Provisional Irish Republican Army

• 1. Introduction

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  The Provisional Irish Republican Army, nicknamed the Provos, put out its first public statement on the 28th of December 1969. The statement declared loyalty to a 32-county Irish republic. It said that republic had been proclaimed at Easter 1916, established by the first Dáil Éireann in 1919, and overthrown by force of arms in 1922. It then called on the Irish people, at home and in exile, for increased support towards defending their people in the North.

  The group behind those words went on to fight British rule in Northern Ireland until 2005. It considered itself the army of an all-island republic that, in its view, still existed. It rejected the authority of both the British state and the government in Dublin.

  This documentary asks how a breakaway faction came to eclipse the movement it split from. It asks where the guns, explosives and money came from, and how an organisation run in secret was structured. It asks how many people died, and how a campaign this long finally came to an end.

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• 2. Fire and Division

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  The Irish Volunteers, formed in 1913, took part in the Easter Rising of 1916 and became known as the IRA during the War of Independence that followed. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922 split the movement. Pro-Treaty fighters were absorbed into the National Army, which defeated the anti-Treaty IRA in the Civil War. The survivors denied the legitimacy of the Free State and set their sights on overthrowing the Northern Ireland state. They mounted a bombing campaign in England in 1939 and 1940, a campaign in Northern Ireland in the 1940s, and the Border campaign of 1956-1962.

  When the Border campaign failed, the IRA argued over its future. Chief-of-staff Cathal Goulding wanted a socialist agenda and a turn towards politics. Traditional republicans such as Seán Mac Stíofáin wanted to recruit more men and rebuild the army.

  In Derry, local government constituencies had been gerrymandered. Policing fell to the armed Royal Ulster Constabulary and the B-Specials, both almost exclusively Protestant. Northern Ireland had been a de facto one-party state under the Ulster Unionist Party since partition. Catholics were treated as second-class citizens, and Protestants were given preference in jobs and housing. In 1966 Ireland marked fifty years since the Easter Rising, and Protestants who felt under threat formed the Ulster Volunteer Force. It killed three people in May 1966, two of them Catholic men. In January 1967 a diverse group that included IRA members and liberal unionists formed the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Its marches, and those of People's Democracy, met counter-protests and violent clashes with loyalists, among them the Ulster Protestant Volunteers led by Ian Paisley.

  The Twelfth marches of July 1969 brought riots to Belfast, Derry and elsewhere. The following month a three-day riot began in the Catholic Bogside area of Derry after a march by the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry. Catholics in Belfast rioted in solidarity and tried to stop RUC reinforcements reaching Derry. That sparked retaliation by Protestant mobs. Arson and intimidation forced 1,505 Catholic families and 315 Protestant families out of their homes in Belfast. Some 275 buildings were destroyed or needed major repairs, and 83.5% of them were occupied by Catholics. People died on both sides, some at the hands of the police, and British soldiers were deployed.

  The IRA had been poorly armed, and it had failed to defend Catholic areas, a role it had held since the 1920s. Veteran republicans blamed Goulding and the Dublin leadership, which for political reasons had refused to prepare for aggressive action. On the 24th of August, Joe Cahill, Seamus Twomey, Dáithí Ó Conaill, Billy McKee and Jimmy Steele met in Belfast. They decided to remove the pro-Goulding Belfast leadership of Billy McMillen and Jim Sullivan. On the 22nd of September, Twomey, McKee and Steele were among sixteen armed IRA men who confronted that leadership. The compromise left McMillen in command but barred him from any contact with the Dublin leadership.

  At a convention in Boyle, County Roscommon, in December 1969, the IRA divided into Provisional and Official factions. Two resolutions caused the break. One proposed a "National Liberation Front" with radical left-wing groups. The other proposed ending abstentionism, the refusal to take seats in the British, Irish and Northern Ireland parliaments. Traditional republicans refused to vote on the Front, and it passed by twenty-nine votes to seven. According to the official minutes, ending abstentionism passed by twenty-seven votes to twelve, over strong traditionalist opposition.

