Dealt with most severely: republican punishment attacks in Newry

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how and why the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) in the Newry-area engaged in a type of violence commonly referred to as ‘punishment attacks’ during the first half-decade of the Troubles. A rich literature has developed to explain the use of punishment attacks, and their consequences, in Northern Ireland’s two largest cities of Belfast and Londonderry/Derry. This paper builds on this work by drawing on the emerging political science literature on rebel governance to develop a resource constraint model and an internal competition model to explain the use of punishment attacks in the rural and semi-rural areas along the border with the Republic of Ireland. The explanatory models are then evaluated against newly collected quantitative data on punishment attacks reported in the Belfast Telegraph from 1974–1975 and qualitative evidence from archival and newspaper sources. The analysis suggests that the resource constraint model provides a better, although imperfect, explanation for PIRA punishment attacks during this period, while the internal competition model provides a better, although imperfect, explanation for OIRA activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Punishment attacks
• rebel governance
• Northern Ireland
• Newry

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Thanks also to the Oxford Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship program at Oxford College of Emory University, which provided the author with teaching relief and with the time to write this article. Finally, and especially, thanks to Pascael Beaudette for her unfailing love and support, and Scott Allen and Michelle Allen for their steadfast friendship, all of which kept the author sane during the COVID-19 pandemic and and made the writing of this article possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The factory manufactured ladies’ hosiery and employed a primarily female workforce. It went into receivership in 1975 and closed shortly thereafter despite briefly receiving government support. See the written response from Stanley Orme in Hansard (United Kingdom, 1975) for further details.

2 The Police Service of Northern Ireland (2010) defines punishment attacks (which they refer to as ‘paramilitary-style’ attacks) as ‘an assault or shooting carried out on an individual or individuals by one or more persons usually from their own community. Typically, the reasoning behind the attack is either to intimidate the victim or to punish them for anti-social activities.’ In addition to the academic work cited above, human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch (1994; 1992) have carefully documented the institutional infrastructure that supported punishment attacks in Belfast.

3 The Local Government (Boundaries) Act (Northern Ireland) 1971 and the Local Government (Boundaries) Act (Northern Ireland) 1972 created 26 local government areas for Northern Ireland, including the Newry and Mourne District Council. The Local Government (Boundaries) Act (Northern Ireland) consolidated the 26 local government areas into 11 areas. The Newry and Mourne District Council merged with the Down District Council under the terms of the 2008 Act. The boundaries established by the 1971 Act are used here for illustrative purposes.

4 Data coded by the author via a manual search of the bound, archived versions of the Belfast Telegraph held at the Central Newspaper Library in Belfast as part of a larger project documenting the frequency and spatial distribution of punishment attacks in Northern Ireland during the PIRA’s 1975 ceasefire. The Belfast Telegraph was used to ensure consistency in the information collected and allow for the collection of the data in a reasonable amount of time. Where possible, additional print and electronic newspaper databases were consulted to collect additional information on specific incidents, but this was only done for incidents that were discovered in the Telegraph during the author’s manual search. Incidents were recorded as punishment attacks if an article explicitly described the attack as such or if the article described violence that was consistent with the methods used in punishment attacks, including gunshot wounds to the joints of the arms and legs, beating the victim with sticks, baseball bats, or other implements, applying tar (and sometimes feathers) to the victim’s body, tying the victim to a fixed point, such as a lamppost, in a public location, or forcing the victim to parade in public. Attacks were coded as ‘feud related’ if the primary article explicitly indicated that the victim was a member of a specific paramilitary group and that the attackers were members of another, separate paramilitary group. Communal (i.e. republican or loyalist) attributions were made using the author’s discretion, using cues including the stated communal background of the victim and the location of the attacks. Organizational attributions were made according to reporting in the primary article and were only possible in a small percentage of cases.

5 The PIRA’s use of head-shaving in this attack against a group of young men is surprising because head-shaving was a form of violence that was most often used against women for collaborating or fraternizing with British forces, especially during the Irish Revolution. See Clark (2020) for a thorough discussion of gender-based violence during the Irish Revolution.

6 The two incidents are reported in reports from the Irish Press (1975) and the Belfast Telegraph (1975c). The Belfast Telegraph report quotes the OIRA blaming the PIRA for ‘the bombing the Republican Clubs premises in Newry on April 9.’

7 The OIRA leader’s statement indicates that the Belfast Telegraph might not have reported on all of the punishment attacks that occurred in the Newry area during this time period.

8 The Republican Clubs the name used by Official Sinn Féin to contest the 1975 Constitutional Convention election.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donald M. Beaudette

Donald M. Beaudette is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Oxford College of Emory University in Oxford, Georgia. He holds an MA in Irish Politics from Queen’s University, Belfast and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Emory University in Atlanta, GA.