The Northern Irish case study is one that provides an interesting scenario for my thesis. The goal of the following chapters is to test my theory, that it is in the reactionary stages of the cycle of protest that marginalised, and peripheral, national movements can utilise the shifting state centre to their advantage so as to escalate the crisis. Whilst these movements themselves are not initiators of centralist expansion and colonisation of peripheral communities in a social, cultural, and political sense, they nevertheless may use the same processes in order to dictate the pace of state reforms. The idea being that in controlling the speed of the cycle they force the state to react in ways that may open opportunities within the perpetual development between centre and periphery. To the extent whereby the struggle itself becomes a defining point of not only the state’s, but, the movement’s identity. Nationalism becomes the key as it provides a sense of continuity and historicity that contemporary movements find difficult to achieve. Thus, in ‘mimicking’ the state, the movement, through exploiting tensions within the cycle of action-reaction-action as a strategy of repertoire expansion, can either ensure that the movement gains full enfranchisement, or, polarises society, so as to heighten awareness of the state’s inability in its current form to placate variant demands of the periphery and national movement itself.

This study will be progressive in so much as the Northern Ireland case will be the founding base for a study of three national movements and their varying paths towards national autonomy. The Northern Irish, Basque and Croat case studies will progressively show how an overall strategy of attacking the state monolith controlled by a competing elite, achieves the initial polarisation which tends to consolidate the crisis itself within the continuous cycle of state and peripheral parallel, yet separate, development. One that cannot be resolved until the periphery attains a nation state. In this way the successful national movement is the one that ‘mimics’ the centre throughout the struggle to create its own autonomous political space via opportunities made available by the reformist state through the struggle itself.

In the Northern Irish example the development of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the post Civil Rights era can be viewed not just as an extension of the failure of British policy formation towards the province, but, also as a child of this perennial struggle between centre and periphery. Thus, I intend to show how the IRA is but a reaction of the overall national movement that gains legitimacy, not just through the success of its strategy of engaging the state, but through the nature of the state’s continual denial of full enfranchisement to the minority Catholic Republican community of Northern Ireland. The movement is hence a reflection of the state, though the Irish national identity would doubtlessly remain, irrespective of whether or not the Ulster state and its elite remained in power. The movement itself exists as long as it can portray its relevance to the overall political solution of the ‘Troubles’.1 As such it is highly responsive to the needs of its community as well as to the weaknesses of the state.

The significance of this, strategically, lies in the ability to marry the benefits of NVDA and electoral formalisation with VDA. I desire to show how the progression in tactics is dependent on the state reaction, with its success lying in the ability of the movement to escalate the crisis in times when the state is seeking to negate such escalation through minimally appeasing the initial demands of the original movement. Protest is hence a strategy that is inclusive of all aspects of the national community’s demands, and provides a unity of purpose that utilises all extremes to challenge the state monolith that is otherwise able to diffuse tensions when faced by a singular movement strategy. In the early days the success of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in portraying the Catholic community as marginalised was essential in mobilising the national consciousness. Yet, without the the expansion of the repertoire to include more formal roads embodied in the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Féin, it is doubtful that the demands of the NICRA would have ever developed past the classic civil rights campaigns.

It is the riding of these waves, and the escalation of cycles of action-reaction-action, which has been at the core of the politicisation, and hence mobilisation, of the national movement. It is by engaging the state that the desired polarisation can be achieved, in turn creating the necessary environment for continued development of the struggle to a position where both centre and periphery can utilise it to their advantage. Without a reforming centre, the need for the periphery to reformulate would be at a minimum. In the end, the expansion of the repertoire to meet the demands of the cycle of protest becomes in itself the key tool in achieving the desired communal autonomy from the ever shifting state entity.

The First Signs of National Movement Shaping to the Political Opportunity Structures Offered by the State in Transition.

In the eyes of many Nationalists the problem with the northern statelet lay in the inability of the Protestant political leadership to provide any sense of identity that could be considered inclusive (Taylor 1984: 69; Gallagher 1991: 18-38). Rather, sectarianism was practised as a means of maintaining the ascendancy of one cultural group over the other (Hennessey 1993: 15). For Catholics frustrated with the lack of civil liberties guaranteed them under British constitutionalism, the very conservative tactics of the southern government in representing their cause, failed to fully equate to the political reality of their immediate political marginalisation (Boyce 1991: 365). High unemployment, a lack of political opportunity structures within the statelet’s bureaucracy and poor housing had created the ingredient for social unrest as the regime was moving towards inclusion at a slower rate than what was demanded by the minority community (Birrel 1978: 23). Out of this environment a mix of nationalism and social awareness was to create a potent political force that was to manifest in the social movement activism of the 1960s; especially with the formation of the NICRA in February 1967 (Boyce 1991: 366). A movement that developed into what Hull (1976: 3-13) would define as the ‘Dublin perspective’; meaning the congruence of all wings of the national movement (the IRA, the NICRA and the EIRE 2 Government) under one nationalist umbrella that would utilise varying means of protest repertoire to attain specific goals whilst challenging the singular Ulster state’s identity and, hence, legitimacy.

The main target would be the 1946 Elections and Franchise Act (Northern Ireland) which allowed for six votes per person according to the value of their business property, a law that placed the Protestant business community at a considered advantage over the under represented Catholics (Arthur 1987: 101-102). This ensured that the national question remained a significant undercurrent in the Northern Irish polity as well as a definer of social relations (Hennessey 1995:9). In many ways the NICRA was more politically astute than the old Nationalists because they were able to recognise the true constitutional position of Northern Ireland within Britain, and attempted to recreate the sphere of political activity rather than reluctantly accept the dictated order established by the Protestant elite (Alcock 1994: 55). This signified a generational change fuelled by the frustrations of a young elite, with the inability of an antiquated regime to create sufficient political space that would placate Catholic demands (Rose 1976: 23; Osborne 1982: 151; Miller 1990: 231). O’Brien (1994: 156-157) felt this to be the natural consequence of a movement built by a generation that were better fed and educated, due to the success of the British Welfare State, and as such felt no desire to accept their second class status.

The NICRA saw that only through bringing civil rights issues to the fore, through protest activism, could they question the legitimacy of the Ulster state (Dunn & Morgan 1994: 9). Yet the main defining force within the Catholic polity was, according to Rumpf and Hepburn (1977: 184), between those who supported constitutional modes of political formation, and those who supported outright rebellion. This split would define the diversity of protest repertoire that was to be used by the Nationalist community as a whole in their battle with the state. For it was the state’s, and the nature of the elite’s dominant settler society’s, consolidation that demanded loyalty of all its subjects to the ‘metropole’, which could be viewed as responsible for the form of contemporary Irish nationalism (O’Brien 1988: 39; Boyce 1990: 39; Weitzer 1990: 29):

Irish nationalism, therefore, was not peculiarly ‘Irish’; on the contrary, its many paradoxes and self-contradictions arise from the close and permanent relationship between Ireland and her neighbour. And Ireland’s dominant political tradition, like most aspects of her life, bears the ineradicable influence of England (Boyce 1991: 389).

More importantly these events were to occur in a period of self-examination by the Protestant elite (Banton 1986: 61). Unionism was undergoing fundamental changes under the Premiership of Terrence O’Neill that was designed to produce a more flexible and responsive leadership that could guarantee the continuity of their rule (Boulton 1993: 23-26). At the heart of this was a re-evaluation of the continued repression of the minority Catholic community and how to incorporate them into the body polity of the North, without jeopardising the state of the Union (Farrell 1976: 229). Several factors would aid this shift in centre attitudes including the lack of Catholic support for the IRA Border Campaigns from 1956 to 1962, an Irish Catholic in the White House, the return of the Wilson Labour Government, and diplomatic rapproachment with Dublin. This allowed a justification for a change in strategy as a new era of tolerance seemed to be emerging towards the Catholic community (Arthur 1987: 90-91).

The reality, however, of Catholic under representation in the structures of government remained evident. In 1964, 3 out of 33 members of the Youth Employment Board, 2 out of 22 members of the Hospitals Authority and 2 out of 24 General Health Services Board were Catholic (Farrell 1976: 242). The slow pace of reform, and the continued lack of political opportunity structure offered Catholics, was to prove a great difficulty for the reform based O’Neill Government. In fact, several studies conducted into the relationship between violence and social disadvantage have pointed to a correlation between high levels of unemployment and an increase in the cycle of protest (McCullogh 1984: 122; Gallagher 1991: 6; Murray 1995: 220). What was emerging were cleavages that were a by-product of parallel, yet interdependent, centre-periphery political development that Tarrow (1977, 1993a) and della Porta (1993) would consider a necessary pre-condition for the mobilisation of the periphery into a consistent state of rebellion.

The inability of the Nationalist leadership in the post World War Two era to achieve desired reform through parliamentary participation was to lead to an upsurge in extra-parliamentary activism that would leave the leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer, out of the new processes of nationalist expression (Rumpf & Hepburn 1977: 192). The sectarian nature of the state further emphasised the futility of participatory democracy and ineptitude of Joe Devlin’s participationist doctrine in achieving political reform (Patterson 1996: 42). The inadequacy of the Nationalist Party (NP), Northern Irish Labour Party (NILP) and Socialist Republican Party (SRP) in assessing the shifting ideological and social needs of the population was to lead to their decline as representatives of contemporary Catholic interests (Lee 1995: 436). Simultaneously, the NICRA openly commenced addressing issues that political parties had feared to undertake so as not to further marginalise their constituencies. Not even the signing of the Joint Memorandum on Citizen’s Rights between the Northern Irish Council and NILP could redress the sectarian polarisation that was emerging in Northern Irish politics (O’Connor 1996: 53).

The first signs of popular discontent with the standing electoral processes emerged in February 1965 when the Campaign for Democracy (CD) commenced holding mass rallies; a campaign aimed directly at influencing Republican Labour Members of Parliament in their future policy direction in the run up to the 1966 general election (Arthur 1987: 92). What is interesting is that somewhere between the initial unemployment rallies of 1961 and the formation of the NICRA, under the tutelage of Billy McMillen, the core value of protest activism had shifted from purely social issues to one steeped in nationalist rhetoric and ideology (Rooney 1984: 81). A shift in ideology that was to bring about a corresponding counter mobilisation of Protestant sentiment that subsequently led to the initial polarisation of these competing communities over the ideological nature of state-periphery development.

The NICRA came into existence in 1967 through the assistance of the Wolfe Tone Societies and the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ), formed in 1964, which was to lead to the formation of the movement along the lines of the National Council for Civil Liberties in Britain (Harkness 1983: 145). Yet, the success of post-war national movements in attaining independence throughout the British and French colonies was to place new impetus on nationalist ideology as a vehicle for communal liberation and civil action (Farren & Mulvihill 1995: 3). As Eamonn McCann, leader of the Dugannon Housing protests of 1961 noted, that though the initial marches were designed to break the Nationalist stranglehold that enveloped the Catholic community it soon became clear that the alluring nature of nationalism itself was too good to ignore as people were:

almost relieved gradually to discover that the guilty discarded tradition on which the community was founded was, after all, meaningful and immediately relevant (Wright 1990: 208).