  The traditionalists then held their own convention. It elected a "Provisional" Army Council of Mac Stíofáin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Paddy Mulcahy, Sean Tracey, Leo Martin, Ó Conaill and Cahill. The word echoed the 1916 Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. It also marked the body as temporary until a further IRA convention could ratify it. Nine of thirteen IRA units in Belfast sided with the Provisionals, roughly 120 activists and 500 supporters. The political party Sinn Féin split along the same lines on the 11th of January 1970 in Dublin. A third of the delegates walked out of the ard fheis in protest at the leadership's attempt to end abstentionism without the required two-thirds majority.

  Young nationalists who had never been in the IRA, but were radicalised by the violence of 1969, flooded in. They became known as "sixty niners." The IRA adopted the phoenix as its symbol of republican rebirth, and one slogan ran "out of the ashes rose the Provisionals." It referred to the burnt-out Catholic areas of Belfast.

  In 1969 the Fianna Fáil-led Irish government donated £100,000 to the Central Citizens Defence Committee in Catholic areas, and some of the money reached the IRA. That led to the 1970 Arms Crisis, in which criminal charges were pursued against two former government ministers and others, including the Belfast IRA volunteer John Kelly.

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• 3. Escalation and Internment

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  In January 1970 the Army Council adopted a three-stage strategy. First came defence of nationalist areas, then a mix of defence and retaliation, and finally a guerrilla campaign against the British Army. The Official IRA opposed the plan. It feared sectarian conflict that would wreck its hope of uniting workers on both sides of the divide. Mac Stíofáin's own formula was to "escalate, escalate and escalate," which the British Army later labelled a "classic insurgency." The aim was to bring down the Northern Ireland government and to inflict casualties heavy enough that British public opinion would force a withdrawal.

  In October 1970 the IRA began bombing economic targets, and by the end of that year there had been 153 explosions. The following year it caused the vast majority of the 1,000 explosions in Northern Ireland. Bombing businesses was meant to deter investment and force Britain to pay compensation, raising the price of keeping Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. The IRA also expected the bombs to pin British soldiers down guarding possible targets, away from counter-insurgency work.

  On the 9th of August 1971 the Northern Ireland government introduced internment without trial, and 342 suspects were arrested in the first twenty-four hours. Loyalist violence was rising too, yet every person arrested was a republican. They included political activists with no IRA link and student civil rights leaders. Riots broke out across Northern Ireland, and twenty-two people were killed in the next three days. Six of them were civilians shot by the British Army in what became known as the Ballymurphy massacre on the 9th of August. In Belfast, the rioting drove 7,000 Catholics and 2,000 Protestants from their homes.

  In the seven months before internment, 34 people had been killed. Between its introduction and the end of the year, 140 died, including thirty soldiers and eleven RUC officers. Recruitment to the IRA rose. In Dublin the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, dropped a planned internment of his own in the Republic.

  Recruitment climbed again after Bloody Sunday in Derry on the 30th of January 1972, when the British Army killed fourteen unarmed civilians at an anti-internment march. In March 1972 the British government suspended the Northern Ireland parliament and imposed direct rule. That had been a key IRA objective, because the organisation wanted the conflict seen as one between Ireland and Britain. In May 1972 the Official IRA called a ceasefire, leaving the Provisionals as the only active republican paramilitary force. New recruits saw the Officials as a body for defence and the Provisionals as one for attack, so defections swelled Provisional ranks.

  The IRA announced on the 22nd of June 1972 that a ceasefire would begin at midnight on the 26th, in anticipation of talks with the British. Two days after that announcement, Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill held a press conference in Dublin to unveil the Éire Nua policy, meaning New Ireland. It proposed an all-Ireland federal republic, with devolved governments and parliaments for each of the four historic provinces. The idea was to ease unionist fears, since an Ulster parliament with a narrow Protestant majority would protect their interests.

