Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

tyovan4's research paper on the IRA

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • tyovan4's research paper on the IRA

    I was hoping some of you guys wouldn't mind reading over this research paper I had to write about the IRA - make sure I didn't leave out anything important or misprepresent anything. Thanks!

    The Irish Republican Army today is a terrorist organization dedicated to the reunification of Northern Ireland with the other 26 counties of Ireland and the establishment of the true 32 county Irish Republic. The IRA, as the Irish Republican Army is commonly referred to, has been engaging in this struggle for nearly a century. The term IRA also encompasses a number of groups, all of whom claim to be the rightful inheritors of the title and tradition of the original Irish Republican Army. There are several feuding groups claiming to be the true IRA operation in both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. The official title of the IRA is Oglaigh na hEireann. In English this would translate to the Irish Volunteers. The title of Oglaigh na hEireann is also claimed by the defense forces of the Republic of Ireland.

    The Irish-British conflict began in 1169 when Norman invaders from England attacked Ireland. The Irish resisted the English invaders and were never completely subdued until the early 17th century. In 1609, land was seized from the Irish in the province of Ulster and was given by Queen Elizabeth I to planters from England and Scotland. The planters differed from the Irish in that they were Protestant and the native Irish population was Roman Catholic.

    Most of the Irish citizens in Ulster chose to stay on their land and work it as tenants instead of vacating the land they no longer owned. In 1641, the Irish revolted against their English overlords. Oliver Cromwell brutally suppressed this uprising, killing the Irish by the tens of thousands. Repressive legislation was instituted against the Irish, including the banning of the Catholic religion. In subsequent years, Catholics were discriminated against by the Protestants through a system of Protestant social, political, and economic privilege. For the Irish, life under British rule meant institutionalised discrimination, electoral gerrymandering, and human rights abuses.

    Although Cromwell may have killed Irish by the tens of thousands, he did not kill off their quest for freedom. Armed uprisings against British rule occurred in 1798, 1803, 1848, and 1867. The Irish began a peaceful push for a degree of independence in the 1880s. Charles Stuart Parnell introduced a bill in Parliament for Irish home rule. This would give Ireland its own Parliament to govern itself. It would still be part of the United Kingdom, however it would be able to govern itself in regards to internal matters. Home rule bills were defeated in 1886 and 1893. The Home Rule issue, although defeated, did not go away.

    Ulster Protestants, fearful of being ruled by the Irish Catholic majority, vowed to resist home rule by force. They founded the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913 and also began importing arms to fight against home rule. Pro home rule forces founded their own militia, Oglaigh na hEireann, in November 1913 to fight for home rule. The home rule bill was passed by the British Parliament in May 1914, however its implementation was delayed due to the outbreak of World War One in August 1914. Another independent armed group was formed in Ireland at this time. James Connolly formed the Irish Citizen Army in Dublin in November 1913. It was comprised of striking union workers who had been locked out of their places of employment and who were being replaced by strike breakers. The Army was formed to enable the strikers to protect themselves from attack by police and also to combat the demoralizing effect of their enforced unemployment.

    Anger at the delay in granting Home Rule led to another uprising in 1916. A small, secretive group, the Irish Republican Brotherhood orchestrated the Easter Rising in 1916. Troops from Oglaigh na hEireann and the Irish Citizen Army were used. The rising was confined to Dublin, and the city’s General Post Office saw some of the heaviest fighting. The leaders of the rising declared Irish independence and issued a declaration of the formation an Irish Republic. The rising was launched on 24 April 1916 which was Easter Monday. The rising was crushed after one week. Sixteen of the leaders of the rising and the signers of the Proclamation of the Republic were executed by a British firing squad after their surrender. James Connolly, who had been wounded through the ankle during the fighting and was unable to stand, was shot seated in a chair. Martial law was also declared after the Rising. At the time of its occurrence, the Rising was not met with a wave of public support from the Irish people. However, the execution of its leaders, the declaration of martial law, and the internment of many of its participants radicalised the Irish people. The British government also threatened to conscript Irishmen into its army to fight in World War One. People no longer supported the moderate nationalist policies of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which was the party responsible for the introduction of Home Rule. They no longer wanted to be part of the United Kingdom, but wanted to be independent. They turned away from the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party and increasingly to the more radical Sinn Fein.

