Wikipedia quotes IRA casualties at 368, Ulster Loyalist casualties at 162 and British security forces casualties at 1049. Presuming that the fight was mainly between the IRA on one side and the UK/Ulster Loyalists on the other, that gives the IRA a casualty ratio of about 3.3/1 in their favor. It’s uncommon for insurgencies to inflict more casualties than they absorb. How come the IRA was able to do that? How did the IRA compare to Iraqi insurgents for the UK military?
How effective was the Provisional IRA strategy for objectives which fell short of republicanism? While republicanism was a strong motivating factor, civil rights were also important. How effective was the IRA in changing that situation? How much effect did attacks on economic targets like the 1993 Bishopsgate or 1992 Baltic Exchange bombings produce?
I can’t recall the book I read it in (something tells me it was ‘A Secret History of the IRA’ by Ed Maloney or ‘Armed Struggle’ by Richard English) that although they didn’t realise it at the time the IRA had hit on a ‘war-winning’ strategy with these massive economic attacks, that the British government were told in a secret meeting by advisers that the British economy could take one, maybe two, more such incidents mainly as foreign investment was pulling out as a result.
Luckily, or unluckily I guess depending on perspective, the peace process was also coming to fruition at this time and they moved away from such tactics.
It did strike me that driving a truck with a few thousand dollars of payload to inflict a billion dollars in damage is seriously punching above one’s weight while avoiding most of the ethical and PR problems of McVeigh/Bin Laden.
What would the UK government have done if the IRA had kept remodeling British downtown areas?
I’m surprised they didn’t go after bridges and interchanges; They’re accessible to the public and vehicles, vulnerable to collapse, non-trivial to repair, highly visible chokepoints. They’re pretty much the bread and butter target of sabotage and airbombing. I’m trying to think of a way to protect them that wouldn’t slow a city to a crawl and I’m coming up short.
One of their terrorist bombings killed the older brother of a schoolmate, so my view is somewhat biased.
The City of London is currently protected by what’s known as the Ring of Steel.
I’ve wondered this as well, perhaps its simply a case that while economic targets are more effective they’re also less ‘showy’ than targeting police and soldiers (and the ‘collateral damage’ of unfortunate civilians who get in the way) and a major part of a terrorist campaign is media coverage.
But yes I agree its puzzling and I’d be interested in the answer to that one.
I grew up in a Republican/Nationalist part of Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and although on a much smaller scale problems are still rumbling on even during nominal peace and people are still being killed for ‘the cause’.
That seems like it would be useful to identify suspects after the fact but not stop it from happening. Wouldn’t a crude disguise defeat CCTV?
That… must have been interesting. In terms of guerilla warfare, how were the Republican areas different from the Loyalist ones? Mao talked about insurgents being fish that swim in the sea of the local population. That seems especially relevant when there are two seas.
It all depends how you define “efficiency”. If one’s looking for efficacy in achieving stated political objectives, then what resulted, in the Good Friday Agreement, was way short of a united Ireland, but a substantial advance in terms of status and (peaceful) political input. On the other hand one can speculate as to whether the outcome was any better for the IRA or the hard-line unionists than what was on offer 20 years earlier (as was quipped at the time, “Sunningdale for slow learners”).
Or one might even ask whether Ireland as a whole is any better off now than it would have been if the Home Rule Act had gone into effect and the whole “physical force tradition” had withered on the vine with no Easter Rising.
What could possibly have been the strategic benefit of hitting “chokepoints”? The IRA wasn’t trying to slow the advance of an invading army.
If we define efficiency as the ratio of casualties, why do you think the IRA was able to inflict more casualties on UK/Ulster forces than it received?
How effective was the IRA at stopping discrimination in jobs and housing, gerrymandering and other forms of civil rights violations?
Disrupting economic activity. Huge prolonged traffic jams as a result of guerilla action would be a daily reminder of the effects of war.
The Troubles aren’t really comparable to the Iraqi insurgency. The latter was something much closer to open war. You wouldn’t see civilians walking through downtown Mosul during the height of the Iraqi insurgency, and there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis displaced by the fighting. By contrast, Belfast was mostly peaceful even from 1969 to 1972, and while there were refugees being displaced until the mid-1970s they were in much smaller numbers.
