The Fenian Way ✒ continues his exchange with Anthony McIntyre on the inferences to be drawn from John Crawley's book which detailed systemic shortcomings within the IRA.

AM: Some of the people in leadership, perhaps sincerely, felt that their experience counted for a lot and strove to draw on it to the best of their ability rather than merely advancing their political careers. After all, they had been around from the year dot and had a sense of what was achievable. They tended to think that new blood had not yet had its enthusiasm tempered by cold hard operational experience. You took a different view.

TFW: Indeed. Because their enthusiasm was tempered by their inability to advance the struggle as they were obliged to do so. They resolutely refused to recognise their own failure. We have mentioned Brian Keenan in this regard. After his release he was sitting at the same table looking at the same faces he had been looking at twenty years earlier before he went to jail yet could not grasp just how bankrupt that scenario was. The Irreplaceable mindset at play again, and he must have felt part of that.

AM: Was longevity of position suffocating initiative?

TFW: Absolutely. One army council member told me he knew the IRA inside out and understood what it was not capable of. Fresh faces thought differently and knew what it was capable of. The attitude of that leadership seemed to be we lost the war and we are not going to let anybody else try and win it. They went into negotiations without trying to strengthen their negotiating position.

AM: You make the point that it was perfectly correct to seek to negotiate with the British or seek alliances with potential allies but in doing so all negotiations had to take place within the parameters set down by the Army Constitution, that there had to be limits to what was negotiable. Sovereignty could not be negotiated away if sovereignty was the whole purpose of the armed struggle.

TFW: That was the whole point of the Army Constitution. The Mitchell Principles were a prime example.

AM: Those principles were in essence a total repudiation of the IRA and its methodology. Anyone reading them can easily discern that they were a joint London-Dublin initiative to lock the IRA into an agreement which would itself be ringfenced by the consent principle and by necessity could only result in an internal solution. And this in turn would be firewalled against any possibility of a resumption of the IRA armed struggle. It aimed for the dissolution of the IRA and the decommissioning of its arsenal. It stated it boldly. It is not something that any effort was made to conceal.

TFW: To sign those Principles, Army leaders had to step outside the Army Constitution. They tried to get around this by saying that the IRA was not signing up to anything. This was the type of argument frequently used. Adams would say that it was Gerry Adams, not the Army, taking the decision to sign the principles. If Adams and McGuinness wanted to fall on their own sword that was fine, but they should not have been seeking to put the Army to the sword. That was one major reason the Constitution existed – to protect the Army structure and volunteers from leaders who had been seriously outmaneuvered during negotiations. At the time of the Mitchell Principles the Army released a statement saying it had some problems with what they contained. To me that was the result of McGuinness sitting in a room talking to the British and having them agree to some cobbled up statement from the IRA that would give the leadership room to maneuver – allowing it to argue that it hadn’t really painted itself into a corner. He would have told the British the statement was not a rejection of the Mitchell Principles, merely a ruse to keep the hardliners on board.

AM: Well, if Jonathan Powell was writing leadership statements to be read out at the Ard Fheis – he even joked that he was considering suing Sinn Fein for plagiarism - it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the British approved that IRA statement which on the face of it appeared to throw a spanner in the works of the Mitchell Principles. As I said previously a senior British diplomat told me - in response to my criticism that he and his colleagues had shafted republicans - that republicans had shafted republicans. I assume it was this type of subterfuge and deception that he had in mind.

TFW: That leadership, not the Volunteers, let down or shafted, to use your language, the IRA. Some of them wanted to pursue political careers, others did not want their children to go through what they did. As for the negotiations, if they were outmaneuvered the safety rail of the Constitution was always there to protect both them and the Army, but they didn’t want it.

AM: They wanted to drive without a safety belt and on the wrong side of the road.

TFW: Yes. The danger signs were there. It could be seen through the developing relationship with constitutional nationalism. It was fine to get pan-nationalism on to the republican side, but the leadership was steadily pulled on to the pan nationalist side, saying the same things they were saying, agreeing to their proposals. Constitutional nationalism is where it ended up remaining. Prior to the ceasefire those leaders were saying the Pan Nationalist Front would become a persuader for unity. Once they bagged the ceasefire the role of persuaders just vanished. It was no longer on the agenda of the Pan Nationalist Front. Peace became the goal rather than sovereignty. McGuinness was even saying he would give his life for peace. It was without doubt the most reprehensible comment in eight hundred years of struggle.

AM: But like all the leaders at that level, he managed to avoid giving his life during the war, so the likelihood of having to give it for peace was remote. The trenchant armed struggle advocate and arch critic of the previous leadership’s truce, the man described as the greatest biggest threat to the British state ended up negotiating an internal solution within that state. What would make his statement about being willing to give his life for peace so reprehensible?

TFW: Because it was a gross distortion of the fundamental nature of what our struggle is all about and it was for the sole purpose of rehabilitating himself into the new political order to solidify his career within it. A British peace in Ireland could never be a republican objective.

