Bosi Report

Social Science History 36:3 (Fall 2012)DOI 10.1215/01455532-1595390 © 2012 by Social Science History Association

Special Section: Cultures of Radicalization:

Discourse and Practices of Political Violence and Terrorism

Lorenzo Bosi

Explaining Pathways to Armed Activism in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, 1969–1972

In this article three pathways into armed activism are identified among those who joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1972. The accounts of former volunteers generally suggest that for those who were already involved in the Republican movement before 1969, a trajectory of mobili-zation emerged because of the long- standing counterhegemonic consciousness present in their homes, which in turn strongly influenced them as committed Republican militants. For those who joined after 1969 and had previously been involved in other political activities, mobilization was a result of a particular transformative event that triggered the belief that armed struggle was the only approach capable of bringing change in the new sociopolitical situation of the time. For the majority, that is, those who joined after 1969 at a very young age without any previous involvement in organized networks of activism, it began as a more abruptly acquired sense of obligation to defend their own community and retaliate against the Northern Ireland establishment, the Loyalists, and the British army. Overall, the accounts of former volunteers generally suggest that Republican volunteers were fighting first and foremost to reclaim dignity, build honor,

348 Social Science History

and instill a sense of pride in themselves and their community through armed activism. In these terms, the choice of joining the PIRA was justified not as a mere reproduction of an ideological alignment to the traditional Republican aim of achieving Irish reuni-fication but as part of a recognition struggle. At an analytic level, this article illus-trates the utility of a multimechanisms interpretative framework. And it contributes to broadening the empirical basis by presenting and analyzing a series of 25 semistruc-tured interviews with former PIRA volunteers.

It is only twenty- five years later [1995] that I looked at a school photograph, I think I was ten or eleven years of age, and there were twenty- eight kids there in the photograph, and I looked and only seven of them joined up. If we all come from the same community, we had all the same experiences, why then didn’t the rest make the same decision I did? Why do certain people say, “I need to do something”? And why do other people say, “No, I need to raise my children and I want to go about my life”? I don’t know why. There is nobody that can answer this question. Why did you join, whereas your peers didn’t join? I guess they didn’t have the same sense of patriotism. By acci-dent maybe they didn’t join, by accident I did. . . . There is no science to it, why so and so joined and the other didn’t? I think it is an individual choice, that you say, “I need to do something, I am interested,” where other people didn’t. (Interview no. 15)

In seeking to explain the pathways of those who joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1972, this article illustrates the utility, at an analytic level, of a multimechanisms inter-pretative framework. The literature on political violence and terrorism has, for the most part, erroneously treated individuals who engage in politically violent organizations as overwhelmingly identical (one- dimensional per-spective). However, in reality the picture is much more composite. There is no static and clear- cut profile that permits the identification of potential individuals who might opt for the use of actions associated with an armed struggle (Crenshaw 2000; della Porta 1992b, 1995).1 As distinct causal fac-tors, identical social backgrounds or a single motivation alone cannot ade-quately explain why individuals engage in political violence in an armed group (Viterna 2006). Despite the recognition that armed activism is a com-plex, multifaceted, and conjunctural phenomenon, scholars have made broad assertions regarding why individuals join violent political groups and organi-zations. In fact, there are many explanations for why an individual becomes

Pathways to Armed Activism 349

involved with political violence, as he or she is influenced by multiple and diverse motivational factors with no single root cause. Reducing this com-plexity tends to portray armed activists as homogeneous groups, yet they vary significantly according to the circumstances, backgrounds, and disposi-tions of the individual actors as well as in relation to the local context and the time of an individual’s mobilization (Horgan 2008a). To gain a more accurate picture of this complex phenomenon than monocausal explanations usually offer, given that one factor on its own cannot adequately explain variations in individuals’ decisions to participate, I propose adopting a multimechanisms perspective to look for different pathways toward armed struggle (della Porta 1992b, 1995; Horgan 2008a; Viterna 2006). In this work I will look for path-ways in the individuals’ processes of becoming armed militants. Explaining pathways to armed activism will help us better understand the microfounda-tions of political violence, which are fundamental if we want to develop a dynamic and interactive approach to the study of the radicalization of politi-cal conflicts at both macro- and mesolevels. At the end of the 1960s political contention emerged in Northern Ireland over the civil rights movement’s claim to make the regional political system more open and fair, a claim that the Unionist establishment and the Loyal-ist countermovement resisted with harsh state repression and open violent confrontation, respectively (Bosi 2006, 2008). This sociopolitical crisis in the region opened the space, first, for extreme communal violence during the summer of 1969 and, then, for the emergence of the PIRA at the end of 1969 as a result of a split from the Official Irish Republican Army (see appendix 1 for a glossary of case- specific terminology).2 It is difficult to explain armed activism mobilization in the PIRA at its early stage, 1969–72, in terms of single pathways, since every former vol-unteer I met had a unique story to tell about his or her own path toward participation in the armed struggle. For those who joined the Republican movement before 1969, a trajectory of mobilization began out of a long- standing counterhegemonic consciousness in their homes. Family ties were key vehicles for armed activism recruitment. These volunteers entered the PIRA in the immediate period after the split with the Official IRA, as they perceived it to be more able to continue the traditional struggle of fighting to free Ireland from British imperialism. For those who joined after 1969 and had previously been involved in other political activities, it began with the belief that the armed struggle of the PIRA was the only form of action


capable of bringing sociopolitical transformation in the new regional situa-tion of the time. The decision to join the PIRA, and thus the conversion from more conventional forms of participation to political violence, was gener-ally triggered by one particular, transformative event. For those who joined after 1969 at a very young age without any previous involvement in an orga-nized network of activism, it began with experiencing state repression or vio-lent sectarian attacks by loyalists rather than the holy grail of the Republic of 1916. Along with their peers in the neighborhood, they felt compelled to join the PIRA as a means of defending and avenging their community rather than for more general political reasons. They say that they acquired that only at a later stage as a result of their socialization into the organization as well as from time spent in jail. Compared with those who followed the two other pathways, the young girls and women from my sample seem particu-larly present among those who mobilized because of what was happening on the ground. Identifying three general pathways to armed activism does not mean that all my respondents mirrored only those factors peculiar to a cer-tain pathway or that those factors were equally relevant for each volunteer. Four of the interviewees (one female among them) were already involved in the IRA before 1969 and later moved to the PIRA at the time of the split with the Official IRA (Interviews no. 1, 6, 11, 17). Another 6 (2 females among them) joined the PIRA between 1970 and 1972, but they had previously been involved in other sociopolitical activities (Interviews no. 2, 5, 18–21). The remaining 17 interviewees (7 females among them) joined the Provisionals after 1969 as a first experience of militancy (Interviews no. 3–4, 7–10, 12–16, 22–25) (see appendix 3).3 While some basic mechanisms are common to all three paths, the domi-nant individual motivations are different, as are the recruitment processes, the types of networks mobilized, the speed and dynamics of the mobiliza-tion, the external enemy identified during the mobilization process, and the effects of repression on individuals. In calling attention to these aspects, I set this work inside an approach that speaks the language of social move-ments and contentious politics and might generate new insights. Further-more, I will argue that in becoming involved in the PIRA’s armed struggle, a widespread need to take action was coupled among my respondents, in varying degrees, with family tradition in the Republican movement, strong ideological motives, transformative events, instrumentality, local community networks, and a sense of defense and revenge. Through the armed struggle,


volunteers were looking to reclaim a sense of dignity, honor, and pride for themselves and for their community. They thought themselves capable of creating conditions for social transformation or at least of giving a testimony of their oppositional behavior toward what they perceived as irresolvable injustices committed against the nationalist community in Northern Ire-land. At the outbreak of the conflict young nationalists were joining armed activism not just to achieve a united Ireland free from British rule but pri-marily to find some form of expression to manifest their own views in the changed political context. In its early years, much PIRA recruitment rested on the armed group’s course of action rather than on a coherent persuasive argument. The armed struggle became the only meaningful environment in which to fully foster an overwhelming sense of empowerment for many indi-viduals. In these terms the majority choice of joining the PIRA was justi-fied not as a mere reproduction of an ideological alignment to the traditional Republican aim of achieving Irish reunification but as part of a recognition struggle at the individual and community levels.4 Among the literature on the Northern Ireland conflict that engages in interviews involving active and/or former Republican volunteers (Alonso 2007; Bean and Hayes 2002; Shirlow et al. 2010; White 1993), this article is original in carefully specifying the mobilization differences among those who became PIRA volunteers between 1969 and 1972 and in disclosing the recog-nition struggle behind most of those who initially mobilized. The article begins by presenting a concise discussion of the data sources used to analyze the case study and a critique of the methodological approaches prevalent in the field. As my analysis relies principally on semistructured interviews, I have focused extensively on this research method. The period between 1921 and 1972 is briefly introduced as a means of providing the reader with an understanding of the broader historical and political contex-tual conditions in which the PIRA emerged. The remainder of this article is devoted to explaining the three pathways of those who joined the PIRA in Northern Ireland by 1972. A special section is dedicated to how armed activ-ism was seen by many volunteers as a possible way to stand up (figuratively speaking), take control of their own lives, battle misrecognized identities, obtain a political voice, and perhaps change the course of history—in other words, what the literature names a recognition struggle. In the last section I set out some tentative conclusions.


Methodology

In this study, using a combination of data- collection techniques, I have drawn on a variety of sources, the first three dating from the period in question and the remainder compiled later: (1) newspaper and magazine accounts;5 (2) archival sources (posters, leaflets, formal communiqués of the organiza-tion, pamphlets, etc.);6 (3) government documents (parliamentary debates and official government reports, public police and court records);7 (4) 25 semistructured interviews with PIRA volunteers from Northern Ireland who entered the organization between 1969 and 1972; (5) autobiographical and biographical narratives and published interviews of IRA volunteers;8 and (6) systematic consultation of secondary sources. In bringing together these sources, the “triangulation” technique I have used not only provides a rich picture of the pathways to armed activism in this empirical case but also complements and remedies the individual sources’ weaknesses by corrobo-rating one another. Most literature on political violence and terrorism has features of ques-tionable scientific merit. By and large it relies on poor research methods, shows a dependence on secondary and even tertiary accounts, and exhibits a general failure to undertake primary research (Ranstorp 2006; Silke 2004). This has left most of the literature deeply removed from its research sub-ject, since “not talking to terrorists seems to have become established as a source of scholarly credibility” (Brannan et al. 2001: 7). We need instead to interact and engage in our fieldwork research with those who are affiliated with violent political organizations if we hope to understand and explain this social phenomenon in its specific context (della Porta 1992a: 4). This obvi-ously poses important ethical and methodological challenges for researchers and their work, which we need to be aware of to defend the scientific credi-bility of our research (Punch 1994).9 In this study I seek to rectify the lack in empirical foundations “of pri-mary data based on interviews and life histories” of those engaged in politi-cally violent organizations (Crenshaw 2000: 410). Conducting semistruc-tured interviews is particularly useful for understanding the critical learning process that leads individuals to participate in armed action as well as for helping to “bring human agency to the center of movement analysis. Quali-tative interviews are a window into the everyday world of activists, and they generate representations that embody the subjects’ voices, minimising, at


