Motives for IRA murders questioned

University of Ulster academic Prof Henry Patterson has questioned whether the conflict in parts of Northern Ireland was a simple "war of liberation" or an exercise in "ethnic cleansing" carried out by the IRA.

Prof Patterson said unlike other struggles for liberation, it was the "self designated 'anti-imperialist' force that killed far more victims of the Troubles than did the state forces".

Addressing the sixth international conference of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies at the University of Valladolid in Spain, he detailed the murder of Fermanagh-based UDR members on their farms, a feature which continued on and off until the 1980s.

At this point, he said Gerry Adams had realised the political damage the killings were doing to his efforts to build a pan-nationalist alliance, while the Ulster Unionists had already branded the IRA campaign as "genocide against the Protestant people".

Prof Patterson said the Provisional IRA was responsible for 48 per cent of deaths while the RUC was responsible for 1.4 per cent and the UDR 0.2 per cent. "Even if it was accepted that there was widespread collusion between state forces and loyalist paramilitaries and 50 per cent of those killed by loyalists was added to the security forces' figure, it would still amount to only 17 per cent of all deaths," he claimed.

In his address - War of National Liberation or Ethnic Cleansing: IRA violence in Fermanagh during the Troubles - Prof Patterson examined the IRA campaign in that county.

The politics professor noted that during previous campaigns the IRA leadership had decided that the part-time B-Specials would not be targets. But the UDR, which replaced the B-Specials, was targeted from the outset. In 1972 six members of the UDR in Fermanagh were killed, four of them on their Border farms. Four farming families with UDR members sold their land and animals in the Garrison area to move to safer areas.

Prof Patterson emphasised different phases of the campaign against UDR part-timers in the area. In the seven years after 1972 only one UDR man was killed in the county. That, he believed, was partly as a result of revulsion at the killing of a UDR man and his wife on their farm and partly because the IRA leadership was dominated by southern-based activists who had taken part in earlier Border campaigns and who may have had qualms about attacking part-time UDR members.

The situation changed at the beginning of the 1980s, he said, when hardline northern activists took control of the Provisional IRA.

It changed again when political considerations also led to the Provisional IRA unit in Fermanagh being disbanded when Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams began his attempt to build a pan-nationalist alliance with the SDLP and Fianna Fáil in the late 1980s, he said.

"The IRA in Fermanagh had carried out a number of widely-condemned killings including the Enniskillen Poppy Day bombing in which 11 people died and the shooting of a 21-year-old Protestant girl sitting in a car with her fiance."

Prof Patterson said the potential political costs to Sinn Féin of such activities led to the standing down of the local IRA unit.

Prof Patterson said: "No doubt many Provisionals then and now would sincerely and forcefully deny that their campaign in Fermanagh was a form of ethnic cleansing." Yet he said "that the killings struck at the Protestant community's morale, sense of security and belonging in the area was undeniable."