The Fourth Red Stained Green Field

By AM Sunday, April 11, 2010

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Fortnight Magazine

The closing lines of this book are arguably the most contentious: ‘the roots of the Provisional movement are to be found primarily in the abject failure of the 1956-1962 border campaign.’ It is an interesting thesis because there is nothing in the preceding two hundred pages that would lend itself to such a conclusion. What emerges from Barry Flynn’s readable study of Operation Harvest is the deep rooted and almost instinctual ideological opposition of republicans to the British presence in Ireland. In terms of removing that presence the IRA’s border campaign was as great a failure as that of the Provisional IRA. But the terms on which the republicans of half a century ago ended their six year armed struggle were vastly different from the manner in which the Provisionals settled up.

Unlike the Provisional IRA the volunteers of Operation Harvest did not acquiesce in British rule nor did they seek a junior role in administering it. Ideologically driven they were opposed to the British presence which in their view was responsible for the partition of the country. The Provisionals for their part were the crystallization of an insurrectionary energy more opposed to how the British behaved while in Ireland than they were to the fact that the British were in Ireland. The British did not have to leave but merely change to bring the Provisionals in from their republican cold. No Operation Harvest republican that I am aware of has been recorded as saying that they did not know Britain was responsible for whatever problems the North faced. There is no shortage of activists from the Provisional IRA’s formative years willing to confess that they had little knowledge of Britain’s role.

Nevertheless, the questionable comparison in the concluding page does nothing to take away from the usefulness of Soldiers of Folly. Barry Flynn has produced a work that focuses entirely on the IRA border campaign of 1956-62 and goes some way to addressing a deficiency in a seriously under researched area of IRA history. Usually Operation Harvest constitutes a chapter in a book tracing the contours of a wider IRA existence. By contrast with the Provisional IRA, which has captured a massive amount of bookish attention, the IRA of the border campaign seems almost like a footnote.

In Soldiers Of Folly Flynn brings no new perspective to bear, concluding like most others who have looked at the era that the campaign proved to be an abysmal failure. He finds little disagreeable in the reasons outlined by Sean Cronin for that failure although he totally rejects the premise of Cronin that the campaign was justified to begin with.

Cronin served as IRA chief of staff for part of the border campaign. He was largely responsible for drawing up the master plan that governed the strategic management and implementation of Operation Harvest. His strategic limitations coupled with the fact that he was equipped with a formal rather than a formidable military mind meant that he was more versed in militarist deficiency than military efficiency. Flynn afforded him no dark corners when it came to turning the spotlight on the failures in IRA leadership personnel.

It would have been more fruitful had Flynn been able to access internal IRA documents of the time that had not already fallen into the hands of the authorities. Had he managed this, more knowledge about debates and difference of opinions at leadership level would have been forthcoming. But he tackled an era from which little in the way of memoirs has managed to escape republican omerta and make their way into the public domain. Posterity will never know as much about the IRA of the border campaign as it will about the Provisional IRA.

Yet Flynn puts flesh on the activities of Operation Harvest and provides his reader with a more rounded account than others who have told the story of the Harvest only as part of a more elongated IRA history.

While rejecting the armed violence, ethos and tactics of the volunteers the author is dispassionate in his analysis without being disparaging of those who took up arms. For the most part he seeks to humanize volunteers rather than excise their basic integrity by acquiescing in the facile ‘terrorist profile’ model. The dead of the IRA are never demonized and are often shown through the window of the families who loved and mourned them. Much detail is provided about the funerals of volunteers and the public emotion they engendered. And while he does not dwell on it Flynn says enough to show that he was not blinkered to the use of state violence particularly that of the B-Specials.

There is much in this book that the reader with a strong attachment to republican history will identify with. But the lesson that Flynn is at pains to point out is one that no republican should allow to drift over their heads unpalatable as it may seem to those who still believe that the physical force tradition should be nourished by their own blood and that of others, and who remember Operation Harvest for the fervor rather than the folly. Simply, there is no violent republican solution to the existence of partition or the administrative and political involvement of a British state whose terms of engagement are endorsed by the overwhelming majority of Irish citizens North and South. Whatever else partition might divide it does not fragment opposition to the use of political violence as a means to resolve the long standing issue of the fourth red stained green field.

Soldiers Of Folly: The IRA Border Campaign 1956-1962 by Barry Flynn. Collins Press. ISBN 978 – 1 84889 – 016 - 9