INLA - Deadly Divisions - The Story of One of Ireland's Most Ruthless Terrorist Organisations by Jack Holland and Henry McDonald (Torc) £9.99.
Reviewed by Dianne Moore A SENSATIONALIST title for a book which tells a sensational story in a remarkably readable and accessible form.
In 360 pages the authors trace the 20 year history of the Irish Republican Socialist Party/Irish National Liberation Army (IRSP/INLA) from its inception in 1974 as a split from the Officials to the present day.
The history of the IRSP/AINLA is full of tragedy. They were in the vanguard of the hunger strikes campaign, stood and won seats on Belfast city council four years before Sinn Fein, discussed and made prominent in their organisation questions of abortion and contraception as far back as 1975 and women played a more prominent and leadership role in their organisation.
After such a promising start combining the national question with a socialist, anti-imperialist politics the organisation went rapidly down hill, heavily infiltrated by the security services who played a provocative role in the subsequent violent feuds.
Militarism became supreme as various factions descended into murderous feuding - with some involved in drug dealing and other criminal activity.
Break-away
Founded on 8 December 1974 by 80 ex-members of the Officials led by Seamus Costello the IRSP was formed because, in the words of Bernadette McAliskey, "The Provos are concentrating on getting rid of the British in a military campaign without any policy on the class war. And the Officials now have no policy on the national question. We will agitate on both the national and class issues".
Relying on primary source material - one of the book's strengths - It addresses the fundamental question of the relationship between political and military wings of national liberation movements. A question answered in the IRSP by the dominance of the INLA -which was to prove disastrous.
Already by the end 1975 there was a split from the IRSP by a left bloc of eleven central committee members around McAliskey.
As McAliskey put it in an essay entitled 'Revolutionary republicanism?':
"The building of a working class movement requires mass organisation on an open basis... Because of its clandestine and militaristic nature, participation in 'the Movement' demanded the exact opposite.
Since the survival of the organisation, the safety, at times, of its members, depended on personal loyalty, secrecy, unquestioning observance of directives from above, it was virtually impossible to envisage the development of a democratic mass organisation from within.
From very early days it was also dogged by the tension between its members in the north and those in the south.
The frustration of the youthful paramilitaries in the Divis Flats, known as 'the Planet of the Erps' with the older, more experienced members from R Dublin played a part in the disintegration of the organisation.
Read this book for the history and the questions it raises rather than the analysis it presents.
An immediate, accessible and essential book.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 67, August 1994, Page 16 The role of all the