Official IRA

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The term Official IRA relates to one of the two elements of the Irish Republican Army - the other being the Provisional IRA - that emerged from the ideological split in the Irish Republican movement in 1969-70.

Reasons behind the split

The reasons behind the split were many, but the main ones were the ending of violence for the IRA, and the ending of abstentionism for Sinn Féin. This issue - which also split the provisionals in later years - is a highly emotiove one in republican circles as the Irish Civil War was fought over the question of participating in the institutions.

During the 1960s the republican movement, under the leadership of Cathal Goulding was heavily influnced by the idea of the popular front and was close to Communist thinking. A key intermediary body was the Communist Party of Great Britain's organisation for Irish exiles - the Connolly Society.

The sense that the IRA seemed to be drifting away from its Republican roots into Marxism angered and distressed many republicans - as the sense that the republican cause was about saving Catholic Ireland was strong. Many in the Official IRA later called the Provisional IRA the "rosary brigade" because of their Catholic and romantic nationalist ideology.

The Officials were known as the "stickies" because they used stick-on orange lillies at parades to commmorate the Easter Rising, the provisionals were known as "pin heads" because they used pinned on lillies. The term stickies stuck, though pin heads disappeared.

Impact of the Split

When the Provisionals (also called the "Provos") split from the Official IRA they took away a lot of experienced volunteers, which deprived the OIRA of some of the operational expertise they would later need during the months after Bloody Sunday which all but finished the OIRA as a paramilitary group. After the split and the failure of the post-Bloody Sunday campaign which lost them much support, the OIRA issued a ceasefire.