One Man's Terrorist Read online

  The Belfast republican Billy McMillen later described the shattering impact of the campaign’s failure upon the movement: ‘The IRA had to face the fact that armed resistance to British rule in the North was getting the cold shoulder from the overwhelming mass of the Irish people.’ In the immediate aftermath, McMillen recalled, many IRA Volunteers ‘succumbed to the general feeling of hopelessness and despair and drifted off to attempt to build their personal lives again’. For those who remained, ‘the task of rebuilding the organization in the face of paralysing apathy and lack of support from the ordinary people was a daunting one.’1

  Confronted with this challenge, the leadership team that crystallized around Goulding decided to broaden the focus of the movement and tilt it sharply to the left. Republicans would no longer confine themselves to preparation for a guerrilla campaign against British rule in the North. In addition to their clandestine work, IRA members were now expected to take part in open political activity, performing a new role as social agitators. Their goal was to organize a mass movement among workers and small farmers that could overthrow the two Irish states, north and south, and replace them with an all-Ireland socialist republic.

  The IRA’s house publication, An tÓglách, called for a determined struggle against those ‘moneylords depending on the British connection for support’ who still ruled Ireland half a century after the Rising: ‘The essence of Tone and Connolly’s teaching is that the freedom of the Irish people can only be achieved through a complete break with the British Empire (under any name) and that the only power capable of achieving and maintaining that freedom is a National Movement led by the Irish working class.’2 Goulding and his associates began to criticize much of the republican tradition as it had developed since 1916, with the help of survivors from the previous generation. George Gilmore, who had taken part in the ill-fated Republican Congress experiment of the 1930s, contributed a series of articles to the United Irishman calling for a return to the politics of James Connolly.3

  The IRA leadership used carefully chosen quotations from Wolfe Tone and Patrick Pearse to legitimize their freshly minted socialist ideology, stressing its continuity with the republican heritage. However, there could be no mistaking their political innovations. Operation Harvest had been exclusively northern in its scope, but much of the agitational work conducted by republicans now took place south of the Irish border. Goulding insisted that confrontation with the Dublin establishment, and with the ‘economic imperialism’ of foreign capitalists, was just as important as the struggle against British rule in the North: ‘While the IRA faced North, its sole aim being the ending of partition, the salesmen of imperialism aided by their native servants commenced a systematic takeover of Irish assets, a systematic speculation in Irish money, Irish manpower, Irish land. The Army guarded a frontier while the imperialists quietly entered by another and laid claim to Ireland.’4

  Kieran Conway, a university student who joined the movement in the late 1960s, has described the charismatic aura of its most influential leaders: ‘Cathal Goulding, Seán Garland and Seamus Costello were living, visible, here-and-now revolutionaries, who had done prison time, or carried the scars of British bullets on their bodies, unlike the dead and distant heroes of the other left-wing groups.’5 Seán Garland, like Goulding, came from a working-class background in Dublin’s north inner city. He had been seriously wounded during the Border Campaign while leading an attack on an RUC barracks in Fermanagh. Two of Garland’s comrades were killed during the raid, each inspiring a celebrated folk song. His reputation for toughness, both physical and ideological, was to be greatly reinforced in the years to come. Seamus Costello was also a veteran of Operation Harvest: after leading an IRA unit on a cross-border raid as a teenager, he was nicknamed ‘the Boy General’, and the loss of a finger in a training accident added to his mystique. Youthful, good-looking and highly articulate, Costello became a poster boy for the movement’s political turn, winning a council seat in his native Wicklow after building up a local base through energetic community activism.

