New Book: Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism

Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism is released this week. It will be available at the Queen's University bookshop, as well as online via the publisher, Ausubo Press, and other online outlets: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes and Noble, Borders.com. In the coming days The Pensive Quill will feature reviews of the book. Today we feature Tommy McKearney's review.

Tommy McKearney, journalist, editor and organizer comments on Good Friday and its author.

Over the past decade, Anthony McIntyre has been one of the most consistent and insightful of Sinn Fein’s critics. As a historian, a former member of the IRA and a onetime party activist with extensive contacts in the organisation, few have been better placed than McIntyre to examine and evaluate the transformation of a political movement from armed insurrectionists to tame reformists. That he regularly published these observations on his website or in the press ensured his uninhibited opinions were routinely available to the public and just as routinely annoying to his former comrades.

That the Provos and Sinn Fein found the McIntyre commentary irritating was due in part to his undeniable analytical skills and in part to his outrageously flamboyant and provocative writing style. Unrestrained by ambition for a media career or held back, as were so many able journalists, by an Establishment leaning editorial policy, he told the story as he saw it.

As a former and long serving activist, he was shocked and then angered by the disingenuousness of those leading the Sinn Fein movement. McIntyre did not disagree with ending armed struggle nor did he deny his old friends the right to plot a new course albeit one he did not support. It outraged him, however, when he realised that the republican grass roots was not being told what was happening. And what infuriated him most was the pressure, usually discrete but often forceful, placed upon those who insisted on pointing out the inconsistencies involved in setting out to smash a state and eventually settling for a part in its administration.

Whatever else may be said about him, Anthony McIntyre never succumbed to any pressure to desist from airing his views. He often cut a lonely figure as he held to frequently unpopular positions. Time after time, when no one else was prepared to challenge the received wisdom, McIntyre took his pen to make a case for the alternative. His biggest achievement may lie in the fact that he now feels sufficient work had been done that he can retire from this arena.

This collection of McIntyre’s writings should not be read as an academic analysis of the last ten years. The author was too close to the events he commented on and too committed to his subject for these essays and articles to be dispassionate or balanced, and yet this book benefits from that. The reader is getting an informed and honest view from the centre of the action at all times. There is too an intensity and a passion mixed with an amusing irreverence in McIntyre’s writing that places some of his best pieces in the rascally company of other Irish enragés such as Swift and Shaw and Behan. Some of his Sinn Fein readers probably wish that he would also join them.

— Tommy McKearney, 22 May 2008

Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!