Talk:Irish Republican Army (1919–1922)/Archive 5

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This archive page covers approximately the dates between 29 July and 1 August 2005.

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Please add new archivals to Talk:Irish Republican Army/Archive07. Thank you. Palmiro | Talk 21:36, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Organisation of wikipedia coverage of IRA(s)

There's clearly a problem relating to how wikipedia covers the various organisations which have been known as the IRA. I'm going to try and summarise the problems in the hope of helping reach consensus on how to approach it.

Note: this is an updated version, as of 7 August, of my original analysis of WP coverage, for ease of reference. The original remains below. I haven't the time to update the development of the various proposals: users will have to read the discussion in subsequent sections to follow that.

Numerous articles exist on the topic.

• The "Irish Republican Army" article (this one) covers the IRA up until the Treaty split in 1922.
• Separate articles cover the IRA from 1922 to 1969 (originally the anti-Treaty faction in the Treaty split), the Official IRA, the Provisional IRA, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA.
• List of IRAs provides a basic history (not just a list) of the IRA and its various successor organisation, as well as Sinn Fein and its successor organisations.
• IRA, which appears to have started as a disambiguation page for the various uses of the acronym (not confined to Irish politics), now also contains a brief history of the IRA and its various successor organisations.

The following issues, among others, arise:

• What should be covered on this page Irish Republican Army - is the current situation satisfactory, should it be a disambiguation page, should it cover all the organisations known as IRA etc - read the entire talk page for full discussion.
• What should the article that addresses the history of all IRAs together be called (or should there even be one?); and what should be done with the current IRA and List of IRAs pages?

Original version of this follows, with list of positions expressed at time of writing Palmiro 19:36, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

---

• Numerous articles exist on the topic.
  • The "Irish Republican Army" article (this one) covers the IRA up until 1969 (see below).
  • Separate articles cover the Official IRA, Provisional IRA, Real IRA and Continuity IRA.
  • List of IRAs provides a basic history (not just a list) of the IRA and its various successor organisation, as well as Sinn Fein and its successor organisations.
  • IRA, which appears to have started as a disambiguation page for the various uses of the acronym (not confined to Irish politics), now also contains a brief history of the IRA and its various successor organisations.
• Points in dispute:
  • Content of this article (Irish Republican Army)

Positions:

1. 1. It should cover all IRAs. Objections: it would be insulting to Irish people to include the IRA that fought the war of independence on the same page as later organisations which are widely perceived as criminals without any political legitimacy; the various organisations calling themselves the IRA are entirely separate organisations and should be dealt with separately.
   2. It should give an outline of the various IRA organisations, describing their common features and giving a brief one or two paragraph outline of each individual organisation, directing the reader to the main articles for each of these. Objections: as for first option above(?).
   3. It should cover the IRA that fought the War of Independence only. Objections: this is basing the article content on a subjective judgement as to who has a right to the name rather than an object of judgement of how the name is actually used (principle of using the common name); the IRA is commonly used as a name for the IRA after the Treaty split and is now commonly used as a name for the Provisional IRA; people will expect to find information on the PIRA here (principle of least surprise); the IRA was universally known as such from 1922 on, was not known by any other name, and no other organisation was known by that name.
   4. It should cover the IRA that fought the War of Independence and the IRA up until the provisional-official split. (Nobody has proposed this explicitly but it is the de facto position as of the current edit)
   5. It should be a disambiguation page. Objections: ease of use, the name IRA was used without contest by the organisation between the 1920s and the 1960s.
   6. It should be a short summary page. Objections: it may not be possible to maintain a short summary page as such, given the nature of wikipedia: the choice may really be between as disambiguation page and a full entry.

• • If there is a separate article on the IRA from 1919 to 1922, what should that article be called?
  • If there is a separate article on the IRA from 1922 to 1969, what should that article be called?

Other issues that should be addressed

• What should the article that addresses the history of all IRAs together be called; and what should be done with the current IRA and List of IRAs pages?Palmiro 12:32, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Proposals for moving this article forward

What's interesting is that your fears (and mine) for IRA have not transpired. It seems to me that we have to go forward on a neutral disambiguation page (as per IRA) and have articles for Irish Republican Army (1916-1922), Irish Republican Army (1923-1969), then the Officials and the Provos etc etc. So I propose that:

• This article (up to 1922) be moved to Irish Republican Army (1916-1922)
• The material after 1922 (to 1969) be moved to a new article Irish Republican Army (1923-1969)
• That the title be recycled to be a REDIRECT to IRA, which is the disambiguation page.

Comments? --Red King 12:40, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

For reasons rehearsed at length in previous posts, I don't think this is entirely ideal, but it may represent the best possible point of consensus. I would prefer something similar, but a bit meatier: Damac's proposed summary page as per his post of 19 July. I wonder is some common ground findable between the two.

