terrorist group IRA

Intersection of Faith Nationalism and Environment in Ireland
Introduction
While terrorist groups are rarely defended by non-members, there is often the sense among objective observers that not all members of a religion that may be said to have “spawned” terrorism are terrorists or sympathetic to terrorism themselves. For instance, not every Muslim supports ISIS or al-Qaeda, and not every Irish Catholic supports the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Most Muslims and Catholics view their religions as religions of peace. On the other hand, critics of religion tend to hold the opinion that all religions lead to extremism when taken seriously and that people from these groups who become “extremists” and take to terrorism are really simply adhering body, mind and soul to the ideology of their religion. But how true is this criticism? Is it possible that in every Muslim or Catholic there exists a potential jihadist or a potential Crusader? Most research into terrorism looks at Middle East terrorism and the Muslim religion and the way nationality and the environment intersect to produce extremists, radicals or terrorists. This study will look at Western terrorism and the IRA as an opportunity to investigate the research question in a way that is more relatable to Westerners. The primary research question is this: How did the intersection of religion, nationalism and environment produce Westernized terrorists within the IRA? The secondary question is this: How could this information be used to help developed a counter-terrorism strategy?
The IRA formed as a result of a long-standing feud between Protestant England and Catholic Ireland—a feud that went all the way back to the apostasy of King Henry VIII in the 16th century. The first landmark killing came with the death of Thomas FitzGerald who declared in public that he would not serve the apostate king in 1534, after the King declared that all subjects accept the Act of Succession. A rebellion against Henry’s daughter Elizabeth followed at the end of the 16th century and launched the Nine Years’ War in Ulster. In 1641, the Irish Rebellion occurred, which was succeeded by the Confederate Wars and the Rebellions and Battles of 1798. While the 19th century saw a union between the Protestant kingdom and the Catholic country, the Irish Republic was formed the following century with the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence in 1921. The Troubles began in 1969 in Northern Ireland and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (commonly known as the IRA) formed to oppose through a strategy of violence the oppression of Catholics and Catholic interests in the North (Bamford, 2005).
The purpose of this study is to understand the intersection of ideology, nationalism and environment with regard to why the IRA formed and what the group sought to do, operating in an underground terroristic fashion as it did. By reviewing the literature available on the IRA and by conducting interviews using Zoom with different generations of Irish Catholics, this study will produce data that will be used to fill the gap in present literature regarding the IRA and why it came about whether it still holds any interest or support from Irish Catholics today.
By understanding what motivates and what motivated the IRA and how it came out of a culture of conflict, it is hypothesized that an appropriate counter-terrorism strategy can be developed and implemented to prevent similar such occurrences from happening in other parts of the Western world where cultural rifts, rising nationalism, and a sense of disenfranchisement may be seeding ground for new terror organizations to crop up.
Literature Review
This literature review used sources that focused specifically on the cultural and historical characteristics of the IRA and what the counter-insurgency efforts of the British were. The purpose of this literature review was to identify the main themes relating to this subject and to situate them without the context of ideology, nationalism and environment. Books, scholarly articles, and primary sources were accessed using Google Scholar and keyword searches related to IRA, counter-terrorism, and the intersection of the identified themes.
Ideology
The provisional IRA was formed in response to the problems in Northern Ireland and the fact that peaceful protests by Catholics were not working in terms of getting any recognition from the Protestant government. In the US, non-violent protests had worked for the African American community and won them the Civil Rights Act. In Northern Ireland, it won nothing. The IRA also did not want to see a political settlement or truce that would mask the underlying issues (Tuck, 2007). The IRA wanted a victory in socio-political terms—a victory for Catholic Ireland in ideological terms. The co-founder of the IRA, Sean MacStiofain, stated, “You’ve got to have military victory first and then politicize the people afterwards. To say you’ve got to unite the Catholic and Protestant working class is just utter rubbish” (Shanahn, 2008, p. 1). In short, the IRA saw the conflict as a war and their efforts as militaristic—not terroristic.
