Where Has All the Money Gone? The IRA as a Profit‐making Concern
| Date | 01 February 1998 |
| Pages | 303-311 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb027153 |
| Published date | 01 February 1998 |
| Author | W.A. Tupman |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
Journal of Money Laundering Control — Vol. 1 No. 4
Where Has All the Money Gone? The IRA as
a
Profit-making Concern*
W. A. Tupman
This paper argues that illegal businesses associated
with
the
Republican Movement
in
Northern
Ireland
are
extremely profitable.
It
raises
the
ques-
tion
of
what happens
to the
profits concerned.
Is
there
a
single major laundering operation
to be
discovered,
is the
operation decentralised
to
indivi-
dual areas
or
units,
or
does
the
money vanish
in
bogus cost-accounting somewhere inside
the
Movement?
Any study
of
a
terrorist organisation raises ques-
tions about
the
legitimacy
of the
state
and the
morality
of
challenging
it by
violent means.
Although individual terrorists
are
charged before
the courts with individual criminal acts, there
is an
acceptance that
the
phenomenon
is
primarily
a
political
one and
that
a
debate
is
possible over
the
relationship between a just cause
and the
employ-
ment
of
illegal means
to
achieve
it.
There
is
little
study
of
terrorism
as an
economic phenomenon
and
the
methods
by
which organisations fund
themselves. Elsewhere, this author has argued that
successful terrorist groups survive
by
resorting
to
funding methods copied from organised crime.1
This raises several interesting theoretical
and
practical questions.
If
funding follows
the
organ-
ised crime model,
how
much effect
has
this
had
on
the
structure
of the
organisations concerned?
Gambetta
and
others have argued that organised
crime
is
increasingly
a
business.2
It
follows
the
successful contemporary business model character-
ised
by
networks,
or
loose associations
of
indi-
viduals
and
groups.
It is no
longer dominated
by
centralised, hierarchical organisation.
If the IRA
has gone down
the
same road then
how
'terrorist'
is
it? An
organisation
may be
called 'terrorist'
because
it
engages
in
acts
of
paramilitary violence.
Those organisations that survive
for a
significant
period
of
time, however,
do so by
engaging
in
many activities other than paramilitary violence.
Funding this has already been mentioned,
but
they
also have
to
recruit; they have
to
train; they have
to engage
in
peaceful political activity
and so on.
The individuals that engage
in
these latter activities
are much more loosely organised then
the
indi-
viduals that engage
in the
paramilitary violence,
yet
are associated with them
in a
non-hierarchical rela-
tionship.
Organised crime
has
also converged
to
some
degree with 'terrorist' organisations, copying
the
cellular structure. Increasingly
it
consists
of
net-
works
of
people who
may
only come together
for
a specific operation and the rest
of
the time may
be
engaged
in
completely different organisations
and
completely different
and
even legal work,
especially where these individuals
are
lawyers
or
accountants.
The
same individuals engaged collec-
tively
in
illegal activity may also simultaneously
be
engaged collectively
in
legal activity.
The
same
is
true
of the IRA.
Post
1968
terrorism
has
been
based
on
five-man cells,
or
Active Service Units
(ASUs)
in the
Northern Ireland context. These
are
operationally autonomous
and may be
engaged
in
their
own
fundraising
as
well
as
other activities
quite independently
of
the central Army Council,
the body that allegedly 'runs'
the
IRA.
It is
neces-
sary
to
know
the
degree
to
which these operations
are audited
by a
central body,
or
whether
the IRA
has followed organised crime
in
becoming what
Van Duyne
has
described
as
'non-organised'.3 This
would provide those attempting
to
control money
laundering
in
this area with some clues as
to
where
to look.
IRA FUNDRAISING
In
the
late 1980s
and
early 1990s Rowan
Bos-
worth-Davics
and
Barry Rider suggested
a
series
of
presentations
on
money laundering
and
terrorism.
From this emerged
a
spoof prospectus
for the IRA
PLC which
has
been shamelessly plagiarised
by
journalists without attribution. Previous versions
of Table 1 have appeared
in the
proceedings
of
the
International Symposium
on
Organised
and
*A longer
and
more developed version
of
this article
is to
be
found
in
McKenzie,
I. K. (Ed.)
(1998).
Law,
Power and Justice
in
England
and
Wales. Praeger: Westport, Conn.
Page 303
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