least as possible, the voice of the researcher” (Blee and Taylor 2002: 96). These interviews were not conducted to denounce, absolve, condemn, legit-imize, and accumulate facts or to reconstruct a possible objective “truth” about some particular event (Passerini 1996). Instead, they were specifically designed to facilitate an understanding of the interviewees’ processes of radi-calization at that time and their social constructions of reality, their expecta-tions, their micronetworking, the (critical) events surrounding their decision to adopt violent tactics, and the experiences in which they were involved or they took part, together with the process of ideological and symbolic justi-fication that lay behind their decisions (Blee and Taylor 2002; della Porta 1992a). An initial image of the legitimation of violence and its use in the memory of former armed activists is also provided. Given that the respondents were recalling why, almost 40 years earlier, they had joined the IRA, it is reasonable to wonder whether these inter-view accounts reflect present interests, selective memories, and self- serving reinterpretations (Bottger and Strobl 2003; Horgan 2008b).10 Such problems of validity, reliability, and time bias have been minimized in this study, as the analysis relies on a combination of data- collection techniques, as men-tioned above, that permitted multiple checks (contemporary and present- day sources, unobtrusive and face- to- face techniques, state and nonstate sources, nationalist and unionist sources, and sources originating from dif-ferent geographic locations). Furthermore, Robert White (2007) determined, by means of an interesting empirical verification—that is, by interviewing his respondents twice, the second time a decade after the first—that retro-spective reports of behavior are relatively consistent over time and that they do not seem to be influenced by present- day social contexts. Finally, the present situation in Northern Ireland seems to have favored a fruitful dia-logue among the different strands of the broader Republican community, which has helped create a more pragmatic self- critical reading of the past than pure ideological self- justification. The 25 semistructured interviews with former rank- and- file members of the PIRA were conducted during four field trips to the region between 2007 and 2008. They lasted between one and two hours; were digitally recorded, by prior agreement from the respondents; and were transcribed for analy-sis. The interviewees were not chosen randomly but were arranged by the staff of the Coiste na n- Iarchimi,11 who identified possible respondents from


backgrounds as diverse as possible (10 out of 25 were women who in the late 1960s and early 1970s joined the long- standing women’s Republican organi-zation Cumann na mBan). I had emphasized that I was interested in inter-viewing Northern Ireland Republican volunteers who entered the movement between the mid- 1960s and the end of 1972. I have not taken into consider-ation potential activists, such as friends or relatives of those I have met, who did not participate; those who between 1969 and 1972 decided to join the Official IRA; or those who decided to move or stayed in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. I have sampled my data on the dependent variable, because my interest here is to explain different paths of mobilization among those who embarked on armed activism in the Provisionals and not which kind of individuals did. Unlike previous research on the PIRA that has used semistructured interviews, my project focuses specifically on rank- and- file militants. By not reproducing any scripted leadership thought, the former armed activists I have met provided a wide array of voices, which helped make different experiences, criticisms, and viewpoints emerge. While I have tried to analyze motives for people’s participation separately, they often com-bine in complicated ways. In fact, where some quotations are rightly posi-tioned, others might have been repeated in these paragraphs several times because of the multiplicity of participants’ reasons for involvement. I met each interviewee at a location of his or her choice, and prior to conducting the interview, I informed him or her of my academic affiliation. I also informed him or her of the interview’s purpose and its four sections: (1) his or her life before joining the PIRA; (2) his or her pathway to activism in the PIRA armed campaign; (3) his or her experiences and commitment as a member of the PIRA during the struggle, with particular reference to time spent in jail; and (4) his or her assessment of the struggle’s efficacy and of its legacy.12 Every interview followed this scheme. The respondents were also informed that they could decline to answer any questions that made them uncomfortable and that they could discuss and add further suggestions to what they thought important in relation to the initial purpose of the inter-view (Smith 1995). This article is based on information taken primarily from sections 1 and 2 of the interviews (see appendix 2). The quotes in this work are taken from 20 of the 25 interviews I conducted. To ensure their ano-nymity, I identify the respondents only by interview number. Summary char-acteristics of the respondents are presented in appendix 3. By the time of the interviews, most of them had served prison sentences. Some were released


only after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Fourteen individual inter-views were conducted as well as six with two respondents each time. Inter-views with more than one interviewee did not negatively affect the results of the interview; in some cases, the opposite can be said. My attempt to better understand the individual pathways into armed activism in Northern Ireland during the early 1970s by engaging in construc-tive dialogue with the research subjects should not be mistaken for a form of connivance with the activities of the PIRA (Esseveled and Eyerman 1992). The fact that in recent years the regional cycle of political violence has ended provides a more congenial atmosphere for fieldwork. The classical problems related to this topic—personal safety, good faith, practical issues, and politi-cal sensitivity (Feenan 2002; Sluka 1995)—seem to have lessened.

The Context: Northern Ireland in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s

The Northern Ireland regime, formally dependent on London, was granted home rule, with its own parliament and government at Stormont in Belfast, in December 1920. The question of whether to remain part of the United Kingdom, the Unionist position, or to be included in an all- Ireland state, the position of the minority nationalist community, loomed over Northern Ire-land from the outset. The Ulster Unionist Party’s position as uninterrupted regional power from the regime’s inception until its suspension by London in 1972 was facilitated by its sociopolitical domination of the disregarded dis-loyal nationalist community, which in turn refused from the outset to accept the legitimacy of the Stormont regime (O’Leary and McGarry 1993). It was only during the 1960s, in response to a series of societal and political changes in the aftermath of the new political settlement that followed World War II (Bosi 2008), that different strands of political actors started to challenge the institutional practices that favored the unionist hegemony while deliber-ately avoiding the issue of partition. Most of them were civil rights activists, primarily from the nationalist community, who started peacefully enough before initiating a campaign of street marches and demonstrations (Bosi 2006, 2011). The street confrontation between civil rights activists, on the one hand, and the Northern Ireland police and the Loyalist countermove-ment, on the other, resulted in an increase in communal violence by 1969. Events culminated on August 12 that year, when the traditional Loyalist


Apprentice Boys March in Derry triggered three days of rioting among the Northern Ireland police and nationalist residents in what became known as the “Battle of the Bogside,” after the Bogside housing neighborhood where the trouble centered (O’Dochartaigh 2005 [1977]: 104–14). In an evening broadcast on August 13, Jack Lynch, the Irish prime minister, stated that the Irish Republic “can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse” (quoted in White 1984: 55). Other demonstrations were organized across Northern Ireland to divert police resources from Derry. The violence soon spread to Belfast, where, unlike Derry, nationalists were a distinct minority and lived in enclaves surrounded by unionists. The effects of Lynch’s broadcast in Northern Ireland and what seemed to be a premedi-tated northern nationalist community uprising were profoundly destabiliz-ing, as unionists genuinely feared that a plan had been organized to end parti-tion and that they were facing an IRA- led rebellion (Galliher and Degregory 1985). Fearing a nationalist insurrection, the Northern Ireland police and Loyalist mobs attacked nationalist neighborhoods in Belfast to reassert order in the region and to fight the perception that it was a community “under siege” (Patterson and Kaufman 2007). The ensuing street battles in Belfast resulted in 7 deaths (5 nationalists and 2 unionists), 154 gunshot wounds, and 745 other injuries. Moreover, 1,505 nationalist families were forced out of their homes by fire damage or intimidation, in contrast to 315 unionist fami-lies, between July and September (Scarman 1972: 9–11). On August 14, given the breakdown in relations between the regional authorities and the national-ist community, the British government reversed its decades- long policy and agreed to the deployment of the British army in the streets to restore law and order. The Troubles, the euphemistic term for the years between 1969 and 1998, when 3,700 individuals lost their lives and more than 40,000 were injured, had just begun. Traditionalist Republicans who had left the IRA after the movement’s involvement in a program of social agitation and left- wing politics during the 1960s13 returned to the fold in the wake of the August violence. They started working to remove the Dublin leadership, which they deemed at fault for leaving nationalist neighborhoods in Northern Ireland defenseless when communal violence exploded (An Phoblacht 1970b). During the IRA con-vention in December 1969, they seceded and created the Provisional Army Council, having refused to accept a vote in favor of ending the policy of abstentionism in the Dáil (the parliament of the Republic of Ireland) and of


entering a “national liberation front,” an anti- imperialist alliance of all “radi-cal left” groups. The first statement produced by the PIRA on January 17, 1970, detailed the reasons for the split with what became known as the Offi-cial IRA: the attempt to end abstentionism, the deliberate marginalization of the military approach, the failure to abolish Stormont, the determination to set up a national liberation front, and illegal internal disciplinary meth-ods (Irish Republican Publishing Bureau 1973: 10). What initially bound the Republican traditionalist leadership and young northern nationalists together was their antagonism toward conventional politics and their belief in the necessity of the armed struggle both to drive the British out of North-ern Ireland and to defend nationalist areas (An Phoblacht 1970c). In March 1970 the Provisionals’ aims were “to end foreign rule in Ireland, to establish a 32- county Democratic Socialist Republic, based on the Proclamation of 1916, to restore the Irish language and culture to a position of strength, and to promote a social order based on justice and Christian principles which will give everyone a just share of the nation’s wealth” (An Phoblacht 1970a). During the first few months of 1970, Provisional leaders waited with prudence, convinced that they did not have sufficient support among the nationalist community to sustain them in an armed campaign. The leader-ship’s first objectives were then to rearm the organization and to train the new young recruits (Mac Stíofáin 1975: 143).14 Winning back support from the nationalist community was also a key way to build a much stronger base from which to launch the planned offensive for the abolition of the Stormont regime, to drive the British out of Northern Ireland, and to bring about the unification of Ireland (English 2003: 125). Although for the most part the PIRA leadership actually tried to restrain young nationalists from rioting with the Loyalists and the British army, from the middle of 1970 it also pro-voked street disturbances with the deliberate intent of weakening the hitherto relatively cordial relationship between the British army and the broad nation-alist community, knowing full well the benefits it would reap in terms of sup-port and recruits. However, it also provoked the security services with the aim of marginalizing the political competition (the Official IRA and the civil rights movement) within the nationalist working- class enclaves. In doing so, they started to secure a strong political foothold, or at least what the British cabinet referred to as “benevolent neutrality” (National Archives 1972), in those nationalist areas from which they would steadily gain new recruits and support in the years to come, making them progressively the dominant force,


