SFWP - in the shadow of a gunman: Part 1
SWFP aspirations towards socialist respectability are undermined by the continued military operations of the Official IRA and the SWFP's own ideological contortions. By Vincent Browne
Prior to Christmas three years ago a row, involving a full time official of Sinn Fein The Workers Party, broke out in a Dublin pub, The Dockers, on Sir John Rogerson's quay. The row resulted in the party official stabbing a broken glass in the face of one of two of his antagonists, both of whom were former members of the party. Inevitably, there were threats of retribution.
These former members, brothers, had been involved in a number of previous occasions in conflicts with other party officials. Indeed there had previously been a row with the same party official at the party's drinking club, Club Vi Cadhain at Gardiner Place. Somebody obviously decided that The Dockers pub incident was the last straw and that the two brothers would have to be taught a lesson.
The Sunday morning after the row two cars carrying eight men drew up outside The Dockers. The men, several of whom were armed, went into the pub and singled out the two brothers, having warned the rest of the Sunday mornning drinking crowd to stand back and mind their own business. They then beat the two brothers over the head with hatchets, causing them very serious injury. A girl who was with one of the brothers and who was then a current member of the party, was beaten when she protested. She had been involved with a senior member of the party some time previously and this may have been an aggravating factor in the dispute.
Seven of the eight men were members of Sinn Fein The Workers Party. All were members of the Official IRA, some members of the Dublin unit and some from Belfast includding one of the most notorious "heavies" of the latter organisation in the North, who is now in jail on an arms offence.
The person who is not a member of the party is perhaps the most interesting of the group. He occupies a very senior positon on the GHQ staff of the Official IRA. He has been involved in numerous robberies over the last several years and is believed to have murdered a prominent individual in Dublin in the course of the last 5 years. He is from the North and was formerly a member of Clann na hEireann (the SFWP British support organisation) and was deported from England. He carried out several robberies in England for the organisation prior to his deportation. It was he who led the party of eight to The Dockers that Sunday morning and it was he who assembled the gang for the operation. They had convened earlier that morning in a house near the North Strand in Dublin, a place where the Official IRA Dublin unit still meets regularly.
Information about this incident comes primarily from one of the eight men who were involved. Also from one of the victims. And people who were members of the Offiicial IRA until recently tell us that there is no way that this incident could have happened without explicit authorisaation for it from a senior officer in the Offical IRA, who is also a member of Sinn Fein The Workers Party.
As the two victims had been involved with the Commuunist Party there were protests from the Communist Party about this incident to the leadership of SFWP. The latter denied any knowledge of the incident or the involvement of any of its members in the affair.
In the course of an interview for this article with Tomas MacGiolla, President of SFWP, and Sean Garland, General Secretary, they both recalled hearing of the incident at the time and remembered the correspondence with 'the Communist Party. They both denied that members of SFWP had been involved and said that as they were unn.aware of the existence of the Official IRA they were not in a position to make any observation about its involvement or otherwise in the incident.
Such incidents are almost unique in the South, where SFWP is keen to project a respectable image while it commpetes for votes as a regular conventional political party of the left. But they are commonplace in Northern Ireland.
The leadership of Sinn Fein The Workers Party now consistently deny any knowledge of the Official IRA or any involvement by the party in military activity. In an interview on RTE's Day By Day programme shortly after the recent general election Tomas MacGiolla said: "I cerrtainly have no knowledge of them (the Official IRA). All I know is that I am convinced and I am aware that there is no question of any military organisation in any way assoociated with us at the present."
He went on to say :"I have no reason to think that (the Official IRA) still exists. Certainly it doesn't exist in any way down here. There was for some years a suggestion that it may have existed in the North' and I pursued that there for quite a number of years to see any evidence of its exisstence and I am satisfied that it certainly doesn't exist in any association with us."
In the course of the same programme Sean Garland said that in his July 1972 Carrighmore speech Tomas MacGiolla had made it clear then that "this party wanted nothing to do with such activities from then on". Asked if he was still a member of the Official IRA army council he replied: "you're talking about today and we'll say 12 years ago, which is a long time."
The offiicial stance of the party nowadays is that as far as they are concerned the Official IRA went out of existence immeediately after the July 1972 ceasefire. It is also suggested that the military campaign from 1970 until the ceasefire was an abberation for which only a handful of hotheads were responsible, while the leadership did what it could to stop the campaign all along.
Like most organisations, SFWP remains to a large extent a prisoner of its past, although it has made remarkkable effotts to disengage itself from its ideological heritage.
The leftward drift of Sinn Fein during the 1960s under the direction of the Trinity intellectual, Roy Johnston, has been well chronicled by now. However, the significance of this development in terms of Marxism has been much exagggerated - it reflected much more the very non-marxist
radicalism of the 1960s, more popularist, more issueeoriented in terms of fish-ins, housing agitation, etc. than a strict marxist strategy would allow.