By the way, if we adopt this proposal, the summary page should be probably here, not on IRA, per naming conventions (spell out acronyms).Palmiro 12:53, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm still in favour of a concise summary page under Irish Republican Army (IRA and List of IRAs should be dropped and linked to this), providing short descriptions (in chronlogical order) of each organisation styling itself IRA, with "See main" links for each. I'm also in favour of the NPOV titles selected for the pre and post 1922 IRAs.

More use needs to be made of the Category:Irish Republican Army and everything relating to the IRAs should be listed here. There is too much needless repetition in the multitute of articles on the IRAs and Sinn Fein. (How many times does it take to describe 1916 or the 1969/70 split. The latter is a signigicant event in their own right and require seperate, detailed entries).

A family tree of the IRAs (I'm currently working on one for wiki) would also illustrate how the IRA has developed and mutated --Damac 13:08, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

As an outside observer on this subject, I found that trying to browse the pages on the IRA without some background on the subject can be a bit confusing. I personally feel the date-ranges for the articles would be best, and, on this page, have a 3-5 paragraph summary of each "IRA" with a link at the top of each summary along the lines of "Main Article: Irisih Republican Army (1919-1922) etc. That would seem to me to work best with Wikipedia standards. --tomf688^<TALK> 13:09, July 29, 2005 (UTC)

Strongly support all of Damac's proposals. Also, as Damac suggested earlier, the same principles should be applied to the Sinn Féin articles. Re naming of the first two articles in the set, do you mean naming them by date range? Palmiro 13:33, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

And I strongly applaud Palmiro for his initiative to sort out this mess. Tomf688 makes the point that it is really difficult for outsiders (his own self-description) to understand the present mess.

As regards naming, I back Red King's NPOV titles Irish Republican Army (1916-1922) (although it technically it should begin in 1917 with the formation of Brugha's Resident Executive) and Irish Republican Army (1923-1969) as well as all the "adjective" IRAs from 1969.

Whatever is done must be replicated for the Sinn Fein pages. As some know, the centenary of SF is approaching November and with some careful planning and coordination, we'll have a suitable batch of NPOV articles to present to the world. contribution by Damac

Interim proposal

Taking Red King's proposal above as a starting point, I'd like to suggest that we proceed as follows, since there seems to be a large degree of consensus around these steps at least:

1. move the material on the IRA that fought the War of Independence to Irish Republican Army (1917-1922)
2. move the material on the post-Treaty split period to Irish Republican Army (1922-1969)
3. merge the material that's currently on IRA and list of IRAs onto this page, and delete list of IRAs (or redirect it here?)
4. redirect IRA here, create an IRA (disambiguation) page to deal with the fact that there are uses of IRA that don't relate to Irish military/paramilitary organisations and put a note to that effect on the top of this page
5. then we can trash out some sort of common ground between Red King's and Damac's proposals as to what exactly should be on this page: the two are not by any means irreconcilable in my view.

• Can we agree what year the original (and best) IRA started in, for the purposes of the article name? The article implies 1916 in the introduction (perhaps due to a missinng 'which') and 1918/1919 under 'origins'; AFAIK the first contemporary use was by republican prisoners in Frongoch and other detention centres in 1917(?); does anyone have an actual precise date for the merger of the Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, which seems the logical point?
  • It seems that Damac has answered this point above.

The ICA never officially merged with the Irish Volunteers or the IRA. The ICA existed in fact until the 1930s. --Damac 00:19, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Any objections?Palmiro 13:56, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Support this proposal in principle. (The devil is in the detail, of course). --Red King 16:27, 29 July 2005 (UTC) [Though I'd start with 1916. Ok, it was the IRB then but, recognising the view that it is confusing to unfamiliar readers, the Easter Rising provides a recognisable belaying point so that's where to start.] --Red King 16:27, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Support with a but; I feel the page "Irish Republican Army" should have a similar layout to that of History of Ireland, where each time period is briefly summarized on this page while providing a link to the main article directly underneath the subheading which goes into more depth. --tomf688^<TALK> 19:11, July 29, 2005 (UTC)

