Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade

The Provisional Irish Republican Army Belfast Brigade was the largest brigade in the organization and was based in Belfast . It was founded together with the Provisional IRA in 1969. Historically, it was divided into three battalions. There were two in the predominantly Catholic West and one for the rest of the scattered Catholic parts of the city. The first battalion operated in the western boroughs of Andersonstown, Lenadoon and Twinbrook. The second battalion was active in the Falls, Clonard and Ballymurphy neighborhoods, which are also in West Belfast. The third battalion operated in the Catholic and nationalist enclaves in the north (Ardoyne, New Lodge and Ligoniel), south (The Markets and Lower Ormeau) and in the east (Short Strand) of the city.

founding

In the aftermath of the 1969 Northern Irish riots, many Republicans in Belfast believed that the IRA had abandoned the Catholic and nationalist communities in the city by failing to prevent loyalists from attacking Catholic neighborhoods and streets and burning their homes . Billy McKee charged the then Brigade Commander Billy McMillen and the IRA leadership in Dublin . So they would have failed to get weapons, plans or personnel to defend the Catholic streets. On September 22nd, McKee and a number of other IRA armed men broke into a brigade staff meeting convened by McMillen and attempted to remove him as IRA commander in Belfast. With this demand they were unsuccessful, but both groups reached the compromise that the IRA in Belfast would no longer receive orders from the IRA leadership in Dublin. In December of that year, the IRA split into the Provisional IRA, which consisted of traditional militarists like McKee, and the Official IRA , which consisted of the remnants of the pre-split Marxist leadership and its supporters. McKee sided with the Provisionals and sat on their first Provisional Army Council, which was formed in September 1970. In 1969, nine out of thirteen IRA units in Belfast became Provisionals. That corresponded to around 120 activists and 500 supporters. After the IRA split in late 1969, the Belfast Brigade was one of the first active units of the Provisional IRA.

history

The beginning of the armed campaign

McKee became the first Officer Commanding (OC) of the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade. From the start there was an ongoing feud between McKee's men and his former comrades in the Official IRA as both factions vied for control of the nationalist territories. However, the Provisionals quickly gained the upper hand due to their profile as the more reliable defenders of the Catholic community.

Through an action he took on June 27, 1970, McKee himself made a major contribution to this reputation. After an Order of Orange parade in the Ardoyne area of ​​north Belfast, riots broke out in which three Protestants were killed in shootings between the Provisional IRA and loyalists. In response, loyalists prepared to attack the unprotected Catholic enclave of Short Strand in east Belfast. Upon hearing this, McKee drove to Short Strand with some armed men and took up a position at St. Matthew's Church. In the five hour shooting that followed, McKee was wounded and one of his men was killed along with at least four Protestant attackers.

The leadership of the Provisional IRA had planned from the beginning to expand its activities and to move from the initially purely defensive operations to an offensive campaign that was to end British rule in Northern Ireland. But this only became possible when, in the course of 1970, the relationship between the Catholic community and the British Army deteriorated rapidly. Previously, the army was viewed by most Catholics, in contrast to the Northern Irish police Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), as a neutral protective power against loyalist attacks and welcomed them when they were sent in 1969. This deterioration is due to the army's harsh treatment of Catholics and nationalists, as the army now often cracked down on the Republican paramilitaries. One example of this was the Lower Falls' 3-day curfew . Less than a week after the Provos “defended” Short Strand, the army sealed off the Lower Falls from July 5-7, 1970 with up to 3,000 British soldiers and carried out an aggressive search for weapons - an episode which occurred in the Popularly known as the rape of the falls . Five civilians were killed and more than 60 injured in fighting between the soldiers and the Official IRA (which was the dominant faction of the IRA in this part of Belfast at the time). More than 300 people were arrested, with the army spraying tens of thousands of CS gas in the area .

Following this incident, the Belfast Brigade shifted its strategy from "defense" to "retaliation" and in January 1971 began launching attacks on Army and RUC patrols. On February 5, 1971, the Belfast Provisionals killed Robert Curtis, the first British soldier. The shooter is said to have been Billy Reid , who was later killed in an exchange of fire with an army unit in the New Lodge area. In other clashes in the city during the same night, an IRA man and two Catholic civilians were killed in gun battles with the army. After that, exchanges of fire between the IRA in Belfast and the security forces were the order of the day. By July 1971, ten British soldiers had died in the city as a result of the IRA.

On April 15, 1971, McKee, along with Proinsias MacAirt, was arrested by the British Army for possession of a handgun. He was convicted of possession of the gun and imprisoned in Crumlin Road Jail. So Joe Cahill took over the Belfast Brigade as OC.

