Border campaign (Irish Republican Army): Difference between revisions

The Border Campaign (December 11 1956–February 26 1962) was a campaign of guerrilla warfare (codenamed Operation Harvest) carried out by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against targets in Northern Ireland, with the aim of overthrowing that state and creating a United Ireland. Popularly referred to as the Border Campaign, it was also referred to as the "Resistance Campaign" by some activists, as found in the IRA statement ending the Campaign in February 1962.^[1] Similarly, Sean Cronin, IRA Chief of Staff at various points during the campaign, titled his account of the 1956-57 period "Resistance - The story of the struggle in British-Occupied Ireland,"^[2] under the pen-name Joe McGarrity. The campaign was a failed attempt to unite Ireland, but for some of its members, the campaign had kept the IRA engaged for another generation.^[3]

The IRA wished to overthrow both "partitionist" states in Ireland, which it deemed to be illegitimate entities, imposed by Britain at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922. However, in 1948 a General Army Convention, according to Richard English, "drafted" what later became General Order No. 8, "prohibiting acts of aggression in the twenty-six counties".^[4][5] IRA Chief of Staff Tony Magan set out to create "a new Army, untarnished by the dissent and scandals of the previous decade," according to J. Bowyer Bell.^[6] The organisation became "apolitical," but it still denied the legitimacy of the British imposed political institutions". At the 1949 IRA Convention, the IRA formally decided to "infiltrate" Sinn Fein, which would become the "civilian wing" of the IRA.^[7] In 1954, after an arms raid at Gough Barracks in Omagh, a speaker at the Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown repeated that IRA policy was directed solely against British forces in Northern Ireland.^[8] According to J. Bowyer Bell, after the Omagh raid the IRA Army Council discussed the situation and "Out of the discussions came General Army Order No. 8, a logical corollary of the Army Convention policy of concentrating on the Six Counties."^[9] Bell states that the "new policy specified that volunteers caught with arms in the Twenty-six Counties should dump or destroy them instead of, as had been the policy in the past, defending them."^[10] From now on, armed action would be focussed on Northern Ireland, which was still part of the United Kingdom and which was dominated by Protestant unionists. The idea of a campaign launched from the Republic against Northern Ireland, first mooted by Tom Barry in the 1930s, gained currency within IRA circles as the 1950s went on.

By the middle of this decade, moreover, the IRA had substantially re-armed. This was achieved by means of arms raids launched between 1951 and 1954, on British military bases in Northern Ireland and England. Arms were taken from Derry, Omagh, Essex, Berkshire and Armagh. At the latter raid on Gough barracks in Armagh in June 1954, the IRA seized 250 Lee Enfield rifles, 37 submachine guns, 9 Bren guns and 40 training rifles.

By 1955, splits were occurring in the IRA, as several small groups, impatient for action, launched their own attacks in Northern Ireland. One such activist, Brendan O'Boyle blew himself up with his own bomb in the summer of that year. Another, Liam Kelly founded a breakaway group Saor Uladh ("Free Ulster") and in November 1955, attacked a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks at Roslea in county Fermanagh. One RUC man was badly injured and a Republican fighter was killed in the incident. In August of the following year, Kelly and another IRA dissident, Joe Christle, burned down some customs posts on the border.

In November 1956, the IRA finally began its own border campaign. They were partly motivated by a desire to prevent any more splits in their organisation. They were also encouraged by the results of the British General Election of 1955, in which two Sinn Féin (since 1949, the IRA’s political wing) candidates were elected in Northern Ireland, with a total of 152,310 votes. This appeared to show that there was a substantial Irish Republican support base within Northern Ireland.

