'The Green Book: I' from 'The IRA' by Tim Pat Coogan (1993)

The IRA
by Tim Pat Coogan (1993) (3rd edition)
ISBN 0-00-636943-X Paperback 749pp
[Note: A fourth edition of this book was published in 2000]

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This chapter is copyright Tim Pat Coogan (1993) and is included on the CAIN site by permission of the author and publisher. You may not edit, adapt, or redistribute changed versions of this for other than your personal use without the express written permission of the author and Harper Collins Publishers. Redistribution for commercial purposes is not permitted.

As we have seen (on pages 578-81) the I.R.A. prepared a structural plan based on the cell system which became public when Seamus Twomey was captured in 1977. The report found on him isolated the I.R.A.'s central problem as follows.

The three-day and seven-day detention orders are breaking volunteers and it is the Republican Army's fault for not indoctrinating volunteers with the psychological strength to resist interrogation.

One of the first documents drawn to every recruit's attention, equal on a plane of importance with the 1916 Proclamation, is the Democratic Programme of the First Dail which met after the Sinn Féin landslide victory in the 'khaki election' of 1918 with a mandate for the whole of Ireland. In the first lecture of the Green Book the recruit is told:

Commitment to the Republican Movement is the firm belief that its struggle both military and political is morally justified, that war is morally justified and that the Army is the direct representative of the 1918 Dail Eireann Parliament, and that as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the moral right to pass laws for, and to claim jurisdiction over the territory, air space, mineral resources, means of production, distribution and exchange and all of its people regardless of creed or loyalty.

The most important thing is security, that means you:
DON'T TALK IN PUBLIC PLACES:
YOU DON'T TELL YOUR FAMILY, FRIENDS, GIRL-FRIENDS OR WORKMATES THAT YOU ARE A MEMBER OF THE I.R.A. DON'T EXPRESS VIEWS ABOUT MILITARY MATTERS, IN OTHER WORDS YOU SAY NOTHING to any person. Don't be seen in public marches, demonstrations or protests. Don't be seen in the company of known Republicans, don't frequent known Republican houses. Your prime duty is to remain unknown to the enemy forces and the public at large.

Another important thing volunteers must realise and understand is the danger involved in drinking alcohol and the very real danger, of over-drinking. Quite a large body of information has been gathered in the past by enemy forces and their touts from volunteers who drank.
Volunteers are warned that drink-induced loose talk is the MOST POTENTIAL DANGER facing any organisation, and in a military organisation it is SUICIDE.

The Irish Republican Army, as the legal representatives of the Irish people, are morally justified in carrying out a campaign of resistance against foreign occupation forces and domestic collaborators. All volunteers are and must feel morally justified in carrying out the dictates of the legal government, they as the Army are the legal and lawful Army of the Irish Republic which has been forced underground by overwhelming forces.

The Army as an organisation claims and expects your total allegiance without reservation. It enters into every aspect of your life. It invades the privacy of your home life, it fragments your family and friends, in other words claims your total allegiance.

All potential volunteers must realise that the threat of capture and of long jail sentences are a very real danger and a shadow which hangs over every volunteer. Many in the past joined the Army out of romantic notions, or sheer adventure, but when captured and jailed they had after-thoughts about their allegiance to the Army. They realised at too late a stage that they had no real interest in being volunteers. This causes splits and dissension inside prisons and divided families and neighbours outside. Another important aspect all potential volunteers should think about is their ability to obey orders from a superior officer. All volunteers must obey orders issued to them by a superior officer regardless of whether they like the particular officer or not.

Before any potential volunteer decides to join the Irish Republican Army he should understand fully and clearly the issues involved. He should not join the Army because of emotionalism, sensationalism, or adventurism. He should examine fully his own motives, knowing the dangers involved and knowing that he will find no romance within the Movement. Again he should examine his political motives bearing in mind that the Army are intent on creating a Socialist Republic.

