PIRA and the British Government's Counter-Insurgency Response

Introduction: Historical Background and Research Questions

The war between the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and the British state from 1969 to 1998 was a complex situation in which various entities pursued similar and dissimilar aims through various channels — political as well as militaristic and terroristic. Even in the midst of the most violent clashes, secret talks were held between leaders of the PIRA and the British state, with the political face of Republican beliefs (Sinn Féin) gaining popular support over the years and to some degree undermining the aims, objectives, and capacity of the PIRA to operate effectively (O'Brien, 1999; Tonge, 2002). The PIRA's strategic effectiveness was also complicated by its own inability to overcome specific problematic features of its organization — most notably the factors of security and territoriality. Likewise, the British state enacted a program of using informants and infiltrators to undermine the PIRA from within. The tension between engaging in peace talks with the PIRA and refusing its demands — such as full British withdrawal and the granting of Special Category Status to "political" prisoners — stemmed from the dramatic history of repression and resistance that had characterized the relationship between Ireland and Britain since the 1500s. Making sense of that tension and exploiting weaknesses within the Republican movement as a whole (via legal, political, police, intelligence, and collusion strategies) allowed the British state to meet and overcome certain challenges it faced throughout this ordeal.

Since the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII separated from Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England, there had been, by extension, tension and conflict in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants. For more than four hundred years, this tension brewed and simmered, boiling over into fits of violence and war. There was the hanging and quartering of Thomas FitzGerald, who publicly repudiated his loyalty to the English monarch in 1534 following Henry's infamous Act of Succession; the rebellion against Elizabeth in 1594 and the commencement of the Nine Years' War in Ulster; the Irish Rebellion of 1641; the Confederate Wars; and the Rebellions and Battles of 1798.

In spite of these decades of fighting, the Acts of Union in 1800 bound the two islands together in one United Kingdom, and Catholic Emancipation permitted Catholics the right to hold seats in Parliament. For a century, union remained the order of the day, until the Easter Rising of 1916 led to the establishment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Dublin, where the Irish Republic as a single, self-governing entity was proclaimed. This was the seed that sprouted into Ireland's Declaration of Independence in 1919 and the Irish War of Independence, which ended in 1921 and culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the partitioning of Ireland — Britain acknowledging the Irish Free State while retaining Northern Ireland.

In 1969, the Troubles began (also known as the Northern Ireland Conflict). This was the continuation of the war between Irish nationalists (mostly Catholics) and the unionists or loyalists (Protestants/British). Prejudice and discrimination against the nationalists had taken place in Northern Ireland, where unionists were the majority, prompting "a wave of sectarian violence" to break out (Bamford, 2005, p. 582). The Provisional Irish Republican Army split from the Irish Republican Army in order to carry out its own violent protest against the systematic marginalization of Catholic nationalists in the North. At the same time, British intelligence was determined to crush the PIRA and put an end to the threat of its rule on the island, just as it had done in centuries past.

The PIRA waged a destructive and often brutal war of retaliation against the British state, attacking British economic infrastructure within Northern Ireland and undermining the political and social order through targeted assassinations. So successful was the PIRA in its early days that victory and the aim of a British-free Ireland seemed not only possible but within the group's grasp. However, the British state did not relent. In early 1972, it doubled down on dissenters and demonstrators when British soldiers fired upon protestors in what became known as Bloody Sunday. The war intensified, and on both sides efforts were made toward better security and the organization and protection of intelligence.

In 1977, the PIRA reorganized itself, transitioning from the model of a British army brigade system to a cell-structured system more suitable to guerrilla-style warfare. This transition was designed to reduce infiltration by security agents and informants working for the British state and to lessen the risk of mass capture. Until then, the British had been able to arrest a great many PIRA volunteers, including founding member Seán MacStíofáin. Following the changes in the PIRA's organizational structure, the British were essentially forced to develop new methods of countering it and attenuating its aims.