I am implacably opposed that sub-idea. There is no significant historical connection between the the army of the Irish Republic and the mafiosi who have recycled the name. --Red King 21:24, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Absolute and total objection — the Irish Republican Army was the army of the Irish Republican Army, empowered by the Parliament of the Irish Republic and under the constitutional authority of the Aireacht. To equate any other claimant of the name to an army of a state is POV in the extreme and that is precisely by using Irish Republican Army (1917-1922) and Irish Republican Army (1922-1969) would suggest. No later so-called IRA had either the authority of the Irish people or the Irish people's parliament either to use the name or wage any war. The article on the army of the Irish Republic belongs under the name of the army of the Irish Republic, which is Irish Republican Army. Other claimants can be called whatever, but to use a name that would suggest continuity between it and the others when less than one in six Irish people accept any continuity and any claim to use the name when the Irish people would see it as biased and inaccurate would be perverse and POV. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 20:20, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree with that view - I've argued for it. Unfortunately, I am persuaded by the argument that Wiki is not the place to make moral judgements. The reality is that the title has had accepted misuse for 80 years. The reason I support the proposal is that it is the only achievable way to remove the current and prevent any future contamination of the article on the War of Independence army with raiméis about the chancers that have squatted on the name. It also makes it possible to challenge any attempt to give them credence by association. --Red King 21:20, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I understand the point. However using dates to disambigulate suggests a valid continuity when that view is actually rejected by nearly 90% of the Irish people, most academics, writers on the issue, etc. Doing that would be like including Lyndon LaRouche in a list of world's greatest thinkers alongside Plato, Socrates, etc when most people think he is dozen short of an egg. Obviously he would deserve coverage. But it is the context that would be the problem. What these IRA articles need to show is that there are two types of IRA — the Irish Republican Army whose right to the name is undisputed (ie, the literal Irish Republican Army, which evolved into the National Army, and then later organisations whose right to use the name is disputed. The structure of the articles need to stress the NPOV point that "they say" they are the continuation, not imply a continuation. The former is NPOV. It is not saying whether they are or are not. The latter is POV. It is accepting that they are. Dates imply a linear relationship. They are also misleading: was the sympathetic-to-Nazism IRA of the early 1940s the same as the conservative Catholic 'Brits out' IRA of the 1950s? Were they the same as the Marxist IRA of the mid 1960s? (I researched the mid 1960s IRA and the swift change from nationalism to marxism was astonishing. The old style nationalist article in An Poblacht dwindled issue by issue until they were tiny sidebars, replaced by marxism from cover to cover.) Was the ó Bradaigh IRA the same as the Adams IRA, or is the Ó Bradaigh IRA now the Continuity IRA? The only solution I can see is to

• keep the undisputed IRA of the Irish Republic, given that no-one disputes its right to the name, on the main page.
• link to other IRAs as claimants to the name after 1922.
• Distinguish the others not by date but period and/or name. So you have an IRA from the Treaty to the Troubles, which can explore the complex identity of the organisation claiming the title. Then in the Troubles you have first the OIRA and PIRA from which emerged other who said they were the IRA. But as their status is distinguished, they should not get more than a cursory mention on the Irish Republican Army page, through a For later claimants to the name, see . . . Anything else, by implicitly accepting a linear linkage or even stating in title form that one existed, would be POV. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 22:40, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Fully support. Using dates or a chronological presentation does not confer legitimacy in any way and the overview page and each article should stress this fact. The IRAs can be differentiated from one another, but they cannot be clearly and clinically seperated from one another. Even in terms of personnel, there was extensive continuities existed between each IRA. For example, Seán Russell, who attempted to collaborate with the Nazis in 1940, was IRA director of munitions under Richard Mulcahy in 1920. Frank Aiken, future minister for external affairs in the 1950s, was IRA chief of staff from 1923 to 1925. Do we also write out that part of Seán MacBride's biography as IRA chief of staff?

Of course the early Provisional IRA is not the same as the present IRA, just as de Valera´s Fianna Fáil is different to Bertie`s outfit. Policies change, but as with FF, there has been an organisational and personal continuity within the Provisional movement. Of course, some people have left but there are people in the present-day leaderhship who have been there from the early 1970s and they believe that they're in the same organisation. It's the same with any organisation, and perhaps the personalities need to be worked into the articles on the IRAs more.

Most Irish people, academics, commentators do reject the legitimicist arguments of the Provo IRA, Continuity IRA etc. However, 90 percent of the Irish people are referring to the Provisional IRA when they use the terms IRA and Irish Republican Army. What the people think is not the best way to decide on how an encyclopaedia is written.

On a final note. FearEireann exaggerates the legitimacy of the IRA's war during 1919-1921. Voters were never asked by Sinn Fein in the 1918 election to vote for war. The manifesto asked them to vote for peace. In addition, less than half the Irish electorate at that election voted for Sinn Fein, meaning that the majority were hostile to say the least towards republicanism. The war was launched by two renegade IRA men that day the Dail met. The Dail for its part mostly in secret, the public were not party to its deliberations, and many of its members were in jail for its proceedings. This assembly was declared an illegal assembly by the constitutional authorities at the time and it was recognised by not one country bar the fledgling Russian SFSR. Not much legality there. Furthermore, the IRA was never under the full authority of the cabinet. The minister of finance (Collins) and not the minister of defence (Brugha) or the IRA chief of staff had the ultimate say.

PS - I have compiled a Genealogy_of_the_IRA which I'd like to see on the Irish Republican Army introduction page. It will help non-Irish users comprehend the complexity of the issue under discussion. --Damac 00:19, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Damac. I also think his points about the original IRA are well made. The fact of a consderable degree of organisational continuity between the various IRAs is a fact. You may not like it, you may think the people involved were wrong, but these are POV considerations. There is no doubt that they lost a lot of political legitimacy and support. That is an NPOV consideration that can be included.

