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The
Provisional republican movement – both the armed
wing the IRA and Sinn Fein the political wing –
is effectively dead. This may seem a strange assertion
considering that Sinn Fein holds seats in the Irish
and British parliaments and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
It is also easily the richest political party in Ireland
thanks to extensive US fundraising.
But
the republican movement from its beginnings in the
late 18th century had only one overarching mission
– freeing Ireland from British rule. The idea
that the everyone living in Ireland is Irish - regardless
of religious tradition or whether they are of settler
or native descent - has also been a central part of
the republican ideology.
Now
Sinn Fein is, in the words of one of its prominent
local leaders, “enforcing British rule in Ireland.”
Until recently it had two cabinet ministers in the
local Northern Ireland administration set up under
the Good Friday Agreement which is so completely subordinate
to the British parliament that Tony Blair was able
to simply suspend it. Martin McGuinness, a former
IRA Chief of Staff who still serves on its ruling
Army Council, was the Minster for Education before
the suspension. Bairbre de Brún was the Sinn
Fein Minister for Health.
Their
experience in office illustrates the nature of the
devolved Northern Ireland government. When de Brún
took office, the budget she had been given by the
British government dictated that one of the two Belfast
maternity wards - one located in a primarily Protestant
area and the other in a primarily Catholic one –
had to be closed. Rather than refusing to close either
de Brún, who considers herself a feminist,
promptly closed the maternity ward in the Protestant
area.
Later
she went on to close a hospital serving a predominantly
rural area, again because that was what the budget
required. When McGuinness was confronted with a demand
by school aides to be paid for the summer in the same
way as teachers are, he replied that he sympathized
with their demand. But, he said, there was nothing
he could do because it wasn’t in the budget.
Their
rapprochement with the British government and their
unwillingness to offend the US administration has
also forced Sinn Fein to abandon its previous left-wing
stance. During the invasion of Iraq, Adams and McGuinness
met with George Bush and Tony Blair in Hillsborough
Castle outside of Belfast despite calls for a boycott
by the Irish anti-war movement. When George Bush called,
all Sinn Fein’s previous rhetoric about a “32-County
Democratic Socialist Republic” had to be ditched.
When
a person dies in mysterious circumstances, an autopsy
is conducted to determine the cause of death. It is
certainly worth attempting a political autopsy to
try to determine the causes of the death of provisional
republicanism.
The immediate cause was suicide. They have signed
up for the Good Friday Agreement whose central provision
is that Northern Ireland will be governed by the British
government until and unless a majority in the North
votes otherwise. This not only forbids the Irish people
as a whole from ever voting for any other arrangement,
but also forbids the people of England Scotland and
Wales from separating Northern Ireland from the United
Kingdom.
In
1976, the republicans rejected an almost exactly identical
arrangement and carried out a fierce bombing campaign
attempting to bring it down. So what had changed in
22 years?
Ed
Moloney’s groundbreaking book, A Secret History
of the IRA (W.W. Norton 2002), which was a number
one bestseller in Ireland, reveals that by the late
1980’s a group around Gerry Adams, the President
of Sinn Fein and a member of the IRA Army Council,
had decided that the IRA’s armed struggle was
incapable of forcing a British withdrawal. Instead
of going to the movement and arguing for calling off
the armed struggle, they embarked on a campaign of
secret diplomacy with the Irish and British governments
which eventually produced the Good Friday Agreement.
This
represented a complete break from traditional republicanism.
When the IRA was unable to sustain their military
campaigns in the 1920’s, '30’s and '50’s,
they declared a cease fire, stored their weapons,
and waited for an opportunity to resume the struggle.
This may have been short-sighted and a continuation
of their near-total dependence on an armed struggle,
but it at least preserved the anti-imperialist core
of republican politics.
The
interesting question is why Adams and Co. didn’t
follow this tradition. And why have they been able
to persuade the overwhelming majority of IRA and Sinn
Fein supporters and of the Nationalist population
of the North, to accept the Good Friday Agreement
which is, on the face of it, a complete violation
of the most basic republican principles.
The
answer has to begin with the events that produced
the Provisional movement. It arose out of the Northern
Ireland civil rights movement and especially from
massive attacks on Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast
by Protestant mobs.
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement was a response
to massive institutionalized discrimination against
Catholics. Its principal demands were equality in
voting rights and an end to discrimination in housing
and employment.
Since
the formation of Northern Ireland in 1920, the province’s
central government as well as its county and city
administrations had been in the hands of the 100%
Protestant Unionist Party. They were determined to
preserve Protestant/Unionist power in the face of
a 1/3 Catholic minority which felt no loyalty to Northern
Ireland.
The
result was gerrymandering and discrimination in hiring
and housing. The Unionist Party refused to allocate
public housing to Catholics or to hire them for government
jobs. In Fermanagh, a county with a nationalist majority,
the Unionist County Council refused to build housing
at all.
Northern
Catholics crowded into some of the worst slums in
Western Europe. They were excluded from virtually
all public employment and from the well-paid industrial
jobs especially on the shipyards.
