Gerry Adams: 'The good old IRA'

November 7, 2014 – Léargas – November 1, 2014, was the anniversary of the execution by the British of 18-year-old Kevin Barry. He was hanged on November 1, 1920. Kevin Barry was one of the "Forgotten Ten" -– Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers who were all executed in Mountjoy prison and buried there by the British government. He and nine other freedom fighters were afforded a state funeral a few years ago when their remains were moved from Mountjoy to Glasnevin.

I was there that day, and more important than all the pomp and ceremony of the fitting state occasion was the huge turn out of citizens who lined the pavements and joined the funeral ceremony. Kevin Barry was a victim and a hero of the Tan War – a conflict that lasted two years and was followed by a bloody civil war which saw atrocities committed by both sides.

His life and death and role as an IRA Volunteer was immortalised in song shortly after his death. "Kevin Barry" became one of the most popular rebel songs of that and subsequent generations.

I remind you of this anniversary because one aspect of the current controversy around how the IRA handled sex abusers during the recent war years is the manner in which Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party have rushed to condemn the IRA of that period, while commending the actions of those who fought in 1916 and in the subsequent Tan War.

Finance minister Michael Noonan speaking at Beal na mBlath in August 1984 said: “Our generation of the Irish owes more to [Michael] Collins than any other Irish hero.” Noonan quoted with approval the words of Arthur Griffith: “Collins was the man whose matchless and indomitable will carried Ireland through the terrible crisis. He was the man who fought the Black and Tan terror until England was forced to offer terms.”

In July last year in Cork Taoiseach Enda Kenny praised the actions of the “Flying Columns of Rebel Cork and its most famous son Michael Collins”. A year earlier addressing the annual Michael Collins commemoration at Beal na mBlath he described Collins as a “reformer. A thinker. A moderniser” and he praised “Collins’s ambition, mental force and high idea”.

The Labour Party rushed to commemorate the founding the Irish Citizen Army – a private, armed body of men and women established by James Connolly who fought in the Rising and many of whom joined the IRA.

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin speaking at Arbour Hill, where the 1916 leaders are buried, called the Rising “one of the most noble and courageous events in Irish history. The leaders of the Rising were patriots of honour and integrity who were prepared to sacrifice everything so that the Irish people could be free.” And the leaders were “heroes”.

But those, like Bobby Sands and Mairead Farrell and Máire Drumm and countless others who stood strong against injustice and courageously fought the British government and its military machine to a standstill in the 1970s, '80s and '90s were part of a “terrorist campaign”. That was “not a clean fight. It was dirty and nasty. And no amount of new historical revisionism, willful amnesia or media indifference can alter that fact.”

It is right that we remember those from previous generations who fought and died or were imprisoned or exiled for their efforts to liberate Ireland of British rule. But if there is a wilful amnesia, it is within the Dublin establishment parties. It has its roots in partition and the abandonment by the Dublin establishment of nationalists and unionists in the North and the ideal of an independent 32-county Irish republic. Little wonder that the government in Dublin has still to bring forward plans to commemorate the 1916 Rising, now only 18 months away. There is no sense of the Proclamation in modern offical Ireland. Or of its promise of equality for all. Except in the hearts and minds of freedom-loving Irish people.

Noonan and Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin hypocritically ignore the brutality and the violence the men and women of that generation of the IRA, led by Collins and others, used to prosecute the war against a numerically stronger, better-equipped and professional British army supported by the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Black and Tans and the Special Branch. They say it was the good old IRA. Different, they claim, from the IRA of the 1970s, '80s and '90s.

The fact is that the Rising in 1916 and the Tan War and Civil War were not "clean" fights. They were dirty and nasty and thousands of Irish citizens and British soldiers died, in the two years of the Tan War, including some 700 civilians.

During that period the IRA operated what would today be called kangaroo courts to meet out summary justice in a climate in which the Royal Irish Constabulary was regarded as little different from the Royal Ulster Constabulary of later years.

The IRA of that time, like its successors of our time, executed scores of people as informers and agents for the British, often leaving their bodies in public places with placards declaring, “Spies and informers beware”. Most were shot but one was taken by boat into the middle of the River Barrow and executed by drowning.

The IRA of that period disappeared scores of alleged informers –- men and women. It is claimed that this number may be as high as 200. Following the conflict there was no attempt to recover the remains, unlike republicans of this generation who have helped secure the return of 10 of the 15 who were secretly buried in the 1970s.

And under that same Michael Collins, who Noonan and Kenny lionise, and the same IRA lauded by Martin, the IRA imported weapons from America, robbed banks and post offices, and levied "taxes". Failure to pay this tax was met with stern measures including beatings.

Collins ordered attacks on RIC members, many of whom were shot from ambush, in the back, in the dark, when they were unarmed, in front of their families, in their beds and without mercy. The IRA killed civilians, including, by accident, children. In one five-month period 46 civilians were killed by the IRA and 163 wounded.

And when the Irish Independent condemned his actions as "murder most foul" what did Michael Collins do? He dispatched his men to the office of the Independent and held the editor at gun point as they dismantled the entire printing machinery and destroyed it.

And if Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil and Labour speak of a mandate to wage that war? They should be reminded that no one voted for war in the 1918 election. As in the 1970s, republicans of that time didn't go to war. The war came to us.