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The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), is an Irish republican paramilitary organisation that considers itself a direct continuation of the Irish Republican Army (the army of the Irish Republic — 1919–1921) that fought in the Irish War of Independence. Like other organisations calling themselves the IRA (see List of IRAs), the Provisionals’ constitution establishes them as Óglaigh na hÉireann (“The Irish Volunteers”) in the Irish language, which is also the official title of the Irish Defence Forces. The Provisional Irish Republican Army is sometimes referred to as the PIRA, the Provos, or by some of its supporters as the Army or the ‘RA.[2]
The IRA’s stated objective is to end “British rule in Ireland,” and according to its constitution, it wants “to establish an Irish Socialist Republic, based on the Proclamation of 1916.”[3] Until the Belfast Agreement, it sought to end Northern Ireland’s status within the United Kingdom and bring about a united Ireland by force of arms and political persuasion.[4] The organisation is classified as a proscribed terrorist group in the United Kingdom and as an illegal organisation in the Republic of Ireland.[5][6]
On 28 July 2005, the IRA Army Council announced an end to its armed campaign, stating that it would work to achieve its aims using “purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means” and that IRA “Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.”[7] In September 2008, the nineteenth report of the Independent Monitoring Commission stated that the IRA was “committed to the political path” and no longer represented “a threat to peace or to democratic politics”, and that the IRA’s Army Council was “no longer operational or functional”.[8][9]
An internal British Army document released in 2007 stated that the British Army had failed to defeat the IRA by force of arms but also claims to have ‘shown the IRA that it could not achieve its ends through violence.’ The military assessment describes the IRA as ‘professional, dedicated, highly skilled and resilient.'[10]
According to modern physical force Irish republicanism theory, the two Irish governmental entities which have existed in Ireland since 1922, Northern Ireland and the state variously known at different times as the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland, were illegitimate, as they had been imposed by the British at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, in defiance of the last all-Ireland election in 1918, when the majority had voted for full independence. The real Irish state was the Irish Republic, unilaterally declared in 1919 and which, according to republican theory, was still in existence. According to this theory, the modern day Provisional Irish Republican Army is merely the continuation of the original Irish Republican Army which served as the army of the Irish Republic during the Irish War of Independence.
While at the time of Treaty and the subsequent Irish Civil War the majority of the “old” IRA held this position, by the 1930s most republicans had accepted the Free State and were willing to work within it – recognising the Irish Army as the state’s armed force. However, a minority of republicans argued that the army of the Republic was still the pre-1969 Irish Republican Army, itself the lineal descendant of the defeated faction in the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Moreover, the IRA Army Council was the legitimate government of Ireland until the Irish Republic could be re-established. This IRA in theory wanted to overthrow both Irish states, but by the late 1940s, it issued orders that “no armed action was to be taken against 26 county forces under any circumstances whatsoever”. From then on, they concentrated on the overthrow of Northern Ireland, which was still part of the United Kingdom, but which contained a substantial Catholic and nationalist population. In the 1950s, the IRA waged a largely ineffective guerilla campaign against Northern Ireland, known as the “Border Campaign”. This was called off in 1962.
The IRA split into two groups at its Special Army Convention in December 1969, over the issue of abstentionism (whether to sit in or to “abstain” from the Dáil or parliament of the Republic of Ireland) and over the question of how to respond to the escalating violence in Northern Ireland (see The Troubles). In 1969, serious rioting had broken out in Derry following an Apprentice Boys march (Battle of the Bogside). Subsequently hundreds of Catholic homes were destroyed in Belfast by loyalists in the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969. The IRA had not been armed or organised to defend the Catholic community, as it had done since the 1920s. The two groups that emerged from the split became known as the Official IRA (which espoused a Marxist analysis of Irish partition) and the Provisional IRA.
The Official IRA did not want to get involved in what it considered to be divisive sectarian violence, nor did it want to launch an armed campaign against Northern Ireland, citing the failure of the IRA’s Border Campaign in the 1950s. They favoured building up a political base among the working class, both Catholic and Protestant, north and south, which would eventually undermine partition. This involved recognising and sitting in elected bodies north and south of the border. The Provisionals, by contrast, advocated a robust armed defence of Catholics in the north and an offensive campaign in Northern Ireland to end British rule there. They also denounced the “communist” tendencies of the “Official” faction in favour of traditional Irish republicanism and non-Marxist democratic socialism, and they refused to recognise the legitimacy of either the northern or southern Irish states.
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