Irish Rebels Suffer Reverses : IRA’s Aim of United Land Seen Further From Reach

The man who called himself Patrick spoke easily, and his articulate manner, his white sneakers and his stylish jacket presented an image more akin to that of a high school basketball coach than of a triggerman for the Irish Republican Army’s Belfast Brigade.

But, at 35, he has spent 11 years in prison, has seen several friends die and admits that his future offers only the promise of violent death or more jail.

Despite the extent of his personal sacrifice, Patrick seems unconcerned that the IRA’s goal of creating a united, socialist Ireland remains an improbable dream and that his own future appears bleak.

“I didn’t think it would last this long,” he said of the IRA’s latest anti-British campaign, now in its 18th year. “But if you really believe in what you’re fighting for, then you do it.”

A product of West Belfast’s Roman Catholic ghetto, Patrick was radicalized by sectarian riots in the late 1960s and learned his political philosophy in British jails. Now he is considered typical of the estimated 350 to 500 hard-core members who sustain the IRA as one of the world’s oldest and most effective self-styled armed revolutionary movements.

A far cry from the thousands of ill-disciplined romantics who fought and won Ireland’s independence nearly 70 years ago, today’s IRA is small, tightly organized and extremely professional.

“It is the most lethal revolutionary organization in Europe and one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world,” said Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Research Foundation for the Study of Terrorism in London. “They have well-developed bomb-making technology and skilled, experienced people.”

Government security forces in Northern Ireland, a Connecticut-size province of the United Kingdom, attribute nearly 80 of the province’s 93 killings this year and most of the 217 bombings to IRA activity. The latest IRA victim, a Protestant paramilitary leader, died last week in a Belfast car bomb explosion.

Decades of Violence

But despite decades of violent work, the IRA finds itself no closer to achieving its political goals, and the pressure on the organization is mounting.

In recent months, the IRA has suffered a series of major reverses, mainly owing to increasingly sophisticated anti-terrorist measures taken by law-and-order forces and vastly improved international cooperation among Western governments against armed revolutionary movements of all types.

Many see 1987 as one of the worst years for the IRA in recent memory. Among the setbacks:

-- In early May, an entire eight-member IRA unit was ambushed and killed by security forces as it launched an attack on a police station 30 miles southwest of Belfast. The losses were the worst suffered by the IRA in a single action since the 1920s and raised serious questions about the group’s tactics and the possibility of infiltration.

-- In October, close cooperation among French, U.S. and British security agencies led to the seizure, off the French coast, of a Danish trawler laden with arms that would have given the IRA enough firepower to rival the Irish Republic’s own armed forces.

Included in the haul, which apparently was loaded aboard the trawler in Libya, were 20 SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles, 10 machine guns with anti-aircraft mounts, recoilless anti-tank rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, 1,000 Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifles and 50 tons of ammunition.

Intelligence reports that three or four other shipments of similar size may already have slipped through stunned the Irish government into deploying nearly one-third of the country’s total security forces for a massive search for arms caches. That search continues.

“No state can tolerate a situation where arms of the volume and power we are talking about are held by any group other than the lawful security forces,” declared Irish Justice Minister Gerard Collins.

-- Less than two weeks after the Danish trawler was discovered, an IRA bomb exploded at a crowded memorial day service in the Northern Ireland town of Enniskillen, killing 11 civilians, including a 20-year-old nurse and three married couples. The indiscriminate killing angered even the IRA’s strongest supporters and seriously damaged the organization’s political wing, Sinn Fein, already struggling to rebuild from election defeats this year in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Apology Helped Little

While Sinn Fein’s underlying support of about 80,000 voters is likely to remain loyal, even the IRA’s unprecedented public apology for the bombing seems to have had little impact on the less committed.

“People who’d viewed us with a degree of interest, curiosity and sympathy but hadn’t yet voted for us, they were blown away with the Enniskillen bomb,” admitted Danny Morrison, a spokesman for Sinn Fein. “This hasn’t been a plus year for the republican movement.”

Despite the severity of the group’s recent problems, no one familiar with Irish history would consider preparing the IRA’s obituary, because the group has repeatedly survived adversity.

