As a former member of Sinn Fein/IRA (the republican movement) for twelve years, I am often asked for my insight into how the republican movement works and where the republican movement is going. So with these constant requests in mind I have decided to write what may turn out to be a book on the republican movement. These writings will first appear exclusively on Hubpages.com as it is Hubpages.com who has provided the opportunity and forum for the writings of non-mainstream writers. I will complement my own knowledge and experience by drawing on the writings of some of Ireland’s foremost experts on Irish Republicanism.
What might have been is an abstraction,
Remaining a perpetual possibility,
Only in a world of speculation
T.S. Elliot
This book will unravel the tapestry of 20th/21st Century Irish Republicanism that has been held together by such mythological threads as socialist republicanism and Irish national liberation. It will uncover the true identity of Irish Republicanism as embodied in Sinn Fein/IRA as a sectarian movement whose objective was and remains to coerce the Protestant people of Northern Ireland into a United Ireland, through a campaign of physical and psychological brutality. This book will further show that whatever the republican movement was intended to be in its embryonic stages, it emerged as a sectarian/criminal empire. This book will give a brief history of Irish Republicanism from 1916 to 1960, including the IRA’s close relationship with the Nazis. It will look at the establishment of the Irish Free State and how many tens of thousands of Protestants were driven from that State by way of murder, intimidation and discrimination at the hands of militant republicans. It will then cover events that led in the late 1960s to a Civil Rights campaign, launched by the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland (the north) against what were seen as institutional sectarian discriminations imposed on the Catholic community by the Unionist (Protestant) dominated Stormont Government in Northern Ireland.
This book will then look at the re-emergence of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the late 1960s and the ideological conflicts that eventually lead to the split within the IRA in 1970, from that split emerged the Provisional IRA. The role played by the democratically elected Irish Government in Dublin at this time will be analysed. It will be shown that as early as 1970 the republican leadership realised that the real obstacle to their desired United Ireland was the Protestant people of Northern Ireland. However, it will be shown that a specific strategy for directly and intentionally targeting Protestants was not adopted by Sinn Fein/IRA until the mid 1980s.
This book will then examine the development of the Provisional IRA and its Political wing Sinn Fein. I will analysis the roles played by republican prisoners and the hunger strikes in which ten young Irish men lost their lives. I will then look at the political status and political momentum that these hunger strikes generated for the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein.
I will look at key sign posts that lead to another split in the IRA in 1986 from which was established Republican Sinn Fein/Continuity IRA. The Provisional Sinn Fein/IRA strategy of that of the Ballot box in one hand the Armalite in the other will be examined as will the Anglo-Irish-Agreement signed by British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher and Irish Prime Minister, Garret Fitzgerald.
The split that occurred in Sinn Fein/IRA in 1986 will be explored in detail, emphasising the importance of such a split for the future direction of the republican movement. It will be shown that the Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein leadership believed that a twin track approach of political and physical coercion could be used against the Protestant people of Northern Ireland to physically and psychologically force them into a united Ireland. The same twin track approach would be used to both economically and psychologically force the British Government and public to become persuaders of the Protestant people of the benefits of a United Ireland.
I will show how the IRA’s numbers were reduced as The Northern Command of the Republican Movement under the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin Mc Guinness took control of both Sinn Fein and the IRA by placing loyal followers into key positions. I will evaluate Sinn Fein’s electoral performance and investigate why the republican movement became involved in secret talks with the British Government, The Irish Government and the SDLP (Catholic/Nationalist Party in the north). These secret talks would eventually bring about the Hume/Adams initiative. I will examine the influence of the American administration on what had become known as the peace process. And why the President of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams had bought into the idea of political coercion to further the aims of the republican movement.
This book will critically examine the road on which the Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein has continued to travel after 1986. This examination will include: the 1992 Sinn Fein policy document ‘Towards a lasting Peace in Ireland’, the secret talks between British Government intermediaries and the leadership of Sinn Fein/IRA, the Peace Process which produced the 1993 ‘Downing Street Declaration’, the 1995 ‘Framework Document’ and culminated in the 1998 ‘Good Friday Agreement’ all of which lead to Devolution and the power sharing Executive at Stormont Buildings in Belfast, the all important but less than perfect Republican and Loyalist cease-fires.
This book will take us up to 2010, a time in which the peace process has produced a power sharing executive at Stormont including the devolution of Policing and Justice from Westminster. The present threat from 'dissident' republicans will be examined and following the collapse of Unionism in the 2010 Westminster Elections I will ask what can the future hold for Northern Ireland and is a United Ireland any closer today than it was before thousands of people were slaughtered in it's name.