at least militarily (Burton 1978). Now strengthened, the PIRA was ready to start a full offensive by October 1970, beginning with a bombing campaign directed primarily at unionist businesses (153 bombs by the end of the year). This had the double intent of making the presence of a government impos-sible in Northern Ireland by breaking the will of Stormont and Westminster and of bombing commercial targets. On October 30, 1971, in a statement from the PIRA Army Council (1971) that appeared in the Republican News, the movement formally announced that it was entering its “third phase,” all- out resistance to British forces. The two groups that emerged out of the December 1969 split initiated a battle to win support from among the broad Republican constituency, which further augmented the process of radicalization. Against its formal nonsec-tarian, nonmilitarist, and gradualist- reformist policies, the Official IRA was drawn into a military campaign from late 1970 until it declared a cease- fire on May 29, 1972, to keep up with the PIRA, especially in Northern Ireland. Part of this campaign involved violence directed at the PIRA, which responded in kind. What had started as a campaign of violence developed into a full- scale feud (Bishop and Mallie 1987: 121–26, 161–63; Patterson 1989: 125–60).15 A further factor in radicalization, producing an outward spiral of vio-lence, was the action and counteraction between the PIRA (the Official IRA only to a lesser extent) and the British army. Wide and indiscriminate repres-sive measures alienated the whole nationalist community from the British army and included the Falls Road curfew, where soldiers sealed off a Repub-lican area of Belfast in July 1970 for two days, refusing to let people leave their homes during a house- to- house search (Warner 2006); the intern-ment one morning in August 1971 of over 350 people, who were locked up without trial (English 2003: 139–42); and Bloody Sunday in Derry in June 1972, when British soldiers killed 14 and wounded many civil rights pro-testers (O’Dochartaigh 2005 [1997]: chap. 8). These measures resulted in the recruitment of many new members and strengthened rather than under-mined the PIRA and its capacity for political violence. In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the Stormont regime collapsed in April 1972, and direct rule was introduced from Westminster.


Armed Activism Mobilization in the PIRA, 1969–1972

Many teenagers and young adults from the nationalist community decided to join the PIRA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, despite warnings that they would risk their lives, prison sentences, or the disruption of their private lives and those of their families and loved ones. The recollections of one former volunteer, who joined the IRA in 1966 and then in 1969, after the split, moved to the PIRA, indicate what new recruits faced:

Well, when the commemoration of the Easter Rising of 1916 was happen-ing, there was an awareness of Republicanism within nationalist areas. I was approached to join the Irish Republican Army. I went to a number of meetings for a number of months, and then me and another fellow were asked to join the Irish Republican Army. I was very honoured to be asked. I went through recruiting classes, which lasted ten weeks. There were twenty/thirty of us at the recruitment class for ten weeks. And every week three or four dropped out. At the end of the ten weeks there were three left—because you were told that everything was bad, you were told you were ending in jail, you were being killed, you would be on the run, you would have no friends. That is a big decision to make. If you are not prepared to live with that, then don’t go ahead with it. So I took the declaration in front of the tricolour as a member of the Irish Republican Army. And I remember always that night coming out from the declaration and feeling ten foot tall because I joined the Irish Repub-lican Army. Joining the Republican Army was for me the ultimate; it was a proud moment. . . . It was a combination of family background and [the] 1966 commemoration. It is akin to tradition. I just felt part of it. (Interview no. 6)

Although official numbers regarding the PIRA’s volunteers have not been made public, reliable studies estimate that between 1969 and 1996 a total of 10,000 people came through its ranks (O’Leary 2005: 233–34). In Belfast alone the PIRA increased its membership from around 50 in 1970 to 1,200 at the end of 1971. So why did so many men and women join the PIRA in spite of the risks? Certainly, the pride of becoming part of a per-ceived “glorious” tradition and a respected organization had a role in moti-vating many, as the quotation above shows. This theme runs consistently


through my interviews with Provisional volunteers who joined the IRA before the 1969 split, and it relates to the family history of these recruits. All of these volunteers were raised in families steeped in Republican tradition. The same cannot be said for all of those who joined later with the outbreak of the Troubles. A strong family connection with the IRA’s struggle, dating back even to the early twentieth century, had in fact a special importance in fostering a certain outlook on history and politics. This outlook revolved around such ideas and values as Irish nationhood; the unreformable artifi-ciality of Northern Ireland, an entity that could not function as a democracy and in which nationalists would never be treated as equals of the unionists; the ultimate importance of self- sacrifice for the aim of a united Irish repub-lic; and the necessity of the “armed tradition” as the only language that the British have ever understood. Obviously, such an ideological background was attached to structural and experiential contexts. One of my respondents, who was originally from West Belfast, commented in this way on the relevance of his family background in his decision to join the IRA in 1964 at the age of 16:

Mine was a very much interested Republican family. My father and my uncle were in prison in the early 1940s. Family networks were getting me involved in the Republican movement. . . . As a young man I was brought up with Republican ideals. You were never brought up to hate the British or anybody. We were never brought up to be violent. We were never brought up to use violence on anyone else, but it became appar-ent that violence was the only thing that the British understood. . . . It [joining the IRA] wasn’t really the thing to do. The thing to do, instead, was going out to dance and going out with girls. Joining the Republi-can movement was not the thing to do at that time, you were too busy enjoying your life when you are young. Probably a lot of friends couldn’t understand me, what I was doing. But they seemed to have realised this when the Troubles started. They didn’t have the background I had, the knowledge I had. They didn’t see really what was going on in the country and how bad it was. (Interview no. 1)

Family ties were key vehicles for mobilization, as the same armed group was itself recruiting among preexisting social and affective ties to avoid infil-trations. Involvement in Republican familial networks particularly facilitated the recruitment processes as new volunteers were introduced to the organi-zation personally by their fathers, older brothers, or uncles. A former volun-


teer from West Belfast states, “I got recruited through relatives” (Interview no. 11). Entering the youth wing of the movement and subsequently the IRA was seen as a natural process. For example, one former volunteer recounts: “My family was a Republican family. At the age of fourteen, it was a sort of routine, you know, you follow the footsteps of your brothers and your sis-ters into the Fianna, which I did in 1968. There was nothing radical at that stage. It was about learning your history, learning Irish songs, traditional music, ballades, and things like that. It was more cultural” (Interview no. 17). Family background in the Republican movement was likely to make the armed activists’ decision to join the IRA relatively straightforward. In their retrospective accounts they do not speak of any jump or abrupt move into the organization. Progress toward the armed struggle was gradual for these vol-unteers. When the split came in 1969, many Republican families chose either the Officials or the Provisionals. In my interviews with those volunteers who were already involved in the IRA, participation in the Provisionals marked a continuation of an earlier involvement with the Republican armed- struggle strategy to drive the British out of Ireland. This former volunteer’s account is typical in this sense:

I joined the Provisionals because the Provisionals have emphasised that they would consolidate the defence of the areas, and never would happen again what happened in August 1969. But also because their objective were [sic] that when they had consolidated the defence of their areas that they would go on the offensive against British Crown forces. So to me, it was music to my ears. I was quite happy to hear this. (Interview no. 6)

These volunteers were attracted to the PIRA armed struggle by strong ideological motives rooted in a long- standing counterhegemonic conscious-ness in their homes, where political violence was seen as a legitimate course of action to obtain political redress. Ultimately, it was a way of getting involved in what they perceived as the “glorious” Republican historical struggle to free their country from British imperialism. As Peter Shirlow et al. (2010: 14) write regarding those for whom a Republican family history was central to their decision to join the armed struggle, such volunteers were keen to establish “a sense of ideological lineage that was brought to the fore by the collapse of social relationships in the 1960s and 1970s.” However, joining the PIRA was critical also for these individuals, and cannot be seen in absolute linear terms, in the development and crystallization of their previously vague


and fragmented beliefs. Alongside their family backgrounds in the Republi-can struggle, these militants also mentioned the perception of a revolutionary situation. The changed political context in 1969 in Northern Ireland was, in their view, a positive opening for a nationalist insurrection led by an armed vanguard. The pathway to armed activism was different for those who joined the PIRA after having been involved in other forms of sociopolitical activity. A Republican family background was either not present or not mentioned in respondents’ accounts of their trajectories toward mobilization. Instead, transformative events seemed fundamental for these individuals in setting in motion the important processes of deep collective understanding and acknowledgment that triggered their decision to join armed activism. Where the triggering event was surely relevant for these militants, it is also true that it took them some time to move inside the organization. Radicalization was for them a gradual process, and within it they were moved forward by a host of environmental factors. Among all the practical alternatives, the PIRA seemed to present them with the most efficacious organization through which to obtain change in what they have perceived as the new sociopolitical situation of the time. Indicative is what a young participant of the civil rights marches recalls:

In August 1971 it was a big departure for many people. I think that the intentions of the British state were very firmly declared when they interned people. It was back to a policy hostile towards Republicans and nationalists. Many of the people who you went to school with, people of my age, then, at that stage, thought that it was an inappropriate time to take passive resistance. For me the big departure was the action of the British state on Bloody Sunday. Basically what you had was a civil rights demonstration out in opposition of internment. The British state reacted by basically coming in and acting as an actor of mass murder on the marchers. I was at the march that day. And whatever notion people have that the civil rights movement can bring about reforms or change in British policy, Bloody Sunday ended that. The British state would not yield to the demands of civil rights [protesters] by purely passive resis-tance. Many people then felt that that was the end of passive resistance and that the only argument that the British had ever listened to in the past was the argument of force, and then many people decided, that’s


what we are going to employ. I was one of those people, and one month after Bloody Sunday I then took the decision to join the Provisional IRA. (Interview no. 5)

They felt dissatisfied with their current activity, because it did not produce results. Political violence for them became absolutely a necessary measure against the changes in the social- political context. A former volunteer who was involved in the youth wing of the Nationalist Party in the late 1960s and through this took part in civil rights marches recalls his moving into the PIRA in this way:

I decided to join the IRA, as I was disillusioned with ordinary politics and how ineffective our politicians were in any sort of change. Then I believed that an armed conflict could lead to a change in our society. Gradually from 1970 on, for one year, I got more and more radical. Internment had a huge effect on me, and I thought then [more] of join-ing the Irish Republican Army. I discussed [it] with my friends, and I was very aware of what an involvement in the Irish struggle meant, but I decided that there was no other option. And I joined late 1971. (Inter-view no. 19)

Similarly, another former volunteer, who moved from a position where she was involved in protest activities to the realization that the new regional situa-tion after 1969 needed a different strategic answer, describes her involvement in the PIRA with the following words:

Fifty years of talking have not achieved anything for the nationalists. The way the gerrymandering of the electoral system in the six counties, at that time, all was gear[ed] to a Unionist state for unionist people. . . . The main thing that we had to deal [with] at that time was survival and the defence of the nationalist areas. Because you had the pogroms where you would have families burnt out down in the Falls, down the Golvener, over Ardoyne, it was a daily experience for families to be homed out. To tell people to hold on and go for a vote and wait for three years was not making sense; we wanted an instant solution, and the only solution was the defence, to defend our own areas was by physical means. Democracy was not anymore an option; unfortunately democracy was not an option at that stage. (Interview no. 18)


