Civil Rights and Provisional IRA

The Civil Rights Campaign and the role of the IRA






In Northern Ireland (the north) in the mid-1960s a campaign for Civil Rights was launched by the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland against the Protestant controlled Stormont Government. The Civil Rights campaigners were demanding changes in the laws that controlled elections, the allocation of public housing, employment and education. The Civil Rights movement was seen by Unionists/Protestants as a threat to their privileged position in Northern Ireland, a State that had been created for the Protestants following the creation of the Catholic Irish Free State. The British and Irish Governments had partitioned Ireland in order that the Protestants in Northern Ireland could remain part of the United Kingdom.



In 1995 I had the pleasure of speaking with Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, a senior Northern Ireland civil servant in 1965. Sir Kenneth told me that in 1965 he had received a communication from a friend at Westminster, which informed him that little notice was being taken of demands from certain Labour and Liberal MPs for investigations into Northern Ireland’s affairs. These demands had been inspired by nationalist/Catholic politicians in Northern Ireland.



So it was that the cries for reform from moderate Catholic politicians were ignored at Westminster. The Civil Rights campaign in Northern Ireland took on new momentum as Catholics were no longer prepared to be treated as second class citizens. Documents released by the British Government on May 27th, 2010, under the thirty year rule give a telling insight into how the British viewed the north and the Irish Government. In 1970 the then British Home Secretary, James Callaghan was told by a senior British Diplomat that the Prime Minister (Taoiseach) of the Irish Republic, Jack Lynch needed to realise that the only way to Irish unity would be by way of the “seduction, not the rape of Northern Ireland”. Mr Oliver Wright, a senior British Diplomat had written his observations in a letter to Mr Callaghan after Mr Wright had served as a Diplomat for six months at Stormont in Northern Ireland.



Mr Wright continued, “So long as we keep the North quiet, the South will give us no trouble, for Mr Lynch also went to the edge of disaster last August and stepped back in time [in his “we will not stand by” speech].



“His courageous speech to his party conference in January marked a change from fantasy to realism about the Irish question,” “If he recognises, as he now does, that force cannot be used to solve the problem of partition, he must come to realise that the only prospect of Irish unity lies in the seduction, not the rape of the North. The South will, I suspect, be a long-time a-wooing, if they ever start: the Irish tend to marry late, I believe,” he wrote.



Wright had been sent to the north in 1969 after British troops had been deployed as peace keepers. Wright described Catholics as ‘Micks’ and Protestants as ‘Prods’, both derogatory terms used in local sectarian parlance in the north.



“It is a tribal society, and the natives stranded by partition on the wrong side of the borders like and trust each other about as well as dog and cat, Arab and Jew, Greek and Turkish Cypriot.” The “Orange Protestant ascendancy” had abused “the existence of British-style democracy” to guarantee and perpetuate a most un-British-style injustice towards the Catholic community” said Mr Wright.



“But the minority, though perhaps more sinned against than sinning, has been far from blameless. In true Irish fashion, the Micks have enjoyed provoking the Prods as much as the Prods have enjoyed retaliating”.



“Catholic attitudes have been at best ambivalent and at worst treacherous. It makes the Prods’ blood boil – and all Irish blood boils at a very low temperature – to see the Micks enjoy the superior material benefits of the British connection while continuing to wave the tricolour at them,” said Mr Wright in truly Imperialist tone.



In the back ground to the Civil Rights campaign lurked the ever present and not so peaceful IRA. 1969 would see the first real appearance of the IRA on the Streets of Belfast since the failed campaigns of the 1940s/50s/60s. The IRA were ill-equipped, yet had answered the rhetorical call of the Ghettoised Catholic people to take to the streets and defend them from the tyranny of loyalist (Protestant) gangs, gangs who were on a daily basis burning Catholics out of their homes while the Police stood ideally by. Initially the IRA was seen as defenders of the Catholic community as the State seemed uninterested in the plight of Catholics. This ghettoised resurrection of militant republicanism was the opportunity the IRA leadership had been waiting for. The Civil Rights campaign and social agitation gave the IRA an opportunity to redeem and reinvent themselves following their previous humiliating defeats at the hands of the British in the 1940s/50s. While the Civil Rights campaign was just and right, for the IRA it was simply a vehicle to get them back on the road. The Civil Rights campaign and the adverse loyalist (Protestant) reaction to that campaign created the very waters in which militant Irish republicanism could once again swim.



