The IRA are back

But did they ever go away?

On 24 July a car containing what police described as an “extremely significant” bomb was stopped by Irish police in County Monaghan. It was en route to Derry in Northern Ireland. The BBC reported that the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) main theory was that the bomb was intended for use in an attack on a police station north of the border. At the time, the Garda Síochána described the device as “military grade”, powered by Semtex and designed to be placed beneath a vehicle. The car is alleged to have been driven by a 25-year-old law student, Isobella Perrie Sullivan, from County Kildare.

In court, an officer outlined how Perrie Sullivan had been stopped because she was suspected of involvement “in IRA operational activity”. She was charged with possession of explosives and granted bail, subject to a host of conditions, including surrendering her passport and observing a curfew. But the gardaí also made one further request: that she have no contact with anyone in the Saoradh political party or the New IRA. Police sources believe the New IRA was likely responsible.

Saoradh (Irish for “liberation”) is a far-left political party and pressure group founded by dissident Irish republicans in 2016. It is a registered political party, whereas the New IRA is a clandestine, armed paramilitary organisation.

The masked and uniformed members of Saoradh are best known for their annual marches through the streets of Derry and Belfast at Easter to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising. While Saoradh denies directing or supporting violence, critics regard it as providing political cover and ideological justification for the more secretive New IRA.

This is the third bomb incident linked to the New IRA in Northern Ireland this year. The first occurred in March at Lurgan police station in County Armagh, where a delivery driver had his vehicle hijacked by masked men who threatened to kill him unless he drove a bomb to the station. The PSNI described the device as “a crude but viable improvised explosive device” and said it was “highly likely” that dissident republican groups were behind the attack. The New IRA claimed responsibility.

A month later, another delivery driver was forced to drive a vehicle fitted with a bomb to Dunmurry police station. Unlike the other two devices, the bomb exploded. No one was injured, but the New IRA again claimed responsibility.

Both of those devices were relatively crude, built around gas cylinders. One of the New IRA’s objectives, however, is to kill police officers, whom it regards as agents of British rule in Northern Ireland and has labelled “legitimate targets”. The bomb recovered in County Monaghan suggests the group may have taken a step forward in technical capability.

Before this advance in bomb-making, the New IRA had already proved itself a destructive force. In 2019 one of its members fatally shot the journalist Lyra McKee during riots in Derry. In a statement issued after her death, the group said: “In the course of attacking the enemy, Lyra McKee was tragically killed while standing beside enemy forces.” It added: “The IRA offer our full and sincere apologies to the partner, family and friends of Lyra McKee for her death.” Saoradh blamed the death on an “incursion” by “heavily armed Crown forces”. “A republican volunteer attempted to defend people from the [police forces],” it said. “Tragically, a young journalist, Lyra McKee, was killed accidentally.”

The interception of the Monaghan bomb may indicate the organisation has been infiltrated by intelligence agencies. There are suggestions that MI5 even sends greeting cards to members as a reminder of just how exposed they are.

It is easy to imagine that today’s militants are little more than thugs or bullet-headed chauvinists wrapped in ideology. What else could attract someone to such a hopeless cause but the opportunity to swagger and bully? And who in their right mind would join an obsolete and unpopular project like armed Irish republicanism, a cause long eclipsed by modern Sinn Féin? Why devote your life to “freeing” Ireland by force when there is no plausible path to victory? A small militia cannot drive Britain out of Northern Ireland. That experiment has already been tried.

There is also minuscule support for armed resistance. The previous generation of militants assented, through the Good Friday Agreement, to pursuing Irish unity by peaceful, democratic means – and accepting that the democratic process may not deliver it.

There is still some support for the argument that the Provisional IRA leadership compromised before achieving its stated objective. Yet, whatever the grievances of former militants, the leadership succeeded in bringing most of the movement with it into the peace process. The 2018 book Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe explores the perspective of former IRA members such as Dolours Price, who believed they had been betrayed by their own leadership and manoeuvred into a settlement that amounted to surrender. But who actually wants to have another go?

What we are seeing is the continuation of a tradition of republican militancy stretching from the 1850s. These tenacious, if blundering, revolutionaries have survived intervals between campaigns – decades in which activists and ideologues were dismissed as eccentrics, their cause written off as irrelevant. Yet they maintained their commitment, convinced that earlier generations endured the same contempt and that history would vindicate them. Periods of obscurity are part of the struggle.

Take Dee Fennell, whom I spoke to for my book, Fifty Years On (2020). At the time, he was a leading member of Saoradh. Fennell’s great-grandfather fought for the British army and was injured at Ypres. He returned to Ireland during the War of Independence and joined the IRA. He supported the treaty that ended that war and partitioned Ireland. Fennell’s grandfather, Jimmy, and grand-uncle were “active republicans” in the 1930s. His grand-uncle was interned and his grandfather “was active right up until the early 1970s and the split”that established the Provisional IRA.