Those respondents who were previously involved in the civil rights move-ment or in nationalist groups felt by 1969 that change would come not through voting or marching in the streets but only through physical force. Their radicalization involved a rejection of the Northern Ireland political order. Loyalist violence and the repression of the state apparatus increased among them the perception that nonviolent forms of protest were useless. In their view, the major practical alternative to armed militancy, namely, pro-testing and marching in the streets with the civil rights movement, was no longer possible. It was felt that a different stance needed to be taken in the struggle and that the PIRA was the organization to make this happen. The process of radicalization from contentious politics to violent political activ-ism is emblematically recollected in these words from two former volunteers:

I was meeting people through the CRM [civil rights movement]. There were meetings in the streets, especially after 1969 when barricades and all that went up. Early on I started to meet with people that in the CRM were involved in the Republican movement. I wasn’t really updated on it, I just knew who was involved and who not. And during the marches you were battered, I was just a young lad at that time, and you want to fight but you can’t fight, you try to defend yourself and you are left undefended. So it wasn’t hard to turn around and say, “Wait I wouldn’t mind equalising things.” So it was like that [that] I proceeded towards the Irish Republican Army. (Interview no. 2)

I remember very very clearly a protest. It was a protest regarding young Irish women going to [a] dance, organized by the British army, and I remember going to protest shouting that no Irish women should go at that dance. I also remember that some local women, when the British army came in, that they were actually giving the tea, and I was protest-ing at that as well as they should not give tea to the British army, because these people were not here as our friends, they were not here to pro-tect us, these people were here to control us. So a friend of mine had heard that I was involved in all this shouting and said to me, “Would you be interested in joining the Republican movement,” and I said, “Yes, most definitively.” And he said “Why?,” and I said, “Fifty years of talk-ing hadn’t been able to remove the inequalities in our society, so maybe some direct physical action would be the way to go.” And rather naively


I believed that we could do it in a very short period of time. (Inter-view no. 18)

What the former volunteers overwhelmingly recall is the perception of the justice of the armed struggle and the belief that change was possible only as the result of one’s own actions and that nonviolent forms of protests and con-ventional politics became useless. The overall international situation of the late 1960s and early 1970s was, in their view, moving toward a radicalization of different conflicts in the West as in the Third World, which ultimately justified the use of violence as a strategic means against Northern Ireland and the British states. One former volunteer remembers: “In South America they were taking up arms, and quite successfully with Che Guevara in Cuba. And then we started to question the Vietnam’s war, ‘What are the Ameri-cans doing in Vietnam? What was the rule of the Vietcongs?’ All this started to come out, all at the same time. So this struck an awareness among us” (Interview no. 20). Instead of being recruited through family networks, this second strand consisted of activists who themselves approached Republican volunteers they knew particularly from their previous involvement in politi-cal activism as well as from their networks of friends and colleagues. “When I decided to get involved in the armed struggle,” said one volunteer, “I went to a friend of school who I knew was in the Republican movement” (Inter-view no. 20). The majority of those who joined the PIRA in Northern Ireland after 1969 were very young and usually without any previous involvement in socio-political activities. Mobilization toward armed struggle was very quick, in contrast with the two other pathways. Political reasons, which these volun-teers say they acquired only at a later stage, as a result of their socialization into the organization during the time they spent time in jail (Shirlow et al. 2010), were not, as many respondents have said, “part of the equation.” A former volunteer remembers:

I was arrested in 1973 for an armed robbery and jailed in Long Kesh. I was then staying there with a group of people that was heavily politicised. So I became politically aware very very quickly. We would have been very revolutionary socialists, international solidarity. We would have identified very rapidly with what was happening in Vietnam, with what was hap-pening with the Palestinians. In the early ’70s there were many struggles


going on all across the world, there were struggles in Africa, apart from the South African situation you had the military struggles in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. We read [Kwame] Nkrumah in Ghana, and we read Samora Moises Machel and the stuff they did, we read Guevara extensively and other Latin American revolu-tionaries, we read Carlos Marighella, who was an urban guerrilla leader in Brazil, we studied the Topamoros and Moteneros, we studied the Chi-nese Revolution. We also studied Irish history, particularly [ James] Con-nolly and [Liam] Mellows, but also the educational ideas around Patrick Pearse. We read Paulo Freire, the pedagogue of the oppressed, which was a major reference book for us in the cages [behind bars]. That politicisa-tion process took place only in prison. (Interview no. 7)

For those who entered only after 1969 and without previous political experi-ence, involvement in familial networks of activism was not the main reason behind their decision to opt for the use of political violence. Rather, events on the ground played a key part, more than anything else. Experiences of state repression or of violent attacks by Loyalists against peaceful marchers, unarmed civilians, and sometimes uninvolved families were the most wide-spread shared features motivating post- 1969 PIRA recruits to join the armed struggle.16 A former volunteer recounts the plight of most individuals who decided to become involved in the PIRA in the aftermath of those events, which raised “moral outrage” among the nationalist community:

I got involved here through the burning of Bombay Street, and through that I became involved with the people who were burnt out. I had no Republican ideas whatsoever at that time. I chose then the Provisional IRA out of threat and because to me they were capable of doing some-thing. Whereas you were told to support Jim Sullivan, OC [officer com-manding] of the Official IRA, someone that was sitting aside watching people burn out and doing absolutely nothing. . . . I became involved in the Republican movement because of the suffering of my people. I saw the suffering of my people like everybody else, and I questioned myself: “Why should my people go through that?” And then I started to become interested in the Republican movement, in the Provisional IRA. I gave an oath for a 32-county republic, to fight for it and to die for it. I have never, ever broken that oath. (Interview no. 10)


Those respondents who joined the PIRA without prior involvement in the Republican movement highlight police and British army attacks and Loyal-ist violence witnessed at first hand, rather than traditional Republicanism, as the most important elements in their decision to join the PIRA’s armed cam-paign. It was not so much ideology that forced them to join. “I was not a con-victed Republican,” recalls one former volunteer. “It was more, like most of the other people, I was reacting to a situation” (Interview no. 25). The armed struggle was an instrument or, as many have stated, a “vehicle” to express their anger and to fight against the British army, the Northern Ireland police, and the Loyalists, whom many of the new volunteers saw as the main enemies against which to address political violence. In the words of one former vol-unteer: “At that age I never saw any other way. The IRA was the only vehicle to defend your area from Loyalist and RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] attacks on a daily basis” (Interview no. 16). Repression reinforced in young nationalists the framing of their situation as profoundly unjust and led them to blame the authorities. As one respondent remembers:

Whenever the British came in, they were seen as an occupying army. All young people in nationalist areas in their concern were potentially ter-rorists, and they treated us as such. When you have an occupying army in your streets, patrolling your streets with rifles, helicopters, armed cars—you know, stopping, checking people, putting them against the wall, arresting them for no reason . . . —all this creates and makes antagonism toward the occupying force. All the young nationalists wanted to join the IRA. We were too young to join, but we could not wait until we were old enough. In fact I told lies, I told the people in the IRA that I was 17, that I was older than actually I was. So they let me in. (Interview no. 7)

Specifically, personal experiences of repression were important in initially motivating people to fight. For the latter strand of armed activists, the impe-tus was very much an emotional response to what was happening immedi-ately around them. The situation on the ground regionally was more impor-tant than historical beliefs and family tradition. Their joining the armed struggle was explained “in terms of a reaction to what was seen as a society in turmoil” (Shirlow et al. 2010: 53). One former volunteer recalls:

My husband was very, very badly beaten by the British army, and he was a gentle kind of a man who was never involved in any activity and fight-


ing in anything, and that shocked us badly. If this almost broke my hus-band’s spirit, it did the opposite to mine, because I had young children at that time, and I thought that “why shouldn’t we fight back against what is happening to us and to our community. I don’t want my chil-dren growing up in a community like this,” where we were beaten off the ground, so I became a bit more involved. And I actually stored weapons in my home. . . . To me it was more a defence than an attack. I wanted to defend my own [family], my kids first of all; my husband was a broken man at that stage. (Interview no. 9)

For nationalists, the feeling was that the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Loy-alists, and the British army were up to destroying them totally, not just in political terms but also as a people. The transition to the armed struggle appeared to respond to the need to defend their primary solidarity net-works. As a respondent states, referring particularly to the community she was from, Ballymurphy: “People in the community were not supporting the armed struggle, but they were supporting their own survival. Because that was what it was” (Interview no. 18). In nationalist working- class areas and in rural areas there was a feeling that they needed to defend themselves and to respond to this violence, because they felt that they were going to “dis-appear” during the attacks to which they were subjected in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This is also clear from this testimony of a former volunteer:

My father was prisoner of war of the Germans during the Second World War. One of the things that sticks in my memory to these days is when-ever the British army sent for reinforcements, hundreds of them came up marching the Whiterock road [in West Belfast] with spotlights, with shells, in ranks and formations, and I remember my dad saying, “This is like Nazi Germany.” And that phrase stuck in my mind. All the indica-tions from the British army at that time were that they were prepared for a military war, that they were going to kill people, that they were going to imprison people, that they were going to search houses, they were going to harass people. And to me there was no constitutional politics, no con-stitutional party and no nonviolent approach that was to counter that, but the only way to counter that was with a military response. (Inter-view no. 3)

This latter strand of armed activists seems to have possessed a strong local-ized sense of injustice as a decisive motivational factor, which became more


clearly demarcated through conflict. Their decision to join the PIRA was often justified, reducing in part the perception of individual responsibility, as part of belonging to a determinate neighborhood and street (O’Dochar-taigh forthcoming). Former volunteers insist that they personally knew their recruiters prior to recruitment:

I joined the Provisionals because probably in my part of the road it was more popular to join the Provos. If I had been living in the other part of the road, I would have joined the Officials probably. We didn’t sit down and talk about which group to join, I didn’t join the Provisionals because they were for abstentionism. I didn’t know until two years later. (Inter-view no. 15)

I think in retrospect that a lot of people made decisions because of who they knew. They didn’t make a decision because of the ideologies involved. I think that they made decisions because of who they knew, or which street they lived on, or who was the leader in that localised area. (Interview no. 3)

Dense interpersonal network structures at the neighborhood level were important in deciding not only whether or not to join but also whether to join the PIRA or the Official IRA. Many of these volunteers joined in groups rather than as individuals. Often they succumbed to peer pressure. Par-ticularly remarkable is the testimony of a former volunteer on how she first became involved in the Officials at the age of 12 and then moved into the Pro-visionals when she was 14:

When I first joined the Republican movement, I first joined the Offi-cials with a group of friends from the same street where I was living. A lot of that time was going with history language, political lectures, and it was only then that I was politically minded and realised what all the politics was around me. It was not until I was fourteen that I was say-ing that the Officials were not doing enough, and then I joined the Pro-visionals. . . . So much was happening. My brother was interned at the time. The beatings that were going on, the loss of friends, everybody was really affected physically and mentally. It was then that in my own mind I was saying to myself that “it is not enough what I am doing in the Offi-cials,” I needed to do something more, and the armed struggle, I felt, was the only way to push this forward and trying to succeed and get a better


life for our people. And that’s why I went to the Provisional movement. (Interview no. 13)

