Irish Republican Army (1922–1969)

The Irish Republican Army (IRA; ) was an Irish republican paramilitary organisation that carried on a number of violent campaigns between 1922 and 1969, in pursuit of a 32-county Irish republic. It arose from a split in the original IRA over the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, and was known during the ensuing Civil War as the Anti-Treaty IRA or the "Irregulars". It split in 1969 into the Provisional IRA and Official IRA.

The Civil War ended with anti-Treaty forces dumping arms, and over the following years, membership fell to fewer than 2,000. The IRA moved to the left in the early 1930s, under the leadership of Moss Twomey and later Seán MacBride. It swung to the right from 1938 under the leadership of Seán Russell; it had contact with the , and Russell travelled to Nazi Germany, dying suddenly on the journey back to Ireland. From 1939 the IRA carried on the S-Plan, a bombing campaign in Britain which included the 1939 Coventry bombing, for which Peter Barnes and James McCormick were hanged. It also carried on the Northern campaign, a series of attacks on security forces in Northern Ireland. Internment without trial was introduced both in Northern Ireland and in the south, and IRA numbers were greatly reduced by the end of World War II. From 1958 to 1962 another series of attacks, called the Border campaign, were carried out, and again internment was introduced north and south.

The IRA moved to the left again in the 1960s, under the leadership of Cathal Goulding. It adopted a Marxist philosophy and advocated class-based, rather than sectarian, action. In 1969 it proposed to end abstentionism, allowing elected Sinn Féin members to take their seats in Dáil Éireann and the Northern Ireland Parliament. This, and the perceived failure of the IRA to protect Catholics during the 1969 Northern Ireland riots, led to the split at the 1969 IRA convention that resulted in the Official and Provisional IRA.

Split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty

The original Irish Republican Army fought a guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland in the Irish War of Independence between 1919 and 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 ended this war by granting most of the island a great degree of independence, but with six counties in the north staying within the United Kingdom as the new jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the Irish delegation in London caused an angry reaction among the less compromising elements in Sinn Féin and among a majority of the IRA. The IRA units in the remaining 26 counties (that were to become the Irish Free State) split between supporters and opponents of the Treaty. The anti-Treatyites, referred to by Free State forces as "Irregulars", continued to use the name "Irish Republican Army" (IRA), as did the organisation in Northern Ireland, which originally supported the pro-Treaty side (if not the Treaty). The majority of headquarters staff, many of whom were close to Michael Collins, supported the Treaty, but opinion among IRA volunteers was divided. By and large, IRA units in Munster and most of Connacht were opposed to the Treaty, while those in favour predominated in the Midlands, Leinster and Ulster. The pro-Treaty volunteers formed the nucleus of the new National Army.

Anti-Treaty officers called an army convention in March 1922, attended by their supporters, which reaffirmed their opposition to the Treaty. They repudiated the authority of the Dáil, claiming that its members had broken their oath to defend the Irish Republic, and declared their own Army Executive to be the real government of the country until the Republic was formally established. The reasons why volunteers chose pro- and anti-Treaty positions are complex. One factor was an evaluation of the military situation. Whereas Collins, Richard Mulcahy and Eoin O'Duffy felt that the IRA could not continue to fight the British successfully, anti-Treaty officers such as Ernie O'Malley and Tom Barry felt that the IRA's position was stronger than it had ever been. Another factor was the role of powerful personalities; where the leader of an IRA unit—for example Sean McEoin, who sided with the Treaty in County Longford—took sides, often the remainder of his command joined him. The same was also true for anti-Treaty leaders such as Liam Lynch in Cork, whose First Southern Division supported him in opposing the treaty.

In March 1922, the Anti-Treaty IRA captured the Royal Navy vessel Upnor off the coast of Cobh, County Cork, which was carrying arms.

Civil War

On the outbreak of civil war in June 1922, the government of the Irish Free State issued directives to newspapers that its Army was to be called "The National Army", and that its opponents were to be called "Irregulars" and were not to be associated with the IRA of 1919–1921. This attitude hardened as the Civil War went on, and especially after the killing of Michael Collins in an ambush in August 1922. Collins wrote to W. T. Cosgrave on 25 July 1922 that those on the anti-Treaty side were "misguided, but practically all of them are sincere". However, the subsequent government attitude under Cosgrave was that the anti-Treaty side were rebels against the lawful government, and were not entitled to recognition as legitimate combatants. Some of the officers of the new Irish Army, led by Liam Tobin, formed an association called the "Old IRA" to distinguish themselves from the anti-Treaty fighters. Some pro-Treaty IRA officers, such as Eoin O'Duffy, alleged that the "Irregulars" had not fought the British in the War of Independence. O'Duffy claimed that the Kerry IRA's sole contribution in 1919–21 was "the shooting of an unfortunate soldier on the day of the truce". In Kerry's case—which saw more Royal Irish Constabulary men killed than anywhere else outside Dublin and Tipperary—this was far from true; however, some areas such as County Sligo and County Wexford did see considerably more action in the Civil War than in the War of Independence. Other IRA men such as Florence O'Donoghue formed a group called the "neutral IRA", which tried to reconcile the two factions.