Nationalism was emerging as a doctrine of mobilisation, especially since 1968, in an environment defined by the sectarian nature of centre periphery relations (Lustick 1985). A factor that the fledgling social movement would have been foolish to ignore. Central to this nationalist reawakening was the Republican community’s realisation that the very nature of their marginalisation was steeped in the core values of Protestant ascendancy and the protection of the Union which would automatically seek to negate state alternatives that were more inclusive. The crisis faced was hence political in nature and structure, and was a byproduct of the inadequacy of the Ulster state to deal with counter claims.

The emergence of the People’s Democracy (PD) under a younger generation led by Catholic peace activists, such as the student Bernadette Devlin, were representative of a generation of urban disassociated Catholic youth whose main concern was not the consolidation of a position within a power structure that would never fully incorporate their demands, but rather an option that would demand social, political and economic equality at all costs (Rumpf & Hepburn 1977: 193). As Denis Haughey of the SDLP told me about the reasons behind a move away from outright rebellion:

After some years of agitating with relatively little progress being made, I came to the conclusion that many of us came to, which was the problem of Northern Ireland was fundamentally a political problem and needed to be dealt with in a political way. And a number of us conceived the idea what we needed to do was form a new political party because the old Irish National Party was completely ineffectual. 3

Protest was seen as a means for demonstrating publicly the discrepancies of state relations between the rival communities (Arthur 1969; Murray 1995: 217). This was what was behind John Hume’s, who would become the future leader of the SDLP, “Positivist Agenda” as protest action was seen as a way of creating space outside cumbersome institutional structures of state via challenging the legitimacy of Stormont to exist in the first place (Patterson 1996: 43). This “Positivist Agenda” was a doctrine that would seek to utilise the very institutions of state that had previously been viewed as the repressive arm of the Protestant elite to simultaneously, through extra-parliamentary activism, symbolically reconstruct the inadequacies of the state in resolving Nationalist demands. In the main, through antagonising and challenging the state to bring around law and order whilst utilising the constitutional law of the repressor to consolidate movement gains. The idea was to utilise movement agitation to actively challenge the state, ie, London, to become actively involved. A point explained by Séan Farren of the SDLP:

I mean they’re the ones who have to make decisions as how the negative fallout from the situation will be dealt with in security terms in particular over the last twenty five years they’ve been the ones who had to increase expenditure on the army, on the police and they had to introduce laws to deal with the situation and so they carry that responsibility as governments for what has gone wrong.4

Many activists clearly saw the state as directly responsible for the spiral into disorder. What Arthur (1987: 93) points out, is that the new politics of the 1960s had accepted the significance and validity of symbolism as a mode of political demonstration and once this occurred, this allowed for the rise of cyclical protest action. Yet without a target the ability to mobilise a population to protest would be limited. As a means to mobilisation, the ritualisation of cultural and social protest in the annual cycle of sectarian parades, designed to keep alive historical memories of varied and shared political experiences, was integral in heightening public awareness to the nationalist nature of repression within the Northern Irish political milieu (Moss 1972: 97; MacStiofáin 1975: 91-92; Doherty & Poole 1995: 21). It is a tool used by both sides of politics.

For the IRA, disillusioned by the failures of the 1956 to 1962 military Border Campaigns, marching was to take on great significance as a means to galvanising a divided Republican community through recognising their shared condition of oppression and the necessity of concentrating the community into one political force through culturo-political socialisation (Bowyer-Bell 1972: 366-397; Rose 1976: 21). Desired social parity became equated with national liberation, a conjunction of strategy and ideology that emerged with the realisation by the civil rights leadership of the validity of employing nationalist ideology in mobilising popular Nationalist support into an overall struggle with the state (Arthur 1987: 92). The Unionists groups for this reason also saw fit, between 1968 and 1970, to organise some 700 events celebrating the founding of the history of their ascendancy (Moss 1972: 98). In fact the utilisation of Calvinist like evangelical beratings of the Catholic community from the pulpit by Paisley granted much of this activism an almost organic spontaneity. The state was playing its hand, as movement was countered by movement, the nature of centre response reached a new level (Miller 1978: 153-157; Taylor 1984: 63).

What was emerging was a reciprocal development of nationalist ideology as two competing identities fought for limited space within the state (MacLaughlin 1993: 97). Loyalists, themselves, found it difficult to disequate Catholic protest from radical activism (Taylor 1984: 62), as this community, now mobilising in the name of civil rights and justice, only six years prior had logistically supported the IRA ‘Border Campaigns’. In this sense, the predominantly Protestant Security Forces, were schooled in the rhetoric of reactionary state nationalism forged in the defence against rebellion (Hennessey 1993: 35; Ignatieff 1993: 183). An underlying reactionism that seemingly manifested in times of state instigated reforms; as shown with the 1966 reformation of the UVF a year after the Catholic NP became the official opposition in Stormont (Boulton 1973).

A pattern developed whereby each reformist push by the O’Neill Government was being met by a subsequent conservative backlash by radical Loyalists to each Catholic response (Kelly 1972: vi-ix). New opportunities for heightened mobilisation were emerging that were to place the IRA in a conundrum. Civil protest by the CD in 1965 had brought the NP to a place within Stormont (Buckland 1981: 109); it also brought the UVF back into the political equation (Lee 1995: 416). What emerged was a recentralisation of state identity within the hands of a given elite that della Porta and Rucht (1995) considered necessary for the radicalisation of policing structures so as to minimise the influence of the mobilising periphery. The rise of the NICRA had similarly created the preconditions for the establishment in October 1968 of Free Derry, yet was countered by an upswing in Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and UVF violence against the Catholic community (Coogan 1995: 160-161).

Cathal Goulding, the then IRA Chief of Staff, came to realise that in the face of government reforms, protest activism would be more likely to gain enfranchisement than physically challenging a highly mobilised state (Bishop & Mallie 1987: 70). This was the birth of IRA collusion with the higher ranks of the NICRA. The collusion was first pointed out in Paragraph 214 of the 1969 Cameron Report on the “strictures on the extremists [and] the dreadful affair at Burntollet” which questioned the nature of past strategies of engaging the state and the validity of open rebellion as a tool of mobilisation by the Republican community. Goulding’s new found anti-sectarian Marxist rhetoric was seemingly asking the IRA to embrace the new reforms and downplaying the nationalist card; a tactical blunder that was exploited by the Provisional IRA that split from the Official IRA on ideological grounds.

This error was due to the inability of the reforming elite within the IRA to recognise that much of their popular support came from their willingness to maintain armed insurrection as a valid strategy of protest (Murray 1982: 311). Amongst Catholics, the IRA’s role was clearly defined as such, leaving many to question the validity for their continued existence if they so chose to concentrate solely on NVDA (Coogan 1995: 66). Especially, considering that up until 1972 this role of civil protest group had been clearly filled by the NICRA. O’Neill desired reforms, whilst the rest of the Protestant community, however, seemed unwilling to likewise relinquish their hegemonic control of state (Rooney 1984: 83).

There was an overall realisation that waiting for the state to commence reform was politically naive. The Catholic community was facing a state elite determined to use the state’s security apparatus to maintain their national ascendancy (Moss 1972: 100; Miller 1978; Banton 1986). For change to occur, it was realised that what was needed was a new structure of resistance aimed at engaging and challenging the state in strategies in the same manner that the state challenged the periphery (MacStiofáin 1975: 143). The IRA had already provided a hierarchy of military defence that was to be exploited in the protest activism of NICRA, and later by the SDLP, in reconstructing a sense of unity through action which created space outside the restrictiveness of official state channels for future mobilisation (MacLaughlin 1993: 98). Protest and rallies became a means to self assertion that would provide space within the cleavages found in, what Maguire (1996a: 8) terms, the cycle of reform-protest-reform for a community purposefully marginalised on the periphery of the Ulster state entity (Hamilton & Trimble 1995: 4). New strategies of engaging the state were needed, and eventually found.

By 1968 the strategists of the NICRA pointed to the death of Che Guevara, the collapse of the officially sponsored Prague Spring, and the rise of student protest activism throughout France, Italy, Mexico, Spain, the USA and West Germany, as a justification for the need to exploit the human rights angle in appealing to the general British populace to influence their government (Arthur 1987: 103). A point that Brian Faulkner, who succeeded Major James Chichester Clark as Prime Minister in March 1971, summed up in retrospect:

It sounded, to a world attuned to such protests, a positive humanitarian cry from an oppressed people. It also seemed to involve a very basic right... many well-meaning but ill-informed people, even in Britain, were under the impression that the ‘evil Unionist government’ had made it illegal for Catholics to vote in elections (ibid.: 104).

The fact that this statement was made by Prime Minister Faulkner, the last Prime Minister of Stormont, and a man long associated with the right of the UUP who once he came to power sought to appease Catholic demands without necessarily isolating the Protestant-Ulster elite, suggests that the elites were aware of the ploy of playing on the marginalisation of the community in order to court media favour (Bruce 1992: 79). The success of such tactics would be played out in the escalation of reactionary violence from the Protestant community which only served to further isolate them from public opinion on the mainland (White 1983: 187-188). A point that was further enhanced by Prime Minister Wilson’s denunciation of extreme-Loyalists as “quasi-fascist” in the wake of William Craig, the predecessor of Faulkner, evoking the Special Powers Act to ban Republican Clubs in March 1967 (Farrell 1976: 244).

Strategically the NICRA was prepared to continue utilising much of the strategies of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the confrontational tactics of non-violent engagement of the state, that were tried in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Alabama and the rest of the Deep South (Wright 1990: 164). The attractiveness of such a strategy lay in the nature of exclusion and disenfranchisement in politically polarising the combatant communities. Yet, there was also the realisation that, due to cultural polarisation, the Blacks would always be defined in minority terms without any true chance at self-determination (McAdam 1982). The advantage held by the Catholics was that their Nationalist Republican ideological tradition could allow the civil rights movement to transcend such limitations once most of the initial demands concerning civil rights had been addressed. Irish nationalism had previously forged a state in 1922, in a way Black Americans could never achieve in the parameters of the US state system (Wright 1990: 165).

