Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY • 285Connolly to designate the nationalist forces used in the Dublin EasterRebellion of 1916. Following the creation of the Irish Free State in1922, the IRA split. The new Irish state turned the members of theIRA loyal to the new government into the national army of the FreeState. The remaining IRA faction, made up of members opposed to thepartition of Ireland and who refused to obey the Free State government,was proscribed and repressed. Various IRA splinter groups that haverejected their leadership’s accommodation to the 1998 political settlementhave pursued violence on their own and have taken names suchas the Continuity IRA, the Real IRA (also called the True IRA), andthe 32 County Sovereignty Committee, but the followings and armsheld by these groups are negligible. The U.S. government in 2001 designatedthese factions as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, thus forbiddingU.S. citizens from giving material aid to these groups.The IRA began a bombing campaign in Great Britain during mostof 1939 and the early part of 1940, striking more than 50 targets inLondon, Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham. The Irish governmentagain banned the IRA in 1939, cooperating with the British insuppressing the group. From 1955 to 1962, the IRA unleashed a “bordercampaign” directed against the Royal Ulster Constabulary, whichagain was suppressed through official Anglo-Irish cooperation.Following the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion, militantUlster Protestant harassment of Catholics in Northern Ireland increasedfrom 1967 onward. This prompted nationalist political organizersto form a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which organizedmarches and protests even in Protestant neighborhoods. TheIRA provided escorts for these marches but lacked sufficient arms tofend off arson attacks by militant Protestants against the homes andbusinesses of Catholics.Disagreements within the IRA over its increasingly Marxist politicalcharacter led to its effective reorganization in 1969 under the nameof the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), the “Provos,”which maintained that its primary goal was not civil rights for Catholicsin a separate Northern Ireland nor some sort of socialist state, butrather unification of Ireland by force even against the wishes of theProtestant majority in the north, and that the primary means to achievethis goal was armed struggle rather than political negotiation. ThePIRA is in fact the IRA that continued the armed struggle from 1969to 1998. The original organization from which the current IRA split