The questions posed in this study are: How did the British government respond to these new forms of terrorism employed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army? What measures were used in combating the waves of violence against the British state from 1977 to 1998, when a settlement was finally negotiated? This study answers these questions by concentrating on the following areas in subsequent chapters.

Chapter One provides the historical context of Northern Irish terrorism and examines how the Troubles began, with particular attention to the events leading up to Bloody Friday. Chapter Two examines how the PIRA operated and its method of terrorism within the British state. Chapter Three shows what processes the British government used to combat Irish terrorism — including legislation, intelligence, the use of informants, special branches, counter-terrorist intelligence, surveillance, and interrogation. Chapter Four illustrates the difficulties encountered by the British state and what it did to overcome them. Chapter Five focuses on control, accountability, the unmeasured actions of the security forces, and collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.

Chapter One: The Troubles

Discrimination against the Catholic nationalist minority had been brewing for years in Northern Ireland. A number of non-violent groups had organized to protest job, housing, and voting discrimination. In areas where Catholic nationalists were a majority, electoral boundaries had been drawn in ways that limited nationalist political power — another bone of contention among civil rights advocacy groups. The police of Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), were almost entirely Protestant unionist in composition and had authorization under the Special Powers Act to perform searches and seizures without warrant, to imprison without due process, and to prevent public demonstrations — all of which were exercised against Catholic nationalists in the years leading up to the Troubles (Tonge, 2002).

At the same time, a growing Republican faction within the IRA promoted a "more extreme militant" viewpoint in which violence served as the viable means of establishing a solution to the discrimination in Northern Ireland, with the ultimate aim being the total reunification of Northern Ireland with the Republic — essentially a repudiation of the British mandate in the province (Bamford, 2005, p. 582). The PIRA embodied this militancy and their actions demonstrated their belief. Out of revenge for Bloody Sunday (January 1972), in which British soldiers fired upon and killed 13 unarmed civilian demonstrators, PIRA set off 40 bombs in a single afternoon — car bombs timed to explode within minutes of one another and designed as an attack on British economic infrastructure in Northern Ireland. This was Bloody Friday (July 1972). The British response, which followed an attack that killed seven people, was Operation Motorman — a strategy designed to return control of Catholic centers in Belfast and Londonderry to the British (Bamford, 2005, p. 583). Thus, while Bloody Friday delivered a blow to the Crown, it also angered British forces and provoked a fight with a far larger opponent. The deed was done, however, and the PIRA had left an indelible mark on the history of Northern Ireland. The response was predictably aggressive: blowback aimed at Catholic civilians was delivered by Protestant unionist militants, and the British crackdown began in force.

Bloody Friday was also a concentrated and violent effort to reignite stalled talks between the IRA and the British government. The IRA had been in negotiations with William Whitelaw of the British delegation tasked with hammering out a truce in the wake of Bloody Sunday. The IRA wanted the British to agree to leave Northern Ireland entirely within three years and to free Republican prisoners. A ceasefire had been in effect, but when Whitelaw's delegation refused to meet the conditions put forward, negotiations came to a halt. The PIRA's response was to launch an all-out assault on the British commercial centers in Belfast, crippling their economic function (Maloney, 2010).

The attack on Belfast was, additionally, a direct challenge to the words of Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner, who stated in conjunction with the plan to "introduce internment" on 9 August 1971: "If Northern Ireland is to survive and prosper, two things are essential. We must sustain a continuing program of economic and social development, and we must find the means to create a more united society here" (Compton, 1971, p. iv). This call for stability and economic sustainability was meant to justify the Special Powers Act, under which 342 men were arrested on 9 August 1971 — and nearly 1,000 in total one month later. These individuals were suspected of "having acted or being about to act in a manner prejudicial to the preservation of the peace or the maintenance of order" in Northern Ireland (Compton, 1971, p. iii). In other words, they were suspected affiliates of the IRA, which Parliament noted had begun "to increase the ferocity of their well-established campaign of violence" that same year (Compton, 1971, p. iii). The implementation of the decades-old Special Powers Act was meant to curb support for the IRA. Parliament cited "over 1,000 incidents involving explosives" and the deaths of more than a hundred civilians, 12 RUC members, and nearly 40 Armed Forces servicemen since 1969 (Compton, 1971, p. iii). The PIRA's retaliation for the discrimination shown to Catholic nationalists was thus met with British retaliation by way of internment. The IRA would counter with more demonstrations in the following months, culminating in Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, when the British Army fired upon Irish civilians. Bloody Friday would serve as the reprisal half a year later in Belfast.

