Dissident Irish Republicanism with John Morrison

This is a podcast produced by Terrorism and Political Violence. My name is Max Taylor. It is my pleasure to talk today to Dr. John Morrison. John is a senior lecturer in criminology and criminal justice at the University of East London. He’s the author of The Origins and Rise of Dissident Irish Republicanism: The Role and Impact of Organizational Splits, which is published by Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2014. In 2016, John will be coediting a special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence with Dr. Paul Gill from University College London, and this special issue will be analyzing 100 years of militant Irish republicanism from the 1916 rising until 2016 – a time for commemoration, of course. John’s particular research interest is dissident Irish Republicanism and today I want to talk about this with him. So John, thank you for talking to us.

John Morrison: Thank you for inviting me Max.

MT: May I begin by asking you very briefly to tell us a little about dissident republicanism? And place it into context and give us a sense of how it fits into the current situation in Northern Ireland.

JM: Well, for many people who are external observers of the Northern Irish peace process and of the Northern Irish paramilitary activity, they would see the republican threat has been dissipated. They would see with Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and what was the provisional IRA being politicized and decommissioned, that there’s no longer a threat there. However, there have been small number of groups and small number of individuals who want to maintain paramilitary violence in order to attain a united Ireland. These groups include the Real IRA, Continuity IRA, and a group called Óghlaigh na hÉireann. And recently the Real IRA has merged with a republican vigilante group called Republican Action against Drugs, to form what they call a more united dissident republican front. Most famously, the dissidents would be known for the bombing in the late 90s of the nationalist town of Omagh; however, in recent times there has been an upsurge in their violence again. And this has included the targeting of police officers and prison officers, and at times the assassination of these officers. However, they’re also partaking in lower-level vigilante activity, activity that wouldn’t necessarily be defined as terrorism. This includes the returned utility of punishment beatings on suspected and known drug offenders, and also the assassination of these individuals as well.

And at the moment, as you rightly said in your introduction, we’re going into a time of commemoration within Irish republicanism, and for the whole island of Ireland. We’re coming towards what can be termed a decade of centenaries. We are already within that decade of centenaries. And central to this is the centenary in 2016 of the 1916 Easter Rising. But we also have to take into account the centenaries of the Irish War of Independence, the signing of the Treaty, and the Irish Civil War in the 1920s. And within dissident Irish republicanism, it’s very possible and it’s very likely, looking at their statements and activities, that these groups will try and manipulate these commemorations to bolster their own support, and to maintain their heightened levels of activity.

MT: You seem to be suggesting in that, John, that this is a quite broad-based – is “movement” the right word? – section. It’s certainly not just about the headline terrorist events, but something greater than that.

JM: It’s something much greater than this. Now, in no way are these dissident groups anywhere near the size of the Provisional movement of what we saw during the troubles. However, there are small groups, some of which are partaking in violent activities. However, we have to differentiate these violent dissident republicans from the nonviolent dissident republicans as well. So you have groups who are political campaigners and political protest groups who, for their purposes, are peacefully demonstrating against the track that Provisional republicanism and Sinn Féin has taken with their politicization. So there has to be a balance there. There has to be an understanding that there’s actually nothing wrong with dissident republicanism per se. It’s when that dissident republicanism is expressed through violent means. That is what we are trying to counter here.

MT: Right. I wonder … what you just said sounds not hugely different from some of the discussions you hear about Jihadi engagement, that there’s a legitimacy about attitudes that clearly the violence is wrong. Why do people – why do you young people in particular – join these movements? Are we looking at something very similar to the reason why people engage in violent Islam?

JM: I would find that there are similarities across groups of why people would join these movements. Oftentimes if you just take them at face value you might be able to say that people join these groups because the ideology that the groups promote. However, when you look more in-depth and when I looked at the interview data that I gathered, through authoring the book that you mentioned in the introduction, I found that one of the dominant characteristics of why a person would join a group, or why a person would join a specific group within Irish republicanism was very little to do about the ideology of the group, but oftentimes was to do with the trust that they had in an individual in their local area who was recruiting them into the group, or was influencing the decisions they had.

And that’s why this observation came out from interviewing rank and file individuals, as well as leadership figures. I’ve found for the rank and file individuals, and those young people you are talking about, that sometimes they don’t know what the full ideology of the group is when they join. They might know the headline ideologies for United Ireland but they don’t know the inner- workings and how these groups want to achieve it. And oftentimes it is based on this trust that they have in other individuals recruiting them.

MT: So you seem to be saying that maybe we’re looking at – I hesitate to say ‘similar’ processes – but sort of parallel kinds of processes, or processes that draw on some kind of common story even.

JM: Exactly, yeah. This is something that we have to take from individual to individual. There are some individuals where they are much more focused on their individual involvement, and their individual reasoning; however, for a broader grouping there is that common story. There is that common story from within their communities and within the country in which they have allegiance to that brings about their membership and their engagement with these groups.

MT: That leads me to think about another kind of parallel as well. One of the current issues we seem to be facing with respect to Jihadi and violent Islamic terrorism is who should assist in its management. Is this an activity for security forces or does the community have a role in this? Who should be leading the de-legitimization of these groups in Ulster?

