Cathal Goulding (7 January 1922 - 28 December 1998) was Chief of Staff of the IRA and the Official IRA.

One of seven children born into a republican family in Dublin, Goulding was involved as teenager in Fianna Éireann, the IRA youth wing which he joined with his neighbour and lifelong friend Brendan Behan. When Goulding reached the age of seventeen in 1939, he progressed to the IRA.

In 1945, he was involved in the attempts to reestablish the IRA which had been almost decimated as a result of the action of the authorities in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. He was among twenty five to thirty men who met at O'Neill's pub, Pearse Street, to try to re-establish the IRA in Dublin. He organised the first national meeting of IRA activists after the Second World War in Dublin in 1946 and was arrested along with John Joe McGirl and ten others and was sentenced to twelve months in prison when the gathering was raided by the Garda Síochána.

Upon his release, Goulding organised IRA training camps in the Dublin mountains. In 1953, Goulding (along with Seán Mac Stíofáin and Manus Canning) was involved in an arms raid on the Officers Training Corps School at Felstead, Essex. The three were sentenced to eight years imprisonment but were released in 1958 after serving only five years.

In 1959, Goulding was appointed IRA Quartermaster General and in 1962 became its Chief of Staff. In February 1966, together with Sean Garland, he was arrested for possession of a revolver and ammunition.

In August 1969, Goulding issued a statement calling for the Irish Army to invade Northern Ireland to protect the Roman Catholic minority from loyalist rioters.

Goulding was instrumental in moving the IRA to the left in the 1960s.[citation needed] He argued against the policy of abstentionism and developed a Marxist analysis of The Troubles. He believed the British state deliberately divided the Irish working class on sectarian grounds in order to exploit them and keep them from uniting and overthrowing their bourgeois oppressors. This analysis was rejected by those who later went on to form the Provisional IRA after the 1969 IRA split.

Goulding remained chief of staff of what became known as the Official IRA until 1972. Although the Official IRA, like the Provisional IRA, carried out an armed campaign, Goulding argued that such action ultimately divided the Irish working class. After public revulsion against the shooting of a British soldier in Derry and the bombing of the Aldershot barracks, the Official IRA announced a ceasefire in 1972.

Goulding was prominent in the various stages of Official Sinn Féin's development into the Workers Party. However, in 1992 he objected to the political reforms proposed by party leader Proinsias De Rossa, a former republican militant turned to revisionist pacifist, and remained in the Workers Party after the formation of Democratic Left. He regarded the Democratic Left as having compromised socialism in the pursuit of political office.

In his latter years Goulding spent much of his time at his cottage "The Schemers" near Myshall, County Carlow. He died of cancer, aged 76, in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. Goulding was cremated and his ashes were scattered, at his own request, at a place known as the Nine Steps on the slopes of Mount Leinster.

In total, Goulding spent sixteen years of his life in British and Irish jails.