Chapter 1
Historical Regression
Irish Republicanism has, in every epoch of its existence, sustained life and meted out death through a combination of romanticised martyrdom and an out right hatred of the great British oppressor. Both can be seen here in a letter from one of the republican hero’s of the 1916-1923 Irish revolution against British rule, Terence Mac Swiney, writing from Brixton Jail in 1920:
Oh my God, I offer my pain for Ireland. She is on the rack…I offer my sufferings here for our martyred people beseeching Thee, O my God, to grant them the nerve and strength and grace to withstand the present terror in Ireland…that by Thy all powerful aid the persecution may end in our time and Ireland arise at last triumphant.[1]
Contemporary militant republicanism is embodied in Sinn Fein/IRA, Sinn Fein/IRA has at all stages failed to be a homogeneous ideological unit because of the diversity of its personnel. Countess Markievicz wrote in one of her prison letters (17 August 1919):
Sinn Fein is not a solid, cast iron thing like English parties. It is just a jumble of people of all classes, creeds, and opinions, who are all ready to suffer and die for Ireland. [2]
From the very out set of the creation of the new liberated territory known then as the Irish Free State (Irish Republic/Eire), Irish republicanism was in confusion. Britain had withdrawn from twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties leaving behind a divided republican movement. Those who had supported and signed the treaty with Britain were prepared to kill their former IRA colleagues to advance their vision for Ireland. Those who opposed the treaty with the British were willing to defend to the death the Irish people’s rightful claim to national self determination over the entire national territory of Ireland. Some militant republicans continued to murder, intimidate and discriminate against those Protestants who wished to continue to live in the Irish Free State where they had lived for generations. Tens of thousands of Protestants were forced from their homes and went either to the newly created Northern Ireland or England for their own safety. In conflicts all over the world it is the case that extremists who have tasted the power of dictating life and death over fellow citizens, do not wish to let go of that power.
In the aftermath of the Irish Civil War (pro and anti Treaty republicans fought each other) Irish republicanism was a fragmented ideology that had beaten itself into constitutional politics. As republicans began to regroup there were obvious ideological differences. Those who had signed up to a 26 county constitutional frame work free from British interference were content to allow the six northern counties of Tyrone, Armagh, Antrim, Down, Derry and Fermanagh to be a Protestant State remaining under British rule. Others continued to pursue a united Ireland through constitutional politics. Others remained within the ranks of militant republicanism and they would not accept that the Free State was anything more than a neo-colonial British state.
Simply put, those supporting the Treaty and accepting the Free State would become known as Fine Gael (political party), those who wished to pursue the ideal of a united Ireland through constitutional politics would after the 1926 extraordinary Sinn Fein Ard Fheis [3] be known as Fianna Fail. Those who would continue to support the IRA Army Council would be a combination of socialist O’Donnellites and others of a purely militaristic mind set who had supported the IRA’s break with Sinn Fein and second Dail in 1925 to pursue a policy of social agitation.[4]
It must be mentioned here that in 1922, when the opponents of the Treaty left the Dail and precipitated the Civil War, the Labour Party provided the first opposition, and consitutional politics was born in Ireland. While this book is focused on militant republicanism, it must be noted that the Labour Party would be the only true voice of the oppressed working class in the newly liberated territory and it continues in that role in the 21st Century. In a poll published in the Irish Times 12th June 2010, the Labour Party was found to be the largest party in the Irish Republic. This is the first time in its history that the Labour Party appears to have made Irish politics a three party contest and it is certain that Labour will be a major player in the Government of Ireland following the 2012 General election.
In the 1920s central Government in Dublin introduced the Local Appointments Commission and the Civil Servants Commission in order to stop corruption and nepitism at local Government level. However, dicrimination and jobbery were rife in local councils, this discrimination against Protestants in particular was highlighted by the appointment of a Trinity Graduate and Protestant to the position of County Librarian in County Mayo in 1930. Mrs Natasha Dunbarr-Harrison was appointed by the Local Appointments Commission on the basis of merit, however, Mrs Dunbarr-Harrison's appointment was not endorsed by the Library Committee of Mayo County Council. The committee initially suggested that Mrs Dunbarr-Harrision had not got a good enough grasp of the Irish Language, however, the real reason for her rejection was reflected in the comments of a Fianna Fail member of Mayo County Council as reported in the Connaght Telegraph on the 29th of December 1930:
I am opposed to the appointment of a product of Trinity which is not the culture of the Gael but poison gas to the history of the Celtic people......bigoted anti-Irish out-post of England in Ireland....that feeds like a parisite on the flesh and blood of our kindly Celtic people...we must check the progress of the pest if we are to preserve Celtic Culture.
