How the IRA Waged War

A Conflict With Deep Roots

ANYONE WHO TRIES TO UNDERSTAND the Irish Republican Army without understanding the history it emerged from will get it wrong. The IRA did not appear from nowhere in 1969. It drew on a tradition of armed Irish republicanism stretching back through the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence, the 1798 rebellion against British rule, and grievances that accumulated over centuries of colonization, famine, and enforced subordination.

The specific IRA most people associate with the late twentieth century, the Provisional IRA, split from the original organization in 1969 following disagreements about strategy and ideology. It emerged in the context of civil rights marches in Northern Ireland being met with violence, loyalist attacks on Catholic neighborhoods, and the British Army being deployed in ways that, whatever the intention, quickly created more enemies than they neutralized. The Troubles, as the conflict in Northern Ireland came to be called, lasted roughly from 1968 to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Over 3,500 people died.

The Structure of the Organization

The Provisional IRA learned from previous failures. Earlier Irish republican organizations had been penetrated by informers, their structures mapped by British intelligence, their operations disrupted before they could execute. The Provos, as they were called, responded by reorganizing into small cells in the 1970s.

Instead of battalions and companies with large numbers of people who knew each other, the reorganized IRA used cells of four to eight people. Each cell knew only what its members needed to know to carry out their own operations. A bomber might not know the identities of the intelligence gatherers who identified the target, or the quartermaster who provided the materials, or the safe house keeper who provided shelter afterward. Compartmentalization made the organization harder to penetrate and harder to roll up when penetrations did occur.

Above the cell level sat a more conventional organizational structure: brigade staff covering areas like Belfast and Derry, an Army Council that set overall strategy, and a political wing, Sinn Fein, that operated openly in the political sphere while the IRA operated covertly in the military one. The relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA was officially one of separation. In practice, senior figures moved between and across both organizations, a fact that became significant during peace negotiations.

Tactics and Targets

The IRA's campaign combined several different types of operation, each aimed at different strategic goals. In Northern Ireland, operations targeted the security forces: the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the British Army, and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). Bombings, shootings, and ambushes killed soldiers and police officers throughout the Troubles.

On the British mainland, the IRA pursued a different strategic logic: economic damage and the disruption of normal life. Bombs in the City of London's financial district in 1992 and 1996 caused hundreds of millions of pounds in damage and demonstrated that the IRA could strike the heart of British commerce. The 1996 Manchester bombing injured over 200 people and caused extensive property damage. The point was not primarily to kill civilians, though civilians died, but to make the cost of maintaining British rule in Northern Ireland too high to bear.

The IRA also targeted individuals they considered legitimate military or political targets. The attempted assassination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, which killed five people and injured many more, was the most dramatic example. Lord Mountbatten, a member of the royal family, was killed by a bomb on his boat in 1979. Airey Neave, a Conservative politician, was killed by a car bomb in the Houses of Parliament car park.

Funding the Campaign

A sustained armed campaign requires money. The IRA funded itself through multiple streams, some legal and some criminal. NORAID, an Irish-American organization in the United States, raised funds that were ostensibly for republican prisoners and their families but which critics and law enforcement argued substantially supported the IRA's military campaign. Irish-American communities in Boston, New York, and Chicago contributed to a level of financial and political support that gave the IRA a transatlantic lifeline the British government spent decades trying to cut.

The IRA also engaged in criminal enterprises: robbery, extortion from businesses in areas it controlled, and later involvement in smuggling and fraud. Prisoners in the Maze Prison maintained organizational discipline and political education programs, turning incarceration into something closer to a training ground than a punishment.

Libya's Muammar Gaddafi provided substantial weapons shipments in the 1970s and 1980s, partly out of ideological solidarity with anti-imperialist movements and partly as a way to destabilize Britain. Shipments of Semtex plastic explosive, AK-47 rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades arrived by boat. The Semtex in particular proved durable: it can remain stable for decades, and British security services spent years worrying about how much of it remained unaccounted for.

British Intelligence and the Informer War

The British government's response to the IRA combined military operations, policing, internment without trial (a policy that proved deeply counterproductive), and intelligence work. The intelligence dimension became increasingly central as the conflict progressed.

Informers, referred to within the republican movement as touts, were the most effective weapon British intelligence had. Placing a source inside an IRA cell or, better, at a senior level in the organization gave security services the ability to disrupt operations before they happened. The IRA's internal security unit, the "Nutting Squad," was responsible for finding informers and executing them. It was itself penetrated by a British agent, Freddie Scappaticci, known by the codename Stakeknife, whose existence became public in 2003 and raised the deeply uncomfortable question of how many IRA executions the British government had allowed to happen to protect its source.

The informer war was brutal and produced its own atrocities. People were tortured to extract confessions of informing, some of whom had not informed. Others were killed on the basis of faulty intelligence or internal IRA political disputes dressed up as security concerns. The bodies were sometimes dumped, sometimes hidden, the latter group becoming known as "the Disappeared," whose families spent decades seeking the remains of people killed by the IRA and secretly buried.

The Hunger Strikes and the Political Turn

The 1981 hunger strikes in the Maze Prison changed the conflict's political dynamics in ways that ultimately led toward a peace process. Ten republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, starved themselves to death demanding recognition as political prisoners. The British government under Margaret Thatcher refused to yield.

The hunger strikes failed in their immediate objective. They succeeded in making the republican cause internationally visible and generating enormous sympathy, particularly in Irish-American communities and in countries with their own experiences of colonial conflict. Bobby Sands was elected to the British Parliament while on hunger strike, demonstrating that republican politics could win electoral support. This opened a debate within the movement about whether the ballot box might accomplish what the Armalite rifle alone could not.

Gerry Adams and other republican leaders began steering Sinn Fein toward serious electoral participation. The dual strategy of armed and political campaigns ran through the 1980s, with growing recognition among at least some IRA leadership that a military victory was not achievable and that a negotiated settlement might be possible.

From War to Peace

The peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was years in the making and involved secret contacts, public negotiations, the involvement of the United States government under President Clinton, and difficult compromises on all sides. The Agreement established power-sharing institutions in Northern Ireland, mechanisms for cross-border cooperation, and a framework for decommissioning paramilitary weapons.

IRA decommissioning, confirmed by independent international monitors in 2005, marked the formal end of the armed campaign. It did not end republican politics or the aspiration for a united Ireland, but it removed the gun from the equation. Sinn Fein has since become one of the most electorally successful parties on the island of Ireland, winning the largest number of seats in the Irish general election of 2020.

The legacy of the Troubles is unresolved in significant ways. Legacy legislation continues to be contested, with families of victims on all sides seeking accountability for killings that remain uninvestigated. The history is present tense: people live with it, argue about it, carry its weight. What ended in 1998 was the active armed campaign. What didn't end was the question of how to honestly reckon with what it cost.