I wonder where FearEireann gets his statistic that less than one in six Irish people accept the description of the Provies as 'IRA'. Pretty much every Irish person I know refers to them as such, even though hardly any of them regard their armed struggle as legitimate.

Also, legitimacy is a dangerous word to throw around in this context - we have to be careful to distinguish between our judgements of what constitutes legitimacy (our point of view), the various such judgements made by people at the time, on varying criteria, and the contemporary legal standing of various organisations (using legitimacy to describe this is in danger of falling into a POV trap in my view. After all, under British law at the time, the first IRA were clearly illegal.)

It's true that nobody disputes the right of the original IRA to use that name, but the original IRA doesn't exist anymore and we're not in the business of deciding about rights to use names. There is, if anything, near-consensus against confining this article to the War of Independence IRA: all except two of the contributors here have objected to that and one of those who objected is now in favour of the current proposal as a compromise. Personally, I also think the current proposal is by no means ideal - because I have a very different view of the nature of the IRA from Fear Éireann's, and also because I don't think page naming should be about making moral judgements - but I'm supporting it as a best consensus option.

On this question:

was the sympathetic-to-Nazism IRA of the early 1940s the same as the conservative Catholic 'Brits out' IRA of the 1950s? Were they the same as the Marxist IRA of the mid 1960s? (I researched the mid 1960s IRA and the swift change from nationalism to marxism was astonishing)

So should we have separate articles for IRA (communists, 1927 - 33), IRA (Nazis, 1939 - 1944), IRA (reactionaries, 1944 - 60s), IRA (commies again, 1960s - 1969) as well as the separate articles we already have? This actually weakens your initial point and proves the opposing argument, that it's in the nature of political organisations to change dramatically, due to objective circumstances as well as internal factors. To treat the IRA from 1923 to 1969, in a historical sense, as one organisation still makes sense.

As regards names, I'm not too hung up on dates v. descriptions. I don't agree with Fear Eireann's objection to dates, but I see no problems describing the 1st IRA as Irish Republican Army (War of Independence. Beyond that, we should be cautious about it: if we have to use Irish political/historical terms that may not be immediately clear to outsiders (and the Troubles can also mean the War of Independence) we are surely better off with dates.

One final point: I think we're tending to look at the question - and Damac has sort of touched on this problem as well - too much from a historical perspective. This is an encyclopedia, and chances are that readers want information about current phenomena rather than history articles. This is badly phrased, but I think what I'm getting at is clear. The Fianna Fail article is a case in point. It's a history of Fianna Fail rather than an analysis of Fianna Fail as a political agent in contemporary Ireland. Perhaps we should think about the presentation of material on political topics in general bearing this in mind. Palmiro 12:40, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

You are missing my point completely. There is only one undisputed organisation known as the IRA. There are numerous disputed claimants to the name. It breaches NPOV to equate disputed claimants to the name with the one undisputed one. What I suggest is that the one undisputed user of the name use the name. A later article dealing with the first disputed IRA use the timeframe from the Treaty to the Troubles, and later claimants from 1969 use their own name, with is Official IRA, Provisional IRA, Continuity IRA, Real IRA. Any attempt to suggest a continuity between the IRA that was the legitimate army of the Republic, and later claimants, is POV and cannot be done under Wikipedia rules. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 15:23, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

With all respect, I think it's you that's missing the point. You're talking about what you see as disputed right to use the name Irish Republican Army. You're making two assumptions that are not necessarily universally shared: first of all, that some sort of moral copyright exists to the name Irish Republican Army, and secondly, that that's the basis on which we should decide where to put material on Wikipedia.

Secondly, the continuity between the IRA that fought the War of Independence and the IRA that fought the Civil War is a matter of fact, and can be checked by reading any history book. Most of the members of the War of Independence IRA who were opposed to the Treaty were also members of the IRA that fought the Civil War: it's as simple as that. Again, I would ask you to think about how you use the word 'legitimate' in the light of NPOV. Palmiro 15:50, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

"Any attempt to suggest a continuity between the IRA that was the legitimate army of the Republic, and later claimants, is POV and cannot be done under Wikipedia rules." I can't even begin to argue with statements like this. We're talking about how to distribute wikipedia's coverage of the various organisations known as the IRA. I think everybody has agreed that the articles that result should detail the historical origins of the various IRAs, and their political claims, from a neutral point of view. Palmiro 15:54, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

You keep missing the point completely every time. A series of organisations use or have used the name IRA. The right of one of them to use it is undisputed by any later organisation, including those who later claimed the name. It was an organisation legitimised in its activities by a vote of a parliament and acted under the constitutional authority of a government. Everyone agrees on that. Others later entities declared themselves the IRA. They had no parliamentary saction. They had to legal authority. Their right to use that name was roundly disputed by the vast majority of people, including the vast majority of those who were in the Irish Republican Army whose legitimacy was defined by parliament. You can no more accept a self-declaration of a name as being equal to a constitutionally authorised organisation than one can accept that if Beverely Flynn and her supporters proclaimed themselves Fianna Fáil they are Fianna Fáil when a different entity legally is Fianna Fáil, or that one can accept Norton I as the legal rival to President Lincoln as US head of state because in 1859 Joshua Norton declared himself US emperor. Similarly if I and other Wikipedians declared outselves the Provisional IRA that would not entitle us to be treated as the Provisional IRA on Wikipedia.

