A Broad Church: Lifting the lid on the Provisional IRA in the South

This valuable study concerns one of the sharpest dividing lines in Irish society, attitudes towards the Provisional IRA and its armed campaign. Whether it is the Republic of Ireland women’s football team singing an “IRA song” or Sinn Féin TDs comparing IRA ambushes in 1920 with those of 1979, nothing is guaranteed to provoke semi-coherent responses from erstwhile public intellectuals than discussions of the “Ra”.

There are also the recurrent “Good old IRA” arguments, with some commentators asserting a moral authority about the killing of suspected informers during 1919-1921 that the Provisional IRA allegedly did not possess when they did the same (on a lesser scale) after 1970.

The strength of this richly detailed narrative is that it illustrates something of the complexity of attitudes as they existed when the armed campaign was actually taking place. It again underlines how despite the oft-repeated claim (on both sides of the Border) that what happened “up there” didn’t really affect the Republic, it was in fact central to its politics.

There were two divergent assertions about southern IRA support during the conflict. One, colourfully summed up by Fine Gael’s John Kelly, was to suggest that only a tiny minority of “half-wits” and “savage old hillbillies” endorsed the IRA. The other, expressed by republicans such as Danny Morrison, was to claim that support for the IRA existed across all political parties in the Republic and that this support would be even greater but for censorship and revisionism.

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Ó Faoleán shows how republicans could bring large numbers on to the streets, as during the H-Block hunger strikes, and is among the few writers to understand the significance of the heroin epidemic in creating space for republican intervention in working-class Dublin

Ó Faoleán is right to suggest that there was a larger number of people than usually accepted prepared to aid the IRA directly and a wider pool still who tolerated certain aspects of the armed campaign. Significant numbers of people accepted, for example, that British soldiers, to use the IRA’s own definition, were “legitimate targets”. And it was not only hardline republicans who expressed satisfaction on first hearing of the Brighton bomb. There was a broad section of the public for whom republicans on a personal level were never the pariahs of media caricature.

Ó Faoleán shows how republicans could bring large numbers on to the streets, as during the H-Block hunger strikes, and is among the few writers to understand the significance of the heroin epidemic in creating space for republican intervention in working-class Dublin.

But at the same time toleration for the IRA was often very shallow. The killing of civilians, gardaí, off-duty military and police personnel or alleged informers could all provoke genuine outrage, even among some republican sympathisers. Ó Faoleán includes some significant examples of this, such as the killing of Emyvale man Gabriel Murphy, which led to a popular backlash in north Monaghan. This is also why the Enniskillen bombing in 1987 was so significant in political terms. It was after Enniskillen that Charles Haughey’s government was able to launch the largest ever security operations directed at the IRA in the South. Horror at the bombing (in which 11 mainly elderly Protestants died) also made the path to extraditing republican suspects to British courts much easier.

Media censorship and hostility undeniably had an impact, but as activist Michael Farrell suggested in the early 1990s, “some aspects of the violence you could explain till the cows come home and it would still turn people off”

This was one of a series of events (the IRA killed more than 50 civilians during 1987-1990) that disillusioned committed republican supporters such as singer Christy Moore. It is to the author’s credit that parts of the book will make uncomfortable reading for a diverse range of people. It is a little disappointing, however, that some significant writing on modern republicanism such as F Stuart Ross’s Smashing H-Block (2011) is missing from the bibliography. Similarly, relevant work by Patrick Mulroe, Marisa McGlinchey and Dieter Reinisch seems to have been ignored. There are also a few minor errors that could be easily rectified in later editions.

Overall the author perhaps underplays the disappointment that Sinn Féin’s poor election performances in 1987 and 1989 caused activists. While it is true that backing for the IRA cannot be judged solely by these results, it is surely significant that with voting a risk-free way of expressing such support (much easier than hiding arms or aiding men on the run) relatively few still took that option. And this remained a key problem for republicans.

Media censorship and hostility undeniably had an impact, but as activist Michael Farrell suggested in the early 1990s, “some aspects of the violence you could explain till the cows come home and it would still turn people off”. Despite being better armed than at any time in its history, the IRA was further away from achieving its objectives in 1989 than it had been in 1972. Indeed that, rather than morality, is the key difference between the Provisionals and the IRA of 1919-1921; the “old IRA” achieved more with less because they were part of a popular mass movement. The Provisional IRA could never hope to gain that level of broad political support for its campaign south of the Border. Achieving that was dependent on ending the war, not escalating it.

Brian Hanley’s books include The Impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland, 1968-79: Boiling Volcano?