04.07.1996

The IRA and armed strategy

Amidst a haze of media fury and a flood of public indignation and outrage at the mangled wreckage of Manchester city centre, a sober assessment is needed on where exactly the IRA is going with its current strategy.

It must be said that such a calm review is almost totally impossible even among progressive working class communities and individuals. Once upon a time, and quite recently, large sections of the class identified with the IRA’s armed struggle, admired their heroism, stood firm with the right to resist through force of arms. This held true when occasional balls-ups led to innocent casualties, something the IRA had always hitherto painfully tried to avoid, even on pain of scrapping a whole operation.

When the target was the armed forces, police, MPs, senior politicians, the rich and powerful, the centres of government and military institutions, it was easy to justify legitimate targets in the war of independence. But this was a two-way street, the IRA chose to make that distinction; chose to try and split the general working class population away from ‘its’ state. They as an armed force made a distinction between the ordinary working class punter and the boys at the top or the men in uniform.

Things are far more murky and contradictory now that working class city centres in the middle of the day at peak shopping times are the targets. Given the cynicism of the state, the lethargy of the security forces and the sheer scale of the assault, civilian working class people, mainly women and children, are bound to be on an even chance for injury or a massacre on a giant scale.

Having been through the earlier phase of struggle, when the targets were the enemy or its institutions, it is hard to understand the reasoning for Manchester, with its huge Irish population and strong republican sympathies, unless one believes such people are more prepared to sacrifice themselves and their children to the cause, rather than some rich war-mongering bastard holed up in his mansion.

None of these changes are accidents. They mark a clear turning away from making a distinction between working class and ruling class military targets. They represent a strategy of waging war on the whole population, as if they were collectively the oppressor rather than being part of the oppressed.

This can only represent a clear degeneration of class analysis and perspective among the current IRA forces and is a long way indeed from the revolutionary fighters of the 70s and 80s.

At the same time one should not draw any inference that the current IRA strategy in straight military terms is a symbol of organisational deterioration - far from it. The Manchester bomb was the biggest and perhaps most sophisticated planted in the whole campaign. The IRA cell network has recently reconstituted itself and has succeeded in closing itself off from internal infiltration and outside observation. Intelligence forces admit to knowing less about the IRA and its internal organisation now than at any time since its inception. As a military machine it is in perfect nick.

It is the direction with which such perfection will be used which is the source of the problem. With Sinn Féin caught on its own petard and clearly off in an entirely different direction from the military, the politics of the whole campaign is badly out of sync and is in class terms at its most reactionary since the 60s, when the movement finally split.

Of course it is incumbent on me to make the point that the whole war and all the deaths as a result of it are the responsibility of the British state and its imperialist domination of Ireland and the causes of the divisions in the first place. The Irish people have the absolute right to resist that imperialist domination in whatever way they find appropriate.

We on the other hand have the absolute right and indeed duty to criticise the strategy, or lack of strategy, that leads to a strengthening of imperialist ideology in the working class and makes the struggle against the whole UK state that much more difficult.

The IRA must recapture its earlier revolutionary, socialist and internationalist vision and set the overall class war at the centre of its struggle for independence and a socialist Ireland.

Dave Douglass