This is the second of three guest posts by Henry McDonald, who has covered Irish politics for the Observer and Guardian newspapers, examining the flaws in the frequently-drawn comparison between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Islamist terror groups like Hamas. The posts are drawn from the final chapter of Henry’s recent book, Gunsmoke and Mirrors - How Sinn Fein Dressed up Defeat as Victory, available here. You can read Henry’s earlier post here.

Irish republicans throughout the generations have never lacked physical courage in pursuit of their goals. They have however been subject to certain boundaries imposed by their own particular background and culture. Throughout the hunger strike the prisoners’ supporters insisted that their fast for political status was not slow drawn out suicide, which for centuries was regarded as a sin in Catholic theology. It seems puzzling none the less that a political movement that produced activists willing to starve themselves to death for a cause would regard still suicide bombing as anathema.

Tommy Gorman, as head of the IRA’s ‘Engineering Department’ in the Belfast in the 1980s, knew many young men and women willing to transport bombs into the city centre and at security bases. They risked death or arrest as couriers of lethal explosive devices. Yet Gorman recalls that during the armed campaign no one ever volunteered for a suicide mission against a British Army or RUC target.

The IRA veteran who literally swam into republican folklore in 1972 when he escaped from the Maidstone Prison Ship moored in Belfast Lough is best positioned to explain why no one was willing to destroy themselves along with others in a few seconds for the ’struggle.’

‘In all the years I was in the IRA there wasn’t a single volunteer I came across who came forward willing to be a suicide-bomber. The hunger strike was different because for the prisoners there was always a back-door to life. At any time their demands could have been met and the fast would have been over and their lives saved. That’s the crucial difference.’

Gorman is visibly amused at the notion that there would have been a reservoir of suicide-bombers: ‘Even if anybody had come forward with the idea that they wanted to blow themselves up alongside Brits or cops he would have been sent packing. He wouldn’t have been taken seriously.’

It is telling that the closest PIRA came to Islamic-style suicide bombing was to use proxies, those forced at gunpoint to become ‘human bombs.’ It is also revealing that the tactic was quickly abandoned by the Provisionals following a wave of national revulsion against such an inhuman strategy.

On October 24 1990 PIRA launched a series of co-ordinated ‘human bomb’ attacks on four separate British Army vehicle checkpoints across Northern Ireland. The largest loss of life occurred at the Coshquin checkpoint on the Derry-Donegal border. The ‘human bomb’ chosen for the attack was Patsy Gillespie, a Catholic civilian who worked in the canteen of a local British Army base and was thus regarded by republicans as a ‘collaborator.’ Patsy Gillespie was forced at gunpoint into a van packed with 1,000 lbs of explosives. He was strapped into the drivers seat and ordered to drive at top speed into the checkpoint. Their chosen target had been told his wife was being held by an armed gang at their home in the nationalist Shantallow area. As soon as he arrived at the checkpoint the IRA detonated the bomb inside the van by remote control blowing Patsy Gillespie and five British soldiers apart. On the same day the IRA in south Armagh tried the same tactic by strapping a local south Armagh man into a van loaded with explosives. On this occasion the driver managed to dive out of the vehicle before impact. One soldier
died at the checkpoint near Newry. A third attack using a ‘human bomb’ was foiled outside Roslea, Co. Fermanagh.

Ed Moloney in his masterpiece ‘A Secret History of the IRA’ has described the ‘human bomb’ tactic as a public relations disaster for the Provisionals. The almost instant abandonment of this ultra-cynical, callous means of delivering huge bombs to British bases is further proof of the limits Irish politics and culture placed upon the ‘armed struggle’. In Gaza, from the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 to the resumption of suicide bombs in Israel on February 4 2008, Palestinians openly celebrated the exploits of
suicide murderers in the streets; in Ireland the use of the ‘human bombs’ sickened an entire nation and drove the mass of the Irish people even further away from the Provisionals’ project. Moreover, as Moloney has argued with some justification, national revulsion against the ‘human bomb’ murders eventually re-inforced that faction of the republican movement determined to run down and ultimately end the armed campaign. The cult of Irish republicanism may be rooted in blood sacrifice but when it came to the
‘human bombs’ it was the blood sacrafice of others.

It is not just the contrasting tactics that radically differentiate the pragmatic Provisionals with the theocratic-driven militants of Hamas and Hezbollah. Throughout their campaign of terror the Provisionals always sought out an ‘address’ to deliver offers of negotiation. It was of course generally speaking to the wrong one - the British government, rather than the true ‘British presence’, i.e. The unionists. None the less from the very outset the Provisionals were eager to open up dialogue with their enemies. Indeed there is anecdotal evidence that in the 1990s a modus operandi was established between the UVF and PIRA in Belfast to avoid the two organisations ‘taking out’ each other’s respective leaderships. In some cases senior IRA figures in the city alongside their old rivals in the Officials also met with loyalists on a regular basis to carve up building site rackets in the city particularly in the 1980s.

Islamist movements have no ‘address’ because they don’t recognise its right to exist, namely Israel. Rather they seek its ultimate destruction. In the end the Provisionals have had to settle for something far less than their ultimate goal of a united Ireland. Movements such as Hamas are maximalist by nature, they are all-or-nothing organisations which regard any compromise as tantamount to something akin or even worse than religious apostasy. That is why throughout the period of the Oslo peace process in the mid 1990s Hamas and its offshoots and allies resorted to the tactic of blowing up buses, cafés and bars in Israel proper as a means of destroying the accord between the Labour dominated government in Jerusalem and the more secular Fatah under Yasser Arafat. Unlike Irish republicans the Islamist entire world view
is coloured by an unbending theology rooted in the early centuries of the last Millennium; republicanism, at least in theory, as opposed to the Provos’ malpractice of it, is rooted in the 18th century European Enlightenment.