Introduction

For thirty years, Northern Ireland was the site of a war without parallel in modern European history. There were no sieges, no battles, no aerial bombardments. The British Army faced an enemy that lurked in the shadows, wearing denim, not khaki, armed with light weapons and homemade explosives. The casualty figures – just under 3,500 deaths and 48,000 injuries – may not seem very high when compared to the bloodshed in countries like Bosnia or Lebanon. But they were the equivalent of 125,000 deaths and nearly 2 million injuries in Britain, or half the British death toll during the Second World War. The same calculation for the US would yield a figure of 600,000 deaths and almost 9 million injuries – much higher than the country’s losses in WWII, and nine times the US casualty rate in Vietnam.¹ Of those killed, 70 per cent were civilians. This devastating conflict unfolded in a highly developed West European state with a reputation for political stability. From Wilson and Heath to Thatcher and Blair, a whole generation of British prime ministers had to grapple with an unprecedented security challenge in their own backyard.

The main protagonist throughout that conflict was the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was responsible for nearly half of all deaths. According to Martin McGuinness, one of the IRA’s most senior commanders, at least 10,000 people belonged to the organization at some point during the Troubles. As Brendan O’Leary pointed out, that plausible figure ‘suggests that an extraordinarily high proportion of Northern Irish working-class Catholic males who matured after 1969 have been through IRA ranks’.2 For obvious reasons, public support for an illegal organization is difficult to quantify. But when the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, had a policy of unconditional support for its armed campaign, it regularly won between 30 and 40 per cent of the Catholic-nationalist vote. It was that degree of sympathy or toleration among Northern Irish Catholics that made it possible for the IRA to sustain a guerrilla war for so long against one of Europe’s most powerful states.

In a survey for the Pentagon, the RAND Corporation described the IRA as ‘one of the most ruthless and capable insurgent forces in modern history’.³ During the 1970s and 80s, Northern Ireland and West Germany were the two most important theatres for the British Army. British generals often preferred to downplay the significance of Operation Banner, as their Northern Irish campaign was known. In fact, the conflict was far more typical of the Army’s experience after 1945 than its preparations for a hot war on the German front that never came. From the decolonization struggles of the 1950s and 60s, to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, British forces have usually found themselves pitted against irregular combatants who wage war with rifles and car bombs rather than tanks and artillery. In belated recognition of that fact, high-ranking officers have started referring to the lessons of Operation Banner, claiming that recent wars in the Middle East demonstrated ‘the particular techniques and the levels of expertise learnt through hard experience, both on the streets and in the fields of Northern Ireland’.⁴ From a very different standpoint, critical historians of the war on terror have begun to recognize the importance of Northern Ireland for any serious account of the British state’s record.⁵

Developments elsewhere have also made it easier to place the Troubles in a wider context. In the 1970s, Tom Nairn insisted that Northern Ireland should be seen not as a relic of the past, but as a portent of things to come.⁶ The resurgence of national conflicts in post-communist Europe and further afield has driven the point home. From Crossmaglen to the Caucasus, the ingredients of such conflicts are easy to identify: frontier disputes, divided populations, self-interested meddling by powerful states. Nationalism and imperialism, two of the most powerful and ubiquitous forces in modern history, are what set neighbours at each other’s throats, not atavistic hatreds. Ancestral voices do not call out to people from beyond the grave: they have to be summoned by the living to legitimize a present-day political stance.

As the title suggests, the main focus of this book is on the political movement that developed alongside the IRA in opposition to British rule. I have concentrated on the period between the first civil rights protests in 1968 and the Good Friday Agreement that drew a line of sorts under the conflict three decades later. Before reaching that point, I have included a short overview of Irish history from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s that should be helpful for those with little or no grounding in the subject. In the final chapter and epilogue, I have also addressed the period since 1998, which as yet scarcely qualifies as history.

The Irish republican movement had two main components, an underground armed wing and a legal political party, formally separate although they were often led by the same people. At the beginning of the conflict, the movement split into two rival camps, known as the Provisionals and the Officials. The Provisionals were by far the most important republican faction: in general, when referring to Sinn Féin or the IRA without any adjectives, they are the tendency I have in mind. But I will also be looking at the history of the Officials – who had their own splinter group, the Irish Republican Socialist Party – and addressing the role played by People’s Democracy, a small left-wing group that had an outsized influence on political events. In the 1970s, activists often referred to the ‘anti-imperialist movement’ as a phenomenon embracing various groups and individuals that could be said to share a common purpose. That concept offers a useful line of approach – even if the rivalry between different sections of the ‘movement’ was bitter and sometimes murderous.

