In 1966, after almost fifty years of discriminatory, oppressive treatment by the dominant Protestant and Unionist majority, Catholic nationalists and their sympathizers in Northern Ireland began a radical protest campaign. Emulating the American civil rights movement, the Northern Ireland movement engaged in nonviolent marches and demonstrations and demanded full civil rights for the Catholic minority. Despite some reform initiatives by the Northern Ireland government, encouraged by the British government, by mid-1969 the civil rights movement fractured and Northern Ireland began its descent into violent social conflict. The summer witnessed intense rioting in both Catholic and Protestant areas, armed skirmishes between police and residents in Catholic urban neighborhoods (especially Derry and Belfast), and the burning out, by Protestant neighbors, of many working class Catholics from their homes in Belfast. Into this chaotic cauldron of civil and sectarian strife stepped a handful of members of the militarily dormant Irish Republican Army (soon to be called the Provisional IRA), intent on defending the Catholic communities of Northern Ireland from the widening onslaught of violent Protestant loyalism. Within a couple years, the Provisional’s (IRA) “primary goal was the realization of Irish national self-determination … [and] a united and fully independent Irish republic … It would involve the destruction of the Northern Irish state, the removal of the Irish border … and the creation of a new political entity utterly free from British sovereignty and control” (English 2016:201–2).1 To achieve its goal, the IRA would employ the most radical of means: armed struggle.