Terrorism in Ireland
THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANGLO-IRISH CONFLICT
In August 1969, the British Army was ordered to increase its presence in Northern Ireland in an effort to quell a series of riots. (See map in Figure 6.1.) Although the British Army had maintained bases in Northern Ireland for a while, riotous situations in Londonderry and Belfast were suddenly far beyond the control of local police and the handful of British regular soldiers stationed in the area. On August 18, 1969, British Army reinforcements began arriving, hoping to avoid a long-term conflict. Their hopes were in vain. The British Army would soon become embroiled in a new outbreak of a war that had spanned centuries.
Ireland has not been completely ruled by the Irish since a series of Viking incursions in 800 C.E. Giovani Costigan (1980) writes that Irish culture originated with Celtic invasions three centuries before Christ. The Irish settled in tribal groups, and government was maintained through kinship and clans. No Celtic ruler or political authority ever united Ireland as a single entity.
In about 500 C.E., the Irish were introduced to Christianity and became some of the most fervent converts in the world. The medieval church played a large role in uniting Ireland, but the traditional Gaelic tribal groups still remained separate. They submitted to a central religion, not a central political system. The relations among Gaelic tribes became important when Viking raiders began to attack Ireland in about 800 C.E. The divided Irish were dominated by their Viking rulers, and the Norsemen used Ireland as a trading base and center of commerce. The Vikings built several Irish cities, including Dublin.
Viking rule of Ireland was challenged in 1014, when a tribal chieftain, Brian Boru, was declared High King of Ireland. He led a united tribal army against the Vikings and defeated them at Clontarf. Fate ruled against the Irish, however. At the end of the battle as King Brian knelt in prayer, he was assassinated. Dreams of a united Ireland crumbled with Brian Boru’s death, and the clans and tribes soon divided leadership again.
Costigan (1980) believes this paved the way for a gradual Norman invasion of Ireland. The Normans were the descendants of William the Conqueror and had ambitions for extending their domains. With the Irish divided and the Viking influence limited, Normans began to stake out territorial claims on the island with the permission of the Norman king. The Normans were particularly successful in Ireland because they used new methods of warfare. By 1172, the Norman king of England had assumed the rule of Ireland.
The Normans and the Irish struggled in a way that was not reflective of modern fighting. The Normans could not maintain the field force necessary to control the Irish peasants, and the Irish did not have the technology that would allow them to attack smaller Norman forces barricaded in castles. Therefore, the Normans built castles to control Irish cities, and Irish peasants generally dominated rural areas. This situation continued until the sixteenth century.
The Protestant Reformation of the 1500s had a tremendous impact on Ireland. Wanting to free himself from the ecclesiastical shackles of Rome, the English king, Henry VIII, created an independent Church of England. He followed up by creating a similar church in Ireland, but the Irish Catholics could not stomach this move. They began to rebel against the English king, and the troubles created by the Reformation have literally continued into the twenty-first century in Ireland.
The problems of the early Reformation were magnified by Henry’s daughter Elizabeth. Not content with merely ruling Ireland, Elizabeth I carved out the most prosperous agrarian section and gave it to her subjects to colonize: This resulted in the creation of the Plantation of Ulster. English and Scottish Protestants eventually settled there, displacing many of the original Irish inhabitants. This created an ethnic division in Ireland fueled by religious differences and animosities.
Costigan (1980) believes the 1600s in Ireland were dominated by three major issues. First, the Plantation of Ulster was expanded, and Irish peasants were systematically displaced. Many of them perished. Second, Oliver Cromwell came to Ireland to quell a revolt and stop Catholic attacks on Protestants. He literally massacred thousands of Irish Catholics, thanking God for granting him the opportunity to kill such a large number of his enemies. Cromwell’s name still stirs hatred as a result.
The third issue of the 1600s also involved Catholic and Protestant struggles, and the image of the conflict is still celebrated in ceremonies today. From 1689 to 1691, James II, the Catholic pretender to the British throne, used Ireland as a base from which to revolt against William of Orange, the English king. In August 1689, Irish Protestant skilled workers, called “Apprentice Boys,” were relieved by the English after defending Derry through a long siege by the pretender. The following year William defeated James at the battle of the BoyneRiver.
The revolt was over, but the Protestants were now forever in the camp of the House of Orange. The Protestants have flaunted these victories in the face of the Catholics since 1690. Each year they gather to militantly celebrate the battle of the Boyne and the Apprentice Boys with parades and demonstrations. It fuels the fire of hatred in Northern Ireland and demonstrates the division between Protestants and Catholics. In fact, the current troubles started in 1969, when riots broke out in Londonderry and Belfast following the annual Apprentice Boys parade.
