From the Loyalist blog It's Still Only Thursday, a third piece in a series looking at 'legitimate targets' during the North's politically violent conflict.

For an overview of the ‘Killing by Numbers’ series, please see Part 1.



OIRA, INLA & IPLO


The ‘Official IRA’

In early 1970, the organisation which styled itself as the ‘Irish Republican Army’ broke into two acrimonious factions- the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA.

The Officials, or ‘Stickies’ as they became known, had in fact a greater claim to be the ‘inheritors‘ of the title of ‘IRA’, since they retained as members most of those who had been active during the abortive ‘Border Campaign’ (Operation Harvest) of 1956-62.

Under their Dublin based leadership, the Officials adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideology, through which they sought to unify the working classes of Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, overthrow the state of Northern Ireland (and the Irish Republic) and thereafter establish a unified, 32 county communist state.

Because of their doctrinaire Marxism and their stated aim of unifying the working class, the Official IRA are widely regarded as being much less sectarian and markedly more cautious than either their Provisional IRA rivals or the splinter groups (INLA/IRSP and IPLO) which would later emerge from within the ‘Stickies’ own ranks.

This is somewhat borne out by the statistics, however, those statistics are skewed by the fact that the Official IRA largely abandoned violence in 1973/74 and thereafter engaged in violence only sporadically.

Continue reading @ It's Still Only Thursday,

➽ Follow It's Still Only Thursday on Twitter @0nIyThursday

Killing by Numbers ➤ Part 3

From the Loyalist blog It's Still Only Thursday, a third piece in a series looking at 'legitimate targets' during the North's politically violent conflict.

For an overview of the ‘Killing by Numbers’ series, please see Part 1.



OIRA, INLA & IPLO


The ‘Official IRA’

In early 1970, the organisation which styled itself as the ‘Irish Republican Army’ broke into two acrimonious factions- the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA.

The Officials, or ‘Stickies’ as they became known, had in fact a greater claim to be the ‘inheritors‘ of the title of ‘IRA’, since they retained as members most of those who had been active during the abortive ‘Border Campaign’ (Operation Harvest) of 1956-62.

Under their Dublin based leadership, the Officials adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideology, through which they sought to unify the working classes of Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, overthrow the state of Northern Ireland (and the Irish Republic) and thereafter establish a unified, 32 county communist state.

Because of their doctrinaire Marxism and their stated aim of unifying the working class, the Official IRA are widely regarded as being much less sectarian and markedly more cautious than either their Provisional IRA rivals or the splinter groups (INLA/IRSP and IPLO) which would later emerge from within the ‘Stickies’ own ranks.

This is somewhat borne out by the statistics, however, those statistics are skewed by the fact that the Official IRA largely abandoned violence in 1973/74 and thereafter engaged in violence only sporadically.

Continue reading @ It's Still Only Thursday,

➽ Follow It's Still Only Thursday on Twitter @0nIyThursday

3 comments:

  1. Readers Quiz: What paramilitary group fits this description from part 3:
    "??? were little more than a motley collection of common criminals, drug dealers and gangsters. They made little or no attempt to attack those they regarded as being ‘legitimate targets’ and instead concentrated on indiscriminate sectarian attacks"

    Answer: Not any loyalist group --Spoiler --here's what they write in part 4 on Loyalsits:
    "However, it does rather destroy the myth that Loyalist paramilitary groups were mindless killers who slaughtered their victims entirely, or even mostly, at random."

    ReplyDelete
  2. “... Had the IPLO not been forcibly disbanded in August, 1992...”

    Isnt this wrong too? Famously the “Night of the long knives” was Halloween, so October 31st not August?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Daithi

    I think the authors are 'confused with numbers'.

    ReplyDelete