Cathal Goulding

Cathal Goulding was an Irish republican activist, socialist, and Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), holding the position from 1962 to 1969. Born into a working-class Dublin family with a deep republican tradition, he spent a total of sixteen years in British and Irish prisons for IRA activities. He is best remembered as the figure who steered the republican movement away from physical-force nationalism and toward socialist political agitation during the 1960s, recruiting a new generation of activists to a range of social and economic campaigns and drawing the movement into engagement with the Northern Ireland civil rights movement.