The ideology supporting this militaristic action in their eyes was based on their belief in a Catholic culture and Catholic identity tied to their belief in their right to form a Catholic government. The group felt that Catholics were marginalized and oppressed in the North and they saw action as the only thing that would get the British to take notice. The removal of the British from Ireland was the objective and the group used local gangs, volunteers, foreign support and paramilitary forces to work towards that objective (Bell, 2008).
Prior to its adoption of a cell structure in the late 1970s, the group had a hierarchal structure that reflected its legitimate aims: it had an Army Council and Chief of Staff and its members could send representatives to the General Army Conventions; however, these were held irregularly over the decades (O’Brien, 1999). The Army Council oversaw tactics, policy, and the process for electing a Chief of Staff (Moloney, 2010). Overall, the members of the organization were considered volunteers and membership was secret in the end, to avoid detection from British agents believed to have infiltrated the organization. The secrecy of the IRA made it very difficult to maintain trust within the ranks, and the effectiveness of the IRA was highly suspected by many Irish going forward (O’Brien, 1999). But the British had been burning Catholic homes and forcing Catholic migration out of Belfast. And so the IRA responded with a gang-style method of operations: bombings, attacks, and a general war of attrition were conducted, with the Green Book outlining the IRA’s methods and aims (O’Brien, 1999).
Nationalism
The goal of the IRA was to create “a united, independent, all-island Irish state” (Shanahan, 2008, p. 1). Thus, at root the organization had both religious and nationalistic motivations that were essentially intertwined. The Irish resented the Protestant stronghold in the North and they resented the Protestant culture that had grown up in the United Kingdom all around them. The Irish Catholic identity in the Irish Republic was fiercely and jealously guarded by the IRA, even as the IRA became marginalized within the wider Irish Catholic community, which began to see the IRA as troublesome and partly to blame for the Troubles (Shanahan, 2008).
The use of a cell structure by the IRA in the mid-1970s was in response to the British presence and infiltration of the organization (Taylor, 2001). Though the IRA leaders had hoped for and anticipated a brief struggle using overwhelming guerrilla style attacks to drive the British forces out of Ireland, the British response of digging in and doubling down caused the IRA to have to change tactics. A merger between the IRA and the political group Sinn Fein occurred as the two had the same nationalistic goals: the IRA would be the military force and Sinn Fein the political force and together they would pursue the goal of a united Ireland. The decades’ long struggle for who would control Northern Ireland ended at last with a political truce but not before the most violent and tensest years of socio-political unrest in Europe had come to pass (Shanahan, 2008). The IRA turned to Hunger Strike leader Bobby Sands for nationalistic support, and the IRA vowed to avenge itself upon anyone colluding with the British against them (O’Brien, 1999).
Environment
The environment in which the IRA’s formation and maintenance was conducted spanned decades, but as the Green Book (1977) pointed out, the efforts and tactics of the IRA “are dictated by the existing conditions,” and before 1969, “Brits were not to be shot, but after the Falls curfew all Brits were to the people acceptable targets. The existing conditions had been changed” (IRA Green Book, 1977, p. 6). Paranoia about eavesdroppers and infiltrators caused the IRA to adopt a cell structure and for total secrecy to be the order of the day. This meant closing ranks and ensuring that the vitality of the organization would be reduced considerably—but there was no other way, as the British government was arresting thousands of IRA members and the public was growing out of sympathy with the organization’s efforts. Thus, the IRA Green Book (1977) stated that the war with Britain was a “war of attrition” and that the primary method of waging the war would be a “bombing campaign” (p. 8). Those who took up the call were reminded in bold, all caps font: DON’T TALK IN PUBLIC PLACES: YOU DON’T TELL YOUR FAMILY, FRIENDS, GIRLFRIENDS OR WORKMATES THAT YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE I.R.A. DON’T EXPRESS VIEWS ABOUT MILITARY MATTERS, IN OTHER WORDS YOU SAY NOTHING TO ANY PERSON” (IRA Green Book, 1977, p. 2). The environment was hostile and IRA members were told in no uncertain terms that they were essentially joining a secret order.
