Fighting for Ireland?: The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement, MLR Smith, Routledge, 1995

Comprehensively covering the evolution of IRA strategy, it ably elucidates the tension between ideology and the strategic realities over the use of force. It also has a nice chronology of the Movement from 1791 to 1994.

It certainly challenged many of the assumptions I had about the IRA, growing up during the 70s and 80s in Protestant and Thatcherite England, living within the Irish community in Harlesden in the early 90s and playing Gaelic football, and being married to an Irish Catholic.

The Introduction is a primer on the strategic approach to the Irish Republic Movement. All the better for being an As Is exercise (as we say in industry) rather than a piece of highly charged journalism.

Chapter 1 is well worth noting in detail because it explains the ideological, cultural, psychological and religious determinants of Republican strategic thinking. The incoherence of some of their thinking is only made clear in a reading & noting of chapters 2-7 covering the history from the Easter Rising of 1916 to the early 1990s.

The intellectual basis for the relevant strategies is the colonial relationship with Britain, and this analysis explains how a lot of British & English targets were chosen. The nationalist vanguard and apostolic succession makes a strong and enduring point about the Movement that violent acts & uprisings have been orchestrated as much to garner self-sacrifice and martyrdom as ends in themselves (the eigendynamik of terrorist cells) as to create a sense of Irish nationhood: to fight is to win, not to fight is to lose. It goes to the heart of the tension between Republicans' beliefs about absolutism and abstentionism: violence was used to polarise, to prevent fence-sitting, and explains the Movement's opposition to constitutional paths to peace and the parliamentary process. Intricately linked to this is another tension: that between atheist, marxist secularism and Roman Catholic sectarianism, and its impact on what targets they hit and their attitude to Catholic Eire. Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of the Irish Republican Movement and the reason why its military strategy is an excellent study for the modern time is because, up until only a few years ago when it officially eschewed violence, the primary political instrument of the Movement was the military one; it avowed a crudely power political strategy, and the primacy of violence was challenged only when Gerry Adams became hegemonic leader of both Sinn Fein and the IRA.

Have the IRA been successful? Even as recently as 1989, Danny Morrison, director of publicity for Sinn Fein from 1979 until 1990, stated that "when it is politically costly for the British to remain in Ireland, they'll go; it won't be triggered until a large number of British soldiers are killed and that's what's going to happen" (p224). That didn't work, clearly. The IRA isn't fighting now, so by their own admission, that means they have lost. The Movement did polarise Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the UK, but the vast majority of all of these entities preferred non-violent politics and not to give in to violence. Their claims to be Irish nationalists and to embrace all Irish people did not convince the Protestants in Ireland or most people who described themselves as in any way Christian in Ireland, North or South. So the IRA has failed in every way they look at it.

One aspect is missing, however. Walter Laqueur has written of the asset-to-liability shift: because of the actions of the IRA, the British government (and certainly a majority of the British people) has shifted its view that Northern Ireland is a sovereign part of the UK to be cherished as such, to a politically neutral one that as soon as a majority of those in Northern Ireland want a united Ireland, then the government will relinquish its hold on the six counties. As a result of this shift, the government negotiated with the IRA to make peace. So maybe the IRA's military strategy was coherent after all?