Читать книгу The Politics of Illusion - Henry Patterson - Страница 13

Within less than a year of its launch, the border campaign had clearly failed, and for reasons that were predicted before it commenced, yet it dragged on from 1956 to 1962. The delay in launching the campaign, which had caused much dissatisfaction in the ranks and led to a couple of anticipatory splinter attacks in Northern Ireland, reflected a debate inside the IRA leadership over the viability of a guerrilla campaign in the midst of a hostile majority population. As an alternative to a guerrilla campaign, some leaders suggested a longer-term strategy: first, sabotage of transport and communications to bring everyday life to a standstill and, second, preparation of the nationalist population for a civil disobedience campaign. The latter, it was calculated, would provoke repression from the police and the B Special constabulary (which was particularly unpopular among Catholics) and provide the space for the IRA to emerge as a ‘people’s’ defence force.²²³

Instead it was decided to opt for Seán Cronin’s Operation Harvest, a plan for a guerrilla campaign waged initially by ‘flying columns’ from the south that would sabotage communications, destroy police barracks and ultimately create ‘liberated areas’. Cronin, a Kerryman and ex-member of the Free State army who had recently returned from the United States, was a forceful personality and the acceptance of his strategy seems to have owed as much to the energy and conviction with which he argued it as to any more substantial factor. It was sadly lacking any grasp of northern realities. Indeed, one of its attractions was precisely its effective suppression of the dynamics of northern sectarianism. For as long as the IRA’s activities were focused on creating ‘liberated areas’ in some of the predominantly Catholic borderlands of Northern Ireland, the question of the repercussions of such activities on Catholic-Protestant relations, particularly in the sectarian cockpit of Belfast, could be ignored.

The IRA Army Council was also well aware that action in the north was necessary to undermine support that had emerged for heretical anti-abstentionist ideas amongst some republicans. The key figure was Liam Kelly, an IRA man from Pomeroy in County Tyrone. Influenced by the formation of Clann na Poblachta, and particularly by Sean MacBride, Kelly persuaded a majority of Tyrone republicans to support the idea of a new political organisation, Fianna Uladh (Soldiers of Ulster) and a new military organisation, Saor Uladh (Free Ulster). Kelly agreed with MacBride that the 1937 Constitution should legitimise the southern state, particularly now that the coalition had taken the Free State out of the Commonwealth and established a Republic in 1948. As a consequence, he argued for an end to abstentionism in the south and a concentration of republican effort against the state of Northern Ireland. Expelled from the IRA in 1951 for planning an operation without authorisation, he was elected to the Stormont parliament for Mid-Tyrone in 1953. His support base by then extended to Derry and Belfast, where some younger republicans – including a later leader of Official republicanism, Billy McMillen – were attracted by his mixture of political and military activism. Jailed for making ‘seditious statements’, Kelly was nominated by MacBride and elected to the Irish Senate in 1954. His release from prison in August 1954 was the occasion of a serious riot in Pomeroy, when thousands of his supporters clashed with the RUC. In November 1955 Saor Uladh attacked the RUC station at Roslea, County Fermanagh, and in November 1956 Saor Uladh and another splinter group attacked six customs posts along the border with the Republic.²²⁴

These developments made inevitable some sort of ‘decisive’ response from the IRA. The Army Council was no doubt encouraged by the 1955 Westminster election results. Two IRA arms raids on army barracks in Armagh and Omagh in 1954, the second of which led to the capture and imprisonment of eight IRA members, had done much to restore republican morale. In the election Sinn Féin contested all twelve Ulster constituencies, half of them with men in prison for the Omagh raid. The result was the largest anti-partition vote since the formation of the state – 152,310 votes – and victories in Mid-Ulster and Fermanagh-South Tyrone.²²⁵ Interestingly, the only constituency with a large Catholic population in which the Sinn Féin candidate did not perform well was West Belfast. Here Sinn Féin’s neglect of economic and social issues ensured that it trailed behind an Irish Labour Party candidate – the Catholic working class would remain wedded to various versions of labourist and republican labour politics until the late 1960s.²²⁶ Meanwhile Cronin’s strategy would direct the IRA’s attentions to the redoubts of intransigent rural republicanism in the border areas and north Antrim.