Gaps
How religion ties into the formation of the IRA and how it intersects with nationality and environment is something that needs to be considered more deeply. As Rooney (2007) shows, the need to wage violent action on behalf of the Catholic communities was one that had to be justified to Catholics as being a moral and legitimate need. What it led to was a “definition of morality [that] was grounded in Catholic teaching,” which ultimately led the IRA “to challenge the leadership of the ecclesiastical authorities” (p. 64). How the Church and the IRA and the public and the nationalist spirit came together in a tense environment should be understood more deeply so that similar situations can be averted.
Methodology
The type of research that will be used to collect data on the gaps discussed in the literature review conclusion will be qualitative as the nature of the research is exploratory and thus best suited to a qualitative research design. A focus group method can allow a researcher to obtain qualitative data that focuses on common themes and concepts found among the responses of the various participants in the focus group when a question is put out for group discussion. Experiments allow a researcher to test a hypothesis and look at specific variables and how they relate. Interviews allow a researcher to obtain in-depth data from a single participant by asking questions that can lead to more questions and more answers and so on. Each method is helpful depending on what the researcher is attempting to do, and so they all have their place in meaningful research. The difference between quantitative and qualitative research is that the former is typically conducted to test a hypothesis whereas the latter is typically conducted to develop a hypothesis.
Qualitative research focuses on exploring a problem and investigating it using in-depth methods such as interviews, focus groups, case study analysis or immersion into the field to experience firsthand what the subjects experience. The data collected is usually analyzed in a subjective manner.
While it is true that both qualitative and quantitative studies can have hypotheses, the reality is that quantitative studies tend to have testable hypotheses while qualitative studies tend to formulate an hypothesis during the iterative process of obtaining and analyzing data. In other words, a quantitative study will pose hypotheses at the outset and then set about testing them to see whether they can be accepted or rejected. A qualitative study on the other hand will pose central questions at the outset and then arrive at a possible hypothesis to explain the data collected at the end of the study. It is common for qualitative research to serve as the foundation for later quantitative research, which will essentially test the proposed hypotheses at the end of qualitative research.
The strengths of the qualitative method are that it allows for a deep down understanding of a phenomenon so that a hypothesis can be developed and then tested using a quantitative method. The weaknesses of the qualitative method are that it is mainly subjective and usually only allows one to look at a small sample.
Nonetheless, the best way to explore the intersectionality of religion, nationalism and environment in the formation of a Western terror organization is to explore the roots of the issue and examine it through the eyes of the individuals involved and through the eyes of individuals today who may have their own understanding of what went on. Perspective reveals a great deal about how these groups are formed. The interviews conducted will be transcribed and content analysis used to identify the themes that best explain the intersectionality.
Data will be collected by using social media to identify people in Ireland who want to be interviewed for this study and an unstructured interview approach will be used to conduct the interviews. The interviews will be recorded using video recording software on the computer and this will allow for the responses to be transcribed and examined in detail. By exploring the responses in this manner a fuller understanding of what causes groups of this particular nature to come together and how such formation could be prevented in the future may begin to be seen. Since the idea is to explore and then arrive at a hypothesis, it will be important to connect themes from the literature to themes discussed in the unstructured interviews.
References
Bamford, B. (2005). The Role and Effectiveness of Intelligence in Northern Ireland. Intelligence and National Security, 20(4), 581-607.
Bell, J. B. (2008). The Secret Army: The IRA. London: Transaction Publishers.
IRA Green Book. (1977). Accessed 14 Dec 2015 from https://tensmiths.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/15914572-ira-green-book-volumes-1-and-2.pdf
Maloney, E. (2010). Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland. NY: Faber, Faber.
O’Brien, B. (1999). The Long War: The IRA and Sinn Fein. NY: Syracuse University Press.
Rooney, N. (2007). Violent nationalism in catholic communities: The Provisional IRA and ETA. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 7(3), 64-77.
Shanahan, Timothy. (2008). The Provisional IRA and the Morality of Terrorism. UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Taylor, P. (2001). Brits. UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tuck, C. (2007). Northern Ireland and the British Approach to Counter-Insurgency. Defense and Security Analysis, 23(2): 165-183.