Volunteers are expected to wage a military war of liberation against a numerically superior force. This involves the use of arms and explosives. Firstly the use of arms. When volunteers are trained in the use of arms they must fully understand that guns are dangerous, and their main purpose is to take human life, in other words to kill people, and volunteers are trained to kill people. It is not an easy thing to take up a gun and go out to kill some person without strong convictions or justification. The Army, its motivating force, is based upon strong convictions which bonds the Army into one force and before any potential volunteer decides to join the Army he must have these strong convictions. Convictions which are strong enough give him confidence to kill someone without hesitation and without regret. The same can be said about a bombing campaign. Again all people wishing to join the Army must fully realise that when life is being taken, that very well could mean their own. If you go out to shoot soldiers or police you must fully realise that they too can shoot you.

Life in an underground army is extremely harsh and hard, cruel and disillusioning at times. So before any person decides to join the Army he should think seriously about the whole thing.

'Analysis' is a word which a recruit soon becomes aware of; it figures prominently in all I.R.A. teaching. For, having warned the would-be guerrilla of what he is up against and told him what he is striving for, it is then of course essential to explain how both the 'for' and against' arose.

The nationhood of all Ireland has been an accepted fact for more than 1,500 years and has been recognised internationally as a fact. Professor Edmund Curtis, writing of Ireland in 800 AD says that 'she was the first nation North of the Alps to produce a whole body of literature in her own speech', and he is told how the Danes were driven out or assimilated by a people 'whose civilisation was a shining light throughout Europe', prior to the Norman invasion of 1169 with which there 'commenced more than 8 centuries of RELENTLESS AND UNREMITTING WARFARE that has lasted down to this very day'.

The objective of the 800 years of oppression 'is economic exploitation with the unjustly partitioned 6 counties remaining Britain's directly controlled old-style colony' and the South under the 'continuing social, cultural and economic domination of London'. This last led to Irish savings being invested in England 'for a higher interest rate' and many hundreds of thousands of boys and girls from this country had to emigrate to England to seek the employment which those exported saving created.

Another aspect of economic imperialism at work is the export of raw, unprocessed materials: live cattle on the hoof - mineral wealth, fish caught by foreign trawlers, etc. Further, from 1958 on, the Free State abandoned all attempts to secure an independent economy, and brought in foreign multi-national companies to create jobs instead of buying their skills and then sending them home gradually.

'Africanisation' is the word for this process elsewhere. Control of our affairs in all of Ireland lies more than ever since 1921 outside the hands of the Irish people.

The logical outcome of all this was full immersion in the E.E.C. in the 1970s. The Republican Movement opposed this North and South in 1972 and 1975 and continues to do so. It is against such political economic power blocks East and West and military alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

It stands with our Celtic brothers and the other subject nations of Europe, and with the neutral and non-aligned peoples of the Third World; it seeks a third, socialist alternative which transcends both Western individualistic capitalism and Eastern state capitalism, which is in accordance with our best revolutionary traditions as a people.

The position of the Irish Republican Army since its foundation in 1916 has been one of sustained resistance and implacable hostility to the forces of imperialism, always keeping in the forefront of the most advanced revolutionary thinking and the latest guerrilla warfare techniques in the world.

The milestones, the battle honours won, the blood-stained trail of sacrifice, imprisonment, hunger strikes, executions, yet with telling blows delivered to the enemy, often in the heart of British imperialism itself, commanding the open admiration of freedom-loving peoples around the world.

NOTE: The moral position of the Irish Republican Army, its right to engage in warfare, is based on: (a) the right to resist foreign aggression; (b) the right to revolt against tyranny and oppression and (c) the direct lineal succession with the Provisional Government of 1916, the first Dail of 1919 and the second Dail of 1921.

In 1938 the seven surviving faithful Republican Deputies delegated executive powers to the Army Council of the I.R.A. per the 1921 resolution [see page 159]. In 1969 the sole surviving Deputy, Joseph Clarke [sic¹], reaffirmed publicly that the then Provisional Army Council and its successors were the inheritors of the first and second Dail as a Provisional Government.