  On the 7th of July, Mac Stíofáin, Ó Conaill, Ivor Bell, Twomey, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness flew to England for secret talks with a British delegation led by William Whitelaw. Mac Stíofáin demanded British withdrawal, removal of the army from sensitive areas, release of republican prisoners and an amnesty for fugitives. The British refused, the talks broke up, and the ceasefire ended on the 9th of July.

  By late 1972 and early 1973, arrests on both sides of the border were thinning the leadership. Mac Stíofáin, Ó Brádaigh and McGuinness were all imprisoned for IRA membership. The Army Council judged that bombs in England would sway British opinion more, so the IRA bombed London in March 1973. An intense period of activity in England followed. By the end of 1974 it had left forty-five people dead, including twenty-one civilians in the Birmingham pub bombings.

  Ceasefires over Christmas 1974 and in January 1975 led, on the 8th of February, to a statement suspending "offensive military action" from six o'clock the next day. Meetings with British representatives ran through the year, and the IRA was led to believe that a process of British withdrawal had begun. Bombs still went off in Belfast, Derry and South Armagh, and the IRA took part in tit for tat killings of Protestant civilians. By July the Army Council doubted the talks, concluding there could be no lasting peace without a public British declaration of intent to withdraw. The truce effectively ended on the 22nd of September when the IRA set off 22 bombs across Northern Ireland.

  A younger generation of activists then turned on the old guard of Ó Brádaigh, Ó Conaill and McKee. They saw the ceasefire as a disaster that gave the British time to build intelligence and took the IRA close to defeat. McKee was also criticised for letting the IRA drift into sectarian killings and into a feud with the Official IRA in October and November 1975 that left eleven people dead. The old guard's influence slowly declined.

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• 4. The Long War

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  After the truce collapsed, the British government adopted a three-part strategy whose parts became known as Ulsterisation, normalisation and criminalisation. Ulsterisation gave a larger role to the locally recruited RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment, a part-time element of the British Army. The goal was to contain the conflict inside Northern Ireland and cut the deaths of soldiers recruited from elsewhere. Normalisation meant ending internment and Special Category Status, which had been introduced in 1972 after a hunger strike led by McKee. Criminalisation aimed to change how the public saw the Troubles, from an insurgency needing a military answer to a crime problem needing police work.

  In September 1976 the IRA prisoner Kieran Nugent began the blanket protest in the Maze Prison. Hundreds of prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms after Special Category Status was withdrawn.

  In 1977 the IRA settled on a strategy it called the "Long War," which it kept for the rest of the Troubles. It accepted that success would take many years, and it put more weight on political activity through Sinn Féin. A republican document of the early 1980s said "Both Sinn Féin and the IRA play different but converging roles in the war of national liberation." The 1977 edition of the Green Book, an induction and training manual, set out the military side. It called for "A war of attrition against enemy personnel British Army which is aimed at causing as many casualties and deaths as possible so as to create a demand from their the British people at home for their withdrawal."

  Tactics moved away from the large bombing campaigns of the early 1970s and towards more attacks on members of the security forces. The IRA used what it called armed propaganda. The publicity from the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and the Warrenpoint ambush drew attention to the nationalist community's rejection of British rule. The IRA also wanted to keep Northern Ireland unstable, which would frustrate the British aim of installing a power-sharing government.

  The prison protest against criminalisation reached its peak in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. Seven IRA members and three Irish National Liberation Army members starved themselves to death in pursuit of political status. The hunger strike leader Bobby Sands and the Anti H-Block activist Owen Carron were successively elected to the British House of Commons. Two other protesting prisoners were elected to Dáil Éireann. The result was a dual approach, known as the "Armalite and ballot box strategy," after Danny Morrison's speech at the 1981 Sinn Féin ard fheis. He asked whether anyone would object if, "with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in this hand we take power in Ireland."

