1969 and all that

AS A journalist I am reluctant to deal in ‘what-ifs’. The nature of my work is to write down what happened, not to speculate on what didn’t. In this case, however, speculation is all there is – and yet it is irresistible to me such is the significance of the claim that has been made, not to mention the fact that it is being widely ignored in the press.

Everyone knows the history of the 1969 split in the IRA – the ‘Officials’ wanted to pursue Moscow-line socialism while the ‘Provisionals’ wanted to defend working class republican areas of the North from loyalist and state violence. Up until this point in December 1969 the IRA had been largely inactive since the end of the disastrous ‘border campaign’ of the 1950s and, as the name indicates, this campaign did not involve Belfast brigades. So, when violence flared in 1969 the IRA was nowhere to be found. “IRA – I Ran Away”, was famously scrawled on a wall.

Or so we all thought.

No-one has actually ever managed to produce a photograph of this famous witticism and although it is clear that the IRA was totally unprepared for the outbreak of violence, it made up for lost time pretty quickly.

Enter the late Tómas Mac Giolla. Mac Giolla, who died yesterday, was at the time president of Sinn Féin and a member, along with Cathal Goulding and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, of the IRA’s governing body, the army council. The traditional understanding of the split is that a reformist group led by Mac Giolla and Goulding wanted to abandon Sinn Féin’s policy of abstentionism that saw it refuse to recognise the authority of the Dáil and parliaments of Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. This was seen by it supporters as a move toward the primacy of politics of over armed struggle. Opponents saw it as capitulation.

The IRA split in December 1969 and Sinn Féin a month later. The December 1969 split saw the formation of a ‘provisional’ army council of the IRA, from which the name the ‘Provisional IRA’ would eventually emerge. In response, the other wing began referring to itself as the Official IRA.

So far, so what? Well, in an interview published today in the Irish Daily Mail, Mac Giolla claimed that the split was a result of the intervention of just one man: Seamus Costello. Costello, who was part of the left-leaning reformist group would later himself walk out and form the Irish Republican Socialist Party and its military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) which, it was reported today, has now disarmed. (1)

According to Mac Giolla, in the interview conducted by Jason O’Toole, the IRA was ready to postpone its support for the various parliaments in order to avert a damaging split.

“We had ensured that the split didn’t occur on the vote to enter Leinster House and Westminster parliaments. If [Ruairí] Ó Brádaigh didn’t win that vote they were all ready to walk out. Let’s put it this way, Ó Brádaigh was allowed to win that vote. We ensured they didn’t lose the vote to make sure there was no walk-out. But as soon as that was over, Seamus Costello called for a motion of no confidence in the IRA and Ó Brádaigh stood up and they all walked out. That’s what Costello did to ensure the split.” (2)

However, the split did occur and the ensuing feud was bloody, as were later feuds with the INLA and Irish People’s Liberation Organisation (IPLO).

But what if it hadn’t? As things did transpire, the Official IRA went on permanent ceasefire in 1972. The organisation didn’t cease to exist, though. It continued ‘protecting’ members of Official Sinn Féin (later Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party and then the Workers’ Party) and was also involved in fundraising activities that included armed robberies and forgery. Putting this aside, there is the more interesting question of politics.

The Workers’ Party never ceased to claim to be a republican socialist party but at the same time it took some extraordinary steps for a group that was once the political wing of the IRA, including supporting the Royal Ulster Constabulary and demanding the extradition of IRA members from the Republic to face the courts in the North. This could not have occurred had the IRA and Sinn Féin held together in 1969/70. But would a slower evolution have occurred? After all, today Sinn Féin recognises the Northern Ireland assembly and Police Service of Northern Ireland. Would the avoidance of the 1969 split have resulted in a lot less bloodshed?

It can be said with some confidence that even if the split had been averted, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and others would eventually have walked out. After all, his group split from the Provisional IRA in 1986 over the issue of recognising the Dáil alone, never mind the British parliament. The question is, when would the split have occurred? In 1972 at the height of the conflict when it would necessarily spawn something like the Provisional IRA? Or later, resulting in a smaller, more isolated group such as the Continuity IRA linked to Republican Sinn Féin, the party founded in the wake of the 1986 split?

Of course, any speculation must take into account the fact that all of the above is premised on one man’s claim about the actions of another man, a man he came to loathe and who was assassinated by the Official IRA. In short, there’s not only a lot of murk but also the possibility that the whole thing is either untrue or so tendentious that it makes any questions surrounding it an irrelevance.

(1) Northern Ireland INLA paramilitaries dump terror cache, Vincent Kearney, BBC News, February 6, 2010
(2) The Irish Daily Mail story has not been published online but relevant extracts can be found here: http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/interview-with-tomas-mac-giolla-in-the-mail/, Cedar Lounge Revolution, February 6, 2010