Border Campaign

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The Border Campaign (English: Grenzkampagne , IRA internally also called Operation Harvest ) was a series of attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) from 1956. The targets of the attacks were in Northern Ireland near the border with the Republic of Ireland . The campaign was discontinued in 1962 due to a lack of popular support.

history

preparation

During the Second World War, the IRA practically ceased to exist. Their underground activity during the war on the British mainland could easily be stopped by the British police and the secret services. Massive action was taken against them in the Republic of Ireland. The then Prime Minister Eamon de Valera feared that the attacks on British targets would jeopardize Ireland's neutrality. He did his best to dismantle the structures of the IRA. After 1945 a few scattered people came together to reorganize the IRA. The main aim was rearmament and the continuation of the struggle against the partition of Ireland. In 1948 an Army Convention took place for the first time in ten years ; the highest body of the IRA elected a new leadership.

There had already been a change of opinion within the IRA in the 1930s. It is true that the governments of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State continued to be seen as institutions that uphold the division of Ireland and thus prevent the Irish people from exercising their right to self-determination . At the same time, qualitative differences were recognized: while Northern Ireland was still under the direct control of Great Britain , there was a certain degree of autonomy in the south of the island . The IRA Army Council expelled the members in General Army Order No. 8 not to attack any agency or representative of the Republic of Ireland.

Planning for the Border Campaign began in 1950. In order to obtain weapons, IRA commandos raided military facilities in Northern Ireland and England between 1951 and 1955. In a raid on the Gough Barracks in the Northern Irish city of Armagh , around 20 IRA members captured numerous weapons in June 1954. The attack on the British military installation attracted considerable public attention to the IRA and resulted in an increasing number of new entrants. In October 1954, the attack by a large IRA command on an army facility in Omagh failed . Eight IRA members were arrested and later sentenced to seven to twelve years in prison for high treason . In the British General Election of 1955 , two of the convicts, Tom Mitchell and Philip Clarke , were elected to the House of Commons for the IRA-affiliated Sinn Féin party. In total, Sinn Féin achieved over 150,000 votes; the moderate Nationalist Party had not put forward any candidates. After the election success, the IRA believed it had enough popular support for the Border Campaign .

In January 1956, the IRA leadership had an operation plan for the Border Campaign , the main features of which were no longer changed and a year later was confiscated by the southern Irish police Garda Síochána . The author of the plan was Seán Cronin , a journalist who had recently returned to Ireland from the USA and who became chief of staff of the IRA in July 1957 . According to the plan, guerrilla warfare methods and popular propaganda were to be used to strengthen the "centers of resistance" in Northern Ireland. First, the administration of these areas should be made impossible and the security forces forced to withdraw. Smaller "liberated areas" were to be created, which would later merge to form larger areas. The concept of the IRA is judged to be strongly influenced by Mao Zedong's theories on guerrilla warfare; tactics from the War of Independence (1919–1921) were also taken up again. At that time, the IRA was able to use flying columns to largely remove areas in the southwest of the island from the control of the British. Cronin's plan envisaged the formation of 25-man air columns to operate from bases south of the border. In its first phase, the Border Campaign was to focus on the predominantly Catholic west of Northern Ireland. Roads and bridges, police and military facilities and symbols of British rule in Northern Ireland were all possible targets.

In 1956, the IRA sent around 20 organizers to the border areas of Northern Ireland, which were mostly inhabited by Irish nationalists. These should train IRA members, scout out possible attack targets and report regularly to the IRA headquarters in Dublin. During this planning phase, the IRA headquarters decided not to include the Northern Irish capital, Belfast, in the campaign, as it was feared that the IRA unit there was riddled with informants and too weak to defend the city's Catholic residential areas against possible attacks.

course

Memorial to Fergal O'Hanlon and Seán South in Altawark, County Fermanagh.

The Border Campaign began on the night of December 12, 1956 with a series of attacks in the border area of ​​Northern Ireland involving 150 IRA members. The facilities of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British Army , bridges and a courthouse , among others, were attacked . On January 1, 1957, an attack by an IRA command under Seán Garland on the RUC police station in Brookeborough , County Fermanagh, failed . Two IRA members, Seán South and Fergal O'Hanlon , died from injuries sustained in the attack. The attack in Brookeborough and the deaths of the two IRA members received widespread press coverage; South and O'Hanlon were buried in the Republic of Ireland with great public participation. On March 2, 1957, IRA members ambushed a freight train in Donegal . The original plan to derail the train failed; Instead, the train rolled to Derry without a driver and caused considerable property damage at the station there.