Some revisionists of modern day Irish Republicanism try to suggest that the IRA were simply innocent by-standers who were created by the conditions of Unionist/Protestant oppression in the 1960s/70s, however, the IRA had never gone away since the founding of the Irish Free State. With people such as John Kelly leading the ghettoised Catholic community it is clear that the IRA were not going to miss the Civil Rights opportunity to get their militant campaign back on the road. To the contrary, the IRA was the very flint that created the spark for decades of sectarian violence.



What ever the IRA’s aspirations it had no resource to play the role of Catholic defender and so its leadership needed money, weapons and training very quickly. The IRA leadership in the person of IRA Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding turned to a sympathetic Irish Government at that time. The Government in power in the IrishRepublic in 1969 was Fianna Fail (constitutional republicans) under Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Jack Lynch. One of Lynch’s TDs (TD - Member of Parliament) was Neil Blaney from Donegal, and it was to Blaney that most unofficial reports came from Northern Ireland because of his position in the Government. It was to Blaney that Captain James Kelly, the Irish Army Intelligence Officer, who was to be later accused of conspiracy, reported first on his own return to the Republic from Northern Ireland on September 14th 1969. Upon his return Captain James Kelly reported,



“When I came back from Northern Ireland on the 14th September 1969 or around that date it came to my notice that a committee in the Government had been appointed, named to me as rightly or wrongly, I don’t know – but named to me as Mr Haughey, Mr Blaney, Mr Faulker and Mr Brennan. In view of the information I had obtained I decided that I should see some of these members of the Government and I made arrangements to see Mr Blaney on a particular evening after my return. I went and did so and told him the result of all the information I had gleaned in Northern Ireland and in effect he was able to assist me also. I then went to see Mr Haughey…so to say I was a liaison officer/it was a liaison officer on an ad hoc basis”.[1]



While Captain James Kelly would later be used as a fall-guy by some for this whole affair, there is no doubt that Captain Kelly was reporting to the highest ranks within Lynch’s Government even if he was not reporting directly to the Defence Minister, Jim Gibbons, who would have been his natural political superior. Captain James Kelly’s main contact in the north was John Kelly; John Kelly was the main organiser of the Citizen’s Defence Committees throughout Northern Ireland at that time. John Kelly was a traditional militant republican; he had been educated by the Christian Brothers in Belfast and had been active in the IRA’s failed campaigns in the 1950s/60s. In a subsequent court appearance on the 14th October 1970, John Kelly, having become a leader of the Citizen’s Defence Committees from August 1969, Kelly made it clear to the Court and all listening that the Defence Committees were simply a cover for militant republicanism. Whether Kelly intended to expose the role of the IRA in such a public fashion remains unclear.



John Kelly had made it quite clear what he wanted from the Irish Government, when he stated,



“I want to be emphatic that we were coming from all parts of the six counties not to indulge in tea parties, not to be entertained, but to elicit, in so far as we could what was the opinion of this Government in relation to the six counties. We did not ask for blankets or feeding bottles, we asked for guns. No one from Taoiseach Lynch down refused us that request or told us this was contrary to Government policy”.[2]



The meetings continued between the militant republicans from Northern Ireland and Captain James Kelly. Captain Kelly also continued to meet directly with the IRA Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding. When Peter Berry, the Secretary at the Department of Justice, was notified by the Irish Garda Special Branch about one such meeting in CountyCavan, and Captain Kelly’s meetings with IRA Chief of Staff Goulding, Berry informed Jack Lynch. Lynch told Berry that any body implicated in any illegal dealings must be brought to justice. Berry however objected to this. The IRA had been infiltrated to the highest level and Berry did not want to expose his people in the IRA.



