The Politics of Illusion. Henry Patterson

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СКАЧАТЬ from the IRA who had asked for his co-operation or connivance in the planned campaign that he thought partition could not be ended by force.²³⁰ As the futile campaign sputtered on, producing only internment (eventually over 250 people were interned in Northern Ireland) and a massive mobilisation of the police and 13,000 B Specials,²³¹ interest and sympathy evaporated. In July 1957, after the IRA had killed an RUC man in County Armagh, internment was introduced in the Republic and nearly 200 men were rounded up.²³² Catholic disillusionment was plain in the Westminster election in October 1959, when the Sinn Féin vote slumped by more than half.²³³ In the Republic the Sinn Féin vote in the 1961 general election declined to 36,393 for 21 candidates – 3 per cent – and only one was elected.²³⁴

      The IRA’s Army Council had addressed an appeal to the Protestants of Northern Ireland to support the independence movement, in the very midst of its military campaign.²³⁵ The exotic futility of this gesture should not obscure the nagging doubts and suspicions which some southern republicans had about a too-direct mobilisation of the forces of grievance and traditional animosity which existed in the Catholic population in the north. It is still unclear whether, as some claim, a decision was made not to include the Belfast IRA in the campaign, so as to avoid the possibility of sectarian conflict,²³⁶ or whether Belfast’s non-involvement reflected fears that its personnel were too well known to the police.²³⁷ What is clear is that the order from the IRA GHQ that all possible steps had to be taken to avoid shooting members of the part-time Protestant constabulary – the B Specials – was intensely unpopular with northern IRA men and their sympathisers.²³⁸ Regarded by the government and the Protestant population as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the state, with a detailed knowledge of their Catholic neighbours, the Specials were the focus of much fear and animosity. Attacks on the Specials were opposed on the basis that their deep roots in local Protestant communities would ensure that such attacks would provoke bitter sectarian animosities. As the IRA campaign reeled under its own futilities and the introduction of internment north and south, some began to query the wisdom of excluding action that would at least restore flagging Catholic interest and support.

      Ironically, it was Seán Cronin, whose original plan had effectively marginalised the appeal to Catholic communalism, who in 1959 appeared willing to contemplate the risky venture of a Belfast campaign. By then the leadership was bitterly divided over whether the campaign should be called off, with Cronin to the fore in pressing for its continuance. He hoped to ensure revival through a sharp change in focus from the border areas to Belfast. Sean Garland, a survivor of the campaign’s most martyrogenic action, the attack on Brookeborough RUC station, was chosen to mobilise the Belfast IRA. Disguised as a Glasgow university student but largely ignorant of the city and its republican sub-culture, he had just enough time to discover widespread demoralisation before he was arrested and gaoled in the Crumlin Road prison, where his mission was received with sullen resentment by the many IRA prisoners who regarded the campaign as by then an obvious and definitive failure.²³⁹

      For some in the Belfast IRA, the failure of ‘Operation Harvest’ stemmed directly from its fastidiousness. As the national leadership settled its divisions by intrigue – Cronin was displaced by an organised letter-writing campaign from Irish-America which used anti-communism and other disreputable charges against his radical American wife²⁴⁰ – the remaining republicans in Crumlin Road speculated on what, if anything, their future might be. Attempts to politicise such discussion were received with hostility.²⁴¹ More typical would have been the jocular remark of a future leading Belfast Provisional that a military campaign of the 1956 sort was ‘no use’ and that the only way forward was to ‘shoot a lot of priests and ministers’, thus ensuring a strong communal base for the IRA in the resulting sectarian polarisation.²⁴² Such sentiments reflected a stubborn reality of the northern situation which the idealist rhetoric of ‘Wolfe Tone’ republicanism found hard to recognise, let alone deal with.

      4 A Limited Reassessment: The IRA after 1962

      In June 1963 an incident occurred in Belfast which epitomised the contradictory impulses at the heart of republicanism as it sought to recover from the failure of the border campaign. A march was to be held to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Wolfe Tone’s birth. It was part of a series of activities organised by the Wolfe Tone Society, which had emerged from discussions between Cathal Goulding, Seán Cronin and Dick Roche in Dublin and a small group of republicans, nationalists and labourites there and in Belfast.²⁴³ In Belfast, the urge behind the Wolfe Tone Society – to create a broad coalition of ‘progressive’ and ‘nationally-minded’ forces – ran up against the brutal wall of communal assertiveness. The Belfast IRA had been asked to act as a colour party, but when the police forbade the carrying of an Irish tricolour, the IRA commander in Belfast, Billy McKee, assented. This decision was bitterly contested by the bulk of Belfast IRA men and, despite Goulding’s attempt to mediate, McKee was forced to resign and was replaced by Billy McMillen. A march inspired by a strategy apparently aimed at building a new ‘anti-imperialist’ alliance to include at least a section of the Protestant community would in fact herald a period of intensifying conflict between the police and republicans on an issue that could reinvigorate communal solidarity amongst Catholics but left even progressive Protestants cold.²⁴⁴

      Goulding was now Chief of Staff of the IRA, his reputation for leftism notwithstanding. Imprisonment in England during the first three years of the border campaign meant that he was untainted by its failure and, in any case, the general demoralisation was such that no one else wanted the job.²⁴⁵ The Army Convention in 1962, at which his tenure commenced, marked the beginning of a process of assessment of the state of the IRA and a reassessment of the history of the republican movement. For Goulding, such a reassessment meant, in part, a return to the debates of the inter-war period, with the aim of reconstituting the IRA as a vanguard of social republicanism. It was in this context that he made overtures to intellectuals outside the IRA. The nature of this external input has been the subject of bitter controversy, but little useful information or analysis has been forthcoming. The split in the IRA and Sinn Féin in 1969-70 would see Goulding’s opponents claim that he had allowed ‘Marxists’ to take effective strategic direction of the republican movement. These claims have been somewhat uncritically repeated in Bishop and Mallie’s history of the Provisionals.²⁴⁶ What was the significance of these external influences?

      The two key individuals involved in this process were Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston. Both had lived in England and been involved there in the activities of the Connolly Association, which had emerged from the disintegrating Republican Congress. A London branch reconstituted itself as a Connolly Club, and this was subsequently revived by an influx of Irish International Brigaders.²⁴⁷ Its monthly paper, the Irish Democrat, had been edited since 1947 by Desmond Greaves, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and author of a major, if tendentious, biography of Connolly.²⁴⁸ Under his leadership the Connolly Association concentrated on organising among Irish emigrants with two principal aims: ‘first their own defence, second the freedom of their country’.²⁴⁹ It also sought to influence the British labour movement away from what was seen as its dangerous mixture of apathy and pro-Unionism on the Irish question.

      During the border campaign the Connolly Association concentrated on attacking the Unionist government for interning republicans and began to press the British government to use its power under the Government of Ireland Act to legislate for civil rights in Northern Ireland.²⁵⁰ As early as 1955, the Irish Democrat had put forward the idea of a civil rights campaign as the way to shatter Ulster Unionism.²⁵¹ For a year in 1960-61 Coughlan acted as a full-time organiser for the Connolly Association, promoting ‘anti-Unionist political activity in Britain’,²⁵² including a march from London to Birmingham to raise the issue of British acquiescence in Unionist rule.²⁵³ A graduate of University College, Cork, who had been in London from 1958 doing post-graduate work, Coughlan returned to a lectureship in social administration in Trinity College, Dublin, in 1961. He was a fervent republican in the sense that he saw the central issue of Irish politics as the completion of СКАЧАТЬ