page_title: Provisional Irish Republican Army campaign
section_title: Libyan arms
hierarchical_section_title: Provisional Irish Republican Army campaign / Libyan arms
context_page_description: From 1969 until 1997, the Provisional Irish Republican Army conducted an armed paramilitary campaign primarily in Northern Ireland and England, aimed at ending British rule in Northern Ireland in order to create a united Ireland.
  The Provisional IRA emerged from a split in the Irish Republican Army in 1969, partly as a result of that organisation's perceived failure to defend Catholic neighbourhoods from attack in the 1969 Northern Ireland riots. The Provisionals gained credibility from their efforts to physically defend such areas in 1970 and 1971. From 1971–72, the IRA took to the offensive and conducted a relatively high-intensity campaign against the British and Northern Ireland security forces and the infrastructure of the state. The British Army characterised this period as the "insurgency phase" of the IRA's campaign.
  The IRA declared a brief ceasefire in 1972 and a more protracted one in 1975, when there was an internal debate over the feasibility of future operations. The armed group reorganised itself in the late 1970s into a smaller, cell-based structure, which was designed to be harder to penetrate.
context_section_description: In the mid-1980s, the Provisional IRA received large quantities of modern weaponry, including heavy weaponry such as heavy machine guns, over 1,000 rifles, several hundred handguns, rocket-propelled grenades, flamethrowers, surface-to-air missiles and the plastic explosive Semtex, from the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi. There were four successful shipments between 1985 and 1986; three of these trips were carried out by the trawler Casamara and a fourth by the oil-rig replenisher Villa. All told, they brought in 110 tons of weaponry. A fifth arms cargo on board the coaster Eksund was intercepted by the French Navy in 1987. This brought the Provisional IRA's new capability to the attention of the authorities on either side of the Irish border. Five men were captured with the boat; three IRA members, including Gabriel Cleary, received jail sentences. Reportedly, Gaddafi donated enough weapons to arm the equivalent of two infantry battalions.
  The IRA therefore came to be very well armed in the latter part of the Troubles. Most of the losses it inflicted on the British Army, however, occurred in the early 1970s, although they continued to cause substantial casualties to the British military, the RUC and UDR throughout the conflict. According to author Ed Moloney, the IRA Army Council had plans for a dramatic escalation of the conflict in the late 1980s, which they likened to the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War, with the aid of the arms obtained from Libya.
  The plan had been to take and hold several areas along the border, forcing the British Army to either withdraw from border areas or use maximum force to re-take them – thus escalating the conflict beyond the point which the Provisional IRA thought that British public opinion would accept. However, this offensive failed to materialise. IRA sources quoted in the Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney say that the interception of the Eksund shipment eliminated the element of surprise which they had hoped to have for this offensive. The role of informers within the IRA seems to have also played a role in the failure of the "Tet Offensive" to get off the ground. Nevertheless, the shipments which got through enabled the IRA to begin a vigorous campaign in the 1980s. The success of the arms smuggling was a defeat for British intelligence and marked a turning point in the conflict in Northern Ireland. The Libyan weaponry allowed the IRA to wage war indefinitely.
  In the event, much of the IRA's new heavy weaponry, for instance the surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and flamethrowers, were never, or very rarely, used. The only recorded use of flamethrowers took place in the attack in Derryard, County Fermanagh, when two soldiers were killed when a permanent checkpoint manned by the King's Own Scottish Borderers was the target of a multiple weapons attack on 13 December 1989. The SAMs turned out to be out of date models, unable to shoot down British helicopters equipped with anti-missile technology. The missiles were eventually rendered useless when their batteries wore out. The Semtex plastic explosive proved the most valuable addition to the IRA's armoury.
  As it was, the numbers of members of the British and Northern Ireland military personnel killed by the IRA increased in the years 1988–1990, from 12 in 1986 to 39 in 1988, but dropped to 27 in 1989 and decreased again to 18 in 1990. The death toll by 1991 was similar to that of the mid-1980s, with 14 fatalities. 32 members of the RUC were killed in the same period.
  By the late 1980s, the Provisional IRA, in the judgement of journalist and author Brendan O'Brien, "could not be beaten, it could be contained". Politically and militarily, that was the most significant factor. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, roughly nine out of every ten IRA attacks were aborted or failed to cause casualties. Republican sources such as Mitchel McLaughlin and Danny Morrison argued that by the early 1990s, the Provisional IRA could not attain their objectives by purely military means.
  A campaign to pressure Libya to pay compensation to IRA victims wa
caption: An AK-47 rifle, over 1,000 of which were smuggled by Muammar Gaddafi to the Provisional IRA in the 1980s
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