The Official Irish Republican Army or Official IRA (informally "the Officials" or "the Stickies") is an Irish republican paramilitary group whose goal was to create a "32-county workers' republic" in Ireland. It emerged from a split in the Irish Republican Army in December 1969, shortly after the beginning of "The Troubles". The other group emerging from this split was the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Both groups continued to refer to themselves as the Irish Republican Army and rejected the political legitimacy of the other. It engaged in military action against the British Army until May 1972. Since then it has been involved in feuds with both the Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army, a radical splinter group formed in 1974. In later years, it was accused of involvement in organised crime.
The Official IRA was associated with Official Sinn Féin, later renamed Sinn Féin the Workers Party and then The Workers' Party, and now known as the Workers' Party of Ireland.
Read more about Official Irish Republican Army: Impact of The Split, The Official IRA Since 1972, Decommissioning, People Killed By The Official IRA
Famous quotes containing the words official, irish, republican and/or army:
“I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.”
—Vera Brittain (1893–1970)
“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A man of great employments and excellent performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men should be held eligible who are under seventy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)