By all appearances—in the ten years since immigrating to Philadelphia in 1959—Vinent Conlon had settled into life as an average Irish-American dad: a handsome, successful carpenter raising five children on a leafy street in the city. But this unassuming cover masked one of the IRA’s most enterprising, quietly ambitious operatives in America, a battle-hardened veteran who had taken control of a secret society of Irish rebels and reorganized it in service of the IRA’s cause.

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And now, to his immense frustration, the people who were in charge of the army back home were squandering this opportunity—and, it seemed, every other one that fate had handed them.

Although Conlon remained a devoted IRA man, the army’s impotence had grown maddening. He had once maintained close friendships with elder IRA leaders, but by 1969 he could no longer ignore the fact that those at the top of the organization seemed content to let the IRA and its American satellite brigade simply limp along, ineffectual and increasingly irrelevant.

One of those old hands, Cathal Goulding, was the official who had first directed Conlon’s work with Clan-na-Gael in America, and across the 1960s the two had remained close. Goulding visited Philadelphia regularly; Conlon had even sided with him when the IRA went through a fraught reorganization in the early 1950s.

Back then, Goulding was the leader of the movement’s more militant faction. But in the run-up to 1969, the friends found themselves on different ends of a stark divide. Under Goulding, the IRA had grown less militant and less ambitious, more interested in Marxist politics than armed resistance.

This unassuming cover masked one of the IRA’s most enterprising, quietly ambitious operatives in America, a battle-hardened veteran who had taken control of a secret society of Irish rebels and reorganized it in service of the IRA’s cause.

In letters from Philadelphia, Conlon fumed at Goulding for his lackadaisical approach to the IRA. And, separately, he began corresponding with a similarly disillusioned set of army insiders— ones who seemed intent on taking the IRA back to its militant roots.

It was these friends who were sending the steady stream of letters to Conlon in Philadelphia. And what they were describing would be the end of all of them—and perhaps the end of the IRA’s mission—if it were discovered.

Only a small, trusted handful of them knew it, but some of Vince’s fellow volunteers back in Ireland were staging a coup within the IRA. They felt they had no choice: they needed to shake up the antiquated army and prepare it for a potential war.

And they were not alone in their darkening view of the IRA’s old guard—including Conlon’s increasingly estranged friend, Goulding. For months, this rebellious group kept Conlon apprised as discontent festered and grew within the organization’s ranks.

There was much to be frustrated about. By 1969, tensions in Belfast and Derry had escalated significantly. Irish Catholic residents of Northern Ireland had grown sick of living in worse housing than their Protestant neighbors, with worse jobs and worse schools, under constant threat of harassment.

But attempts to mobilize against such inequities were met with brutal force by Northern Ireland’s Unionist-controlled police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. With no civil outlet for Irish Catholics’ discontent, a violent confrontation was brewing. Meanwhile, under Goulding, the IRA—which historically had served as the protector of Catholic enclaves in the North—seemed completely unprepared for this new moment.

Among that small group of volunteers, though, momentum was building to break away and form a new, more militant IRA, one that would do what the old guard wouldn’t. This was dangerous business, and not just because the end goal would involve a violent campaign to fight British occupation.

If the mutiny didn’t succeed, its failure could be fatal for all who had chosen the wrong side—after all, the IRA had never taken kindly to such internal dissent, and divisions had generally led to bloody infighting. But as conditions for Irish Catholics worsened, the malcontents were beginning to feel that they had no choice.

Conlon watched from afar, poised like a coiled spring. Whenever a split came— and they came often, in the world of Irish rebellion— he always sided with the more enterprising and ambitious. And so, as the IRA approached this new crossroads, Conlon knew unequivocally which path he would take.

According to the letter in the blue envelope, the time for restraint was nearing an end. As IRA members watched the harsh realities rally more and more Irish Catholics against Northern Ireland’s Unionist government, many within the organization were coming to feel that they had to seize the moment. Support for this fledgling contingent was spreading within the IRA, and among Northern Ireland’s Catholics more broadly.

Now, according to the letter Conlon had received, the plotters were almost ready to act, and formally break ties with Cathal Goulding. But things were not yet cleanly arranged, the anonymous writer urged, and Conlon needed to proceed with caution. He should lie low until the group of them in Ireland could work out their own structure and divisions of power.

What’s more, the letter writer explained, there were also competing factions in America, some of whom would likely still support Goulding’s more conservative IRA and weren’t to be trusted. Conlon would be a valuable asset in the States, but only if he kept his head down for a while longer.

By the time Conlon got to the letter’s final page, its tone had pivoted from hopeful to darkly paranoid, and unequivocal in its warning: “Keep us informed on the basic developments in America. And whatever else you do do not reveal to anyone over there or here however much you trust them that you are in touch with us,” the anonymous writer said. “Or we will be sunk.”