AM: That was always the republican position – even when the Peace People burst on to the scene, their peace demand was rejected by republicans on the grounds that it was not peace with justice, it was in fact a British peace. Gerry Adams even wrote a pamphlet to that effect, lambasting their demands. In the mix somewhere we have to deal with the fact that several leaders were clearly a protected species and their chances of being killed were diminishing in proportion to their usefulness to the British, who were deploying measures to maximise their survivability. We know this from the Brian Nelson legacy. Ed Moloney has also flagged up the sordid Top Man’s Agreement where there was an arrangement in place between the loyalists and republicans that leaders would be exempt from being targeted by the other side. John Crawley summed this up succinctly when he observed that the prevailing attitude was to survive the war, not to win it.

TFW: That would not make them agents as is often alleged. It is too easy a label to use. The British knew who they were dealing with, experience of them was the controlling factor.

AM: That is true. Often we get the charge that the leadership were made up of touts. That in my view never bore scrutiny. Most probably, there was an element of that somewhere in the mix, particularly in the agent of influence role. We can very easily conceive of a key figure working with Stakeknife so that genuine volunteers would be undermined; side-lined or smeared while some faux inquiry could take place – all to disrupt the Army rhythm; signing off on the execution of people who were either authentic agents or those who the British deemed in the old Kitsonian phrase unwanted members of the public and who were better disposed of. I have never felt Adams and McGuinness were agents of the British. But I guess they did not need to be if they were taking the movement in the direction signposted by the British – internal solution and unity only by consent. Why would the Brits need them as agents if their own interests were dovetailing with those of the Brits? Counterinsurgency strategy has moved on from just shoot the big guy at the front wearing the turban. If it could have the big guy at the front move matters in a direction conducive to the overall goal of counterinsurgency, it would be counterproductive to shoot him.

TFW: The focus should be less on the role of the agent and more on a combination of bad political strategy and no military strategy alongside no integration of both. Stating peace was the objective rather than sovereignty handed the advantage to the British. The Movement entered negotiations with Hume-Adams as their bottom line. But Hume-Adams was so weak that it had to be hidden from everybody.

AM: I recall declining to attend a march in support of Hume-Adams on the grounds that I did not know what it was I was supposed to be marching for.

TFW: They were now signalling that the issues raised in Hume-Adams were the core reason the IRA was at war, which was untrue. Hume-Adams was far removed from why the war was fought. The Army leadership once it endorsed Hume-Adams was in total breach of its own Constitution and the fundamental tenets of Irish republicanism: the bread-and-butter stuff. The army leaders tasked with conducting the negotiations wanted to be free from the constraints of the Constitution. While John Crawley in his book talks of the military illiteracy of Martin McGuinness we have to go further and look at just how that translated into political illiteracy as well. The exemption those negotiators secured for themselves is what allowed them to negotiate a very politically illiterate non-republican outcome.

AM: Internal solution is not spelt the same way as sovereignty. It is very legible and you would need to be illiterate to not see that. But Gerry Adams was politically and strategically savvy even if Martin McGuinness was not. Adams knew where it was going so it was more by calculation on his part than the result of illiteracy. What immediately leaps out at me is that if Hume didn’t fight the war to secure what was in Hume-Adams, there was no good reason for Adams to have fought it. And he did fight it, winning the admiration of many within the ranks for the risks he took on a daily basis during the early and most intense phase of the armed conflict.

TFW: The volunteers knew why the war was fought. The first ceasefire only ended to quell opposition in the ranks or on the back benches, if you like, a parliamentary phrase McGuinness utilised. There was no cavalcade through West Belfast when the second one was called. By this time people had realised there was no declaration of intent by the British to withdraw. How the Army was actually at the table when the core aim was not on the table is the result of the Constitution being sidestepped. Constitutional nationalism was actually asking for more in the New Ireland Forum than the leadership negotiators. As I said earlier, who would die for Fianna Fail? Yet Fianna Fail and the others in the Constitutional nationalist camp were asking for more.

AM: Volunteers were not being asked to risk their lives for less - that was hidden from them. They were never told that the goalposts had been shifted. What they were being asked to risk their lives for had been taken off the table by the same leaders that were asking them to risk their lives. To describe such leaders' directives to volunteers as thoroughly reprehensible is probably an understatement. It is impossible not to notice how much the Army Constitution figures in your analysis. It is something you are at pains to revisit when we discuss how implacable opponents of the internal solution ended up negotiating it and then becoming inveterate defenders of that solution against any republican who had found fault in it.

TFW: It is important to remember that the Army Executive did not view the Constitution as a holy grail. It was more of a white line in the middle of the road. Yes, there were points where the Army would have move across that line and speed up for the purposes of overtaking but never to drive the entire journey on the wrong side of the road.

AM: What was the role of the Army Executive?

TFW: Look at it as you might a Supreme Court. It concerned itself with constitutional matters internal to the Army. It decided if any move was in line with the Constitution. And where it was not in line with the Constitution, the Executive was to act as a brake. The Executive was charged with being the custodians of the Constitution. Brian Keenan would shout nobody fucks with the constitution of Óglaigh na hÉireann, a remark he made the first time I met him, yet he was supporting every breach of it. The Executive has to be a standalone body that can function without the approval of the Army Council. In this situation the Army Council was telling the Army Executive to get lost and that it was going to do its own thing never mind the Constitution. In most countries the rulings of a Supreme Court are observed by governments. We had a situation here where the Army’s supreme court, the custodian of the constitution, was effectively told we don’t care for your role or rulings and if you don’t like it vote us out. Nobody would claim on behalf of the Executive that its members were legal authorities, but they were the most seasoned and experienced volunteers available to the Army and they had a serious function but were ignored. I’m not trying to reduce the argument to a technical point but the sidestepping of the Army Constitution was one factor to explaining the original question as to why so much was given away in return for so little.