  Attacks on high-profile targets stayed a priority. The Chelsea Barracks bombing in London in October 1981 killed two civilians and injured twenty-three soldiers. A week later came an assassination attempt on Lieutenant General Steuart Pringle, the Commandant General Royal Marines. The Hyde Park and Regent's Park bombings in July 1982 killed eleven soldiers and injured over fifty people, including civilians. In October 1984 the Brighton hotel bombing targeted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom the IRA blamed for the deaths of the ten hunger strikers. It killed five members of the Conservative Party attending a party conference, including the MP Anthony Berry, while Thatcher narrowly escaped.

  A planned escalation in England in 1985 was prevented when six IRA volunteers were arrested in Glasgow, among them Martina Anderson and the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee. A bigger plan for the late 1980s, modelled on the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War, depended on surprise. It was cancelled after French authorities seized a ship carrying 150 tonnes of weapons donated by Libya. The ship's captain had told them about four earlier shipments, which let the British Army deploy countermeasures. In 1987 the IRA began attacking British military targets in mainland Europe, starting with the Rheindahlen bombing. Roughly twenty other gun and bomb attacks on British forces' personnel and bases followed between 1988 and 1990.

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• 5. Talking While Bombing

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  By the late 1980s the Troubles had reached a military and political stalemate. The IRA could stop Britain imposing a settlement but could not force Irish reunification. Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams was in contact with John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and with a delegation from the Irish government. They were looking for political alternatives to the IRA's campaign. Seeing this interest, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, began to engage with the republican leadership.

  Backchannel diplomacy began in October 1990, when Sinn Féin was given an advance copy of a planned Brooke speech. He delivered it in London the following month. He said the government would not give in to violence but would offer significant political change if violence stopped. He declared that "The British government has no selfish, strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland." The IRA answered with a three-day ceasefire over Christmas, its first in fifteen years.

  The bombing in England then grew. The IRA planted 36 bombs there in 1991 and 57 in 1992, up from 15 in 1990. The Baltic Exchange bombing in April 1992 killed three people and caused an estimated £800 million in damage. That was £200 million more than the total damage caused by the Troubles in Northern Ireland up to that point. In December 1992 Brooke's successor, Patrick Mayhew, gave a speech in Coleraine aimed at the IRA. He said reunification could come by negotiation but not through giving in to violence. Secret talks through intermediaries went on, but slowly. The Warrington bombing in March 1993 killed two children, and the Bishopsgate bombing a month later killed one person and caused an estimated £1 billion in damage.

  In December 1993 the British prime minister, John Major, and the Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, held a press conference at Downing Street to deliver the Downing Street Declaration. It conceded the right of the Irish people to self-determination, with separate referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic. The Army Council voted in January 1994 to reject it. On the 31st of August 1994 the IRA announced a "complete cessation of military operations," on the understanding that Sinn Féin would join talks.

  A strategy called "TUAS" was then explained to the rank-and-file. Inside the republican movement it meant "Tactical Use of Armed Struggle," while the wider nationalist movement heard "Totally Unarmed Strategy." It envisaged Sinn Féin, the SDLP and the Irish government acting together to press London, with the armed campaign starting and stopping as needed. The IRA kept the option of ending the ceasefire if negotiations failed.

  The British government refused to admit Sinn Féin to multi-party talks before the IRA decommissioned its weapons. The IRA refused to disarm before a final settlement. It saw itself as undefeated and said decommissioning had never been raised before the ceasefire. In March 1995 Mayhew set three conditions for Sinn Féin's entry. The IRA had to agree to "disarm progressively," a scheme for decommissioning had to be agreed, and some weapons had to be handed over before talks began as a confidence-building step. In September the IRA publicly called this an "unreasonable demand" and a "stalling tactic."

  On the 9th of February 1996 the Army Council delivered a statement to the broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann ending the ceasefire. Just over 90 minutes later the Docklands bombing killed two people and caused an estimated £100-150 million in damage. Three weeks later the two governments announced that multi-party talks would begin on the 10th of June, with Sinn Féin excluded unless the IRA called a new ceasefire. The Manchester bombing on the 15th of June injured over 200 people and caused an estimated £400 million of damage to the city centre. Most attacks were in England, apart from a mortar attack on a British Army base in Osnabrück, Germany. The first attack in Northern Ireland since the ceasefire ended came in October 1996, when the Thiepval barracks bombing killed a British soldier. In February 1997 an IRA sniper team killed Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, the last British soldier the IRA killed.