Starting
in 1968, the civil rights movement protested this
with non-violent demonstrations consciously modeled
on the African-American civil rights movement. Their
demands, in the somewhat sexist language of the time,
were “one man one vote, one man one job, one
family one house.” These demonstrations were
repeatedly violently attacked by bands of Protestants
who felt the civil rights movement endangered their
relatively privileged status in the North. The escalating
tension from the civil rights agitation soon produced
a huge anti-Catholic pogrom centered in Belfast. Tens
of thousands of Catholics were burned out of their
homes by loyalist mobs. The police stood by and watched.
The IRA, as it was then constituted, was both unable
and unwilling to defend the Catholic ghettoes. The
Dublin-based leadership had few arms available and
little interest in waging armed struggle even to defend
nationalist neighborhoods. Graffiti on Belfast walls
proclaimed “IRA – I Ran Away.”
The
Belfast programs fueled the split in the republican
movement that produced the Provisionals. Soon they
would launch their military campaign against the British
army and the police, Thousands of young people flocked
into the Provisional IRA and later Sinn Fein.
In
latter years continual repression aimed primarily
at young Catholic males provided the IRA with a steady
stream of recruits. The British army, and even more
frequently, the virtually all-Protestant Northern
Ireland police force or the locally recruited British
army regiment, routinely put young Catholic men up
against a wall and searched them; and beatings were
common place. In US terms this would be like recruiting
a Black liberation army in response to systematic
police violence.
The
IRA provided first and foremost arms and a chance
to fight back. It also provided an ideology that explained
nationalist oppression and offered a strategy for
resistance. In its simplest terms this said that you
were oppressed because you were Irish, the solution
was to end British rule and the way to win that was
armed struggle.
In
the process the republican movement was transformed.
Its membership, previously concentrated in the south,
was now predominantly drawn from Northern Ireland.
By the early 1980’s, Gerry Adams and a group
of younger, Northern republicans had gained control
of the IRA and consequently Sinn Fein.
This
new leadership was rooted in the northern experience
rather than the ongoing republican tradition dating
back to the Easter 1916 rising. Many, like Martin
McGuinness, had little family history of republicanism.
They had been shaped by the civil rights movement
and, especially by the Belfast pogroms and the ongoing
security force harassment of nationalist youth. Openly
contemptuous of the older republican leadership who
had declared cease fires, they repeatedly stated that
they were going to go on fighting until Britain left
Ireland once and for all.
In
reality they did the opposite. Once they concluded
that the armed struggle wasn’t going to drive
the British out, the Provisional leadership set about
coming to terms with the British and Irish governments.
They have even done what would have seemed unthinkable
a few years ago by allowing a representative of the
British and Irish governments to verify that the IRA
had rendered much of their armaments inoperable. The
IRA recently carried out its third act of decommissioning
which reportedly included all its heavy weapons and
a large portion of the supply of plastic explosives.
In a carefully choreographed move, Gerry Adams promised
that the IRA would permanently end all armed resistance
to British rule.
All
this has been accomplished with only minimal resistance
from the republican rank and file. There was a split
that produced the 32 County Sovereignty Movement and
the so-called “Real IRA,” Bur that split
has been fairly easily contained. If some republicans
have been unhappy with the movement’s direction,
they have tended to just drop out and get on with
their lives. Demoralization has been far more common
than resistance.
By
now it seems very clear that the Provisional movement
at both the leadership and rank and file level had
at best a very thin commitment to the ideals of republicanism.
Their defining experience had been Protestant attacks
on the Catholic working class ghettoes and the brutality
of the overwhelmingly Protestant security forces.
It would appear that for most the republican ideology
was only an elaborate justification for the reality
that they were just fighting for the interests of
Northern Catholics not the ostensible goal of a 32
county democratic socialist republic.
When
they realized that the armed struggle wasn’t
about to end British rule, Adams and Company turned
to promoting Catholic interests inside a Northern
Ireland government subordinate to the British parliament.
In the Northern Ireland administration, Sinn Fein
has functioned explicitly as a representative of the
Catholic/Nationalist populations, sharing power with
the Unionist Party which represents the Protestant
community. They have jettisoned any pretense of even
seeking to represent, what Theobald Wolfe Tone, the
founder of Irish republicanism called “Protestant,
Catholic and Dissenter.”
The
disputes within the Northern Ireland administration
were virtually never been about political principles
or even priorities. Instead they were about communal
interests and the pace at which the IRA will disarm
and move toward disbanding. By the time this article
is published Sinn Fein will, in all probability, be
back in coalition with the Unionist Party.
These
are at least some of the immediate causes of the Provisional
movement’s accommodation with Britain and with
the southern government. But there were also elements
in traditional republican ideology that facilitated
this. Adams and Mc Guinness are not the first IRA
leaders to abandon the cause. Eamon de Valera, the
last commander to surrender in Easter 1916 and the
President of the Irish government during the War of
Independence, became the Prime Minister of the partitioned
Irish Free State. From there he went on to order IRA
members interned and even hung. In addition to Adams
and Mc Guinness at least two previous IRA Chiefs of
Staff have come to terms with constitutional politics
and the southern establishment.