AM: I feel that historians revisiting the era are going to find that observation more and more challenging – how so little was secured compared to the lives lost on all sides, time spent in prison, families ripped apart. Ultimately, the sidestepping of the Constitution was a total contempt for the army and the volunteers.

TFW: A total contempt for republican objectives as well. They would try to find historical parallels for their stance, claiming that Sean Garland had been given exemption in order to join the British Army. Garland was infiltrating the British Army rather than joining it but that was lost on them. The new buzz word was ‘special dispensation’, a catch-all phrase that the Army Constitution made no provision for, but that leadership viewed as a licence to do what it pleased.

AM: You said above that the leadership had decided that it had lost the war but was not prepared to allow anybody else to try and win it. Do you think they were telling the British that they had accepted this defeat and were inviting the British to give them a way out that might save face?

TFW: The leadership might not have said the war is over and we need your help – remember that particular statement? But that is the message that it wanted to be communicated to the British. Once that happened the British knew they had the leadership in check and after that it was a matter of moving the pieces for checkmate. Bobby Fisher said many years ago that once you know where checkmate is you just work your way back and get all the pieces in position to make it happen. The acceptance of the PSNI and the promoting of the equality agenda, all of this was the checkmate of the internal solution working itself out.

AM: Some of the more candid amongst those who remained in the Movement but who were not beguiled by the leadership dissembling felt that the armed campaign had reached the end of the line, it had run out of road.

TFW: Nonsense. It suited the leadership’s point of view to portray the armed struggle as stagnant just as Michael Collins used that scenario to justify his acceptance of the Treaty terms in 1922. As John’s book has demonstrated the armed struggle had much more operational potential if only its leadership took their own responsibilities more seriously. I have spoken of the complete absence of a military strategy, which is damning in itself, but there was also something else missing; political targets for that military strategy to reach.

In one of the many and welcomed comments on the series the notion of the ‘impossiblist agenda’ was raised concerning the IRA and its core objective but that precludes the strategic possibility of interim objectives, both military and political being reached. A truly integrated strategy.

AM: Something to be explored further in our next outing.

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

In Quillversation 🎯 IRA Army Council's Total Contempt For Volunteers

The Fenian Way ✒ continues his exchange with Anthony McIntyre on the inferences to be drawn from John Crawley's book which detailed systemic shortcomings within the IRA.

AM: Some of the people in leadership, perhaps sincerely, felt that their experience counted for a lot and strove to draw on it to the best of their ability rather than merely advancing their political careers. After all, they had been around from the year dot and had a sense of what was achievable. They tended to think that new blood had not yet had its enthusiasm tempered by cold hard operational experience. You took a different view.

TFW: Indeed. Because their enthusiasm was tempered by their inability to advance the struggle as they were obliged to do so. They resolutely refused to recognise their own failure. We have mentioned Brian Keenan in this regard. After his release he was sitting at the same table looking at the same faces he had been looking at twenty years earlier before he went to jail yet could not grasp just how bankrupt that scenario was. The Irreplaceable mindset at play again, and he must have felt part of that.

AM: Was longevity of position suffocating initiative?

TFW: Absolutely. One army council member told me he knew the IRA inside out and understood what it was not capable of. Fresh faces thought differently and knew what it was capable of. The attitude of that leadership seemed to be we lost the war and we are not going to let anybody else try and win it. They went into negotiations without trying to strengthen their negotiating position.

AM: You make the point that it was perfectly correct to seek to negotiate with the British or seek alliances with potential allies but in doing so all negotiations had to take place within the parameters set down by the Army Constitution, that there had to be limits to what was negotiable. Sovereignty could not be negotiated away if sovereignty was the whole purpose of the armed struggle.

TFW: That was the whole point of the Army Constitution. The Mitchell Principles were a prime example.

AM: Those principles were in essence a total repudiation of the IRA and its methodology. Anyone reading them can easily discern that they were a joint London-Dublin initiative to lock the IRA into an agreement which would itself be ringfenced by the consent principle and by necessity could only result in an internal solution. And this in turn would be firewalled against any possibility of a resumption of the IRA armed struggle. It aimed for the dissolution of the IRA and the decommissioning of its arsenal. It stated it boldly. It is not something that any effort was made to conceal.

TFW: To sign those Principles, Army leaders had to step outside the Army Constitution. They tried to get around this by saying that the IRA was not signing up to anything. This was the type of argument frequently used. Adams would say that it was Gerry Adams, not the Army, taking the decision to sign the principles. If Adams and McGuinness wanted to fall on their own sword that was fine, but they should not have been seeking to put the Army to the sword. That was one major reason the Constitution existed – to protect the Army structure and volunteers from leaders who had been seriously outmaneuvered during negotiations. At the time of the Mitchell Principles the Army released a statement saying it had some problems with what they contained. To me that was the result of McGuinness sitting in a room talking to the British and having them agree to some cobbled up statement from the IRA that would give the leadership room to maneuver – allowing it to argue that it hadn’t really painted itself into a corner. He would have told the British the statement was not a rejection of the Mitchell Principles, merely a ruse to keep the hardliners on board.

