Young people chanting ‘Oh, ah, up the Ra’ is becoming commonplace in nationalist – and not-so-nationalist – Ireland. Primary age children were at it during the big homecoming parade for the Olympic team in Dublin earlier this month. And it drew arguably the biggest crowd of the day for those ancient IRA fellow-travellers, the Wolfe Tones, at the Electric Picnic music festival in Stradbally, County Laois.
“People are going to sing that chant anyway. It’s like the Jackie’s Army song,” Victor Williams from Swords told the Irish Times at Stradbally. “It’s a chant they know. I’m sure there are some who are going to sing it politically, but everybody here is just having a good time. I don’t think there is any badness about it.”
Sinn Féin must be delighted that a laudatory chant about the IRA, who killed nearly five times more people in the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ than the British Army, RUC and UDR combined,1 has become so popular and normalised among children and young people. As former IRA man and Sinn Féin Assembly member Paul Butler told Irish Times journalists Mark Hennessy and Gerry Moriarty2: “They’re obviously nationalists. Obviously, whether anyone likes it or not, a lot of young people see the IRA as a kind of movement, as freedom fighters, even if they don’t think of it very often.”
“They know that it was about getting Britain out of Ireland and ending discrimination,” says Butler. Were those two aims worth killing nearly 1,800 people, the great majority of them Irish people? one might ask. John Hume believed the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence for unity was not worth one human life, and I agree with him.
I hope fervently that Sinn Féin do not get into power in the next seven months and start rewriting history to make the men and women of the Provisional IRA into heroes. I fear that will be relatively easy in this republic, given the state’s foundational myth, rooted in the justice of the 1916-1921 War of Independence, Sinn Fein’s insistence that they are the legitimate inheritors of that mantle, and the re-emergence of anti-Britishness in the post Brexit period.
Laurence McKeown, former IRA man, Maze prison hunger striker and now a playwright, does not agree with those (like me) who argue that the civil rights campaign, the SDLP’s peaceful politics and demographic change would have left Northern nationalists roughly where they are now, minus thirty years of conflict and 3,700 deaths.
“I don’t think we would be where we are today without the armed struggle. Unfortunately, so many people died. I still don’t see a generosity on the part of unionism to engage with all the issues that nationalists had,” he says. “I do not see any point where unionism voluntarily would give any concessions; everything had to be fought for. Hopefully that is changing now”. He might have added: “now that Sinn Fein are winning.”
Michael Culbert, director of the ex-republican prisoners support group Coiste, also insists the IRA’s campaign was justified, but he is a rare ex-IRA man who admits that the views of the unionists were not understood. “We weren’t overly thinking of their views, that this is their home. It is only with hindsight I am looking at that.”
These men are clearly uncomfortable when the matter of the men they killed is raised. Butler says he was contacted by “a grandson, or something” of the 50 year old RUC officer he killed in 1974, and he offered to meet him, although the offer was not taken up. He was only 17 when he carried out that murder.
Culbert says he has often thought of the man he killed. “What can you say, the awful stuff that happened, the killing etc. As far as I am concerned there was a war on. How can you talk about this without sounding cold? I don’t know, but I am really not cold. I was a participant in the struggle. I was a member of an armed group. I don’t want that to sound vicious. It is awful that anybody died, it really is, but the British were not going to give – that is my firm view.”
One problem with this argument is that members of the British security forces were not the largest number of people killed in the fight to end discrimination and the British presence in the North – not by a distance. Over 2,000 were civilians, compared to 503 British soldiers and 509 members of the RUC and locally recruited UDR/Royal Irish Regiment. The IRA killed 1,771 people, compared to the British security forces 361 and loyalist paramilitaries 1,035.
In the Republic, the IRA and the smaller INLA also killed 11 members of the Garda Siochana during the ‘troubles’. Over the summer I read The Kidnapping, by Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy, the story of the November 1983 kidnap by the IRA of supermarket boss, Don Tidey, and the shooting dead of one Irish soldier (Patrick Kelly) and one unarmed trainee garda (Gary Sheehan) by IRA gunmen in the course of his rescue from Derrada Wood in the wilds of County Leitrim.
The gardaí let it be known that they were looking for five IRA members in connection with the kidnapping and killings: Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, Gerard McDonnell, Tony McAllister, Oliver McKiernan and Seamus McElwaine. The most notorious of these, and the only one who ever appeared in a court in connection with the kidnapping, was McFarlane. He had been convicted of the murder of five Protestants in a bombing and shooting at the Bayardo Bar on Belfast’s Shankill Road in August 1975.