All we can do, under NPOV principles, is to say that

• one entity's right to the name is undisputed. It had the authority of a parliament elected by a popular vote behind it.
• Later groups proclaimed themselves the IRA. Their right to use the name was/is disputed by

1. The parliament of Ireland
2. The people of Ireland
3. The majority of members of the undisputed Irish Republican Army.

The latter groups have to be covered but the fact that they were self-declared claimants to the name can't be overlooked. Only one entity was a legally constituted national army. The rest weren't. It is that simple. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 16:23, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Your position can be summarised as follows: only the IRA that fought the War of Independence legitmately used the title IRA. Therefore Wikipedia's NPOV policy requires us, without any choice, to put that IRA on this page and every other organisation that used the name somewhere else.

It seems to have escaped your attention that nobody else has agreed with this interpretation of NPOV as applied to organisation of the wikipedia coverage of the IRA, and that everybody else who has expressed an opinion is (in some cases with reservations) essentially in agreement with the proposal outlined above.

In these circumstances, your edits, which in my view are flying in the face of NPOV and are clearly flying in the face of consensus on this talk page, are utterly unjustifiable.

In addition, your new template is a howling violation of NPOV. Really, it's incredible.

In view of the fact that you've unilaterally made these highly POV changes in the face, and against the trend of, of a bona fide attempt to find a consensus NPOV solution, I'm reverting them. Palmiro 20:06, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

For the umpteenth time you get it wrong. You obviously have a weak grasp of history and no understanding what NPOV means. It is a historic fact that one organisation has an undisputed right to the name. Others claim a right to use it, a right disputed, as anyone with an elementary grasp of history knows well. I have reverted the page to the correct version, which keeps the distinction and places the different organisations using the name at different locations linked by a template, which is the standard way Wikipedia deals with such disputes. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 20:22, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't think your personal attacks are going to help us resolve this problem any more than your attempts to pre-empt a consensus decision will. You have only aggravated the issue by adding a template with arbitrary content and severe POV issues. (Why do the articles in the template not correspond to those in cat:Irish Republic Army?)

Your post above misses the point, and I base this observation on the following principle considerations.

1. The term "Irish Republican Army" is widely used by all sorts of people to describe later IRAs, whatever they thought about the political legitimacy of those groups' claims. You have ignored the evidence presented on this talk page to that effect.
2. It is true that one group's legitimacy is agreed by all the others. This does not mean that it is uncontroversial to say "the 1919-1922 IRA was legitimate and the others weren't". The other groups do not accept that the original IRA was more legitimate than they were. This is really a question of logic, not of politics.

Please let's get back to trying to reach a consensus here. Palmiro 21:23, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Again you miss the point. One group's legitimacy is undisputed. Others aren't. The article cannot ignore that. So this article should, under NPOV rules, focus on the undisputed meaning of the name Irish Republican Army and link to articles about the others. That is what it does. Re trying to build a consensus, you unilaterally changed the page to include disputed IRAs on it, when there are other articles there about them. I simply gave the 1922-1969 IRA its own article, and linked all the IRAs together in a template, which is how Wikipedia deals with issues like these. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 21:42, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Please do not distort what has happened here. There was no other page dealing with the IRA from 1922 to 1969 (which contrary to what some people think, was never known as the Official IRA). There appeared to be no logical and satisfactory place for it except on this page, in keeping with Wikipedia naming conventions. I and other users repeatedly raised this question and you never refuted the points we made, as is shown by the many contributions further up this page.Palmiro 21:51, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

"you unilaterally changed the page to include disputed IRAs on it, when there are other articles there about them". This is simply not true. We rehearsed this at length. The IRA from well before 1930 until 1969 was not known by any other name, whether by people who accepted its political legitimacy or otherwise; no other group was known by that name during that period. You did not dispute either of these contentions. There was no other article about the IRA during this period (which was not known as the Official IRA), and I did not include on this page organisations which have their own pages.Palmiro 21:57, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

With regard to naming Jtdirl has a valid point here. Their is a vast distinction between the IRA of the Irish Republic and those that followed. Whilst the IRA of the Irish Republic was the standing army of that State the IRA's that followed were very often just bands of professional and organised criminals, thungs and terrorists that have attempted to subvert the independence of the successor States at every opportunity both nationally and internationally. Those IRA groups who have used the term since the Irish Free States foundation have only used it as a tag of convenance and also it is the realisation of their believe that the State is an illigitimate entity and that they are the only successors to the Irish Republic. Whilst it is generally accepted that the common name of an organisation should be used their are well stated exceptions to this - wikipedia should not promote myths nor the simplification of headlines if it is to be professional. This article should focus directly on the IRA of the Irish Republic and any additional articles should in so far as possible (in their naming) avoid the implication that those IRA's are ligitimate successors - their are so many IRA's that been specific is absolute - dont make this article a garbage heep for failed Irish republicanism. Djegan 22:40, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