The move towards open nationalist confrontation became more evident with the CSJ’s decision, with the tacit approval of the NICRA, to escalate the campaign in August of 1968 via marching through RUC lines during the Coalisland to Dungannon march (Budge & O’Leary 1973: 94-95; Heskin 1980: 107-108; Lee 1995: 420). The highlighting of the overt influence of Loyalist radicals, through Paisley’s successful appeal of employing an RUC road block to halt the rally, was a clear infringement on the right to gather. What was needed was a larger stage and the decision to march on Derry, the largest Catholic city in the North on October 5, with some 2 000 protesters was to bring the nationalist aspect of the repression into focus (Moody 1974: 26-34; McCann 1993: 83). Soon Catholics saw the validity of continuing NVDA throughout the North. On October 9, 1 000 students marched on City Hall, Belfast, to set up the PD which the NICRA leadership would come to view as a direct threat by extremists on the left to any restructuring of the pre-existing political system (Farrell 1976: 247). As Henry Patterson (1997: 183) noted:

The coming in from the cold of republicanism referred in Adam’s case to emerging common ground- in analysis at least- with the main ideologists of the student-based People’s Democracy organisation, who saw in the civil rights campaign a way of hastening a crisis of the Northern Ireland state with a potentially revolutionary outcome.

When they were joined by the future leader of the SDLP John Hume, Ivan Cooper of the ‘moderate’ Citizens’ Action Committee and some 15 000 demonstrators (Lee 1995: 420), in response to Craig’s banning of marches on November 16, O’Neill responded, after pressure from British Prime minister Harold Wilson, by proposing a new reform package that would include the dismantling of the Derry Corporation (Farrell 1976: 248; Coogan 1995: 73).

For the NICRA this came too late and the decision was made to confront the statelet on all issues including the national one as previous protests had proven successful. The PD hence opted to march from Belfast to Derry, led by Michael Farrell, in a four day track that would commence on January 1 1969 (Wright 1990: 194; Taylor 1997: 43). Eighty set out but by the time they had reached Burntollet Bridge, they numbered some several hundred. More significantly, the direct threat to the state was exemplified in the response of the RUC and off-duty B-specials who ransacked Catholic businesses and stores (Farrell 1976: 250-251; Weitzer 1995: 60; Clayton 1996: 158). This was a publicity coup for a movement determined to demonstrate the disparity of the state security apparatus and bigotry of the Loyalist elite:

In any case all Unionists were becoming increasingly embedded against the other community and the British government as the whole thrust of the civil rights campaign was to portray Catholics as innocent victims, badly treated by Protestants and who had finally reacted against injustice. Unionists saw that the strategy involved instilling feelings of guilt in the British public, and to present the minority community as free from guilt and hence able to occupy a position of moral superiority in hence eyes of the British opinion (Alcock 1994: 59).

The response in Derry was swift and was to mark the turning point of the NICRA transitions from a purely non-nationalist movement, into a nationalist based one, as outraged residents barricaded the Bogside of Derry City in response to the B-Specials running amok and establishing Free Derry (McCann 1993). This was an assertion of the right to self-determination and the open delegitimation of the right of the state to use force on a specific community (Farrell 1976: 251). When the subsequent Cameron Commission of 1969 blamed the rioting not on the tactics of the RUC, but rather on their lack of numbers to control the rioters, the Catholics soon began to realise the futility of reforming a system that was bent on justifying violent means of population control (Weitzer 1995: 60).

The popular discontent was demonstrated in the February 24 Stormont elections where eight candidates were run on a militant leftist and civil rights platform. Hume would win Derry from McAteer, a clear generational victory, whilst Protestant civil rights activist Cooper would win mid-Derry along with the PD’s winning South Armagh (Coogan 1995: 83). The proof that Catholics began to see more value in utilising extra-political means of political and social mobilisation than in participating in more formalised electoral means was shown by the NILP’s sole candidate Paddy Devlin’s ability to keep his seat. He was able to win the Falls partly due to his own civil rights activism (Farrell 1976: 254). The NICRA responded in turn with the ascension of a more radical executive (Boyce 1991: 365-366).

The weight of expectation paid off, and on April 22 1969, ‘one man, one vote’ was ceded to Northern Ireland, and significantly on the following day Terrence O’Neill resigned (Doherty & Poole 1995: 40). The UVF showed their disapproval by exploding two bombs in water pipelines, in order to demonstrate to the Catholics that the Protestant community was not as willing to accept reform of the state (Farrell 1976: 256). It was a declaration of intent. One that would lead to many within the IRA to question the reasoning behind a cessation of arms. More importantly it forewarned a polarisation of the conflict through a radicalisation of the state’s response, which ran the risk of the conflict becoming the definer of both movement and state.

With the ascension to the Premiership on May 1 of Major Chichester-Clark by one casting vote from his cousin O’Neill over Faulkner, the NICRA called a halt to all protest action (Harkness 1983: 156). The subsequent arrest of some 37 PD demonstrators on July 26, would lead to the death in custody of the Catholic Patrick Corry. Derry and West Belfast were to rise again between August 12 and 15 which would leave six dead: five Catholics and one Protestant (O’Brien 1972: 178-180; Darby 1976: 43-45). NVDA had shaped a violent response by the state and the subsequent fleeing of over 1 820 families, of whom 82.7% were Catholic, from their Belfast homes between July and September, would lead to the radicalisation of the movement away from the civic option, to a more co-ordinated militancy designed to utilise the perceived benefits of VDA augmenting the strategies of NVDA (Farrell 1976: 267). On August 15, with the coming of the British Army, IRA units were put on alert.

Nevertheless, it must be recognised that the initial cycle of NVDA did bring about significant change within the development of self-dependency of the local boroughs and councils (Dunn 1993: 23; Doherty & Poole 1995). The most significant was the 1969 Governmental White Paper, which was an extension of the original 1966 Governmental White Paper, that ceded direct responsibility for education, personal social services, local heating services and roads and planning to districts councils (Birrel 1978: 23). More significantly however, was the 1969 inquiry by two British police officers, Robert Mark and Douglas Osmond, which found the RUC to be highly ‘inoperative, outdated, sectarian centred, IRA obsessed and extremist in nature’. This would, in turn, lead to the 1969 Hunt Committee findings that recommended the disbanding of the USC, a repeal of the Special Powers Act, and a reconstitution of the RUC along non-sectarian lines to be overseen by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in London (Weitzer 1995: 62-63).

In 1969, however, the Stormont Parliament would rescind these hard fought for gains through the establishment of four new organisational frameworks aimed at further centralisation of the statelet, consisting of: Centralised Boards, Area Boards, Governmental Departments and District Councils (Birrel 1978: 25). Patterson 5 however argued that this was less an attempt to undermine reform by Stormont than a bid to destabilise the building of the power base of local councils which had played a substantial role in implementing discriminatory policies through controlling the allocation of public housing and local government employment. Thus, within the cycle of action-reaction-action there emerges a new pattern, that Maguire (1996a: 6), in invoking the cyclical paradigm of Tarrow’s and applying it to ‘abnormal’ societies, has defined as ‘reformist-rebel-reformist’. One that the NVDA initiated, suggesting that within the cycle there is a tinge of counter action as the cause of rebellion on the parts of the activists, just as much as a pre-planned push for inclusion on the political agenda of state would be a cause.

The Problems with Non Violent Direct Action as a Single Issue Strategy and the Emergence of the Protestant State Sponsored Counter Movement.

The problem with the pacifist oriented protest activity of the NICRA was that it was viewed by Loyalists as the embodiment of anti-state activity and the irredentist policies of Dublin (Coogan 196: 67). The NICRA social platform had failed to recognise that the roots of the “Troubles” lay in the innate competition between conflicting national identities and mythologies (Hillyard and Boyle 1982: 17; O’Brien 1988: 35; see also Seton-Watson 1977; Lustick 1995). Campaigns were based on opening up access to state institutions, which Rose (1976: 1) claims was built on the premise of how the state should be governed rather than who will govern it. In turn, this negated the core of Catholic nationalism that was built on the premise of national sovereignty as the primary solution for all social, economic and political disparity (Hechter 1985: 19-20; Boyce 1990: 39).

The rise of the periphery would be seen by the centre as innately nationalist as the state was formed on the premise of exclusion of the other (Wallerstein 1974: 281, 1980: 265-266; Ignatieff 1993: 183). In terms of the Unionist perspective, the question could never be solely addressed along human rights lines, but rather on the ascension of a nation subjugated by the state they were trying to reform (Roberts 1986: 18). This in itself may explain certain aspects of Protestant militancy as Protestant groups, especially those lead by Paisley, began to fear that the goal of political change through civil unrest would not be satiated until more irredentist goals were sated (Hennessey 1995: 8).

The irony of the NICRA campaigns for social justice and political enfranchisement was that it had created a uniquely Protestant Irish counter movement that had recentralisation, if only for a little while, as the centre piece of their demands (Mason 1985). In fact it signalled a point of strategy convergence that would lead to the state itself to formulate a movement that would define its existence in opposition to the periphery. This ‘mimicking’ by the centre follows on from Kitson’s 6 (1960) counter insurgency strategical study of “the other” in replicating a cyclical development of group identity in formulating fluent, responsive communities within the process of struggle. Stratifying both Protestants and Catholics in direct conflict. This left the British Army and state in the middle as claims and counter claims isolated both communities from the rule of law. In fact, it came close to even criminalising Protestant mobilisation as militant.

By the end of 1969 this left the British and Protestant elite facing a unique scenario of Security Forces protecting a retrogradist and antiquated social class, whilst oppressing a people who were no longer necessarily ‘disloyal’ (Clayton 1996: 125). Opening up access points within the state to absorb the minority community would, according to Tarrow’s (1992, 1995) notion of creating a consistent dimension within a given political environment, run the risk of encouraging or disencouraging collective action. At the same time, with the national question being at the core of the problems, it could not guarantee fully that the extension of state created opportunity structures would be enough.

The Ulster Protestant elite were not afraid to use violent policing strategies to achieve their own goals (Farrell 1983; Aughey & Mcilheney 1984; Ryder 1990). Thus, the overemphasis on NVDA would place an unnecessary restriction on the civil rights movement capacity to fully protect, not just the legal and political rights of their constituency, but also the physical well-being at the hands of overzealous, and ideologically committed Security Forces. The impotency of the NICRA was demonstrated in the arrest, beating, and sentencing for six months, the ex-chair of the NICRA, Frank Gogarty on July 31, only a few days after a local youth Danny O’Hagan was shot dead by the British Army (Farrell 1976: 274). It was almost as if the British Army and the RUC were inviting the IRA to respond. The futility of utilising civil protest action without the corresponding support of VDA, when the state utilised CS gas and plastic bullets to hold back the hordes (Maguire 1996a: 4), heightened the sense of the Republican community’s ineffectiveness to achieve reform without engaging the state directly.

It was the Bodenstown Wolfe Tone commemoration meeting in June 1968 that was to prove to be the watershed in the strategic shift towards the readoption of VDA as a major tactic in the Nationalists’ protest repertoire (Rooney 1984: 81). According to Guelke (1995: 114), what the NICRA had taught the Provisional IRA was that only through violence could the Protestant ascendancy be truly challenged. The State Security Forces had developed into a defined Protestant mechanism of control. Yet, it was the ability of the majority Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) to equate Protestant distinctive cultural survival with that of the Ulster state, that was to prove of great significance in forging a new Ulster state identity. Central to this new ‘Loyalism’ was to be the protection of the essence of Ulsterism within a responsive state.

