User:Mal McKee/Irish Republican Army

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Template:TOC-right Actually a broad term encompassing both historical and factional organizations, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) includes various insurgent groups beginning in when Ireland was a colony of the United Kingdon, in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. At various times, different groups claimed the title, resulting in various qualifiers such as Official IRA, Provisional IRA, Real IRA, etc.

IRA groups variously have considered themselves subordinate to overt political organizations, or been autonomous movements of their own.

Origins

Before any group called itself the IRA, there were Irish Home Rule movement, opposed by the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) that objected to Catholic-dominated, Irish nationalist Home Rule. Had there been no UVF and no opposition to Home Rule, the Irish Volunteers would not have had a motivation to conduct the Easter Rising of 1916. While the Irish Volunteers were not the only nationalist force, which arose from the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the original IRA can be traced most clearly to them. The IRB had been formed in 1858.

Northern Ireland

Real IRA

The Real IRA (RIRA), also called the Continuity IRA, group formed, in Northern Ireland, from PIRA members who rejected the 1998 peace process and continued fighting the British. Both the British and Irish governments consider it separate from the IRA. According to the RAND Corporation, it was created by PIRA’s ex-quartermaster general, Michael McKevitt and his common-law wife Bernadette Sands-McKevitt. The two were public members of a political organization called the Sovereignty Committee. She was the sister of Bobby Sands, who was the first PIRA member to die as a result of a hunger strike, in 1981. They recruited a number of PIRA bomb-makers, and their operations have emphasized bombing rather than small unit combat. The RIRA claimed responsibility for with Omagh bombing of August 1998, which Sands-McKevitt condemned; she said she approved of the halt to violence of the RIRA and PIRA.

The RIRA has been designated a "foreign terrorist organization" by the U.S. government, beginning in 2001. "RIRA opposes compromise with the British government or with the Protestant unionist majority in Northern Ireland, which favors keeping Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. Many of the attacks have coincided with the implementation of the new steps of the Good Friday Accord."