AM: Well, if Jonathan Powell was writing leadership statements to be read out at the Ard Fheis – he even joked that he was considering suing Sinn Fein for plagiarism - it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the British approved that IRA statement which on the face of it appeared to throw a spanner in the works of the Mitchell Principles. As I said previously a senior British diplomat told me - in response to my criticism that he and his colleagues had shafted republicans - that republicans had shafted republicans. I assume it was this type of subterfuge and deception that he had in mind.

TFW: That leadership, not the Volunteers, let down or shafted, to use your language, the IRA. Some of them wanted to pursue political careers, others did not want their children to go through what they did. As for the negotiations, if they were outmaneuvered the safety rail of the Constitution was always there to protect both them and the Army, but they didn’t want it.

AM: They wanted to drive without a safety belt and on the wrong side of the road.

TFW: Yes. The danger signs were there. It could be seen through the developing relationship with constitutional nationalism. It was fine to get pan-nationalism on to the republican side, but the leadership was steadily pulled on to the pan nationalist side, saying the same things they were saying, agreeing to their proposals. Constitutional nationalism is where it ended up remaining. Prior to the ceasefire those leaders were saying the Pan Nationalist Front would become a persuader for unity. Once they bagged the ceasefire the role of persuaders just vanished. It was no longer on the agenda of the Pan Nationalist Front. Peace became the goal rather than sovereignty. McGuinness was even saying he would give his life for peace. It was without doubt the most reprehensible comment in eight hundred years of struggle.

AM: But like all the leaders at that level, he managed to avoid giving his life during the war, so the likelihood of having to give it for peace was remote. The trenchant armed struggle advocate and arch critic of the previous leadership’s truce, the man described as the greatest biggest threat to the British state ended up negotiating an internal solution within that state. What would make his statement about being willing to give his life for peace so reprehensible?

TFW: Because it was a gross distortion of the fundamental nature of what our struggle is all about and it was for the sole purpose of rehabilitating himself into the new political order to solidify his career within it. A British peace in Ireland could never be a republican objective.

AM: That was always the republican position – even when the Peace People burst on to the scene, their peace demand was rejected by republicans on the grounds that it was not peace with justice, it was in fact a British peace. Gerry Adams even wrote a pamphlet to that effect, lambasting their demands. In the mix somewhere we have to deal with the fact that several leaders were clearly a protected species and their chances of being killed were diminishing in proportion to their usefulness to the British, who were deploying measures to maximise their survivability. We know this from the Brian Nelson legacy. Ed Moloney has also flagged up the sordid Top Man’s Agreement where there was an arrangement in place between the loyalists and republicans that leaders would be exempt from being targeted by the other side. John Crawley summed this up succinctly when he observed that the prevailing attitude was to survive the war, not to win it.

TFW: That would not make them agents as is often alleged. It is too easy a label to use. The British knew who they were dealing with, experience of them was the controlling factor.

AM: That is true. Often we get the charge that the leadership were made up of touts. That in my view never bore scrutiny. Most probably, there was an element of that somewhere in the mix, particularly in the agent of influence role. We can very easily conceive of a key figure working with Stakeknife so that genuine volunteers would be undermined; side-lined or smeared while some faux inquiry could take place – all to disrupt the Army rhythm; signing off on the execution of people who were either authentic agents or those who the British deemed in the old Kitsonian phrase unwanted members of the public and who were better disposed of. I have never felt Adams and McGuinness were agents of the British. But I guess they did not need to be if they were taking the movement in the direction signposted by the British – internal solution and unity only by consent. Why would the Brits need them as agents if their own interests were dovetailing with those of the Brits? Counterinsurgency strategy has moved on from just shoot the big guy at the front wearing the turban. If it could have the big guy at the front move matters in a direction conducive to the overall goal of counterinsurgency, it would be counterproductive to shoot him.

TFW: The focus should be less on the role of the agent and more on a combination of bad political strategy and no military strategy alongside no integration of both. Stating peace was the objective rather than sovereignty handed the advantage to the British. The Movement entered negotiations with Hume-Adams as their bottom line. But Hume-Adams was so weak that it had to be hidden from everybody.

AM: I recall declining to attend a march in support of Hume-Adams on the grounds that I did not know what it was I was supposed to be marching for.

TFW: They were now signalling that the issues raised in Hume-Adams were the core reason the IRA was at war, which was untrue. Hume-Adams was far removed from why the war was fought. The Army leadership once it endorsed Hume-Adams was in total breach of its own Constitution and the fundamental tenets of Irish republicanism: the bread-and-butter stuff. The army leaders tasked with conducting the negotiations wanted to be free from the constraints of the Constitution. While John Crawley in his book talks of the military illiteracy of Martin McGuinness we have to go further and look at just how that translated into political illiteracy as well. The exemption those negotiators secured for themselves is what allowed them to negotiate a very politically illiterate non-republican outcome.