What was occurring was a counter movement developing at the centre of the state which I believe to be a natural consequence of a ritualisation of mobilised identity within the cyclical parallel development of the state centre and periphery. This reciprocal development of antagonistic centre and periphery identity was to cause quiet resignation amongst many Republican activists as the goals of communal enfranchisement and state reform were now being overtaken by the struggle of two competing mutually exclusive ideologies of state. Such events would force a strategic rethink on both sides, as Denis Haughey of the SDLP told me:

on the other hand Unionists have taken the view that they were a distinct [people] and were entitled to a state to themselves which they could control. 7

Significantly, with the arrival of the British Army, on August 15 1969, as an extension of state security procedures, the IRA were given the historic justification for the expansion of their repertoire to include the initiation of VDA as a tool of protest activism (Murray 1982: 311). The problem was that the increased protesting would escalate into full scale rioting once the Security Forces were deployed to counter the activists. Amongst Protestants, such activity would soon become equated with more radical elements within the Nationalist community that saw itself as insubordinate to the established law and order (Coogan 1996: 67). At the same time, Catholics would see this an extension of Protestant military predominance, thus reassuring them of their ‘colonial’ status (Osborne 1982: 154). The British Army, hence, became a significant ingredient in the overall justification by the IRA for an upswing in the cycle of action-reaction-action. The British Army as such would become a defining element of future expansions of repertoire as the symbolic representative of the omnipotence of the Northern Irish state centre.

Upswing, Downswing: The Search for a New Strategy in Challenging the Centre.

The strategic placing of terrorism at the centre of collective action was a response not only to the military occupation of the Province, but also strategic utilisation of Ulster state policing as a form of community subjugation. The leanings of MacStiofáin, the leader of the Provisionals, to VDA can be traced to his stint in prison where he was daily in contact with the leaders of the Cyprian anti-colonial movement, EOKA, who in turn were greatly influenced by the FLN’s fight with the French in Algeria from 1956 to 1962 (MacStiofáin 1975: 74-79). This was an expansion of movement protest repertoire to incorporate both ‘home grown’ and ‘imported’ methods of VDA (Coogan 1996: 122). Be it the Young Ireland and Fenian rebellions of the past century, or the nail bombs, 'knee capping' and booby trap explosives of the modern “Troubles” (Maguire 1996: 1), I feel they are inherently tied to Tilly’s expansion of repertoire in order to respond to the reactive repression of shifting elites through the defensive action of counter-action. A strategy that seemingly runs correspondingly to the inability of either the reforms proffered by Westminster to resolve disputes, or the unwillingness of the state to fully review the demands of national movements.

In Northern Ireland, the four Rs of rebellion, reform, reaction and repression are tactics in continuous use rather than the outcome of particular conflicts. Cycles of protest are not followed by cycles of reform nor, indeed, by all-out rebellion. Instead, Nationalist protest has led to occasional attempts at reform, but the result is usually a massive wave of Unionist counterprotest. The subsequent weakening or abandonment of reforms- which is the typical result of this process- radicalises the minority community and provokes further rounds of violence (Maguire 1996b: 8).

Much of the reasoning behind the split within IRA ranks lay with the frustrations felt by MacStiofáin, with the inability of the Official IRA to defend the Catholic community throughout August 1969 in Derry (MacStiofáin 1975: 143; Bishop & Mallie 1987: 122). The collusion between the state and the Orange Orders, in what became known as the Battle of the Bogside, in allowing for the Apprentice Boys rally to go ahead, as well as the subsequent use of ‘due force’ to breakup Catholic demonstrators, convinced MacStiofáin, David O’Connell and Seamus Twomey of the need to challenge Goulding (Cronin 1980: 184-191). In October 1969 a meeting was held to ask questions of the Official IRA concerning their inability to defend Catholics in the face of increased state intervention (Bowyer-Bell 1972: 430; Coogan 1995: 365-371).

In August the IRA had suffered a significant decline in reputation amongst beleaguered Catholics who had been saved by the British Army (Taylor 1997: 67). Fraternisation between the British Army and Republicans had risen to the extent whereby even the Loyalists became concerned as to whose side the British Army was on (Evelegh 1978: 5). The regime had successfully placated the initial fears of the rival community which led to a marginalisation of the IRA within their own community (Lee 1995: 429-430). MacStiofáin reacted by leading a walkout on January 11 1970, to form the Provisional IRA, loyal to the Provisional Constitution of the Republic that recognised all 32 provinces, and the need for a new aggressiveness in order to reclaim lost ground (Taylor 1997: 67). An escalation was sought as the regime became more complacent towards demands that they felt had been met. The IRA did not have to wait long as the cycle of action-reaction-action would bring around the desired intensification of the struggle, when on June 27 1970, Loyalist mobs rioted through the Catholic Short Strand in Belfast.

The inability of the Official IRA and NICRA to withhold these concerted attacks upon the Catholic community would question the ability of the overall national movement to reform a system determined to maintain the political status quo via the implementation of Draconian policing measures (Coogan 1995: 464; O’Connor 1996: 55). Militancy grew as the cycle dictated a radicalisation of both the state and its challenger’s demands. This was why many turned to the Provisional IRA as the sole means of defence against further state organised political attacks. The Provos were to offer a programme, Eire Nua, based on the formation of a democratic, socialist republic with a federal system of parliament, the latter being dropped in 1982, which was designed on ‘Third World’ political ideology based on notions of movement response towards colonialism (Laqueur 1987: 209). This I feel is significant because it places the movement not merely in the context as an alternative reaction to the state, but one willing to become an autonomous solution to the state engendered disequilibrium between rival communities.

The use of terrorism was a signal of an expansion in protest repertoire used to attain political concessions through playing on Protestant fears and prejudices about the Catholic community. Simultaneously, it provided a link between the contemporary struggle to past cycles of protest action, which granted the military campaign a sense of historic continuity. This was a declaration of intent that sought to intensify the conflict as a means of stratifying the struggle with a hope of polarising the political system beyond reform (Guelke 1995: 15).

1969 had taught the Provisionals that spontaneous mob violence could be relied upon to intensify Army strategies of policing, shepherding and law enforcement upon peaceful Catholic protesters, that would lead to the further disillusionment of the Catholic community towards the Security Forces (Adams 1982; Dunn 1993: 23; O’Neill 1994). The idea was to play on social and economic disenchantment of the Catholic community with the failure of the British Welfare state, and convert this disenchantment into a rejection of all things British, especially the British Government (Moss 1972: 103). The point was to make the Catholic community aware that what they faced was modern day colonialism, and in spite of all British rhetoric about the need for faith in all de jure structures of liberal democracy, they were de facto colonised (Osborne 1982: 154; Boyce 1990: 39). The secondary aim was to demoralise the validity of the Security Forces and portray them as intent on maintaining the political status quo that was at the heart of the “Troubles” (Taylor 1984: 60). Thus making the Army accomplices to the facts.

The Army’s direct collusion with Stormont was highlighted in the aftermath of the Protestant march on the Strand in Belfast (Taylor 1997: 75-78). On June 27 1970 some, 6000 Catholics cordoned off on the Short Strand of East Belfast whilst Belfast commander Billy McKee ambushed four Protestants, killing two and wounding two (Farrell 1976: 273; Bell 1993: 176). This brought a swift response from the Security Forces when on July 3 some 3000 soldiers, in a mist of CS gas, ransacked the houses of Catholics on the Lower Falls Road of Belfast (Winchester 1974: 68-69). Five Catholics during the thirty six hour curfew were shot dead by the Army (Taylor 1997: 78-79). Northern Irish society was polarised, and the Nationalist community had their enemy. The curfew was to prove a watershed, as original demands for the fall of Stormont were now augmented by the nationalist rhetoric of old. As a tool of movement mobilisation, the IRA’s intent of escalating the crisis to highlight the innate bias of state would gain significant ground with each heavy handed response by the state. A fact bourn out by Joe Austin of Sinn Féin who pointed to this time as instrumental in his own mobilisation into the movement:

Well I think that I am like many of our own party members of the same age were rather than educated into the party we were hypnotised by events that took place in Belfast particularly in August 1969. Where we had an explosion of piped up anger, a demand for equal and civil liberties and we also mimicked certain events that had taken place at that point in time in America, in North America, where we had the rise of the Black Civil Rights Movement. 8

A clear equating of ethno-national repression and the need to counter it through movement mobilisation was emerging which distinguished the de facto use of the state as a means of population control, from the de jure equality of the elite’s rhetoric. By the end of 1970, 153 bombs exploded (BBCTV 1997). Directed mainly at Protestant businesses, the Provisionals were on the offensive. The aim of the strategy was to engage the state so as to increase their reaction. Talks and marches had provided little except for a consolidation of the Ulster elite’s power base, it was now realised bombs must be used to force the Nationalist question onto the agenda (Patterson 1996: 44). The IRA tactic of provoking was proving successful. Yet, the SDLP was still making headway, as Protestant reformists were seeking to resolve the question at the conference table (Coogan 1995: 356-361).

The Army had acted on orders from Stormont, this new centralist restructuration of security was to create a solidification of the struggle that would force the IRA’s hand (Taylor 1997: 78). ‘One man, one vote’ had been achieved on April 22 1969. The young civil rights activist, Bernadette Devlin, had been elected to Westminster in the Mid Ulster by-election on April 22 1969 (Farrell 1976: 255) Yet Stormont, and the Protestant parliamentary majority it symbolised, still existed. Little had been resolved, and as such a new strategy was used that would shift the responsibility of equality back on the very institution that the NICRA had opposed, the state (Lee 1995: 431). By August 1970, the cycle of violence instigated by the state in August 1969 was now proving too effective in mobilising nationalist opposition (Patterson 1997: 150-156). With the completion of each cycle of protest, the state’s power base steeped in harsh state security application and electoral gerrymandering, would become even more entrenched. It was here that the first move towards electoral participation was sought so as to exploit the political opportunity structures that the state was now offering, in order to delegitimise the militant nationalists (Hedges 1988: 104).

It was on 21 August 1970 that the six opposition Members of Parliament united to form a new political alliance on the strength of their reputations gained during the civil rights era. Gerry Fitt was a leader of the Republican Labour Party, Austin Currie a Nationalist and Paddy Devlin from the NILP; whilst John Hume, Ivan Cooper and Paddy O’Hanlon were prominent Independents (Farrell 1976: 275). This was a prime example of how many varying political interests can come together in an almost social movement manner and unite behind what was extensively a nationalist goal of self-preservation in numbers. It was those years of civil rights campaigning that formulated their new desire to formalise the hard won gains of the movement. As such, they had no intention of losing their movement status as they saw themselves merely as formalised structures of the demands established during the civil rights campaigns (Farren 1995: 1-2).