I broadly agree with Jtirl. There was a complete difference between the IRA of say 1918 when it had a clear mandate and the more recent claimants to the name. Only I would draw the line at May 24 1923 --ClemMcGann 23:13, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

That is a fair point. It might be a good cut-off point. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 23:28, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

The big problem here is people confusing legitimacy with titles. I've said this time and time again. Most Irish people (lets refer to them seeing that other people constantly invole them) are dexterous enough to use the acronym IRA to describe the historical pre-Treaty organisation as well as the present outfits while at the same time remaining fully aware that this does not confer legitimacy on the current crowd. Outspoken critics of the Provisional IRA like Michael McDowell, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Garret FitzGerald have all used and have used the terms IRA and Provisional IRA interchangeably and in doing so, reflects the common currency that that acronym has.

Historians also use the term IRA for all organisations since 1917. I have a book out in front of me written by a Government of Ireland scholarship holder called Brian Hanley, entitled The IRA 1926-1936, Dublin (Four Courts Press), 2002. To take from the book's blurb: "This is the first book to examine the IRA in depth for the years prior to the Second World War"..."examines the IRA's ideology"..."IRA's turn to social radicalism" etc. A look through the extensive bibliography of this excellent and well-researched volume provides numerous titles of scholarly studies and articles on issues such as Ernie O'Malley: IRA intellectual, The IRA and the modern Irish state, Executed: Tom Williams and the IRA, The new IRA, 1925-1962 (by JA Murphy!), A pocket history of the IRA, etc etc. These books reflect the standard and widespread naming conventions in Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK.

And on the issue of the legitimacy of the First Dáil and the War of Independence. Can we please move away from simple moral arguments that suggest the original IRA was a legion of Angels. This is POV rubbish. The IRA at that time did not have a clear mandate to carry out what they did. Neither was made of total heroes. Elements within that IRA carried out some atrocious sectarian murders. This is fact and no motions passed by Dáil Éireann justified that. The legitimacy of DÉ was widely disputed at the time and is still disputed by some. I already posted something about this, which was conveniently ignored by some. It might be worthwhile to restate my points. In the 1918 election, voters were never asked by Sinn Féin to vote for war. The SF manifesto asked them to vote for peace. In the event, many people couldn't vote owing to the SF intimidation of members of the Irish Parliamentary Party. In addition, less than half the Irish electorate at that election voted for Sinn Féin, meaning that the majority were hostile to say the least towards republicanism. The "war" was launched by two renegade IRA men that day the Dáil met. The Dail for its part met mostly in secret, the public were not party to its deliberations, and many of its members were in jail for its proceedings. This assembly was declared an illegal assembly by the constitutional authorities at the time and it was recognised by not one country bar the fledgling Russian SFSR. Not much legality there IMO.

I accept that the pre-Treaty IRA is the only organisation accepted by all as an IRA. The IRA-ness of proceeding organisations is disputed. 80 years on, I oppose the blatent application of Irish Civil war naming categories on particular organisations. The article on the post-Treaty IRA should not have "anti-Treaty" in front of it, but rather after it. RedKing made this suggestion some days ago and most people agreed. Despite this, one person has gone ahead and made his changes regardless of the developing census here. Who gives him the moral authority to do so? Perhaps it might be necessary at this stage to involve some outside wikipedians/reviewers to sort out this issue once and for all and to invest our efforts in the writing of articles. --Damac 15:28, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

I think we will continue to struggle on this one. If we invite RFC, then we invite comment from people who know less about it than we do. Someone said earlier that this is "civil war politics". I think he meant it as an insult, but actually it very close to the truth. Some of us here are adamant that there is a seismic shift between the IRA that fought the war of independence and the organisations that have subsequently used the name. You are right about them being no angels but that is irrelevant. No one is trying to beatify the original IRA and order the rest to hell fire and damnation - that is a caricature of our position. [Well, the RC church did, but that's irrelvant too!] What we are saying is that this article MUST end in 1922 or 1923. That is when that era of history ended. I think that FearÉireann's template gives a reasonable pointer backwards and forwards. The later organisations are NOT the original IRA, at best they were mutineers from it. To pretend otherwise is not encyclopaedic. You are being deceived by the duplicate name. There is no valid connection. You may create other articles with the word IRA in the title, but don't put the provos in this one. --Red King 20:00, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Red King is correct in all he says. Re the supposed "developing consensus", Red King, Djegan, ClemMcGann all disgree with what you are trying to do. It is unencyclopædic and would be factually wrong to do what you want to do with the IRA articles. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 20:17, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

I disagree that RedKing is correct in all he says. I am a professional historian and I have never heard the anti-Treaty IRA ever being referred to as mutineers. It is a fact that a significant portion of the IRA leadership disagreed with the Treaty. It is a fact that large portion of the population in particular areas of the country disagreed with the Treaty. It is a fact that a considerable part of the electorate voted for anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TDs in the 1922 election. To refer to military or political opposition to the Treaty as a mutiny or its supports as mutineers is absolute POV in my opinion and it is impossible to find such terms or descriptions in any scholarly discussion on that sorry period in Irish history.