    In the elections of 1918, Sinn Fein’s position was that if their representatives were elected, they would not take their seats in the British Parliament. Instead, they would form their own Irish Parliament and work towards Irish independence. Sinn Fein upheld its campaign promises, and in January 1919 had the first meeting of the Irish Parliament (Dail Eireann) in Dublin. Dail Eireann proclaimed an Irish Republic, established a provisional constitution, appealed for international recognition and support, and stated that the Irish Republic would be governed by “Liberty, Equality, and Justice”.

    The Anglo-Irish war was initiated by a small number of young and determined Irish Volunteers, who after January 1919 were known as the Irish Republican Army. They knew they could not defeat the British toe to toe on a traditional battlefield. Instead they were organized into small, independent units that launched guerrilla attacks on the numerically superior British forces. After the attack, the insurgents melted back into the civilian population.

    The main target of the insurgency was the Royal Irish Constabulary. Assassination campaigns were undertaken against this increasingly unpopular police force and against British intelligence officers in Ireland. These assassinations not only resulted in the acquisition of arms for the out-gunned rebels, they also forced the authorities into increasingly harsher reprisals which led to increased support from the populace for Irish independence. The British were hesitant to deploy troops to Ireland to end the fighting. It viewed the IRA’s actions as terrorism, not warfare, and a police response was required, not a military one.

  • #2
    Continued..


    The British solution was to recruit World War One veterans from mainland Britain to join the Royal Irish Constabulary. They soon became known as the Black and Tans due to their distinctive uniforms. They had no knowledge of the complex situation in Ireland and actions of theirs such as the burning of towns and firing into a crowd of civilians at a football match exacerbated the problems in Ireland.

    In 1920, the British Parliament passed the Government of Ireland Act. This act created two governments with limited devolved powers. One government was based in Belfast and served 6 of the 9 counties of the historic province of Ulster, where many Protestants who wished to remain part of the United Kingdom lived. The other government was based in Dublin and governed the other 26 counties. This solution was acceptable to the Ulster Protestants but not to Irish nationalists. By 1921, the British were tired of the fighting and realized the benefit was not worth the cost. The IRA realized that it could not continue fighting indefinitely, and both sides agreed to a ceasefire in June 1921. Negotiations for a political settlement began that October.

    The Sinn Fein negotiators were hoping for full independence of an Irish Republic. The British were not willing to give that much in negotiations and insisted that Ireland stay within the British Empire and accept the Crown as the head of state. In December 1921, the Anglo-Irish treaty was signed. The 26 counties in the south of Ireland gained self-governing dominion status and were known as the Irish Free State. Ireland was not a republic, it sill was part of the Empire and had the Crown as the head of state. The treaty caused deep division in the Free State. Some were pleased with it, reasoning that Ireland had much more independence than before and that it was a stepping stone to full independence from the United Kingdom. Ireland would not achieve this full independence until it became a republic in 1949. Opponents of the treaty were angry that Ireland was not a republic, that the Crown was still head of state, that the North of the country was not part of the Free State but still part of the UK, and that the UK still retained its naval bases in the Free State.

    The division ran so deep as to cause a split in both Dail Eireann and the IRA in 1922. A civil war ensued between those who supported the treaty, who were known as Free Staters, and those who opposed the treaty, Republicans. In May 1923, the Civil War ended. The IRA was largely inactive after this until 1939. At this time, it conducted a series of bombings in English cities. This was over by 1941 as a result of low public support and of the use of internment in both the UK and the Free State.

    In the 1950s, the Irish government began protesting against the division of Ireland into the Republic and the North. The dream of many Irish nationalists was the unification of Ireland and the establishment of a 32 county republic as envisioned by Pearse and Collins in 1916. This policy was ineffective due to the British government’s indifference to the issue, and there was a renewal of the IRA. The IRA conducted a series of raids against British installations with the aim of acquiring arms in the early 1950s. This gave them enough kit to sustain the Border Campaign of 1956-1962. This was a largely unpopular and ineffective campaign. The most famous incident of this campaign was the failed 1957 attack on the Brookeborough RUC barracks just five miles over the border into Northern Ireland. Sean South and Fergal O’Hanlon were killed in this event. Both have been immortalized in two of the republican movement’s most famous songs, “Sean South” and “The Patriot Game”.

