Brown, James (‘Jimmy’) (1956–92), republican socialist and drug-dealer, was born in Broadway Road off the Falls Road, west Belfast, son of Jimmy Brown, brewery worker, and his wife Eileen, part-time domestic help. He joined the Official IRA at the start of the ‘troubles’ in 1969, and worked in its intelligence department. Brown aligned himself with the faction led by Séamus Costello (qv), which became the IRSP/ INLA in 1974; he remained within the Official IRA as a spy after the split, but joined the IRSP openly by early 1976. In December 1977 Brown joined the IRSP ard comhairle, becoming Munster organiser in February 1978. He operated as a political spokesman and an ‘intelligence officer’, planning bombings and shootings. Admirers nicknamed him ‘the Professor’ because of his detailed plans, articulate speech, and Marxist rhetoric; critics called him ‘the Clown’ because of numerous high-profile blunders.
Brown was closely associated with Gerard Steenson (d. 1987), known as ‘Dr Death’, a boyhood friend and neighbour, and supported Steenson's attempted coup against the INLA leadership (December 1981). By February 1983 Brown was Belfast chairman of the IRSP and a candidate in a council by-election when he, Steenson, and other leading Belfast INLA members were arrested on the evidence of Rab McAllister, an INLA member turned supergrass. When McAllister retracted (March 1983), most of the prisoners (including Brown and Steenson) were detained on the evidence of another supergrass, Jackie Grimley. In December 1983 Lord Justice Maurice Gibson (qv) dismissed the charges, saying Grimley (a petty criminal and police informant) was unreliable. Steenson, Brown, and their associates were detained on the evidence of a third supergrass, Harry Kirkpatrick. Brown used frequent bail applications to deliver political speeches; he also produced numerous political articles and letters. Those named by Kirkpatrick were convicted of terrorist activities (December 1985), but in December 1986 their convictions were overturned on appeal.
During their imprisonment the Steenson–Brown group were caught up in internal disputes within the INLA after the capture of Dominic McGlinchey (qv); three INLA factions united as the Irish People's Liberation Organisation (IPLO) against the Belfast-based chief of staff, John O'Reilly. In October 1984 O'Reilly tried to kill Brown's girlfriend as part of a purge of opponents, and in summer 1985 Brown was attacked in jail by inmates loyal to O'Reilly.
After the release of the Steenson–Brown group, the IPLO tried to wipe out the O'Reilly faction, which retained the name INLA; eleven died in the feud. Steenson was shot dead on 14 March 1987; Brown gave the oration at his funeral. Brown emerged as principal IPLO spokesman and leader of its political wing, the Socialist Republican Collective. He lived in Dublin, where he worked with community media groups in the north inner city, regularly visiting Belfast. His affable personality and political commitment won him many friends in media and far-left circles, where he was widely seen as the power behind the IPLO; in fact, control rested with the leading gunmen in an increasingly volatile and criminal organisation. It killed several high-profile loyalists and carried out random shootings in loyalist bars; Brown replied to accusations of sectarianism with republican–Marxist arguments about national struggle as precondition for class struggle.
In search of cash to buy heavy weapons, the IPLO turned to drug-smuggling from 1989. Brown oversaw these operations, using old INLA arms-smuggling routes and methods. While generally evasive, he sometimes justified this by citing revolutionary organisations elsewhere in the world which sold drugs to raise revenue. The IPLO adopted ‘open door’ recruitment, accepting criminals and individuals rejected by other paramilitary groups, and it became increasingly unpopular among the nationalist population. In late 1991 and early 1992, as the possibility of IRA retaliation against the IPLO increased, Brown threatened to stand against Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams in west Belfast and tip the seat to the SDLP; he also threatened that if attacked, IPLO members would target leading members of Sinn Féin. At the same time he called for a ‘broad front’ with Sinn Féin and other republican organisations.
Meanwhile, tensions developed over drug profits; IPLO drug dealers allegedly collaborated with loyalist business partners in killing leading IPLO gunman Martin O'Prey in August 1991. Matters came to a head over the proceeds of a post office robbery in Whiterock; a ‘Belfast Brigade’ emerged to challenge the ‘army council’. Each side accused the other of drug-dealing, collaboration with loyalists, and working for British intelligence; the split was more personal and territorial than ideological. On 18 August 1992 Brown was shot dead in west Belfast by a member of the ‘Belfast Brigade’. The feud claimed two more lives; on 31 October the IRA mounted a ‘night of the long knives’ against both factions. Overpowered, demoralised, and lacking political motivation, both groups disbanded.
Brown never married but had one son by a relationship with a prominent community worker. Some sympathy can be felt for him as a self-educated working-class boy, shaped by the sectarian violence of the early troubles and seeking in Marxism a tool to make sense of the world. A devious man who deceived himself, he provided an ideological veneer for sectarian murder and criminality, and expanded paramilitary involvement in drug-dealing.