The Provisional IRA war began early in 1971. It did not begin, as myth now has it, as a movement to defend the Catholics. Everything they did brought death and suffering on the Catholics as well as on others!
When the Catholics needed defence most, in August 1969, the IRA was paralysed. In 1962, they had ceased the desultory military “campaign” began in 1956 and gone “political”. Under the influence of Stalinists (Ray Johnstone) and a Stalinist-inclined leadership (Cathal Goulding, Tomas MacGiolla, Sean Garland) they moved from the old Republican basics of armed struggle on principle and a boycott of all parliaments in the two islands until there was a united Irish Parliament in the direction of mainstream politics. The Stalinoid IRA/Sinn Fein was discredited by its failure to defend the Catholics in the crisis of August 1969. The Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein split away in December 1969 and January 1970. Compared to the pseudo-left Stalinists, they had about them a certain old-fashioned primitive honesty. But it was a right-wing, tradtionalist physical-force-on-principle and no-nonsense-about-parliament movement. Guided by their central belief in physical force on principle rather than any immediate defensive reaction they prepared for war against the British, subscribing to the grave delusion that it was a matter of getting the British out of “British-occupied Ireland”. They recruited youth stirred up by recent events and steeped in Republican myths and traditions, and in an astonishingly brief period of one year after their formation launched their war. Internment for Catholics only, without charge or trial in August 1971 threw the mass of the Catholic population into their camp. In 1972 they won the dubious victory of direct London rule and abolition of the Belfast Parliament and they got Britain’s Tory government to negotiate with them. They have won nothing notable since.
They started the war for reasons of blind traditional Republican dogma. Two decades and more later they no longer subscribe to dogmas. They have shed the dogma against the Dublin parliament. They want to stop the war. In principle they have abandoned the axiom of physical force being the only permissable method. They want to go into mainstream politics. There they will be what all the earlier Republican “physical force” politicians became when they turned to “real politics”. Even if ceasefire proves impossible to get now, they are a political formation whose leaders have abandoned all the raison d’etre of what they have done for 23 years! The major achievement of their twenty year war is and even more immense division in the Irish people.
The long war
The Provisional IRA has fought a long war of 23 years. Its central achievement has been to make the division in Northern Ireland between Catholic and Protestant deeper and stronger. High walls now run between the Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry, true symbols of what the Provisional IRA has achieved. Given that the main opposition to a united Ireland was and is a compact block of one million Irish people in North-East Ulster, the war the Provos have waged could not have done other than increase the divisions. It was a war that could only be won if it conquered the Protestants or convinced London and Dublin to conquer and coerce the Protestants. The basic idea of Irish republicanism — to unite the people of Ireland — never meant that, and could not mean it. One million Protestants in a united Ireland, as alienated as the half a million Catholics in the Six Counties, would not by any measure be progress. Just as rebellion jumped from Protestant to Catholic Ireland between 1912 and 1916 it would almost certainly jump back again from the Catholics to the Protestants if they were a coerced minority in a unitary Irish state. Such a thing will not happen because there is no force that can make it happen: socialists and serious Irish republicans should not want it to happen.
If the long war is about to end, that is good. If it is accompanied by a political settlement acceptable to most people in the two communities, it will be progress. If not, it will be a lull, not the end of the war. Peace will make possible the beginning of working-class unity. But it will be a long time before the baneful effects of the Provisional IRA’s war die down.
The Protestant General Strike
In May 1974, the Protestant working class of Northern Ireland mounted one of the most successful general strikes in working-class history. They brought down — and it has not risen since — the Belfast Catholic-Protestant power-sharing government Britain had set up six months earlier to replace the Protestant majority-rule Belfast government.
The power-sharing executive had been set up according to the terms of the Sunningdale Agreement signed by Dublin, London and Belfast politicians late in 1973. Northern Ireland elections produced a minority of Protestant-Unionist politicians willing to form a government in tandem with the Social Democratic Labour Party, the middle-class constitutional nationalist organisation, led by Gerry Fitt and John Hume. Together, they had a majority against Ian Paisley and his friends in the Northern Ireland Aassembly; they formed a power-sharing government against strong Protestant opposition. Once it had got properly going, the power-sharing executive with British money to dispense, might have slowly gained in Protestant acceptance. But British politics cut across Irish developments, as so often in history. British Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath called a snap general election in February 1974, appealing to “public opinion” against striking miners. 11 of the then 12 Northern Ireland Westminster seats [there are 17 today] were won by outright opponents of power-sharing.
The power-sharing executive still had a majority in the Northern Ireland assembly, but its authority was badly damaged. The strike finished it off.
The strike erupted against the setting up of the Council of Ireland agreed at Sunningdale, very loosely linking Belfast and Dublin. Such a Council of Ireland had been provided for in the 1921 Treaty but never came into existence.
There was some coercion at the beginning of the strike. But it quickly became a powerful and enthusiastic demonstration of the strength of the Northern Irish working class, albeit in a bad cause: the demand, for a return to majority — sectarian — Protestant rule over the Catholics.
After nine days, the Belfast government collapsed. Britain’s plans to create power-sharing political institutions to run the Six Counties were in ruins. IRA bombs had brought down the old Stormont regime; an Orange general strike had stopped Britain replacing it with an executive in which Catholics had an institutionalised right to share power, and their aspirations for a united Ireland accommodated in a Dublin-Belfast Council of Ireland. It was stalemate. That stalemate has now lasted 20 years.