Economic imperialism is evident on every main road and city street of Ireland: in Banking, Insurance, Merchant Marine, the Motor Industry, Mining, Fisheries, Industry in General, I.C.I., Courtaulds, Pye, Phillips, Grundig, Shell-BP, Wimpey etc.; and cultural imperialism, epitomised in the Conor Cruise O'Briens of this Island, has been reinforced since the Treaty sell-out by successive Free State Governments via mass media, R.T.E., and the press and through education.

The injustice of being as an individual politically impotent, the injustice of unemployment, poverty, poor housing, inadequate social security, the injustice of the exploitation of our labour, our intelligence and our natural resources, the injustice of the bloody-minded destruction of our culture, our language, music, art, drama, customs, the inherent injustice of the state repression which is necessary to maintain the present system as a whole.

A Government system which will give every individual the opportunity to partake in the decisions which affect him or her: by decentralising political power to the smallest social unit practicable where we would all have the opportunity to wield political power both individually and collectively in the interests of ourselves and the nation as a whole. Socially and Economically we will enact a policy aimed at eradicating the Social Imperialism of today, by returning the ownership of the wealth of Ireland to the people of Ireland through a system of co-operativism, worker ownership, and control of industry, Agriculture and the Fisheries.

Culturally we would hope to restore Gaelic, not from the motivation of national chauvinism but from the viewpoint of achieving with the aid of a cultural revival the distinctive new Irish Socialist State: as a Bulwark against imperialist encroachments from whatever quarter. Internationally our alignment would hopefully be with the progressive Governments or former colonies like ourselves with the dual purpose of mutual advantage and of curbing the endeavours of imperialistic military and economic power blocs throughout the world.

A new recruit's immediate obstacle is the removal of his (her) ignorance about how to handle weapons, military tactics, security, interrogations etc. An O.C.'s might be how to put a unit on a military footing; an I.O.'s how to create an effective intelligence network; a Cumann Chairman's how best to mount a campaign on a given issue, e.g. H Blocks etc., and for all members of the movement regardless of which branch we be-long to, to enhance our commitment to and participation in the struggle through gaining as comprehensive an understanding as possible of our present society and the proposed Republican alternative through self and group education.

Before we go on the offensive politically or militarily we take the greatest defensive precautions possible to ensure success, e.g. we do not advocate a United Ireland without being able to justify our right to such a state as opposed to partition; we do not employ revolutionary violence as our means without being able to illustrate that we have no recourse to any other means. Or in more everyday simple terms: we do not claim that we are going to escalate the war if we cannot do just that; we do no mount an operation without first having ensured that we have taken the necessary defensive precautions of accurate intelligence, security, that weapons are in proper working order with proper ammunition and that the volunteers involved know how to handle interrogations in the event of their capture etc, and of course that the operation itself enhances rather then alienates our supporters.

Even the given situations of adequate bomb warnings are exploited which is again our mistake in not having sufficiently considered our defensive before going on the offensive: the so-called Bloody Friday [see page 480] being the prime example. Either we did not stop to consider that the enemy would 'Dirty Joe' us on the warnings or we overestimated the Brits' ability to handle so many operations. But regardless of which is the case we made the mistake and the enemy exploited it.

Other more everyday examples: [the enemy] exploits the mistake of a volunteer who stays in his own home by arresting him; he exploits the careless dumping of war materials by lifting them or, as is the more recent tactic by volunteers who return to pick the materials up; he exploits I.R.A. - sticky [Official I.R.A.] confrontations by staying out of the way to allow the subsequent detrimental publicity and effect on support to run its course; he exploits I.R.A. - Loyalist confrontations by moving in behind the I.R.A. unit and attacking it, plus again the detrimental international publicity.

We exploit these mistakes by propagating the facts. So it was with their murderous mistakes of the Falls Road curfew, Bloody Sunday and internment, which were exploited to our advantage support-wise as was the murder of John Boyle in Dunloy.

Tactics are dictated by the existing conditions. Here again the logic is quite simple. Without support Volunteers, Dumps, Weapons, Finance, etc., we cannot mount an operation, much less a campaign. In September 1969 the existing conditions dictated that Brits were not to be shot, but after the Falls curfew all Brits were to the people acceptable targets. The existing conditions had been changed.

