Official Irish Republican Army

Template:IrishRThe term Official Irish Republican Army or Official IRA refers to one of the two organisations—the other being the Provisional Irish Republican Army—that emerged from the split in the then Irish Republican Army in 1969–70. Both organisations continued to refer to themselves as the Irish Republican Army and rejected the political legitimacy of the other. The Official IRA had an essentially Marxist approach. Initially engaged in military action against the British Army, it declared an end to offensive action in 1972 but since then engaged in feuds with both the Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army, a radical splinter group formed in 1974. In later years, it was accused of involvement in organised crime, and while it has not carried out any military actions for many years it appears that it remains in existence.

The Official IRA was associated with Official Sinn Féin, later renamed Sinn Féin the Workers Party and subsequently The Workers Party, and now known as The Workers Party of Ireland.

The split in the Republican movement, 1969–1970

The shift to the left

The split in the Irish Republican Army, soon followed by a parallel split in Sinn Féin, was the result of the dissatisfaction of more traditional and militant republicans at the political direction taken by the leadership. Particular objects of their discontent were the IRA's unwillingness to engage in armed action against the British state or military defence of Catholic, nationalist areas in Northern Ireland, and Sinn Féin's ending of its policy of abstentionism in Ireland. This issue is a key one in republican ideology, as traditional republicans regarded the Irish state as illegitimate and maintained that their loyalty was due only to the Irish Republic declared in 1916 and in their view, represented by the IRA Army Council.

During the 1960s, the republican movement under the leadership of Cathal Goulding, radically re-assessed their ideology and tactics after the dismal failure of the IRA's Border Campaign in 1956-62. They were heavily influenced by popular front ideology and drew close to Communist thinking. A key intermediary body was the Communist Party of Great Britain's organisation for Irish exiles, the Connolly Association. The Marxist analysis was that the conflict in Northern Ireland was a "bourgeois nationalist" one between the Protestant and Catholic working classes, fomented and continued by the ruling class. Its effect was to depress wages, since worker could be set against worker. They concluded that the first step on the road to a 32-county Socialist Republic in Ireland was the "democratisation" of Northern Ireland (ie the removal of discrimination against Catholics) and radicalisation of the southern working class. This would allow "class politics" to develop -eventually resulting in a challenge to the hegemony of both "British imperialism" and the respective unionist and nationalist establishments North and South of the Irish border.

Goulding and those close him argued that, in the context of sectarian division in Northern Ireland, a military campaign against the British presence would be counter-productive, since it would delay the day when the workers would unite around social and economic issues.

The sense that the IRA seemed to be drifting away from its conventional republican and nationalist roots into Marxism angered the more traditional republicans. Many in the Official IRA later referred to the Provisional IRA as "the rosary brigade" because of what they saw as the Catholic and romantic nationalist ideology of the latter. Some radicals believed that the Irish government, MI5, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had conspired to cultivate the split because they were afraid of another Cuba in Europe's "back yard". The Arms Crisis provided evidence that some members of the Irish (Fianna Fáil) government had attempted to supply arms and funds to a variety of individuals in Northern Ireland. The radicals viewed Northern Protestants with unionist views as "fellow Irishmen deluded by bourgeois loyalties, who needed to be engaged in dialectical debate". As a result, they were reluctant to use force to defend Catholic areas of Belfast when they came under attack from loyalists - a role the IRA had performed since the 1920s. Since the Civil Rights marches began in 1968, there had been many cases of street violence. The Royal Ulster Constabulary had been shown on television in undisciplined baton charges, and had already killed three noncombatant civilians, one a child. The Orange Order's "marching season" during the summer of 1969 had been characterised by violence on both sides, which culminated in the two day, "Battle of the Bogside" in Derry.

August 1969 riots

The critical moment came in August 1969 when there was a major outbreak of intercommunal violence in Belfast and Derry, with tens of fatalities and whole streets ablaze. On August 14-15, loyalists, in some cases aided by the Police, burned out several Catholic streets in Belfast in the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969. In accordance with its Marxist analysis, the IRA leadership opposed armed defence of Catholic communities and very few weapons were provided for the defence of Catholic areas. Many local IRA figures, notably Joe Cahill and Billy McKee were incensed by the leadership's inaction and in September, they announced that they would no longer be taking orders from the Goulding leadership.