    After this failed campaign, IRA leadership decided to focus their efforts on highlighting the plight of Northern Catholics who were treated as second-class citizens. The mid 1960s saw the emergence of a civil rights movement pushing for basic human rights such as voting, housing, and jobs for Northern Catholics. The movement began to be met with violence and in the summer of 1969, British soldiers were deployed onto Northern Ireland’s streets to keep the peace during the contentious summer marching season of the Protestants. In August 1969, the movement was met with a violent backlash from Ulster Protestants. Catholics were attacked and their neighbourhoods burnt by Protestant Unionist mobs. The Royal Ulster Constabulary and Army did not help protect the Catholics from the fiesta of violence. The IRA was extremely disorganized at this time, and did not possess sufficient armaments to protect their neighbourhoods from attack by Unionists or by the RUC. Many young IRA volunteers were angry and bitter with the established leadership’s failure to protect Catholics. The younger men thought that the leadership was too focused on Marxist political theories than with acquiring more guns and protecting their people. These younger men broke away from the IRA and formed their own group. The new group was known as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA or the Provos) and the older group was known as the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA or the Stickies).

    1970 saw sectarian rioting by both sides, and 1971 saw the deaths of three soldiers and the killing of two men by the British Army. The summer of 1971 saw the reintroduction of internment for Republican suspects. This further exasperated tensions. On 30 January 1972, British Paratroopers fired on unarmed members of a civil rights demonstration. Thirteen people died that day, one man died later of his wounds, and thirteen others were wounded. The day became known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday dramatically increased support for the IRA, and civil unrest and violence against the Army and RUC increased.

    During the early 1970s, the British government suspended the hated Northern Irish Parliament (Stormont) and instead began governing the province directly from London. This caused a split in the republican movement, in which moderates hoped for a peaceful political settlement. In 1972, a truce was formed between the Army and IRA. However, this was broken a few days later. The PIRA resumed its campaign of violence, while the OIRA did not.

    The armed struggle continued throughout the 1970s. The IRA carried out bombing campaigns against economic targets and terror campaigns against pubs, killing both civilians and off-duty British soldiers. In 1979, the PIRA conducted a brilliant ambush of British soldiers, killing 18 members of the Queen’s Own Highlanders and the hated Parachute Regiment (which was responsible for Bloody Sunday a few years earlier). In 1979, the IRA also succeeded in killing Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, as he was vacationing in the Republic of Ireland.

    In 1981, ten Republican prisoners died on a hunger strike in British prisons. They refused to be treated as common criminals, and were on a hunger strike in hopes of gaining a special political status for their crimes. This would give a legitimacy to their cause, which the British were unwilling to do. The deaths of the hunger strikers was a propaganda coup for the IRA. The leader of the hunger strike, Bobby Sands, was actually elected to Parliament before dying.

    Fighting continued throughout the 1980s. An attempt was made to assassinate the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. 11 soldiers were killed in bomb attacks in London in 1982. In 1987, 11 people were killed on Remembrance Sunday at Enniskillen’s war memorial. Also in 1987, eight IRA Volunteers were killed in an ambush at Loughall and in 1988 the Special Air Service killed several members of an IRA Active Service Unit in Gibralter. In 1989 a bombing at the Royal Marines’ School of Music resulted in the deaths of 10 Royal Marines.

    In 1986, Sinn Fein changed its policy of abstentionism. Henceforth, SF members would take their seats in Dail Eireann when they were elected. This change of policy angered some hardcore republicans, and Ruairi O’Bradaigh walked out of the party’s annual conference that year. He formed his own party Republican Sinn Fein, with its own military wing, the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA).