The plan for the Border Campaign — codenamed, "Operation Harvest" — was devised by Seán Cronin. It envisaged the use of guerrilla units called flying columns, initially four units of about 50 men each. They were to operate from within the Republic of Ireland and to attack military and infrastructure targets within Northern Ireland. In addition, another twenty organisers were sent to various locations within Northern Ireland to train new units, gather intelligence and report back to the leadership in Dublin. An IRA document seized in the Republic in 1956 stated that the aim of the campaign was to: "break down the enemy’s administration in the occupied area until he is forced to withdraw his forces. Our method of doing this is guerrilla warfare within the occupied area and propaganda directed at its inhabitants. In time as we build up our forces, we hope to be in a position to liberate large areas and tie these in with other liberated areas — that is areas where the enemy’s writ no longer runs"^[11].

The reference to "liberated areas" shows that IRA leaders had been influenced to some degree by Maoist guerrilla ideas. For further discussion of IRA military thinking see The Green Book (IRA training manual).

No actions were to take place in Belfast, the capital and biggest city in Northern Ireland. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, the IRA in the city was believed to have been infiltrated by informers. Secondly, it was implicitly recognised that IRA actions in Belfast would provoke reprisals by loyalists against the Catholic/nationalist population there. This had happened on a large scale in 1920-22, during and after the Irish War of Independence.

The campaign was launched with simultaneous attacks by around 150 IRA men on targets on the Border on the night of 11 December 1956. A BBC relay transmitter was bombed in Derry, a courthouse was burned in Magherafelt, as was a B-Specials post near Newry and a half built Army barracks at Enniskillen was blown up. A raid on Gough barracks in Armagh was beaten off after a brief exchange of fire.

The IRA issued a statement on 12 December announcing the start of the Campaign, "Spearheaded by Ireland’s freedom fighters, our people have carried the fight to the enemy…Out of this national liberation struggle a new Ireland will emerge, upright and free. In that new Ireland, we shall build a country fit for all our people to live in. That then is our aim: an independent, united, democratic Irish Republic. For this we shall fight until the invader is driven from our soil and victory is ours"^[12]

On December 14, an IRA column under Seán Garland detonated four bombs (one of which blew in the front wall) outside Lisnaskea RUC station before raking it with gunfire. Further attacks on Derrylin and Roslea RUC barracks on the same day were beaten off.

In response, on December 21, 1956, the government of Northern Ireland under Basil Brooke used its Special Powers Act to intern several hundred Republican suspects without trial. This, in time, severely limited the IRA’s capacity to build up units within Northern Ireland.

On January 1, 1957, an IRA column under Noel Kavanagh attacked the Derrylin RUC barracks again, killing RUC constable John Scally, the first fatality of the campaign. Others involved in that attack included two prominent IRA men, Charlie Murphy and Ruairi O Bradaigh. The following day, Seán Garland and Dáithí Ó Conaill planned an attack on the Police station at Brookeborough, but assaulted the wrong building. Two IRA men, Seán South and Fergal O'Hanlon, were killed in the abortive attack. Garland was seriously wounded in the raid. He and the remainder of the group were pursued back over the border by 400 RUC, B Specials and British soldiers.

The funerals of South and O’Hanlon in the Republic produced a strong emotional reaction among the general public there. The two men are still considered martyrs in Irish Republican circles ^[13]. Up to 50,000 people attended their funerals.^[14] However, the Republic’s government, led by John Costello of Fine Gael, feared that the IRA’s action would drag it into a diplomatic confrontation with Britain and in January 1957, it used the Offences Against the State Act to arrest most of the IRA’s leadership, including its Chief of Staff, Seán Cronin. Fine Gael’s coalition partner, Clann na Poblachta (led by former IRA Chief of Staff Seán MacBride) resigned from government in protest over this policy. In the ensuing Irish general election, 1957, Sinn Féin won four seats and polled 65,640 votes (c. 5% of those cast).

However, the new government, of Fianna Fáil, led by Éamon de Valera proved even more hostile to the IRA than its predecessor. In July 1957, after the killing of an RUC man, de Valera introduced wholesale internment without trial for IRA suspects. Then in November 1961 his Minister for Justice, Charles Haughey established military courts which handed down long prison sentences to convicted IRA men. The use of internment on both sides of the Irish border made it even more impossible for the IRA, most of whose leadership was imprisoned, to maintain the momentum of their campaign.