  The president of Sinn Féin, Tomás Mac Giolla, did not have the same military profile as Garland or Costello, although he had also been interned during Operation Harvest and now served as chairman of the IRA’s central authority, the Army Council.6 After some initial hesitation, he became a strong supporter of Goulding’s left turn. As a university graduate, Mac Giolla was an exception to the rule in the IRA leadership, where self-taught men like Goulding and Garland held sway. When the Border Campaign lurched to a halt, Peter Berry, a senior official at Dublin’s Department of Justice, disdainfully referred to IRA Volunteers as ‘men of limited education and poor personality who have made no particular mark in their jobs and private lives’.7 Cathal Goulding would have despised Berry’s elitism, but he was keen to recruit some college-trained intellectuals who could give the movement’s new platform a more elaborate theoretical foundation. Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston stepped forward to play that role. Johnston, the son of an Ulster Presbyterian who had taken a lonely stand against Unionism during the Home Rule Crisis, became the IRA’s director of education.

  Opposition to Goulding’s new departure soon began to emerge. Some veterans drifted away from the movement, while other leading figures continued to oppose Goulding from within. Two of the most important dissenters were the IRA’s director of intelligence, Seán Mac Stíofáin, and Goulding’s predecessor as chief of staff, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. Mac Stíofáin, born in England of part-Irish descent, had served in the Royal Air Force before joining the IRA. He was arrested in 1953 on the same arms procurement venture that had landed Cathal Goulding in jail, and got to know members of the Cypriot revolutionary group EOKA while serving time in Pentonville Prison. Ó Brádaigh had seen action during the Border Campaign and now worked as a schoolteacher in Roscommon, a poor, largely rural county in Ireland’s west. Both men held positions on the Army Council.

  In many cases, the resistance to Goulding stemmed from conservative political attitudes held by IRA members. Others simply believed that the IRA should concentrate on the struggle for national independence and steer clear of ‘divisive’ social questions. However, some traditional republicans also held the new platform responsible for a perceived slackening of commitment to armed struggle. After bubbling beneath the surface for several years, this current of opinion was forcefully articulated in July 1969 by a well-known Belfast republican, Jimmy Steele, at the reinterment of two IRA men who had been hanged in Britain during the Second World War. Steele pointedly heaped praise on those who ‘went forth to carry the fight to the enemy, into enemy territory; using the only methods that will ever succeed, not the method of the politicians, nor the constitutionalists, but the method of soldiers, the method of armed force’. In Goulding’s new-look IRA, he added contemptuously, ‘one is now expected to be more conversant with the teachings of Chairman Mao than those of our dead patriots.’8

  Of course, there was a certain irony in Steele’s invective, as the movement led by Mao had not shown any reluctance to use force in pursuit of its objectives and was now a leading sponsor of armed struggle in the Third World. The IRA itself discreetly petitioned Mao’s government for support in the 1960s, although Chinese diplomats snubbed its emissary Seamus Costello.9 Cathal Goulding rejected claims that the movement had turned its back on guerrilla warfare. Speaking at an IRA commemoration in 1965, he gave the following assurance to supporters: ‘The only way to rid this country of an armed British force is to confront them with an armed force of Irishmen backed by a united Irish people. The British forces in the Six Counties will be confronted by such a force.’10 At Bodenstown two years later, Goulding stressed that there was no contradiction between armed struggle and political action: ‘The will to use military force does not exclude the use before or at the same time of other forces both political and social, to the realization of the same end.’11

  A similar message could be found in a confidential IRA document obtained by the Irish governm
ent when its police force arrested Seán Garland in 1966. Although Garland’s paper warned that ‘classic guerrilla-type operations cannot be successful’, it went on to recommend a different type of insurgency in the North, with operations ‘designed to inflict as many fatal casualties as possible’ on the British Army: ‘We must learn from the Cypriots and engage in terror tactics only.’12

  The movement’s ideological baggage made it harder to discuss such matters without confusion. For many republicans, after the apostasy of Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera and Seán MacBride, ‘politics’ was a dirty word, and only those who bore arms for the Republic could be trusted to follow the right path. Garland’s blueprint may have been partly designed to appease men like Seán Mac Stíofáin, who worried that the movement was drifting away from its true vocation. Mac Stíofáin would still have been troubled by the document’s stress on the need to build a political movement ‘with an open organization and legal existence’ as the precursor to any ‘extra-legal’ action.13

  Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was more sympathetic to the idea of political agitation as a complement to the IRA’s traditional role. He had stood for election to the Dáil during the Border Campaign and won a seat on an abstentionist platform. But Ó Brádaigh personified a type of republican for whom abstention from the assemblies in Dublin, Belfast and London was not merely a tactic but a sacrosanct principle. From his perspective, the IRA’s right to wage war derived from its claim to represent strict legal continuity with the Second Dáil of 1921. Whatever leeway might exist for tactical innovation in other fields, there could be no flexibility on this point.

  As a result, when Goulding and his allies broached the question of taking seats in parliament, there was bound to be a strong backlash from traditionalists. Seamus Costello was one of the strongest voices calling for the policy of abstention to be discarded. Goulding and Garland later argued that he was needlessly abrasive, alienating people who might otherwise have been won over.14 But Costello combined this view with a firm belief in the necessity of armed struggle, as he made clear when speaking at Bodenstown in 1966: ‘To imagine that we can establish a republic solely by constitutional means is utter folly. The lesson of history shows that in the final analysis, the robber baron must be disestablished by the same methods that he used to enrich himself and retain his ill-gotten gains.’

  For Costello, it was essential to maintain ‘a disciplined armed force which will always be ready to strike at the opportune moment’.15 Seán Garland had a similar message at Wolfe Tone’s graveside two years later, where he urged the IRA to embrace a new role. The movement’s open, political wing was expected to function as ‘a bridge between the underground activities of the army and the people’, while the IRA itself provided the necessary muscle: ‘It must be ready to defend a revolution in the making, to defend the people who are agitating for their rights.’16

  The Orange State

  For all the bombast of its leaders, Goulding’s new model army was more of an irritant than an existential threat to the ruling class in Dublin. Its supporters took part in direct action of various kinds, from ‘fish-ins’ on the property of foreign landowners to the occupation of vacant buildings.17 There was a gradual increase in IRA membership in the South as it recovered from the low point of the early 60s, rising from 657 in 1962 to 1,039 four years later, according to police estimates.18 However, Goulding had no illusions about the movement’s overall strength: ‘A famous revolutionary once said: “A guerrilla must move through his people like a fish moves through water.” We, I think, moved through our people like fish through a desert.’19

  The internal debate on abstention had not been resolved in time for the Irish general election of 1969. Even if it had, Sinn Féin would have struggled to make an impression. Popular opinion in the South did shift towards the left in the late 1960s, but only to a limited extent, and in any case the Irish Labour Party was harvesting the fruits of that turn, having shed some of its rhetorical timidity and promised to break the mould of Irish politics. Labour won its highest-ever vote share in the 1969 election, but Fianna Fáil still comfortably outpaced its rival after a red-baiting campaign.20 At a time when political turbulence rocked much of Western Europe, the Republic of Ireland appeared to be an oasis of stability.

  Its northern neighbour presented a very different prospect. The political system in Northern Ireland was much less flexible, and the potential for republican agitation to disrupt the status quo much greater. The Unionist Party had held power at Stormont, the regional assembly, without interruption for almost half a century: between 1920 and 1969, there were just four prime ministers, two of whom served for twenty years each. When Basil Brooke took the helm in 1943, he warned that a post in the Northern Irish cabinet ‘is not, and should not be, a life appointment’, but did little to dispel that impression over the years that followed.21 There was no clear line of demarcation between the Northern Irish government, the Unionist Party and the Orange Order. Between 1921 and 1969, all but three cabinet ministers and all but eleven of the ruling party’s MPs were Orangemen at the time of their election.22 The first Unionist prime minister, James Craig, abolished proportional representation for elections to Stormont in 1929, having already done so for local councils in 1923. His aim, openly stated, was to ensure that every regional poll would be a referendum on partition, with all other questions pushed to one side.23

