Get Him Out

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Collins - his assassination in 1922 sparked more repression. s - his assas ? sparked e repre FOR il for Ir gireal International Brigade.

Growing support for De Valera's Fianna Fail Party isolated Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. even further. In the February. 1932 elections, Fianna Fail romped. home with 72 seats to Cosgrave's 57. Shortly after, on Julyl 1932, the De Valera Government defaulted on the payment of land annuities to Britain, thus beginning the 'Economic War' which was to last until the end of the '30s.

Again, this move satisfied many republicans-except those on the left, who called for the nationalisation of the big ranches, and who stirred up small tarmers in support of this demand.

For De Valera such agitation was distinctly troublesome, and after a brief honeymoon period of tolerating the I.R.A., he decided to go after it with vigour, and on June 18 1936 banned it as a legal organisation. The following year a new constitution claiming legal jurisdiction over all Ireland was adopted; and on April 25 1938 an Anglo Irish agreement was signed whereby Ireland gained possession of the ports that had been ceded . to Britain under the terms of the treaty.

Elections held on June 17 Directionless, the 1.R.A. leadership under Sean Russell embarked on a bombing campaign in Britain during the period 1938-9.

The results of this-civilian deaths in Coventry and the consequent hanging of the alleged I.R.A. men Barnes and McCormack-only served to hasten the disintegration of the now thoroughly demoralised volunteers in Ireland.

Twilight And when war broke out in September 1939, it looked very much as if the "Twilight of the Gunmen' had begun.

Fantastic schemes for securing arms from Nazi Germany •were hatched. Russell actually met Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop in August 1940 and together they launched 'Operation Dove'-a mission designed to provide the I.R.A. with arms.

This collapsed though shortly after it was launchedRussell aied on a U-boat which was heading for and as none of the I.R.A. staff in Ireland had even a hint of what Russell was planning, there was no way that the Germans could have landed arms and have them distributed.

Such ideas were obviously the product of men desperate for action; men who felt that with Britain at war they could take advantage of the situation and free Ireland once and for all.

For them though, was implya question of repeating 1916-tactically altered, of course, but along the same lines.

But if the Easter Rising and the failure to secure German arms then can be regarded as a tragedy, one can only look on Russell's plans as farce, more befitting a 'Punch' cartoonist's view of the I.R.A. than a serious struggle against imperialist rule.

Throughout the war years, the I.R.A. edged closer to chaos: the Russell escapade was followed by the 'Stephen Hayes' affair, when the I.R.A. Chief-of-Staff suspected of being an informer, was interrogated by other I.R.A. leaders-Sean McCaughey among others-and would undoubtedly have been shot was it not for the fact that he escaped.

The hated Black and Tans The upheaval and suspicion within the top ranks of the I.R.A. only served to demoralise the army further.

From 1945-52 the I.R.A. underwent a slow, agonising process of reconstructing their forces.

Working around the AntiPartition League which was then agitating in the North, they managed to bring into the movement fresh forces most notably in Belfastprepared to engage in a further round of arm ed struggle. From 1951-54 a series of arms raids were staged in the North, in preparation for the campaign that was to begin in December 1956, with a series of co-ordinated attacks on RUC Barracks.

These attacks, known as Operation Harvest, signalled a generalized I.R.A. offensiveconfined exclusively to the North-which lasted on and off until 1962. In truth though, the I.R.A. campaign -which limited itself mainly to country areas such as South Armagh, South Ferranagh and East Tyerne,- was of any success only for the first six months of 1957.

From August 1957 to March 1962, they were mainly on the defensive as both Northern and Southern administrators opened up internment camps and threw suspected I.R.A. men into them wholesale.

Lack of arms, casualties suffered (in one operation. at Edentubber in November'57 the I.R.A. lost five men when a mine they were laving exploded without warning) and police arrests joined to wear the I.R.A. down During all of 1959 there were only 27 incidents; in 1960-76; whereas the first month of the campaignDecember 56-had alone produced 25 incidents and 1957 saw 341 reported I.R.A. attacks.

Dwindled The '56-162 campaign thereby dwindled to a halt, although formally it ended on February 26 1962.

The ceasefire statement noted that a major factor in deciding to end the struggle had been 'the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people-the unity and freedom of Ireland' How this "distraction" had taken place and what if anything-the IRA had done to check it, was never made clear.

In truth though the 56-62 campaign faltered because the IRA had no policy other than moral exhortations to the Catholics of the north to "do their bit" for "the old cause"

Instead of scrutinising their own policies, the IRA leadership contented themselves with blaming the very people whose support they wanted and needed. but whom they had never tried to involve in any mass way in an anti-imperialist struggle.

After 1962 there was some attempt to analyse the failings of the past, but this merely took the IF LA iT the direction of the Sta ilinis: stageist conception of social Men like Cathal Goulding-now head of the Official IRA-developed under the influence of British Communist Party member Roy Johnston, the 'theory" that first Northern Ireland had to be reformed, then class unity between Catholics and Protestants forged, ther end partition and then have a socialist revolution.

It may seem odd that a military man like Goulding. who had led arms raids in the early fifties, could so easily adopt such an utterly reformist quasi-pacifist perspective.

In truth, the transition was net so difficult-for both the IRA and Stalinism share a common petit-bourgeois base and both are intensely nationalistic in outlook. (It perhaps no coincidence that virtually at the same time another petty-bourgeois nationalist-Fidel Castro--was likewise describing a path to Attractive Goulding therefore had to make no qualitative break with republicanism in order to embrace Johnston's ideas. which in the period of demoralisation after 1956-62 must have appeared attractive to people disenchanted with the traditional IRA emphasis on the gun as the means of freeing Ireland.

And when the Civil Rights agitation began in 1967→. the revamped Northern republicans must have thought that this-the struggle to reform Norther Ireland-was at last a confirmation of their theory But with the pogroms of 1969, and the introduction of troops in August of that year it became clear that Northern Ireland was not going to be reformed-it could only be destroyed.

And that was to have repercussions within the republican movement which was now beginning to think about taking down the guns which had lain on the shelves since 1963

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesda! 30 November, 1977 PEE*