Constructing ‘The New Irish Man’ Transformation Within and Upon the Revolutionary Body Through the Uniform of the Provisional IRA, 1970 – 1981

This research analyses the uniform adopted by the Provisional IRA in the north of Ireland during the years 1970–1981. Using sources such as legislation enacted in both Stormont and Westminster, as well as newspaper reports and parliamentary debates, the first part of this article focuses on understanding the ways in which the UK government tried, and ultimately failed, to limit the wearing of republican political uniforms during the period. The IRA, at this time, constructed a distinctive uniformed body that appeared both on the streets as well as in photographs that were disseminated, through publishing, to a wider public sympathetic to their cause. This uniformed body adopted elements of the internationally recognized trope of the “freedom fighter”. The second part of the article investigates how the IRA used the image of this figure to position their struggle as an anti-imperial one, through the borrowing of dress and motifs from other revolutionary groups both historical and contemporary to the conflict. The figure that emerged I call the “new Irish man”, a revolutionary subject for Ireland that could represent both the transformation of the individual as well as the IRA as an organization.