There are a number of recurring themes in republican politics that transcend organizational boundaries. One is the relationship between political activity and guerrilla warfare. ‘Politics’ should be understood here in a broad sense, as something much wider than what happens in parliaments or voting booths. Malcolm X’s famous dichotomy between the ballot and the bullet has its Irish counterpart in the supposed polarization between ‘constitutional’ and ‘physical-force’ nationalism. In fact, many episodes of the struggle for national independence could not be slotted neatly into either category, from the Land League of the 1880s to the general strike against conscription in 1918, and the same can be said of more recent events.

The protest guru Gene Sharp adopted the term ‘civil resistance’ to describe his preference for Gandhian forms of agitation, but it was already commonly used by activists who prioritized mass action over armed struggle during the Troubles. Civil resistance in this sense need not be non-violent in a way that Gandhi or Sharp would have recognized, but it does not involve creating a specialized military force with its own weapons. There were three moments when civil resistance reached a peak – 1968–69, 1971–72, 1980–81 – all of which proved to be of decisive importance. The self-image of Irish republicans has often been profoundly elitist: they saw themselves as a courageous, self-sacrificing vanguard, winning freedom for the masses. In practice, it was only when republicans and others were able to mobilize those masses as a force in their own right that their efforts left a permanent mark on Irish history.

The successive attempts to blend the republican tradition with socialism form another theme. Writers have often presented Northern Ireland as a region where the writ of Marxism simply does not run. There is no question that communal identities were more important than class consciousness in shaping its political life. However, this would have come as little surprise to a Marxist as orthodox as Lenin, who dismissed the idea that national disputes would simply melt away, even in the white heat of socialist revolution: ‘By transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality “only” – “only”! – with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the “sympathies” of the population.’7

Soon after Lenin wrote that sentence, in a pamphlet that identified Ireland as ‘the touchstone of our theoretical views’ on national self-determination, the British government established new state frontiers on the island without taking the wishes of local inhabitants into account. It was entirely predictable that those frontiers would remain in contention, greatly weakening the impact of class politics. Nonetheless, socialist ideas and activism had a very tangible impact on the region’s history, and some of the most important developments stemmed from the effort to combine republican and socialist ideologies.

Influenced by Marxist perspectives, left-wing republicans had to address some fundamental questions. Was the struggle for national independence synonymous with the battle for socialism, or did one take priority over the other? How should Northern Ireland’s Protestant working class be understood – as fellow proletarians to be won over, or as settler-colonists to be defeated? The answers they supplied have lasting relevance to modern political debates.

There is always a danger of ‘presentism’ when discussing events on the island. At a time when question marks still hang over Northern Ireland’s political status, the difficulty of holding recent developments in a long-term historical perspective should be obvious. Of course, it is easier to identify this pitfall than to avoid it. I have tried to keep speculation about the region’s future trajectory to a minimum, and the approach I take to its past may help guard against an overly deterministic view of what comes next. When writing about the modern republican movement, it is only proper to give central importance to the Provisionals and their most enduring leadership team, composed of men like Gerry Adams, Danny Morrison and Martin McGuinness. But I have also kept an eye on the paths not taken, and the individuals who came to the fore at various points before exiting the stage: Cathal Goulding and Seán Garland, Seán Mac Stíofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Michael Farrell and Bernadette McAliskey, Seamus Costello and Ronnie Bunting. Northern Ireland’s history need not have been as it was, and its future will depend on conscious political choices as well as long-term structural constraints.

Note on terminology

Traditionally, Irish nationalists and republicans have preferred to speak about ‘the North of Ireland’ (or simply ‘the North’), rather than ‘Northern Ireland’, because they feel the latter term confers unwarranted legitimacy. I have used these names interchangeably throughout the text. Northern Ireland has existed in its present form for a century, and the refusal to accept its official title now seems quixotic. This does not imply approval of the way Northern Ireland was established by the British government in 1920–21, or any particular view of how its future should be determined. I have referred to Northern Ireland’s second-largest city as ‘Derry’, not ‘Londonderry’, in line with the majority preference of those who live there.