Just what am I trying to do, FÉ? I have never proposed including a straight run history linking the pre-Treaty IRA with the Provos (as RedKing suggested). I agree with a seperate article on the pre-Treaty IRA. I do try to confer legitimacy on any subsequent IRA. What I am trying to do is to have common naming proceedures reflected on Wikipedia. I wish to avoid complicated and POV names being applied to particular organisations. Creating an article on the post-1922 IRA and calling it Anti-Treaty IRA is POV. Go through the Dáil Debates from 1926 and you'll find representatives of every party refer to that organisation as the IRA or the Irish Republican Army. You'll find the same in Stormont debates and Hansard. Every reliable history book of the period refers to the IRA or Irish Republican Army to refer to that organisation time and time again. Wikipedia needs to accept normal and common usage of terms. It is not the place to confer legitimacy on any particular organisation.

Speaking of legitimacy, you have completely ignored the points I and others have made on that. It is important to remind you that the belief that Dáil Éireann was a sovereign parliament is only really held in Ireland. No government (bar one) recognised it. Wikipedia is not just read by Irish eyes and your articles could easily be accused of being wildly POV by those Irish people who disagreed with republicanism then and now. Do their opinions count in your worldview?

What I'm concerned about is clarity for the mass of Wikipedia users who are not well versed in Irish history as others. Think about them for a change. The see the term IRA or Irish Republican Army in their newspapers or books and what to find out more about it. They enter the term in Wikipedia and end up (in one case) on a bitty disambiguation page that until recently ignored the period 1922-1969/70. If they type in the full title, they end up reading about the historic IRA (complete with a Hohenzollern coat of arms until recently and which furthermore seems to to talk about so many things other than the IRA). Only after a few clicks and confusion might they land on the article that they were looking for in the first place.

It was also nice of you FÉ to invite Djegan to the forum on the false premise that a "user wants to blur the line between the Old IRA and later IRAs and is annoyed that, as a professional historian, I am trying to point out the fact that post 1922 IRAs did not have the same legitimacy in the public's eyes as the IRA of the Anglo-Irish War". You forgot to mention that the user is also a professional historian and that the same user is not trying to confer legitimacy on post-1922 IRAs. Where have I written that? This appeal to Djegan, who has not contributed anything significant to the debate, demonstrates clearly to me that you have failed to engage in this discussion in any meaningful way and that you are determined to enforce your agenda here regardless.

The problem of what to do when various organisations use the same acronym or title is not just an Irish one. A similar problem exists with the German KPD or communist party. There was an historic KPD, a post-war one (briefly) in East Germany, one in West Germany (subsequently banned), and plenty of other parties that used the title in various ways since the 1970s. All have been accommodated on the one page ( [[1]]). It's not necessarily the approach I'd support for the IRAs but it just goes to show how flexible, objective, and NPOV other Wikipedians can be. It is sad to see what could be a great set of articles messed up because of the determination of particular individuals to wage the petty squabbles of Irish civil war politics on this forum. Let's think about the mass of Wikipedia users. --Damac 21:51, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

The fact that I have not greatly contributed to the article does not mean that what I say is bogus - nor does it mean that i am a sidekick for Jtdirl. The reason i have contributed is simple, I am interested in the discussion. IRA has become a colloquial for Irish republicanism. Djegan 18:16, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

The only messing up here is attempts to write lazy inaccurate articles that blur distinctions and promote a simplistic, pass-standard Junior Cert understanding of Irish republicanism. Wikipedia as an encyclopædia has to follow rules or accuracy and NPOV, not reflect simplistic bias from any side. Dumbed down history is not an option here. If you think accuracy and NPOV is simply a concern of "particular individuals" you are completely mistaken.