In response to the Border Campaign , Northern Irish Prime Minister Basil Brooke enacted the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) of 1922 on December 15, 1956 ; a law that gave the judiciary and the police special powers and was the legal basis for detention without trial. In addition, the Sinn Féin party was banned. The Northern Irish government, surprised by the attacks, deployed 3,000 RUC police officers and 12,000 auxiliary police officers, so-called B-Specials . In addition, British pioneers made numerous cross-border roads impassable in order to concentrate traffic on 17 police-controlled border crossings. In January 1957 about 50 people were interned in Northern Ireland; in October 1957 the number of prisoners had risen to almost 250. The Northern Ireland special legislation permitted the imposition of curfews , a measure that in August 1957 after a bomb attack in the town of Newry was put into effect and led to clashes between the police and young people.

In the Republic of Ireland, the Border Campaign contributed to early elections and the end of the reign of John A. Costello : On January 28, 1957, Clann na Poblachta , a republican party led by Seán MacBride , initiated a vote of no confidence in the government of Costello partly because the government did not do enough for the reunification of Ireland. Costello dissolved Parliament prematurely; in the new elections in March 1957 , Sinn Féin obtained approximately 66,000 votes and four seats. In July 1957, Eamon de Valera, who had resumed government in March, introduced internment without trial in the Republic of Ireland. Initially, 63 suspected IRA members were interned in the Republic at Curragh ; in March 1958 their number had risen to 131. Internees who renounced acts of violence were released early. The last internees were released in March 1959. The IRA did not succeed in replacing the internees with recruits. The number of attacks in Northern Ireland fell from 341 in 1957 to 26 in 1960. Saor Uladh , a faction led by Liam Kelly , particularly active in County Tyrone , was responsible for some of the attacks .

The public interest in the Border Campaign initially in the republic subsided after a few months. An exception was the funeral of five people, including four IRA members who had been killed in a premature bomb explosion in November 1957 in Edentubber, a town in County Louth near the border with Northern Ireland. In the 1961 elections in the Republic , Sinn Féin lost almost half of the votes and all seats. In Northern Ireland, where the Sinn Féin ban did not apply to the UK House of Commons elections, moderate nationalists believed they could outperform Sinn Féin candidates in all constituencies ahead of the 1959 election . The reason given was the low public interest in the Border Campaign and the impairment of everyday life in rural areas caused by the attacks. In the election, Sinn Féin lost more than half of the votes compared to 1955.

The Border Campaign officially ended on February 26, 1962 with a statement by the IRA that weapons and equipment had been deposited and that all fighting IRA members had been withdrawn. The reason given for the termination of the Border Campaign was the lack of support from the Irish people. The cessation of the attacks had been discussed in the IRA Army Council since January 1961 due to the lack of weapons and ammunition, financial problems and important members arrested. According to those involved, there was no serious opposition to the decision within the IRA leadership. A total of 17 people died between 1956 and 1961, including eleven Republicans and six RUC police officers. According to the Northern Irish Government, property damage was £ 1 million; additional security expenses were approximately £ 10 million.

consequences

The end of the Border Campaign marked a low point for the Republican movement. The IRA had shrunk to a small splinter group that was in a state of inner conflict. The leadership drew the lesson from the failure of the border campaign that the armed struggle was a wrong path and increasingly oriented itself towards left ideologies such as Marxism . The procurement of weapons was discontinued; many veterans turned their backs on the movement.

