MacGiolla, later president of Sinn Féin, political education began with a massive all-party rally held in O’Connell Street in 1949 to condemn the passage of the Ireland Act at Westminster as an ‘iniquitous’ solidification of partition. The ‘national question’ became identified with the ending of the British-supported ‘Orange State’ thanks to the thorough and well-produced pamphlets detailing Unionist discrimination and gerrymandering which the all-party campaign had produced.221 Then came the collapse of the coalition government and the return in 1951 of a lacklustre Fianna Fáil administration whose energies were totally absorbed in an unimaginative response to the Republic’s burgeoning economic crisis. For many like MacGiolla, enthused and mobilised in 1949-50 and observing the lack of results from the campaign of the constitutional parties, membership of Sinn Féin was a natural progression, as was support for the armed assault on Northern Ireland, to which the IRA had been committed since 1948.
Republicans could not have been unaware of the massive crisis of the Republic’s domestic economy in the mid-1950s, when unemployment rocketed and emigration levels surpassed their worst pre-independence levels. However these developments were treated not as evidence of the bankruptcy of de Valera’s ideals of economic autarky but rather as signs that ‘Free-Statism’ could only corrupt and violate what were essentially sound principles of national development. Thus while the crisis impelled Fianna Fáil to jettison the economics of Sinn Féin and to reintegrate the Republic into the world economy, it confirmed the republican movement in its full-blooded protectionism. MacGiolla and other republicans watched trains arrive in Dublin’s Westland Row station from the west of Ireland, packed to capacity with those who were going straight on to the mailboats at Dun Laoghaire and emigration. They gave out leaflets at rallies of the unemployed in O’Connell Street.222 The message was the consoling one that, until the ‘British occupation’ of the Six Counties was ended, the economic depression would not be ended – a prediction that would prove more damaging to the IRA in the Irish Republic than the predictable failure of its armed campaign in Northern Ireland, which was launched at the end of 1956.
Idealism and Sectarianism in the 1956 Campaign
Within less than a year of its launch, the border campaign had clearly failed, and for reasons that were predicted before it commenced, yet it dragged on from 1956 to 1962. The delay in launching the campaign, which had caused much dissatisfaction in the ranks and led to a couple of anticipatory splinter attacks in Northern Ireland, reflected a debate inside the IRA leadership over the viability of a guerrilla campaign in the midst of a hostile majority population. As an alternative to a guerrilla campaign, some leaders suggested a longer-term strategy: first, sabotage of transport and communications to bring everyday life to a standstill and, second, preparation of the nationalist population for a civil disobedience campaign. The latter, it was calculated, would provoke repression from the police and the B Special constabulary (which was particularly unpopular among Catholics) and provide the space for the IRA to emerge as a ‘people’s’ defence force.223
Instead it was decided to opt for Seán Cronin’s Operation Harvest, a plan for a guerrilla campaign waged initially by ‘flying columns’ from the south that would sabotage communications, destroy police barracks and ultimately create ‘liberated areas’. Cronin, a Kerryman and ex-member of the Free State army who had recently returned from the United States, was a forceful personality and the acceptance of his strategy seems to have owed as much to the energy and conviction with which he argued it as to any more substantial factor. It was sadly lacking any grasp of northern realities. Indeed, one of its attractions was precisely its effective suppression of the dynamics of northern sectarianism. For as long as the IRA’s activities were focused on creating ‘liberated areas’ in some of the predominantly Catholic borderlands of Northern Ireland, the question of the repercussions of such activities on Catholic-Protestant relations, particularly in the sectarian cockpit of Belfast, could be ignored.
The IRA Army Council was also well aware that action in the north was necessary to undermine support that had emerged for heretical anti-abstentionist ideas amongst some republicans. The key figure was Liam Kelly, an IRA man from Pomeroy in County Tyrone. Influenced by the formation of Clann na Poblachta, and particularly by Sean MacBride, Kelly persuaded a majority of Tyrone republicans to support the idea of a new political organisation, Fianna Uladh (Soldiers of Ulster) and a new military organisation, Saor Uladh (Free Ulster). Kelly agreed with MacBride that the 1937 Constitution should legitimise the southern state, particularly now that the coalition had taken the Free State out of the Commonwealth and established a Republic in 1948. As a consequence, he argued for an end to abstentionism in the south and a concentration of republican effort against the state of Northern Ireland. Expelled from the IRA in 1951 for planning an operation without authorisation, he was elected to the Stormont parliament for Mid-Tyrone in 1953. His support base by then extended to Derry and Belfast, where some younger republicans – including a later leader of Official republicanism, Billy McMillen – were attracted by his mixture of political and military activism. Jailed for making ‘seditious statements’, Kelly was nominated by MacBride and elected to the Irish Senate in 1954. His release from prison in August 1954 was the occasion of a serious riot in Pomeroy, when thousands of his supporters clashed with the RUC. In November 1955 Saor Uladh attacked the RUC station at Roslea, County Fermanagh, and in November 1956 Saor Uladh and another splinter group attacked six customs posts along the border with the Republic.224
These developments made inevitable some sort of ‘decisive’ response from the IRA. The Army Council was no doubt encouraged by the 1955 Westminster election results. Two IRA arms raids on army barracks in Armagh and Omagh in 1954, the second of which led to the capture and imprisonment of eight IRA members, had done much to restore republican morale. In the election Sinn Féin contested all twelve Ulster constituencies, half of them with men in prison for the Omagh raid. The result was the largest anti-partition vote since the formation of the state – 152,310 votes – and victories in Mid-Ulster and Fermanagh-South Tyrone.225 Interestingly, the only constituency with a large Catholic population in which the Sinn Féin candidate did not perform well was West Belfast. Here Sinn Féin’s neglect of economic and social issues ensured that it trailed behind an Irish Labour Party candidate – the Catholic working class would remain wedded to various versions of labourist and republican labour politics until the late 1960s.226 Meanwhile Cronin’s strategy would direct the IRA’s attentions to the redoubts of intransigent rural republicanism in the border areas and north Antrim.
Operation Harvest began on the night of 12 December 1956 with approximately 150 men involved in attacks on ten different targets in Northern Ireland. By its end six members of the RUC and eleven republicans were dead, a relatively small number by comparison with the 1970s and 80s, but a significant loss of life in the atmosphere of the time.227 Its high-point was the abortive attack on Brookeborough RUC station in Fermanagh in January 1957. Like all the ‘flying columns’, that which attacked Brookeborough was composed of IRA men from the south with only the skimpiest knowledge of local conditions. Two of the group, Sean Garland from Dublin and Daithi O’Connaill from Cork, would play crucial and conflicting roles in post-1962 republican rethinking. The key figures in the attack would be the two IRA men who were killed during it, Sean South and Feargal O’Hanlon. The deaths of two young idealists – as they were widely perceived in Catholic Ireland – resulted in a powerful spasm of public emotion:
When the bodies of South and O’Hanlon were carried across the border, their transmutation from young men into martyrs began. There began a week of all but national mourning. Crowds lined the route of South’s funeral cortege to Dublin … Town Councils and County Corporations passed votes of sympathy.228
In the general election that took place shortly afterwards, Sinn Féin’s nineteen candidates received just over 5 per cent of the vote and it had four TDs elected. These were unexpected victories but, as Rumpf and Hepburn noted, the result was ‘ultimately insignificant’.229 Mass concern over the coalition government’s lack of response to a massive economic crisis was the decisive issue in giving de