Likewise at present, for example, although the leadership of the S.D.L.P. has proved itself to be collaborationist and thus an enemy of the people. At various stages since 1974 we could have employed the tactic of making them subjects of ridicule by tarring and feathering them when for instance they were members of an Executive which tortured and interned Irishmen, which penalised rent and rates strikers, etc., or when they recently declared at Westminster in a debate on H Block that 'Life should mean Life and there should be no Political Status'. The defensive precaution in the latter example being of course that the people be made aware beforehand that they actually did make such an utterance.

The rule of thumb for all our actions can therefore be clearly seen to be that we must explain by whatever means we have at our disposal why we bomb, why we punish criminals, why we execute informers etc.

So far as the I.R.A. were concerned, these people were helping to 'service the war-machine' of their enemies. And the Green Book itself says:

We do not exclude taking an action which does not completely fill the criteria of this analysis on how to conduct the struggle. Many instances have arisen and will arise again when we have had to step outside these general terms of reference to our immediate detriment propaganda-wise and support-wise. However even in such an eventuality, if we rationalise our action, get our defensive before our offensive, try to ensure that we have an alternative, relatively unaffected area of support from which to operate if the support in the area in which the detrimental but unavoidable action takes place, we are adhering as best as possible under the circumstances to a proper conduct of the war.

THE ENEMY: CATEGORISE-CURE: The enemy, generally speaking, are all those opposed to our short-term or long-term objectives. But having said that, we must realise that all our enemies are not the same and therefore there is no common cure for their enmity. The conclusion then is that we must categorise and then suggest cures for each category.

Some examples: We have enemies through ignorance, through our own fault or default and of course the main enemy is the establishment.

The enemy through ignorance we attempt to cure through education though such an attempt is obviously futile if we do not firstly educate ourselves. Our means are marches, wall slogans, press statements, Republican press and publications and of course person to person communication. But as already has been stated, we must first educate ourselves, we must organise the protests and demonstrations efficiently, we must be prepared to paint the wall slogans and to sell and contribute to Republican press, Publications and Press statements.

The enemy through our own fault or default is the one we create ourselves through our - conduct and through our collective conduct of the struggle: the wee woman whose gate or back door gets pulled of its hinges by a volunteer evading arrest and who doesn't get an apology as soon as possible afterwards or more preferably has the damage repaired by one of our supporters; the family friends and neighbours of a criminal or informer who has been punished without their being informed why. In brief our personal conduct as well as our conduct of our Republican activities must be aimed at if not enhancing support, at least at not creating enemies unnecessarily.

The establishment is all those who have a vested interest in maintaining the present status quo in politicians, media, judiciary, certain business elements and the Brit war machine comprising, the Brit Army, the U.D.R., R.U.C. (r) [reserve], Screws, Civilian Searchers. The cure for these armed branches of the establishment is well known and documented. But with the possible exceptions of the Brit Ministers in the 'Northern Ireland Office' and certain members of the judiciary, the overtly unarmed branches of the establishment are not so clearly identifiable to the people as our enemies as say armed Brits or R.U.C.

It is our task therefore to clearly identify them to the people as such and again depending on the existing conditions and our ability to get our defensive before our offensive, effect a cure. Execution, as earlier stated is not the only way of making this category of establishment enemy ineffective: we can variously expose them as liars, hypocrites, collaborators, make them subjects of ridicule etc., e.g. The 'Mason-Superthug' poster image, the 'Captain Nervewreck' cartoon strip, the Conor 'Booze' O'Brien pun etc.

GUERRILLA STRATEGY: Many figures of speech have been used to describe Guerrilla Warfare, one of the most apt being 'The War of the Flea' which conjured up the image of a flea harrying a creature of by comparison elephantine size into fleeing (forgive the pun). Thus it is with a Guerrilla Army such as the I.R.A. which employs hit and run tactics against the Brits while at the same time striking at the soft economic underbelly of the enemy, not with the hope of physically driving them into the sea but nevertheless expecting to effect their withdrawal by an effective campaign of continuing harrassment contained in a fivefold guerrilla strategy.