The community was politicised by its militancy, and the move towards formal channels ran the risk, nevertheless, of limiting the repertoire of the national movement, as well as granting the centre the right to negotiate and appease the periphery without fully addressing the national question. Yet, the power of London’s control over the province proved too strong. One by one, many NICRA activists realised that to ignore the state would be to the detriment of the Republican community.

Political power is greater in London and so you can only seek vindication of your political rights from those who hold political power and that’s where we had to go to get it and the civil rights movement was directed against the institutions here that denied civil rights which were supported.9

Nevertheless, Catholics remained skeptical about the utilisation of formalised political options in protecting rights won during the civil rights campaigns (Hamilton & Trimble 1995: 42). Especially if they still lacked the influence within state policing, security and public policy formation within the wider context of state engendered societal cleavages, as exemplified in the wake of ‘Bloody Sunday’ (Dillon 1995). As Roberts (1986: 18) points out from the Protestant perspective, schooled in the strategic battles with more militant wings of the Irish national movement, ‘constitutional’ nationalism is still nationalism.

With each move by the SDLP that demonstrated a willingness to partake in the political system, as with the acceptance of a venue at the July 7 1971 all party talks (Kelly 1972: 43-47), the Provisionals would counter these peace initiatives by hitting politically sensitive military targets (Farrell 1976: 280-281). The over reaction of the authorities in raiding some 342 Republican houses with 2500 troops and auxiliary staff on August 9 1971 with the implementation of internment, was to demonstrate the colonial nature of much of the security aspects of British rule (Boyce et al. 1975: 58; Bew et al. 1979: 183). A response that would lead to the IRA commencing a bombing campaign that would leave 35 dead after 100 explosions by the end of August (Taylor 1997: 93), yet would also give greater legitimacy to the IRA’s claim as being the army and the protector of the movement:

A subtle political change had taken place as well. Up to this point, mass support in the Northern Catholic population had been for civil rights and for reform within the Northern state, with Irish unity following gradually. Now most Northern Catholics felt that the Northern state was unreformable, and that they would only get civil rights in a united Ireland. Their objective was no longer to reform Northern Ireland but destroy it. (Farrell 1976: 284)

The necessity of organising the movement along clandestine lines for security purposes also led to an increased isolation of the political cadre from the people they represented (Boyce 1990: 42). A strategy of increased social agitation and visibility was necessary in order to increase the level of legitimacy for the IRA amongst the population at large. The problem was that it exposed many members of the civil wing to retribution at the hands of the security forces and Protestant terrorist organisations, though the leadership themselves would see this as an advantage in exposing the innate bias of the state (Rooney 1984: 80-81).

More significantly for the IRA, the resultant reaffirmation of radical Loyalism through the reintroduction of internment was to force the moderate SDLP to leave the official political arena (Tomlinson 1980: 185; McCann 1993: 88-91). The SDLP could not be seen to continually support a system that now implemented the full force of the law against one specific community. When over 300 Catholics were arrested and not one Protestant was, the pro-Unionist bias of the judiciary, RUC, and Army was clear (Lee 1995: 437). This, in my opinion, accentuates how significant is the role of the state, as well as the way an elite formulates its official ideology of state formation, in defining the nature of a movement. The development is perpetual. Without the continuous recentralisation of the Security Forces towards arch conservative Loyalism, then the need for the SDLP to embrace nationalism would have been minimal. As it was, if the SDLP did not leave, then they would have been in the same situation as the Official IRA in 1969. SDLP legitimacy, as the voice for a marginalised community, would be questioned by the very community they represented.

The IRA in the meantime had little doubt of the significance state engendered integration and repression would play in structuring their own movement identity (Coogan 1995, 1996; Patterson 1997). The state was more than a fulcrum of popular discontent, it was the creator of the struggle in which a new Ulster national identity could be re-formed. An identity forged within the very militant ideological construct of the Ulster state that would leave many Catholics believing that the state did not not even view them as an underclass as much as what Conversi (1994, 1995; see also Wilson 1991) calls the integral ‘other’. That is the ethnic and ideological juxtaposition to that of the state centre elite’s own vision of self. This left the Ulster elite to be view as exclusive and innately prejudicial. As Joe Austin of Sinn Féin intimated to me in explaining why the IRA may have embraced an “exclusive” nationalist doctrines of state:

I think that there is a racial attitude that underlies that level of English society and I think that it applies right across the board in Ireland. It applies obviously to Sinn Féin, but it applies to the Irish in general and I think if that you look and reflect the treatment of, for instance of John Bruton, who’s the Prime Minister of the South of Ireland, if you reflect how he has been treated by John Major I think that racist element is at play there.10

The Ulster state was now viewed as not just exclusive, but also chauvinistic in the methods chosen to exclude the periphery. In response the IRA felt the necessity to ‘mimic’ the state likewise, by providing a similar ideological push for excluding the other in the hope of dismantling the state. The significance of co-ordinating VDA with nationalist rhetoric of the events as a means of publicity generation was noted by the British War Office as far back as 1922, when reports declared Sinn Féin as possessing a publicity wing that was unrivalled in its ability of being “energetic, subtle and exceptionally skilful in mixing truth, falsehood and exaggeration...” (Laqueur 1987: 122). At the core was the desire of the IRA to take the role as the militant wing of the overall national movement, designed to take on the state at the slightest hint of increased state repression or a decrease in the reform processes (Hull 1976: 40).

Through continuing the cycle of protest-reform-protest, via taking the initiative over the state, the IRA had brought a reaction from a state seeking a cessation of the conflict (Boyce 1990: 42). The formation of the UDA, 11 in the early summer of 1971, was a precursor to a new counter insurgency (Aughey & McIlheney 1984; McKeown 1989). Originally an Ulster vigilante organisation, the UDA would soon become the embodiment of anti-IRA state terrorism, until its outlawing in 1993 (Bruce 1992: 49-50). In fact Coogan (1996: 125) would call the UDA a ‘mirror’ movement of the IRA. The conflict was now militarising Protestant movement identity as a counter-point to IRA backed anti-state activism (Bruce 1989). This general polarisation would entrench the Ulster state more so than political union with Britain at the centre of Ulster national identity and moral authority (O’Dowd 1980: 1). A scenario the IRA was able to exploit in demonstrating the insolubility of the conflict within a Northern Irish state paradigm.

When paratroopers were called in from Belfast to quash Free Derry on January 30 1972, the role of the military had considerably changed (Osborne 1982: 154; Dillon: 106; Hamilton et al. 1995: 42). In the space of half an hour, 180 rounds of ammunition had been fired and 13 Catholic civilians lay dead (BBCTV). The Security Forces had responded and the Catholics were forced into action as reports emerged that the Army acted on the orders of Stormont and the British Government (Taylor 1997: 113). The IRA took this as an example of the duality of law within the statelet. A scenario that della Porta (1996) would see as integral in exposing the illegitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence. In turn this itself contributes to an intensification of the reform process as elites scramble to absorb reemerging cyclical discontent. The dual implementation of law and order along ethno-national lines in divided communities leads to a scenario, as Weitzer (1995: 4) points out, whereby the state’s policing and security arms are viewed as the protectors of privilege of one community over another:

Policing in divided societies is organised first and foremost, then for the defence of a sectarian regime and the maintenance of a social order based on institutionalised inequality between dominant and subordinate communal groups (ibid.: 5).

In such circumstances what initially develops amongst marginalised communities as a strategy of protest tends to also develop into an act of political self-expression that leaves an indelible mark in the collective psyche of the community of activists as it gives the action a place within the continuum of past rebellions (Townshend 1987: 179; Bairner 1996: 159; see also Purdie 1990; Murray 1995). A continuum that places the state at the centre of the reactionary nature of the movement. The patterns of action-reaction-action were the same as those that were employed by Catholics in the 1840s and 1850s in the wake of the failures of the United Irishmen (Seton-Watson 1977: 40; Doherty & Poole 1995: 21). The upsurge of violence, be it from the state or against it, I believe symbolises the decline in the legitimacy of the state. The events surrounding the January 30 killing of 13 Catholic protesters that became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ would mobilise a new generation to rebellion. A generation that with the completion of each cycle would become ever more sophisticated in reading the direction of the state’s future reforms and model their repertoire accordingly.

To Absorb, or to Exclude? The Reformulation of State Political Opportunity Structures and the Radicalisation of the Centre.

The introduction of non-jury courts and the modifications of the rules of evidence for ‘scheduled offences’ after the Diplock Report into the nature of the Northern Irish judicial system, and the lack of response from the mainland, was to convince many IRA activists that civil rights could only be guaranteed if the repressive regime was militarily defeated (Tomlinson 1980: 191). Terrorism would be important to both strategies, especially since ‘Bloody Sunday’, with the aim of bringing into question the British Army’s image of neutrality (McCann 1993: 107). This led to a radicalisation of the movement’s extremes in the face of widespread ‘P checks,’ SAS ‘Cracksquads’ and intelligence gathering exercises in Catholic neighbourhoods, leaving the Security Forces, according to Tomlinson (1980: 192), with a Janusian quality. One that at once would be seen as protector of the state and punisher of those on the state’s periphery.

The state had opted for the joint strategy of reconciliation and stringent policing (Coogan 1987: 209). The act of appeasement to the Catholics was to be the suspension of Stormont on March 22 1972 (Boyd 1972: 68; Kelly 1972: 130; Dunn & Morgan 1994: 9). The IRA had succeeded where the NICRA had failed. Yet, this new direct rule was tainted by an increase in state security. With a people’s sense of identification ignored by the state, this reinforcement of “British” justice through the ‘right of might’ left little option but to identify their own personal struggle with that of the national movement (O’Connell 1993: 37; Coogan 1996: 171). A position solidified by the reactionary state centre:

The point is that the extent to which people are prepared to resort to violence as a possible solution to conflict is largely determined by the strength of commitment and identity with respective, and presumably conflicting, aspirations. For some people in Northern Ireland, and identity with either or a united Ireland is the single most important fact of their lives. Indeed, for some it is almost a sine qua non. It should not be surprising therefore that they will go to any lengths to protect and promote their respective identities both for themselves and for their children (Murray 1995: 226).

This was the basis of Republican discontent with the state which the Provisionals were willing to exploit. As Maguire (1996: 4) has shown CS gas and plastic bullets radicalises activists, whilst heightening the futility of peaceful demonstration against the contemporary weaponry of the state. Ideologically, the Provisionals began to seek a new method of engaging the state so as to retake possession of the pace of reform. The rescinding of Stormont was seen as a tactical move by the British Government designed to de-escalate the crisis (Harkness 1983: 170). Yet, the fundamental issue of what to do with the new radical nationalism, born of struggle, was left unresolved.

