-class children. Those who were bright enough and could pass an intelligence test when they were eleven years old were streamed into an academic education. For the first time ability dictated how far children could go.

  No other factor was more responsible for causing the Troubles. The Eleven Plus, as the exam became known, opened the door to the middle classes and introduced a significant element of social mobility into British society. This was also the case in Northern Ireland, but the state’s Catholic population encountered an extra obstacle, the built-in systems of discrimination that had been constructed to preserve unionist privilege. As more Catholics obtained a college education, their economic, their social, and ultimately their political expectations soared. It was unionism’s refusal and inability to satisfy these expectations that finally unplugged the Northern Ireland volcano.

  Gerry Adams’s early life, like that of his peers, was a tough one. After a brief period living with his maternal grandmother in the Falls Road in West Belfast, the family moved to the northern outskirts of the city, to Greencastle on the picturesque shores of Belfast Lough, where they rented a one-room flat. The family grew, each year bringing a new addition and added strain on living space and financial resources.

  The family, which eventually numbered five boys and five girls, hankered to be back in West Belfast, where the rest of the extended Adams and Hannaway clans lived, and so in the early 1950s, and largely thanks to his mother’s efforts, Gerry Adams made a move that was to have significant consequences for Irish history.

  At the end of the Second World War, Belfast had a huge homeless problem. German bombers had twice raided the city but missed their economic and military targets and devastated inner-city housing estates instead. The unionist government was forced to build public housing projects, and it was into one of these, a sprawling estate known as Ballymurphy on the slopes of the hills overlooking West Belfast, that the Adams family moved.

  Home at 11 Divismore Park, Ballymurphy, gave the growing Gerry Adams much-needed social stability, comfort, and welcome contact with family as well as a new circle of friends. But it was also to provide him less than two decades later with a base that he would use first to dominate the IRA in West Belfast, next the city, and then the entire organization. If Annie Adams had not insisted on making the move to Ballymurphy, the IRA might never have been led by Gerry Adams, and Irish history would now look very different.

  His parents were conscious of the opportunities offered by the Eleven Plus, and they encouraged their eldest son to sit for the exam. At the second attempt he passed and was granted a place at the boys-only St. Mary’s Christian Brothers Grammar School, situated on what was then the more affluent fringe of West Belfast. Most St. Mary’s boys were expected to stay at school until the age of eighteen and would be encouraged to go on to college or enter a profession. The Adams family’s hopes for Gerry Jr. were naturally high. Family photographs of the day show a gangly, if not awkward, teenager whose thick spectacle frames reinforced a bookish image.

  But the family’s hopes were to be dashed. By 1964 he was flirting with republican politics and had helped campaign for the Sinn Fein candidate during an election in West Belfast, the highlight of which was two days of stone-throwing between RUC riot squads and local nationalists and republicans, including the adolescent Gerry Adams.

  Adams’s studies suffered, and by Easter 1964 he was at the bottom of the class.8 With many contemporaries in Ballymurphy already working and a growing number of mouths to feed at home, he left St. Mary’s in early 1965 and took a job as a bartender, first in a Catholic-owned pub on the Loyalist Shankill Road and then in one of Belfast’s most famous hostelries, the Duke of York, home at the time to what passed for the city’s artistic and left-wing intelligentsia.

  A year later, when he reached eighteen, Adams’s career in the IRA began. He was sworn in to D Company (D Coy) of the Belfast Brigade, the unit his father had belonged to and whose members came from the Falls Road and West Belfast.9 Within six years D Coy was to be known as one of the most ferocious and active units in the emerging Provisional IRA, earning its members the nickname “the Dogs,” after “the dogs of war.”

  Adams had chosen a period of tumult within the Republican movement to join the IRA. Always prone to ideological, military, and personality disputes, the IRA was again on the verge of a bitter and bloody split when the Belfast officer commanding took Gerry Adams through the IRA oath and welcomed him into D Coy.

  The history of the IRA both before and after it tasted defeat in the 1921– 23 Irish civil war is essentially the story of military failure followed by retreat and introspection. After each reverse the remnants of the IRA would divide into two camps, those who retreated to their firesides and dreamed of better days to come and a second chance to take up the gun and bomb, and those who advocated a new and radical change of direction. Invariably that would involve advocating heresies, usually that the IRA should ditch its almost mystical distaste for parliamentary politics, and an internal row, possibly a split, would follow.

  Virtually every twentieth-century republican leader had trodden this path. Michael Collins walked down it, and Eamon de Valera did as well. So too would Gerry Adams, although in circumstances that were to make the efforts of Collins and de Valera appear amateurish and clumsy.

  After the 1921 Treaty the IRA divided into those who stayed loyal to Michael Collins and those who supported Eamon de Valera, and a bitter civil war followed. The split was not caused by the partition of Ireland. The Treaty had set up the Boundary Commission to draw the borders of the new Northern Ireland state, and even anti-Treatyites firmly believed that when nationalist areas were removed from the six partitioned counties, as the British had implied during the Treaty negotiations, the truncated remnant would not be viable and the new state would collapse into their hands.