The Strategy is:

1. A war of attrition against enemy personnel which is aimed at causing as many casualties and deaths as possible so as to create a demand from their people at home for their withdrawal.

2. A bombing campaign aimed at making the enemy's financial interest in our country unprofitable while at the same time curbing long term financial investment in our country.

3. To make the Six Counties as at present and for the past several years ungovernable except by colonial military rule.

4. To sustain the war and gain support for its ends by National and International propaganda and publicity campaigns.

5. By defending the war of liberation by punishing criminals, collaborators and informers.

The greatest threat posed to the I.R.A. is that of penetration either by enemy agents and informers or by the supergrass system. To guard against this threat, volunteers learn tactics such as anti-interrogation techniques, which the Green Book concentrates on in particular - an indication of how importantly this is viewed by the I.R.A., and which we will examine shortly. But even more important than the counter-interrogation techniques is the creation of a good self-image on the part of the volunteer, by dinning into him the justice of his cause and his personal superiority to the 'Brit' enemy, who has 'not only the sympathy of, but a degree of control over the elements which largely formulate people's opinions - TV, Radio, the large circulation press'.

While one of our chief considerations in deciding tactics is the concern for our friends, relatives, neighbours, our people is the midst of whom we operate, the enemy is simply dealing with an impersonal, inferior foreigner, a 'Paddy'. 'Musck-Savage' or 'Bog-Wog', and with the great added advantage of all the resources and back up of a conventional army, para-military police, etc., e.g. M.R.F., S.A.S., plain clothes units, covert surveillance teams etc.

At this juncture the most obvious differences between the Brit and the I.R.A. volunteer, apart from the fact that the Brit is an uninvited armed foreigner who has no moral or historical justification for being here in the - first place, are those of support, motivation and freedom of personal initiative.

The Brits support, his billets, dumps, weapons, wages etc., are all as stated earlier provided for by involuntary taxation. His people who pay the taxes have never indicated nor indeed have they been asked to indicate by any democratic means their assent to his being here at their expense.

The I.R.A. volunteer receives all his support voluntarily from his people.

A member of the I.R.A. is such by his own choice, his convictions being the only factor which compels him to volunteer, his objectives the political freedom and social and economic justice for his people. Apart from the few minutes in the career of the average Brit that he comes under attack, the Brit has freedom or personal initiative. He is told when to sleep, where to sleep, when to get up, where to spend his free time etc.

The I.R.A. volunteer, except when carrying out a specific army task, acts most of the time on his own initiative and must therefore shoulder that responsibility in such a way that he enhances our necessary stated task of ensuring that his conduct is not a contributory factor to the Brit attempt to isolate us from our people.

The summary continues:

By now it is clear that our task is not only to kill as many enemy personnel as possible but of equal importance to create support which will carry us not only through a war of liberation which could last another decade but which will support us past the 'Brits Out' stage to the ultimate aim of a Democratic Socialist Republic.

Resistance must be channelled into active and passive support with an on-going process through our actions, our education programmes, our policies, of attempting to turn the passive supporter into a dump holder, a member of the movement, a paper-seller etc., with the purpose of building protective support barriers between the enemy and ourselves, thus curbing the enemy's attempted isolation policy. And of course the more barriers there are, the harder it is for the enemy to get at us while at the same time we increase the potential for active support in its various forms.

The immediate protective barriers are of course, our own security, the other branches of the movement, our billets etc. But we must build up other barriers by championing the various causes in our support areas through involvement in the various enemy structures which have been brought down as a result of the war: Policing, Transport, Bin-Collection, Advice Centres, etc.,

The alternative to our plotting such a course is obvious. IF, for example, we have an area with a unit of IRA volunteers and nothing else: no Sinn Fein Cumann, no Green Cross committee, no local involvement etc., after a period, regardless of how successfully they have been against the Brits, they end up in jail leaving no structures behind: no potential for resistance, recruits, education or general enhancing of support.