AM: Internal solution is not spelt the same way as sovereignty. It is very legible and you would need to be illiterate to not see that. But Gerry Adams was politically and strategically savvy even if Martin McGuinness was not. Adams knew where it was going so it was more by calculation on his part than the result of illiteracy. What immediately leaps out at me is that if Hume didn’t fight the war to secure what was in Hume-Adams, there was no good reason for Adams to have fought it. And he did fight it, winning the admiration of many within the ranks for the risks he took on a daily basis during the early and most intense phase of the armed conflict.

TFW: The volunteers knew why the war was fought. The first ceasefire only ended to quell opposition in the ranks or on the back benches, if you like, a parliamentary phrase McGuinness utilised. There was no cavalcade through West Belfast when the second one was called. By this time people had realised there was no declaration of intent by the British to withdraw. How the Army was actually at the table when the core aim was not on the table is the result of the Constitution being sidestepped. Constitutional nationalism was actually asking for more in the New Ireland Forum than the leadership negotiators. As I said earlier, who would die for Fianna Fail? Yet Fianna Fail and the others in the Constitutional nationalist camp were asking for more.

AM: Volunteers were not being asked to risk their lives for less - that was hidden from them. They were never told that the goalposts had been shifted. What they were being asked to risk their lives for had been taken off the table by the same leaders that were asking them to risk their lives. To describe such leaders' directives to volunteers as thoroughly reprehensible is probably an understatement. It is impossible not to notice how much the Army Constitution figures in your analysis. It is something you are at pains to revisit when we discuss how implacable opponents of the internal solution ended up negotiating it and then becoming inveterate defenders of that solution against any republican who had found fault in it.

TFW: It is important to remember that the Army Executive did not view the Constitution as a holy grail. It was more of a white line in the middle of the road. Yes, there were points where the Army would have move across that line and speed up for the purposes of overtaking but never to drive the entire journey on the wrong side of the road.

AM: What was the role of the Army Executive?

TFW: Look at it as you might a Supreme Court. It concerned itself with constitutional matters internal to the Army. It decided if any move was in line with the Constitution. And where it was not in line with the Constitution, the Executive was to act as a brake. The Executive was charged with being the custodians of the Constitution. Brian Keenan would shout nobody fucks with the constitution of Óglaigh na hÉireann, a remark he made the first time I met him, yet he was supporting every breach of it. The Executive has to be a standalone body that can function without the approval of the Army Council. In this situation the Army Council was telling the Army Executive to get lost and that it was going to do its own thing never mind the Constitution. In most countries the rulings of a Supreme Court are observed by governments. We had a situation here where the Army’s supreme court, the custodian of the constitution, was effectively told we don’t care for your role or rulings and if you don’t like it vote us out. Nobody would claim on behalf of the Executive that its members were legal authorities, but they were the most seasoned and experienced volunteers available to the Army and they had a serious function but were ignored. I’m not trying to reduce the argument to a technical point but the sidestepping of the Army Constitution was one factor to explaining the original question as to why so much was given away in return for so little.

AM: I feel that historians revisiting the era are going to find that observation more and more challenging – how so little was secured compared to the lives lost on all sides, time spent in prison, families ripped apart. Ultimately, the sidestepping of the Constitution was a total contempt for the army and the volunteers.

TFW: A total contempt for republican objectives as well. They would try to find historical parallels for their stance, claiming that Sean Garland had been given exemption in order to join the British Army. Garland was infiltrating the British Army rather than joining it but that was lost on them. The new buzz word was ‘special dispensation’, a catch-all phrase that the Army Constitution made no provision for, but that leadership viewed as a licence to do what it pleased.

AM: You said above that the leadership had decided that it had lost the war but was not prepared to allow anybody else to try and win it. Do you think they were telling the British that they had accepted this defeat and were inviting the British to give them a way out that might save face?

TFW: The leadership might not have said the war is over and we need your help – remember that particular statement? But that is the message that it wanted to be communicated to the British. Once that happened the British knew they had the leadership in check and after that it was a matter of moving the pieces for checkmate. Bobby Fisher said many years ago that once you know where checkmate is you just work your way back and get all the pieces in position to make it happen. The acceptance of the PSNI and the promoting of the equality agenda, all of this was the checkmate of the internal solution working itself out.

AM: Some of the more candid amongst those who remained in the Movement but who were not beguiled by the leadership dissembling felt that the armed campaign had reached the end of the line, it had run out of road.

TFW: Nonsense. It suited the leadership’s point of view to portray the armed struggle as stagnant just as Michael Collins used that scenario to justify his acceptance of the Treaty terms in 1922. As John’s book has demonstrated the armed struggle had much more operational potential if only its leadership took their own responsibilities more seriously. I have spoken of the complete absence of a military strategy, which is damning in itself, but there was also something else missing; political targets for that military strategy to reach.

In one of the many and welcomed comments on the series the notion of the ‘impossiblist agenda’ was raised concerning the IRA and its core objective but that precludes the strategic possibility of interim objectives, both military and political being reached. A truly integrated strategy.

AM: Something to be explored further in our next outing.

