Ireland's OWN: History
IRA Border Campaign (1956-1962)
—by Máirtín Pilib de Longbhuel
The IRA’s 1939 bombing campaign in England had been a failure. A split in the organization in July 1946 (resulting in the foundation of Clann na Poblachta) weakened the IRA further. Despite these setbacks the GHQ of the IRA estimated that there were still 200 real activists still at work, with hundreds more on the fringes. An IRA convention took place in September 1948 with the purpose of electing a new Executive. The Executive appointed Tony Magan as Chief of Staff. Magan immediately set out to reorganize the movement.
The IRA conceded that one of the biggest mistakes of the 1939 campaign was the failure to harness popular support. Political naiveté was the result of the IRA being apolitical. At the 1949 army convention a resolution was passed allowing IRA members to join, infiltrate and control Sinn Féin so that the army could have a political wing. In 1950 there was an election in which Sinn Féin ran two IRA men as candidates and, as J Bowyer Bell points out, “the alliance was sealed and Sinn Féin was again a factor in the Republican movement”.
By May 1951 a ‘Campaign Plan’ was in place. The IRA had now begun preparing to attack the British army and RUC in the North. The IRA had started growing in size and arms raids took place, first in Derry, in which the IRA had procured a relatively small number of weapons (although they were more sophisticated than those used by the state army in the South at the time). A second successful raid took place in Armagh. The IRA took over 300 weapons from the British army’s Gough barracks. The IRA was evidently becoming more confident. Bowyer Bell describes the 1951 Wolfe Tone commemoration as the most enthusiastic in a generation. In addressing the crowd Gearóid O’Broín said: “These arms were captured by the Republican forces for use against the British occupation forces still in Ireland and they will be used against them…in due course”.
Not all arms raids were a success however. In October 1951 eight men were captured when attempting a raid in Omagh. This was misfortunate for the IRA in a way, but benefited them in other ways. There was an upsurge in funds, recruits and sympathizers to the IRA as well as to Sinn Féin, who were now focusing their attention on the Westminster elections. Failed operations like Omagh were effectively strengthening the Republican movement.
The Westminster election occurred in May 1955. In the Six counties Sinn Féin polled 152,310 votes and had elected two abstaining candidates, Tom Mitchell in Mid-Ulster and Phil Clarke in Fermanagh – South Tyrone. Sinn Féin had absorbed almost the entire nationalist vote in the two areas, their election campaign focused exclusively on the national question and the ending of partition. To the IRA it indicated solid support among northern nationalists. In June of the same year Sinn Féin’s electoral successes in the Twenty-six county local elections further endorsed the IRA’s belief of widespread popular support for the unification of Ireland and for the IRA’s methods to achieve unification.
In May 1956, the now confident seven-man army council voted six-to-one in favour of a campaign in the North. The Border Campaign, following years of preparation, finally got under way on the night of 11th December 1956. The IRA suffered their first casualties in the opening hours of 1957. Seán Sabhat and Fergal O’Hanlan were killed in an attack on Brookeborough RUC station. The reaction of the Irish public was extraordinary. The two men became martyrs and Bowyer Bell describes what began as “a week of all but national mourning”. This further indicated to Republican the legitimacy of their campaign. Roy Foster dismisses this notion, claiming that the 50,000 mourners who followed Sabhat’s funeral were simply expressing “the traditional psyche of nostalgic rural republicanism rather any comprehension of realities of life in the North”.
Republican emphasis shifted again to politics, this time in the South. There was a general election in March 1957. The Sinn Féin candidates campaigned solely on the national question like they had done previously in the North, and like the North many of their candidates were prisoners. The party received 65,640 first preference votes, electing four of their candidates. They were Ruairí Ó’Brádaigh, John Joe McGirl, John Joe Rice and a brother of O’Hanlon.
The election of four TDs, the IRA believed, gave militant republicans a mandate for the campaign. However, it was the opinion of most people, including many who followed Seán Sabhat’s funeral, that the campaign was madness and the IRA irresponsible. Despite this apparent public opinion in the South the campaign continued. The IRA structure in the North remained solid and the organization, knowing there would be no swift victory, settled into a war of attrition.
In the summer of 1957 the momentum of he campaign began to decline. The drain of supporting men on the run, their families and the dependents of prisoners cost about £400 per month. This money was becoming more and more difficult to find and if it couldn’t be found the campaign would be halted. From the winter of 1958-59 the campaign had all but finished. In 1959 the Curragh internment camp had closed and the last IRA internees in Crumlin Road jail in the North were released in early 1961.
In 1949, the IRA took on a political dimension through the Sinn Féin party in an attempt to avoid in the future the mistakes they made with the 1939 campaign, i.e. let a campaign proceed without popular support. The republican electoral successes of the mid-1950s left the IRA believing the results provided for a military campaign. But because of the protracted nature of the Border Campaign the IRA through passing of time suffered lack of sanctuary, limited popular support, severely limited foreign aid and a desperate inferiority to British security forces in numbers and resources. Even in the North, where support tended to be consistent, support in many areas seemed to disappear.
Other significant incidents that sealed the IRA’s fate included the so-called ‘Curragh incident’ (IRA internees breaching discipline by escaping from the Curragh without leadership approval), which effectively caused a split in the organization.
The final nail in the coffin of the Border campaign came in October 1961. In the Twenty-six county elections, Sinn Féin’s first preference votes diminished to three per cent of the total poll. In February 1962, the army council met and formally called of the campaign. In a statement they claimed to recognize the reason for failure to be lack of support and called for support for a future campaign that they hoped would be “final and victorious”.
Sources:
Bell, J. Bowyer, The Gun in Politics: An Analysis of Irish Political Conflict, 1916-1986, Transaction Pub (July 1987)
Foster, R.F., Modern Ireland 1600-1972, Penguin Press, London (1988)
See Also:
Page updated 17 Aug 2008
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