Terrorism had been the modus operandi of the PIRA after the official IRA had preferred to seek a political solution to the problem of discrimination and partition in Northern Ireland. The PIRA essentially viewed itself as the authentic Irish Republican Army. It established itself in 1969 in the face of RUC aggression during non-violent Catholic civil rights demonstrations. Riots in August of that year followed RUC attacks, and the Battle of the Bogside inspired further riots, demonstrations, and protests throughout Northern Ireland. In Belfast, the oppression was most severe: homes and businesses owned by Catholics were torched and destroyed, and thousands of nationalist and Catholic families were cast out of their communities. The evident support shown by the RUC to unionist Protestants gave rise to comparisons with a pogrom aimed at suppressing Catholics (Shanahan, 2008).

The PIRA was thus born out of an intense desire to fight back against Protestant aggression in the North as well as to "spoil" any attempt to "obtain a political settlement" (Tuck, 2007, p. 168). As Seán MacStíofáin, one of the PIRA's founding leaders, stated, the intent was to achieve victory through arms: "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" (Shanahan, 2008, p. 1). The official IRA had wanted exactly that — therefore the PIRA, appealing to old-world sentiment and the violent militarism of the early twentieth-century Catholic forces, set about arming the Northern Ireland Catholics and nationalists who saw the conflict as both ideological and physical, with the outcome of the physical conflict determining the establishment of the ideology. The PIRA aimed to assault and destabilize the unionist forces that were wreaking havoc on their Catholic and nationalist brethren: terrorist tactics, bombings, shootings, and assassinations were their "way forward" to the envisioned prize: "a united, independent, all-island Irish state" (Shanahan, 2008, p. 1).

The PIRA acted: in January 1971 it detonated sixteen bombs; in February, thirty-eight; and from that point on was averaging 40 per month, not counting the nearly one hundred detonations in July alone (Shanahan, 2008, p. 2). In the early summer of 1971, victory seemed at hand. Those expectations dissipated, and by 1975 secret talks between the PIRA and the British state were conducted in order to find a resolution. A ceasefire was called as PIRA leaders Ó Brádaigh and McKee met with Merlyn Rees of the Northern Ireland British government. While the PIRA leaders anticipated a full British withdrawal, Rees aimed more at a political truce. The divergence of aims brought new division to the PIRA, resulting in the collapse of the ceasefire and the organizational overhaul of 1977. The ceasefire had also allowed British agents to gain access to the PIRA, and its overall hierarchical structure became compromised. Both sides returned to fighting in 1976, and the PIRA's shift to a cell structure in the following year was intended to address British state infiltration (Taylor, 2001).

What had appeared to be a quick war based on an overwhelming wave of violence now looked to be a "long war," and the need to organize PIRA activities into individualized, tight-knit cells meant that the group would now be relying on a tremendous "spirit of mission" to drive overall operations (Samaan, Verneuil, 2009). A new alliance between the PIRA and Sinn Féin — acting as the political voice of the Republic — came into being as the two outlets of nationalist outrage pursued the same end through different channels. The British were not open to further ceasefire talks. Sinn Féin won more support after the Hunger Strike of 1981, which was related to the denial of Special Category Status to Irish prisoners. By the 1990s, Sinn Féin was confident that a political solution could be reached and began distancing itself from the PIRA.