Well it was only an unusual upbringing in retrospect, and thankfully the area I grew up in was removed from the worst of the violence although there was the occasional incident. Ironically Northern Ireland in general still has a significantly lower level of ordinary violence and crime than the rest of the UK or more urban areas of the Republic.
I first discovered the internet in my early twenties, that was an eye-opener I can tell you. 
As for Republican VS Loyalist areas I can’t really comment on that as I have no experience of the latter. Although to give you an idea of how divided the communities were in a discussion a few days ago a colleague from the Shankill Road in Belfast commented that he never knowingly met a Catholic until he was in his late teens, and that was far from unusual.
Economic targets again? And general nuisance-making, blowing up bridges and other important infrastructure is going to have a major impact, provided you can keep the pressure up. Look at the disruption caused recently in England by a drone being sighted over an airport, it was closed for days.
I think you might overestimate the amount of traffic Ireland has. But regardless, you shouldn’t be surprised they focused on more symbolic attacks rather than trying to slow traffic. It was a political campaign not an actual war for control of the territory.
Listening to Ian Paisley and his use of apocalyptic language, I get the impression that many NI Protestants feared they would be massacred like the Tutsis later were by the population they used to dominate. NI Catholics seemed to be treated much like blacks in the US South. Is that about right? Could Northern Ireland have turned into Yugoslavia?
Ireland wouldn’t have been the target. London and other large English cities would. Maybe the Chunnel. That could have been embarrassing.
With regards the IRA having a casualty rate in their favour you have to bear in mind that apart from a few instances the British Army’s main objective was not to maximise the number of IRA dead, though I have no doubt many in the army celebrated any casualties inflicted on the IRA.
True. I was comparing it other insurgencies and the NI insurgency was milder than many others. The fact that the IRA insurgents were white and English-speaking likely contributed to counter-insurgency operations having less of a bodycount focus.
Was the main British military objective to keep the peace? If so, how successful was it at that?
The nature of the insurgency itself is probably more relevant to how it played out.
In the US doctrinal manual about counter-insurgency (FM 3-24) there’s some talk about the differing natures of insurgencies. Some are more violence or economic centric. Some are more political centric. The Troubles is a good example of a politically centric insurgency. Violent attacks were a supporting effort to the overt political efforts of Sinn Fein. The insurgents weren’t generally looking to progress up Mao’s three phases to the last phase, mobile operations, and defeat the government. In some insurgencies that’s the approach. Comparing them, simply because they both fall under the umbrella of insurgency, can lead to bad conclusions.
They did try to blow up a bridge: Chronology of Provisional Irish Republican Army actions (1992–1999) - Wikipedia
And tried again in 2000. Fizzled both times luckily.
You’re right.
How good were those violent attacks at supporting Sinn Fein’s political efforts?
What did the UK want out of its deployment? To act as a kind of internal UN Peacekeepers between Catholics and Protestants in NI? That must have presented plenty of predictable visible targets to the IRA.
Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom and not the Republic of Ireland. That’s what both the security forces and the protestant paramiliitaries wanted. The Irish Republican forces failed to accomplish that.
The Easter Peace accord did establish self rule under the United Kingdom. It covered possible separation but one that requires a majority vote. The protestant majority liked that. The Irish Catholic minority got some provisions for increased cross border cooperation with Ireland. (Which incidentally have caused issued for Brexit.) It was a compromise in the face of stalemate. Compromise is actually a pretty common part of ending many insurgencies. Government reforms undercut, weaken, and marginalize the insurgents left after giving the insurgency something. To an extent Sinn Fein was successful at getting part of what they wanted.
Both the republican and unionist paramilitaries used the chaos to do some local ethnic cleansing. It wasn’t as violent as what we associate with the term in the Balkans but there was some sorting of people into non-diverse neighborhoods and localities based on lower levels of threat. They both pursued to a limited degree so in a sense they got something they wanted that the security forces likely didn’t have as a goal.
It stalemated for decades; eventually both sides worked out a deal that the parties mostly liked enough to marginalize what was left of the paramilitaries.
Counter-insurgents have to secure the people and protect stuff to succeed. That severely constrains their ability to be unpredictable and/or seize the initiative.
Many good points made already. But it must also be pointed out that the unionists and British forces often were able to define their retaliatory actions as government sanctioned law enforcement. This skews the kind of count you are attempting to make. If you jail a man for life he doesn’t get counted among the casualties of war, even though everybody knows why it really happened.