The IRA's failure to defend Catholic neighbourhoods during the rioting in Belfast in August 1969, also badly damaged the organisation's standing in northern nationalist areas. The letters "IRA" were derisively described as "I Ran Away" in popular graffiti of the time. Instead, many Catholics initially welcomed, Harold Wilson's decision to send in the British Army to "restore order".

Discontent was not confined to the northern IRA units. In the south also, such figures as Ruairi O Bradaigh and Sean MacStiofain opposed both the leadership's proposed recognition of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and their failure to use force in defence of northern Catholics. This increasing political divergence led to a formal split in the movement in December 1969. A troika consisting of Seán Mac Stiofáin, Dáithí Ó Conaill and Seamus Twomey together with others established themselves as a "Provisional Army Council" in 1969, when the existing IRA Army Council voted to recognise the British, Irish and Northern Ireland Parliaments as legitimate.

Initially, the 'Official IRA' retained the loyalty of most of the IRA's existing organisation. Only in Belfast and Derry were the 'Provisionals' a majority. In Belfast the Officials' only area of real strength was the Lower Falls and Markets district, which were under the command of Billy McMillen. Other OIRA units were located in Derry, Newry, Strabane, Dublin and Wicklow. However, the Provisionals would rapidly become the dominant faction, both as a result of intensive recruitment and because some Official IRA units (such as the Strabane company) later defected to them ^[1].

There was a similar ideological split in Sinn Féin after a contentious 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. The then leadership of Sinn Fein passed a motion to recognise the Parliaments in London, Dublin and Stormont but failed to attain the prerequisate two thirds majority necessary to overturn Sinn Féin's constitutional opposition to 'partitionist' assemblies. Those defeated in the motion walked out, to form Provisional Sinn Fein. The remaining party under the leadership of Tomás Mac Giolla was to contest elections first as Official Sinn Féín, then Sinn Féin The Workers Party and aligned itself with Cathal Goulding's Official IRA, as the Marxist faction came to be known. The party inherited the historic Sinn Féin headquarters of Gardiner Street, thus giving legitmacy to it, in the eyes of some, to be the the legitimate successor of that party and briefly known popularly as Sinn Féin Gardiner St. Whereas those supportive of Seán Mac Stiofáin's "Provisional Army Council" came to be known popularly as the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Féin or Sinn Féin Kevin St. That party contested elections as "Sinn Fein".

The Officials were known as the "Stickies" because they sold stick-on lilies to commemorate the Easter Rising; the Provisionals, by contrast, were known as "pinnies" (pejoratively "pinheads") because they produced pinned-on lilies. The term Stickies stuck, though pinnies (and pinheads) disappeared, in favour of the nickname "Provos" and for a time, "Provies". The paper-and-pin Easter Lily of the IRA was the traditional commemorative badge of the Easter Rising ^[2], whereas the self-adhesive Easter Lily of the Officials was a novel invention, symbolic of the divergence of opinion between them.

Impact of the split

Following the IRA split, experienced Volunteers joined the "Provisionals" rather than the "Stickies" thereby depriving the OIRA of some of its operational expertise, especially in Belfast. Initially there was much confusion among republicans on the ground, Martin McGuinness for example, joined the Official IRA in 1970, unaware that there had been a split and only later joined the Provisionals. The Provisionals launched an armed campaign against the British presence in Northern Ireland. Despite the reluctance of Cathal Goulding and the OIRA leadership, their volunteers on the ground were inevitably drawn into the violence. The Official IRA's first major confrontation with the British Army came in the Falls Curfew of July 1970, when over 3,000 British soldiers raided the Lower Falls area for arms, leading to three days of gun battles. The Official IRA members on the ground blamed the Provisionals for starting the firing and then leaving them alone to face the British. The bad feeling left by this and other incidents led to a feud between the two IRAs in 1971–72, with several killings carried out by either side.

Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin alleged in the 1990s that the Goulding leadership sought, in 1969, and received a small amount of arms (roughly 70 rifles, along with some hand guns and explosives) from the KGB, which arrived in Ireland in 1972. This has not been independently verified however. On the whole, however, the OIRA had a more restricted level of activity than the Provisionals. Unlike the Provisionals, it did not establish de facto control over large Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry and characterised its violence as "defensive". However it retained a strong presence in certain localities, notably the Lower Falls and Markets areas of Belfast.

In December 1971, the Official IRA killed Ulster Unionist Party Senator John Barnhill at his home in Strabane. This was the first murder of a politician in Ireland since the assassination of Free State Minister for Justice Kevin O'Higgins in 1927. On Bloody Sunday, an OIRA man in Derry is believed to have fired several shots with a revolver at British troops, after they had shot dead 13 nationalist demonstrators—the only republican shots fired on the day. The anger caused by Bloody Sunday in the nationalist community was such that the Official IRA announced that it would now be launching an "offensive" against the British forces.

However the OIRA declared a ceasefire later in the same year. The Official IRA ceasefire followed a number of armed actions which had been politically damaging. The organisation bombed the Aldershot headquarters of the Parachute Regiment in revenge for Bloody Sunday, but killed only seven civilians. (See 1972 Aldershot Bombing). After the unpopular killing of William Best, an 18-year-old Catholic man home in Derry on leave from the British Army, the OIRA declared a ceasefire. In addition, the death of several militant OIRA figures such as Joe McCann, in confrontations with British soldiers, enabled the Goulding leadership to call off their armed campaign, which they had never supported wholeheartedly.

The Official IRA since 1972

Although formally on ceasefire (except for "defensive actions") since 1972 (see above), the Official IRA continued some attacks on British forces up to mid 1973, killing seven British soldiers in what it termed "retaliatory attacks". In addition, the OIRA's weapons were used intermittently in the ongoing feud with the Provisionals. This flared up into violence on several occasions, notably in 1975, when the Provisionals tried to wipe out the remaining Official IRA presence in Belfast—11 republicans on either side were killed in the feud.

In 1974, radical elements within the organisation who objected to the ceasefire, led by Seamus Costello, established the Irish National Liberation Army. Another feud ensued in the first half of 1975. Three INLA and five OIRA members were killed. The dead included prominent members of both organisations including Costello and Billy McMillen. However, from the mid-1970s onwards the Official Republican Movement became increasingly focussed on achieving its aims through left-wing constitutional politics. From 1981 on, Sinn Féin the Workers Party, renamed the Workers Party the following year, had some success in the Republic of Ireland, but little in the North.

Much as the Provisionals were to find twenty years later, a commitment to armed struggle severely limited prospects for political growth and it seems reasonable to say that from no later than 1980 or so, the Officials had no effective military capacity. In later years, some former Officials were to rise to high levels in the Republic—while a few others, formerly associated with the movement, even went on to act as advisers to David Trimble. However there has been no statement of any sort to the effect of winding up the Official IRA or even the traditional republican order to "dump arms".

Throughout the 1980s, allegations that the Official IRA remained in existence and was engaged in criminal activity appeared in the Irish press. These eventually proved a considerable political embarrassment to the Workers Party, and in 1992 the leadership proposed amendments to the party constitution which would, inter alia, effectively allow it to purge members suspected of involvement in the Official IRA. This proposal failed to obtain the required two-thirds support at the party conference that year, and as a result the leadership, including six of the party's seven members of Dáil Éireann, left to establish a new party, later named Democratic Left. The Workers Party continues to exist, but it is small and not influential in Irish politics.

In the late 1990s, some former Northern based Official IRA members launched a "re-founded" Official Republican Movement, intended to pursue the socialist republican politics which the Officials espoused in the 1970s. They are not thought to advocate the use of violence however.

Most recently, there have been allegations of criminality against former senior Official IRA figure Sean Garland, who was accused in 2005 by the United States of helping to produce and circulate counterfeit US dollars out of North Korea.

Persons killed by the Official IRA

According to the Sutton database of deaths at the University of Ulster's CAIN project[1], the OIRA was responsible for 52 killings during the Troubles. Twenty-three of its victims were civilians, 17 were members of the British security forces, 11 were republican paramilitaries (including three of its own members), and one was a loyalist paramilitary.

Further information/sources

30 May 1972: "Official IRA declares ceasefire"—BBC News