Irish People's Liberation Organisation

Irish People's Liberation Organisation
Participant in the Troubles
IPLO volunteers at the funeral of Martin O'Prey
Active	1986 – May 1992
Ideology	Irish nationalism Irish republicanism Left-wing nationalism Socialism Anti-imperialism
Leaders	Jimmy Brown, Gerard Steenson
Area of operations	Northern Ireland
Originated as	Irish National Liberation Army
Opponents	United Kingdom

The Irish People's Liberation Organisation was a small Irish republican paramilitary organisation which was formed in 1986 by disaffected and expelled members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) whose factions coalesced in the aftermath of the supergrass trials. It developed a reputation for intra-republican violence and criminality, before being forcibly disbanded by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1992.

Some of the IPLO's most notable attacks during its short existence (compared to other paramilitary groups in Ireland) were:

The IPLO remains a Proscribed Organisation in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The IPLO emerged from a split within the INLA. After the 1981 Irish hunger strike, in which three of its members died, the INLA began to break apart. The INLA virtually dissolved as a coherent force in the mid-1980s. Factions associated with Belfast and Dublin fell into dispute with each other. When INLA man Harry Kirkpatrick turned supergrass, he implicated many of his former comrades in various activities and many of them were convicted on his testimony.

Members both inside and out of prison broke away from the INLA and set up the IPLO. Some key players at the outset were Tom McAllister, Gerard Steenson, Jimmy Brown and Martin 'Rook' O'Prey. Jimmy Brown formed a minor political group, known as the Republican Socialist Collective, which was to act as the political wing of the IPLO.

The IPLO's initial priority was to forcibly disband the Irish Republican Socialist Movement from which it had split, and most of its early attacks reflected this, being more frequently against former comrades than on the security forces in Northern Ireland. The destructive psychological impact of the feud on the communities that the combatants came from was huge as it was viewed as a fratricidal conflict between fellow republicans.