*

If such paranoia and peril were felt in Philadelphia, that was doubly so in Belfast, Northern Ireland’s largest city and the spiritual home of this mutinous movement within the IRA. Belfast was geographically fated, perhaps, to feel under siege.

Wedged between hills to the west and a large, tidal inlet to the northeast, the city—tucked away in County Antrim, in the corner of Ireland’s northern Ulster Province—had been contested territory nearly since its founding in 1888, when the British occupied all of Ireland. Its name alone carries that dark history of colonialism: “Belfast” is an anglicized version of the Irish Béal Feirste, or Mouth of the Sandbar.

It was a tough city, working class and sharp, with a booming textile and shipbuilding industry that had briefly made it the island’s largest metropolis, bigger during the late nineteenth century industrial revolution than even Dublin, in the south. In a trend that defined Belfast, though, such fortunes weren’t shared equitably between its Catholic residents and its Protestants.

As the 1960s drew to a close, the city housed around 416,000 people in neighborhoods that were stringently divided, mostly according to religion: the majority of Protestant, Unionist neighborhoods sat in Belfast’s north and east, while its mostly disenfranchised Catholic, nationalist neighborhoods were in the west.

In a city of fault lines, the neighborhood of Clonard sat at the heart of Belfast’s two largest ghettos, both named after their respective main streets: Shankill Road, a Loyalist, largely Protestant working-class stronghold; and the Falls Road, which was nationalist and largely working-class Catholic. The two streets would become household shorthand for their respective ideologies, the arteries around which Belfast unofficially oriented itself.

They both extended west from Belfast’s city center, with the Falls arching south and Shankill progressing straight before cutting north and ending, serving as the boundary line into Loyalist Belfast. But near Belfast’s downtown, the streets converged, nearly intersecting at the small, central ghetto known as Clonard; here, the Shankill and Falls factions were dangerously close.

For as long as anyone could remember, each neighborhood’s respective Catholic and Protestant residents had lived in uncomfortable proximity. But as the city’s Catholic minority grew more and more desperate under Unionist rule, the day-to-day tensions were manifesting into something more.

It began quietly in 1968, when a group of university students in Derry organized and began protesting British occupation and Unionist rule, inspired partly by the American civil rights movement. The protests and marches led to more violent clashes between protesters and the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Soon, Northern Ireland’s Catholic neighborhoods were suffering near-constant incursions by both Loyalist mobs as well as the RUC and its brutalist auxiliary police brigade, known as the B Specials. In nationalist neighborhoods, the successes of the Loyalist mobs bolstered suspicion that these extrajudicial offensives were being planned in conjunction with the RUC—and that the Unionist authorities and Loyalist mobs were effectively one and the same.

The regular, violent interventions by the police against nationalist protestors, meanwhile, were also politically loaded, because the RUC—although ostensibly impartial—was in fact overwhelmingly Protestant and inherently Unionist. Nationalists thus saw the RUC as anti-Catholic, while Protestants considered it an important pillar of Unionist politics. In such a charged environment, it didn’t take much for these standoffs to spread into a broader conflagration.

The explosion occurred on the morning of August 12, 1969, in a ghetto known as the Bogside, a disenfranchised Catholic area in Derry’s west. It was the weekend of the Apprentice Boys’ march, an annual Unionist celebration in which Protestant revelers would parade past Catholic ghettos, hurling insults and worse.

With little help from the RUC, Derry’s Catholics were usually left to face the day’s indignities on their own. But in 1969, as the group of Protestant marchers approached the Catholic ghetto that August morning, the residents of the Bogside— hardened by months of unrest—were prepared to defend themselves.

As the marchers closed in, a battle erupted. Petrol bombs were hurled through the sky and tear gas was launched into crowds. Soon, entire pockets of Derry went up in flames. Barricades were erected around the city’s Catholic neighborhoods, blocking the areas from their RUC and Loyalist neighbors.

The siege lasted forty-eight hours. No one died in Derry, but it was a dangerous, dark release, both for the city and the North as a whole. The chaos in the Bogside was not an isolated, one-off incident—and the tension in Northern Ireland was not likely to abate; instead, the events in Derry signaled that Irish Republicans and nationalists had reached a tipping point. “There is hope in the future,” said one nameless resident of the Bogside. “It lies in the hands of the people of Derry.”

The Battle of the Bogside, as it came to be known, forced a decision from British and Northern Irish officials that would have ramifications for decades. Since the partition of Northern Ireland in the 1920s, Northern Ireland’s Unionist-majority parliament—known as Stormont—had often been left alone by London politicians, who generally preferred to keep the Irish problem at arm’s length.