Your mention of the KPD shows just how much you have failed to grasp the debate here. There is no comparison. There was a lineal continuity with the KPD. There is not with the IRAs. There is one everyone was agreed was the IRA, and which had its legitimacy vouched for by an elected parliament and sovereign government. Others claimed themselves, without parliamentary or popular sanction to be the IRA subsequently. Many groups in overlapping timeframes claimed that they were the IRA and the others weren't. Some genuinely believed they were the actual IRA, though most Irish people said they were wrong. Some simply used the name IRA as a flag of convenience for sectarianism. It would be a bastardisation of history, and platently POV, to insist that, contrary to the assertions of successive Irish governments, Irish parliaments, members of the Irish Republican Army volunteers in the War of Independence and the Irish public, all the IRAs as the same, and are validly either the one organisation or linear successors of each other. That POV is not an option on wikipedia. FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 22:26, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Damac and Palmiro has introduced the concept of legitimacy, to charge others with it. Like sainthood etc, it is a red herring. Nobody on this side of the argument is trying to make any judgements on legitimacy, but simply that the various organisation are not the same and should not be muddled into the same article. That's just sloppy. There are many articles on Wikipedia that begin with a disambiguation statement. Many of those specifically say "if you are looking for <insert popular misconception here>, then see the page you want here. The most relevant example in this context is Ulster. Hundreds of newspaper articles all over the world use "Ulster" to mean "Northern Ireland", but that doesn't make it any less wrong. I fully accept your argument that "IRA" is widely used to mean the Provos (this week anyway. I expect next week it will be CIRA or RIRA or some other protection racketeer), but Wiki needs to sort the wheat from the chaff. As a very simple example, have a look at the history of Caprese Michelangelo and the work of fellow wikipedians to tease out confusions.

(btw, of course I know that "mutineer" is PPOV - I would not use it in a main article. But as a statement of fact, it is strictly correct - they refused to obey the orders of their Chief of Staff and the of Executive of the Irish Republic.) --Red King 23:08, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

FearEireann was the first user to refer to the issue of legitimacy in a post of July 19. If you read FE's posts, he constantly refers to the legitimacy issue, so much so that I offered him an alternative viewpoint on that issue (widely held in some quarters and countries) which he has chosen to ignore completely. As I have said before, the issue of legitimacy does not concern me and if it helps at all, I do not consider any of the organisations presently styling themselves an IRA to be in any way legitimate.

RedKing, if the anti-Treaty IRA were "strictly" mutineers, then the pre-Treaty IRA and Dail Eireann were illegal, treasonous and seditious organisations and not legitimate in any way according to the same moral reasoning.

I don't disagree. I meant within the Irish Republic's frame of reference. But I already disclaimed that it was PPOV and that it was just to demonstrate a point. It doesn't stand examination by itself. --Red King 19:32, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

For the umpteenth time, I do not assert and never have asserted that the pre-Treaty IRA or any of the organisations (not plural) are the same.

Neither am I asking for all organisations bearing the name to be "muddled" on the same page. What I have been asking for is for fair naming proceedure and conventions to be adopted when naming that organisation that styled itself IRA after the split of 1922.

FearEireann, you have failed to grasp the KPD article. Not all of the organisations mentioned on that page (I refer to the orgs that were established in the 1970s) enjoyed linear continuity with the original party. That's why I brought that example to your attention.

What I also argue for, and will go ahead with it, is to describe the split that occured in the IRA in 1922, showing how the organisation viewed the Treaty at different levels. it is important to account for is the continuity in terms personnel between the various IRAs, particularly between the pre- and anti-Treaty organisations bearing that name. This is a fact and something that should be recognised. What is now under the heading "The IRA and the Treaty" is Junior Cert history pass standard in my opinion and I look forward to rewriting it. Indeed, to be accused of writing lazy, pass-standard Junior Cert history articles by someone who has claimed that "Prince Joachim was considered as King of Ireland during the 1916 Rising" certainly makes me laugh. I haven't heard lines like "Many IRA men worshipped the "long fella" (President de Valera, also called "deV) and the "big fella" (Collins, also called "Mick")" since the glory days of Inter Cert history either. --Damac 07:07, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I believe that you mis-read that one. I suspect it should have read "was proposed for". Crazy by today's reading, but those were royalist times. It wasn't ever so long since England had imported a german king. --Red King 19:32, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

To be honest FÉ has just contradicted his arguments for his own original position by saying that this article should deal with the IRA up to the end of the Civil War. First of all he said the IRA up to the Treaty split was one organisation, distinct from later ones, and couldn't be mixed up with any succeeding IRA by being put on the same page as it. Now he says that it can be on the same page as the republican side in the civil war - but seemingly not the same page as the IRA from 1923 to 1926, which was indisputably the same organisation as the latter.

I suspect he was trying to compromise. I agree with your analysis. The only break is the treaty ratification. --Red King 19:32, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

The constant misrepresentations, on this and other talk pages, of what other users have actually said and done is one of the most annoying features of this dispute, and one of the reasons why I'm putting it on RfC. Hopefully that will help us sort out this argument, as it's clear we've reached an impasse here and what's happening on this talk page currently is not the sort of dialogue that will lead to a consensus emerging.

As a final comment, too many of the contributions on this page suffer from a failure to appreciate the category distinction between historical fact and political (nationalist) myth. Palmiro 15:24, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I quite agree. The myth is that there was real continuity through and beyond the Treaty. There wasn't. --Red King 19:32, 1 August 2005 (UTC)