  After the May 1997 general election, Tony Blair replaced Major as prime minister. His Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, had said she would admit Sinn Féin to talks within two months of an IRA ceasefire, without prior decommissioning. The IRA declared a new ceasefire in July 1997, Sinn Féin joined the talks, and they produced the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. One aim was that all paramilitary groups would fully disarm by May 2000. Decommissioning was monitored by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, led by the Canadian General John de Chastelain. Some weapons were put beyond use on the 23rd of October 2001 and the 8th of April 2002. The 2001 act was the first time an Irish republican paramilitary organisation had voluntarily disposed of its arms.

  In October 2002 the British government suspended the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly and restored direct rule, to prevent a unionist walkout. The trigger was partly Stormontgate, allegations that republican spies were operating within the Parliament Buildings and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The IRA temporarily broke off contact with de Chastelain, but more decommissioning took place on the 21st of October 2003. After the Northern Bank robbery of December 2004, the Irish justice minister, Michael McDowell, said there could be no place in government for a party that supported or threatened violence, held explosives or firearms, and was involved in criminality. At the start of February 2005 the IRA withdrew a decommissioning offer from late 2004. That followed a demand from Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party for photographic evidence of decommissioning.

  On the 28th of July 2005 Séanna Walsh read out a statement declaring an end to the armed campaign. It affirmed that the IRA would pursue its aims solely by peaceful political means and ordered volunteers to end all paramilitary activity. Two independent witnesses, the Catholic priest Father Alec Reid and the Protestant minister Reverend Harold Good, viewed the secret disarmament work. On the 26th of September 2005 the commission announced that "the totality of the IRA's arsenal" had been decommissioned. Jane's Information Group estimated the haul included 1,000 rifles, 2 tonnes of Semtex, 20-30 heavy machine guns, 7 surface-to-air missiles, 7 flamethrowers, 1,200 detonators, 11 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 90 handguns and over 100 hand grenades. Peter Hain, by then Secretary of State, accepted the conclusion. Later, the Independent Monitoring Commission said in its 10th report that any weapons kept would have been held by individuals against IRA orders.

  In February 2015 the Garda Commissioner, Nóirín O'Sullivan, said there was no evidence the IRA's military structure remained operational. In August 2015 the PSNI chief constable, George Hamilton, said the IRA no longer existed as a paramilitary organisation, though some structure remained. He spoke after the shooting of Kevin McGuigan, a former Belfast IRA commander, in what was believed to be revenge for the earlier killing of Gerard Davison. Hamilton found no evidence that the IRA leadership sanctioned the McGuigan killing. A British government assessment concluded in October 2015 that the main Troubles-era paramilitary groups still existed, but that their leaderships were "committed to peaceful means to achieve their political objectives."

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• 6. Guns and Money

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  In Derry in early 1972 the IRA's weaponry amounted to six M1 carbines, two Thompson submachine guns, one or two M1 Garand rifles and a variety of handguns. Black market deals and gifts from sympathisers later brought a large array. It included surface-to-air missiles, M60 machine guns, ArmaLite AR-18, FN FAL, AKM and M16 rifles, DShK heavy machine guns, LPO-50 flamethrowers and Barrett M90 sniper rifles. Bombs came in many forms, from car and truck bombs to time bombs and booby traps. The explosives included ANFO and gelignite donated by supporters in the Republic of Ireland, and Semtex from the Libyan government.

  The IRA's engineering department built improvised mortars in the Republic of Ireland. By the 1990s they matched military models in standard. Mortars answered the heavy fortification of RUC and British Army bases, because indirect fire could bypass some perimeter defences. Delay timers and the disposable nature of the weapons let volunteers cut the risk of arrest at the scene.

