The new Provisional IRA was led by men who represented traditional, conservative, republican values, who believed that armed struggle was the only way to rid Ireland of the British presence and that parliamentary politics was an endeavor best viewed with suspicion and treated with disdain. A majority on the caretaker Army Council, and later the Army Council elected after the first IRA Convention, had seen active service during the 1956–62 campaign, and most of them came not just from the twenty-six counties that made up the Irish Republic but from predominantly rural counties as well. Only two of the seven were from the North, from where the impetus for the new IRA had come; there was no representative from Dublin, where Goulding’s influence had been strongest. They were all men, all approaching middle age, and all Catholics, some devoutly so.
No one exemplified these characteristics better than the new IRA’s chief of staff, Sean MacStiofain. The son of an Irish mother and English father who was raised in South London, MacStiofain was forty-one years old when he attained the highest rank in the IRA. He had been involved in radical Irish politics since his teenage years and became a fluent Irish speaker. Heavily influenced by his mother’s strongly nationalistic views, he joined the IRA’s English unit in 1949, at the age of twenty-one, but later moved to Ireland and eventually settled in County Meath, where he worked for the Irish language body, Conradh na Gaeilge.
Infused with the special zealotry of the convert, he angrily resisted British media attempts in the early years of the Troubles to anglicize his name to John Stephenson, the designation on his birth certificate. His arrest and imprisonment with Goulding for the Felsted raid meant that, like Goulding, he avoided the internal warring that had plagued the IRA at the end of the failed Border Campaign and escaped blame for the fiasco of 1956–62. His decision to remain inside the organization despite the differences with the Goulding leadership, meanwhile, put him at a great advantage when the split came.
The way MacStiofain chose to express his opposition to Goulding appealed to a very broad section of dissidents, not all of whom were as directly affected by the events of August 1969 as were the Belfast men. He had two celebrated clashes with Goulding, both of which endeared him to the Catholic, conservative center of the republican movement, even though each time Goulding got the better of him.
Not long after Roy Johnston had been installed as adviser to the Army Council, MacStiofain confronted Goulding with Johnston’s past membership in the Communist Party (CP) and its Irish offshoot, the Connolly Association. The IRA’s rule book, known as General Army Orders, specifically prohibited Volunteers from joining the CP; it was the product of an age in Ireland when Sunday Mass would end with a prayer for the conversion of Russia. MacStiofain demanded that Goulding dismiss Johnston, but the chief of staff stood up to him and said if Johnston went, then so would he. MacStiofain was forced to back down.1 The new IRA commander later explained why he took such a hard line: “We opposed the extreme socialism of the revisionists [the Goulding faction] because we believed that its aim was a Marxist dictatorship which would be no more acceptable to us than British imperialism or Free State capitalism.”2
Anticommunism was to become a recurring obsession of the new IRA. The editorial in the very first edition of Republican News, the Provisionals’ Belfast weekly newspaper, set the tone. Republican News, or RN, as it became known, had been set up in February 1970 by two IRA veterans, the dissident leader Jimmy Steele and Hugh McAteer, a former chief of staff from Derry. IRA men thought of it as “the Belfast Brigade newspaper.”3 Outlining the malign influence of the Goulding supporters, RN railed against them in language that would not have been out of place in a speech by Senator Joe McCarthy: “Gradually into executive posts both in the IRA and Sinn Fein, the Red agents infiltrated,” the paper complained, “and soon these men became the policy makers. Young men and girls were brainwashed with the teachings and propaganda of the new policy makers and well-trained organizers were sent into different areas to spread the teachings of the Red infiltrators.”4 The same paper, edited by someone who many years later became a leading light in the Irish Tridentine Mass movement, later described the mission of the IRA’s youth wing, na Fianna Eireann, in simple terms: “Our allegiance is to God and Ireland….”5