IRA Provo Terrorism
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Between 1969 and 1981, at least 1525 civilians were killed in the "troubles" in Northern Ireland or Ulster.1 This is by far the highest death toll inflicted by political violence in recent years in Western Europe, or indeed anywhere outside of the Third World. Most of this civilian death toll has been inflicted by several terrorist groups representing both the "Catholic" and the "Protestant" sides in Northern Ireland's civil conflict. Of these, the most violent and the best known is the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, commonly known as the IRA Provos or simply the Provos. In this study, the conduct and motivation of the Provos will be used as a case study of terrorism in general: who commits it, why it is committed, and what if anything is gained by it. The thesis of this study is that political terrorism is morally, ethically, legally, and politically indefensible. It is morally and ethically indefensible because its purpose, indeed its definition, is the maiming or slaughter of innocent people in pursuit of a political end. It is legally indefensible because the terrorist, even if successful, has by his conduct planted the seeds of violent opposition, even terrorism, against himself. And it is politically indefensible because for all the blood it sheds it fails to achieve the ends for which it is supposedly justified by its perpetrators. Before we can discuss IRA Provo terrorism, or any terrorism, we must deal with a questio
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o be alien, incomprehensible, and unnecessary.17 Some limited practical links could be forged between the Provos and other extremist groups, or with politicians (such as Moammar Kadafi) who wanted to make trouble for the West. In spite of a certain amount of pro forma rhetoric by ideologists of both the right and the left, the IRA Provos remain essential parochial, unable to persuasively make the case their cause has broad relevance to global ideological conflicts. For all the dabbling of Official and Provisional IRA factions in leftist ideology, Ireland's troubles remain essentially and narrowly Irish.
Indeed, the ideology of the IRA has at times complicated their relations with the IRA's chief source of foreign support Irish Americans. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical spokesperson Bernedette Devlin attempted to explain the IRA program in the language of revolutionary ideology before Irish American audiences sympathetic to the IRA. The result was incomprehension and alienation between her and her audience, who tended to be religious and conservative Irish American Catholics, whose emotional resonators were tuned to Prince Billy, the Battle of the Boyne, and the Easter Rising, not to Marx and Mao.18 Subs
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Approximate Word count = 3165
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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