In the early years of the Northern Ireland conflict, the IRA in Belfast developed rapidly. In August 1969 the Belfast Brigade had only 50 active members. At the end of 1971 it had 1,200 members. These gave it a large, but also harder to control structure. During this time Joe Cahill authorized IRA bombings to begin, as well as the intensification of attacks on British forces and the RUC. His own headquarters were in a house in Andersonstown. From there he drove regularly through the city to coordinate the individual operations of the IRA.

Internment and the escalation of violence

On August 9, 1971, the British Army began Operation Demetrius , which meant the introduction of internment of suspects without charge ( internment policy ). This policy should help arrest the IRA leaders. The following day, Joe Cahill held a press conference at a school in the Ballymurphy neighborhood, stating that the operation was a failure. He said, "We have lost a brigade officer and a battalion officer. The rest are volunteers or private as they would say in the British Army." However, Cahill had to flee to the Republic of Ireland to avoid arrest. So Seamus Twomey took over Cahill's position as OC and thus command of the Belfast Brigade.

When British troops marched into the nationalist areas of Belfast to apprehend paramilitary suspects, there was violent rioting and fighting in those areas for the first three days following the introduction of the internment. A total of 17 people were killed in the clashes. These included two Provisional IRA members and three British soldiers. Later in 1971, 37 British soldiers and 97 civilians were killed. In 1972 the death toll increased even further. The period was also lossy for the IRA. The second battalion of the Belfast Brigade, for example, lost 20 IRA volunteers in the 12 months after August 1971 alone.

From June 26 to July 10, 1972, the Provisional IRA leadership declared a truce and held talks with the British government. But that truce broke when the IRA Belfast Brigade and the British Army faced a confrontation in Lenadoon, west Belfast. The local IRA insisted that Catholic families who had been forced to flee Protestant areas should be housed in houses that were evacuated by Protestant families who had fled the predominantly nationalist Lenadoon. The loyalist Ulster Defense Association (UDA), in turn, threatened to burn the houses down if they were occupied by Catholics. When the Catholic families tried to lodge there, the army stopped them, causing an uproar with the local Catholic population. Seamus Twomey, commander of the Belfast Brigade, said the British had violated the ceasefire. Shortly afterwards, his men opened fire on the soldiers. Sean MacStiofain, the IRA chief of staff , officially announced the end of the ceasefire that same night in response to the events in Belfast.

In addition to the attacks on the British Army, the bombings on commercial targets such as shops and companies were a central part of the Belfast Brigade campaign. The most devastating example of the Provisionals' series of attacks on commercial targets was Bloody Friday on July 21, 1972, in which 22 bombs exploded in one hour in Belfast city center, killing nine people and injuring 130. Although most of the IRA attacks on commercial targets, according to the organization, were not carried out to kill or injure people, they kept happening. Another example was the 1972 attack on the Abercorn restaurant in Belfast, which killed two people and wounded 130.

Setbacks - Operation Motorman and arrests

By 1972, the Provos de facto controlled many nationalist areas of Belfast and set up permanent crews for checkpoints and barricades. But these no go areas were retaken by the British Army in a major operation called Operation Motorman in response to the 1972 Bloody Friday bombings . The British security forces now began to build fortified posts in Republican West Belfast. In doing so, they considerably restricted the IRA's freedom of movement. After this setback, Seamus Twomey, who authorized Bloody Friday, was replaced as brigade commander by Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell (Adam's deputy). Adams held this post for ten months before being arrested and interned by British forces in July 1973. The British managed to arrest the next three commanders of the Belfast Brigade over the course of the next year: Ivor Bell, who held the post from July 1973 to January 1974, and Sean Convey, who managed to do so only two months before resigning in March 1974 was arrested, and Brendan Hughes, who was arrested in May 1974. These setbacks were indicative of the pressure on the IRA in Belfast, which was hit hard by arrests during this period.

After 1972, the number of British soldiers killed by the IRA in Belfast plummeted. In 1972 the Provisional IRA killed 145 members of the security forces, most of them in Belfast. By 1974 that number had reduced to 40. The Belfast Brigade then changed tactics to compensate for the heavy casualties or prisoners it had suffered up to that point. Due to the numerous arrests and the increased army presence, the brigade refrained from open confrontations with the army and replaced them with attacks by snipers. In addition, the revulsion in the population caused by Bloody Friday forced the Provisionals to temporarily refrain from further car bomb attacks.