It was also very republican, in the traditional sense of that word. The national question remained central to its ideology and the struggle against "British imperialism" was seen as the focus of the party's main line of activity both in economic and nationalistic terms.
The IRA was run down during that period with the main emphasis on civil rights. The belief was that concentration on civil rights would have the effect of destabilising the state in Northern Ireland. But when violence flared on the streets of Belfast in August 1969, the republican movement reacted instinctively in the traditional republican manner. Although its rhetoric didn't catch up for a while and the split with the Provisionals confused the issue, the Official IRA got caught up in a military campaign against British presence in Northern Ireland as much as did the Provos.
Although the party now seeks to minimise the signifiicance of the issue, the Battle of the Lower Falls was a major macho boost to the Officials in July 1970. They boasted at the time that it was "the first major battle between the forces of the Republic and the British army since 1921". Some enthusiasts even went so far as to claim that it was the heaviest military engagement involving the British army since the Second World War - nowadays Tomas MacGiolla refers to it merely as a confrontation between the people of the Falls and the British army. "Slates were thrown from the roofs", he says minimising the degree of military engagement that occurred.
The military campaign of the Official IRA stepped up considerably in the months after the introduction of internnment in August 1971. Local O/Cs were encouraged to outtdo the Provos in militancy. The Derry O/C at the time recalls being berated at the time by very senior members of the Official IRA for not shooting enough British soldiers.
The course of the campaign began to go sour on the Official IRA from an early stage and in fact it was the Offiicials who were most associated in the public mind with atrocities rather than the Provisionals in early 1972. The following is a sequence of incidents which caused considerrable public outrage and pressure on the movement to halt its campaign:
December 12, 1971: Senator Jack Barnhill was shot dead when he resisted attempts to burn down .his house. Allthough it seems that there was no intention to kill him, in fact, his name had apppeared on a death list of prominent individuals, compiled by the leadership of the Official IRA, to be assassinated at some future date. The list inncluded several resident magistrates and prominent unionnist politicians.
February 22, 1972: Seven people, including five cleaning women, a priest and a gardener, were killed when bombs went off at the headquarters of the Britsih parachute regiiment at Aldershot. The Official IRA planted the bomb in retaliation for the killing of the civilians in Derry during Bloody Sunday. The leadership approved the operation believing that over 20 senior Parachute officers would be killed.
February 25, 1972: The Official IRA gunned down the Unionist politician, John Taylor on a pavement in Armagh. Relations now between SFWP and the Official Unionists are very close, thus this incident seems all the more bizarre in retrospect. However Goudling seemed quite dismissive about the incident when interviewed some years later on March 8, 1975 by The Irish Times. Referring to the Taylor shooting he said: "I suppose you could say that, well, Brian Faulkner should have been the target, he was in charge, but, like everything else, availability of the target matters too". March 6, 1972: Marcus McCausland, a former officer in the UDR was shot dead by the Official IRA. The coldblooded nature of this shooting as well as the fact that this was a middle class target provoked particular outrage.
March 12, 1972: A woman was fatally injured in crossfire in Leeson Street, Belfast, between the Official IRA and the British army.
March 24, 1972: The Official IRA announced that it would continue its campaign in spite of the prorogation of Storrmont - this statement was almost as hardline as that issued at the time by the Provisional Chief of Staff, Sean MaccStiophain, which is much better remembered.
April 10, 1972: The Official IRA killed 2 soldiers in a booby trap.
May 10, 1972: A 15 year old girl was beaten, tarred and feathered by the Official IRA in the Leeson Street area of Belfast.
May 21, 1972: An off-duty British soldier, Ranger Best, who was at home on leave in the Creggan in Derry was shot dead by the Official IRA. This incident led to the Official IRA ceasefire which was announced on May 29, 1972. Prior to the announcement of the ceasefire there was heated debate at army council level on the issue of the Best killing. Several members of the council condemned it and said that public support had been devastated by it, others pointed out that an explicit army council order had been made some months previously stating that British soldiers in or out of uniform were legitimate targets.
In fact, the issue had arisen some weeks previously in Derry. The local unit had managed to set up a brothel in the Waterside area and it was proposed to entice British officers there and poison them. Explicit authorisation for this action was obtained by the Derry staff for this operration from a very senior member of the Official IRA at the time, now a senior member of the SFWP Ard Comhairle.
There was heated discussion at army council level on the cease fire - it was vigorously opposed by Seamus Costello and others.
However the terms of the cease fire were deliiberately qualified in a manner that allowed a continuance of the campaign more or less as before. The statement said: "the IRA has agreed to this (cease fire) proposal reserving only the right of self-defence and defence of areas if attackked by the British army or sectarian forces."