In February 1967 the Northern Irish civil rights movement was founded , which wanted to achieve an end to the discrimination against the Catholic minority. In the civil rights movement, representatives of the left wing of the Republicans were active without exerting a dominant influence on the movement. Attacks by loyalist extremists on civil rights demonstrations, encouraged by partisan behavior by the RUC, led to serious unrest , which the British Army deployed to end in August 1969. Previously, loyalist extremists had burned down entire streets in Belfast's Catholic quarters. In the absence of weapons, the Belfast IRA was hardly able to prevent the attacks and thus to fulfill its function as defender of the Catholic city district, which had existed since the 1920s. In late 1969, the IRA split into a Marxist-oriented wing, the Official IRA , and a larger, more violent and nationalist-oriented wing, the Provisional IRA , which became one of the main actors in the Northern Ireland conflict .

reviews

Michael Rainsborough , Professor of Strategic Theory at King's College , rated the IRA's strategy in the Border Campaign as " elitist ". Also due to the prohibition of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, no attempts were made to explain to its own supporters or the public what the use of force should achieve. The IRA found itself in a state of doctrinal immobility and was neither in a position to develop alternative, non-military options nor to adapt its own political goals to actual military capabilities. This led to the isolation and defeat of the IRA.

For Michael Farrell , a leading member of the Northern Irish civil rights movement, the IRA had limited itself to the politics of armed struggle. There was no significant political organization with which the supporters could be mobilized. Thus, no “mass resistance” developed, which was necessary to supplement a guerrilla war. For the Northern Irish government, the Border Campaign was only a nuisance, but not a threat, Farrell said.

Seán Cronin, the planner of the Border Campaign , named 1980 as the main reason for its failure that Sinn Féin could not benefit from the support of the minority in Northern Ireland and could not consolidate the support. In addition, the armament of the IRA was inadequate, there was a lack of money and the IRA was poorly organized in Northern Ireland and did not exist in many parts of the country. The IRA of the 1950s was "narrow-minded" and was unable to cope with the political and social conditions of the time. The use of force by the IRA was not in the interests of the minority in Northern Ireland, said Cronin.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 12 ff.
  2. ↑ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 15 f.
  3. ^ MLR Smith: Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement. Routledge, London 1995, ISBN 0-415-09161-6 , p. 66.
  4. ↑ Coogan, IRA , p. 328; Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 19f.
  5. ↑ Tim Pat Coogan: The IRA 15th edition, Fontana, London 1990, ISBN 0-00-636943-X , pp. 337ff; Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 24ff.
  6. ↑ Coogan, IRA , pp. 333, 340ff; Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 27ff.
  7. ^ Smith, Fighting for Ireland, p. 67.
  8. ↑ This assessment in Smith, Fighting for Ireland , p. 67f. and Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 53f.
  9. ↑ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 48-54.
  10. ^ Coogan, IRA , p. 383.
  11. ^ Coogan, IRA , pp. 335, 348, 383.
  12. ^ Coogan, IRA , pp. 384, 386f.
  13. ↑ Coogan, IRA , pp. 396ff. Kevin Haddick Flynn: Seáin South of Garryowen.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: History Ireland 1/15 (Retrieved November 7, 2011).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.historyireland.com  
  14. ^ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , 144.
  15. ^ Coogan, IRA , p. 388.
  16. ^ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 136, 152.
  17. ^ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , p. 150.
  18. ^ Coogan, IRA , p. 390.
  19. ↑ English praise . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1957, pp. 29-31 ( online ). Coogan, IRA , pp. 390, 412.
  20. ^ Smith, Fighting for Ireland , p. 71.
  21. ^ J. Bowyer Bell: The secret army. The IRA. 3rd edition, Transaction, New Brunswick 1997, ISBN 1-56000-901-2 , pp. 316ff.
  22. ↑ Coogan, IRA , pp. 399f.
  23. ^ Coogan, IRA , p. 385.
  24. ↑ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 179f.
  25. ^ Coogan, IRA , p. 418.
  26. ↑ Flynn, Soldiers of Folly , pp. 196f.
  27. ^ Coogan, IRA , p. 384.
  28. ^ Smith, Fighting for Ireland , p. 81.
  29. ↑ Smith, Fighting for Ireland , pp. 68f, 72. MLR Smith is the pseudonym of Rainborough (accessed November 27, 2011)
  30. ↑ Michael Farrell: Northern Ireland. The Orange state. 2nd edition, Pluto Press, London 1976, ISBN 0-86104-300-6 , p. 221.
  31. ^ Seán Cronin: Irish nationalism. A history of its roots and ideology. Academy Press, Dublin 1980, ISBN 0-906187-34-6 , quoted in Flynn, Soldiers of folly , pp. 201f.