The first sign of a new offensive emerged after William Whitelaw had been named the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. A new bombing campaign commenced to assure the authorities that the radical national movement would not be satisfied with the suspension of Stormont (MacStiofáin 1975: 242; Lee 1995: 441). A total review of Britain’s role in Northern Ireland was demanded. By June 13 the commencement of an all out attack on the state monolith would lead to MacStiofáin, McGuinness, O’Connell and Twomey calling a halt to action for seven days (Coogan 1996: 172-173). The state responded with opposition leader Wilson being sent to Belfast to negotiate (Coogan 1995: 392). On the 15th, the four IRA representatives, plus Adams, were flown to Chelsea, London, for talks with Whitelaw (Whitelaw 1989: 100). The state was to listen. Yet both sides were so polarised that peace was unattainable as two competing national identities, shaped by the same cycles of reform-protest-reform, ‘mimicked’ each other to a stand still (White 1984: 128-130).

The suspension of habaes corpus through the implementation of the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act would prove a catalyst for the IRA seeking to prove the bias of British rule (Wilkinson 1976: 16). The state had upped the pressure and was itself radicalising according to the nature of peripheral response to increased state centralisation. At the core of this was the introduction of ‘counter insurgency’ theory into direct policing and security maintenance within the British state (Rolston & Tomlinson 1982: 23). One that would force the IRA to ‘mimic’ the changes within the state policing environment in their own strategy of selected VDA implementation.

The development of the strategy of “counter insurgency” by Lieutenant General Sir Frank Kitson as a tactical response to anti-colonial movements in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Oman, and the subsequent implementation in Northern Ireland was to demonstrate, not only the attitude, but also the belief of the peripheral nature of the national movement’s claim within British political society (Rolston & Tomlinson 1982: 28; Dillon 1991: 28). Kitson, the veteran of the Cyprian Campaign against EOKA, was to play a major role in training the Security Forces at the Camberly Staff College, and with the commandeering of the Third Battalion Royal Green Jackets in West Belfast in 1972 and 1973, the British Government was clearly sending the message that the state was prepared to declare a clandestine war against the IRA rather than listen to the demands of the radical wing of the Irish Nationalist community (Rolston & Tomlinson 1982: 28; Dorril & Ramsay 1991: 212). The state sought to justify its extreme extra-parliamentary modus operandii through over playing the significance of the opposite movement to the survival of the state and the de-escalation of the militancy within the cycle of protest:

Security systems actively seek to maximise their autonomy from civil society- by exaggerating the seriousness of threats to the nation and stressing their “ultra-sensitive” position, “dangerous” work, and the need for absolute secrecy in decision making (Weitzer 1990: 6).

Yet, it would also be a mistake to believe that the state is somehow the ‘blackbox’, “unproblematically registering and punitively responding to social stimuli” without movements fully having control of their own action (Weitzer 1990: 7). The reality of Northern Ireland is that the state in many ways has been the progenitor of the crisis. A militarisation and criminalisation of the crisis in which the state has actively sought to place the Irish Republican movement’s goals outside the state’s agenda. The IRA more often than not would ‘mimic’ the state so to place its demands at the centre’s attention, whilst forcing the state to themselves openly engage in the struggle to highlight its collusion with militant Protestant goals (Patterson 1997: 153). This was adeptly done via timing upswings in the instigation of VDA with the exact moment when the state centre was lulled into a false sense of security concerning their successful de-escalation of the crisis. Kitson’s role was to combine de-escalation and attrition in order to slow IRA responses (Dillon 1994: 98).

Not only had it placed the Northern Irish question on the centre of the political agenda, it also demonstrated to the Irish community that in times of great extremes they were to be considered as hostile aliens by the British state. A status that would not be afforded to their co-citizens of the Protestant faith, nor the large Catholic community on the mainland. This was the advantage of VDA, it was an apt tool of polarisation in times of overall political apathy and movement lethargy. Civil rights of the Irish were considered inconsequential to the overall needs of British state security (Dillon 1991: 170). If this could be significantly demonstrated then the cause could no longer be mistakenly negated.

Thus, it became more evident that organised Irish oppositional activism was viewed by the British media, police, army and the parliamentarians as anti-British, and as such, the IRA’s demands for a resolution of the Northern Irish question within an ‘All-Ireland’ framework became less plausible (Curtis 1984). The end effect of the bombing campaigns was not just successful mobilisation that came directly after the suspension of habeas corpus, but also as a measure of the legitimacy of the British state authority in the province which was at the heart of the state’s inability to attract wider Catholic support (Wilkinson 1976: 16). The highest point of violence was reached in the ‘Troubles’ in 1972 when 467 people were killed, which included 103 Army officers and soldiers. By 1973 the killings had decreased to 250, and 216 in 1974 (Laqueur 1987: 10-11). What this shows contrary to Laqueur's own theory, is that in times of heightened conciliation, the amount of deaths dropped, as during the Sunningdale period. This escalation in times of crisis, and the de-escalation in times of truce, highlight the strategic nature of employed violence, and how it was used as a tool by the IRA to convince the authorities of the seriousness of their claims.

It will be argued by some that without paramilitarism, the possibility of new and lasting constitutional arrangements for Northern Ireland would never have come about. Conversely, many may feel that without the paramilitaries, new arrangements would have been unnecessary (Bairner 1996: 167).

The problem facing the SDLP was that much of the legitimacy they had gained in the disbandonment of Stormont and the attainment of full enfranchisement by 1973 was lost amongst the militants who felt that the adoption of parliamentary means was a betrayal of the values of the movement (Lee 1995: 442-443). Throughout the formation of Fitt and Devlin’s Towards a New Ireland policy, that sought a constitutional transition to join Dublin and London rule, such concerns were becoming evident (Patterson 1996: 45). More importantly, this meant a legitimation of the role of British participation as a congruent for Unionist political opinion, as well as a guarantee of their right to continued existence. This was a stance that the IRA would find difficult to uphold as it was a signal of a shift away from the traditional strategies of Republican protest into the uncharted waters of British electoral politics (Ibid.: 46).

Sunningdale and Direct Rule: The Recentralisation of State and the Emergence of a New British State Paradigm.

The IRA had to face the political reality that any move towards formalisation would have to be countered by an awareness of the inaffordability of relinquishing the militant strategy. Terrorism had become a significant tool in forcing the centre to review past strategies of control and policing (Murray 1982; Lee 1995). Yet, it had failed to shake the resolve of the security forces in confronting the resistance. The movement needed a responsive arm that would ‘mimic’ the intent of the state, and ensure their capability of dictating the pace of the state’s response. The period, up to the Sunningdale era, had taught the Nationalist community that a broad based strategy was needed and the time for reconciliation between centre and periphery was still far off.

With the decline of the Stormont Protestant monolith, both London and Dublin thought that the solution of direct rule would for now placate the interests of the Republican minority (Boyd 1972: 68; Lee 1995: 461). A point seemingly acceptable to the Dublin parliament with its recognition in Paragraph Five of the Sunningdale Communique which recognised the constitutional status of the Northern Irish statelet. This was to lead to the strange scenario of the pro-Nationalist SDLP being portrayed in Britain as being pro-system and the ultra-Loyalists as anti-system (Coogan 1995: 351-352). In turn, this placed the Catholic community in the unusual position of being the lynchpin for the reform process of the very system they had actively campaigned against during the times of the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Arthur 1988: 70). A position hard to justify to a constituency schooled in anti-state rhetoric.

Dublin was looking for closure, and London an end to terror (Carty 1996: 158). This placed a great importance on the success of Sunningdale, one that in many ways would fail to see the impossibility of resolving legally the crisis instigated and run by dissident movements who demanded inclusion but never fully expected to receive it (Hadden & Boyle 1989: 26). Full enfranchisement and the introduction of proportional representation in 1973, as a consequence of the British Government’s White Paper on Constitutional Proposals, could not nevertheless influence the political environment when the heart of social policy in a non-devolved parliamentary setting lay under the centralised auspices of the Northern Ireland Office (Birrel 1978: 34-36). This signified a substantial loss to the Unionist Party as its monopoly over governance of the province was significantly eroded as Direct Rule would create more political opportunity structures for Catholics to exploit within the overall cycle of ‘reform-protest-reform’.

It was however in the March 20 1973 White Paper that the government recognised that no full representation could occur without the full exception of the sectarian nature of Northern Irish politics, and recommendation for the formation of a 78 seat unicarmel assembly elected by the single transferable vote method of proportional representation (Rumpf & Hepburn 1977: 208-209). In many ways, this was admitting defeat for class based political platforms, as it recognised that the ‘Troubles’ could solely be defined in nationalist terms. The police, justice, security, elections and all matters concerning enfranchisement, would be directly administered from Westminster. The fact that the vast majority of first preference votes for the June 28 Northern Ireland Assembly elections went to parties whose platforms were clearly defined as Catholic or Protestant further entrenched the sectarian cleavages within Northern Irish electoral politics (Osborne 1982: 156-161; Lee 1995: 442-443). The SDLP were able to establish the acceptance of such constitutional means of addressing the national question through winning some 19 seats, as this was seen as a rejection of IRA policies steeped in redressing issues through awakening nationalist consciousness via increasing the cycle of violence-repression-violence (Rumpf & Hepburn 1977: 210).

The anti-violence platform had enabled Fitt, the SDLP’s founding president, to reach the position of Deputy Chief Executive of the Executive. This was a reward for their adoption of constitutional strategies and essentially gave them the de facto title of official “Republican” opposition (Faulkner 1978: 247). Cashing in on this overwhelming popular will, the SDLP pushed their weight behind supporting the Northern Irish state on issues of constitutional violence and repression (Dunn & Morgan 1994: 9). This was risky, as the state had mobilised a campaign of internment that was aimed at the heart of militant Republican resistance. On the positive side however, the SDLP were convinced that they were single handedly successful in bringing about an “Irish dimension” to the reformed constitutional arrangements of Northern Irish government (Fitzgerald 1973: 140-141).

It became clear to many Nationalists that this unexpected poll would challenge their electoral legitimacy, as it would the Loyalist camp, to a process of political reform which had too often looked elitist in makeup (Dunn & Morgan 1994: 8-10). The fact that it was two months after the Executive was formed also allowed the anti-Sunningdale Protestants to run on the undemocratic nature of its implementation (Fisk 1975: 45-48). They formed the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) to run a campaign of one candidate in each constituency, winning 52% of the vote as well as 11 of the 12 contested seats (Flackes & Elliot 1989: 319-322). Yet, the May 14 Ulster Worker’s Council (UWC) strike was to play havoc with these strategies for a while to come (Rumpf & Hepburn 1977: 212). It was a mirroring of earlier Catholic inspired movement action, and proved just as effective on the side of the state elite (O’Connor 1996: 48). As the former Minister of Home Affairs William Craig (1974: 737-738) stated about the intent of much of the radical unionists in opposing the power sharing arrangement between both communities:

...we must not prop up the undemocratic form of administration that now exists in Northern Ireland; there is not the necessary consent for the present constitutional formula.

