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The IRA sold its guns to the Welsh
Harvest fails
The campaign was Operation Harvest, a guerrilla offensive along the border launched in 1956, and it was a complete disaster. Both Belfast and Dublin reintroduced internment without trial, Eamon de Valera among them, and the IRA men they locked up included loads of its members. The organization's back was broken.
A turn to the left
The new chief of staff, Cathal Goulding, a Dubliner, concluded the IRA had been wasting its time. The notion that the IRA would one day rise up and free Ireland was a ridiculous pipe dream. Marxist academics and people from the British Communist Party were close to him, and they persuaded him that the IRA's future lay in socialist activism: a non-sectarian workers' alliance against imperialism and capitalism. The IRA leadership of the 1960s took to it, and conferences and seminars full of talk about smashing capitalism followed.
Older veterans were furious. Many were culturally conservative Catholics, not Marxists. Joe Cahill, jailed for killing a policeman in 1942, felt the movement was being led off the true path of republicanism and that sooner or later there would be a showdown.
A near-dead IRA
By then the IRA had gone so quiet that a future member of the Provisional IRA believed it was completely dead, except in the minds of himself and other old Republicans. When the IRA returned to the story around 1970 it had few guns, and getting them became a priority, because it had given so many to the Welsh, who did not want to give them back.
Who were the Free Wales Army?
The Free Wales Army was a small militant Welsh nationalist group that appeared in 1963 under Julian Cayo-Evans. Its members wore green uniforms and paraded in public, which won it far more press attention than it had real strength. Cayo-Evans and others were tried in 1969, around the time of Prince Charles's investiture at Caernarfon.
Why did Operation Harvest fail?
The campaign ran from December 1956 to February 1962. Northern nationalists did not rise in support, and without local help the IRA columns were easy for the RUC and the B Specials to pursue. Both governments on the island interned suspects without trial. When the IRA ordered its men to dump their arms in February 1962, its statement blamed the attitude of the general public.
How did the IRA split in 1970?
Cathal Goulding's leftward turn and the IRA's weakness in Belfast during the August 1969 riots drove a wedge through the movement. In December 1969 critics formed a Provisional army council and left. The split was formalized at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in January 1970, when a majority voted to end the policy of refusing to sit in the Dublin parliament and the minority walked out. The two sides became known as the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA.
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