Throughout the rest of 1972 and the early part of 1973 the military campaign continued more or less as before. This fact is best illustrated by just two incidents in this period. On December 5, 1972 a massive mortar attack blitz was launched throughout Northern Ireland. British army in-
stallations and camps and RUC stations were fired on in Blight's Lane in Derry, Kilrea, Coalisland, Croagh, Co. Tyrone, Lurgan and in Belfast at Silver City, Fort Monagh, Ardoyne and North Queen's St. It was a huge undertaking. Because of its size it was co-ordinated by the GHQ staff in Dublin and explicitly supported by the army council,
This incident took place over six months after the announcement of the ceasefire.
The other illustration of the extent to which the ceaseefire initially was in name mainly was a statement issued by the Command Staff of the Official IRA in Belfast on May 2, 1973, almost a year after the cease fire announcement, claiming responsibility for the deaths of 7 British soldiers "during recent retaliatory action in Northern Ireland".
Thus the pretence that the military campaign came to an abrupt halt in the middle of 1972 is entirely false - the campaign continued for at least a year afterwards.
However it is true that from the middle of 1973 onnwards the screws were put on military activity. This was done not by any formal decision but by the more rigid interpretation of the terms of the cease fire . Operatives were fmding it .harder and harder to get clearance for jobs and even when clearance was given the delay involved meant that the operation often couldn't be carried out anyway. Also there was a problem of equipment. While the leaderrship repeatedly promised new, more and better arms and explosives, the actual provision of these was a very diffferent matter. There were always excuses why something couldn't be delivered and it was only in retrospect that volunteers recognised this as a means of stopping the miliitary campaign altogether.
Thus the campaign was stopped not by fiat following the cease fire announcement but by a gradual process which effectively choked off military activity without any accommpanying major decision to that effect.
It amounted to a masterstroke on the part of Cathal Goulding who for the most part didn't want a military cammpaign at any stage. Yet he managed to bring the movement with him into 1974 without any major rift, having effecctively hoodwinked the organisation into a real ceasefire to which it never really consented.
But, in spite of the cleverness by which this manoeuvvred, it was inevitable that it would give rise to tensions andthese surfaced in the latter part of 1972. A convention of the Official IRA was held in October and there a docuument presented jointly by Seamus Costello, and another senior member, clearly defined the objectives of the moveement in traditional republican terms, in contrast to the more civil rights emphasis of Goulding. The Costello line won through and Costello followed this up with a detailed proposal for a resumption of the military campaign offiicially. In this he was heavily defeated at a resumed army convention the following month.
But the differences didn't end there. Proposals emerged for the restructuring of the organisation and a commission was set up in early 1973 to examime proposals. One paper dealt with Garland's concern of "the revolutionary party" which he had first postulated the previous June in Bodenawn. The main aspect of this proposal was that one organisation, the party, would be responsible for all the activities of the movement - i.e. military as well as poliitical.
Costello had a strong case for retaining the existing structure of two organisations, one political and one miliitary, but with greater cohesion between the two. A third paper was prepared by Eoin 0 Morchu who was editor of United Irishman at the time but who was later to leave the movement and join the Communist Party. He argued for the effective disbanding of the IRA and its incorporaation into the political organisation for certain specialised activities.
The militarists within the movement perceived this debate in terms of great alarm. They believed that it was not only 0 Morchu who was in favour of doing away with the IRA but also Garland who effectively wanted to emassculate the organisation and thereby abandon entirely the struggle for national unity.
This debate, which effectively centred on whether there should be an open resumption of the military campaign waged through 1973 and early 1974. Seamus Costello was suspended from the IRA for factional activity - he was in fact attempting to win support for his position throughout the movement in a manner that apparently contravened the procedures for such debate.
He was courtmartialed at the party's educational centre at Mornington, Co. Meath. He was found guilty of charges and dishonourably dismissed from the IRA.
Undaunted, he continued his campaign within Sinn Fein but was resoundingly defeated at the Ard Fheis of 1974 when a resolution calling for his re-instatement was thrown out - he had been suspended from membership by the Ard Comhairle . There were allegations of rigging in connection with the Ard Fheis but it is clear that he would have been routed anyway.
Costello then established the IRSP (The Irish Republican Socialist Party) and the INLA (The Irish National Liberaation Army) on the same day, a Sunday in December 1974 in the Spa Hotel in Lucan. Costello was to insist first thai' there were no links between the IRSP and the INLA but in fact the manner of their birth suggested otherwise. About 90 people assembled in the hotel in Lucan. They broke for tea, then reconvened as a separate group to form the INLA. Actually some of the people who disapproved from the outset with Costello's plans for a military orrganisation left during the tea break. Costello was to insist that the two organisations were entirely separate and that the political organisation would have no control over the military one - it was this insistence that eventually led to the resignation of Bernadette McAliskey from the party.