In 2005 the IRA announced a cessation of armed activity, and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement began to be fulfilled, with a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland going into effect in 2007.

In total, more than 3,500 people died as a result of the Troubles and approximately 30,000 were injured. While these numbers may seem comparatively small in absolute terms, what is not small is "the number of deaths associated with political violence ... [which] was greater than that in all other European Community countries combined" (Shanahan, 2008, p. 3). The tense and violent situation in Northern Ireland lasted half a lifetime, underscoring the determination of both sides to see an end to the conflict that would support their respective aims. To the British and much of the outside world, the PIRA was a terrorist organization. To the PIRA and its supporters, it was an armed uprising. The difference in characterizations may be incidental. The British response to the change in military tactics adopted by the PIRA beginning in 1977 was not.

Chapter Two: How the PIRA Operated and Its Method of Terrorism

The PIRA operated according to a strategy whose objective was to devastate British forces and British infrastructure in Northern Ireland to such an extent that the country would relent in the face of popular opinion — or the withdrawal of public support. Removal of the British and all manifestations of the Crown, from the RUC to the governmental structure, was the goal. The PIRA utilized all manner of forces — volunteers (a great many of whom joined following Bloody Sunday), paramilitary units, foreign supporters, local gangs, and more (Bell, 2008).

The initial organizational structure of the PIRA was based on the British military hierarchical system. Because the PIRA was unofficial and considered an uprising, its character changed over time — especially from 1977 onward. Before 1969, the IRA was headed by the Army Council and the Chief of Staff. Every level from the bottom up was able to send representatives to the IRA's General Army Convention (GAC), which met consistently (O'Brien, 1999). Following the split in the IRA and the formation of the PIRA, the GAC convened only three times over the next four decades — once in 1970, again in 1986, and finally in 2005.

The GAC voted on the IRA Executive, consisting of twelve members who chose the individuals who would make up the Army Council. The Army Council acted as oversight for daily affairs and also oversaw policy decisions, tactical maneuverings, and the election of the Chief of Staff. Departments within the PIRA consisted of Finance, Training, Arms, Intelligence, Operations, Security, and more. The PIRA's headquarters were situated in Dublin, but with the 1977 reorganization, authority was redistributed to the Ulster counties, where the Northern Command of the PIRA oversaw the area within which the Troubles were concentrated (Moloney, 2010).

The PIRA's soldiers were called "volunteers." Prior to the 1977 restructuring they were organized as parts of units following the British military style, with companies covering a specific area within a much larger zone overseen by a battalion, itself typically part of a larger brigade. The five main brigades of the PIRA were situated in Belfast, Londonderry, Donegal, Tyrone/Monaghan, and Armagh. The Belfast Brigade grew exponentially in the early years of the PIRA, consisting of more than a thousand volunteers just prior to Bloody Sunday after starting with no more than a few dozen at the time of the August Riots (Moloney, 2010). Bloody Sunday served to fuel even greater numbers joining the PIRA, especially in Derry where the incident occurred. Each brigade had its own battalions, and each battalion and company had its own commander and officers.

As the 1970s wore on and the British were able to arrest more and more PIRA members, a new structure was eventually adopted that essentially did away with the battalion order. While regular companies continued to exist for the sake of monitoring regions held by Catholic nationalists, obtaining intelligence, and storing arms, the actual coordination of attacks was carried out by active service units — essentially cells and sleeper cells of no more than half a dozen to a dozen individuals. A quartermaster still oversaw the control and flow of arms and ammunition. By the 1980s, there were anywhere between 50 and 100 active service units operating in Northern Ireland (O'Brien, 1999). The main reason for this reorganization was the collapse of security within the PIRA.