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

24 comments:

  1. The Provo's got the leadership they deserved.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Could it have been possible that the British with hundreds of years off colonism and counter insurgency experience and with the placing of well placed traitors in the high positions in the army could the internal securities freeroll in all army matters been conceived by the Brits and then introduced as having came from those leaders whos military genius were infect never geniuses at all.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm intrigued by TFW's emphasis on the IRA constitution as the touchstone of republicanism. If I understand it, this corresponds to the thinking of those activists who formed the 32CSM back in the day. But is this not closing the barn door after the horses have all left?
    I think if one is trying to peg exactly when the Provisional movement departed from republicanism 1986 makes more sense than 1997.
    There's always the sense to me that those who supported abstentionism are portrayed as out of touch, eccentric and in favour of "a rigid orthodoxy" and in a way I can understand that. But I cannot understand how centring fidelity to the IRA constitution, the constitution of a secret army and therefore by definition secret, is any less esoteric. I'm not trying to get bogged down in some historical argument between RSF and 32 CSM, but I am trying to understand the point of view those who see a decisive break over that issue and not the other. If the Republic was the objective, then 1986 should have been the breaking point not 1997.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MDP,

      I'm not sure this gets to the point being made by TFW.

      It did not convey to me that his point was that the Constitution was the touchstone of republicanism. If he was inclined towards a touchstone perspective it would be more around the issue of sovereignty.
      I too was interested with his focus on the Constitution and sought to tease it out a bit more. His point seemed to be that it was not an ideological touchstone but a practical safety rail.
      The Republic as an objective could still have remained post-1986. Although at this point we know the intention was otherwise.
      The way it worked out is that the baton of the Republic was handed over to RSF which did nothing with it while the Provos ran with an internal solution and got it.

      Delete
  4. "the leadership had decided that it had lost the war but was not prepared to allow anybody else to try and win it"

    This is perhaps an overly benign perspective, but I've always thought that Adams & co did not want to see any future generation blighted by the violence, deprivation, and imprisonment that a renewed campaign of violent republicanism would bring.

    I can also see the power of the adjacent theory that everything Adams & co did empowered and advanced their political careers, but I still tend to think that the winding down of the IRA, and the finality of the ceasefires, came from a place of peaceful intention.

    There is within this train of thought ability to bear witness to the cynicism of Adams & co in performative warfare: the deaths and injuries of civilians, soldiers, RUC, IRA volunteers in operations which did not have victory as a sincere objective.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brandon - to me that is a very benign perspective.
      Were they really concerned with not wanting to see a future generation condemned to misery and violence?
      What evidence is there for that?
      There is a lot of evidence to show that they did quite well in terms of political careers.
      I think your take would have more going for it were they to have opted for the internal solution and but not pursue political careers within its structures. It is the careerist dimension that so undermines their claims.
      On a variation of your theme I have sometimes wondered if Adams looked at what he had, how readily they were prepared to believe what he told them even when he didn't believe it, and then thought to himself that with such limited ability there was no future in the project - just cash in the chips and hope for the best return.
      When I think of the six hunger strikers who died when they could have been saved, the human bombs, the disappeared, it is hard to see a benign hand guiding it all.
      I recall conversations with TC and he thought Adams was much more humane than McGuinness. That might lend itself to your interpretation.
      The challenge when we try to be definitive about it is that there are so many lies swirling around in the mix, that our judgements calls can often only be tentative.

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  5. Over on TheBrokenElbow.com Ed Moloney introduces a rebuttal of Liam Kennedy's by Emmet O'Connor.

    O'Connor's piece touches on some of the Quillversation themes

    https://thebrokenelbow.com/2022/12/12/who-was-to-blame-for-the-northern-troubles/

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    1. That was a very interesting article thanks Brandon.

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  6. Having just finished The Yank (a truly excellent book), something occurred to me.

    Within the ranks of the IRA there appeared to be a degree of pride at how the British military perceived them. Leadership figures, in response to Crawley's suggestions about upping training, would point to documented cases of the British praising the calibre and professionalism of the IRA.

    I wonder if Glover's Future Terrorist Trends report was intended to fall into IRA hands to encourage existing training and discourage innovation.

    Something of a conspiracy theory, but within the realm of the possible.

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    1. Psychological ops were constantly used by both sides Brandon.

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    2. Brandon - that sentiment has been expressed before about the Glover document.

      We might never know.

      They would certainly strive to mould a leadership they could work with and if such tactics were conducive to that end they would have considered them.

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  7. Throughout these exchanges between TWF and AM there appears, at least to me anyway, a dogged resistance to addressing the consequences of directing the Provisional Movement into participation in partitionist assemblies. The challenge presented by the armalite and ballot box strategy was aptly summarised by Clr. Paul Corrigan after the Enniskillen fiasco; "We do not expect to escape from the consequences of this explosion, even if the IRA were not involved."

    But the IRA were involved.
    And though you don't have to agree with me on this, but it appears the needs of the aspiring social climbers trumped all other considerations, including that of 'The Republic'.

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    1. where would this dogged resistance manifest itself?
      The consequences in my view have been well covered - an internal solution with all that entails was the consequence.

      Last time you raised the issue of causes - which you thought needed no explaining.

      I feel the consequences are much easier to see than the causes.

