The Provisional Irish Republican Army was born in December 1969 when the Dublin-based republican movement split into two factions, ostensibly over the traditional republican policy of abstensionism with regard to the Belfast, Dublin and London parliaments, but more consequentially over the issue of whether to pursue an offensive campaign in light of the arrival of the British army in Northern Ireland the previous August. One group within the pre-split IRA, led by Cathal Goulding, was reluctant to supply arms to Catholics in the North for fear of alienating the Protestant working class who were (according to its Marxist ideology) to be included in a cross-community class-based workers' revolution. The other group preferred a more aggressive response. Led by Daithi O'Connaill, Ruairí Ó'Brádaigh and Seán MacStiofáin, it rapidly became the numerically dominant faction in Northern Ireland, attracting younger recruits such as Gerry Adams in Belfast and (later) Martin McGuinness in Derry. It was O'Connaill who proposed the name ‘Provisional Irish Republican Army’ for the new breakaway group, its name echoing the ‘Provisional Government of the Irish Republic’ declared at the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916 (White 2006, p. 151). But it was MacStiofáin who best summed up the thinking of the new group: ‘You've got to have military victory first and then politicize the people afterwards. To say you've got to unite the Catholic and Protestant working class is just utter rubbish’ (Smith 1995, p. 95).