The problem for Nationalists was that the Premiership of Merlyn Rees in the Northern Ireland Office would, through the canvassing of devolution in the wake of the failure of Sunningdale, lead to a return to civil strife as the direct result of the reassertion of the Protestant ascendancy (Roberts 1986: 10). An ascendancy fostered by the insistence of the Secretary of State in opening lines with the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) over strategy of protests (Coogan 1996: 202).

Eventually, after two years, the Whitelaw policy was in disarray. The fact that the SDLP only operated seriously as a power within its own constituency had much to do with their inability to halt the collapse of Sunningdale. Most of its energies were concentrated on undermining the electoral capacity of the extremist wing of the Republican Movement (Hammil 1985: 144-145). This closed the doors to full Irish participation within the reform process, and at once strengthening the power of the Protestant centre (Farren & Mulvihill 1995: 4). In fact this was to undermine its stance within its own community, which during the initial failures of the Sunningdale Agreement’s reform process had risen significantly (Arthur 1996a: 71).

Rightly or wrongly, many moderate Nationalists viewed the SDLP’s seeming lack of interest in internment issues and its participation in what was viewed as a government of occupation as signs of its betrayal of the national cause (Rumpf & Hepburn 1977: 214). This was to manifest itself in the loss of two seats in the following election (ibid.). Though, the respectability gained from years of successful movement activism perhaps saved them from a more humiliating fate. Especially, considering their public humiliation in the face of Sunningdale’s collapse, which had been the centre piece of their platform for constitutional reform (Downey 1983: 134).

It is doubtful that the Sunningdale Agreement’s joint power sharing arrangement would have emerged if it were not for the polarisation of the electoral system as a result of the increased tensions between centre and periphery (Arthur 1974, 1987; Aughey 1996). Yet, it would also never have reached a point of potential consolidation were it not for the efforts of the SDLP in speaking for the ‘moderate’ voice of the Republican community. O’Dowd (1980: 21) notes that the strategy of attempting to resolve the crisis through the adoption of parliamentary means placed the movement at a disadvantage due to the ‘compartimentalisation’ of the movement into legal and illegal subsections. In this sense, I believe that this only served to diminish the fluidity of options available to a movement willing to juggle NVDA, VDA and more formalised routes of mobilisation. The state, as shown in della Porta and Tarrow’s (1986) study into the Italian state’s creation of political opportunity structures to counter leftist terrorism, gains ascendancy over the movement by dangling carrots in order to include moderates, whilst waving a baton over the militants. Thus, diminishing a social movement’s options and increasing the state’s role as adjudicator. At once granting legitimacy it could never attain in a cycle successfully manipulated by the peripheral movement.

For the IRA, a new era had emerged to exploit, as it now became clear in the wake of the UWC strike action and the subsequent collapse of Sunningdale that no state reform was possible without destroying the Loyalist monopolistic demographic base (Bruce 1993: 95). The solution was a radicalisation of the ‘Troubles’ and the realisation that only through an irredentist policy could this demographic discrepancy be addressed. Yet, this did not fully disrupt their slow move towards embracing more formal links with the established political system of state. For now any form of established electoral participation was viewed as pro-Ulster rhetoric and hence could not address the Nationalist question if it was not innately predisposed to the Nationalist community (McKinley 1987: 190). In fact, it was not till 1979 that one could see the move towards an embracement of electoral politics as violence was proving too strong a polariser (Coogan 1995: 502-512). The corresponding reorientation of both Sinn Féin, and Herri Batasuna in the Basque Country, suggests that the links forged between the Basque Revolutionary Party (EIA) and the Provisionals provided more than simply moral links. They were to be strategic and logistic as well (McKinley 1987: 190).

The Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Response of the Provisional IRA to the Reassertion of Protestant Loyalism.

The promulgation of the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, the subsequent increase in legal surveillance, and the emergence of the SAS as a policing tool, would be viewed by the moderate SDLP as an attempt to halt civic development which would have led to a greater liberalisation of the democratic structures of state (Taylor 1997: 174). The IRA however saw this as a clear negating of the ‘Irish’ community from the political equation. Their response was to take the campaign onto the mainland. Amongst the British Government, this intensification of the conflict, after the Birmingham bombings, was used as an excuse to reorientate official British policy to the protection of the Union rather than an ensurer of peace (Weitzer 1990: 217):

This is why the struggle in the North is founded in the contradiction between popular notions of justice and the application of the ‘rule of law’. It also explains why the struggle has come to be waged military and through embryonic and temporary forums of popular democracy constructed around attempts to resist state power (Rolston & Tomlinson 1982: 42).

Something was stirring, strategically speaking, amongst the radical sector of the national movement and the December 8 1974 break from the Official IRA of Seamus Costello, and Bernadette McAliskey,12 to form the Irish Republican Socialist Party after his dismissal from the Ard Comhairle (Executive Council) accentuated the change (Holland & McDonald 1994; Bairner 1996: 162). It became clear that for the IRA, shared Government was not an option, and only through engaging the state, or more likely threatening the state, could the national question be resolved. Both communities were caught within a permanent stratification of the struggle, which led to one feeding off the radicalism of the other, as Boyle and Hadden (1994: 56) state:

In this sense the correct description of the nature of the communities in Northern Ireland is dependent on the actions and policies of others, the paramilitaries, the leaders of the main political parties and the British and Irish Governments.

This perpetual shaping and reshaping of doctrine in accordance to shifting state structures of inclusion and exclusion would only highlight the role of the centre’s Security Forces in consolidating the crisis as a means to resolving the now extremist peripheral demands. For the IRA to exist it must ensure the continuation of the cycle of action-reaction-action, and correspondingly increase its repertoire to assist this (Murray 1995: 226). What the SDLP and the NICRA activist core politicians failed to recognise, and the IRA did, was that formalisation, or more correctly, the conduits placed on participation and eventual inclusion in the political processes, would do little to address the core problem of conflict. That is the inability of the Protestant ascendancy to share power with an emerging elite and competing ideological movement (van der Wusten 1988: 193). It was with this in mind that I feel that the IRA leadership sought an escalation of the cycle in order to reclaim lost ground as they became more aware that as things stood the radical Ulsterism were gaining the ascendancy.13

What was to be the rallying card for much of the radicalisation of the movement came with the implementation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, as a tool of policing in 1975 after the slow phasing out of internment, due to the recommendation of Rees’ White Paper on the issue, between from July 4 1974 to its end in December 1975 (Coogan 1980: 52; Hillyard & Boyle 1982: 1). This was seen as the final implementation of the Diplock Committee report’s findings that tended to be more concerned with law and order rather than resolving the national question; the decision to trial without jury seemed to support this (Hadden & Boyle 1988: 55). The basis of these courts was to extend the role of the military powers to include arrest and prosecution (Hillyard & Boyle 1982: 1). This consolidated the Army’s position as moral authority of state. The IRA now could reshape itself as the militant protector of the entire movement as well as Republican civil order. Significantly, the cycle had come full circle. Like MacStiofáin in the early 1960s, Adams was incarcerated for 18 months on October 15 1974, taking the opportunity to write a weekly column for the Republican News that would become the IRA’s ideological and strategic platform for the next twenty years (Taylor 1997: 200).

The statistics spoke for themselves, between 1969 and 1977, although Catholics were 37% of the population they constituted 47% of all the victims of the violence, 65% of murdered civilians and 88% of those shot by the Security Forces (Murray 1982: 313). There seemed to be a relation between peak years of violent activity and years that symbolise the greatest rise in political discontent with the implementation of governmental security policies (Bairner 1996: 159-161). I believe this suggests how an increase in policing by the state has in fact moulded the nature of the response by the IRA, with VDA being used as the preferred strategy when ‘overt’ policing strategies and the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act had been implemented.

According to Gunther (1992) and Tilly (1984b, 1985) this is a natural response in periods of elite initiated state shifts in power, either through democratisation, or elite transference processes, when the state is vulnerable. This occurs when the state utilises coercive institutions as a reaction to a threat to their predominance, be it pacifist, or violent in nature (Weitzer 1990: 1-2). Yet such tendency to brand the IRA as an internal enemy would not be accepted by a community that had come to view VDA as far from mindless brutes but as somewhat strategic actors in the overall defence of the national movement:

The violence is often presented in terms of amoral ‘godfathers’ seducing young people into criminal acts. If this was the case, then solutions would be much easier to achieve (Murray 1995: 225).

Yet, at the 1977 Army Council, the now declining Official IRA would put an end to their members adoption of VDA as a legitimate means of political protest (Rooney 1984: 87). The Provisionals did not follow suit. The reality on the ground dictated the fact that the IRA had to remain responsive to an increase in ‘overt’ policing if they were to retain relevance. In the view of the Provisionals, the new core problem of the “Troubles” was no longer found amongst the established Protestant elite’s ascendancy per se, but rather in the alliance this elite had formed politically and militarily with the British Army (Dunn & Hennessey 1996: 179). The IRA was now coming to realise that the state, in its role of elite bastion, had given birth to a counter nationalism that would become equally legitimate as that proffered by the periphery, one that had to be given equal weight to that of the Republican community’s identity. As Joe Austin suggested:

I think that what we have to acknowledge is that the Loyalist community are not an ethnic mistake, they are not something that is just created, that the Loyalist community has fears that are real fears and they are genuine fears. I think that we have to facilitate those fears and that it is our responsibilities with others to alleviate those fears.14

If these fears were not alleviated then there was a risk of IRA action creating an environment that could readily minimise the opportunity for future reconciliation. The state was now taking the initiative, and as such, realising that an increase in violence could in fact enhance their status as the keepers of peace in an intercine conflict. With this in mind the Ulster elite did not seek resolution, as their earlier fears of the radical Fenian was being proven correct, all be it with the aid of an intensification of state policing (Gallagher 1995: 33).

In such circumstances, the role of the state is not designed to form consensus, but rather to maintain social division (Enloe 1980). Thus, the cycle of protest was being ridden by the Protestants to ensure their ascendancy; where VDA had thrown the cat amongst the pigeons was that this could only work as long as the discord, and hence the targets, were dictated by the centre not the periphery. In one move, the British had not only entrenched the authoritative nature of their military presence, but innately tied the security of the North to the Union thus negating much of the demands of the IRA from the political process. What the crisis was doing was legitimising the role of the British state as mediator between the two competing ideologies. A position the SDLP was willing to play as Alex Atwood stated:

Now there are elements within the British Government and the British Parliament that are not inclined to go down that road because they see that that is a redefinition of the British Union, they see that that is somehow conceding to terrorists.15

The political space that national movements themselves give the nationalist cause is that they alone can provide the infrastructure needed to balance the politically variant ideologies of Right and Left in the guise of a loosely associated national front. It is here that I disagree with Rumpf and Hepburn’s (1977: 219) conclusions that movements are solely concerned with social progress rather than the full attainment of statehood. An argument that runs contrary to the thoughts of Tilly (1993b) who shows how the movement’s main concern is with the way nationalism is seen as the vehicle to social revolution, and even what I would call social reformation. I would suggest that their argument shows how economic masters became national, as well as class, enemies. Northern Ireland proves the fact that nationalism can in fact unite varying social classes with varying concerns into a formidable political force that sees social change as an embodiment of the national right to sovereignty. Thus, placing sovereignty outside of the centre, as the main objective of movements seeking equality of opportunity that the state denies them. This follows on from what Maguire (1996b: 4) has attributed to the adaptability of nationalism as an ideology of movement mobilisation:

Nationalism has not so much created a single “routine of contention” but has created a multitude of such routines which cause internal dissent but also enormous explosions of activity which catches its enemies, and even its so-called leaders, off guard at times.