Indeed, while Northern Ireland’s Loyalists and Unionists were ardently devoted to the Crown, that same emotional attachment was hardly true of rulers in Westminster, where Northern Ireland was something between a political inconvenience and a liability. This ambivalence on behalf of Great Britain only further radicalized Northern Ireland’s Loyalists, who grew to fear not only being overtaken by Irish nationalists, but also being abandoned by an apathetic Westminster.

The Battle of the Bogside, as it came to be known, forced a decision from British and Northern Irish officials that would have ramifications for decades.

These simmering political realities were drawn into the open by the Battle of the Bogside. Facing a complete breakdown of order in Derry, Unionist leaders in Stormont reluctantly asked London to send in British troops. With few other choices, a wary Westminster acquiesced, and ordered a deployment of the British Army into Northern Ireland to take over from the bruised RUC police force, which was modestly sized and incapable of reestablishing control.

Ironically, it was Catholic residents who welcomed the British soldiers most warmly, seeing them as a definitive mediator between them and Unionism. They hoped the soldiers arrived to do what the RUC and Stormont couldn’t: keep the peace. (This perspective was not shared among militant Republicans, who viewed the British and Unionists as the same enemy.)

But the true effects of this military escalation were soon clear. While Stormont still ostensibly maintained direct control over Northern Ireland, the arrival of royal troops signaled a usurpation by the Crown, injecting the politics of the British mainland directly into the territory’s day-to-day.

Even though the soldiers were being deployed to a semiautonomous region of the British Empire, they were not under the control of Stormont; their orders came from London, and London only. Thus, the deployment marked a fundamental shift in the delicate balance of power between these governments, one a regional power and the other a global one.

Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to draw the RUC’s attention away from Derry that weekend, nationalist civil rights organizers urged followers in places like Belfast to take to their own streets. They did—but so did violent Loyalist mobs who had been triggered by Derry’s unrest. They rampaged through the nationalist ghettos of Belfast, prompting a scramble among residents to defend themselves.

Both sides converged near the Divis Flats, a housing complex that sat where the Falls Road and Shankill contingencies grew closest, at the city center. It was the natural place toward which a sectarian tide would pull, and on the night of August 14, 1969, as mobs surged through the streets and toward Clonard, it was where the first shots of the Troubles rang out.

The initial volley came from the Catholic side and was answered by a frenzy of machine-gun fire from the RUC. The exchanges escalated from there. By the end of the night, Clonard was smoldering. One Protestant and four Catholic residents of Belfast were dead, including a young Catholic schoolboy who had been killed when an RUC bullet pierced his bedroom wall in Divis Flats. By the following evening, British troops had arrived on the streets of Belfast and Derry.

In times past, this was exactly the sort of attack against which the IRA would have defended the Catholic residents of West Belfast. But on those August nights, no armed IRA men arrived to confront the Loyalist mobs; instead, the rioters burned nationalist streets from end to end, largely unchallenged. In the ruins of Clonard, there was an unavoidable, unsettling verdict: Northern Ireland’s Catholics needed defending, and the army tasked with it had failed at the job.

This was why, after August 1969, the IRA found itself at a crossroads. Its older, antiquated leadership—eventually known as the Official IRA—had proven unable or unwilling to defend besieged Catholic ghettos. Faced with that cold reality, a younger, gutsier contingent of nationalist fighters began moving to the fore. This new faction of the IRA came to be known as the Provisionals, or the Provos, and their symbol was a phoenix rising from the ashes of West Belfast.

*

By the late 1960s, the IRA had been through decades of dizzying rifts and splits. Feuds, grudges, and reinventions had become as closely held a tradition for the IRA as the notion of thirty-two united counties.

But in 1969, the group was on the cusp of the most consequential schism in its modern history. Discontent had festered in the IRA’s ranks for years, and the Dublin-based leadership—accused of being antiquated and conflict-avoidant—had long been criticized as out of touch with the struggles of Irish residents in places like West Belfast, many of whom wanted more aggressive challenges to Unionist rule. Never before, though, had there been such a compelling opportunity for mutiny.

Under Cathal Goulding, the IRA had shifted away from armed conflict, orienting themselves toward political solutions and, by some accounts, off-loading their modest armory of weapons to other guerrilla groups. Even in the wrenching aftermath of August 1969, the IRA’s core leadership was reluctant to shift to a war footing, cautiously guarding its limited arms and banking on political intervention from both Dublin and London. That hesitancy, though, would incense and motivate younger, more militant volunteers who were growing increasingly desperate as tensions mounted.