  Colonel Muammar Gaddafi donated two shipments of arms in the early 1970s and another five in the mid-1980s. The four shipments that arrived included 1,200 AKM assault rifles, 26 DShK heavy machine guns, 40 general-purpose machine guns and 33 RPG-7 rocket launchers. They also held 10 SAM-7 missiles, 10 LPO-50 flamethrowers and over two tonnes of Semtex. He gave $12 million in cash as well.

  In the United States, the Irish Northern Aid Committee, known as NORAID, was the financial backbone of support. It was founded by the Irish immigrant and IRA veteran Michael Flannery. It officially raised money for the families of IRA prisoners, but opponents accused it of being a front for the IRA and for gunrunning. The main transatlantic smuggling network was run by another immigrant and IRA veteran, George Harrison. He estimated he sent 2,000-2,500 weapons and about 1 million rounds of ammunition to Ireland. The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested him in June 1981, which blocked the American arms supply. Irish American support weakened from the mid-1970s and faded further in the 1980s amid bad publicity about IRA atrocities and NORAID. By 1998 only $3.6 million was raised in America, too little, many historians agree, to make a difference to the conflict.

  In 1972 bad weather forced a light aeroplane to divert to Shannon Airport from Farranfore in County Kerry, where IRA volunteers had been waiting. A Canadian IRA supporter piloted it, and it had flown from Libya with arms that included RPG-7 rocket launchers. In 1974 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested seven Canadian residents for smuggling weapons to the IRA. One of them, Philip Kent, was found with fifteen FN rifles and a .50 calibre machine gun in his car. By the 1990s supporters in Australia sent more than A$20,000 a year.

  The former MI5 agent Willie Carlin said the Army Council avoided attacking Scotland because it would cost support there, and fundraising in Glasgow and among farmers with Irish relatives mattered. In Wales, the militant group Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru had links with the IRA. Its founding member Owain Williams, on the run over explosives allegations, was reportedly housed in Mac Stíofáin's family home in Navan. The group's later leader, John Barnard Jenkins, claimed that the IRA adopted a cell system he had shared with fellow prisoners. One of the group's final attacks hit the South Stack relay station in Anglesey, a communications link for British forces in Northern Ireland. Jenkins said it was meant to "show the IRA that we MAC did not appreciate what the British Army was doing in Ulster."

  The Basque group ETA reportedly gave the IRA fifty revolvers in exchange for explosives training. In 1973 Spanish police accused the IRA of supplying explosives for the assassination of Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco in Madrid. The Palestine Liberation Organization hosted IRA volunteers at training camps in the Middle East in the 1970s. A 1977 PLO arms shipment seized in Antwerp held twenty-nine AK-47 assault rifles, seven RPG-7 launchers, two Bren light machine guns, mortars and ammunition. Yasser Arafat distanced himself from the IRA after the 1979 killing of Mountbatten. In 2001 three Irishmen known as the Colombia Three were arrested and accused of training Colombian guerrillas. The Irish justice minister said the IRA was to be paid up to $35 million to teach FARC bomb-making. The men were acquitted in April 2004, the verdict was reversed on appeal in December 2004, and by then they had fled to Ireland.

  The vast majority of IRA revenue came from inside Ireland. Its fundraising included robberies, counterfeiting, protection rackets, kidnapping for ransom, fuel laundering and cigarette smuggling. It also ran legitimate businesses such as taxi firms, nightclubs, offices and nursing homes. British law enforcement estimated that by the 1990s the IRA needed £10.5 million a year. There were over 1,000 raids on post offices in Northern Ireland. The PSNI, the Independent Monitoring Commission and both governments accused the IRA of the biggest bank raid in British history, in which £26.5 million was stolen. The IRA denied it. In April 1987 RUC chief constable John Hermon said it cost the IRA £2-£3 million a year to maintain its activity. A parliamentary committee report of the 26th of June 2002 said overseas donations had been exaggerated and estimated that the IRA made £5-8 million a year while spending £1.5 million on its campaign. One IRA interviewee said Belfast "ran itself for years on its social clubs."