The 1700s and early 1800s were characterized by waves of revolt, starvation, and emigration. Irish nationalists rose to challenge English rule, but they were always soundly defeated. Each generation seemed to bring a new series of martyrs willing to give their lives in the struggle against the English.
Among the best-known revolutionaries was Thomas Wolfe Tone. From 1796 to 1798, Wolfe Tone led a revolt based on Irish nationalism. He tried to appeal to both Protestants and Catholics in an attempt to form a unified front against Great Britain. Wolfe Tone argued that Irish independence was more important than religious differences. In the end, his revolt failed, but he had created a basis for appealing to nationalism over religion.
Despite the efforts of people like Wolfe Tone, religious animosity did not die in Ireland. During the late 1700s, Protestants and Catholics began to form paramilitary organizations. Divided along religious lines, these defense organizations began violently to confront one another. The Orange Orders were born in this period. Taking their name from William of Orange, these Protestant organizations vowed to remain unified with Great Britain. The Orange Lodges soon grew to dominate the political and social life of the north of Ireland.
The early 1800s brought a new level of political struggle to Ireland. In 1801, the British Parliament passed the Act of Union, designed to incorporate Ireland into the United Kingdom. Struggle over the act began to dominate Irish politics. Unionists, primarily the Orange Protestants in the North, supported the act, whereas republicans, who became known as Greens, argued for a constitutional government and an independent Ireland. Daniel O’Connell led the republican movement in the early part of the century, and Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant, created a democratic Irish party to support the cause in the late 1800s.
The struggle for republicanism accompanied one of the saddest periods in Irish history. Displaced from the land, Irish peasants were poor and susceptible to economic and agricultural fluctuations. Historian Cecil Woodham-Smith (1962) documents that Ireland had undergone a series of famines in the 1840s, as peasants in the country began to rely on the potato as their main crop. In 1845, the crop failed, and agricultural production among the peasants came to a standstill until 1848. Even though thousands of Irish people began to starve, wealthy farms in the North exported other crops for cash.
The 1845–1848 famine devastated Ireland. Its effects were felt primarily among the poor, especially among the Irish Catholics. In an era in which other industrialized nations were experiencing a tremendous rise in population, Ireland’s census dropped by 25 percent. As famine and disease took their toll, thousands of Irish people emigrated to other parts of the world. During this period, unionists in the North consolidated their hold on Ulster.
In the years following the famine, some members of the British Parliament sought to free Ireland from British control. They introduced a series of home rule acts designed to give Ireland independence. Charles Stewart Parnell and other republicans supported home rule, but they faced fierce opposition from unionists. The unionists were afraid home rule would shift the balance of economic power in the North. They believed continued union with Great Britain was their only option for economic success. Unionists were supported in British military circles.
Even though Parnell was a Protestant, most republicans were Catholics living in the southern portion of Ireland. Unionists tended to be Protestant skilled laborers, industrialists, and landlords in the North. The religious aspect of the conflict remained and was augmented by deep economic divisions.
Another aspect of the evolving conflict needs to be emphasized. By the nineteenth century, both the unionists and the republicans were fully Irish. This means neither side comprised transplanted settlers from another country, but the Catholics and the Protestants—despite all political differences—identified themselves as citizens of the Emerald Isle. Unionist Protestants in the North had lived in Ireland for generations, and they were as Irish as their Catholic counterparts. The unionists were able to call on Britain for help, but the struggle in Ireland began to take on the earmarks of an intra-Irish conflict. Irish unionists, usually Protestant, dominated the North, and Irish republicans, primarily Catholics, controlled the South.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY
By the twentieth century, the struggle in Ireland had become a matter of the divisions between unionists and republicans. A host of other conflicts was associated with this confrontation, but the main one was the unionist-republican struggle. The unionists often had the upper hand because they could call on support from the British-sponsored police and military forces. The republicans had no such luxury, and they searched for an alternative.
Costigan (1980) believes that the republican military solution to the Irish conflict was born in New York City in 1857. Irish Catholics had emigrated from their homeland to America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, but they never forgot the people they left behind. Irish immigrants in New York City created the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) as a financial relief organization for relatives in the old country. After the American Civil War, some Irish soldiers returning from the U.S. Army decided to take the struggle for emancipation back to Ireland. Rationalizing that they had fought for the North to free the slaves, they believed they should continue the struggle and free Ireland. The IRB gradually evolved into a revolutionary organization.