Whoever knew, or what exactly was the extent of the money, training and guns given to the IRA by the Irish Government, may never be known. What has gone down in history however, is an affair only comparable to Nixon’s Watergate or Regan’s Nicaragua. The end result of the Irish Government’s links to the IRA was the charging of two Government Ministers with conspiracy and the trial of one of these Ministers in the Autum of 1970. IRA Chief of Staff Goulding had from 1962 been directing the IRA up a one way street of social agitation through political awareness. He realised that any new direction in the way the republican movement challenged British Imperialism must include a role for the IRA, for if they were not led then they would decide for themselves what to do next.[3]



The new thinking being pursued by IRA Chief of Staff Goulding created problems for those republicans who believed in the purely militaristic traditional role of the IRA, so it was that sectarian tensions in the late 1960s created an opportunity for the IRA to take up arms in what appeared to be a defensive role among the Catholic people of Northern Ireland. This sectarian distraction gave breathing space for Goulding’s re-thinking of Irish Republicanism. However, Goulding would soon find opposition to his new plans for the IRA, the Belfast IRA under the leadership of Billy Mc Millen wanted more than a defensive role for the IRA. Billy wanted to strike back at both the British establishment and their loyalist cheer leaders. Goulding viewed the IRA in Belfast as “sectarian bigots” and he did not want the IRA again to become a purely militaristic liberation force for the ghettoised Catholics in the north.









[1] Pages 53-54 Arnold, 1984



[2] Page 55 Arnold, 1984



[3] Page 92 Patterson, 1989



[4] Page 95 Patterson, 1989



[5] Page 98 Patterson, 1989









Civil Rights Campaign



Civil Rights. IRA

From as early as 1966 Goulding’s policies were facing continued opposition. As an IRA document captured in May 1966 by the Gardai gives a clear indication of the problems being faced by Goulding for creating political activity as the primary role of the IRA. Gouldings re-thinking of the role of the IRA and the broader republican family was taking the leadership principle from that of militarist idealism of traditional Fenianism into a semi-Leninist path.[4] In 1967 Billy Mc Millen carried out a number of fire bomb attacks on British Territorial Army bases in the north contrary to G.H.Q. policy and the latter’s backing simply of a Civil Rights campaign of civil disruption. Goulding continued to view the IRA in Belfast as “sectarian bigots” as they refused to accept the new thinking of the IRA leadership.



Goulding’s hopes in 1967 for new political direction for the IRA especially in the south, development which would divert the IRA away from an isolated militaristic force, would be dealt a severe blow, as sectarian violence in the north escalated out of control, the IRA leadership in Dublin had lost control almost three years after the IRA Army Council had agreed a gradualist campaign of Civil Rights through civil disruption. The original embryonic, peaceful and legitimate Civil Rights Campaign was now consumed by militant Irish Republicanism and the British/Loyalist response to that militarism.



The new Northern Ireland, Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill, addressed the question of discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland and provided a world audience with a new image of Northern Ireland, as a progressive society, by implementing new policies in regards to housing, education, and employment. The Civil Rights campaign had been hi-jacked by militant republicanism and people such as IRA leader Billy Mc Millen wanted a sectarian tit for tat killing head count. The problem for Mc Millen and his Belfast IRA command was that they had clocked up little intellectual mileage and were driven purely by sectarianism. As Henry Patterson explains,



“The resistance of the Belfast leadership to the new thinking was explained by the fact that the movement there was dominated by ‘Catholic Bigots’”.[5]



In 1969 many leading republicans left the movement because they felt that the Dublin leadership did not understand the north and that the Dublin leadership simply wanted to engage in politics. One of those to resign, Kevin Mallon, would ironically in 1986 be one of the leading Provisional IRA members supporting the removal of abstentionism as a long held Sinn Fein/IRA policy and therefore the politicisation of the republican movement. Mallon had by 1986 come to realise the benefits of the Janus face of republican coercion in its politico-militaristic style.



End of Chapter 2.