Operation Harvest began on the night of 12 December 1956 with approximately 150 men involved in attacks on ten different targets in Northern Ireland. By its end six members of the RUC and eleven republicans were dead, a relatively small number by comparison with the 1970s and 80s, but a significant loss of life in the atmosphere of the time.227 Its high-point was the abortive attack on Brookeborough RUC station in Fermanagh in January 1957. Like all the ‘flying columns’, that which attacked Brookeborough was composed of IRA men from the south with only the skimpiest knowledge of local conditions. Two of the group, Sean Garland from Dublin and Daithi O’Connaill from Cork, would play crucial and conflicting roles in post-1962 republican rethinking. The key figures in the attack would be the two IRA men who were killed during it, Sean South and Feargal O’Hanlon. The deaths of two young idealists – as they were widely perceived in Catholic Ireland – resulted in a powerful spasm of public emotion:
When the bodies of South and O’Hanlon were carried across the border, their transmutation from young men into martyrs began. There began a week of all but national mourning. Crowds lined the route of South’s funeral cortege to Dublin … Town Councils and County Corporations passed votes of sympathy.228
In the general election that took place shortly afterwards, Sinn Féin’s nineteen candidates received just over 5 per cent of the vote and it had four TDs elected. These were unexpected victories but, as Rumpf and Hepburn noted, the result was ‘ultimately insignificant’.229 Mass concern over the coalition government’s lack of response to a massive economic crisis was the decisive issue in giving de Valera a final impressive election victory. In 1956 he had made it clear to emissaries from the IRA who had asked for his co-operation or connivance in the planned campaign that he thought partition could not be ended by force.230 As the futile campaign sputtered on, producing only internment (eventually over 250 people were interned in Northern Ireland) and a massive mobilisation of the police and 13,000 B Specials,231 interest and sympathy evaporated. In July 1957, after the IRA had killed an RUC man in County Armagh, internment was introduced in the Republic and nearly 200 men were rounded up.232 Catholic disillusionment was plain in the Westminster election in October 1959, when the Sinn Féin vote slumped by more than half.233 In the Republic the Sinn Féin vote in the 1961 general election declined to 36,393 for 21 candidates – 3 per cent – and only one was elected.234
The IRA’s Army Council had addressed an appeal to the Protestants of Northern Ireland to support the independence movement, in the very midst of its military campaign.235 The exotic futility of this gesture should not obscure the nagging doubts and suspicions which some southern republicans had about a too-direct mobilisation of the forces of grievance and traditional animosity which existed in the Catholic population in the north. It is still unclear whether, as some claim, a decision was made not to include the Belfast IRA in the campaign, so as to avoid the possibility of sectarian conflict,236 or whether Belfast’s non-involvement reflected fears that its personnel were too well known to the police.237 What is clear is that the order from the IRA GHQ that all possible steps had to be taken to avoid shooting members of the part-time Protestant constabulary – the B Specials – was intensely unpopular with northern IRA men and their sympathisers.238 Regarded by the government and the Protestant population as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the state, with a detailed knowledge of their Catholic neighbours, the Specials were the focus of much fear and animosity. Attacks on the Specials were opposed on the basis that their deep roots in local Protestant communities would ensure that such attacks would provoke bitter sectarian animosities. As the IRA campaign reeled under its own futilities and the introduction of internment north and south, some began to query the wisdom of excluding action that would at least restore flagging Catholic interest and support.
Ironically, it was Seán Cronin, whose original plan had effectively marginalised the appeal to Catholic communalism, who in 1959 appeared willing to contemplate the risky venture of a Belfast campaign. By then the leadership was bitterly divided over whether the campaign should be called off, with Cronin to the fore in pressing for its continuance. He hoped to ensure revival through a sharp change in focus from the border areas to Belfast. Sean Garland, a survivor of the campaign’s most martyrogenic action, the attack on Brookeborough RUC station, was chosen to mobilise the Belfast IRA. Disguised as a Glasgow university student but largely ignorant of the city and its republican sub-culture, he had just enough time to discover widespread demoralisation before he was arrested and gaoled in the Crumlin Road prison, where his mission was received with sullen resentment by the many IRA prisoners who regarded the campaign as by then an obvious and definitive failure.239
For some in the Belfast IRA, the failure of ‘Operation Harvest’ stemmed directly from its fastidiousness. As the national leadership settled its divisions by intrigue – Cronin was displaced by an organised letter-writing campaign from Irish-America which used anti-communism and other disreputable charges against his radical American wife240 – the remaining republicans in Crumlin Road speculated on what, if anything, their future might be. Attempts to politicise such discussion were received with hostility.241 More typical would have been the jocular remark of a future leading Belfast Provisional that a military campaign of the 1956 sort was ‘no use’ and that the only way forward was to ‘shoot a lot of priests and ministers’, thus ensuring a strong communal base for the IRA in the resulting sectarian polarisation.242 Such sentiments reflected a stubborn reality of the northern situation which the idealist rhetoric of ‘Wolfe Tone’ republicanism found hard to recognise, let alone deal with.
4 A Limited Reassessment: The IRA after 1962
In June 1963 an incident occurred in Belfast which epitomised the contradictory impulses at the heart of republicanism as it sought to recover from the failure of the border campaign. A march was to be held to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Wolfe Tone’s birth. It was part of a series of activities organised by the Wolfe Tone Society, which had emerged from discussions between Cathal Goulding, Seán Cronin and Dick Roche in Dublin and a small group of republicans, nationalists and labourites there and in Belfast.243 In Belfast, the urge behind the Wolfe Tone Society – to create a broad coalition of ‘progressive’ and ‘nationally-minded’ forces – ran up against the brutal wall of communal assertiveness. The Belfast IRA had been asked to act as a colour party, but when the police forbade the carrying of an Irish tricolour, the IRA commander in Belfast, Billy McKee, assented. This decision was bitterly contested by the bulk of Belfast IRA men and, despite Goulding’s attempt to mediate, McKee was forced to resign and was replaced by Billy McMillen. A march inspired by a strategy apparently aimed at building a new ‘anti-imperialist’ alliance to include at least a section of the Protestant community would in fact herald a period of intensifying conflict between the police and republicans on an issue that could reinvigorate communal solidarity amongst Catholics but left even progressive Protestants cold.244
Goulding was now Chief of Staff of the IRA, his reputation for leftism notwithstanding. Imprisonment in England during the first three years of the border campaign meant that he was untainted by its failure and, in any case, the general demoralisation was such that no one else wanted the job.245 The Army Convention in 1962, at which his tenure commenced, marked the beginning of a process of assessment of the state of the IRA and a reassessment of the history of the republican movement. For Goulding, such a reassessment meant, in part, a return to the debates of the inter-war period, with the aim of reconstituting the IRA as a vanguard of social republicanism. It was in this context that he made overtures to intellectuals outside the IRA. The nature of this external input has been the subject of bitter controversy, but little useful information or analysis has been forthcoming. The split in the IRA and Sinn Féin in 1969-70 would see Goulding’s opponents claim that he had allowed