  The Treaty had imposed on members of the new Irish parliament and the “Free State” government an obligation to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown, and it was this that divided the IRA. Collins’s men argued that the oath did not matter. Ireland had secured the freedom to achieve freedom, bit by bit, county by county, and that was all that mattered. Predictably his supporters became known as stepping-stoners. De Valera eventually agreed to sign the oath but claimed this was not the same as swearing it, an elasticity of attitude to such matters that Gerry Adams was to imitate and incorporate wholesale into his own peace process strategy.

  The resulting Irish civil war was an unequal battle. Armed by Britain and facing an opposition that hesitated to strike the first decisive blow, Collins’s “Staters” put the IRA on the defensive almost from the beginning. The war was over by 1923. The IRA leadership, on de Valera’s urging, ordered its members to dump arms.

  Three years later “Dev” abandoned military methods. He resigned from Sinn Fein and announced the setting up of a constitutional republican party known as Fianna Fail, or Soldiers of Destiny, a name that was chosen to appeal to the militarist tradition from which the party sprang.

  The vast bulk of the IRA followed de Valera, and IRA units were transformed almost overnight into Fianna Fail branches, or cumainn. Those who rejected Fianna Fail did not like what they saw but were confused about what to do. Some were content to wait and see whether or not de Valera did deli
ver on the republican rhetoric, especially after election victories brought the party to power. Others, like Peadar O’Donnell, argued that republicans should eschew establishment politics, move to the left, and take up radical social and economic policies. Many IRA men who thought as O’Donnell did later went to Spain to fight against Franco.

  At first de Valera welcomed IRA support, not least because the civil war had left deep divisions in Irish society. Trust was hard to find, old civil war enmities simmered just beneath the surface, and Fianna Fail needed friends wherever it could get them. But the alliance was to be short-lived. In 1932 de Valera won enough seats to form a coalition government, and within four years he moved against the IRA and declared it an illegal organization.

  By this stage the IRA was once again turning its attention to the older enemy. The British had reneged on promises made in 1921 when the Boundary Commission was set up. In a majority report the commission brushed aside nationalist concerns and recommended that all six partitioned counties be incorporated in the new Northern Ireland state, and the fledgling administration in Dublin had little option but to acquiesce. The decision made the new entity a viable one but at the cost of sowing the seeds of future conflict. Nearly half a million Catholics and nationalists, a third of the population, had been forced against their will into a state with which they did not identify and whose leaders were openly hostile to them.

  Nationalist Ireland was unsure about what tactics to adopt. De Valera’s answer was to turn up the rhetorical heat. He drafted a new constitution in 1937 which set the goal of reuniting Ireland in legal stone. Physical-force republicans advocated a more traditional approach and urged renewed war against the British but not against de Valera. The IRA ended its conflict with the Southern state. It was a seminal development because it started a process that eventually led to the IRA’s formally recognizing the Southern state and then participating in its institutions. From then on, the main goal of the IRA was to get the British out of the North rather than to eject the impostors in Dublin.

  By 1939 the IRA felt confident enough to declare war against Britain, and under the leadership of Sean Russell, a veteran of the 1916 Rising and an opponent of O’Donnell’s socialism, a bombing campaign was launched. As republicans had done before the 1916 Rising, lines were opened with Germany, whose Nazi leaders were themselves at war with Britain. Although the IRA hoped for all sorts of assistance, little came of the relationship.

  The Forties Campaign, as the IRA’s war came to be called, forced its own split. Sean MacBride, son of the legendary Maude Gonne MacBride and himself a former chief of staff, broke with Russell. When the Second World War ended, the future Nobel laureate quit the IRA and formed his own political party, Clann na Poblachta, which enjoyed considerable, but brief, electoral and political success.

  The IRA was the author of its own defeat in the Forties Campaign. In the sort of botched operation that would play such a crucial role in the modern peace process, a bombing in Coventry in the English Midlands at the start of the campaign went badly wrong, and five civilians were killed and another sixty wounded. At around the same time the IRA in Dublin raided the Irish army’s weapons reserves and, much to its own surprise, netted a dozen truckloads of guns and one million rounds of ammunition, most of which the IRA promptly lost when the police discovered their hiding place.

  The Coventry debacle roused the English police, which used harsh methods against IRA suspects, while the Dublin arms raid permitted de Valera the political space to seek emergency powers, which he used to intern IRA leaders. De Valera was concerned that the IRA’s attacks on Britain and its overtures to Hitler’s Nazis could give the British the excuse to force him to take Britain’s side in the “Emergency,” as the Irish government termed the Second World War. Chief of Staff Russell had journeyed to Germany in a bid to get arms and other assistance from the Nazis, while the Germans hoped to use the IRA network to facilitate espionage operations against the British. It was just the sort of activity that gave de Valera nightmares, but luckily for him the Germans had grossly overestimated the IRA’s capabilities and virtually all the spies they sent to Ireland were exposed and arrested. Russell meanwhile died during a journey on board a German submarine not long after the Coventry bombing, and the IRA campaign soon petered out. By 1945 the IRA had effectively ceased to exist. Its structures and leadership had evaporated. Not even a membership list had survived the defeat. For a short while it seemed as if the long history of violent Irish republicanism had come to an end.