Its roots lie in the armed resistance against British rule during the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Dublin. In the ensuing political turmoil, the IRA counted several Irish government ministers within its ranks as it directed an effective campaign of violence against the British presence.

By late 1920, the IRA action had helped force concessions from Britain and a pledge of independence for Ireland’s 26 southernmost counties.

Enraged IRA Leaders

But the failure of Irish negotiators to hold out for inclusion in the Irish Republic of the six Protestant-dominated northern counties enraged many IRA leaders, who rejected the legitimacy of the new Irish Parliament. The IRA has fought sporadic campaigns for a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland ever since.

With its headquarters in Dublin, the IRA carried its fight into the heart of the Protestant north only in the 1950s. A campaign of sabotage was launched here that lasted six years before it was finally crushed by the authorities in 1962.

In 1968, when Northern Ireland’s minority Catholics--demonstrating for full civil rights--looked to the IRA for protection against Protestant mobs, the organization was so ill-prepared and poorly disciplined that many joked that the letters IRA stood for “I Ran Away.”

By 1970, the IRA had fragmented, with a hard-line group known as the Provisionals assuming control and reorganizing the organization into small, dedicated cells.

The result has been agony for Northern Ireland, where Catholics, outnumbered nearly 2 to 1 by Protestants, complain of discrimination in allocation of jobs and housing. Authorities attribute to the IRA roughly 80% of the 2,600 fatalities in Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence since 1968.

Attacks in Britain

The organization also has mounted devastating operations in Britain, including an attack three years ago at a Brighton hotel that narrowly missed killing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her Cabinet.

The IRA has broadened its horizons in recent years, forging links with other revolutionary movements, such as the Basque separatist organization, Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Terrorist expert Wilkinson asserts that the IRA at one time provided Basque separatist personnel with expertise in arms and explosives, although these links have loosened in recent years.

There are also reports that the IRA has received money and arms from Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, who sees the IRA as a convenient way to harass an unfriendly Britain.

U.S. satellite photographs taken Oct. 14 are said to show the Danish trawler, the Eksund, taking on its cargo of missiles and other weapons at a military berth in the Libyan port of Tripoli.

Irish-American Support

At a time when the American mood has turned sharply against organizations committed to armed violence, the IRA still enjoys at least some of its traditional sympathy and financial support from Irish-Americans. Last year an estimated $300,000 was funneled to the IRA from American donors, according to U.S. Justice Department figures.

(The figure amounts to roughly 10% of the IRA’s estimated budget, which is believed to be raised mainly from domestic bank robberies, rackets and tax frauds.)

But increased Anglo-American government cooperation and the shifting American public mood have eroded much of this traditional support, and IRA leaders today no longer look to the United States but to Europe and the Middle East as their principal sources for weapons.

The U.S. Senate last year also ratified an extradition treaty with Britain that effectively ended the longstanding U.S. role as a sanctuary for IRA activists.

But potentially more damaging for the IRA is a shift of mood closer to home, in the Irish Republic.

With Sinn Fein’s political support in Northern Ireland having peaked at about 13%, party leaders viewed Ireland as the prime growth area for the movement, especially at a time of rising unemployment there.

After an acrimonious debate last year, Sinn Fein even agreed for the first time to permit victorious candidates from the group to take their seats in the Irish Parliament.

Support in Ireland Drops

But revulsion over the Enniskillen bombing, coupled with the shock of the Eksund cargo seizure and the prospect of rising violence in the south, has turned the tide of opinion in the Irish Republic sharply against Sinn Fein, at least for the present.

The Irish government’s admission that it is using highly sophisticated equipment lent by Britain in the search for more IRA weapons dumps is viewed by many as an indication of just how great this change is.

“Such cooperation, let alone the public admission of it, would have been impossible a year ago,” an Irish government official said in Dublin. “People want a united Ireland, but not if it means violence spilling over down here from the north.”

But the IRA is no stranger to adversity, and its members remain philosophical.

“I’ve obviously thought about what’s going to be accomplished from all this, especially since I’ve given it the best years of my life,” said Patrick, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his new jacket. “I’ve never thought of anything other than a united Ireland. It’s up to us to make it happen.”