With the arrest of founding leader Seán MacStíofáin, for instance, a major change came to the Belfast Brigade. The large military units were dissolved and replaced by small cells that acted independently of one another — the primary reason being to boost both security and "operational capacity" (Bell, 2008, p. 437). The issue of security, however, would never be fully resolved: as would later be revealed, the British had their own moles inside the PIRA — among them Frank Scappaticci, "the deputy head of the PIRA's internal security section" (Charters, 2013, p. 203). The organizational structure of the PIRA by the late 1970s also resembled a loose-knit, secretive, highly territorial collection of street gangs, with each cell typically isolated from the others. The cell structure did not resolve this problem of isolation (Bell, 2008, p. 437). The PIRA was not unaware of informers within its ranks: over the course of three decades, the group killed 71 individuals "alleged" to be informants (Sarma, 2005, p. 167). Thus the issues of organization and security were complicated by several competing factors, needs, and aims within the PIRA itself.

On the one hand, the PIRA wanted to remain autonomous yet effective, with a measure of discipline and organization that could hold individuals accountable within a larger hierarchy. On the other hand, the need to remain free of British intelligence agents and double-agents caused the organization to break itself into smaller parts that could be more independently structured so as to impede possible collusion. This, however, had its own drawbacks: trust and secrecy led to territoriality, suspicion, and an even more dangerous climate in which violence threatened to overwhelm the very aims and objectives — the maintaining of a nationalist society in Northern Ireland — that the group sought to achieve and protect.

The method of terrorism that the PIRA employed within the British state was not viewed as terrorism by members of the PIRA but rather as paramilitary activities in the order of an uprising or a guerrilla force. Guerrilla tactics, in other words, is the framework through which the PIRA would have identified its own operations (Shanahan, 2008). The terms color the actions, and depending upon where one's sympathies lie — with the loyalists or the nationalists, with the Protestants or with the Catholics — the usage of terms can be more than merely suggestive. It is therefore helpful to simply examine the method of acting in order to understand the PIRA's operations and what the British faced in attempting to thwart the group.

The origination of the PIRA's activities can be located in the August Riots, when protestors in Derry hurled rocks and petrol bombs while the RUC responded with CS gas. The burning of Catholic homes and forced emigration from Belfast was a final straw: the violence aimed at Catholic nationalists compelled the PIRA to act in kind. MacStíofáin, who had been Director of Intelligence for the IRA, connected with other Republicans disenchanted with the Dublin office's leadership, and in Belfast the majority of IRA units joined the PIRA.

The PIRA did not trust that a political solution could be effected, which is why, though it supported Sinn Féin, it did not view the political party as a viable way forward, and the two entities harbored a degree of mutual misgiving. The Irish government gave money to the PIRA in its early days (English, 2005), but the advent of a "long war" caused support to shift away from the paramilitary organization toward the political expression of Republicanism with a view toward peaceful resolution. The PIRA identified British rule in Ireland as invalid and refused to accept it, but the reality of a protracted war did little to provide legitimacy to the concept of a "long war." Within the first two years of the August Riots, the PIRA had armed and mobilized volunteers within Catholic areas in an effort to guard against loyalist assault and had appeared relatively confident of an immediate and favorable British response. As the PIRA had also begun coordinating attacks on the infrastructure of the occupiers, British capitulation seemed imminent. It was not, and the PIRA was obliged to restructure its operations following the collapse of the 1975 ceasefire and the infiltration of the PIRA by British agents.

The restructuring from battalion to cell-based operational activities gave the PIRA a much more secretive and gang-style character. It issued in 1977 a new edition of its training manual, called the Green Book, which illustrated the strategic methodology of the PIRA by outlining its aims and techniques. The war against the British state was viewed as an attritional war, with the object being to inflict enough punishment that the British public would call for withdrawal. The Green Book also highlighted the nature of this campaign — violent, via the bombing of British financial institutions and interests, in order to eliminate the prospect of any monetary or commercial advantage to Britain's continued presence in Northern Ireland. The PIRA also aimed to destabilize the counties of Northern Ireland to such an extent that they could only be managed by the paramilitary forces. To support this war, the PIRA appealed to both national and international interests, using, for example, the hunger strike led by Bobby Sands as a means of gathering support. The final method of controlling the war was the PIRA's intention to act swiftly and mercilessly with individuals found to be colluding with the British, whether criminally, collaboratively, or as informants (O'Brien, 1999).

