Seán Mac Stíofáin (born John Edward Drayton Stephenson; 17 February 1928 – 18 May 2001) was an English-born Irish republican who served as the first chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, a position he held between 1969 and 1972. Born in London to an English father and a mother of reputed Ulster Protestant descent, he attended Catholic schools before serving in the Royal Air Force. He joined the Irish republican movement in London in the late 1940s and was imprisoned in England in 1953 for his part in an arms raid on a school armoury. On his release in 1959, he settled in Ireland, rose through the ranks of the IRA, and was among the leading figures behind the organisation's split in December 1969, emerging as chief of staff of the newly formed Provisionals. A committed "physical-force" republican and devout Catholic, he oversaw the escalation of IRA violence during the early years of the Troubles, including the Bloody Friday bombings of July 1972, and led the Provisional delegation that held secret talks with the British government in London that same month.
Mac Stíofáin's leadership ended abruptly following his arrest in Dublin in November 1972, when a prolonged hunger and thirst strike, eventually called off on the orders of the IRA Army Council, was widely seen as a loss of nerve that fatally undermined his authority. He never regained a senior position within the movement, and was formally replaced as chief of staff in March 1973. In later years he worked as a journalist and campaigned for the Irish language, before his death in County Meath in 2001. In 2020, a book by the barrister David Burke alleged that Mac Stíofáin had for years also acted as a Garda informer, a claim subsequently raised in Dáil Éireann and one that remains disputed among his supporters.
Childhood Although he used the Gaelicised version of his name in later life, Mac Stíofáin was born John Edward Drayton Stephenson in Leyton, Essex, on 17 February 1928. He was an only child of his parents' marriage, although his mother had three daughters from an earlier marriage. His father, Edward George Stephenson, was a political agent, and his mother, Lilian Mary Stephenson (formerly Brown, née Newland), of 81 Maryville Road, Leytonstone, was said to have been a Londoner of Ulster Protestant east Belfast descent. The Guardian reported, however, that his mother was in fact born in Bethnal Green, London, and that Mac Stíofáin never claimed she herself came from Belfast, only that "her people" did. Some accounts have suggested that his mother's Irish antecedents were later embellished by her son. His father was reportedly an atheist and allegedly also of Irish descent, and Mac Stíofáin was baptised as a Catholic at the age of seven.Second- and third-generation Irish joining the republican movement is not uncommon – see the October 2004 Fortnight Magazine book review of "Choosing The Green? Second Generation Irish and the Cause of Ireland" by Brian Dooley here . He stated his mother had left an impression on him at the age of seven with her instruction:
"I'm Irish, therefore you're Irish… Don't forget it."
His childhood was marred by his alcoholic father, whom the Guardian also described as having been violent towards his mother. His mother, who doted over her son, died in February 1939, when Mac Stíofáin was ten. Mac Stíofáin attended a Catholic school in Islington, where he came into contact with the London Irish community and with pro-Sinn Féin students. On the outbreak of war he was evacuated to the countryside, an experience that further alienated him from his father, who subsequently remarried.
He returned to London in 1942 and worked in factories and on building sites, collecting books on Ireland in his spare time; on one occasion he entered the grounds of Pentonville Prison and painted the words "Roger Casement died for Ireland" on its walls, in memory of the executed Irish patriot.
He left school in 1944 at the age of 16 and worked in the building trade before being conscripted into the Royal Air Force in November 1945, where he served as a storeman and attained the rank of corporal. He spent 1946 posted to Jamaica, where he later said he had witnessed the poverty and subjugation of the island's non-white population under British colonial rule. He was sent back to Britain at the beginning of 1947 and was discharged in December 1948, after which he became a self-employed builder and repairer; he neither drank nor smoked. After leaving the RAF, he returned to London where he became increasingly involved with Irish organisations in Britain. He first joined Conradh na Gaeilge (Gaelic League) early in 1949, then the Irish Anti-Partition League, from which he resigned in June 1949 after concluding it was hobbled by the Irish government. He also bought (and later sold) the United Irishman, and joined Sinn Féin in London. Around this time he met his future wife, Máire Casey, from Castletownroche, County Cork, at an Irish club in London; they married in October 1949 and had three daughters. Towards the end of 1949 he helped organise a unit of the IRA in London and became its commanding officer. He later claimed that his lifelong dislike of communists as opportunists and authoritarians dated from this period, although he described himself, in vaguely defined terms, as a "Connolly socialist". Mac Stíofáin then began work for British Rail.
Joining the IRA On 25 July 1953, Mac Stíofáin took part in an Irish Republican Army arms raid on the armoury of the Officers' Training Corps at Felsted School in Essex. The IRA obtained over 108 rifles, ten Bren and eight Sten guns, two mortars and dummy mortar bombs in the raid. The police seized the van carrying the stolen weapons some hours later, due to it being so overloaded that it was going at about 20 mph on the Braintree bypass with a queue of traffic behind it. On 19 August 1953, he was sentenced, along with Cathal Goulding and Manus Canning, to eight years' imprisonment by a court in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. It was in the run-up to the raid that Mac Stíofáin learned his first few words of Irish from Goulding. He later became fluent in the language.
While incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton prisons in London, he studied accountancy and learned not only a smattering of Greek from the Cypriot EOKA prisoners (he befriended Nikos Sampson) but also "the realities of an anti-British rule guerrilla campaign"."Outstanding IRA leader and giant of a man in the Republican Movement" , in: Saoirse, June 2001
Upon being granted parole at the beginning of 1959, Mac Stíofáin moved to County Cork, where his wife and family were then living, rather than to Dublin, as is sometimes stated, and became increasingly known under the Irish version of his name. This was not his first visit to the country: he had been to Ireland a month before the Felsted raid in 1953.Mac Stiofain, Sean Memoirs of a Revolutionary He rejoined the IRA, opposing calls within the organisation to end its border campaign, and worked as a fundraiser for Irish-language organisations. He remained active in the IRA and gave the Bodenstown oration in 1959. Mac Stíofáin became a member of the IRA Army Council in 1962. He was uneasy with the left-wing political direction (under way from 1964) his erstwhile friend and IRA chief of staff, Cathal Goulding, was bringing to the IRA. Appointed IRA Director of Intelligence in 1966, he established extensive IRA contacts in Northern Ireland during this period and continued to voice his opposition to the Goulding line, gaining support among members. Despite his hostility to the left-wing direction, he was prominent in agitations in Midleton against ground-rent landlordism as well as against foreign buy-outs of Irish farmland in County Meath, where he moved with his family in 1966, having been appointed a fundraiser for an organisation linked to the Gaelic Athletic Association.
A tall, well-built man, Mac Stíofáin was regarded as a rather stoic personality who did not drink or smoke. He was a devout Catholic, and was infuriated by an article in the United Irishman, by Roy Johnston, condemning the reciting of the Rosary at republican commemorations as "sectarian". For refusing to distribute the newspaper, he was suspended from the IRA for six months in 1964.
Leading the Provisional IRA
When an IRA special army convention voted to drop the principle of abstentionism in December 1969, a troika comprising Mac Stiofáin, Dáithí Ó Conaill and Seamus Twomey together with others established themselves as a "Provisional Army Council" in anticipation of a contentious 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. At this, the Marxist leadership of Sinn Féin failed to attain the prerequisite two-thirds majority necessary to overturn the party's constitutional opposition to "partitionist" assemblies.
Mac Stiofáin was subsequently appointed the chief of staff of the Provisional Army Council. At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in Dublin on 11 January 1970, Mac Stíofáin declared from the podium that he pledged his "allegiance to the Provisional Army Council" before leading the walkout of disgruntled members to form what would become Provisional Sinn Féin. In a later interview, Mac Stíofáin denied a suggestion that he had taken the microphone from Goulding to make the declaration, saying only that he had walked to it himself, and he estimated that around forty per cent of those present joined the walkout. The split also ended Mac Stíofáin's friendship with Cathal Goulding, who went on to serve as chief of staff of the rival Official IRA. Although both had been good personal friends before the split, Goulding was later scathing about "that English Irishman". Goulding told the Guardian that Mac Stíofáin spent his time trying to prove to others that he was as Irish as they were, and that within the IRA he felt he had to appear more militant than his colleagues.
The "Provisional Army Council" in the coming months commanded the loyalty of the IRA national organisation, save for a few isolated instances (that of the IRA Company of the Lower Falls Road, Belfast, under the command of Billy McMillen, and other small units in Derry, Newry, Dublin and Wicklow). Mac Stiofáin's men soon came to be known as the Provisional IRA.
Nicknamed "Mac the Knife", Mac Stíofáin was a dedicated "physical-force" republican who believed that violence was the only means to bring about an end to Northern Ireland's status as part of the United Kingdom. In his autobiography, he set out the aims of the Provisional IRA as moving from "area defence" to "combined defence and retaliation" and then a "third phase of launching an all-out offensive action against the British occupation system". He also gave a detailed account of his development of the tactic of the "one-shot sniper". He oversaw IRA units along the border in the lead-up to the split, and is said to have taken part in an unsuccessful attack on Crossmaglen RUC station in August 1969, an account corroborated by later biographical sources.
His military strategy was summed up in his own words by "escalate, escalate, escalate", and in 1972, by far the bloodiest year of the conflict, the IRA killed around 100 British soldiers and lost 90 of their own members. He was separately quoted as saying the IRA "must win" and could not "afford to lose", and that the campaign would continue regardless of the cost.
On 7 July 1972, Mac Stíofáin led an IRA delegation to a secret meeting with members of the British government, led by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw, at Cheyne Walk in London. Other members of the delegation were Dáithí Ó Conaill, Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams, Seamus Twomey and Ivor Bell. According to Mac Stíofáin, he and Ó Conaill had earlier travelled into Derry in disguise to attend a funeral, evading the British Army along the way. Leading the delegation, Mac Stíofáin spelled out the three basic demands of the Provisionals: