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The
recent killing of a Protestant working for the security
forces by the RIRA has been criticised by all quarters.
Most interesting have been Martin McGuiness' criticisms
reported by the media and Anthony McIntyre's recent
analysis of the RIRA in the Blanket. Both have raised
issues of crucial importance regarding physical force
republicanism that need to be commented on.
First,
present day physical force Republicanism -that is
the campaign of the RIRA and the CIRA- is criticised
for not having popular support and being representative
of just a tiny minority of people. This is nothing
new. One of the main criticisms of the various IRA
campaigns is that they were not supported by the majority
of the Irish people in general, and in electoral terms
in particular. Only a minority -even if a relatively
significant one- of the Irish people North, South
and abroad supported the Provisional IRA campaign
(1970 - 1994). This can be measured from opinion polls
and Sinn Fein's electoral performance. So, when the
Provisional condemn the RIRA's campaign on the basis
that they do not have popular support, they are in
fact ridiculously saying "our minority was bigger
than your minority". For Irish Republicanism,
the legitimacy of an armed campaign is not grounded
on support by the majority of the people, but on the
fact that if the British government maintains its
presence in the North of Ireland through force, any
Irish person -be they representative of the majority
of the people or not- has the right to use physical
force to resist British occupation. As an American
political scientist wrote 20 years ago, the decisive
criteria to judge physical force Republicanism are
not opinion polls or electoral performance. "A
paramilitary organisation does not set out to win
at the ballot box. It sets out to win its political
aims. The one does not necessarily have anything to
do with the other. Power, according to Mao's famous
axiom, does indeed come out of the barrel of a gun,
and the hard truth is that politics ultimately has
a lot more to do with the dictates of power than with
the interests of the 'plain people'. In the scheme
of things, 'winning the hearts and minds of the people'
is more often the by-product than the cause of success."
(Padraig O Malley, Uncivil Wars, 302) The RIRA
and CIRA would answer the critique that they have
no popular support by stating that popular support
will be a by-product of their success. The present
author agrees that it is quite spurious to judge physical
force Republicanism in terms of "majority support".
Did Connolly and Pearse represent a mathematical majority
of the people in 1916, or the Fenians in 1867, or
Young Ireland in 1848 and Robert Emmet in 1803 ? No,
of course, they didn't. Neither did the Bolsheviks
in 1917, or Che Guevara when he was with Castro in
the Sierra Maestra in the late 1950s. The key question
is not mathematical majority support, but whether
the movements involved have a strategy that takes
forward the struggle of the people, and the revolutionary
direction in which those Republican organisations
are taking
Ireland as a whole. If it is indeed the case, is far
more problematical.
Secondly,
present day physical force Republicanism is criticised
for going nowhere and being counter-productive. The
RIRA and CIRA would probably answer to that that to
call off their campaign would be in fact retrogressive.
To quote O Malley again: "If the IRA called a
halt to its operations, there would, of course, no
longer be an overt conflict, and therefore there would
be a less pressing need for a 'solution'. Indeed,
were the IRA simply to cease and desist, the impact
could be retrogressive, since there would no longer
be any reasons for Loyalists to make any concessions
to nationalists when their 'unreasonableness' no longer
carried with it the threat of greater instability.
It is improbable to assume that they would make concessions
in the future if the IRA put the gun away, in view
of their demonstrated unwillingness to make concessions
in the past, no matter how menacing the IRA gun."
(p.308) Even if the Provisional movement has called
off its operations, it only gets concessions from
the British and the Unionists through the implicit
latent threat that if their demands are not met, there
will be growing support for the RIRA and CIRA. So
even if the Provisional movement condemns the actions
of present day physical force Republicanism, it nevertheless
indirectly benefits from their campaign -or at least
up to a point.
For
the present author, the armed campaigns of the RIRA
and CIRA are unlikely to decisively shift the balance
of forces at the present stage, because they are not
the organic expression of a mass movement. They have
more in common with the IRA campaigns of 1939-1945
or 1956-1962 than the 1971-1972 or 1981 periods. They
do not have a mass orientation. The priority should
be the rebuilding of a radical mass movement that
would challenge the status quo. The problem is that
at the present moment, the "mass movement"
remains an abstract slogan. We do not have the magic
"five point plan" to build the mass movement.
It is precisely because of the absence of a mass movement
that physical force republicanism is able to present
itself as being the only alternative to Stormont.
The actions of the RIRA and the CIRA are to a large
extent the product of our own impotency to create
a viable alternative. Present day physical force Republicanism
does not need any more condemnations -being more a
question of political expediency than moral principle-
but constructive political criticism. Instead of it
being left out in the wilderness, those sympathetic
to its aims should reach out and engage this enduring
tradition of Irish politics.
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