The Books: “A Secret History of the IRA” (Ed Moloney)

History bookshelf:

Next book on the shelf is A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney. If I recall correctly, Emily got so angry reading this book that she threw it across the room! Good times!! Ed Moloney has been Northern editor of The Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune – and has written this book with unprecedented access to – well – the “secret history” of the IRA. It’s the story of the IRA but more than that it’s the story of the rise of Gerry Adams. The pretty much Machiavellian rise of Gerry Adams. Having stayed in Ballymurphy when I was in Belfast, and having seen Gerry Adams’ car outside the Sinn Fein head office – I really feel like an insider. There is nothing like seeing Gerry Adams’ car parked at the curb to really make you feel close to the heart of something important.

When my family went to Ireland when we were all kids – we went to visit my “Auntie Bridgie” in Killarney. An 83 year old woman who lived in a 2-room dark house with cows right outside the door. Her husband had been dead for … 30 years? 40 years? Anyway, on the dark stained wall over the stove were three things: A picture of JFK. A picture of Pope John Paul II. And a pin in a small dusty glass case – the pin had a red ribboned thing hanging off it. I am unable to describe it, because I am a loser. It wasn’t a medallion – but a ribboned thing, almost like an epaulet. It was her husband’s IRA pin. Of course this would have been the IRA back in the 20s and 30s, a very different organization from the one we see now. But those three items were the only wall decorations. Kinda says it all, don’t it??

I’ll post an excerpt about the Provisional IRA.

From A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney.

The first Provisional leaders were sure of the rightness of their cause and the reasons for breaking with the Officials. The initial statement from O Bradaigh’s breakaway Sinn Fein in January 1970 listed five reasons for splitting with Goulding: his recognition of the Irish and British parliaments; the move to embrace extreme socialism; illegal internal disciplinary methods; the failure to defend Belfast; and the policy of defending the Northern parliament at Stormont. The list demonstrated that the Provisionals were essentially a coalition of differing grievances; for some Marxism was the major problem with Goulding, and for others the military rundown of the IRA. One characteristic of the new IRA above all others that united the coalition – the glue that held it together – was a distrust of politics, parliamentary politics in particular, and an unshakable belief in the correctness of armed struggle.

The early Provisional leaders were determined that they would not stray down the path of parliamentary reformism trod by other nationalist and republican leaders. Each previous generation of freedom fighters had been betrayed, they believed, by leaders seduced by the siren call of parliamentary politics. They would be the exception. For this reason they defined the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA in simple and traditional terms. The military wing, the IRA, was in charge, and Sinn Fein would obey and be subservient to the Army Council. That was the case in the South and also in the North, where, according to one veteran party activist, Sinn Fein was secondary to the IRA from the outset: “Sinn Fein was the poor relation. It wasn’t worth bothering about. Sinn Fein in the 1970s was an organization without clout; it supported the ‘campaign’ and held lofty ideas of a united Ireland but nothing else. The IRA was boss.”

As the war intensified and more and more Northerners joined up, the antipolitical nature of the Provisionals intensified, as one of the Provisionals’ founding members recalled:

When the resistance began, Northerners came in droves, and they were reacting to events for a number of years. The Northern guys were quite slow to be politicized. They looked down on Sinn Fein and dismissed it, saying, ‘We’re Army men.’ I shared a cell with them in Mountjoy, and that was their view. They were quite happy sitting in their cells reading the Sun or the Mirror boasting about operations. They were purely militaristic – hit, hit, keep on hitting.

Whereas the first IRA commanders were Southerners, the foot soldiers in the war, the Volunteers, came overwhelmingly from the North and at first mostly from Belfast, where the attempted loyalist pogroms of August 1969 had taken place. Many IRA units elsewhere in North, in republican heartlands like Tyrone, Armagh, and Derry, were slower to take sides in the republican split; in some cases months went by before they decided whether to follow Goulding or MacStiofain. The Provisionals were born in Belfast and sustained by the city’s bitter sectarian politics.

Some of those outside Belfast were repelled by the Provisionals’ simplistic politics. Typical of this category was the Derry republican Mitchel McLaughlin, who stayed with the Officials for several months before joining the Provisionals, later rising to become a key Adams aide and advocate of his peace strategy. “At the time of the split,” he once told an interviewere, “I actually stayed with the Official Republican Movement. Mainly because of their politics which undoubtedly were more progressive than the more, kind of nationalistic rhetoric that I was hearing [from the early Provisional leaders].” Gerry Adams and the Ballymurphy unit were not the only IRA members to hesitate before taking sides in the split. Not surprisingly, many were waiting to see who came out on top, and so what happened in Belfast was crucial. When Belfast republicanism went over to the Provos, as it did during the crucial year of 1970, many of the rural units followed, and soon if angry young Northern Catholics wanted to hit back at either the loyalists or the British army, they knew they would find a warm welcome in the Provisionals.

The IRA before August 1969 was an organization kept going by family tradition. Membership was passed from father to son, mother to daughter, but the recruits who flocked to the ranks of the Provisionals were a new breed, motivated by an atavistic fear of loyalist violence and an overwhelming need to strike back. Known as Sixty-niners, they joined the IRA literally to defend their own streets, were resolved that the near-pogroms of August 1969 would never again be repeated, and were ready, if the opportunity arose, to retaliate. They joined the Provos because the Officials had failed to defend their communities in the way that was expected, and they automatically associated the Officals’ obsession with politics with military weakness and betrayal. From the outset abhorrence of politics and the requirement for defense and armed struggle were just different sides of the same coin.

Typical of the new Provisional IRA Volunteer was Bernard Fox, an apprentice coach builder from the Falls Road who joined the IRA in 1969, when he was just eighteen years old. He is now a senior figure in the leadership and was named in 2001 in the British media as a senior figure in the Provisional IRA’s GHQ staff. He spent nineteen years in prison, either jailed or interned, for IRA activitiy. His motive for signing up was straightforward, as he once explained in a newspaper interview after the peace process reforms had secured his release fromk prison: “I was almost shot in a gun attack at Norfolk Street. I came away wanting a gun. It was survival. You wanted to protect your own people … my family and myself. When the barricades went up I wanted a gun so I approached this fella who was in the IRA and asked for gun and he said: could I shoot a British soldier? At that time I hadn’t the idea that it was the British government’s fault …”

Brendan Hughes from the Lower Falls Road district, a figure who later became an IRA legend, was similarly affected by the violence of August 1969. “At that time it was simply ‘Here we are being attacked by Loyalists, by B Specials, by the RUC, by the British army,’ and there was a need to hit back,” recalled the former Belfast commander. “I mean I was in Bombay Street the morning after it was burned out, helping people out, and I went to the bottom of the Falls Road and seen all the burnt-out homes. I had relatives in Bombay Street who were burnt out, and I felt the desire to get back at these people who were doing it.” Micky McMullen, a former long-term IRA prisoner, came under similar pressure but managed to resist it: “Up to 1969 there was nothing, but August 1969 was the turning point. I became involved in community defence you know and stuff like that, helping families to move after they had been burned out. At that time a lot of my friends would have been trying to join the IRA and the rationale would be just to get stuck into the ‘Orangies’ you know. It was a defence thing but something stopped me from getting into that.”

Fox, Hughes, and McMullen and the many hundreds who followed them into the Provisional IRA in the first years of its existence were part of a Northern Catholic tradition that went back nearly two hundred years, when another armed uprising had very nearly ended British rule in Ireland. The United Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798 is celebrated as the moment when modern, secular Irish republicanism was born, but it but it also coincided with the birth of sectarian politics in Ireland and left a scar that marked Northern socidety for centuries to come.