Republican News · Thursday 14 November 2002

A Sunday with the IRA

BY SEAN OILIBHEAR

The centrality of the IRA within the communities from which it emerged - and its existence as the undefeated people's army - was clear for anyone to see at two gatherings of republicans on Sunday last, 10 November.

Beside the busy Sunday traffic on Belfast's Falls Road, several hundred people from the Beechmount-Iveagh area, and beyond, came together to mark the anniversaries of two young IRA volunteers from the area, from A Company, 2nd Battalion, Belfast Brigade.

Albert Kavanagh and Stan Carberry were two of the young people in Belfast who saw streets burning in the pogroms of 1969, who saw friends and family fleeing their homes, fleeing from the loyalists and the RUC. Albert, Stan and many others fought back in the ranks of the IRA, defending their area and bringing the war to the British. Those who remembered them at La Salle Drive were comrades-in-arms, their families, their friends and the many people from that area whose help over the years provided the water within which the IRA fish could swim, and operate.

Thousands of the same type of people gathered on Sunday, in the rolling fields of North Louth, to remember and pay tribute to more young men, more volunteers of the Irish Republican Army. They gathered at Carrickarnon in bright autumn sunshine to march to Edentubber, where four volunteers and a comrade died in a premature explosion in 1957, just 15 years before Albert and Stan joined them in the ranks of the republican martyrs on the streets of Belfast.

Two of the Edentubber dead had come north from County Wexford to join their comrades in the campaign along the border. Other volunteers were recalled at Edentubber, those who had been reared and had died in action in the fields around where we had gathered, where North Louth runs seamlessly into Armagh.

Two gatherings in two counties, 43 miles apart, but united together as Irish republicans - activists, former protagonists, supporters and family members remembered their friends - those who had pledged their lives to the IRA, those who laid themselves down in battle for the IRA, those who had helped lay the foundations for our struggle's onward march.

Those who cry out for the 'disbandment' of the army to which these young volunteers belonged, to which Sunday's crowd give their allegiance, might just have learned something about this conflict, and its history, had they been among us at Beechmount and Edentubber on Sunday last.