Nationalist working- class areas functioned as recruitment hotbeds, offering potential nationalist participants moral support and encouragement in the process of mobilization. In retrospective accounts the symbolical neighbor-hood was perceived as uniformly supportive of their struggle. This was seen as fundamental not only for them but for their families as well:

At the time I joined I felt that it was very much a community endeav-our. Everybody in the community was involved. Because we used houses for meetings, we used houses for weapons training, we used houses for dumps, we used houses for bomb making, and we didn’t sleep in our own houses. So we used to go up and ask people if we could sleep there tonight, and whenever I was leaving the house next morning the people would have fed you, they might have put a pound in your pocket, they would bless you. It was very much an all community endeavour. We felt we were very much part of the community. (Interview no. 7)

Defending your own community was not only a reason to get involved but also an important moral refuge, used to justify the decision to resort to vio-lence. So if the main stated reason for joining was a necessary response to state violence, there was also a strong emotional need to take revenge on the enemy, whether the Loyalists, the British army, or the Northern Ire-land establishment. Self- defense and retaliation were strongly interlinked motivations:

The British army was here to oppress us. When I was going to school I was stopped by the army. Actually it was then that I thought, this is wrong. I was then joining riots in the streets. I made a choice at that time, there was actually a slogan on the wall, “Join the Na Fianna Éireann,” so I went there, and I asked, “Can I join?,” and they asked, “Why do you want to join?,” and I said that “I want to fight for Ireland.” What moti-vated me was a sense of revolution to what the British were doing to our community. There was a mobilisation within the community against the British and what they were doing, and I just became a part of that. There was a sense of patriotism, to defend your people, a reactionary feeling, because you wanted to retaliate to what the British were doing against your community. (Interview no. 15)


As Kevin Bean (2007: 52) writes in an important work on Sinn Féin, “The social movement organization that emerged from this crisis was much wider than the narrow base of pre- 1969 Republicanism.” The PIRA benefited enor-mously from the massive influx of young recruits who collectively became known as the “sixty- niners” in the Republican movement. A generation of young nationalists, this time also including many women,17 became involved in politics during the daily street battles and the violent face- to- face inter-actions with the repressive state apparatus and the Loyalists. They portrayed their situation as “immoral” and “unjust” and rapidly expanded their ideo-logical framework, revitalizing their antipartitionist and pannationalist atti-tudes and interpreting politics as a form of violence. The leadership of the PIRA was then able to persuade young nationalist rioters without previous involvement in any sociopolitical activity that “active offence against the British state was the only or at least the best way to address the unreformable polity of Northern Ireland” (O’Leary 2005: 226). There was no time or place for any kind of reform, as in their view “contemporary conditions validated a lengthy Republican tradition and orthodoxy” (English 2003: 133). According to a former volunteer:

In 1969 the Troubles broke out. I witnessed the burnings and some of the shootings. I also witnessed the death of a school friend. Shortly after that I was arrested for rioting behaviour, and I was sentenced to two months in prison. While I was in prison I met some people who were both mem-bers of the Provisional IRA and of the Official IRA. While their influence was really strong, . . . they probably just stoked an awareness then for the first time. It was the first recollection of anything political. Before, dur-ing the very early stages of the Troubles, I wouldn’t have known what was going on, the political issues and colonisation and all that, never gave [it] a thought before. And it [wa]s then, when I come out of prison, late 1971, that I made my own choice to join the Provisional IRA. . . . I wanted revenge, for my people to live in a better world. It wasn’t through any political motivation that I decided to join the IRA; I decided to join the IRA to be able to fight back at the British. I still did not understand the politics of Ireland. . . . Inevitability wasn’t a factor. At that particular time I was 17, I was looking at what was happening around me, I prob-ably made my own conclusions very, very quickly, and I just made a deci-sion to join the IRA. With a sense of being able to strike back with any


sense of meaning at the British, at unionism. Not that I fully understood then, but I just felt that what was done towards us was wrong and that someone had to do something, and that is what it was that motivated me; a very, very simple choice. And the only wagon at that particular time was looking at other people that lived here who were IRA men, and sort of say[ing], yeah, I wanted to be one of them. (Interview no. 4)

The responsibility to defend and protect their own community, as per-ceived by many of my interviewees, not only justified their own decision to join the armed struggle but also countered the argument that this decision was forced upon them: “They [the British] were the aggressors, they have started everything, we have just answered” (Interview no. 7). Former vol-unteers have stated that individual choice played an important role in their decision to join the PIRA. In their accounts of those early days they take full responsibility for their part in the struggle. Two respondents recall their per-sonal choices, comparing them with the fact that not everyone from the same community engaged with the PIRA:

I don’t think it was an inevitable choice. To say that it was inevitable would have meant that everybody of my age would have made the same choice. But not everybody did. You had choices. You had some people saying no, it is not for me, others saying yes, it is for me but only at some [other] stage, other people saying we have to do what we have to do. I had to say that people like my parents, the older [generation], were giving you choices, they were saying to you, “Listen, you have a sister living in England, would you not go over and live in England, your cousins live down in the South would you not go and live there,” so whether it was fear from your parents or from other people, you were always able to make your choices. It was not inevitable, you had choices. I like to think that it was up to me and I made a conscious choice, a decision, and I will stand by [it]. I am not just a hopeless victim of this war. (Interview no. 3)

I didn’t see it as inevitable but as free will. I was never going down any other road. Whenever the British came out on the streets, there was that element of goodwill, but in a very short period of time they were seen to be here to prop up the state, to reinforce partition, to reinforce this notion that Catholics, nationalists, were second- class citizens. Somehow that they are strangers in their land, that somehow they are lesser human


beings than the good Protestant people. For me there was absolutely no doubt that there had to be some showdown with the British and it was simply a matter of time. I remember before I was actually involved, I was in England at that stage, actually, before Bloody Sunday actually hap-pened, there were a number of British soldiers who had been killed, and guys who I was playing with, who were from Irish families in England, these guys were saying, “This is terrible that these soldiers have been killed.” I was saying: “No, they should not have been there. British sol-diers being on the streets of Belfast should expect to be killed. Because they should not be there. This has nothing to do with them.” And these guys got very annoyed, they said to me, “How can you say that?” For me it was really clear, British soldiers do not belong in Belfast or any part of the North in any sort of role, as far as I was concerned. (Interview no. 7)

Armed Activism as a Recognition Struggle

What was common among young nationalists who decided to become PIRA volunteers—either as an outgrowth of previous militancy in the Republican movement, because of a shift toward political activism motivated by an iden-tifiable triggering event, or as a more abruptly formed sense of obligation to defend their own community and retaliate by taking the war to the enemy—was an appeal for action. They desired to address a feeling of impatience toward what was going on around them. Embracing the armed struggle was perceived as a means of transforming the world for the better; they believed it the most effective approach for bringing about social transformation and an end to social humiliation and repression (alleged or actual). It was, in their view, a personal journey of self- improvement, a way of reclaiming dignity for themselves and of rejecting what they felt to be the long- subordinate position of their own community. Young nationalists turned to political violence as a means of regaining the respect denied them by the Northern Ireland regime and the British army presence in the streets of the region from 1969. They equated then armed activism with honor and dignity:

When we were growing up we were educated with a British education. Around fifteen and sixteen you were then discovering that there was not only British history. So that awareness at that age made us feel that we had our own identity and that we were not subjects to the British gov-


ernment. That realisation and a huge resentment as well motivated us to ask, “Why were we denied to learn our history? Why were we denied to learn our own language?” So there was all that in the background, and when you found out that you were denied all that, this created a resent-ment. That in itself is a form of revolution. (Interview no. 18)

Many saw it as a generational obligation. Very representative of many of my interviewees’ feelings are the words of one of them: “As a young man I thought I had a part to play [in the conflict]” (Interview no. 1). Through political violence, individuals saw a way to find some form of expression to make their own views manifest to a society in conflict. They were not in search of an identity. Instead, they got involved in the armed struggle as an expression of the identity they already had. The PIRA was just offering what many of these young nationalists thought they needed at this stage. What this respondent recalls typifies the mood expressed by other former volunteers I have interviewed:

There are many factors coming to the mind of a fourteen- , fifteen- , sixteen- year- old guy. There is no doubt about that. For some it is, “I want to be there, I want people seeing me being there.” There is no doubt that that played a part. But for me the choice at the start was I could either go to school and learn about history, whether it was Irish history, ancient history, Second World War, or actually participate and make history. That wasn’t so clear at the time, but it is clear now. That is why I didn’t go to school. I was out watching, witnessing, and making history on the daily basis. (Interview no. 3)

One suggestion implicit in this statement, as in many others, is that in join-ing the armed struggle, former volunteers saw the opportunity to change the course of history, something they felt they had been excluded from for a long time. Through violent forms of action, they felt a sense of pride and finally had the feeling of being in control of their own future and of being able to transform their circumstances. They saw themselves as able to change the course of history by removing British rule from Northern Ireland. Inter-linked with this pride in the narratives of those who joined the PIRA before 1972 is a frequent reference to the “need to do something” and to frustra-tion with “ordinary politics,” “with talks and endless meetings.” During their accounts the interviewees took full responsibility for their part in more than


30 years of violence in the region, seeing their actions as a refusal to yield to the authorities and as a way to respond proudly to humiliation. They repeat-edly stressed the importance of motives such as “not being treated as second- class citizens.” Underpinning their decision to join the armed struggle was a refusal to condescend as well as deference in the face of perceived socioeco-nomic injustice and repression. A former volunteer recalls:

The response I found from many people, I actually didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand why they were beaten and doing nothing. Basically, a lot of the attitude I found at that time from the older people was “keep your head down and stay quiet,” because most of the few Catholics with jobs were employed by unionists and needed to keep their jobs, so there-fore the community had to stay quiet. So they said nothing, because they could not afford to lose the few jobs they had. But I was angry, looking at them and saying: “No you can’t do that, no you can’t stay quiet about this. This is wrong.” And our family had a mixed reaction; some felt we should go out screaming about, and others felt [we should] stay quiet, to keep things quiet and maintain the status quo, where instead, I was per-sonally not prepared to maintain the status quo. (Interview no. 18)

Many of my respondents describe the hope of those days as being mixed with anger. In their impatience for action, the young nationalists played a large role in what seemed, at that stage, a historic opportunity to drive the British out of Ireland relatively quickly. A sense of self- affirmation was fos-tered by a sense of possibility that Irish reunification was close at hand. Par-ticularly among those who joined after 1969 without previous involvement in any political activities, everything seemed to be moving in this direction at that time. And they wanted to be part of it:

I think that in the early years, from 1971 right through 1977, we were of the opinion that we were able to bomb and shoot the British out of Ire-land. That we could hit them to such an extent that they would not [be able to] sustain their presence, and they [would] leave. In 1972 there were over 100 British killed in the North. If we can do that on a continued basis they are hammered. But we were never able to repeat those large casualties after 1972. (Interview no. 7)

At the time of their involvement with the PIRA, none of my respondents in fact thought that the coming Troubles would last longer than a few years.