Six years later he was the IRA prisoners’ leader in the Maze during the 1981 hunger strike. In his classic book about the hunger strike, Ten Men Dead, Guardian journalist David Beresford described him as a “sectarian mass murderer – or at least that would be the tag which could easily be attached to him by a hostile press. That is why he was never chosen for a hunger strike – he was potentially a one-man public relations disaster.”
In June 2008, over 24 years after the events at Derrada Wood, McFarlane was brought to trial on charges of false imprisonment and possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. The gardaí felt they had a strong case because they had photographs of McFarlane’s fingerprints at the scene and a statement – denied by McFarlane in court – that he had been there. But after the court ruled that his statement, allegedly made 10 years earlier, was inadmissible, the case collapsed and McFarlane walked free.
David Kelly, Patrick Kelly’s son, who attended the trial, said; “Unfortunately, it looks highly probable that no one will ever be prosecuted for the kidnapping or the killings.” That proved to be the case – and to add insult to injury, two years later the European Court of Human Rights awarded McFarlane €15,500 in compensation and costs from the Irish state for delays in bringing his case to trial. He is now a “feted individual in republican circles,” say the authors.
In 2012 David Kelly confronted Martin McGuinness in Athlone, where he was canvassing for votes in that year’s presidential election in which he was a candidate. Kelly asked McGuinness for the names of his father’s killers. McGuinness said he did not know their names and denied that he was on the IRA’s Army Council. Kelly called him a liar. Ed Moloney, author of the authoritative book, A Secret History of the IRA, believes it was inconceivable that McGuinness did not know who was involved at Derrada Wood: “McGuinness was on the Army Council, so would have been intimately aware of crucial detail such as who was involved.” David Kelly told McGuinness: “Before there can be any reconciliation in this country, there has to be truth.” “Murder is murder” he added, as a section of the crowd witnessing the exchange broke into applause.
People like McGuinness and McFarlane were hardened revolutionaries, well used to the Provisional’s use of killing for the cause of Irish unity. Gary Sheehan’s sister, Jennifer McCann, hoped that those who killed her brother had his death on their conscience. “But I don’t really know if people who carry out these crimes, do they have a conscience?” she asked. Not if those crimes were carried out in pursuit of so-called ‘Irish freedom’ is my response. “Young people in West Belfast, or anywhere else, don’t see me as a criminal,” says Paul Butler.
Forty years ago the IRA were not viewed as the patriotic freedom fighters many people – and particularly young people – see them as today. The then Labour Party cabinet minister Barry Desmond wrote in his autobiography: “I walked behind the coffins of the gardaí and army, public servants who were murdered in cold blood by the Provos. As I tried to convey my sympathy on those awful occasions, I never forgave these IRA apologists for the pain and suffering I witnessed on the faces of the widows and children they maimed for life.”
The Chief Justice, Tom O’Higgins, justifying the ban on Sinn Féin appearing on RTE, called the party of the IRA an “evil and dangerous organisation whose object was to overthrow the state and its institutions, if necessary by force.”
Everything has changed now, of course. Over the past 26 years since the Good Friday Agreement Sinn Féin in the Republic has become just another left-of-centre party. The IRA’s violence is now seen as ancient history. We are well on the way to large numbers of younger people believing it was justified.
Meanwhile, successive opinion polls and focus groups have shown that most people in the Republic are not prepared to make the slightest sacrifice in their symbols and laws – flag, anthem, constitution – to help unionists feel more welcome in a united Ireland. A group of Trinity College Dublin politics students I talked to two years ago said they were “uneasy about bringing British colonisers [i.e. unionists] into a united Ireland.”3 All this confirms me in my belief that we in the South are in for a very rude awakening if and when there is a narrow vote in favour of unity in a border poll in the next 10-20 years.
1 The data in this article is taken from Lost Lives: the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton (Mainstream Publishing, 1999). The figures cited are for the years 1966-1999.
2 Interviews with former IRA men in ‘I think we were right to do it’ – 30 years after the ceasefire, former IRA members look back’, Irish Times, 24 August
3 ‘Discussing Irish unity over dinner with Trinity College politics students, April 2022
Andy Pollak retired as founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in July 2013 after 14 years. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent, assistant news editor and Belfast reporter with the Irish Times.
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