The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA)

While perhaps no longer relevant with more notorious groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, be it in current activity or geographic location, the Provisional Irish Republican Army serves as a good example of a more tightly knit terrorist group that covers only a small geographic region. The Provisional Irish Republican Army is a paramilitary group located in Northern Ireland, who used to operate throughout, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, Great Britain, and Europe, with their tactics consisting of the use of bombings, assassinations, kidnapping, extortion, and robberies; and perhaps are best known for their strategy “The Long War” before their cease-fire in 1994. The group had about 10,000 members of their 30-year period, along with several thousand
sympathizers.
The Provisional Irish Republican Army, whom from this point forward will be referred to as PIRA, originally drew their morals and justification for armed conflict from an ideology which suggests that armed conflict is a necessity, and that blood sacrifice and martyrdom should be ennobled. The movement itself may have originally derived from the core republican belief in ‘Ireland’s destiny’, a manifest that “it is the Irish people’s God-given destiny to achieve the united independent thirty-two country Irish republic proclaimed in 1916” (The Provisional Irish Republican Army and Morality of Terrorism, pg 57). However, toward the end of their activity, the Provisional Republic had undergone a change toward more traditional republican ideology. At its core, PIRA’s ideology is Irish republicanism; a belief that Ireland should become an independent republic, which emerged as a result of their opposition to British rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under the Act of Union of 1801.
PIRA originally formed as a sort of successor to the original Irish Republican Army (IRA), and as a result were widely known as such.
What brought about the formation of this group was a conflict between the Catholic residents of Bogside and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in Derry/Londonderry, in Northern Ireland; this lead to what is now known as the Battle of Bogside, a three day battle between rioters and police. At that time, the original IRA had been poorly armed, and as a result was seen as inadequate, not helped at all by republican veterans’ critical view of the current IRA’s Dublin leadership, which had refused to prepare for the violence. Consequently, this lead to a formation of the “Provisional” Army Council by traditional republicans in December of 1969, following an IRA Army convention in Boyle, County
Roscommon.
Early on in their activity, PIRA’s initial strategy was the use of force to collapse the government of Northern Ireland, and to force the British into withdrawing from the region. This campaign was given arms and funding in support from Libya, and some Irish American groups; their movement gained an increase in traction after the 1972 Bloody Sunday Incident, in which British forces killed unarmed protesters. While not credited for it explicitly, in March of 1972, is it believed PIRA set a bomb inside the Belfast Abercorn Restaurant, the carnage that ensued from the resulting exploding culminated in the deaths of 2 young women, 136 men, and reported injury from women and children. Following this incident, the IRA said they would suspend all military operations for seven days if they were invited to Whitelaw, after which the Secretary of State publicly rejected their offer, saying “he ‘could not respond to ultimatums from terrorists who are causing suffering to innocent civilians in Northern Ireland and shooting British troops’” (Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, pg 157). Regardless, the British and the IRA pursued more peaceful encounters, leading to an eventual ceasefire, however temporary; the PIRA would not see their “end” until 2005.
PIRA’s early tactics focused largely on the use of stone-throwing and the occasional petrol bomb, but as the group progressed, their scope of technological use eventually went beyond the use of guns and bombs, and became known for a wide variety of tactics.
Toward the end of their operations, they were known for counterterrorism officials, for using “more than 30 varieties of weapons – including mortars and rockets – as well as numerous methods to lay and detonate explosives, advanced sniper tactics, etc.” (Aptitude for Destruction: Case Studies of Organizational Learning in Five Terrorist Groups, pg. 97). In regards to the use of explosives in particular, the PIRA employed the use of both Remote Manual detonation, and Automatic Detonation, their use of remote detonation in particular mostly consisted of burying command wires, allowing their bombers to set them off from a fairly long distance; and often took advantage of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, to avoid pursuit after their
attacks. While largely regarded as terrorist, the activities of PIRA after 1997 had changed in the eyes of their peers from “terrorists” to “freedom fighters”, most notably by the Secretary of State of Northern Ireland, Peter Mandelson; this change largely followed after their change to end their armed campaign. While the impact they had on Britain and Ireland’s political situation is arguable, their tactics certainly left some sort of mark. In a way I can sort of understand the shift in view from “terrorists” to “freedom fighters”, but I find their methods questionable to say the least; at any rate, they did garner a fairly large number of sympathizers during their 30-year campaign. I suppose what I found most fascinating about this group was their tight knit ‘community’ and smaller geographical area of operations.