Conclusion

This article has pursued three main goals. First, on the empirical level, it has systematically examined the pathways of those who joined the PIRA in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1972 and challenged the dominant readings of the prevailing Irish literature on why individuals joined the Pro-visionals’ armed struggle. Second, analytically, it has illustrated the utility of a multimechanisms interpretative framework. Third, it has expanded the source base for the study of armed activism by presenting and analyzing a series of new interviews with former Provisional volunteers. What empirically emerges from this study is that family tradition in the Republican movement, strong ideological motives, transformative events, instrumentality, local community networks, state repression, Loyalist vio-lence, a sense of defense and revenge, and an appeal for action against per-ceived oppression and discrimination compose an extensive range of mecha-nisms that explain why individuals in Northern Ireland joined the PIRA between 1969 and 1972. So three distinct mobilization trajectories— pre- 1969 IRA involvement, post- 1969 mobilization with sociopolitical experience, post- 1969 mobilization without any sociopolitical experience—were identi-fied as combining these different mechanisms. However, no special path was connected with a particular rule in the organization. Surely those who were already involved in the IRA had better resources in terms of networks but also in terms of political education to move to important positions in the organization, particularly at an early stage (White 1993). Yet this was not always true. A remarkable example is Martin McGuinness (Danny Morri-son can also be mentioned here), who entered the PIRA after 1969 without prior involvement in any social or political activity and by the early 1970s had already risen to the top of the organization in Derry (Clarke and John-ston 2003). Contrary to claims made in the prevailing Irish literature, the decision to join the PIRA was not rooted in individual personality disorders, social exclusion, or psychological distress. Ultimately, I would argue, it was not even about the desire to achieve Irish reunification. Rather, the decision to join the PIRA was first and foremost about the struggle for recognition of a community that stemmed from a perceived sense of second- class citizen-ship shared by the majority of volunteers and the larger constituency. Armed activism was therefore the enactment of an identity. New volunteers after


1969 fused the need to reclaim a sense of dignity, honor, and pride for the nationalist community to a wider political objective, that of Irish reunifica-tion. Furthermore, they saw in the PIRA armed- struggle strategy a chance to change the course of their own history, something they felt had long been impossible. With the outbreak of the Troubles, young nationalists in Northern Ireland did not turn immediately toward traditional Republican-ism, which has been always weak in the region, either as a political force or ideologically. They mobilized instead in the organization that was better aligned with their need for action to fight against perceived oppression and discrimination. This “new” reading of Republican microradicalization not only challenges much of the existing literature on the micromobilization into the PIRA, which has mostly looked to explain its emergence by drawing a “long- view” approach, but also explains how the majority of the Republican movement could accept the peace process starting in the 1990s even though the dream of a unified Ireland remained unfulfilled (Bean 2007; Bosi and della Porta forthcoming). At an analytic level, this article suggests that a multimechanisms per-spective, which looks for different pathways toward armed activism, can make further progress toward understanding the variations that occur among individual micromobilization into armed groups. Such an approach has three advantages. First, it is flexible enough to allow different mechanisms to influ-ence individual behavior. Second, it helps us more firmly grasp the trajec-tories toward armed struggle. Third, it has a greater explanatory value than one- dimensional perspectives, given that one motive on its own cannot ade-quately explain variations in the circumstances, backgrounds, and disposi-tions of the individual actors in relation to the time of their mobilization, the recruitment process, the external enemy identified during the mobilization process, and the local context with the effects of repression on individuals. Finally, this article advances a rigorous empirical approach to the study of political violence by combining several data- collection techniques to gather primary sources: interviews, autobiographies, pamphlets, posters, leaf-lets, newspapers, court and police records, parliamentary debates, and offi-cial government documents. The 25 semistructured interviews with former PIRA volunteers broaden the empirical basis, transforming the research into a clear contribution to the literature with new empirical evidence.


Appendix 1 Glossary of specific terminology

Bogside—predominantly nationalist neighborhood outside the city walls of DerryCivil rights movement—heterogeneous network of groups and organizations that

from the mid- 1960s proactively claimed civil rights for the nationalist minority by demanding rights for everyone in the region; has deliberately avoided the traditional Nationalist and Republican aspiration to reunite Ireland and bring an end to the Northern Ireland state

Easter Rising—an insurrection mounted during Easter week in 1916 by the Irish Republi-can Brotherhood with the intent of ending British rule in Ireland and establishing an Irish republic

Loyalists—generally prepared to use political violence to protect their community, to defend Protestantism, and to keep Northern Ireland a part of the United Kingdom

Nationalists—mainly Catholic minority community that wishes to unify Northern Ire-land with the Republic of Ireland

Northern Ireland—6 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland that are linked politically with Great Britain as part of the United Kingdom (the other 26 counties have been known since 1949 as the Republic of Ireland)

Republicans—traditionally stand for a united Ireland; prepared to use political violence to seek a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and unification with the Irish Republic

Stormont—Northern Ireland regional parliamentUnionists—mainly Protestant majority that wishes to maintain the region’s union with

Great BritainVolunteer—a member of the Irish Republican Army

Appendix 2 Questions related to the interviewee’s life before joining the PIRA and the reasons for this choice

1. Life before joining the PIRAWhat year were you born?Where was your principal place of residence during the 1960s and early 1970s?What was your occupation or main activity at that time?Please tell me a little about yourself in the late 1960s.How old were you at the time you got involved in the Republican movement struggle?How interested were your family in politics? Which sort of politics were they inter-

ested in?Were you involved in any sociopolitical activities before you got involved with the

Republican movement struggle? Which ones?At the time of your involvement, how would you define yourself politically? Right-

wing? Left- wing? Other sort of politics?When you were growing up, were you aware of the IRA? And how did you regard it?Did you march in the streets with the civil rights movement [CRM]? If yes: At what

stage? Were you affiliated with any organization? What was the motivation of your involvement in the CRM? What is your opinion on the state response to CRM activity?


How did you see the CRM’s form of action in comparison to the Republican movement?

2. Pathways to activism in the PIRA armed campaignHow did you first get involved in the Republican movement armed struggle? How

were you recruited?What was it that other volunteers were doing to introduce you to the armed struggle?What was your motivation for joining the Republican movement armed struggle?Why did you come to the conclusion that the civil rights movement was not an effec-

tive way of achieving your demands?Were there some particular events that radicalized you and led you to believe that the

Republican armed struggle was the way forward?Is there a history of “Republican struggle” within your family or in your neighbour-

hood that would have influenced you?When you became involved, what did you see as the goal of the Republican struggle?At that time, did you perceive your choice to enter in the Republican movement as

something inevitable? Was it the only thing to do or the best thing to do?At the time you chose to join the Republican movement, did you ever think about

joining different organizations or about using a different sort of strategy to achieve your political aims?

Why have you preferred to join an organization that legitimized the use of politi-cal violence instead of those that utilized constitutional methods or peaceful protest?

Did you feel that the nationalist community was behind you or saw your action as a way to move the community toward your own political aims?

Did all your friends join the movement with you?How were your relations with those who did not join the movement? Did you stop

meeting and socialising with those friends who didn’t commit themselves to the Republican armed struggle?

Why, in your opinion at that time, did those friends choose not to join the Republi-can struggle?

Did they join other forms of political commitment?Why did you choose the Provisionals instead of the Officials?Did any of your friends choose the other part of the movement? What were rela-

tions with those friends like after the split? How did you perceive their choice at the time?

Did your political convictions lead you to join the movement, or did you join the movement and then acquire a set of political convictions within it that justified and rationalized this decision?

Ap

pen

dix

3

Res

pond

ent s

ampl

e in

form

atio

n

No.

Sour

ceYe

ar a

nd p

lace

bo

rnG

ende

rSo

cial

cla

ss

back

grou

ndFa

mily

po

litic

sEd

ucat

ion

Occ

upat

ion

Prev

ious

so

cial

- pol

itica

l ac

tiviti

esR

ecru

itmen

tYe

ar jo

ined

PI

RA

16/

28/0

7 B

elfa

st19

48 B

elfa

st

(Fal

ls R

oad)

Mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sSt

rong

R

epub

lican

Hig

h sc

hool

Text

ile

prin

ter

No

Fam

ily

netw

orks

1964

(IR

A)

1969

26/

28/0

7 B

elfa

st19

50 B

elfa

st

(Bal

lym

urph

y)M

ale

Mid

dle

clas

sN

o in

tere

st

in p

oliti

csM

iddl

e sc

hool

Diff

eren

t jo

bsC

RM

App

roac

hed

Rep

ublic

ans

he k

new

1970

37/

1/07

B

elfa

st19

56 B

elfa

st

(Bal

lym

urph

y)M

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

No

inte

rest

in

pol

itics

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tN

oR

ecru

ited

1970

47/

1/07

B

elfa

st19

53 B

elfa

st

(Sho

rt S

tran

d)M

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

No

inte

rest

in

pol

itics

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tN

oR

ecru

ited

1971

57/

2/07

St

orm

ont

1954

Der

ryM

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

Wea

k in

tere

st

in p

oliti

cs,

no a

ffilia

tions

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tC

RM

App

roac

hed

Rep

ublic

ans

he k

new

1972

67/

4/07

B

elfa

st19

46 B

elfa

st

(Ard

oyne

)M

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

Stro

ng

Rep

ublic

anM

iddl

e sc

hool

Sailo

rN

oFa

mily

ne

twor

k19

66 (I

RA

) 19

69

77/

4/07

B

elfa

st19

56 B

elfa

st

(Sho

rt S

tran

d)M

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

Mild

inte

rest

in

pol

itics

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tN

oR

ecru

ited

1972

87/

4/07

B

elfa

st19

55 B

elfa

st

(Bal

lym

urph

y)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sN

oM

iddl

e sc

hool

Shop

as

sist

ant

No

Rec

ruite

d19

71

97/

4/07

B

elfa

st19

44 B

elfa

st

(Ard

oyne

)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sSt

rong

R

epub

lican

Hig

h sc

hool

Hou

sew

ifeN

oVo

lunt

eers

sh

e kn

ew19

70

107/

5/07

B

elfa

st19

50 B

elfa

st

(Bal

lym

urph

y)M

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

No

inte

rest

in

pol

itics

Mid

dle

scho

olN

/AN

oR

ecru

ited

1970

117/

5/07

B

elfa

st19

46 B

elfa

stM

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

Stro

ng

Rep

ublic

anM

iddl

e sc

hool

Diff

eren

t jo

bsN

oFa

mily

ne

twor

ks19

64 (I

RA

) 19

69

1211

/4/0

7 B

elfa

st19

59 B

elfa

st

(And

erso

nsto

wn)