The 1975 ceasefire

Partly as a result of the arrest losses suffered during this period, and partly as a result of secret negotiations between the IRA leadership and the British government, the Provisional IRA announced a second armistice from January 1975 to January 1976. The Belfast Brigade for the most part welcomed this lull. Under the terms of the ceasefire, it ended offensive operations against the British forces. In return, the British administration financed so-called republican incident centers in nationalist parts of Belfast, which were supposed to control the ceasefire and to which Catholic residents could complain about the security forces. However, these actually developed into offices for Sinn Féin . Nonetheless, there was hope among the security forces that this would advance the development of the political wing within the republican movement and that it would triumph over its military wing. But in practice the ceasefire did little to reduce violence in Belfast. The loyalist paramilitaries feared collusion between the IRA and the government. They intensified their murders of Catholic civilians and killed more than 300 between 1974 and 1976. Billy McKee, who was back in command of the Belfast Brigade after his imprisonment at that time, responded with retaliatory attacks on Protestant civilians. The IRA carried out a total of 91 sectarian murders between 1974 and 1976, many of them in Belfast. One of the most notorious attacks occurred on August 13, 1975 when an IRA team led by Brendan McFarlane machine gun gunfire at Bayardo's Bar in Belfast's Shankill Road . Five people were killed and 40 injured. The attack was intended to target members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) who allegedly went to the bar, but only one of the dead had paramilitary connections.

McKee was heavily criticized by many Republicans for slipping into a sectarian murder campaign with the Belfast IRA. His critics, however, were even more angry about an order in which he called for an attack on the still existing Official IRA in Belfast in mid-1975 in order to finally crush that organization. The ensuing feud resulted in the deaths of 11 Republican paramilitaries and a number of nationalist civilians, including B. the head of the Falls Road Taxi Association, whose business is linked to the Provisionals. In addition, McKee's critics, most notably Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison , alleged that discipline in the Belfast Brigade collapsed during this period, causing some of the IRA volunteers to slide into organized crime. In addition, the British intelligence services were able to recruit more informants within the IRA and gather information during the ceasefire.

This is why many IRA volunteers in Belfast welcomed the end of the armistice in January 1976 with almost relief.

reorganization

Many members in the IRA argued that the ceasefire almost resulted in the movement's defeat. A group of young Provisionals from Belfast, led by Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell, both released from internment in 1976, were determined to reorganize the IRA. First they ousted Billy McKee as OC of the Belfast Brigade. They accused him of demoralizing the brigade and discrediting it through the sectarian and intra-republican feuds.

With their newly gained influence throughout the IRA, they then reformed the old IRA structures. The number of volunteers who participated in attacks was significantly reduced. They also organized them into closed cells ( Active Service Units ) so that the information an IRA man had about the organization was limited to only his 5 or 6 cell members. This process also greatly reduced the number of active IRA volunteers in Belfast. At its peak in the early 1970s, the brigade had up to 1,500 members. In the early 1980s, the number dropped to around 100 men in Active Service Units and another 200–300 in supply units . The cell structure also went hand in hand with greater control of the brigade leadership over the volunteers, as all weapons were administered by a quartermaster who liaised with each unit and could only be used if the brigade leadership approved the operations.

Hunger strike period

The IRA's new cell structure was partially undermined by the 1981 hunger strike . During the mass protests that arose from the solidarity of the population with the prisoners, IRA members in Belfast were asked to lead the riots against the RUC and army in nationalist areas. As a result, UK security forces managed to identify and obtain information on many IRA members, which had proven difficult after the cell structure was in place.

Supergrasses

In the 1980s, the Belfast Brigade through the use of special informer of the security forces, was the so-called super grasses ( Super telltale ), hit hard. These were IRA men who, after being arrested, allowed themselves to be recruited as spies by the RUC for fear of long prison sentences or who were offered immunity from prosecution in return for testifying against other IRA men. Although there were ultimately few final convictions of IRA men through the Supergrass system, it did result in many IRA volunteers being arrested and imprisoned for long periods while waiting to be tried.

The tactic was first used in 1981 after the arrest of Belfast IRA man Christopher Black. After receiving assurances that he would be safe from law enforcement, Black made testimony that resulted in 38 arrests. On August 5, 1983, 22 members of the Provisional IRA were sentenced to a total of 4,000 years in prison on Black's charges. However, 18 of these convictions were overturned on appeal on July 17, 1986, as the judge responsible often did not recognize the statements of a single man as the only evidence against the accused without further evidence. Up to 600 paramilitaries have been arrested under the supergrass regime. Many of them were from the IRA Belfast Brigade.

The subsequent fear of informers in the Belfast Brigade, but also the infiltration by the security forces, did much to reduce the effectiveness of their units. While the Belfast Brigade was the most active of the four brigades in the 1970s, that changed in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus the rural IRA units, such as the East Tyrone Brigade and South Armagh Brigade , became more and more important within the organization.

