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Soldiering Against Subversion. Dan Harvey
Читать онлайн.Название Soldiering Against Subversion
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isbn 9781785371875
Автор произведения Dan Harvey
Издательство Ingram
The Provisional IRA’s strategy was to target the Stormont regime and force the British protecting power to use its own troops in counter-insurgency operations. The measures taken by the British troops would then operate to keep the political temperature of the dissident community at a level favourable to the Provisional IRA.
Catholic Nationalists, already externally under siege, were now to come under the internal influence of the Provisional IRA. Catholic youths were vulnerable to Provisional IRA propaganda, and were ripe for radicalisation. The veteran IRA recruiters gave Catholic youths a ‘cause’ in defence of their own areas. Unfortunately, the uncompromising Unionists and the British army played right into the narrative in a way unimagined by their recruiters. Young men and women were driven into PIRA and sympathy was generated for them and their military across the Catholic communities.
Now community-based with widespread support, PIRA generated a reputation that ensured even those opposed to them would not cross them. The lack of real access to Catholic communities made it difficult for the RUC Special Branch to identify members. Rotation of British army units unskilled in counter-terrorism made the army a very blunt instrument. Those who called for stronger military action, the commitment of more troops, internment without trial, curfews and the like, ought to have borne in mind that they were behaving as the Provisional IRA’s strategy called for them to behave.
These measures brought mounting costs: moral, military, political and psychological; and it was these, not the insurgent operation itself, which was expected in due course to modify the political will of the protecting power – the British. Thus, every measure of military escalation was, in a sense, a success for those who provoked it – PIRA.
The Provisional IRA was highly organised. Overall charge was executed by the seven member Army Council, an army executive which in turn was elected by the General Army Convention (GAC). Made up of delegates from the brigades, the GAC met infrequently and the Army Council was considered by republicans to be the de jour government of Ireland. The Chief-of-Staff (appointed by the Army Council) was supported by General Headquarters (GHQ) staff, comprising of a Director of each department: Intelligence, Operations, Training, Engineering, Finance, Security, Publicity, Research and the all-important Quartermaster.
Territorially, there were two commands: Northern and Southern. The ‘War Zone’, Northern Command, comprised eleven counties (the Six Counties and five border counties) and Quartermastering Support. Southern Command was comprised of the remaining twenty-one counties, and was involved with all the provisioning, supplying and logistical facilitation of operations, both in the War Zone, England and Europe. Training, bomb-making, financing, weapon importation, storage and transportation and anything else in producing the capacity to sustain the ‘cause’.
There were a number of consciously constructed operational phases and evolving game plans which gave the Provisional IRA purpose, direction and momentum over the years of the Troubles:
• Defence (‘Area Defence’)
• Offence (‘One Big Push’)
• The ‘Long War’
• Bombs, Bullets and Ballot Boxes
• Dirty War
• Stalemate, Standstill and ‘One Final Push’
• Peace Process
• Bombing Britain
• The Good Friday agreement
The ‘Quick Victory’ of the early 1970s was not realised and a war of attrition took hold. There were several other critical periods during the conflict and many changes occurred as PIRA were faced with rapidly changing political realities. Sometimes the military establishment were at odds with its political masters, with all sides becoming more sophisticated over time.
If the British security forces were combatting terror, then their Irish counterparts south of the border were mounting a containment operation. The Provisional IRA killed 15 people in 1970, 89 in 1971 and in 1972, the worst year of the Troubles, the so-called ‘Year of Victory’, – they killed 243 people in a concerted and terrifying shooting and bombing campaign.
The televised rioting, the burnt-out Catholic homes, internment and Bloody Sunday all became rallying points around which PIRA built a support network for fundraising and arms supply – particularly in America, but elsewhere also. It was all powerful propaganda, and recruits, arms and money followed.
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The hard fact is that in guerrilla war the enemy holds the initiative for large parts of the time and information is the key to his defeat.
(Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo,
GOC Northern Ireland, 1971–3.)
The British army implemented the political will of the Stormont and Westminster governments in arresting and detaining IRA suspects during ‘Operation Demetrius’ on 9 August 1971, a course of action advised against by Lieutenant General Tuzo. However, a British army Press Officer with 39 Infantry Brigade stated at the Operation’s beginning: ‘Today is the beginning of the end of the IRA … without the head the body will simply thrash around and eventually die ….’ However, many IRA leaders had slipped the net and internment soon became an unmitigated disaster. Violence escalated and ‘for every one we picked up, we have recruited 10 for the IRA’. A new generation of republicans had taken up the struggle.
As well as being ‘at war’ with the British, the IRA was also at war with itself; following the December 1969 split between the ‘Red’ Marxist Official IRA, under Cathal Goulding, and the ‘Green’ militaristic Provisional IRA under Seán Mac Stíofáin. The Provisional IRA was convinced that only physical force would drive the British out of Northern Ireland, a campaign that went into overdrive during 1971 and reached its peak in terms of deaths in 1972, when the Officials (or ‘stickies’ as they were known because that was how they applied the Easter Lily emblems on their lapels at Easter time, the Provisionals preferring to use a pin) called a ceasefire. But not before they had bombed the headquarters of the Parachute regiment at Aldershot, England, killing seven (including five canteen staff members) in reprisal for Bloody Sunday.
By any normal standards, 1972 was a grim year in terms of bombings, shootings and the number of fatalities. In July alone there were 200 explosions, 2,800 shootings and 95 deaths. But for the Provisional IRA, now sixteen months in existence, it gave cause for great self-belief, not least their 7 July secret high-level meeting with William Whitelaw, Secretary for Northern Ireland, in 96 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London. With Stormont abolished, direct rule (from London) was instigated and law and order was firmly placed under British Government and military control. A ceasefire called on 26 June, then ten days old and holding, was the backdrop to the talks. The assembled delegation consisted of Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell, Seán Mac Stíofáin, Martin McGuinness, Dáithí Ó Conaill, Seamus Twomey and an observer, the Dublin solicitor Myles Shevlin. The meeting proved inconclusive, the Provisional IRA’s demands were too much for the British, and the ceasefire was over within 72 hours. A confrontation occurred at Belfast’s Lenadoon housing estate when Catholic families were prevented from being rehoused in vacated Protestant houses. The image of a British army Saracen armoured car suddenly ramming a truck piled high with the Catholic families’ furniture was broadcasted widely and internationally.
The Provisional IRA sensed a final victory and they ‘escalated, escalated, escalated’ their campaign up yet another gear. On