While several small rainforests have been consumed in the production of books about the Irish republican movement and the conflict in Northern Ireland since 1969, comparatively little has been written about the period that preceded the crisis and the revival of militant and armed republicanism.

This book looks at the IRA and Sinn Féin between the 1956–62 ‘border campaign’ and 1969. The campaign itself is dealt with in the first chapter as the event that brought about the internal debate after 1962. I examine developments within the movement with regard to internal structural and ideological changes, but also in...

The IRA ‘border campaign’ of 1956 to 1962 occupies a peculiar place in the history of Irish republicanism. It has arguably been romanticised not only by republicans themselves but in books like Coogan’s first edition ofTheIRA and in Bowyer Bell’sThe Secret Army. A more recent work, however, by Barry Flynn comes to the conclusion that the campaign itself was both ill-conceived and futile. For republicans during the period under review here it was important in terms of assessing both why the campaign had failed and more importantly what lessons could be drawn from it in order to...

The general view of the republican movement in the 1940s and 1950s, including that of former Chief of Staff Seán Cronin, was that it was imbued with a deeply conservative ideology.¹ It has been argued that the movement was reactionary, and had more in common with European fascism than it did with the leftist image of the movement in the 1930s, although the prominence of socialist ideas projected throughAn Phoblachtunder the editorship of Peadar O’Donnell and Frank Ryan did not necessarily reflect the republican support base. Others have claimed that the movement was by and large apolitical but...

For traditionalist republicans, the refusal to recognise the parliaments in Leinster House and Stormont symbolised their allegiance to thede jureRepublic which they claimed had been illegally overthrown in 1922. For them it still had legitimacy with legal authority having been passed to the IRA Army Council in 1938 by the surviving anti-Treaty Sinn Féin members of the Dáil elected in 1923. Traditionalists, as represented today by Republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity IRA, still adhere to that belief.

A proposal to abandon abstentionism was put to the IRA Convention in November 1964. The strength of the opposition led...

Goulding and those close to him after 1962 quickly came to the conclusion that by itself Sinn Féin was not an adequate vehicle for their political ambitions. Instead, they decided to establish an organisation that they hoped would draw in a wider group of individuals who were sympathetic to republicanism but antipathetic to Sinn Féin and the IRA. A March 1969 memo from Peter Berry suggests that they were persuaded of the merits of this by ‘suggestions from left-wing sources’ outside the movement.¹

The main vehicle for the new departure was the Wolfe Tone Society, which was established to organise...

The Dáil passed the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement on 7 January 1966 by 66 votes to 19. The Labour Party opposed the measure and Fine Gael abstained. Labour put many of the same arguments as republicans and one Labour TD, Denis Larkin, discerned signs of a realignment in the politics of the Dáil that would open up the kind of opportunities for the left that were being envisaged by some republicans and the Communists.¹ The Wolfe Tone Society, which had organised a lobby of the Dáil on 4 January under the auspices of the Economic Independence Committee, congratulated the Labour...

In 1970 Cathal Goulding claimed that ‘by 1967 the movement had become dormant’.¹ Sales of theUnited Irishmanhad fallen to a few thousand by mid-1967, while publicly claiming a circulation of thirty thousand.² When Mick Ryan was asked to travel around the country to collect debts and to report on the movement he found it to be in an ‘awful state’.³ An IRA document on theUnited Irishmanfrom February 1967 recognised the need to boost circulation by setting proper sales targets under the responsibility of county organisers and becoming a ‘campaigning paper’ on social issues.⁴ The paper’s editor...

The start of 1969 brought an escalation in tensions in Northern Ireland and there were indications that some Goulding supporters were annoyed at what they regarded as the provocative strategy being pursued by Peoples Democracy and other radical elements in the civil rights movement outside of the control of NICRA. Peoples Democracy was founded in October 1968 in Queen’s by students who were involved in the civil rights movement and the university left. They were strongly influenced by black American groups such as the Student Non Violent Coordinating Council (SNCC) and developed in a similar manner towards a more radical...

The real epilogue to the events and ideological debates described above was not only the armed conflict that lasted until the definitive IRA ceasefire in 1997 but also the political events culminating in the May 2007 agreement between Sinn Féin and the DUP to share power. The enthusiasm engendered by that historic compromise has been since tempered but the structures look destined to survive.

Despite their claim that the Provisionals eventually came to adopt their strategy, the modernising faction gained nothing politically if that was the case, and indeed the only remaining organisational representative of that faction is the Workers...