Whilst
there is undoubtedly some surface truth in the
Defenders/civil rights argument, it is far from
the whole picture and for a man such as Eamonn
McCann, who is a Trotskyite revolutionary, to
attempt to give such a shallow and bourgeois interpretation
of these momentous and bloody events, displays
a lack of understanding on his part of just how
revolutions and popular revolts come into being.
It is perfectly understandable that revisionist
historians and UK apologists would attempt to
place such a hangman's noose around the neck of
Irish history: it absolves the UK State of all
responsibility for the nasty little entity it
created and called Northern Ireland, and for the
inevitable misery and bloodletting that flowed
from it. It is therefore hardly surprising that
the British government would wish to obscure in
the mists of time what motivated those who joined
the insurgency that broke out in 1969. It has
no wish to highlight the fact that the northern
statelet became a 'permanent' entity after the
British Prime Minister of the day, David Lloyd
George, made the most dire threats of "dreadful
and escalating war" if the Irish revolutionaries
refused to bow to his demands and sign the Anglo-Irish
Treaty, which the Second Dáil finally ratified
on 7 January 1922 by a vote of 64 to 57.
Of
course, popular revolts rarely go to order and
to make an issue of the fact that northern Catholics
and nationalists prior to 1969 in the main supported
nationalist and not republican political organizations
is to miss the point entirely. If one was to use
this yardstick, one would have to dismiss as illegitimate
almost every popular revolt in history going back
to that of Spartacus, for had not the majority
of revolutionaries who rose up along-side Spartacus
previously accepted their slavery passively? I
will not go that far back but use the example
of the Russian October Revolution. Prior to that
historic event, only a small minority of the Russians
Masses supported the Bolshevik brand of socialism.
True, Lenin's Party had elected parliamentarians
within the Russian Duma in the period leading
up to WW1, but they were not even the largest
party amongst the Socialist Deputies, let alone
the political parties who made up that Assembly
as a whole.
Yet
when the suffering of the Russian masses became
intolerable, they reached for Lenin's Bolsheviks
as the nearest vehicle to hand which they thought
might offer them some respite from oppression,
and give them their best chance to bring their
sufferings to an end. Whether their choice was
wise is not for this article. My point is when
people feel their oppression has become intolerable,
they reach out for what ever revolutionary organization
is to hand and offers them the best chance of
getting out from under the yoke of their oppressor.
For
the working class Catholic youth of the north
of Ireland who were to become the backbone of
the PIRA insurgency, Irish Republicanism offered
them their best hope. These young people had grown
up with Irish nationalism; many of their parents
had been active supporters of it, voting decade
after decade for the various northern politicians
who sailed under the reformist flag. Far from
this lessening their load, they had seen their
parents endure political impotency, mass unemployment
and sectarian discrimination in the allocation
of public housing stock, in which there had been
a post-war boom in the UK due to the policies
of the Attlee government at Westminister (which
in the rest of the UK had brought respite from
appalling housing conditions by offering millions
of working class people a decent Council House).
For many of these young workers the final straw
was the brutality dished out to the supporters
of the NICRM by the RUC, working under orders
from the Stormont government, whilst the UK State
turned a blind eye.
No
one should have been surprised that the Nationalist
working class youth turned to the one organized
political force that had not only opposed the
northern State since its inception but had always
proclaimed that it was non reformable, the Irish
Republican Movement. True, in the north and especially
in Belfast the Republican Movement had an element
of Catholic Defenderism about it, but these people
were a minority within the organization nationally.
And even those who held a Defenderist outlook
never looked across the Irish Sea to Westminster
for their salvation, but to the Irish nations
as constituted in the Republic of 1916.
Many
of the aforementioned young workers soon found
themselves in the ranks of the newly formed PIRA,
and within a short space of time the British State
found themselves fighting a full blown insurgency
which could have threatened the very existence
of the United Kingdom. The Westminster government
quickly took control of the situation, by sending
the Unionist administration at Stormont packing
and in the process they instigated Direct Rule
from London and poured enormous military and economic
resources into crushing the insurgency. This in
itself makes nonsense of the Defenderist theories,
as, if true, the UK State would have quickly conceded
to the Catholic minority that which all other
citizens within the UK then attained.
Far
from the failure of the PIRA's 'long war' proving
that the Catholic and progressive part of the
population within the north of Ireland were always
opposed to Irish Republicanism, the opposite is
true. For at a time of great crises and turmoil,
by joining and supporting the PRM, the working
class and rural youth from within the nationalist
community clearly demonstrated that they had absolutely
no confidence in reformist Irish Nationalism.
The only real conclusion we can draw from the
failure of the PIRA insurrection is that the UK
State was prepared to sit it out, conscious of
the fact that revolts and insurrections have a
limited time frame. If revolutionaries are not
successful within a comparatively short span of
time they will in all probability fail.
There
will be those who will deny this by using the
Vietnamese struggle for Independence as their
example. They would be mistaken however, as the
Vietnamese people's titanic struggle for national
liberation was not only a national insurrection,
but it was also a link in the chain of the Cold
War, then being fought between the United States
and their allies and the USSR and the fraternal
States that supported it. Thus the USSR and its
allies were able to provide much of the economic,
medical, human, military and strategic resources,
which enabled Ho Chi Minn to lead his people to
victory in a 'long war'. That the Adams leaderships
failed to factor in this when they set their movement
on the 'long war' strategy is one of the main
reasons we are where we are in the north of Ireland
today.
Finally,
I wish to touch briefly on the 'what if question'
that is often asked metaphorically of Republican
hero's such as the PIRA hunger striker Bobby Sands,
as it has some relevancy to the issue under review
here. In my opinion, no Irish Republican ever
took up arms to usher in human and democratic
rights for the Nationalist and Catholic people
who live within the UK Statelet in the northeast
of Ireland. Just as in Michael Collins' day, no
Republican fought the war of Independence with
the aim of partitioning the nation politically.
But
as I wrote above, revolutions and insurrections
cannot be ordered on Spec, they are always a work
in progress. So just as it would be ridiculous
to conclude that Bobby Sands or any deceased Republican
would have taken up arms for what the leadership
of SF has now accepted; that in itself does not,
as some Dissidents claim, make what Mr. Adams
and his leadership clique have settled for wrong
in and of itself, although most progressive people
would baulk at their methodology.
For
in their own way Adams and his leadership have
achieved something Michael Collins and the Free
Staters failed to do. When they signed the Treaty
in 1922, the Free State government assigned the
Catholic and Nationalist people, who found themselves
stranded within the new Northern Ireland Statelet,
at the mercy of a vengeful Unionist bourgeois
ascendancy, who were determined to make the nationalist
communities lives a misery; and so they did.
Despite
their reactionary methodology, the Adams leadership
of SF, knowing the war was lost, have managed
to at least gain the means for the Nationalist
minority community to defend themselves politically
against any backlash from the British State and
their northern acolytes, which in truth is something
which is not to be regarded lightly, as history
shows. As to the political future, the real question
Irish republicans and all progressive people on
the island must now face up to is not about the
rights and wrongs of the GFA, for that will now
be for the historians. What we have to resolve
is how we move forward to a Thirty Two County
Socialist Republic. Perhaps it would do no harm
if we all mulled over John Lennon's words. How
can I go forward when I don't know which way I
am facing?