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    2. Clumsy perhaps again in my wording, let me be clearer: the demise of the Provisional Movement lay in a leadership that persuaded the majority of the membership to entertain entering into partitionist assemblies as a road to 'The Republic'
      It's as plain as a duck's arse that this is where the points were switched.
      How did this happen?
      (i) MacStiofáin's, not unreasonable inclusion of Adams & McGuiness in the delegation to Whitehall.
      ( ii) Superior finesse perhaps of Brits in recognising malleability of delegates.
      (iii) Back channels perhaps or possibly cultivated & developed over time with those deemed so.
      (iv) Divide & conquer. Perhaps encourage those sensed malleable, to build momentum once the opportunity arises, to overthrow the intractable 'old guard'.
      (v) Maybe then further seeds are sown for a more reasoned & civilised approach.
      (vi) Late 70's Fermanagh & South Tyrone, West Belfast and Mid-Ulster flagged and mooted as potential recognition and even retrospective validation of Republican actions (as 1918 retrospective validation of '16. Republican/Nationalist Westminster results buoyed by local election results, particularly in Fermanagh DC would have been enticing).
      (vii) Bait sucked upon if not completely taken,
      (viii) H-Blocks issues come to the fore. Sand's recognised as shoe-in.
      (ix) Generals perhaps come to a position where to sacrifice a few troops for the cause seems acceptable.
      (x) Free-State elections contested. Louth & Cavan/Monahan secured.
      (xi) '83 Presidency of Sinn Féin contested. Ó'Brádaigh out, Adams in. Now detached from any corporate historical knowledge & wisdom, the psuedo-reublicans make the Army northern-centric at Council & Executive level and also politically controlled at Sinn Féin level.
      (xii) '86 job done. Republic ditched. Careers secured.

      All that's left is history, and for all those now realising themselves buggered, to figure who maliciously greased their holes!

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    3. A plain duck's arse would be explained much easier than that and without one single perhaps in it!

      On a more serious level, it is a most useful checklist which shows a multiplicity of factors that belies the simplicity that readers might have found in your earlier characterisation of why the ship sank. It is serious commentary and it is to your credit that you put it together. I am not sure that people who did not live through those events in an activist sense or who do not have a keen eye for history will grasp all that in one take.

      And much of it can be challenged which means there is room for further discussion rather than have a guillotine dropped on the grounds of that is all you need to know.

      The very first point about MacStiofain including the Belfast delegation begs the question of why, and indicates where the power centre lay in the IRA. He also was prepared to explore an end to the campaign on terms much more flexible than Belfast. The Belfast leadership decided on the plane back from London to break the truce. He didn't want it broke but followed suit. The request for a truce came out of Derry according to him although McGuinness denied that when I spoke to both. I think MacStiofain was more reliable on that.

      This allows us to leapfrog to the point about the northerncentric shift. That indicates the regularisation of what was in already in existence.

      And if it was already in existence this leads onto another point which flows against what is similar to the RSF view of history outlined by yourself: what if the Republic was lost long before 1986 for the reason that it was an impossibilist demand? That it was as unreal prior to 86 as it was after it?

      As we have chatted this over numerous times even while on the beer, you will get that I am coming from my own study of the history which has led me to see it in a particular way, more discontinuous than continuous. It does not mean I am right. It might even mean I am in an analytical rut and unable to see out of it. But this underlines the value of discussion and exploration such as what this ongoing exchange has invited. And much of what is valuable lies outside anything said between myself and TFW but comes from contributions made by commenters like yourself and the others who have chipped in.

      Good points nonetheless and an arguable position to take.

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    4. " .... what if the Republic was lost long before 1986 for the reason that it was an impossibilist demand?"

      FFS!
      If it hadn't been for the executions after The Rising, the 1916 proclaimed Republic would have been deemed still-born. It was always an impossibilist venture from the start.
      "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right" so said Bonar Law, then leader of the Conservative opposition in Westminster. But then the threat of conscription came in the lead-in to the 1918 general election. Irish mammies weren't going to allow their Sean's & Seamus's be shipped to French, Turkish or God knows where battlefields ... were they fuck! They bait their husbands out the door to vote for Sinn Féin in their droves. They voted agin conscription rather than for 'The mythical Republic'

      As you say, we've shared cups and opinions on this before. Our retrospective opinions don't differ greatly but they are retrospective evaluations. I was under the impression that your discussion with TWF, prompted by John Cawley's page-turner, were about where the movement failed and went astray. With as much respect as I can muster, I do think both yourself and TWK are in a rut of your own making. John Cawley on the other hand has but exited one rut only to firmly embed himself in yet another.

      None of the well-intentioned people who I ever met in the Republican Movement ever told me they were primarily fighting for parity of esteem. They generally said they were fighting to get 'Brits Out' or they were fighting for 'The Republic'.

      Unfortunately, we got neither.

      If this conversation is to have real & lasting value, it's time to stop throwing shapes, stop dancing around the issues and face the truth, even if it's painful.

      FTP,
      H.J.

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    5. If this conversation is to have real & lasting value, it's time to stop throwing shapes, stop dancing around the issues and face the truth even if it's painful

      But isn't that what you have been doing? You have still to explain what this truth actually is.

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    6. The truth it seems for many, is still what the party tells them.
      The truth for others, was what the party told them ... until it wasn't.

      Then the truth became a lie.

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    7. but what is this truth that you know and which others dance around?

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  8. @ AM

    "Were they really concerned with not wanting to see a future generation condemned to misery and violence?
    What evidence is there for that?
    There is a lot of evidence to show that they did quite well in terms of political careers."