As Rogers (2000) notes, the "use of economic targeting by PIRA did not take place in isolation" (p. 2). Such a strategy was traditionally associated with guerrilla and terrorist forces aiming to undermine a colonizing enemy. Both the PIRA and the British state thus had international examples from which to draw in terms of paramilitary action and how to counter it.

Throughout the Troubles, the PIRA launched several large-scale attacks, including Bloody Friday, which killed a dozen people and injured 100. In 1974, the PIRA bombed public houses and a department store — including one on the British mainland in London, which took five lives and injured 80. In 1976 the British Ambassador to Ireland was assassinated; the Queen's own cousin was killed in 1979; Margaret Thatcher was targeted in 1984; Ian Gow MP was killed in 1990; and the Cabinet on Downing Street was targeted in a mortar attack the following year (Rogers, 2000, p. 3). The method throughout the conflict was consistent: targeting economic infrastructure and politically or socially significant individuals within the British state through bombings designed to drive a wedge between the British public and the British government.

The best way to understand the methods of the PIRA is to understand the Green Book. The 1977 edition essentially called for total fidelity, loyalty, and allegiance from its volunteers, placing the PIRA first, and family and friends second. It was in many ways like a secret fraternity. Tactics, the manual asserted, "are dictated by the existing conditions" — in other words, this was a piecemeal, makeshift war in which operations were determined by the availability of supplies and the conditions imposed upon volunteers by the enemy. The Green Book noted, for instance, that prior to 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).

The cover of the Green Book depicts a black-cloaked PIRA volunteer, face masked, holding an automatic weapon. In bold print are the words: "Loose-talk costs lives," followed by the sub-text: "In taxis / On the phone / In clubs and bars / At football matches / At home with friends / Anywhere!" and again in bold: "Whatever you say — say nothing." Indeed, the first line of the book describes the main rule of the PIRA: "The most important thing is security!" This secrecy carried the weight of a Masonic order. The Green Book stipulated further: "That means you: 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 manual also described the dangers of excessive drinking, which could result in loose lips: "Volunteers are warned that drink-induced loose talk is the MOST POTENTIAL DANGER" to the PIRA's survival. It described guerrilla-style tactics as well as how to resist talking under torture if captured. Thus the most important aspect of the PIRA following its 1977 restructuring was the maintenance of absolute secrecy. As for tactics, the Green Book made clear that it was "a war of attrition" and that "a bombing campaign" was the primary method of operations (IRA Green Book, 1977, p. 8).

Conclusion

The response of the British government to the actions of the PIRA cannot be conceived simply: it consists of a complex combination of legal approaches, policing, infiltration, repression, terrorism, murder, politicking, peace talks, negotiations, restructuring, refining, and a willingness to cease fighting in favor of political truce. Years of changes and rearrangements were involved in the British state's response. It ranged from bloody and violent — as on Bloody Sunday — to repressive and demeaning — prompting the Hunger Strikes — to positive and practical, regarding the political negotiations with Sinn Féin. Consequently, one could assert that the British response was made up of components that were part immoral and unlawful and part lawful and honest. Considering the number and range of men involved in the conflict, such should come as no surprise.

There is never a clear line of action or justice in any conflict between individuals acting from different ideological backgrounds and beliefs, where passions run high and outrage is a driving force behind acts of retaliation and murder. The fact is that the British response to the changes in the PIRA's organizational structure adopted in 1977 showed a willingness both to confront the new cell system with cells of its own — like the UDA — and to use a political strategy after infiltrating the PIRA and exploiting its weaknesses in terms of structure and internal trust to inspire a different movement of support: away from violent Republicanism and toward a more political and peaceful expression of the Republican ideals held by the Irish nationalists.

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