ABSTRACT
The despondency experienced by the Provisional IRA as a result of the 1975 ceasefire coincided with a shift in British security policy towards Northern Ireland. This policy, referred to as Ulsterisation, involved reductions in the overt presence of the regular British Army and turning over greater responsibility for security to the locally recruited forces of the RUC and UDR. The purpose was to restore an atmosphere of normality to the province. The Provisional viewed the reductions of regular army personnel as a ‘withdrawal, forced upon them by the IRA’s success’, but emphasised that it was a ‘pragmatic withdrawal with no gains intended for the IRA’. They believed that because the ‘Brits’ will to beat the Irish Republican Army by military means had diminished’, so they had ‘resorted to political strategy as a means of weakening resistance’. 1
