Northern Campaign (Irish Republican Army) - Strength of The IRA

Strength of The IRA

The IRA was literally split during the period by those held in places like "K-Lines" (No.1 Internment camp) Curragh, County Kildare, and those IRA volunteers still at liberty. Added to this were a series of political splits pivoting on which the direction the IRA should take at this juncture. The as yet unannounced, but widely accepted, failure of the S-Plan campaign, ongoing IRA collusion with the Abwehr, (German Intelligence), and the landing of American troops within Northern Ireland on 26 January 1942 all combined to form a crisis for the IRA. While the British Government had decided not to conscript in Northern Ireland following mass protests in 1941, a large number of citizens from Northern Ireland and Éire had joined the British Army to fight in World War II—decreasing the potential recruitment base of the IRA.

Legislative changes in both Éire, and Britain c. 1940 had seen internment and harsher laws introduced to combat the IRA's activity during the S-Plan campaign. Internment had been introduced by the Government of Northern Ireland in 1938. Detentions arising from these moves, combined with executions of IRA volunteers in Britain and Éire, had weakened IRA morale and structure. The IRA response, hunger strikes conducted languishing in prisons in Britain, Northern Ireland, and Éire, weakened the organisation still further. It fell to IRA volunteers still at liberty to attempt to reorganise the IRA and any IRA military action that could be mustered.

Bowyer Bell, in his history of the IRA, states that at the beginning of 1942 there were over 300 IRA volunteers in four companies constituting the Belfast unit. These men were led by the small group calling itself Northern Command. Compared to the IRA that remained active/available in population centres such as Dublin, the Northern Command was by far the strongest remaining hub of IRA volunteers left at liberty in Ireland. In attempting to organise the "Northern Campaign", the Northern Command enlisted the help of Patrick Dermody, CO. of IRA Eastern Command, the CO. of IRA Western Command, Tommy Farrell, and the remaining productive elements of IRA Dublin centre including Charlie Kerins and Mick Quill.

IRA arms caches did still exist. They were largely scattered throughout inaccessible, rural areas of Ireland, and usually only known to only one or two volunteers from the surrounding area. Many IRA units in rural areas had received little attention from the General Headquarters of the IRA, (GHQ), in sometime and they had also not seen active duty in over a decade. After election in April 1942, the new IRA Army Council began to make attempts to reach out to them and to gather up the arms they watched over.

The basic plan of the IRA Army Council, as explained by Bowyer Bell, was to:

"collect the contents of the Twenty-six County dumps, move the stuff close to the border, and then just before operations were initiated, smuggle it over".

By August this movement of arms had taken place, Tommy Farrell and Patrick Dermody reported that combined, they had accumulated a total of over twelve tons of arms, munitions, and explosives, without alerting the authorities in Éire or Northern Ireland.

The campaign plan envisioned that once the arms were assembled and smuggled into Northern Ireland they would be distributed to waiting IRA units described as:

..."commando-type units, forty or fifty men all told, striking up from the South across the border to open up operations.

This tactic, (the flying column), was still to be found in use 20 years later during the Border Campaign when it was discovered in a captured copy of the IRA's training manual The Green Book.