Operation Harvest began on the night of 12 December 1956 with approximately 150 men involved in attacks on ten different targets in Northern Ireland. By its end six members of the RUC and eleven republicans were dead, a relatively small number by comparison with the 1970s and 80s, but a significant loss of life in the atmosphere of the time.²²⁷ Its high-point was the abortive attack on Brookeborough RUC station in Fermanagh in January 1957. Like all the ‘flying columns’, that which attacked Brookeborough was composed of IRA men from the south with only the skimpiest knowledge of local conditions. Two of the group, Sean Garland from Dublin and Daithi O’Connaill from Cork, would play crucial and conflicting roles in post-1962 republican rethinking. The key figures in the attack would be the two IRA men who were killed during it, Sean South and Feargal O’Hanlon. The deaths of two young idealists – as they were widely perceived in Catholic Ireland – resulted in a powerful spasm of public emotion:

When the bodies of South and O’Hanlon were carried across the border, their transmutation from young men into martyrs began. There began a week of all but national mourning. Crowds lined the route of South’s funeral cortege to Dublin … Town Councils and County Corporations passed votes of sympathy.²²⁸

In the general election that took place shortly afterwards, Sinn Féin’s nineteen candidates received just over 5 per cent of the vote and it had four TDs elected. These were unexpected victories but, as Rumpf and Hepburn noted, the result was ‘ultimately insignificant’.²²⁹ Mass concern over the coalition government’s lack of response to a massive economic crisis was the decisive issue in giving de Valera a final impressive election victory. In 1956 he had made it clear to emissaries from the IRA who had asked for his co-operation or connivance in the planned campaign that he thought partition could not be ended by force.²³⁰ As the futile campaign sputtered on, producing only internment (eventually over 250 people were interned in Northern Ireland) and a massive mobilisation of the police and 13,000 B Specials,²³¹ interest and sympathy evaporated. In July 1957, after the IRA had killed an RUC man in County Armagh, internment was introduced in the Republic and nearly 200 men were rounded up.²³² Catholic disillusionment was plain in the Westminster election in October 1959, when the Sinn Féin vote slumped by more than half.²³³ In the Republic the Sinn Féin vote in the 1961 general election declined to 36,393 for 21 candidates – 3 per cent – and only one was elected.²³⁴

The IRA’s Army Council had addressed an appeal to the Protestants of Northern Ireland to support the independence movement, in the very midst of its military campaign.²³⁵ The exotic futility of this gesture should not obscure the nagging doubts and suspicions which some southern republicans had about a too-direct mobilisation of the forces of grievance and traditional animosity which existed in the Catholic population in the north. It is still unclear whether, as some claim, a decision was made not to include the Belfast IRA in the campaign, so as to avoid the possibility of sectarian conflict,²³⁶ or whether Belfast’s non-involvement reflected fears that its personnel were too well known to the police.²³⁷ What is clear is that the order from the IRA GHQ that all possible steps had to be taken to avoid shooting members of the part-time Protestant constabulary – the B Specials – was intensely unpopular with northern IRA men and their sympathisers.²³⁸ Regarded by the government and the Protestant population as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the state, with a detailed knowledge of their Catholic neighbours, the Specials were the focus of much fear and animosity. Attacks on the Specials were opposed on the basis that their deep roots in local Protestant communities would ensure that such attacks would provoke bitter sectarian animosities. As the IRA campaign reeled under its own futilities and the introduction of internment north and south, some began to query the wisdom of excluding action that would at least restore flagging Catholic interest and support.

Ironically, it was Seán Cronin, whose original plan had effectively marginalised the appeal to Catholic communalism, who in 1959 appeared willing to contemplate the risky venture of a Belfast campaign. By then the leadership was bitterly divided over whether the campaign should be called off, with Cronin to the fore in pressing for its continuance. He hoped to ensure revival through a sharp change in focus from the border areas to Belfast. Sean Garland, a survivor of the campaign’s most martyrogenic action, the attack on Brookeborough RUC station, was chosen to mobilise the Belfast IRA. Disguised as a Glasgow university student but largely ignorant of the city and its republican sub-culture, he had just enough time to discover widespread demoralisation before he was arrested and gaoled in the Crumlin Road prison, where his mission was received with sullen resentment by the many IRA prisoners who regarded the campaign as by then an obvious and definitive failure.²³⁹

For some in the Belfast IRA, the failure of ‘Operation Harvest’ stemmed directly from its fastidiousness. As the national leadership settled its divisions by intrigue – Cronin was displaced by an organised letter-writing campaign from Irish-America which used anti-communism and other disreputable charges against his radical American wife²⁴⁰ – the remaining republicans in Crumlin Road speculated on what, if anything, their future might be. Attempts to politicise such discussion were received with hostility.²⁴¹ More typical would have been the jocular remark of a future leading Belfast Provisional that a military campaign of the 1956 sort was ‘no use’ and that the only way forward was to ‘shoot a lot of priests and ministers’, thus ensuring a strong communal base for the IRA in the resulting sectarian polarisation.²⁴² Such sentiments reflected a stubborn reality of the northern situation which the idealist rhetoric of ‘Wolfe Tone’ republicanism found hard to recognise, let alone deal with.