    Sinn Fein began secret peace negotiations in the late 1980s. Although they continued their bombing campaigns into the early 1990s, PIRA declared a ceasefire in 1994. In 1996 thought, with talks on arms decommissioning under way, PIRA detonated a massive bomb in London. The ceasefire was re-established in 1997 and led to the Good Friday Agreement for peace in 1998. The agreement was announced by all the main political parties, except for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and was backed by referendums north and south of the border. The agreement encompassed a return to devolution for governance of the province and the establishment of a power sharing administration. An integral part of the agreement is the cessation of paramilitary violence and the decommissioning of arms.

    The peace has had problems however. PIRA split due to disagreement over the Good Friday Agreement. Mickey McKevitt, the Quartermaster General of PIRA and common law husband of the late Bobby Sands’ sister, broke away from PIRA to form the Real Irish Republican Army. This group was responsible for the incident causing the largest loss of life during the entire Troubles, the 1998 car bomb in Omagh, County Tyrone, that resulted in the deaths of 29 people. This attack was widely condemned. McKevitt was arrested in the Republic in March 2001 on terrorism related charges.

    Comment


    • #3
      Part Three

      The devolved Parliament was suspended in 2002 over allegations of IRA intelligence gathering. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA pledged to disarm, however it has yet to do so. In December 2004, PIRA was involved in a $50 million robbery from the Northern Bank. And in January 2005, Robert McCartney, a Catholic from Belfast, was brutally murdered in a pub fight by IRA men. The IRA the returned to the scene of the crime to destroy forensic evidence and has been widely accused of intimidating witnesses. With the war against the British over, people in Northern Ireland say that IRA members have degenerated into mafia-like gangsters who prey on their own people. For now it appears that the group is losing the support of mainstream Catholic and Republican opinion. Many ordinary Catholics, experts say, are less concerned with the IRA dream of a united Ireland than simply being allowed to live untroubled by gunmen and warlords.

      Comment


      • #4
        Some of your "facts" expressed in that paper many will find plain insulting and offensive. Did you source your material from the Sinn Fein website?

        I don't know where to begin correcting the heinous errors contained in it!


        Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.

        Comment


        • #5
          I used a variety of sources. Unfortunately, most of them were from Republican slanted sources. Hence why I'm asking far more knowledgeable people to point out my mistakes, so I can make it an accurate and factual paper.

          Comment


          • #6
            If you paid me 392.35 euro. i could write out a perfect paper for, as this is probably my only area of expertise....
            The trick to pet names is a combination of affectionate nouns. Honeybun. Sugarpie. Kittentits.

            Comment


            • #7
              i really dont know what to say
              but having served through the 1969 till the end of the so call troubles
              were were the irish defenceforces garda etc
              dont know were you would soure material that isnot biased either way
              i will have to think

              Comment


              • #8
                1: Pretty sure most Auxilleries/Black & Tans were Irish born. Worth mentioning that this was a time of massisve unemployment for soldiers returning from the front, and the wages for the Auxilleries were relatively good. Also, they weren't RIC (I don't think) but auxilleries to

                2: You forgot the SNAFU of the 1916 rising, where because of divided leadership and communications breakdown, only about 500 rebels instead of 5,000 available took part.

                3: Bloody Sunday, the massacre at the GAA pitch, took place in retaliation for the murder of most of the military intelligence officers stationed in Dublin at the time by Michael Collins 12 Apostles.

                4: There was also an IRA raid on the Garda magazine in the Phoenix Park, when millions of 9mm ball was stolen. And later turned up in the corpses of RUC men.

                5: There's currently a tribunal trying to establish whether the Paratroopers were returning fire- I've read first hand accounts which indicate that closer to 30 were killed, and the IRA men among them were buried in unmarked graves to avoid losing a propaganda coup.

                6: I believe the "ambush" in 1979 consisted of two bombs on a timer. The first one was to attract attention, the second to kill and wound those members of the security forces and emergency services who had just arrived on the scene to assist. "Brilliant" in that context is a very subjective term.

                7: WHen the IRA succeeded in killing Mountbatten, they also succeeded in killing every other person (six in all, I believe, all civilians) in his boat, including a 9 year old boy. And Mountbatten was about as relevant to the conflict as Alex Ferguson.