The year 1957 was the most active year of the IRA's campaign, with 341 incidents recorded. In the summer of 1958, two IRA men (James Crossan and Aloysius Hand) were killed in separate gun battles with the RUC. In November 1957, the IRA suffered its worst loss of life in the period when four of its members died preparing a bomb in a farm house at Edentubber, county Louth, which exploded prematurely. The civilian owner of the house was also killed. In 1959, only 77 incidents were recorded in the campaign and in 1960, this fell to just 26. Moreover, many of these actions consisted of minor acts of sabotage, for example the cratering of roads.

The final fatality of the conflict came in November 1961, when an RUC officer, William Hunter, was killed in a gun battle with the IRA in south county Armagh.

By late 1961, the campaign was over. It had cost the lives of eight IRA men, four republican supporters and six RUC members. In addition, 32 RUC members were wounded. A total of 256 Republicans were interned in Northern Ireland in this period and another 150 or so in the Republic. Of those in Northern Ireland, 89 had signed a pledge to renounce violence in return for their freedom.

That the IRA’s campaign had run its course by 1960 is testified by the fact that the Republic of Ireland's government released its internees (judging them to be no further threat) in that year. The Northern Irish government followed suit on the 25 April 1961.

Although it had petered out by the late 1950s, the Campaign was officially called off on February 26 1962. In a press release issued that day, drafted by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh who consulted with several other persons including members of the Army Council, the IRA Army Council stated:

"The leadership of the Resistance Movement has ordered the termination of the Campaign of Resistance to British occupation launched on December 12, 1956. Instructions issued to Volunteers of the Active Service Units and of local Units in the occupied area have now been carried out. All arms and other matériel have been dumped and all full-time active service volunteers have been withdrawn... Foremost among the factors responsible for ending the campaign has 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. The Irish resistance movement renews its pledge of eternal hostility to the British forces of occupation in Ireland. It calls on the Irish people for increased support and looks forward with confidence – in co-operation for the final and victorious phase of the struggle for the full freedom of Ireland"^[15].

— IRA Army Council, 1962

Implicit in the statement was a recognition that the IRA, after a promising start in 1957, had failed to mobilise much popular support behind its campaign.

The Border Campaign was considered a disaster by some IRA members, not least because it enjoyed practically no support from the nationalist population of Northern Ireland. Even before the campaign ended some within the organisation had begun to consider other avenues in pursuit of the organisation's goals. Many of those involved with the Border Campaign felt that their lack of support was due to a failure to address the social and economic issues faced by ordinary people. The early seeds of addressing such issues are found in Sinn Fein election materials in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Cathal Goulding, who became IRA Chief of Staff in 1962, tried to move the IRA away from pure militarism and towards left wing and ultimately Marxist politics. This process ended with the 1969/70 split in the republican movement between the Official IRA and Provisional IRA wings. The Officials, under Goulding wanted to transform the movement into a revolutionary party involved in both parliamentary and street politics, while the Provisionals under Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, wanted to maintain the movement's traditional refusal to engage in parliamentary politcs. More immediately, the Provisional faction wanted to use armed force to defend the Catholic community in Belfast from loyalist attacks in the civil strife that had broken out in Northern Ireland (the start of the "The Troubles"), but it must be noted that the Official IRA, as led by Goulding, also engaged as Belfast defenders. A key difference is that, ultimately, the Provisionals also wanted to re-build the IRA's military capacity to launch a new armed campaign.^[16]

The Officials and Provisionals went their separate ways in 1969. The Official IRA maintained armed actions up until 1972, but characterised them as "defensive". Feuds between the two IRAs in the 1970s claimed about twenty lives. The Provisional IRA launched what turned out to be a much more sustained and destructive campaign than the Border Campaign — the Provisional IRA campaign 1969–1997, which was to claim up to 1,800 lives.

• Article on the campaign from An Phoblacht
• Republican website, Ireland's Own article
• "The Patriot Game" on TG4's Anamnocht