    I don't think I can produce any tangible evidence. A few things inform my general theory, though. If we take Moloney's thesis that 1982 was the point that Adams & co embarked on a process of running down the IRA, a political career would have seen fairly distant and remote for any of those involved in steering republicanism towards electoral politics.

    People can and do change, and become corrupt. But that doesn't change the initial correctness of their actions. Tony Blair became a Labour MP in the same year that Gerry Adams did, 1983. Labour in 1983 was not the vehicle to the type of power and prestige synonymous with Blair in later years. It is difficult to believe that Blair's motivations for becoming a Labour MP in 1983 were anything other than ideologically committed.

    It's generally accepted that Adams is a man who does not lack personal bravery. Steering a ruthless, organised paramilitary group to a position of ceasefire and redundancy required Adams to risk his life (and bear witness to the taking of many others). Again, I just can't see why someone would do with for the promise of an average and not especially lucrative political career.

    I have heard Adams criticised as "pompous" - this might go some way to explaining him enjoying the trappings of politics, but he never took his seat in Westminster - and I think he could have easily and solid it to his constituency. Nor did he seek office within Stormont. others did, of course, but they were not the architects of the strategy to wind down the IRA.

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    1. The same year he had his solicitor write to the Irish Times to claim he was vice president of SF and not vice president of the IRA. That could be construed as clearing the way for a political career.

      Why would a political career seem distant then? It was around then that it started.

      Could we really say with any confidence that they were taking up political positions yet at the same time thinking they did not see careers emerging from them?

      People do change and perhaps they did but I think from the evidence we have, applying Occam's Razor, it is easier to assume that opportunity changed rather than people.

      Was the ambition to have an average career or were there greater ambitions? It is my belief that in the case of Adams he fancied a crack at the Presidency. He had a very high profile career of considerable longevity. Malachy O'Doherty suggests he is a millionaire. At the same time I never thought wealth or personal was a motivating factor with him.

      He had courage but he also could see that the ruthless disciplined body that was the IRA was quite prepared to believe anything it was told. That might have led to him feeling he could get away with virtually anything.

      These things might all have been secondary and his primary
      motive might have been peace because he realised the war was going nowhere.

      But as it took such much organised lying to beach the project, there will always be the suspicion that lying about the motives played a crucial role as well.

      I think for your contention to hold up there would need to be more supporting it than there is at present. I guess my thinking on the matter is shaped by Orwell when he said nine out of ten revolutionaries are social climbers with bombs. I pretty much regard revolutionaries as much as I do clerics.

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  9. @ AM

    I think the overall vote for Sinn Fein was around 10% of the vote in the North, and negligible in the South.

    I think the Presidency of Ireland at that stage would have seemed like a pipe-dream. But then again, so would the idea that the IRA disbanded, gave up its weapons, and embraced policing via a devolved assembly at Stormont. Adams is often described as a man of vision.

    I find it hard to conceptualise coveting the political careers that Adams & co have had. I regularly come into contact with individuals with considerably more political clout and power. it brings to mind what Kissinger said:

    "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

    But maybe it wasn't the Westminster, Stormont, or Dail career that motivated them, but the feting of Washington, dinners with Mandela, meetings with Castro and so on.

    Maybe pragmatists became opportunists, which I think is what happens when ideology is diluted.

    I wonder what impact John Hume had on Adams. I guess we will never really fully understand, beyond seeing that Adams ended up endorsing what Hume signed off on.

    It's a very interesting discussion.

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    1. Brandon, I would see it as a work in progress. Did Adams think about the presidency early on? I doubt it. But these things evolve. I had a pretty settled view by 2005 that this was his goal.
      I am not sure people with different avenues to the career structure would covet the career Adams had but from someone who was a revolutionary the chance of becoming part of the establishment after opposing it for so long might look quite appetising and rewarding.
      You might be right - posing as an international statesman might have overrode anything else. I think the response to allegations of being a war criminal might support your interpretation. It is hard to be feel comfortable in the company of the great and the good when they are reading Say Nothing.
      Hume - I don't think he influenced Adams at all. My view is that Adams wanted to be Hume.
      And that is fine, given Hume's commitment to peaceful means of resolving all conflicts. The contentious issue for me is not his wanting to be Hume but why wage war just to end up becoming Hume and refusing to acknowledge his role in that war, instead pretending that he was a Hume type character all along??
      Because I disagree with you does not mean I have called it right. I think you make a most valuable contribution to the discussion, one that cannot be brushed aside.

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  10. Good points Brandon.
    But in my opinion I think you're being much too generous towards Adams. Yes, people do change. Change, as they say is the only constant. However, when people change it's not always for the better.
    Power, recognition and attention can go to any individual's head. In fact the way it works on some people's neurology has been shown to be very similar as to how it does in addicts. The dopamine hits become so powerful and so needed by some that what's considered otherwise normal socially orientated behaviour becomes secondary. As with addicts, lies, denial, deceit and poor decision-making become habituated.
    To my mind this understanding explains the type of behaviour as has been exemplified in different ways by Sean Quinn & Gerry Adams.
    (Ref: The Winner Effect; The Neuroscience of Success and Failure, By Ian Robinson, Professor Emeritus, Trinity College, Dublin).

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