Fem

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

Mild

R

epub

lican

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tN

oR

ecru

ited

1971

1311

/4/0

7 B

elfa

st19

60 B

elfa

st

(And

erso

nsto

wn)

Fem

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

Mild

R

epub

lican

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tN

oR

ecru

ited

1972

1411

/4/0

7 B

elfa

st19

56 B

elfa

st

(Bal

lym

urph

y)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sW

eak

N/A

N/A

No

Rec

ruite

d19

71

1511

/5/0

7 B

elfa

st19

55 B

elfa

st

(New

Lod

ge

Roa

d)

Mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sTr

ade

unio

nism

Mid

dle

scho

olA

ppre

ntic

e pl

umbe

rN

oR

ecru

ited

1970

1611

/5/0

7 B

elfa

st19

51 B

elfa

stM

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

Mild

inte

rest

in

pol

itics

Mid

dle

scho

olSh

op

deliv

erie

sN

oR

ecru

ited

1970

1711

/7/0

7 B

elfa

st19

55 B

elfa

st

(Bal

lym

urph

y)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sSt

rong

R

epub

lican

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tN

oFa

mily

ne

twor

ks19

68 (I

RA

) 19

69

1811

/7/0

7 B

elfa

st19

54 B

elfa

st

(Bal

lym

urph

y)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sN

o in

tere

st

in p

oliti

csM

iddl

e sc

hool

Shop

as

sist

ant

CR

MVo

lunt

eers

sh

e kn

ew19

70

194/

2/08

D

erry

1951

Der

ry

(Riv

er F

ront

)M

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

No

Mid

dle

scho

olA

ppre

ntic

eN

atio

nalis

t Pa

rty

and

CR

M

Volu

ntee

rs

he k

new

1971

204/

2/08

D

erry

1954

Der

ryM

ale

Wor

king

cl

ass

No

Mid

dle

scho

olSt

uden

tC

RM

Volu

ntee

rs

he k

new

1971

Ap

pen

dix

3

(con

tinue

d)

No.

Sour

ceYe

ar a

nd p

lace

bo

rnG

ende

rSo

cial

cla

ss

back

grou

ndFa

mily

po

litic

sEd

ucat

ion

Occ

upat

ion

Prev

ious

so

cial

- pol

itica

l ac

tiviti

esR

ecru

itmen

tYe

ar jo

ined

PI

RA

214/

2/08

D

erry

1949

Der

ry

(Cre

ggan

)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sN

oM

iddl

e sc

hool

Nur

sery

No

Doe

s not

re

mem

ber

1972

224/

4/08

B

elfa

st19

55 B

elfa

st

(Fal

ls)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sN

oN

/ASt

uden

tN

oR

ecru

ited

1970

234/

4/08

B

elfa

st19

53 B

elfa

st

(Fal

ls)Fe

mal

eW

orki

ng

clas

sM

ild

Rep

ublic

anM

iddl

e sc

hool

Diff

eren

t jo

bsN

oR

ecru

ited

1970

247/

1/08

C

ount

y D

erry

1955

Cou

nty

Der

ryM

ale

Peas

ant

Stro

ng

Rep

ublic

anN

/AN

/AYe

sFa

mily

ne

twor

ks19

71

257/

1/08

C

ount

y D

erry

1954

Cou

nty

Der

ryM

ale

Peas

ant

Wea

kN

/AN

/AN

oR

ecru

ited

1970


Notes

I would like to thank the interviewees for their willingness to participate in this research. Also I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special section for their helpful comments. Donatella della Porta, Chares Demetriou, Mark McNally, Eduardo Romanos, and Gilda Zwerman provided useful commentaries on this research at various stages. None of the above is in any way of course responsible for the opinions I have expressed.1 In this article the terms armed struggle and political violence are used interchange-

ably. Whether threatened or actual, political violence is a particularly confrontational form of action oriented at inflicting material damage to individuals and/or property for political goals, be these ethnonational, religious, or ideological.

2 In this article I refer to nationalist and unionist, rather than Catholic and Protestant, communities to emphasize the political character of communal division in Northern Ireland and the fact that this is not a conflict about religious beliefs or practices. I use capitals to refer to organized political Unionism and Nationalism as well as for Loyalism and Republicanism.

3 The sample of my respondents is clearly skewed toward the latter path. I have tried to balance this disproportion by relying on other sources as well, including auto-biographies and published interviews (see the Methodology section). It should also be remembered that a massive influx of new volunteers happened only with the out-break of the Troubles, and the large majority of these were young teenagers who simply had no time for previous social- political activities before moving to armed activism. Yet another path might have emerged with more interviews with former volunteers from the countryside and border areas. So far my fieldwork has allowed me to interview only two respondents from the countryside (Interviews no. 24–25), Belfast and Derry. Although I have placed them in the third path, they recollected during the interviews the presence of a strong Republicanism in their community when they were growing up. That factor is more typical of the first path. Interviews planned with volunteers from South Armagh, a strong Republican area in Northern Ireland, were ultimately not conducted for safety reasons.

4 This interpretation of mobilization into armed activism is similar to other analyses of collective- action motivations that underline the fight against identity misrecognition and for achieving a political voice (Fraser 2003; Hobson 2003; Honneth 1996; Philips 2003; Roy 2004; Seidman 1993; Wood 2003).

5 The following newspapers and magazines were examined at the Newspaper Library and at the Linen Hall Library of Belfast with the intent of reconstructing the various contemporary perspectives on the Northern Ireland political system: An Phoblacht (Dublin); Belfast Telegraph, Derry Journal, Dungannon Observer, Fortnight Maga-zine (Belfast); Gown (Queen’s University Belfast Left review); Guardian (London); Humanist (Dublin); Irish News (Belfast); Irish Democrat (London); Magill Monthly Magazine (London); Belfast Newsletter, Nusight, Republican News (Belfast); Sunday Times (London); Irish Times, Tuarisic, United Irishman, Wolfe Tone Societies Journal (Dublin).


6 The archives searched include the Special Political Collection of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, the Hibernica Collection at Queen’s University Belfast (Main Library), and the Conflict Archive on the Internet website (cain.ulst.ac.uk). These archives contain a vast amount of superb material, including official documents and secondary source extracts.

7 Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.8 For autobiographical and biographical narratives and published interviews of IRA

volunteers, see Adams 1996; Anderson 2002; Bean and Hayes 2002; Clarke and Johnston 2003; Collins 1997; Mac Stíofáin 1975; McGartland 1997; McKeown 2001; Morrison 1999; O’Callaghan 1999; O’Doherty 1993; White 2006.

9 Francesca Polletta (2006) is the section editor of a relevant forum in the journal Mobi-lization titled “Mobilization Forum: Awkward Movements” (see also Blee and Vining 2010). Concerning ethical difficulties in studying political violence, see also Sluka 1995; Wood 2006. In regard to more methodological challenges related to this research subject, see Bottger and Strobl 2003; Smyth and Robinson 2001; White 2000.

10 For extensive discussions of reliability and validity in oral sources, see della Porta 1992a; White 1993: 183–88.

11 Coiste na n- Iarchimi is an umbrella organization working for the social, eco-nomic, and emotional well- being of current and former Republican prisoners and their families (www.coiste.ie). It is fair to say that it is politically close to the PIRA, although not all the interviewees agreed on Sinn Féin’s strategy in the postagree-ment period. Despite this, at the time of the interviews none of the respondents saw any immediate reason for a return to the armed- struggle strategy. My sample of interviewees contains an overrepresentation in favor of those who remained in Sinn Féin. Coiste na n- Iarchimi might have adopted its own selection process favoring former volunteers who were likely to tell particular kinds of stories. I have tried to fill this gap through archival sources, particularly autobiographical and biographi-cal narratives and published interviews of IRA volunteers who then joined dissident Republican groups or who did not align themselves with Sinn Féin. For the latter, see Alonso 2007; Bean and Hayes 2002; Shirlow et al. 2010; White 2006. However, we should keep in mind that “the conceptualization of validity in phenomenologi-cal research differs significantly from the conceptualization of validity in quantita-tive methods. Rather than focusing on sample size and participant selection, deep qualitative methods focus on the internal coherence of the narrative. In addition, the presentation of material should be grounded in examples in a manner that gives suf-ficient evidence to allow the reader to evaluate the authors’ interpretations” (Burgess et al. 2007: 74).

12 A final semistructured interview schedule was developed for this study after it was refined through discussions with colleagues and three pilot interviews. The final interview schedule, on a volunteer’s life before joining the PIRA and on his or her pathway to activism in the PIRA armed campaign, is reproduced in appendix 2.

13 After the fiasco of the Border Campaign (1956–62), the leadership of the Republican movement called off political violence on February 26, 1962 and, under the influence


of the Wolfe Tone Societies in 1963, attempted to hold it in reserve, preferring and promoting a new gradualist- reformist grassroots agitation strategy focused on civil rights demands (see the interview with Cathal Goulding, chief of staff of the IRA, in This Week 1970). The new turn prompted fierce resistance from within the Republi-can movement. The new leadership, influenced by the growing popularity of social-ism in the 1960s, decided to move the organization toward the left, picking up on the socialist republican analysis of the 1930s (Peadar O’Donnell, George Gilmore) and adhering to the relatively moderate “three- stage” theory. Their assumption was that Northern Ireland was an “irreformable” entity that could not survive without systematic discrimination and artificial division of unionist and nationalist workers (Costello 1966). Therefore asking for civil rights for the region was seen as an impor-tant way to strike the Achilles’s heel of unionism (Coughlan 1966), which, on the one hand, would gradually dismantle the Northern Ireland regime by reforms and, on the other, would function as a vehicle to unite the two communities. Only then would a true Republican revolution by a united people be possible (Greaves 1963). So the Republican movement, particularly its Dublin leadership, was at this stage committing itself to social transformation through legal political means, with a view to having a military role afterward (Irish Republican Army [Official] 1972). The left- Republican core in the Republican movement became, at the time of the split, the Official wing of the IRA, then later the Workers’ Party (Hanley and Millar 2009).

14 There are allegations that the early PIRA started its activities with arms and fund-ing, roughly £100,000, from a part of the Republic of Ireland establishment at a time when such backing was of some value. The intent was to move the Republican movement away from any association with the extreme Left and ultimately “to get the IRA as a whole to drop its political activities in the South, and concentrate on military activities in the North” (O’Brien 1972: 197). A series of articles in Magill Monthly Magazine between May and August 1980 brought the allegations to the forefront again. See O’Brien 2000.

15 For a thoughtful treatment of Official IRA history, see Hanley and Millar 2009.16 My interviewees’ accounts seem highly consistent here with those of former volun-

teers who in the recent past have criticized the leadership of Sinn Féin in the post-agreement period. See Bean and Hayes 2002.

