WHEN THE IRAS ALARM CLOCKS STRUCK

Patrick West recalls a declaration

of war on Britain 60 years ago

SIXTY YEARS ago this week, the Irish government declared war on Britain. A proclamation was relayed to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, the Stor- mont government, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. It declared: 'I have the hon- our to inform you that the government of the Irish Republic, having as its first duty towards the people the establishment and maintenance of peace and order, herewith demand the withdrawal of all British armed forces stationed in Ireland.'

True, this statement did not emanate from the recognised government of Eire — rather, in the words of the Daily Tele- graph, it was 'that extremist and irreconcil- able element, which is sternly discountenanced by Mr de Valera's Gov- ernment'. This was a declaration of war by the Irish Republican Army.

The declaration heralded the beginning of a bombing campaign which, between 1939 and 1940, saw over 300 explosions in England, causing seven fatalities and 96 casualties. Despite such human tragedy, the operation is remembered in folklore as one characterised by ineptitude, farce and disaster — a campaign immortalised in the Dubliners' song The Ould Alarm Clock'.

The operation had its gestation in the late 1930s, the brainchild of Sean Russell, an Easter Rising veteran who had become the organisation's quartermaster general in 1936. As early as 1937 Russell's men, advocating a campaign of bombing and assassination in Britain, had already hatched a set of ambitious schemes.

One of these was a plan to use a plane to drop a bomb on the Houses of Parlia- ment. Russell and his co-conspirators eventually decided against the scheme on grounds of impracticality, the argument being that if they hired a plane in America it would only have enough fuel to cross the Atlantic, and would have to crash-land in France after dropping its load. Alterna- tively, another senior IRA veteran, Tom Barry, suggested taking an IRA unit on a suicide mission to kill the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. This was likewise turned down as a non-starter.

The IRA resigned itself to a campaign of sabotage, deciding on the grounds of Celtic solidarity not to bomb Scotland or Wales. In December 1938, the Army Council met in Dublin to give final approval to the plan and declare itself the legitimate government of Ireland. For the sake of correctness, on 12 January 1939, it presented the British with a formal decla- ration of war should it refuse to withdraw from Ulster within 96 hours.

Five days later, eight bombs exploded simultaneously in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Alnwick. In the next 18 months the IRA detonated a series of bicycle, balloon and letter-box devices in all major English cities, killing, among others, a Manchester fish porter and a Scottish academic at King's Cross station, London. (The choice of target could be as surreal as it was deadly. In June a balloon bomb exploded in Madame Tussaud's 'killing' Henry VIII, though it left Red Riding Hood intact as the bomb in the Wolf's bed failed to explode.) By far the biggest atrocity was the bombing of Coventry in August, when five people were killed by a bicycle bomb.

The campaign was undertaken with the full understanding that Britain was prepar- ing for war with Germany. Consequently the bombings aroused much interest in Germany. While the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung asked, 'Irish nationalists or English communists?', elsewhere the newspaper Angfi ff gloated, 'At the news of the out- rage the beefsteak fell in horror from the fork of the overfed Englishman at his opu- lent breakfast table.'

The two dozen chosen to implement the campaign were largely recruited in London pubs, and were consequently hopelessly naive, having little if no experience of sab- otage operations. Apart from a sparse knowledge of explosives, the men were notoriously careless, often leaving incrimi- nating evidence in the form of documents scattered on the floors of houses they vacated. And training sessions were hope- lessly slap-dash. One volunteer, Paddy McNeela, later recalled a drill session when a grenade failed to detonate. Anoth- er young man picked it up and tested it with his teeth remarking, 'Tim, it's all right, it should have gone off.' Upon tossing it away it exploded.

Another account, recalled to the histori- an Tim Pat Coogan, had a group of suspi- cious-looking men with thick Irish accents entering a London shop and asking, 'Tell us, daughter, would y' be after havin' a few alarm clocks there.' They were told, 'Cer- tainly, sir, do you mind waiting for a moment,' whereupon the assistant went to the back of the shop and promptly tele- phoned Scotland Yard.

The last bombs in London had been aided by the blackout in the early months of the war. As with 1916, following the old dic- tum that my enemy's enemy is my friend, the IRA believed they and the Germans could make common cause together. The Nazis knew little about Irish politics, but there was intelligence traffic between them and the IRA. In August 1940 Russell went to Germany and met Joachim von Ribben- trop and other senior military officers to request guns, explosives and transmitting equipment. (Russell was a true veteran of courting totalitarian regimes, having paid a visit to the Soviet Union in 1926. When asked by the Soviets how many bishops they had hanged, his delegation said 'none'. The Bolsheviks replied dismissively, `Ah, you people are not serious at all.') The Germans were equally unimpressed, as is illustrated by the scornful remarks of the Nazi spymaster Captain Hermann Goertz, who remarked in 1940, 'The IRA's intelligence system was as primitive as that of children playing cops and robbers.' Fol- lowing inconclusive talks with von Ribben- trop, Russell was sent back to Ireland in a U-boat. After complaining of stomach pains on the return journey, Russell arrived back in Erin a corpse, and with him died all hopes of a Nazi/IRA pact of alliance.

Though starved of assistance from Ger- many and smothered by intensified securi- ty in Britain, the collapse of the IRA's England campaign was thanks not least to the vigilance of de Valera. So often berat- ed for his government's wartime neutrality (not to mention his message of condolence to Germany upon the death of Hitler) the Long Fella displayed his eagerness to crush these troublesome pretenders by rounding up all IRA men in Dublin from where the campaign was conducted — soon after the outbreak of the war. By March 1940 the campaign in Britain had petered out and by 1945 the IRA was a spent force.

The 1939 'declaration' was symptomatic of the old IRA: hopelessly unrealistic and self-important, run by men of shameless bravado. Only with the passing of a genera- tion would the long-promised terrible beauty be born, when in 1969 the IRA would be reincarnated in the guise of the Provisionals, a ruthless, efficient and dedi- cated movement that has terrorised Eng- land in the way the men of 1940 could only have dreamed of.

The author works for the Catholic Herald.