JM: This is a fascinating question, and it’s one that I have tried to grapple with over the years. On the face of it, we have people who say that the Sinn Féin leadership of Mark McGuinness, Gerry Adams, Gerry Kelly and others – those who were involved in the Provisional IRA. They should be the ones leading this de-legitimization campaign. However, when you look at the way that these groups are recruiting and when you look at the statement that these groups are utilizing, oftentimes they are focusing more on these actors, the Sinn Féin actors, the former Provisionals as being the enemy, as being those that they are differentiating themselves from.

So this would lead us to believe that maybe these would be the wrong actors to de-legitimize. Because a lot of these violent dissident republicans are defining their membership and defining their continued existence as being in opposition to Sinn Féin. So while Sinn Féin have a role, it is more within the community, it is more within possibly those non-violent dissident communities that I was talking about earlier. They should probably be front and center within the campaign. But there should also be those external within the community, those external from republicanism, it could go down to even local football coaches, local activists within the area.

All these other influential individuals, if we’re talking about trust being a key element of why people engage with the group, trust may also be a key element of why someone would disengage from these groups as well. So if there’s an individual not associated with these groups that they trust, that can draw them away – that can be a huge factor. But you rightly mentioned the security forces as well. We can’t move away from the role that security forces play here.

There’s an interview just a couple of days ago by Bill Kerr, who’s one of the leading police officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the PSNI. And he emphasizes – both within Northern Ireland but within the United Kingdom and Europe as a whole encountering any threat from political violence – that one of the key role for the security forces is good community relations. It’s about being able to have sustained community relations within the communities that are most at-risk, so that these communities feel comfortable and trust the security forces to help them and go to them at a time of crisis. But also that within these security forces he also emphasizes – and I would agree with him – that central to all their investigations, and central to everything they do must be human rights, that there has to be the centrality of human rights when investigating and when dealing with these threats.

MT: One of the things I’ve always found very good about your work is that you’re not afraid to take a bottom-up approach. You engage with people and you are not locked into the big grand scheme of things, but I think very much of what you say is informed by people who do this kind of stuff or engage with it on the ground. Does that represent a kind of challenge in the way that we think about the nature of terrorism: the top-down approach or the bottom-up approach?

JM: It does represent a huge challenge, but I also think it represents one of the greatest opportunities that we have. As you said, my work looks from a bottom-down approach. It looks at not just what the leadership figures are saying, but a lot of it is looking at what the rank and file are doing, and the decision-making of rank and file individuals. Central to my research especially in regards to splits was looking at how a group such as the Provisional IRA politicized and successfully politicized as they have, and what I found through my analysis and through my research – and it’s obvious I feel once I say it – is that it’s all well and good for leadership to want to fully politicize, for leadership to want to step away from armed activity, but that can only be successful if they are able to bring the vast majority of their membership with them, if they’re able to the vast majority of the rank and file membership with them.

So that’s one of the things that we should be looking at in order to disengage these individuals, in order to draw them away from political violence. We have to not just look at necessarily challenging what the leadership are doing, and challenging what the leadership are saying. We have to see what the reality is on the ground for those rank and file individuals. Why are they, first of all, becoming involved, and secondly, why are they staying involved with these groups?

It’s not always the case that it’s going to have to do with the national leaders are saying. There might be something much more local to do with this. And in relation to the dissident republicans, this local element is vital. Because if you look at what it means to be a member of the Real IRA or the New IRA in Dublin, it’s very much different than what it is to be a member of that same grouping in Derry or Belfast. So we have to look at these local levels. We have to look at exactly what kind of activity they’re partaking in, and exactly what it means for them to be involved. And it’s only with that information that we can really understand how they can leave these groups.

MT: I think they’re really important points, John. Is this a real threat to security in Northern Ireland or is it just a little blip? Is it something that‘s going to endure?

JM: I feel that this is a real threat. As I’ve repeated throughout the interview, I don’t feel that it’s anywhere near the threat that the Provisionals had, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a real threat. Last year the head of MI5 said they have thwarted more attacks by violent dissident republicans than they have in any other year. But there were still 20 plus attacks on civilians and on security forces. We have seen the development of a horizontal mortar device that has been seen in Afghanistan and other areas that has targeted police land rovers. We have seen the assassination of police officers. We have seen the assassination of a prison officer. We’ve seen the intent there of the group.

The group mightn’t be as successful in succeeding in carrying out their attacks as of yet over the past 12 months, but there has been heightened activity and heightened awareness. MI5 have managed to arrest a number of people who were part of a group calling themselves the Continuity IRA but in reality it split away from what we would see as the original Continuity IRA. And within the information they gathered through surveillance of these individuals and groups, it shows that they are planning to pose attacks, and are planning to pose real threats. We have also last year seen the targeting of British Army recruitment officers through letter bombs, which were luckily stopped before they reached their intended destinations. These and other attempted attacks are indicating that there is a significant threat here, and it’s one which we have to watch. And one which is being watched, both by the security forces and the intelligence agencies as well. But one that isn’t largely being looked at by academics at the moment.

MT: I think that’s probably the point to stop now, John. We’ve taken up our allotted time. Thank you so much for, I think, a really enlightening and interesting conversation around this. Thank you John for taking part of this.

JM: Thank you very much Max.