Sabotage! The origins, development and impact of the IRA’s infrastructural bombing campaigns 1939-1997.

At various moments in the twentieth century the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in its various incarnations have used the tactic of infrastructural bombing, notably in their 1939 attacks in England on electricity pylons and in the summer of 1971 in Northern Ireland on its electrical distribution network. In 1996 the British Security Service (MI5) foiled an attack by the IRA aimed at causing a total electrical blackout of the greater London area, a plan that would have seen major disruption in the capital for many weeks or months. Using recently declassified material this paper seeks to re-evaluate the impact of these IRA infrastructural sabotage campaigns that have until now either been ignored or judged to have been derisory or incongruous failures. This paper demonstrates the historical development of this tactic from both the IRA's perspective, and that of those who were tasked with hindering it, highlighting the devastating potential of such tactics in the future.