Republicans
have always seen armed struggle as the primary, if
not the only, strategy for resistance. The IRA, not
Sinn Fein, controlled the republican movement. The
IRA, as an army fighting a secret war, had to command
unquestioned obedience. Secrecy was a military necessity
so there could be no free exchange of information.
A
Secret History of the IRA makes it clear that
Gerry Adams used this habit of secrecy and obedience
to negotiate the deal that became the Good Friday
Agreement not only behind the backs of the IRA and
Sinn Fein but, at times, of other members of the Army
Council.
The
Republican Movement’s almost complete lack of
a class analysis, especially of the southern state,
also helped to make the deal possible. Southern governments
have been seen as either less or more nationalistic,
depending on their policies and pronouncements. This
tradition made it natural for Gerry Adams to begin
the peace process by soliciting the support of Charlie
Haughey, the soon-to be Irish Prime Minister who was
perceived as the most nationalist southern politician.
Republicanism
has never had any understanding that there is a ruling
class in the south with its own interests and concerns
and its own ties to Britain. The Irish ruling class
is about as interested in leading a struggle against
Britain as the Mexican ruling class is in leading
a struggle against the US. Throughout the peace process
the Irish and British governments have worked in tandem,
sharing the objective of ending the IRA’s struggle
and bringing new stability to Northern Ireland.
Support
for the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process
has gone well beyond the ranks of the IRA and Sinn
Fein. They have been overwhelmingly popular with the
Northern nationalist electorate. Sinn Fein’s
vote has grown steadily as the process has gone on,
at the expense of Social and Democratic Labour Party,
In the November Assembly elections they supplanted
the SDLP as the largest nationalist party in Northern
Ireland.
Much
of this support can be attributed to war-weariness
after nearly 30 years of conflict. Ordinary people
speak with great emotion about being able for the
first time to go anywhere in their own cities and
towns without fear of violence. Until the IRA and
the loyalist paramilitary groups declared their cease
fires, many working class young people seldom went
out of their own small ghettoes.
But
the deal’s popularity goes beyond simple war
weariness. There have been great changes in the North
since 1968, especially in conditions for nationalists.
Gerrymandering and discrimination in the allocation
of public housing are a thing of the past. Housing
for working class people, once the worst in Western
Europe is now among the best. Generous subsidy programs
are available to allow people to build homes courtesy
of the British Exchequer. In employment there has
been substantial progress for middle class Catholics
with education even when working class people are
often left behind. Discrimination in employment is
at least formally illegal. The Catholic to Protestant
unemployment rate has declined from two and a half
to one to two to one. Unemployment and poverty in
Northern Ireland today probably have more to do with
class than discrimination.
To
a very large degree, the demands of the Northern Ireland
civil rights movement – an end to discrimination
in housing, employment and voting – have been
won. Catholic neighborhoods are filled with new housing
built at British government expense and many have
their own community center. There are a myriad of
community self-help and cultural organizations funded
by the British government and/or the European Union.
As noted earlier, employment discrimination is now
illegal and Catholics with a university degree can
enter a comfortable middle class existence.
Much
of this, especially the massive spending in nationalist
neighborhoods, undoubtedly began as pure British government
conflict management strategy. It was obviously intended
to wean the nationalist population away from the Provos.
In that it failed. But it did succeed in helping to
create a hunger for normalcy and peace in much of
the nationalist population. This can be seen in the
steady rise in the Sinn Fein vote as the peace process
has gone on. Large numbers of middle class, professional,
Catholics have switched their allegiance to Sinn Fein,
as they have see it become the most able and energetic
proponent of their interests.
If
these are some of the reasons behind the success of
the peace process, the question of what this means
for the future of Irish republicanism and revolutionary
politics in Ireland remains. The time has surely come
for a thoroughgoing re-thinking of the republican
tradition. The goal of an independent, democratic
32-county republic that, in the words of the Easter
1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, “cherishes
all the children of the nation equally” is still
a starting point for any republican or socialist politics
in Ireland.
The politics and strategies of the republican movement,
especially its near-total reliance on armed struggle
and absence of class politics, need to be fundamentally
re-examined. This is especially crucial because historically
republicanism and the labor movement have been the
two sources of radicalism in Ireland. This is not
to suggest that there is a magic bullet for the Irish
left any more than there is for the US left. There
is no policy that, if once adopted, will lead inexorably
on to the revolution or even to building a new mass
movement.
What
is needed now is a period of discussion and debate,
including with and among republicans. It will be equally
important to participate and learn from whatever actual
struggles there are on the ground – from the
anti-war movement, to campaigns for political prisoners,
to protests over new charges for rubbish collection
in the south. Only that combination of debate and
discussion with involvement in day-to day struggles
holds out any hope for an escape from the present
political quagmire.
Note:
This is a slightly updated version of an article written
for the US socialist magazine, New Politics
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