Irish Republican Army

The Irish Republican Army, usually shortened to the IRA, is a name carried by several militant organisations in Ireland across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries rather than the name of one continuous body. The groups that have used it have been predominantly Catholic and share the aim of an independent republic covering all of Ireland, free of British rule. The original force, now often called the old IRA, was raised in 1919 from members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, and was later reinforced by Irishmen who had served in the British Army in the First World War. It fought Britain in the Irish War of Independence and, in Irish law, was the army of the Irish Republic declared by the Dáil Éireann in 1919. Over the following century it was reorganised and split several times, and later paramilitary bodies, above all the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which took a leading part in the Troubles in the north of Ireland, each claim to be its only legitimate heir.