The IRA

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             "In the mid 1960's, a peaceful Civil Rights movement developed in Northern Ireland. It was based on similar campaigns in the United States and in Britain, and it sought equal rights for Northern Ireland's minority Catholic community, who had suffered systematic discrimination since the foundation of the state (White 1995)." In response to the protesting, many Protestants and their supporters in Northern Ireland began engaging in violent acts of oppression against the Catholic minority (O'Day 1997). This resurgence of violence again split the IRA, those who wanted to support those being attacked and those who did not. The faction that refused to take no action was centered along the northern border of the free state of Ireland; those in the south did not wish to get involved in a "sectarian bloodbath (O'Day 1997)." The members along the northern border separated and formed the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein in 1970 (Porter 1998). This is the group that is known as the IRA to date. After their establishment, they embarked on a ferocious guerilla campaign that continues today (White 1989). In reaction to this campaign of violence that ranged from shootings to car bombings, the British initiated their own forms of violence, the most protested of was internment (White 1989). One of the goals of the internment was to get names of IRA leaders from the prisoners. This plan was largely unsuccessful as pointed out by one of the IRA leaders of the time, Sean MacStiofain, " if one IRA member's name had been obtained from each of 700 detainees, the Provisionals would have been destroyed immediately. That they were not indicated wither the inaccuracy of initial British information or the incompetence of their intelligence officers (Davis, 1994)." The violence that was escalating was about to explode. On Sunday, January 30, 1972 there was a large anti-internment march in Derry.