NOT only do nearly all Irish people do it but it has become a vital part of this country’s political narrative.
What we all do is happily differentiate between the old IRA and the Provisional IRA. The old IRA fought a just and good war. The Provos were cold-blooded murderers who slaughtered innocents.
In a way this version of events has been necessary for all of us. It has certainly been needed by the Republic of Ireland’s two main parties of government, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who developed directly from men who had taken up arms.
Over the years it seems to have just become an accepted part of our history. In that way any of us can get to sing an old rebel song and it’s okay because the old IRA were the good guys and the violence was justified.
It’s the same thing that we all do, the same thing that the whole of Irish society does, the same thing that Ireland’s main political parties do. The thing is, though, do we ever ask how true all of that is? Is the difference between the old IRA and the provisional IRA an historical fact or is it just a matter of interpretation?
We are fast approaching the centenary of 1916 when any number of dubious versions of history will be bandied about, when the hostility the 1916 insurgents initially faced from the population of Dublin, for instance, the spitting on them as they passed, will go unmentioned. When history will be airbrushed.
So how true is that distinction, that easy, reliable, distinction, between the old IRA and the Provisionals? Is it just that the fight against the Empire is seen as just, especially after the execution of those 1916 insurgents, when the fighting commencing in 1969 is seen as not?
Is that our starting point? Or is it that the time passed allows us to look at the violence of long, long ago as somehow lesser than the violence we all saw happening in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s?
Now this isn’t an historical study and I’m only chasing a thought but as I’m writing this I just went over and picked up a Robert Kee history book covering the period of the old IRA and I opened it at random.
This is what I read and it happened in February 1921 shortly after the British executed seven IRA men in Cork Barracks. ‘An elderly lady, a Mrs Lindsay of Coachford, County Cork, a Unionist Irishwoman, had given warning to the authorities of an ambush being prepared in her locality.
It was her information which led to the arrest of those IRA men who were shot in Cork. She had meanwhile been kidnapped by the IRA as a hostage and when the sentences were carried out in Cork barracks she herself was shot dead.
Her execution as a spy did not prevent further reprisals being taken by the IRA the next day on six unarmed soldiers who were shot dead in the streets of Cork.’
Robert Kee, by the way, would have been an historian with a very sympathetic view of Irish nationalism. But the kidnapping and execution of an old lady and the shooting dead of six unarmed soldiers? Doesn’t that sound just a bit like something the Provisionals did? Why does 60-odd years make such a difference?
I’m not denying at all the legitimacy of those who took up arms against the British Empire. Yet, by the same token, is it not just a little too easy for us all to deny that legitimacy to those who did the same in 1969 and beyond? Isn’t this old IRA cover just a little too handy when it comes to talking about people being killed?
Somehow the leaders of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are going to justify the blood spilt in their own parties history but deny that to the likes of Gerry Adams. And I don’t know, maybe they are right, maybe the circumstances are completely different and the killing of an old lady in 1921 was justifiable but was not justifiable in 1971.
It’s all a bit too easy for us all though isn’t it, this old IRA thing. Don’t you think?
See More: IRA, Ireland, Provisionals