                8: The "ambush" in Loughgall, AFAIK, began as an attempt by the IRA to carry out a section in attack on the barracks/outpost. Aside altogether from the tactical lunacy of attacking with assault rifles a position which has both fortifications and and more (and more heavily armed) defenders than you have attackers, I understand the IRA men in question co-operated with their opponents by runnning out, two at a time, into a wide open area covered by several British automatic weapons.

                I could be mixing this up with something else.

                9: Sinn Fein TD's do not take the oath of office as required to take their seats in Dail Eireann. They merely write their names on a piece of paper which happens to have other words written on it also.

                10: "IRA members have degenerated into mafia-like gangsters who prey on their own people"- Degenerated, you say? Interesting viewpoint......

                11: Oglaigh na hEierann is the official title of the Irish Defence Forces. Unelected, undemocratic, terrorist organisations accountable to no-one do not have official anything. They have propaganda, plain and simple.

                12: Saying the Irish-British conflict began in 1169 is akin to stating that the British-American conflict began in 1498. Technically accurate, but grossly misleading.

                13: Around 1913 there were a whole other range of issues affecting the Irish question, not the least of which was the fact that Dublin had the worst slums in Europe at that time, and I understand the lockout was part of an effort to alleviate the situation by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce or whatever it was called. WB Yeats wrote a poem which essentially slated the penny-counters for their efforts. Also "the Monto" one of the most notorious red light districts in Europe. Owned and run by good Irish catholics.

                14: There was widespread intimidation for the 1918 elections which effectively prevented any real opposition to Sinn Fein. See current reports on Zimbabwe for a comparison.

                15: The paramilitary arm of Republican Sinn Fein is Republican IRA, isn't it?

                Lots of books on the subject, all should be available online.
                Take these men and women for your example.
                Like them, remember that posterity can only
                be for the free; that freedom is the sure
                possession of those who have the
                courage to defend it.
                ***************
                Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.
                ***************
                If you're not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Relying on Republican websites for information is not wise. Your paper is full of inaccuracies which even I can spot (even though some of the "mistakes" I've pointed out are probably correct, and if this paper is being graded you shouold be torn apart for it.

                  It reads like it was cut and pasted from www.sinnfein.ie with those inconvenient parts of history just left out entirely.

                  Having said that, there doesn't seem to be an awful lot on www which isn't either newspaper reports or political websites, so you can't be blamed for that. You'll need to do this the old fashioned way- by buying the books and reading them.
                  Take these men and women for your example.
                  Like them, remember that posterity can only
                  be for the free; that freedom is the sure
                  possession of those who have the
                  courage to defend it.
                  ***************
                  Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.
                  ***************
                  If you're not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Thanks for the help JAG!

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      8: The "ambush" in Loughgall, AFAIK, began as an attempt by the IRA to carry out a section in attack on the barracks/outpost. Aside altogether from the tactical lunacy of attacking with assault rifles a position which has both fortifications and and more (and more heavily armed) defenders than you have attackers, I understand the IRA men in question co-operated with their opponents by runnning out, two at a time, into a wide open area covered by several British automatic weapons.


                      Very interesting not accurate.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        The Magazine in the Phoneix Park was not or is a Garda establishment and is located close to to what is know as the 40 acers , the Army sports fields, and the cricket grounds . The Garda Depot is on the other side of the park and there was no such thing as Garda when the raid on the magazine took place .
                        Don't spit in my Bouillabaisse .

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by rod and serpent
                          Very interesting not accurate.
                          If that's the only innaccurrate correction I made, I would be very surprised- and I did say I could be mixing it up with something else.
                          Take these men and women for your example.
                          Like them, remember that posterity can only
                          be for the free; that freedom is the sure
                          possession of those who have the
                          courage to defend it.
                          ***************
                          Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.
                          ***************
                          If you're not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Most RIC would have been though. Most of them went on to become the senior officers in the New Garda Siochana,following the foundation of the state.(Dublin Metropolitan Police existed until the 30s)


                            Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Tyovan4 start from scratch. In future do not use republican sites they are extremely biased and innacurate.

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X