The formation of IRSP/INLA posed a very severe threat to the Official IRA/Sinn Fein because its Northern memmbership had been in the main unhappy with the cease fire and its strict enforcement. Entire units of the Official IRA, such as that at Divis Flats in Belfast, immediately defected to the INLA. Anxiety over the possible decimation of the Official IRA must have been a contributory factor in the feud that subsequently broke out between the two organiisations - IRSP members remembered chillingly repeated expressions of regret on the part of senior members of the Official IRA that they hadn't wiped out the Provisionals at their infancy (see separate report on page 10 and 11).
FollOWing the IRSP split the proposed organisational ~ ~hanges in the Official IRA did not go through, at least not until after 1978, if at all. The significance of the Offiicial IRA declined significantly however. Army Council meetings which used to take place on a monthly basis began to take place only on a three monthly basis. Its main topic of discussion was proposed robberies and the control of the political organisation.
The IRA was always used to control Sinn Fein and this did not end certainly until well after 1978, if even then. The IRA convention used to be held regularly prior to the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis and there at the convention it would be decided how the IRA should vote en bloc at the Ard Fheis. Therefore military discipline was effectively deployyed at the party level to influence decisions.
The level of robberies stepped up considerably after the ceasefire, especially when the ceasefire became effective. The robberies took place across the north and in the south. A gang formed in Belfast especially for robberies, which became known as "The Dirty Dozen" (initially comprised of 12 men and later of 13), it reputedly stole £200,000 in one 4-month period. Targets were mainly post offices, post office vans and security vans.
The IRA became primarily merely a fund-raising organiisation but it served other purposes too. It kept order in the vast drinking clubs that the organisation owns in Northern Ireland and in Dublin. It maintained internal discipline through intimidation and beatings. It also provided the means of self-defense for the party which got into feuds from time to time with the Provos.
The Official IRA has also been responsible for running rackets in Belfast particularly. This involved primarily the operation of tax exemption fraud, which the Provos have also perfected. On many buillding sites lump labour is emmployed on a contractual basis. The firms which provide this contracted lump labour are provided with tax exempption forms by the authoriities, which means that workkers do not pay P A YE but rather their tax contribuutions are paid on an annual basis. The scope for abuse is considerable and this is exxploited by para-military orrganisations allover the North.
The building site on which the para-military organisaations can conduct these racckets obviously can be only in those areas where they have a measure of control. Thus for the Official IRA the building sites where they operate the tax exemption rackets are in the Lower Falls, The Markets, Twinbrook and Bawnmore areas of Belfast. Actually their area of influence has diminished recently with the defection of one of their major racketeers to the IRSP. When these rackets were working well for the Official IRA it was estimated that they were earning up to £3 ,000 per week from them.
They also got involved in another and more exotic form of racketeering: the massage parlour business. Up to about two years ago they were running three massage parlours in Belfast. One of these, incredibly, was run in conjunction with the UVF but this was closed down after a disagreement between the two organisations - the UVF and the Official IRA often co-operated in recent
years and, reportedly, exxchanged information. Anoother of the parlours was fireebombed by the Provos and a third was closed down by the RUC. One of SFWP's candiidates in the local elections of May last year was convicted of running brothels in the Ormeau Road area of Belfast.
The Official IRA is still very visible in Belfast as the incident in Ardmonagh Gardens on January 29 of this year shows (see page 10). It has less than 50 operaatives in the city however and these are organised into units based around the drinking clubs in Cyprus Street in the Lower Falls area, in New Lodge Road, in the Markets, in the Short Strand, in Turf Lodge and in Bawnmore.
The O/C in Belfast until recently was a very promiiment figure.
He apparently has steppped aside and his place has been taken by a person who is not significantly less proominent. The Official IRA is also relatively strong around the drinking club. There are also members in the Craiggavon area.
On a national level it is not clear what re-organisation has taken place but it is a certainnty that the Chief of Staff is a member of SFWP. So too is the Finance Officer and the Adjutant General. The Dublin unit O/C is also a member of the party.
There are about 30 active members on call in the Dublin area. These are enngaged almost exclusively in robberies. Some of these are not members of SFWP or at least deny membership.
By all accounts the organiisation is well armed with Russian Kalashnikov AK 47 carbines and sophisticated 357 Magnum revolvers. It appears that many of the Official IRA's arms were dumped around 1975 - one of the dumps was discovered in Monaghan by Gardai in September 1980. Among the items found then were 6 handguns, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, walkie-talkie radios and a quantity of silver coins - left overs from a bank raid. Training manuals and other documents were also found, leading Gardai to conclude that weapons trainning had been carried out by the Official IRA some short time previously.