  In local government, Unionists made extensive use of gerrymandering to maintain their control in areas like Fermanagh and Derry City where there was a nationalist majority.24 The restriction of the local-government franchise to property owners served as another barrier to nationalist participation, as Catholics were more likely than Protestants to rent their homes. When the Nationalist Party put down a motion at Stormont calling for universal suffrage in 1958, the Unionist politician Brian Faulkner remarked in a private conclave that it was ‘quite obvious’ why such reforms were unacceptable, although the sectarian logic could not be stated openly: ‘The real reason behind it is Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh.’25

  If opposition developed outside the electoral field, the Special Powers Act of 1922 gave Northern Ireland’s government the authority to ban newspapers and demonstrations, and to intern suspects without trial. The Act even gave Stormont’s home affairs minister the power to criminalize any act ‘not specifically provided for in the regulations’ that he considered to be ‘prejudicial to the preservation of the peace’.26 A part-time force known as the B Specials backed up the full-time Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). In the late 1960s, the RUC was nine-tenths Protestant, the Specials almost exclusively so. Both were armed.27

  Protestants had a much greater share of professional, managerial and skilled-manual jobs, while Catholics tended to occupy unskilled posts if they were employed at all. In 1971, Catholic men were two-and-a-half times more likely to be out of work than their Protestant counterparts.28 Less than 5 per cent of the workforce in Belfast’s iconic shipyards was Catholic.29 Unionist politicians regularly issued warnings that the minority should be kept out of sensitive posts. In 1933, the future prime minister Basil Brooke boasted to supporters that as a businessman, ‘he had not a Roman Catholic about his place’, urging his fellow employers to remain vigilant against those who ‘were endeavouring to get in everywhere and were out with all their force and might to destroy the power and constitution of Ulster’.30 Emigration levels reflected the economic disparity: between 1926 and 1981, the annual rate of departure for Catholics was more than twice that for Protestants.31 This had the happy effect, from the Unionist perspective, of counteracting a higher birth rate among Catholics, otherwise their share of the population would have been almost 5 per cent greater.32

  The law that established the machinery of government in Northern Ireland made it clear that ultimate jurisdiction lay with Westminster. However, British politicians preferred to overlook this clause and leave the Unionists free to govern as they saw fit. For many years it was the convention at Westminster to ban all di
scussion of Northern Irish affairs. Britain’s political class had the best of both worlds, with full control over Northern Ireland’s territory – which proved to be of vital strategic importance during the Second World War – but no responsibility for its day-to-day affairs. When the Irish state left the Commonwealth in 1949, Clement Attlee’s government quickly passed a bill guaranteeing there would be no change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status against the will of Stormont. It made no attempt to push through local government reform as a quid pro quo from the Unionist administration, claiming, wrongly, that such matters lay beyond its remit. A group of backbench Labour MPs, the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, set out to disrupt this consensus in the 1960s, but Harold Wilson ignored their calls for intervention after his accession to Downing Street.33

  The most significant challenge to the Unionist Party at the ballot box came from the Northern Irish labour movement. Communal divisions had not squeezed class conflict out of the picture altogether. In the 1930s, a communist-led movement of jobless workers briefly forged a pan-sectarian alliance to demand action against unemployment. During the Second World War, Northern Ireland accounted for 10 per cent of all working days lost to strikes, despite having just 2 per cent of the UK’s total workforce.34 That surge left its mark on the first post-war election, when the vote for Labour candidates jumped from 7.5 per cent in 1938 to almost 32 per cent seven years later.35 Working-class discontent drove Basil Brooke to accept the social reforms introduced by Attlee’s government after 1945, at a time when some Unionist politicians wanted to loosen ties with Westminster so they could maintain the pre-war status quo.36 The challenge to Unionist hegemony faded during the 1950s, but started to recover again in the last years of Brooke’s premiership. In 1962, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) won four seats in Belfast with over 40 per cent of the vote.37