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In
April, the Cuirt International Festival of Literature
took place courtesy of the Galway Arts Centre. It
was in its eighteenth year. The Town Hall Theatre
played host to most of the main events and as a sign
of the high literary stature of the occasion names
such as the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman had been
billed to attend. I had always liked Dorfman who,
from the point of view of the powerful, has the irritating
habit of deflating their sense of self-importance.
Once commenting on the ill-health of democracy in
his own country he astutely observed that:
What
politicians have done in Chile is that they’ve
made democracy fragile by saying it’s so fragile
we can’t touch it. Well, no. You’ve got
to bring people into the process of defining democracy,
testing it and pushing it. If you don’t it’s
not true democracy.
A
situation not unlike what we have inflicted upon us
here, where people get told they are ‘mischievous’
and ‘enemies of the peace process’ if they
ask a difficult question. On another occasion Dorfman
wrote:
Dictators
aspire to total power in order to seek refuge from
the demons they have unchained. As a way of silencing
their ghosts, they demand to be surrounded by a
rampart of flattering mirrors and genuflecting counsellors
that assure the tyrant that yes, you are the most
beautiful of them all, the one who knows more.
These
words have powerful resonance for anyone familiar
with the authoritarian culture that has gripped Provisional
republicanism under the leadership of seeming Sinn
Fein president for life, Gerry Adams, who views an
idea not his own as if it were a SARS-like contagious
disease which his functionaries must prevent other
people catching. Although Adams eighteen months ago
sought to demonstrate his revolutionary credentials
- in defiance of those to his right within the party
- by visiting Castro’s Cuba, it struck me after
reading Ed Moloney’s A Secret History Of The
IRA that many readers may conclude that he shares
more in common with the former ruler of Dorfman’s
country - Augusto Pinochet - than with the leader
of the Cuban left.
Ultimately,
it was in anticipation of Moloney - rather than Dorfman
- delivering the Anne Kennedy Memorial Lecture that
attracted me to Galway. Anne Kennedy was a poet,
writer, photographer and broadcaster who hailed from
Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington state. She
came to live in Galway in 1977. And it in turn it
has established a tradition of honouring her literary
acumen. It was my first time in the city and its cosmopolitan
mix made the visit all the more appealing as well
as demonstrating the broad social appeal of the festival.
Fourteen hours on a bus there and back - my sole companion
a biography - was a lot to endure but the lecture
was worthwhile and meeting up again with Ciaran Irvine
who sometimes features on The Blanket made
the night’s post-lecture drinking all the more
entertaining. Little chance of hearing self-serving
peace process elasticity in that company. And it was
a fulfilling experience to talk with Maura Kennedy,
the daughter of Anne in whose memory the lecture was
being delivered. This was the fifth annual Anne Kennedy
lecture. Before dying in 1998 she had published two
books of poems, Buck Mountain Poems and The
Dog Kubla Dreams My Life. Maura is central to
the Cuirt project and when I asked her how she felt
to see her mother honoured in such a fashion she simply
said it was a 'great honour' to carry on with her
mother's tradition.
And
what a vibrant tradition it seemed to be. I could
not imagine Ed Moloney being invited to give his lecture
during the West Belfast Festival. And if he were it
is not too difficult to envisage some Sinn Fein members
handing out SARS-type masks accompanied by instructions
on how to fit them over the ears. Robert Fisk is welcome
to our festival because he is expected to tell the
truth about forces we do not like. And when he leaves
we loudly praise him for extolling the value of truth
and silently breathe a sigh of relief that he ignored
our addiction to equivalence. The problem with Moloney
is that he would not be coming to tell us what murderous
horror the Israelis inflicted on Palestinian civilians
or how many civilians the Argentinian military disappeared.
No, his narrative in large part interrogates the character
we as a community elect to represent us as MP in the
British Parliament. Consequently, it makes us uncomfortable
to feel the moral high ground shift beneath our feet
and take on the appearance of someone else's neck,
while our shouts of 'human rights abuser' are turned
back on us. But if we want genuine rather than political
truth then this is the price we have to pay for it,
otherwise it is merely about poking the other side
in the eye. Because, unless we subscribe to some intellectually
limiting metanarrative, there is no one great system
of pure evil that works 24/7 to oppress one great
system of wholesome good. Uncomfortable as it may
be to digest, Napoleon's comment that 'among those
who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress'
leaps out to tear away our eye patch - that intellectual
attire we like to sport when looking inward - compelling
us to view what we can otherwise pretend exists only
in 'the other'.
