Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Charles Townshend

Author:Charles Townshend
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09-08T03:00:00+00:00

Such a strategy relies on the premise that the British people do not support British government sponsored murder in Ireland, that they want their troops withdrawn from Ireland, as indicated in opinion polls, and that they have the potential to eventually force the British government because of the cost of the war or the attrition rate or because of the demoralisation and war weariness, to withdraw from Ireland.

Provisional IRA statement, An Phoblacht/Republican News, 5 January 1984

By contrast with the Clan’s embrace of the new technology of high explosives, the most resonant of all the Irish ‘terrorist’ actions of this time, the 1882 Phoenix Park assassinations of the two leading members of the Irish government, was carried out with surgical knives. (Helping to ensure, amongst other things, that in future ministers would seldom be allowed to walk about unguarded.) By contrast, too, the political message of this act was hard to decipher, since the ‘Irish National Invincibles’ never carried out another, or issued any political manifesto. If the killing of Gladstone’s son-in-law pushed him towards Home Rule, was this what the Invincibles wanted?

The failure of the Clan dynamite campaign brought direct Irish–American violent action in Britain to a surprisingly complete end, in contrast with the extraordinary resilience of the ‘physical force’ movement in Ireland itself. (They deployed the potent symbol of the ‘phoenix flame’ which would rekindle from its own ashes.) Its apparent decay around the turn of the century, so marked that almost everybody wrote it off, in fact coincided with a major reinvigoration, and refocusing, of Irish cultural identity in the form of the Gaelic revival. The dramatic insurrection in Dublin in 1916 represented a fusion of the old organization with the explicitly ethnic objectives formulated by Patrick Pearse – ‘Ireland not free merely, but Gaelic also’. In Pearse’s writing, the ‘resonating roll-call that blurs history, context and nuance’, which Tololyan identifies as the core of national ideology, is startlingly vivid. His call to violent action, too, was suffused with the ideal of ‘death knowingly grasped’ so central to the Armenian Vartan story – as, indeed, was the martyrdom of hunger-striking republican prisoners after the failure of the rising, most famously Thomas Ashe in 1917 and Terence MacSwiney in 1920.

Though Irish republicanism’s commitment to physical force was consistent, its ambivalence about terrorist methods was partly due to the imprecision of its thinking about the utility of violence as such. Was the point of violent action simply to ‘hurt England’ – in the hope presumably that Britain would eventually get fed up and quit – or could it directly drive out the enemy? Given the huge disparity in available force, the second idea was almost literally suicidal. But it seems to have been what motivated most ‘physical force men’. Research into the IRA’s mainland campaign, for instance, has shown little in the way of reasoning about the effect of ‘operations abroad’, beyond the need to find ‘something to do’ and the urge to ‘do to you what you are doing to Ireland’, as one of the Manchester arsonists of April 1921 put it.

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