The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA)

While perhaps no longer relevant with more notorious groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, be it in current activity or geographic location, the Provisional Irish Republican Army serves as a good example of a more tightly knit terrorist group that covers only a small geographic region. The Provisional Irish Republican Army is a paramilitary group located in Northern Ireland, who used to operate throughout, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, Great Britain, and Europe, with their tactics consisting of the use of bombings, assassinations, kidnapping, extortion, and robberies; and perhaps are best known for their strategy “The Long War” before their cease-fire in 1994. The group had about 10,000 members of their 30-year period, along with several thousand
What brought about the formation of this group was a conflict between the Catholic residents of Bogside and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in Derry/Londonderry, in Northern Ireland; this lead to what is now known as the Battle of Bogside, a three day battle between rioters and police. At that time, the original IRA had been poorly armed, and as a result was seen as inadequate, not helped at all by republican veterans’ critical view of the current IRA’s Dublin leadership, which had refused to prepare for the violence. Consequently, this lead to a formation of the “Provisional” Army Council by traditional republicans in December of 1969, following an IRA Army convention in Boyle, County
Toward the end of their operations, they were known for counterterrorism officials, for using “more than 30 varieties of weapons – including mortars and rockets – as well as numerous methods to lay and detonate explosives, advanced sniper tactics, etc.” (Aptitude for Destruction: Case Studies of Organizational Learning in Five Terrorist Groups, pg. 97). In regards to the use of explosives in particular, the PIRA employed the use of both Remote Manual detonation, and Automatic Detonation, their use of remote detonation in particular mostly consisted of burying command wires, allowing their bombers to set them off from a fairly long distance; and often took advantage of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, to avoid pursuit after their