Tactical Innovation and the Provisional Irish Republican Army

Abstract

This article provides an overview of Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) innovations with regards to improvised explosive devices (IEDs). It situates PIRA's tactical innovations within the broad organizational psychology literature focused on the nature and drivers of creativity and innovation. This discussion helps frame the two empirical analyses that follow. The first analysis provides a graphical timeline of PIRA's radical innovations (and their drivers) in relation to IED technology. This helps provide a sense of the specific occasions in which PIRA innovations were numerous and when they were sparse. The second analysis looks at the locations in which PIRA radical innovations debuted. This provides us with an understanding of the specific PIRA units responsible for these innovations. The results demonstrate that while PIRA operations spanned the six counties of Northern Ireland for 29 years, radical IED innovations were conceived, developed, and initially implemented within only two areas of operations for only seven of those years.