Profiling the Irish Republican Army (IRA) (1969-1997)
This article profiles the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which existed from 1969 to 1997, when it was dissolved following a negotiated peace agreement with the British Government, known as the Good Friday Agreement, in April 1998. To profile the IRA, the article examines the root causes underlying the IRA’s insurgency, its political and military organizations and their activities, the British Government’s counterinsurgency campaign against the IRA, how the IRA’s insurgency was resolved, and an update on the situation in Northern Ireland from 1998 to 2024.
Introduction
The Irish Republican Army, commonly referred to as the IRA, found its origins following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1920 which separated Ireland so that Northern Ireland would remain inside the rule of Great Britain (Duerr, 2023, p. 404). The IRA aligned with the political party ‘Fienna Fail’, who also opposed the treaty, but they were both defeated by pro-treaty forces in the 1922 to 1923 Irish Civil War, which upheld the treaty’s amendments (Duerr, 2023, p. 404). Following this defeat, the IRA resurfaced in 1969 due to a mass civil rights movement and a range of protests, which spurred a revival of terrorist activity (Lippman, 2018, p. 118). Alongside having various offshoot organizations, such as the ‘Official IRA’ (OIRA), the ‘Provisional IRA’ (PIRA), the ‘Continuity IRA’ (CIRA), and the ‘Real IRA’ (RIRA), the groups officially amassed 488 terrorist attacks from 1973 to 1997, resulting in t...