  Generally the IRA opposed drug dealing and prostitution, partly because they were unpopular in Catholic communities. Kevin Sheehy, chief of the RUC Drugs Squad, said the IRA tried to keep volunteers away from drugs. He described one member caught with a small amount of cannabis as "disowned and humiliated" locally. Dealers faced punishment shootings, and some were killed under the covername Direct Action Against Drugs. There were claims, however, that the IRA "licensed" some dealers in return for protection money. After the murder of Robert McCartney in 2005 the IRA expelled three volunteers. In 2008 the Independent Monitoring Commission stated that the IRA was no longer involved in criminality, though some members acted for their own ends.

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• 7. Inside the Organisation

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  The General Army Convention was the IRA's supreme decision-making body, supposed to meet every two years, or every four after a change to the constitution in 1986. Secrecy made it hard to gather so many people, so during the armed campaign conventions met only in September 1970, October 1986 and October or November 1996. After the 1997 ceasefire they became more frequent, with meetings in October 1997, May 1998, December 1998 or early 1999, and June 2002. The convention elected a 12-member Executive, which picked seven members to form the Army Council. The Council set policy, took major tactical decisions and appointed a chief-of-staff.

  The chief-of-staff was assisted by an adjutant general and a General Headquarters staff. That staff included a quartermaster general and directors of finance, engineering, training, intelligence, publicity, operations and security. The quartermaster general's department was the largest, accounting for about 20% of IRA personnel. It acquired weapons, smuggled them to Ireland, hid them in arms dumps and distributed them. Engineering ranked next in importance, making improvised explosive devices and mortars.

  Below headquarters sat a Northern Command and a Southern Command. Northern Command covered Northern Ireland plus the border counties of Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Louth. In 1977 the "war-zone" was placed under Northern Command, which made coordinated attacks and quick tactical changes possible. Southern Command, which included the Dublin Brigade, supported the north by importing and storing arms, providing safe houses, raising funds through robberies and running training camps. A separate England department, attached to headquarters, handled the bombing campaign in England.

  The IRA called its ordinary members volunteers, or óglaigh in Irish, to stress that it was an irregular army people were not forced to join and could leave at any time. Until the late 1970s they were organised in companies, battalions and brigades, such as the Belfast, Derry, South Armagh and East Tyrone Brigades. In late 1973 the Belfast Brigade introduced secret cells called active service units, of between four and ten members. Similar changes spread by 1977, because larger structures were easy for the security forces to penetrate. The old structures kept the support work, such as policing nationalist areas, gathering intelligence and hiding weapons. The South Armagh Brigade kept its traditional hierarchy. Only a handful of its volunteers were convicted of serious offences, and it had fewer arrests than any other area, so the security forces struggled to recruit informers there.

  The IRA kept no detailed personnel records, so numbers are uncertain. The journalists Eamonn Mallie and Patrick Bishop say roughly 8,000 people passed through the ranks in its first 20 years. McGuinness estimated 10,000 over the whole Troubles. The British Army counted 500 volunteers in July 1971, 130 in Derry and 340 in Belfast, while the journalist Ed Moloney says Belfast alone had over 1,200 by the end of that year. After the late 1970s restructuring the army estimated 500 full-time volunteers. A 1978 report by Brigadier James Glover said a small number could "maintain a disproportionate level of violence." The journalist Brendan O'Brien puts the late 1980s at roughly 300 active volunteers and 450 in support roles. Moloney estimates 600-700 active volunteers in October 1996.

  The IRA's declared goal was an all-Ireland democratic socialist republic. The Queen's University Belfast professor Richard English writes that radical, especially socialist, ideas were a key part of IRA thinking, though adherence varied. The former volunteer Tommy McKearney says there was no coherent analysis of socialism, only an idea that details would follow victory. Eamonn McCann called the Provisionals a non-socialist IRA compared with the Official IRA. In the 1980s, IRA prisoners read Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Antonio Gramsci, Ho-Chi Minh and General Giap. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 put dogmatic socialism in doubt as possible allies in Eastern Europe withered away. Prisoners then looked to the African National Congress. Many saw parallels with Nelson Mandela's struggle and were encouraged by his use of compromise after taking power.