J. Bowyer Bell (1974) has written the definitive treatise on the origins and development of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He states it began with a campaign of violence sponsored by the IRB in the late 1800s. Spurred on by increased Irish nationalist feeling in the homeland and the hope of home rule, the IRB waged a campaign of bombing and assassination from 1870 until 1916. Its primary targets were unionists and British forces supporting the unionist cause. Among their greatest adversaries was the British-backed police force in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).
The activities of the IRB frightened Irish citizens who wanted to remain united with Great Britain. For the most part, these Irish people were Protestant and middle-class, and they lived in the North. They gravitated toward their trade unions and social organizations, called Orange Lodges, to counter growing IRB sympathy and power. They enjoyed the sympathy of the British Army’s officer corps. They also controlled the RIC.
The Fenians (named after a mythical Irish hero, Finn McCool) of the IRB remained undaunted by unionist sentiment. Although Irish unionists seemed in control, the IRB had two trumps. First, IRB leadership was dominated by men who believed each generation had to produce warriors who would fight for independence. Some of these leaders, as well as their followers, were quite willing to be martyred to keep republicanism alive. In addition, the IRB had an organization. It not only served as a threat to British power, but it also provided the basis for the resurgence of Irish culture.
At the turn of the century, no person embodied Irish culture more than Patrick Pearse. The headmaster of an Irish school, Pearse was an inspirational romantic. He could move crowds to patriotism and inspire resistance to British policies. He was a hero among Irish-Americans, and they sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support his cause. He told young Irish boys and girls about their heritage, he taught them Gaelic, and he inspired them to be militantly proud of being Irish. He was also a member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. When the concept of home rule was defeated in the British parliament, republican eyes turned to Pearse.
THE 1916 EASTER REBELLION
By 1916, the situation in Ireland had changed. The British had promised home rule to Ireland when World War I (1914–1918) came to an end. While most people in Ireland believed the British, unionists and republicans secretly armed for a civil war between the North and South. They believed a fight was inevitable if the British granted home rule, and each side was determined to dominate the government of a newly independent Ireland. Some forces were not willing to wait for home rule.
With British attention focused on Germany, leaders of the IRB believed it was time for a strike against the unionists and their British supporters. At Easter in 1916, Patrick Pearse and James Connolly led a revolt in Dublin. Pearse was a romantic idealist who felt the revolt was doomed from the start but believed it necessary to sacrifice his life to keep the republican spirit alive. Connolly was a more pragmatic socialist who fought because he believed a coming civil war was inevitable.
The 1916 Easter Rebellion enjoyed local success because it surprised everyone. Pearse and Connolly took over several key points in Dublin with a few thousand armed followers. From the halls of the General Post Office, Pearse announced that the revolutionaries had formed an IrishRepublic and asked the Irish to follow him. The British, outraged by what they deemed to be treachery in the midst of a larger war, also came to Dublin. The city was engulfed in a week of heavy fighting.
Whereas Pearse and Connolly came to start a popular revolution, the British came to fight a war. In a few days, Dublin was devastated by British artillery. Pearse recognized the futility of the situation and asked for terms. J. Bowyer Bell (1974) points out the interesting way Pearse chose to approach the British: He sent a message using a new title, Commanding General of the Irish Republican Army, to the general in charge of British forces. The IRB had transformed itself into an army: the IRA.
Transformations continued in the political arena, and, ironically, what Pearse and Connolly could not achieve in life, they could achieve in death. Irish opinion was solidly against the IRA, and most Irish people held Pearse and Connolly responsible for the destruction of Dublin. The British, however, failed to capitalize on this sentiment. Rather than listen to public opinion, they cracked down on all expressions of republicanism. Dozens of republicans, including Pearse and the wounded Connolly, were executed, and thousands were sentenced to prison. The British promise of home rule seemed forgotten. Most Irish people were appalled by the harsh British reaction, and the ghosts of Pearse and Connolly rose in the IRA. Irish political opinion shifted to favor revolution.
THE INFLUENCE OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: DE VALERA, COLLINS, AND THE TAN WAR
Sinn Fein, the political party of republicanism, continued its activities in spite of the failure of the Easter Rebellion. When World War I ended, many of the republicans were released. Eamon De Valera, whose life had been spared because he was born in America, emerged as the leader of Sinn Fein. Michael Collins, who avoided extended imprisonment because he happened to walk over to one side of the room when other prisoners were singled out for punishment, came to the forefront of the IRA. Together De Valera and Collins began to fight for Irish independence in 1919.