These were the words of a constitutional 'republican' and while Mayo County Council were sacked for refusing to endorse the appointment of Mrs Dunbarr-Harrisson, Protestants would continue to be dicriminated against in every walk of life in the new Free State. When Sinn Fein or what remained of Sinn Fein, came out of the debris of the 1920s it was a party in total confusion. British withdrawal, yes, but was Sinn Fein purely a nationalist party or had it the socialist blood of James Connolly in its veins, bold uncompromising socialism appeared absent. Richard English, Professor of Politics at QueensUniversity, Belfast suggests that socialist republicans sustained their project through self deluding myths:
James Connolly’s socialist republican theory was their intellectual point of reference, but they failed to see that even Connolly’s own career demonstrated the inadequacy of his central thesis. Inter war socialist republicanism offered incoherent readings of the 1916-1923 revolutionary period; on the basis of these misconstructions they maintained the fiction that republicanism, properly understood, had class conflict at its root.[5]
Peadar O’ Donnell, one of Connolly’s most ardent followers in the subsequent generation acknowledged that it had been possible for Connolly’s socialism to be drowned in nationalist tears. Writing in 1933, O’ Donnell claimed that Connolly was not presented as having seen,
That the final battle ground for Irish Freedom must be the revolutionary struggle of the Irish workers against Irish capitalism.[6]
If Connolly’s socialism is ever mentioned, it is to admit a fault which the manner of his death redeemed. In the 1940s and 1950s the IRA Army Council continued to pursue a purely militaristic campaign. That said, the IRA’s military capacity even at its height was nothing more than a blot on the landscape as the Second World War raged, however, there were some exceptions:
At 2.30pm on the 25th of August, 1939, Broadgate in the centre of Coventry was crowded with shoppers and people returning to their places of work. It was a sunny Friday afternoon, and the weather forecast for the weekend promised two days of sunshine. What the people did not expect was for an IRA bomb to rip through the crowed streets. When the smoke cleared, fifty-two, men, women and children lay dead, dying or injured.[7]
What was even more alarming and in stark contrast to their rhetoric of Freedom was the IRA’s links to Hitler and Nazi Germany. One might suppose that the IRA viewed the enemy of their enemy as a friend. In February 1939 a German Intelligence agent Oskar Pfaus using the alias, Eoin Duffy, arrived in Dublin to make contact with the IRA. Pfaus meet with the IRA staff at General Headquarters, including some of the most senior republicans at that time, Sean Russell and Seamus O’Donovan. The Nazis wanted the IRA to work as a fifth column inside Britain and the IRA was happy to do business with them. O’Donovan travelled to Germany on many occasions in order to secure guns and explosives. On the 23rd of August, nine days before the Germans invaded Poland; O Donovan was on his third trip to Nazi Germany, which surely proved that there was nothing progressive about contemporary militant Republicanism.
The IRA’s pursuance of a purely militaristic agenda failed to draw any real attention except from the legislators in The Irish Republic and the Protestant dominated Stormont Government of Northern Ireland, both of whom introduced the usual measures to control militant republicanism, namely, internment, interrogation, raids, shootings and censorship.
Since the foundation of the Irish Free State/Republic there has always been a great deal of sympathy for the plight of the minority Catholic community that was abandoned to the dictate of the Unionist dominated Stormont Government. However, sympathy for the Catholics in the north among the masses in the south is sympathy for an oppressed minority; such sympathy cannot be taken to imply support for a united Ireland. In the north, the predominant concern of the Catholic community has been for an end of the Unionist regime at Stormont and its oppressive anti-Catholic policies. Compared with the question of reunification is of little more than sentimental significance.[8]
Following the creation of the Irish Free State the IRA had few friends; former allies had given their allegiance to de Valera and his new Government in Dail Eireann (Irish Parliament). American sympathisers with Irish republicanism consoled themselves in the Irish Constitution of 1937 (Bunreacht Na hEireann), a constitution that was drawn up by de Valera and the Catholic Church, in Articles 2 and 3 of the original constitution it laid claim to the whole Island of Ireland. This claim would be watered down in a constitutional referendum in order to facilitate the fledgling peace process in the late 1990s.
The initial claim to the whole Island of Ireland by de Valera in the original constitution was enough to convince Irish Americans to give their hard earned dollars to the new constitutional politics of de Valera and Fianna Fail rather than the militant politics of Sinn Fein/IRA. The American input even up to the modern day is a key component of Irish politics. The American input takes on many forms and they will be discussed throughout this book.
End Chapter 1: Click the link to take you directly to Chapter 2.
http://hubpages.com/hub/A-Fairly-Secret-Army-Chapter-2-Civil-Rights-and-the-role-of-the-IRA
[1] Page 46 English, 1994
[2] Page 29 English 1994
[3] Page 36 Patterson, 1989
[4] Page 44 Patterson, 1989
[5] Page 270 English, 1994
[6] Page 28 English, 1994
[7] Page 32 Dillon, 1994
[8] Page 160 Morgan, 1980
