I.R.A.'s Exit

At hideaways near the United Kingdom's only guarded border last week, 30 young men sorrowfully stored their arms and folded away the olive-green uniforms whose orange, green and white shoulder patches bore the proud label "Freedom Fighters." They were the remnants of 500 romantics who in 1956 launched the Irish Republican Army's last terrorist campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.

The little border war could not be compared with the blood-soaked '20s (it took only 15 lives), but "the boys" managed to do $3,000,000 worth of property damage and pin down 5,000 ill-spared men of Britain's regular army, plus 5,000 militiamen, 15,000 constables and 1,500 special commandos. Last week, as it withdrew from the "occupied area" (i.e. Ulster), the "leadership of the resistance" announced that the I.R.A. had abandoned its war to reunite the Irish Republic with six Ulster counties.

From Sod to Sky. Even in Ireland, times and tactics change. After 700 years of battling the English, Irishmen are no longer obsessed with "the Six Green Fields," as the predominantly Protestant counties are still called in Southern Ireland. Eire's government, which has long espoused a diplomatic solution for partition, has outlawed the I.R.A. and even forbids Ireland's press to carry its name. Since 1956 the Roman Catholic Church has treated I.R.A. membership as a mortal sin. The cause has been hurt by a decline in the "tolerant sympathy" of Irish-Americans, whose dollars largely financed the rebels. Eire's President Eamon ("The Long Fella") de Valera, a legendary hero of the Battle of Boland's Mills in 1916, once pledged to make "Ireland her own, and all therein, from the sod to the sky," but he has repeatedly censured latter-day rebels. Chided Dev: "These young men are living in the past."

If today the I.R.A. looms larger in the imagination than any other army in modern times, it is because imagination was always its main weapon. Never has a minuscule army enlisted so many gifted poets, playwrights and novelists,* nor a colonial quarrel produced so rich a body of literature. By contrast with its gay and gallant image, in its later days the I.R.A. engaged in violence almost as ruthless and aimless as the Secret Army Organization's in Algeria, notably at the start of World War II, when its booby traps maimed and killed innocent civilians in England. But the S.A.O. men practice violence on a far larger scale, and besides, they do not write nearly as well.

Heroes for Pedestals. In its heyday during "The Troubles" (1916-21), when ragged irregulars blew up barracks and bridges and battled England's Black and Tans, the rebellion bred more than enough heroes and martyrs to fill all the pedestals that remained when the Irish finished dynamiting English statuary. It boasted as many wits and eccentrics, from the unknown patriot who dubbed Queen Victoria "The Famine Queen," to Robert Bolton, who escaped from Dublin's Mount joy Prison after leaving a note explaining politely that the accommodations were below his accustomed standard.

News of last week's cease-fire was greeted skeptically by Eire's Prime Minister Sean Lemass, himself an old I.R.A. hand, who as a 16-year-old was captured by the English, booted in the backside and told to "go home to Mum." But though the I.R.A. craftily hid its weapons and warned that it planned to "prepare for another situation," its leaders would find few fellow countrymen willing to die in 1962 for the Six Green Fields.

*Among them: Poets William Butler Yeats (who was an I.R.A. "morale officer") and Oliver St. John Gogarty; Playwrights Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan; Novelists Sean O'Faolain, Liam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor.

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