Meanwhile, the IRA in Northern Ireland maintained its links with Michael Collins; but several Northern IRA leaders joined the anti-Treaty side – Belfast commander Joe McKelvey and Commandant General Charlie Daly (both were executed by Free State forces). The Northern IRA launched a renewed military offensive in May 1922, in which it was aided covertly by both the National Army and the anti-Treaty IRA. This scheme was interrupted by the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. Many Northern IRA men then had to flee the North in order to escape internment or worse at the hands of the Northern authorities. Over 500 of them ended up in the National Army during the civil war.

The IRA had been expanded hugely in 1922, from perhaps 15,000 men before the truce with the British in July 1921, to over 72,000 by November 1922. Veterans of the War of Independence derisively termed the new recruits "truceileers". These were to divide in broadly the same ratio as the veterans; however, most of them did not take part in the Irish Civil War. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Free State had about 8,000 fighters, mostly pro-Treaty IRA volunteers. The anti-Treaty side could muster about 15,000 men but it could not arm them all. At the start of the war, they had just under 7,000 rifles, a few machine guns and a handful of armoured cars taken from British garrisons (who were under orders not to fire on IRA units) as they evacuated the country. The remainder of anti-Treaty IRA arms were shotguns (3,000 of which were confiscated after the Civil War) and other civilian weapons.

Public support for the Treaty settlement and the new Irish Free State was reflected in the victory of the pro-Treaty side in general elections in 1922 and 1923. Anti-Treaty forces controversially seized a number of public buildings in Dublin in April 1922, most notably the Four Courts. Eventually, after two months and under British pressure, Michael Collins decided to remove them by force. Pro-Treaty forces bombarded the building, which surrendered after two days. Confused fighting raged for another five days, with anti-Treaty elements of the IRA's Dublin Brigade, under Oscar Traynor, occupying O'Connell Street until they were dislodged by artillery fire.

In July 1922, the anti-Treaty IRA units held most of the south and west of Ireland. However, the Republicans, under a new chief of staff, Liam Lynch, soon lost most of the territory they initially controlled. While the anti-Treaty side had a numerical advantage at the very start of the war, they were soon both outnumbered and outgunned. The Free State's National Army was quickly expanded to over 38,000 by the end of 1922 and to 55,000 men and 3,000 officers by the end of the war; one of its sources of recruits was Irish ex-servicemen from the British Army. Additionally, the British met its requests for arms, ammunition, armoured cars, artillery and aeroplanes. By August 1922, the Free State had re-taken all the major towns and territory held by republicans. The Free State's best troops were the Dublin Guard: a unit composed of former IRA men, mostly from the Dublin Brigade's active service unit who were to the forefront in the Free State's offensive of July–August 1922. They sided with the Free State primarily out of personal loyalty to Collins.

The anti-Treaty IRA was not equipped or trained to fight conventional warfare. Despite some determined resistance to the Free State advance south of Limerick by late August, most of them had dispersed to fight a guerrilla campaign.

The anti-Treaty guerrilla campaign was spasmodic and ineffective. Much of it was composed of the destruction of infrastructure such as the main railway bridge linking Cork with Dublin. They also burned many public buildings and "commandeered" supplies by force, alienating many civilians. Furthermore, without the public support that had existed during the War of Independence and facing an enemy who knew them and the countryside intimately, the anti-Treaty forces found that they could not sustain a guerrilla war such as that fought against Britain. Only in County Kerry was a relatively effective campaign fought, with the IRA units re-taking Kenmare and other towns from the Free State on several occasions. The IRA's relative popularity in this area had much to do with the brutality of the occupying Free State troops. Other areas of guerrilla activity included County Cork, western County Mayo, County Wexford and several other localities.

Despite the limitations of the anti-Treaty IRA's campaign, they still inflicted more fatalities on Free State troops (about 800) in the eleven-month civil war than they had on British Crown forces, who lost about 600 killed in the almost three-year-long War of Independence (1919–1921). The disparity is possibly due to the Free State troops' relative paucity of training and equipment compared with British forces.