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The Provisional IRA: An Assessment in the Wake of the 1981 Hunger Strike

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Paul Wilkinson
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Extract

THE PROVISIONAL IRA (PIRA) IS THE OFFSPRING OF THE IRISH Republican Army which played such a leading part in the war for Irish independence, 1919–21. Its leaders claim to be the true inheritors of the Irish Republican tradition of struggle against the British, determined to complete the task by expelling the British presence once and for all and thus to ‘liberate’ the whole of Ireland by reunifying north and south and establishing a PIRA socialist state.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1982 , pp. 140 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1982

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References

1 For comprehensive and authoritative histories of the earlier phases of IRA history see Coogan, T. P., I. R. A., London, Pall Mall Press, 1970 Google Scholar and Bowyer Bell, J., The Secret Army: The IRA 1916–1974, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1974.Google Scholar

2 See Majoribanks, Edward and Colvin, Ian, The Life of Lord Carson, 3 vols., 1932–36Google Scholar, and Montgomery Hyde, H., Carson, 1953.Google Scholar

3 See Calton Younger, Ireland's Civil War, 1968.

4 Among the many accounts of the re‐emergence of armed conflict in 1969–70 three very different perspectives are provided by: Rose, Richard, Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice, London, Macmillan, 1976;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kelly, Henry, How Stormont Fell, Dublin, Gill Macmillan, 1972;Google Scholar and Sunday Times Insight Team, Ulster, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972.

5 See, for example, An Phoblacht, 12 April 1977, 15 June 1977, and 17 October 1981.

6 Contro Informazione, November, 1978.

7 In an interview with II Giornale Nuovo, Milan, 2 September 1979.

8 See, for example, report by James Allan, ‘Dublin IRA “armchair generals” lose power to Belfast’, Daily Telegraph, 5 June 1981.

9 Sterling, Claire, The Terror Network, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981, p. 170.Google Scholar

10 Irish World, 28 August 1880.

11 New York Times, 6 January 1981.

12 FBI written evidence filed in the Federal court, Brooklyn, November 1981, in the case of the U. S. Government versus Mr. Martin Flannery and three other persons.

13 Quoted in Claire Sterling, op cit., p. 160.

14 For reviews of the role of the PLO in international terrorism see, for example: Laffin, John, Fedayeen, London, Cassell, 1978;Google Scholar Sobel, Lester A. ed., Palestinian Impasse: Arab Guerrillas and International Terror, New York, Facts on File, 1977;Google Scholar and Golan, Galia, The Soviet Union and the PLO, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1977.Google Scholar

15 See reports of the confession by Patrizio Peci published in Corriere della Sera and II Giornale Nuovo, 16 April 1980.

16 Interview given by Gerry Adams to Time magazine, published 18 November, 1979.

17 Irish Times, 12 August, 1981.

18 As Maria McGuire, the former Provisional activist, wrote in her memoirs: ‘All along they (PIRA) had believed that by terrorizing the civilian population you increased their desire for peace and blackmailed the British Government into negotiating… All the Provisions knew was to bomb’. To Take Arms, London, Macmillan, 1973.

19 For discussions of the problems of finding an appropriate liberal democratic response to the terrorism in Northern Ireland see the author's Terrorism and the Liberal State, London, Macmillan, 1977, pp. 121–70 and his Terrorism versus Liberal Democracy: the problems of response, London, Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1976; and Robin Evelegh, Peacekeeping in a Democratic Society, London, Charles Knight, 1979.

20 This continues to be one of PIRA's major worries. In December 1981 their weekly newspaper An Phoblacht admitted the bitter blow inflicted on their organization by one of their most trusted men who they said had ‘betrayed over twenty of his people’ to the authorities.