The
purpose of Moloney’s lecture was to demonstrate
how:
The
future of the Good Friday Agreement now rests with
a party which began its existence dedicated to the
destruction of the government of Northern Ireland
and the partition settlement that underlay it, but
the same party has ended up, utterly and absolutely
dependent on them.
So
sure were the British establishment that republicanism
was firmly trapped in the snare and that the only
way out was for it to shed its teeth - the purpose
of ensnaring it to begin with - that the media no
longer treated alarmist calls of crisis in the peace
process with even a modicum of seriousness. At an
early point in the lecture the audience was treated
to a witty account of how 15 dead sheep in Tyrone
was considered a more newsworthy item than our terminally
boring political saga. Moloney argued that such an
attitude was predicated upon an awareness that the
peace process had brought the IRA campaign to a definitive
and irreversible conclusion.
The
packed Town Hall was told that Gerry Adams’ alternative
to the armed struggle had been in place for years,
even when others were racking their brains trying
to escalate the war. That it was a strategy of deception
aimed at conning not only the republican rank and
file but also other members of the leadership came
in a very illuminating comment:
There
was never a chance that Adams could have gone to
an Army Council upon which figures like Slab Murphy,
Kevin McKenna or Michael McKevitt sat and say, 'listen
lads I have an idea; how about we recognise Northern
Ireland and agree that we won’t get Irish unity
until the Prods say so, we’ll cut a deal with
the Unionists to share power, Martin here can become
a minister - and Barbara - meanwhile you guys will
call a permanent ceasefire, give up all those Libyan
guns, recognise a new re-named police force and
eventually we’ll wind down the IRA and disband
it. If we do that, then Sinn Fein, under my leadership
of course, will become the new SDLP and Fianna Fails
of Ireland.' Does anyone here seriously think Adams
could have gone to the Army Council with such a
message and survive the experience?
At
a time when so much fudge and ambiguity has been given
free reign Moloney certainly did not pull his punches.
While Adams is about to launch a second book about
not being in the IRA, Moloney told a very different
story:
By
the time he led the IRA in Belfast, Adams’
list of military achievements was already a lengthy
and impressive one: he had made his home Ballymurphy
the strongest IRA area in the city; as commander
of the Second Battalion in Belfast, his IRA units
had pioneered the use of the car bomb and had forced
the British to introduce internment before their
intelligence on the IRA was complete, with the result
that internment was a military and political disaster.
He had ordered the importation of the Armalite rifle
from America, which for a while made the IRA in
Belfast better armed than the British Army. With
the destruction of an undercover British spy ring
in West Belfast, he made a name as a counter-intelligence
genius on a par with Collins and he had also made
a reputation for ruthlessness, as the disappearance
of Jean McConville and others would also bear grim
witness.
Ultimately,
Moloney asserted, Adams succeeded because of the existence
of two dual peace processes - the sham one he sold
to the IRA’s army council and which helped to
disguise the real one to the point where its 'success'
- and the defeat of the Provisional IRA - became a
foregone conclusion. Yet we are forced to ask how
the sham one ever took hold. Surely it must have been
obvious to the dimmest bulb in the tree that something
untoward was afoot. Otherwise we can only conclude
that, as Jenny McCartney once wrote in another context,
virtually the entire leadership along with the rank
and file functioned as ‘goldfish perpetually
fated to forget that they swallowed the same thing
six seconds earlier.'
The
question and answer session that followed indicated
that few in the audience had been rerouted away from
the real lesson of the peace process. In some ways
it could all be summed up by George Orwell who claimed
that nine times out of ten revolutionaries are social
climbers with bombs. And despite all the buildings
destroyed by IRA bombs throughout this war, quite
a bit of building work has been carried out since
constructing new second homes for members of the republican
leadership. Some animals are more equal than others.
A
sure sign that Moloney’s outstanding work on
how the IRA was effectively defeated through the peace
process has made its mark is the launch of the paperback version of
his widely acclaimed book A Secret History Of The
IRA. For those of us who sought a different and
better outcome - more just, more egalitarian, more
democratic, more honest - read it and weep.
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