In 1966, when the mood was relatively quiet, Jimmy went round the houses in north Belfast to collect money for the cause and had doors slammed in his face. This also recalls how the nationalist Patrick Pearse and his comrades were themselves reviled and spat at as they marched through Dublin following the failure of the 1916 Easter Rising. These stories reinforce, for people like Dee Fennell, the idea that unpopularity is simply part of being a dedicated Irish republican. It becomes a form of minor martyrdom. They are convinced that circumstances will eventually shift in their favour, as they did in 1919 and 1969.

It is not, however, about defeating Britain through armed struggle. Even the New IRA recognises that such an ambition would be unrealistic. Fennell said: “Militant republicans who are involved in armed struggle see their role as one of consolidation and keeping that torch burning until such time as there may be mass support for such actions.”

Saoradh is associated with the New IRA in the same way that Sinn Féin was associated with the Provisional IRA. But when Fennell discussed the survival of the republican armed tradition, his explanation centred on lineage.

This was also true of the Provisionals. When the group emerged from the 1970 split in the IRA, its organising core included people whose families had long connections to militant republicanism. Gerry Adams’s uncle Dominic had been an IRA leader and sent the future playwright Brendan Behan to England on a bombing mission in 1939.

That heritage matters. During renewed violence – in 1916, 1919, 1956, 1969 – a core group could draw upon inherited experience, and knowledge of weapons, networks and arms. They understood how to organise, maintain clandestine structures, and draw upon existing networks of safe houses and contacts abroad. They knew and trusted one another because their fathers, mothers and uncles had built those networks before them, organising, fighting and, in some cases, dying together.

They believe that a dormant republican impulse within a peaceful population will reawaken, and when it does, they will lead it. In 1918 the catalyst was opposition to the threat of conscription in the First World War. In 1969, it was the sectarian violence that erupted during the civil rights campaign. There were other moments during the Troubles that reinvigorated the IRA, such as the hunger strikes of 1981 and the protests over Orange Order parades through Catholic areas in the 1990s.

At moments of acute tension in Northern Ireland, ordinary people on both sides of the divide can feel wounded, angry and more willing to forgive – or at least understand – the actions of militants, whether republican or loyalist. That is one of the consequences of living in a deeply divided society.

Why do young people with no memory of the Troubles become involved? Part of the attraction is the security and status it provides. Young people who join a paramilitary organisation acquire authority in their communities, learn how to handle weapons and explosives, and build the confidence that others will not easily challenge them. They have what they call “backing”.

A fight in a bar can, of course, turn ugly, but it is unlikely to result in someone returning later to shoot you in the legs as punishment for insulting a comrade. That power comes from belonging to a paramilitary organisation: personal disputes backed by collective violence. The gun used to kill Lyra McKee was found to have been used in four punishment shootings. Even the Provisionals carried out more punishment attacks than attacks against its enemies, including the police and the army.

It is assumed that these groups are made up simply of opportunists, power-seekers and thugs. But these dynamics exist in many armed movements: they attract people to the reputation that comes with belonging to a fighting organisation, the excitement of danger and, for some, the opportunity to inflict violence.

In Belfast two months ago, after a knife attack on a local man for which an asylum seeker has been charged, loyalists coordinated protests across the city and orchestrated attacks on the homes of people of colour. They were quickly able to mobilise dozens of men – dressed in black and masked – because the organisational structures were already in place. Estimates put the strength of loyalist paramilitary groups in Protestant communities at around 6,000.

There is also the possibility of becoming a legend. Sinn Féin, despite opposing dissident republican groups, continues to honour the heroes and martyrs of the Provisionals. Its argument against young people joining dissident groups is not that sacrifice and struggle are meaningless, but that the armed campaign has ended and that political change must now be pursued through democratic means. But that reasoning has little traction with people who have signed up to bear the same scorn that Sinn Féin’s leaders endured during the long IRA campaign. Republicans didn’t have majority support within the nationalist community until the violence ended.

Young people hear from Sinn Féin that the IRA campaign was a necessary and honourable struggle, and that it ultimately succeeded. Dissidents reject that conclusion. They argue that the purpose of the campaign was not merely to achieve reform or equality for Catholics, but to unite Ireland – and that aim is unfinished.

They have a point. The Provisional IRA is being legitimised retrospectively in the same way as the IRA of the War of Independence, although both were condemned in their own time by the Church and by significant sections of the population. Sinn Féin should acknowledge that the Provisional IRA campaign was a violent and unsuccessful strategy that caused immense suffering, or at least recognise it as a consequence of a polarised population.

Instead, the party honours figures such as Brendan McFarlane, who was involved in the 1975 Bayardo Bar attack on Belfast’s Protestant Shankill Road, in which five people were killed. The president of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, described McFarlane as “a great patriot who lived his life for the freedom and unity of Ireland” and a “giant of Irish republicanism”.

This reverence sends a complicated message to dissidents. It does not persuade them that they will be judged differently by history. Some may be attracted by the status and belonging that come with membership of a powerful group, but it is more compelling to believe that one’s actions are morally justified – and that, even from those who oppose them, future generations may one day regard them as part of a heroic tradition.

Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book is How to Fix Northern Ireland (Atlantic Books)

[Further reading: The far right are stoking the violence in Belfast]