  The Provisionals saw their campaign as a continuation of the Irish revolutionary period of 1916-1923. Ó Brádaigh called it "the current phase of the age-old Irish republican struggle."

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• 8. The Toll

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  Two detailed studies of Troubles deaths, the Conflict Archive on the Internet and the book Lost Lives, differ slightly. The archive says the IRA caused 1,705 deaths, about 48% of the total. Of those, 1,009 (about 59%) were members or former members of the British security forces, and 508 (about 29%) were civilians. Lost Lives gives 1,781 deaths, about 47% of the total, with 944 (about 53%) in the security forces and 644 (about 36%) civilians. Its civilian figure includes 61 former security force members. It also covers civilians employed by the security forces, politicians, judges, and alleged criminals and informers. Most of the rest were loyalist or republican paramilitaries, including over 100 IRA members accidentally killed by their own bombs or shot as agents or informers.

  Overall, the IRA caused 87-90% of British security force deaths and 27-30% of civilian deaths. In England it was responsible for at least 488 incidents, 2,134 injuries and 115 deaths, including 56 civilians and 42 British soldiers. Between 275 and 300 IRA members were killed. The worst single loss came at Loughgall in 1987, when the Special Air Service killed eight volunteers who were trying to bomb a police station.

  The Abercorn Restaurant bombing in March 1972 exploded without warning, killing two women and injuring many people. After the bad publicity, the IRA introduced telephoned coded warnings to avoid civilian casualties while still damaging property. Civilian deaths hurt the IRA by handing the British propaganda gains and harming recruitment and funding. Bombs still killed civilians, generally through mistakes, incompetence or poor communication. The Donegall Street bombing killed seven people, four of them civilians. On Bloody Friday, twenty-two bombs planted within a one-mile radius of Belfast city centre killed nine people, five of them civilians. Premature explosions caused the Remembrance Day bombing, which killed eleven people including ten civilians, and the Shankill Road bombing, which killed ten including eight civilians. The counter-terrorism expert Andy Oppenheimer described the bombing campaign as "the biggest terrorist bombing campaign in history."

  Under the Terrorism Act 2000 the IRA is proscribed in the United Kingdom. In the Republic it is an unlawful organisation under the Offences Against the State Acts, and its volunteers are tried in the non-jury Special Criminal Court. The Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973 created Diplock courts there, with a single judge and no jury. The IRA's standing orders forbade volunteers on trial from entering a plea or recognising the court, on pain of expulsion. The orders were relaxed in 1976 after sentences for IRA membership in the Republic rose from two years to seven. IRA members were often refused United States travel visas. American television called them "activists," "guerrillas" and "terrorists," while British broadcasters, particularly the BBC under its 1989 editorial guidelines, commonly said "terrorists." Republicans rejected that label and spoke of war, armed struggle and armed resistance. An internal British Army document by General Sir Mike Jackson and two other senior officers, released in 2007, described the IRA as "a professional, dedicated, highly skilled and resilient force." It called loyalist paramilitaries and other republican groups "little more than a collection of gangsters."

  The IRA publicly condemned sectarianism, yet some members carried out sectarian attacks. Malcolm Sutton classifies 130 of its killings, about 7%, as sectarian killings of Protestants. Public backing varied over time. A survey by the Economic and Social Research Institute in September 1979 found that 20.7% in the Republic broadly supported IRA activities and 60.5% opposed them. Asked about motives, 44.8% expressed some sympathy and 33.5% broadly rejected them. A 1999 study found that 42% of Northern Irish Catholics sympathised with republican violence and 52% did not. In the Republic, 39.7% sympathised. A 2022 poll found that 69% of Irish nationalists believed there had been no option but "violent resistance to British rule during the Troubles."

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