The days following August 1969 would make clear the trouble toward which Northern Ireland was headed. Loyalists were organizing their own paramilitary groups in Shankill and other Unionist strongholds: the Ulster Volunteer Force, and later the Ulster Defense Association.

The perception within nationalist neighborhoods—one that has since been bolstered by the findings of contemporary reconciliation panels—was that these groups were supported by Unionist politicians, the RUC, and the B Specials, many of whom moonlighted as members of these extrajudicial groups or tacitly encouraged them to attack Catholics. This underscored nationalists’ rejection of the RUC’s authority.

As they barricaded themselves away from Unionist structures, it fell to the IRA not only to defend the neighborhoods, but also to maintain some kind of social and civil order in nationalist areas that had rebuked local authorities.

The Officials approached the moment cautiously, preferring soft power to militancy. But the more militant IRA faction, emboldened by the burning of Clonard Street, began operating autonomously in the weeks following the August riots. This breakaway group rallied their own streams of support and began recruiting younger, more eager volunteers.

The rift between the Officials and the Provos thus widened quickly, and support for the mutinous volunteers spread westward and southward, particularly among disenchanted Irish nationalists who had long questioned the capabilities of the conservative Official IRA leadership.

Support for the Provisional IRA faction would pull a group of older IRA men back into the fray. Among them was a group of veterans from the army’s failed border campaign in the 1950s— including Vince Conlon—who had never gotten their moment in a full-scale war. It would be the death knell for the IRA in its then-present form.

Internal discord within the movement, long whispered but rarely voiced, spilled into public view after August 1969. Rifts and splits tore entire families apart, and the infighting ranged from petty to fatal.

In a last-ditch effort to knit the Irish Republican movement back together, the IRA’s Dublin leadership— much of it aligned with the Officials— held a convention in December 1969. Attendees included both the old and new guards of the IRA, in the hopes that they could hash out their differences and reunite the movement.

The convention failed miserably. The Belfast brigade was shouted down by Cathal Goulding’s Official IRA. Faced with the unavoidable truth that the institutional IRA cared little for the Provisional’s misgivings, the dissidents walked out with their supporters. Among them was a West Belfast native named Gerry Adams—an enigmatic young volunteer who would later emerge as one of the de facto leaders of the rebels.

History would label this moment the formal baptism of the Provisional IRA, the group that would soon become the preeminent paramilitary force of nationalist Ireland. Sinn Fein, the main Republican political party, which was closely linked to the IRA, underwent a similar split not long after.

Together, the new Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein solidified a new Republican front, ensuring a fresh start for the IRA. In the Provisional movement was the new Republican vision. For many young people in Belfast, it was the only one worth supporting, if any were to succeed at all.

*

The Provisionals may have had the momentum and willpower to start a new armed campaign—but they lacked the means. During the IRA’s slow decay, no one had properly kept track of members, money, or guns; indeed, rumors persisted that the organization had discarded most of its weaponry. During the bloody riots of August 1969, desperate cries echoed across Clonard: “Have we any guns?”

No one was even sure who among the IRA’s volunteers had fired the initial shot that had killed the first Protestant resident to die on the August night that Clonard Street burned. In the weeks surrounding the split, it was difficult to tell who was in charge of the IRA at all.

It remained unclear, moreover, what would happen between the Officials and the new, aggressive Provisionals. Even if the Provisionals could organize themselves into a legitimate fighting force, logistical hurdles stood in their way. For the Provisionals to survive on the streets of Belfast, they would need two things: money and—most desperately—guns.

Surmounting this latter obstacle fell to a well-known veteran of the 1950s, one of the older IRA fighters who had turned against Cathal Goulding. The man’s name was Dáithí, or Dave, O’Connell—the storied “Long Fella” from the Brookeborough raid.

n the weeks surrounding the split, it was difficult to tell who was in charge of the IRA at all.

A quiet schoolteacher who hailed from County Cork, O’Connell moved north to Donegal after the border campaign, where he took over the county’s IRA brigade and fell in with the militant faction that would eventually become the Provos. By the time it split off into its own army, O’Connell had become one of the IRA’s most reliable, ambitious hands—and was on his way to becoming the Provisional IRA chief of staff.

In the early 1970s, as the Provos were fashioning themselves into an army, O’Connell set off for America, where an old friend was in a unique position to help. This fellow IRA veteran had already proved invaluable to the cause, rallying support from across the ocean, and his efforts in America were not limited to fundraising and social clubs.

Luckily for O’Connell and the Provos, what Vince Conlon was particularly good at—and had spent the last decade doing—was finding guns.

______________________________

The Next One Is for You: A True Story of Guns, Country, and the IRA’s Secret American Army by Ali Watkins is available via Little, Brown.