In 2005, Denis Donaldson , a former IRA man and senior Sinn Féin representative in Belfast, was 'outed' as an informant. He was later murdered in his vacation home in Donegal . The highest ranking alleged informant in the Belfast IRA is Freddie Scappaticci , who was second in command of the IRA Internal Security Unit from 1980 to 1990. Scappattici denies the allegations that he is an informant to this day. But the fact that the allegations are credible shows how the extent of informants permeated the IRA in Belfast.

1980s and 1990s

In 1988, three unarmed IRA members of the Belfast Brigade were killed by the Special Air Service (SAS) while preparing an attack in Gibraltar . Their shared funeral in Milltown Cemetery was attacked by a loyalist fanatic named Michael Stone . He killed three cemetery visitors, one of whom was a member of the IRA. At the funeral of this dead volunteer, two armed British soldiers, who were out of service at the time, drove into the funeral procession. They were beaten and then killed by IRA members ( corporals killings ).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the loyalist paramilitaries re-intensified their murders of Catholics. In response, the IRA attempted to assassinate loyalist leaders in Belfast. She wanted to avoid sectarian retaliation against Protestant civilians like the one that occurred in the 1970s. However, in an attempt to wipe out the leadership of the Ulster Defense Association in 1993, the brigade committed one of the worst atrocities in the entire IRA campaign. Two volunteers from Ardoyne, West Belfast, were assigned to bomb a fish shop on Shankill Road because Johnny Adair and other UDA men were meeting there regularly. However, the bomb exploded prematurely, killing one of the bombers, Thomas Begley, and nine Protestant civilians. Another 58 were injured. The loyalist paramilitaries weren't in the building.

The spiral of violence created by the murders between the IRA and the loyalists did not end until August 1994 after the IRA announced a unilateral ceasefire.

Despite the termination of this armistice by the IRA in 1996-1997, the Belfast Brigade remained militarily inactive during this period.

today

After the renewed ceasefire in 1997, which continues to this day, the IRA Belfast Brigade has largely ceased to conduct armed activities. However, she continued to use her weapons for a few actions. In late 1997 and early 1998, loyalist paramilitaries shot dead several Catholic civilians. This was in response to the killing of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) leader Billy Wright, who was murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). The IRA in Belfast then killed a senior member of the Ulster Defense Association (UDA) in retaliation .

In 2004 the brigade was accused of having carried out the Northern Bank robbery, the largest bank robbery in Great Britain or Ireland of all time. However, this has never been proven. Furthermore, in late 2004, several IRA members killed the Catholic Robert McCartney in a pub brawl in Short Strand. Afterward, other members of the IRA destroyed the evidence of the murder and intimidated McCartney's relatives, who demanded that the killers be convicted. In the summer of 2005, the IRA disarmed almost completely. Although details of this process have not been disclosed, most of the Belfast Brigade's weapons are believed to have been destroyed.

losses

A total of 105 members of the PIRA Belfast Brigade were killed during the Northern Ireland conflict. Of them, 19 were from the first battalion, 41 from the second battalion, and 45 from the third battalion.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Taylor: Provos The IRA & Sinn Féin . Bloomsbury Publishing , 1997, ISBN 0-7475-3818-2 , pp. 60-61.
2. ↑ Provos The IRA & Sinn Féin , pp. 65–66
3. ^ Eamon Mallie, Patrick Bishop: The Provisional IRA, p. 141.
4. ^ Richard Deutsch: Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA . Pan Books, 2003, ISBN 0-330-49388-4 , p. 112.
5. ^ Provos The IRA & Sinn Féin , pp. 77-78
6. ↑ English, pp. 134-135
7. ↑ Mallie, Bishop, the Provisional IRA, pp. 175-176
8. ^ Mallie, Bishop, p. 182
9. ^ Ed Moloney: A Secret History of the IRA . Penguin Books , 2002, ISBN 0-141-01041-X , p. 98.
10. ↑ Peter Taylor: Brits . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001, ISBN 0-7475-5806-X , pp. 119-120.
11. ↑ Joe Cahill . The Times . July 26, 2004. Retrieved March 19, 2007.
12. ^ Moloney, p. 103
13. ↑ Mallie, Bishop, p. 188
14. ^ Same this, p. 192
15. ^ Moloney, p. 116
16. ↑ Mallie Bishop, p. 215.
17. ^ Moloney, Secret History of the IRA, p. 118
18. ^ Bishop, Mallie, Provisional IRA, p. 247
19. ↑ ibid
20. ^ O'Brien, The Long War, p. 160