17 Compared with those who followed the two other pathways, the young girls and women from my sample seem particularly present among those latter armed activ-ists who mobilized because of what was happening on the ground. Female former armed activists have stressed, among their motivations toward political violence, the need to defend their families. They mean not only their relatives but also their larger community. From the interviews I have conducted, however, no single path emerges that is typical for female armed militants. Gender seems not to have mattered par-ticularly for establishing different types of mobilization. Republican women showed no desire for female emancipation in the early 1970s; the situation in the 1980s was a little different (Alison 2009). Those I met did not regard their struggle as part of a sexual emancipation. What one former female volunteer recounts is typical:


“Women were in the struggle because our society was in the struggle. We were not only part of the struggle because we were women; I was part of the struggle because our community was under threat, so for this reason we made a collective response as men and women. The strength of women came out with the development of the Troubles. The women came to the fore especially in the early ’70s, because if you look at that on a daily basis, the men have been arrested, the women as well, I was for example, but less than men. So, women started to gain a deep role within the armed struggle and a more pro- active role within it. But this was not done because of our gender but because of our collective community. That was the main reason for many women to get involved” (Interview no. 18). So the internment of their hus-bands, sons, and brothers afforded women a role in the struggle. This does not mean that they experienced no sexism in a predominantly male organization. This was particularly true early in their careers in the PIRA. Men seemed not to be keen to work with them. Female armed militants remembered the “presence of chauvinism” in the movement early in the 1970s (Interviews no. 12–13). For more on Republican female militants, see Alison 2009. On participation by women in armed groups, see Viterna 2006; Zwerman 1992.

References

Adams, G. (1996) Before the Dawn: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann.Alison, M. (2009) Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno- national

Conflicts. London: Routledge.Alonso, R. (2007) The IRA and Armed Struggle. London: Routledge.Anderson, B. (2002) Joe Cahill: A Life in the IRA. Dublin: O’Brien.An Phoblacht (1970a) “On this we stand: The rock of the Republic,” February.An Phoblacht (1970b) “Publicity Bureau clarifies the position of the IRA,” February.An Phoblacht (1970c) “Tabhacht na Gaeilge,” April.Bean, K. (2007) The New Politics of Sinn Féin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.Bean, K., and M. Hayes (2002) Republican Voices. Belfast: Seesyu.Bishop, P., and E. Mallie (1987) The Provisional IRA. London: Heinemann.Blee, K. M., and V. Taylor (2002) “Semi- structured interviewing in social movement

research,” in B. Klandermans and S. Staggenborg (eds.) Methods of Social Move-ment Research. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 92–117.

Blee, K. M., and T. Vining (2010) “Risks and ethics of social movement research in a changing political climate.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 30: 43–71.

Bosi, L. (2006) “The dynamic of social movement development: Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement in the 1960s.” Mobilization 11 (1): 81–100.

——— (2008) “Explaining the emergence process of the civil rights protest in Northern Ireland (1945–1968): Insights from a relational social movement approach.” Journal of Historical Sociology 21 (2–3): 242–71.


——— (2011) “From ‘British rights’ to ‘British out’: The Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement between the 1960s and early 1970s,” in H. Kouki and E. Romanos (eds.) Protest beyond Borders: Contentious Politics in Europe since 1945. Oxford: Berg-hahn: 125–38.

Bosi, L., and D. della Porta (forthcoming) “Patterns of disengagement from political armed activism: A comparative historical sociology analysis of Italy and Northern Ireland,” in J. Gunning (ed.) Terror No More? State, Societal, and Internal Dynam-ics in Transforming Violent Conflicts. London: Routledge.

Bottger, A., and R. Strobl (2003) “Potentials and limits of qualitative methods for research on violence,” in W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan (eds.) International Handbook of Vio-lence Research. Dordrecht: Kluwer: 1203–18.

Brannan, D., P. Esler, and A. Strindberg (2001) “Talking to ‘terrorists’: Towards an inde-pendent analytical framework for the study of violent substate activism.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24 (1): 3–24.

Burgess, M., N. Ferguson, and I. Hollywood (2007) “Rebels’ perspectives of the legacy of past violence and of the current peace in post- agreement Northern Ireland: An interpretative phenomenological analysis.” Political Psychology 28 (1): 69–88.

Burton, F. (1978) The Politics of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast Community. Lon-don: Routledge.

Clarke, L., and K. Johnston (2003) Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government. Edinburgh: Mainstream.

Collins, E. (1997) Killing Rage. London: Granta.Costello, S. (1966) United Irishman, July.Coughlan, A. (1966) Tuarisic, August.——— (2000) “The psychology of terrorism: An agenda for the twenty- first century.”

Political Psychology 21 (2): 405–20.della Porta, D. (1992a) “Biographies of social movement activists: State of the art and

methodological problems,” in M. Diani and R. Eyerman (eds.) Studying Collective Action. Newbury Park, CA: Sage: 168–93.

——— (1995) Political Violence and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.della Porta, D., ed. (1992b) Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Under-

ground Organizations. London: JAI.English, R. (2003) Armed Struggle. Oxford: Macmillan.Esseveled, J., and R. Eyerman (1992) “Which side are you on? Reflection of methodologi-

cal issues in the study of ‘distasteful’ social movements,” in M. Diani and R. Eyer-man (eds.) Studying Collective Action. Newbury Park, CA: Sage: 217–37.

Feenan, D. (2002) “Researching paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 5 (2): 147–63.

Fraser, N. (2003) “Social justice in the age of identity politics: Redistribution, recogni-tion, and participation,” in N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds.) Redistribution or Recog-nition? A Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso: 7–109.

Galliher, J., and J. Degregory (1985) Violence in Northern Ireland: Understanding Prot-estant Perspectives. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.


Greaves, D. (1963) The Irish Question and the British People. London: Connolly.Hanley, B., and S. Millar (2009) The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and

the Worker’s Party. Dublin: Penguin Ireland.Hobson, B. (2003) Recognition Struggles and Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Honneth, A. (1996) The Struggle for Recognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Horgan, J. (2008a) “From profiles to pathways and roots to routes: Perspectives from

psychology on radicalization into terrorism.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (618): 80–94.

——— (2008b) “Interviewing terrorists: A case for primary research,” in C. Hsinchun, E. Reid, J. Sinai, A. Silke, and B. Ganor (eds.) Terrorism Informatics. New York: Springer: 73–99.

Irish Republican Army (Official) (1972) The IRA Speaks in the 1970s. Dublin: Respol.Irish Republican Publishing Bureau (1973) Freedom Struggle by the Provisional IRA.

Dublin: Irish Republican Publishing Bureau.Mac Stíofáin, S. (1975) Memoirs of a Revolutionary. London: Gordon Cremonesi.McGartland, M. (1997) Fifty Dead Men Walking. London: Blake.McKeown, L. (2001) Out of Time: Irish Republican Prisoners, Long Kesh, 1972–2000.

Belfast: Beyond the Pale.Morrison, D. (1999) Then the Walls Came Down: A Prison Journal. Cork: Mercier.National Archives, Public Record Office (1972) CAB 128/48/3, CM (72) 13th Conclu-

sions, March 7, CA, 3.O’Brien, C. (1972) States of Ireland. New York: Pantheon.O’Brien, J. (2000) The Arms Trial. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.O’Callaghan, S. (1999). The Informer. London: Corgi.O’Dochartaigh, N. (2005 [1997]) From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of

the Irish Troubles. New York: Palgrave.——— (forthcoming) “Nation and neighbourhood: Nationalist mobilisation and local

solidarities in the North of Ireland,” in A. Guelke (ed.) The Challenges of Ethno- nationalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

O’Doherty, S. P. (1993) The Volunteer: A Former IRA Man’s True Story. London: HarperCollins.

O’Leary, B. (2005) “Mission accomplished? Looking back at the IRA.” Field Day Review 1 (1): 217–46.

O’Leary, B., and J. McGarry (1993) The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding North-ern Ireland. London: Athlone.

Passerini, L. (1996) Autobiography of a Generation, Italy ’68. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Patterson, H. (1989) The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA. London: Serif.

Patterson, H., and E. Kaufman (2007) Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945: The Decline of the Loyal Family. Manchester: Manchester University Press.


Phillips, A. (2003) “Recognition and the struggle for political voice,” in B. Hobson (ed.) Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency, and Power. London: Routledge: 263–74.

PIRA Army Council (1971) “Statement from Army Council,” by Sean McStiophan, Republican News, October 30.

Polletta, F. (2006) “Mobilization forum: Awkward movements.” Mobilization 11 (4): 475–78.

Punch, M. (1994) “Politics and ethics in qualitative research,” in N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage: 83–104.

Ranstorp, M., ed. (2006) Mapping Terrorism Research: State of the Art, Gaps, and Future Directions. London: Routledge.

Roy, O. (2004) Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst.Scarman, L. S. (1972) Violence and Civil Disturbances in Northern Ireland in 1969:

Report of Tribunal of Inquiry. Belfast: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.Seidman, G. W. (1993) Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and

South Africa, 1970–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press.Shirlow, P., J. Tonge, J. McAuley, and C. McGlynn (2010) Abandoning Historical Con-

flict? Former Political Prisoners and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Man-chester: Manchester University Press.

Silke, A., ed. (2004) Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements, and Failures. Lon-don: Cass.

Sluka, J. (1995) “Reflections on managing danger in fieldwork: Dangerous anthropology in Belfast,” in C. Nordstrom and A. Robben (eds.) Fieldwork under Fire: Contem-porary Studies of Violence and Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press: 283–96.

Smith, J. (1995) “Semi- structured interviewing and qualitative analysis,” in J. Smith, R. Harre, and L. V. Langenhove (eds.) Rethinking Methods in Psychology. London: Sage: 9–26.

Smyth, M., and G. Robinson (2001) Researching Violently Divided Societies: Ethical and Methodological Issues. London: Pluto.

This Week (1970) “Republicanism: Why it has failed.” July 31.Viterna, J. (2006) “Pulled, pushed, and persuaded: Explaining women’s mobilization into

the Salvadoran guerrilla army.” American Journal of Sociology 112 (1): 1–45.Warner, G. (2006) “The Falls Road curfew revisited.” Irish Studies Review 14 (3): 325–42.White, B. (1984) John Hume: Statesman of the Troubles. Belfast: Blackstaff.White, R. (1993) Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History. West-

port, CT: Greenwood.——— (2000) “Issues in the study of political violence: Understanding the motives of

participants in small group political violence.” Terrorism and Political Violence 12 (1): 95–108.

——— (2006) Ruairí Ó Brádaigh: The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.

——— (2007) “‘I’m not too sure what I told you the last time’: Methodological notes on


accounts from high- risk activists in the Irish Republican movement.” Mobilization 12 (3): 287–305.

Wood, E. (2003) Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——— (2006) “The ethical challenges of field research in conflict zones.” Qualitative Sociology 29 (3): 373–86.

Zwerman, G. (1992) “Conservative and feminist images of women associated with armed, clandestine organizations in the United States.” International Social Movement Research 4: 133–59.

Documents

Bosi Report