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.