  But the movement was not quite extinguished. By 1947, after a slow, painful reconstruction effort, the IRA was showing signs of revival. Structures were rebuilt and a leadership of veterans, headed by the new chief of staff, Tony Magan, put in place. Recruitment was under way, as was training in the hills outside Dublin, and a monthly newspaper was being published. A year later, in 1948, the year of Gerry Adams’s birth, the IRA was large enough to hold a Convention, the gathering of IRA representatives that the organization’s constitution decrees exerts supreme authority over its policies, ideas, and military direction.

  The Convention decided that Oglaigh na hEireann, as its own members called the IRA, was to make plans for a new military campaign to end the British occupation of Northern Ireland. There would be no repeat of the mistakes of the Forties Campaign, its leaders determined; this time the campaign would be in the North itself, not in Britain.

  It was at this point that the IRA leadership took another small but significant step toward accepting the existence and legitimacy of the southern Irish state, whose creation it had once declared illegal. It forbade units from making any attacks on the Irish police, the Garda Siochana, or any other military forces of the state, for fear that Dublin government reprisals would undermine the offensive against Northern Ireland. The IRA’s ruling body, the seven-man Army Council, issued General Army Order no. 8, forbidding such military action. From then on the South was to be the IRA’s logistical base, while the North would be the war zone.

  Preparations for the campaign began with a series of arms raids in Northern Ireland and Britain. In 1955 came a sign that Northern nationalists might be receptive to an IRA campaign when, in the midst of agitation over the arrest of suspected IRA activists, two republicans, one of them an IRA man imprisoned for his part in an unsuccessful arms raid, were elected to the Westminster parliament. The Nationalist Party had stood aside to give Sinn Fein a free run, and overall the republicans won 152,000 votes, an unprecedented level of support, which the politicized Adams movement took twenty years of political work and a major ideological U-turn to better.

  Thus boosted, the IRA campaign, code-named Operation Harvest but known popularly ever since as the Border Campaign, began in earnest. In December 1956 a series of cross-Border raids on security and government installations signaled the start. The campaign was strictly limited to areas outside Belfast. The IRA leadership feared that the city’s Catholic population was vulnerable to Protestant attack and might be held hostage by the unionist government for the IRA’s good behavior elsewhere. In practice IRA actions were confined to the Border counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Armagh.

  The Northern authorities introduced internment within days of the first acts of violence, while the Gardai harassed the IRA leadership unmercifully. By mid-1957 de Valera was back in power, and when an RUC officer was killed in an IRA booby trap bomb in Tyrone, he introduced internment and later set up military tribunals that handed out draconian sentences. More seriously for the IRA, the public support evident in 1955 failed to materialize on the ground. The bulk of Northern Ireland Catholics simply ignored the IRA’s call to arms.

  The Border Campaign limped on for a further five years but was effectively over at that point. In February 1962 the IRA leadership finally acknowledged defeat, ordered its units to dump arms, and admitted the great part played by Northern nationalist indifference to the campaign in the decision to end hostilities.

  Twelve people had been killed in the 195
6–62 campaign; six were RUC members and six IRA men. Another thirty-eight people—civilians, IRA men, and Northern security personnel—were wounded.10 At the time unionists were alarmed at this level of IRA activity, but by the standards of the coming conflict it was a tame affair. In 1972, for instance, the worst single year of the Troubles, the entire casualty list for the five-year Border Campaign could be compressed into an average ten-day period.

  Exhausted and demoralized, republicans retreated once more. Most quit and took up normal lives, but others returned to the fray determined to rescue something out of the wreckage of defeat. Among them was a forty-six-year-old Dublin painter and decorator called Cathal Goulding, who had several qualifications for leadership. He was one of the small number of IRA men who in 1945 had met in Dublin and agreed to start the slow process of rebuilding the IRA from the ashes of the Forties Campaign, and he was possibly the most enthusiastic of the group. A good friend of the playwright Brendan Behan, with whose widow he was later to father a child, he had a family background that was impeccable from a republican standpoint. His father had “been out” in the 1916 Rising, while his grandfather had been a Fenian revolutionary.

  Goulding had also proved his mettle. In 1953 he led a high-profile raid on a British army base in Felsted, Essex, in southeast England, along with the Derry IRA man Manus Canning and a London-based ex-RAF member, Sean MacStiofain, who was later to become the first chief of staff of the Provisional IRA. The raid netted a huge haul of weaponry but so loaded down the men’s getaway van that a routine police patrol became suspicious and stopped them. They were later sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment each. Goulding was released in 1959 and returned to rejoin the IRA’s Army Council and become its quartermaster. But because he had been in an English jail in the early years of the Border Campaign when the most serious setbacks were suffered, he escaped blame for its dismal failure. As a neutral figure amid factions fighting in the ruins of a failed war, Goulding became, in 1962, the IRA’s new chief of staff.