Brian Hanley

speaker

657 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 12 Jun

Brian Hanley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Irish History Podcast · The Rise of the Provisional IRA: Conspiracy vs Reality · 16 Sep 2026 podcast

I think it's it's it's way down the list of reasons to split, but there's also then the question of defence in Belfast.

But actually on the ground in Belfast, that was the biggest question.

And

The officials' concentration on agitational politics to some people seems like a downgrading of the idea of armed struggle.

And fairly rapidly people are beginning to realise that the conditions, you know, if you'd said five years before that the time would come again when we would have to fight against the British, a lot of people would have said that idea belongs in the past.

June border campaign, that was a disaster.

Nobody nobody in the north was interested.

But things begin to change very rapidly on the ground because you've got the introduction of the British Army all across the north.

You've got a unionist government still in power, which is unrepentant really about its policies and which sees the British Army as as, you know, another part of its police force.

And f facts on the ground begin to shift towards a situation where the provisionals idea that actually yes, the IRA exists to unite Ireland by force of arms.

We've tried this several times in the last fifty years.

Now another opportunity is going to arise and we will do it this time.

The officials seem a lot more cautious, a lot more, you know.

Yes, arms should be used in pursuit of our aims, but the time is not right for an arm campaign and so on.

So these are among the factors really that are leading to this split.

But on the ground, it's a lot more confused and a lot more messy and and

Doesn't lend itself to easy explanations, actually.

Yeah, what you outlined there is basically what the official Republicans believed themselves by the late seventies.

And the idea that this split was engineered to weaken a left wing Republican movement and to bring about the formation of a of a more right wing IRA that would concentrate its ex its activities within the north and not threaten the south.

was believed fervently by a lot of people who were involved in the official Republican movement, which then became the Workers' Party.

Showing 121–140 of 657 · page 7 of 33