Official Irish Republican Army

The Official Irish Republican Army was the wing of the Irish Republican Army that remained after the organisation split in 1969, as the breakaway Provisional IRA formed around armed resistance. In Belfast it was known as the Stickies, a name that marked a political and organisational divide which soon became an armed rivalry. The split was rooted in arguments over the IRA’s failure to protect Catholic communities and over whether republican politics should pursue accommodation or renewed armed struggle.

Origins and the 1969 split

In the late 1960s, the Irish Republican Army was largely dormant and conspicuously short of weapons. It had sold some of its remaining arms in 1968 to the Free Wales Army. When sectarian clashes erupted in 1969, the organisation could do little to prevent loyalists from driving Catholic families from their homes. Its perceived failure to defend the community damaged its standing and prompted some residents to mockingly recast its initials as I Ran Away.

That failure sharpened demands in Belfast for a more aggressive organisation. In September 1969, IRA commander Liam McMillen convened a leadership meeting in a room on Cyprus Street. Twenty-one armed men, led by Billy McKee, burst in. McMillen was widely blamed for the IRA’s failure during the riots; McKee confronted him and declared that he and his faction were voting him out. The encounter made visible a conflict over who could lead the movement and what it should do to defend the Catholic population.

By early 1970, the breakaway Provisional IRA had formed, explicitly committed to armed resistance, while the old IRA became known as the Official IRA. The division did not produce separate, peaceful spheres of activity: the two wings fought one another even as both faced loyalist mobs, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army. The resulting contest turned the split into a sustained conflict within republicanism as well as part of the wider violence.

Names, symbols, and political division

On Belfast’s streets, the Official IRA’s members were called the Stickies, in contrast to the Provisionals, or Provos. The book describes the names through the rival ways members wore the Easter lily: Officials supposedly attached commemorative lilies to their shirts with adhesive, while Provisionals pinned paper lilies to their clothing. A small badge thus became a visible shorthand for a much larger division over identity, strategy and the meaning of republican commitment.

The ideological distinction was also connected to political participation. The Provisional split reflected a suspicion that the Officials had become too political, and a longstanding republican tradition of abstentionism held that participation in parliamentary politics could dilute revolutionary commitment. That tension did not settle the movement’s future; it became part of the continuing argument over how political and armed activity could be combined.

Rivalry and life in Belfast

The division had direct consequences for people suspected of belonging to either organisation. In March 1972, Robert McConville, then seventeen, was interned on suspicion of membership in the Official IRA. His arrest removed him from his family after his father’s death, as his mother, Jean, was already in severe depression and increasingly confined to the family flat. The account presents his suspected affiliation as the grounds for internment, not as proof of membership.

The rivalry also shaped the dangers faced by the Provisional IRA’s Belfast leadership. Brendan Hughes, commander of D Company, was a target for the Stickies as well as loyalist paramilitaries, police and the British Army. His cousin Charlie, who had preceded him as D Company commander, had been shot and killed by the Officials. Later, when Provisional IRA intelligence officer Joe Lynskey was shot at home, he and Hughes’s associate Joe Russell believed the assailant might have been a member of the Official IRA; that identification remained a suspicion rather than an established fact.

Local presence and legacy

The Official IRA’s presence in Belfast extended beyond armed confrontation. Some neighbourhood shebeens were operated by its members and served as local gathering places in a city where many traditional pubs had been burned or bombed and travel beyond one’s own enclave could feel unsafe. Two such venues were the Burning Embers and the Cracked Cup. The Burning Embers acquired its name despite Brendan Hughes having once set fire to it; the Cracked Cup occupied a former secondhand crockery shop on Leeson Street, where dim light, rotting floorboards and pictures of the Virgin Mary and Patrick Pearse made an unlikely setting for an Official IRA gathering place.

The book’s later index records the Official IRA’s war with the Provisionals and its association with Belfast shebeens, underscoring how the organisation appears both as a faction in a national political rupture and as part of the everyday geography of neighbourhood life. Its defining significance lies in that double role: it was at once the remnant of the old IRA and one side of a new, violent contest over republican authority and strategy.