This means that the need for a movement does not decline after the initial gains of the first wave of protest. In fact it may act as an adjunct to the formalisation of movements into political parties as the electoral option in itself is but merely an extension of protest repertoire into more legalistic and parliamentary fields, as shown in Brand’s (1978: 29) study into Scottish nationalism in the wake of the re-emergence of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s. This demonstrated the success of both the SDLP and IRA, in the British context, of attaining a voice in the established political system through accepting party political formalisation in formal as a means of accessing a state controlled by a definable competing national elite (Hamilton et al. 1995: 75). A new tactic was sought that would place moderates in a position to at once challenge the state whilst formulating a viable nationalist agenda that could be accepted by both sides.

The consequences of moving towards a constitutional solution, concurrent to an increased role for the Army in policing, was to place a constraint on the liberalisation of the RUC (Weitzer 1995: 16). In fact, the establishment of the Police Complaints Board in 1977 never fully satiated the IRA, due to the fact that it dealt solely with internal complaints. What was not addressed were important civil rights issues, as the rescinding of the Emergency Provisions and Prevention of Terrorism Acts (Tomlinson 1980: 188). The subsequent protest held on the behalf of police doctors, the UDA, the Police Authority, the NICRA and the SDLP were of little effect. The findings of the 1979 Bennett Report stated that police strategies in fact hampered rather than defeated the fight against terrorism, suggesting that the Ulster elite had little intention of employing non-confrontational strategies of policing (Coogan 1980: 137; Tomlinson 1980: 188).

Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, had been de facto isolated from the political system, due to the continued militancy of the IRA. The space needed to accommodate them throughout the 1970s was simply not there, which heightened the perceptions of the electoral system being inept in resolving a conflict built on the loss of confidence with the state (Boyce 1991: 369). Peace without IRA consent is superfluous, for it is denying the right of enfranchisement of a significant proportion of the Republican community. Yet, from a structural perspective the IRA itself would lose much of its weight within the movement if it was to move away from its position of strength, that of its ability to strike at the heart of the British state through VDA. This only serves to show how the British-Unionist Axis of this period was by nature exclusive; and the statelet of Ulster once again became their fiefdom independent of main land norms in public policy formation.

Successful national movements hence turn the strategy of oppression back onto the state, engaging the state similarly in order to spread its resources. A national movement based solely on NVDA is easily restricted through concentrated policing. One however that is diverse in strategy, spreading the state’s resources as the state can never be sure from whence the next attack will emerge. It is here, in spreading the state troops off in many directions, that the IRA, in its Green Book,16 was able to manipulate the cycle that the state had instigated via challenging the state’s ability to concentrate its energies into one point of access (Coogan 1975: 205, 1996: 245-251). In terms of the overall movement they also enabled the creation of strategic space within the perpetual structure of state and periphery development in, following on from Tarrow (1996: 45), as much as new options created were able to form new opportunities for the expansion of movement repertoire and future activism against the state.

The problem with terrorism was that by itself it could not bring around the desired political solution (della Porta 1983, 1992a; della Porta & Tarrow 1986). Terrorism was an extension of the movement’s strategy, as acknowledged by Adams (Shamrock & Devenport 1997: 238-239), designed to cause maximum confusion (Wilkinson 1976: 3). Its role was to highlight the plight of an aggrieved minority at the expense of the state by utilising implied threat as a signal, as della Porta and Rucht (1995) seem to suggest, that if conditions are not taken seriously within governmental structures, then the movement will have little recourse but to react outside the official channels of state conflict resolution. The problem is that the restructuration of identity has created a ‘them’ versus ‘us’ scenario (Miller 1978: 153-157; Boyce 1991: 364; Ignatieff 1993: 21; Dunn & Hennessey 1996: 179). What Tilly (1985) saw only served to solidify the relationship between state and periphery in perpetual conflict leaving the cycle of protest to continue on its way (Hechter 1985: 19-20; Lustick 1985). A situation that would lead to the criminalisation of the conflict (Rolston & Tomlinson 1982: 29).

It is also interesting how Boyle and Hadden (1994: 66) have noted that it is in times of increased paramilitary violence that a counter-tendency emerges, due in part to fear for personal safety, whereby people feel obliged to align themselves with a specific party in order to express their sentiments electorally. This, from an IRA perspective, can be viewed as both a mobilisation of popular discontent for the wrong cause, that of the legitimation of the preexisting system as the best means to conflict resolution that the movement is ideologically opposed to (Lustick 1985: 8-9; MacLaughlin 1993: 97), and the justification for the continued existence of this system as the sole means of conflict resolution defeats much of the purpose of the original action (Hennessey 1993: 35).

Preparing The Next Wave: The Expansion of IRA Repertoire as a Cyclical Response to the State’s criminalisation of the Movement.

It was the Hunger Strikes that were to symbolise the power of protest in a period when effective harm of the self, rather than direct harm of the other was to grant the IRA, as a movement, the rarefied position of martyrdom (Beresford 1987). A position they could never fully claim on the British mainland schooled in the dialectic of the bomb and anti-British rhetoric. In such an environment, NVDA would have to undertake a more dramatic nature capable of capturing the attention of a population fearing an escalation of the crisis in their own backyard. The Ulster state and British constitutionalism remained the enemy. Thus, to play at reconciliation in an environment that still negated the national question, would only serve to isolate the Republican movement from its community.

Many Protestant Unionists had come to view the successful civil action that saw the downfall of Stormont as a defeat of a system of government that was representative of the majority of the population in the name of a vocal, innately anti-Ulster, minority (Hennessey 1995: 8). In the aftermath of ‘Bloody Sunday’ much of the NVDA was seen as sectarian insurrection and would, as such, be dealt with accordingly by the security forces. The next battle would have to deal directly with the issues of those who had been caught up in the cycle of action-reaction-action. From a civil rights perspective the most worrying factor was the importance placed upon interrogation at the centre of attaining convictions. This led to an increase in the number of suspects held without charge on suspicion of crimes against the Anti-Terrorist Acts. In comparison with the rest of Britain the rates of arrest without charge were substantially higher: some 65% of those arrested in Northern Ireland were held without charge compared to 15% in England and Wales, of which 94% were convicted compared to 82% in England and Wales; this seemed somewhat prejudicial (Hillyard & Boyle 1982: 5-6). It was also in direct contradiction to Article 15 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Yet it was not until the Maze Prison riots of 1976 that imprisonment, let alone civil justice, was to take on a highly politicised form (Rolston & Tomlinson 1982: 27).

It was at once an acknowledgement of the innate polarisation between the state and the minority Nationalist community, as well as a declaration that for the state the main issue was not the national question, but, rather a security issue as now the Catholic question would be equated to that of state security (Boyce 1990: 39-43). It is here that Weitzer (1990: 4) feels that the Army and the RUC fall into the a pattern of response common amongst most settler societies who view security forces as “designed to perpetuate racial, ethnic, or religious domination through the suppression of threats from the subordinate population.” As an anonymous British Army Major stated in the Guardian on November 1980:

some people believe in selective internment. I believe in selective assassination (Rolston & Tomlinson 1982: 29).

The unifying nature of the ‘Hunger Strikes,’ and their value as a tool for movement mobilisation was proven in the involvement of the GAA, in an official capacity, in fund raising for the families of the Hunger Strikers (Sugden & Harvie 1995: 13). An action that controversially saw, for the first time, the support of a Provisionals initiated action by a conservative movement traditionally more inclined to concentrate solely on cultural, rather than socio-political, issues of national importance. By the late 1970s the base for this new method of popular mobilisation was to become an effective tool in mobilising a Republican community publicly disgruntled with the political processes of the day. The relevance of the 1916 heritage to contemporary Belfast and Derry was few and far between (Moxon-Browne 1982: 95-98; Lee 1995: 369). The community needed a contemporary symbol and contemporary martyrs that had lived through internment and British policing the way they had. The October 28 1980- October 3 1981 Hunger Strikes which claimed ten lives, and especially the fasting to death on May 5 1981 of Bobby Sands was to provide the ritualised spectacle required to complete the cycle and usher in an era of new ‘martyrs’. Each death was significant, since it provided the necessary open demonstration that had not been seen since the fall of Stormont (Beresford 1987; Campbell 1994: 178).

The funerals decorated with paraphernalia and symbols of resistance, such as the tricolours, rosary beads and crucifixes draped on the coffins of young martyrs, “redeemed from a life of violence” through their ultimate personal sacrifice, was an evocative scene that challenged past glories such as the 1969 Belfast-Derry march and the August 1969 Free-Derry riots (Taylor 1997: 298). Granting a sense of continuity, allowing this “time the ghost of 1916 not merely walking, as in 1966, but being reinforced by new volunteers- ghosts, week after week” (O’Brien 1994: 171). The line between peace activist and men of violence were thinly drawn and the fluidity of the two allowed for a commonality to emerge between the two extremes of the national movement in the cause of the people.

In Ireland, as well as in Britain, the general longing for an end to political violence has become the IRA’s greatest asset. Partly, this is a mechanical and general phenomenon. The more you crave for peace, the more you may come to be dependent on the men of violence, who alone can supply you with that which you crave (O’Brien. 1994: 172).

The greatest success of the Hunger Strikes was the embarrassment caused to the British Government as their own record on prison and human rights abuses was shown up by this most extreme of actions and sacrifices. Both Farren and Mulvihill (1995: 4-5) note this effectiveness lay in their ability of throwing government strategies into disarray as it became clearer that the proposed talks between Haughey and Thatcher were quite exclusive in nature; even leading to the tacit recognition at the December 1980 Haughey-Thatcher summit that further IRA exclusion would prove futile.

What was now sought was a complete redress of the nature of Protestant predominance within the established political system. It was only through placing the periphery at the centre, through proffering an ‘All-Ireland’ solution, would the issue of separate state centre-periphery development be addressed. It was with this in mind that the IRA were to enter the 1980s ever more sure that the key to survival as a movement lay in the polarisation of society. In order to ensure the significance of the national movement within the continuum of the cycle of protest, and parallel state-centre/peripheral movement development.