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POLITICS
Posted: Nov 15, 2009
The Lost Revolution
The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party
Brian Hanley & Scott Millar, Penguin
Review by Liam Cummins
For a generation that came to socialist politics in the late sixties and early seventies the Workers’ Party, under its various names Sinn Fein, Official Sinn Fein (although never ‘officially’called thus), Sinn Fein The Workers Party and finally the Workers’ Party, played a central role in their political development. Because of the party’s importance even those on the left who were not members or sympathisers found themselves defining their politics relative to those of the WP. It is still the most significant left wing party to have been built in Ireland. At its height it had seven TDs, an MEP, Proinsias De Rossa who was also a TD, and numerous councillors. Its activists and supporters played a very significant leadership role in the building of the huge PAYE demonstrations in the late seventies and early eighties. Many former members are still in leading positions in the trade union movement.
Throughout the twentieth century, Left-republican rethinks emerged as a result of military or political defeats. This was the case in the twenties and thirties. The same pattern followed the failure of the IRA’s Border Campaign in the fifties. Influenced by returned emigrants or others who had came in contact with left wing politics, the movement turned to radical agitational politics. But as Cathal Goulding, then IRA Chief of Staff, emphasised, his objective was “to take the whole movement in that [radical] direction, not to break away, to stick with it and to take the whole movement”.
The agitation that followed took many forms and included fish-ins and action against the payment of ground rents aimed at the remnants of landlordism; the Dublin Housing Action Campaign which mobilised thousands in a campaign of occupations, squatting and street protests against slum housing conditions in the city; strike solidarity action but where sometimes this solidarity was in the form of military support such as the strike at the Silvermines in Co Tipperary in 1971 where bombs were placed on the electricity transformers. A young IRA activist was to die following extensive burns suffered during this action. Similar ‘active support’ had previously been provided during the long-running cement strike where premises, machinery and vehicles of two Dublin strike breaking construction companies were destroyed.
But not all republicans followed the new direction. In the early years most of those who did not agree with the shift drifted away from the movement. But the emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the north changed the dynamic. The violent state and loyalist reaction was unexpected. The attacks on nationalist areas, particularly in Belfast, clearly demonstrated the republican weaknesses and lack of military material to provide defence to the areas. Despite Goulding’s stated wish to hold the movement together, a formal split occurred and the Provisional IRA was founded in late December 1969, and Sinn Féin, split at an ardfheis a month later over the proposal to change the movement’s policy of abstentionism.
Initially despite the split and leadership hostility, at a more local level, things continued more or less as previously. I knew one young activist in the southeast, who continued to receive newspapers from both the Officials and the Provisionals, which she would diligently sell every week. The book also mentions that both organisations, locally, cooperated in actions against the British army, sometimes even passing material and intelligence between them. However following a number of politically disastrous actions, an OIRA ceasefire was declared in 1972. Continuing tensions within the Officials lead to a further bitter split and the foundation of the IRSP in 1974. In the following years, the WP developed a Northern policy almost indistinguishable from the Unionists – the enemy no longer being imperialism but the Provos.
So where did it all go wrong? At the centre of Marxist politics is the idea that change has to come from below - that the emancipation of the working class has to be the act of the working class. At the heart of republican politics is a secretive, conspiratorial culture which leads to a form of radical reformism – change from above. We will do things for you, whether as military activists, trade union leaders or elected TDs.
That view of change from above also married neatly with a political attachment to the Stalinist states and their organisational version of Democratic Centralism, which in reality was all centralism and no democracy. While some privately expressed reservations about support and links with totalitarian regimes like North Korea this was never freely debated in the party. As long as these regimes survived, this was just about tenable and was made more or less palatable because of potential political and financial support. But the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 changed all that. Many former supporters of the Stalinist regimes rushed to embrace of the market and western liberal democracy as the only alternatives.
But in its move to embrace the establishment there was the embarrassment of its continuing historical baggage - the Official IRA or Group B, as it, by then, described itself. Technically on ceasefire since 1972, it had never decommissioned and continued to be involved in military and later ‘fundraising’ actions. Although never publicly acknowledged, in the period after the ’72 ceasefire the need for a military organisation was sometimes justified in the South, and quietly accepted, as a necessary requirement in the event of a Chile-type coup. In the North the ceasefire was always conditional and the OIRA maintained the ‘right to defend any area under aggressive attack by the British military or by sectarian forces from either side’.
Increasing media scrutiny of the links with the OIRA combined with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes lead the WP TDs, with the exception of Tomás MacGiolla, to split and form a new party – New Agenda – that subsequently became Democratic Left. DL formed part of the FG-lead coalition of 1994-97 and later, despite previous mutual hostility, merged into the Labour Party.
This is an interesting book, which once again highlights the point that, despite the often-considerable bravery and sacrifice of republican activists, radical change cannot come from within republican politics. Recommended reading.
Read also these recent articles on Politics:
Jan 05, 2010: Marxism in Galway
Nov 15, 2009: The Lost Revolution
Jun 07, 2009: Breaking News: Workers and Unemployed Action Group gains
Jun 07, 2009: Election Analysis: A seismic shift in Irish politics
May 26, 2009: ‘Dublin's Banksy’ joins local election campaign
May 23, 2009: Give Fianna Fail & Greens a kicking!
Feb 15, 2009: ONE DAY NATIONAL STOPPAGE
Feb 15, 2009: Unfit to rule
