While some at home remain trapped in the past conflict, cleverly updating their messaging for the digital age and boosting their hype and marketing, their military thinking is still—well—pure 90s.
Take the recent emergence of the far-right New Republican Movement. You could almost hear the confused murmurs and head-scratching as people tried to work out whether this new armed group was masquerading as Republicans with extremist aims. I was quizzed on the breaking news and asked whether they had any connection to the old—or new—IRA. I had no idea, so I reached out home for answers. The replies were swift: their motives are purely racist.
The episode underlines how a Monty Python–esque reality is unfolding before our eyes. Leaving aside, for the moment, that this group claims to be “protecting Irishness,” releasing a Provo-style video and going viral for their efforts, it still exposes how delusional—and amateurish—such military posturing has become. And for a whole host of reasons, now more than ever.
Once, after I got out of prison, I was approached by the Real IRA. They wanted a meeting. I made enquiries about their motives and was promptly advised to avoid them like leprosy. They were in a recruitment phase, I was told, and heavily infiltrated by the Brits. Come to think of it, that advice came wrapped in a thick layer of irony. Either way, I avoided the intermediary until they eventually gave up.
The formation of the Real IRA, Continuity IRA, Saoradh and the 32 County Sovereignty Movement was a gift to the British, and they jumped in with both feet. It allowed them to shape military and political narratives from the outset. If you want evidence, just look at the results—or the lack of them. A quick, if lazy, glance at their Wikipedia pages is enough to grasp their failure to deliver on stated objectives. Internal feuding and endless splintering have always sabotaged even well-intentioned movements. Funny how that happens.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu writes:
Just as water, which carries a boat from bank to bank, may also be the means of sinking it, so reliance on spies, while producing great results, is oft-times the cause of utter destruction.
He goes on to describe five classes of spies: local, inward, converted, doomed and surviving. Considering the damage the Brits inflicted on IRA 1.0, imagine what they were able to do with these fledgling offshoots. As for any future claim to being the true heirs of the cause, it wouldn’t be shocking if British spymasters themselves were the entrepreneurs behind them. Divide and conquer.
Western states are now ramping up investment in their war machines. Partly this stems from Trump’s whining that the US carries everyone else, and his threats to pull American resources if allies didn’t pay more. Governments reluctantly opened their cheque books. The EU alone is projected to increase spending by 11% between 2024-2025. There’s also a relatively new addition to the war industry: quantum technologies. I had to look it up. This is the “alien” part I mentioned earlier. We can barely imagine what’s being developed—except to say Marjorie Taylor Greene may not have been exaggerating that much when she ranted about “Jewish space lasers.”
About a year ago, Ukrainian forces released footage of a small homemade drone effectively “capturing” a Russian soldier. The video follows him as he’s guided away by instructions relayed from the drone via its operator. Other clips showed soldiers who failed to grasp their predicament—likely their first encounter with this hovering menace—being killed by grenades dropped from above. I mention this because the three masked interlopers in the New Republican Movement video are going to need to seriously up their game if they believe they’re protecting anyone.
Back in the day, the Provos struggled to smuggle in a handful of handguns and AK-47s. And while merely possessing the capacity for violence was often enough to force negotiations, future conflicts won’t be fought with twentieth-century paraphernalia. Nobody fears the schoolyard bully anymore. Today’s real threats are the bespectacled nerds hunched over laptops—in bedrooms or modern glass towers—designing malware, drones and AI systems capable of doing far worse.
⏩Michael Phillips is a former republican prisoner.
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