No Minute Silence

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence - Sylvia Plath

I am deeply honoured that Ausubo Press felt strongly enough about my writings to want to put them out as a book. It is not just an acknowledgement of the effort I put in to writing them against a background of stress, ostracism and intimidation but is also recognition of those republicans who spoke to me and allowed me to bring to public attention their views and concerns.

At those times none of us were remotely concerned with books. Nor had I any desire to write one. Today, after the publication of Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, I don’t claim to have written 'a book'. At different times over the past ten years I wrote articles which evolved into a book. Perhaps it is best described as having put a book together rather than having written one.

For long I had been pressed by many in the academic and journalistic world to publish my doctoral dissertation on the formative years of the Provisional Movement. I suppose it is par for the course with PhDs. While I thought it was probably worthwhile to pursue such a venture, a number of reasons militated against it. Having become a walking footnote in the final months of my PhD in 1999, I have never yet managed to return to it. Even now the thought of having to read it again seems a chore for another day. Ultimately, I had no inclination to put the effort in that would turn it into a book.

Holding it together in a coherent and integrated manner was never the challenge, as was demonstrated by the writing of the PhD. On occasion I would produce chapters for academic publications, providing they did not take up too much of my time and the subject interested me sufficiently. There were other book offers which did appeal to me but time constraints prohibited any serious pursuit of them. On one less than memorable occasion myself and a friend started writing a history of the Northern state for a British publisher only to find that neither of us had the time to complete it within the terms of the contract.

One academic suggested that publication of the thesis would allow me to make the breakthrough into mainstream academia. Even being a close personal friend failed to assist him in understanding me, at least on that. The academic mainstream where I had many friends and colleagues had no attraction for me. Having tutored at Queens in 1994, I gratefully chalked up the experience but declined offers to do any more. Teaching was not what I wanted to do. Occasionally I would guest lecture on a masters course or deliver papers at Irish, British and European universities. Yet overall, I never longed for the conventional academic life and was mildly surprised to read in a 1994 issue of the Guardian that I sought a career in academia! It fitted the narratorial schema of the Guardian piece better than it would ever fit me. Outside of researching and procuring new knowledge which could be placed in the public domain, the centre of gravity in academia had little in the way of drawing power for me.

In a sense the choice was made for me rather than by me. Given the demands of an already pressing work schedule combined with the deep felt need to give attention to my young children, born after the completion of the PhD, I was confronted with decisions that had to be made about my time. I opted not to write books in deference to the regular churning out of short pieces that would explain events as they were happening. I informed my academic friend of this. He did not agree but remained supportive throughout.

With time to reflect I now think the decision was the correct one. While there are some great works analysing the peace process, none better than Ed Moloney’s critically reflective A Secret History of the IRA, there is a drought of critical republican voices speaking in raw event-induced tones irrigating this under-worked field; the outcome of spontaneous heated involvement rather than cold detached reflection. Were it otherwise, the idea for this book would probably not have gestated to the point of delivery. In any event it is now here and readers can make their own minds up.

The articles in it will not constitute a blockbuster but even at my most hesitant I could not deny that they were part of a blockade buster. And the blockade they helped bust was that old anti-intellectual cudgel called censorship. In spite of everything that has happened to republicanism, the element that reviled me most was the brazen censorship employed by Provisional leaders against their own republican kith and kin, equalled only by the ease with which those being led acquiesced in their own silencing. My unassailable belief in the right to express a political opinion had been forged in the crucible of Dublin’s Section 31 and London’s Broadcasting Ban. I could never reconcile myself to the notion that anyone had the right to bully another into withholding expression of their political opinion. I became steely in my determination that it would never work with me. Armed with the unstinting support of my wife and a small band of redoubtable friends, some of whom remained within the Provisional Movement, I would not be moved in the slightest by thought police, street thugs, unsolicited visits from the sinister, hectoring bullies, anonymous maligners, house picketers, ostracism, whisper weasels, vexing editors, enraged columnists, whoever. It simply did not matter. The censor, not I, would skulk away tail buried between legs.

A movement that had been the victim of state and media censorship should never have allowed itself to be become an unrelenting practitioner of the same dark art. But history is replete with examples of former revolutionaries moving from positions of seeking to expand freedom to positions of seeking, often brutally, to curb it. For this reason, although Good Friday, like other books over the past ten years, may add something to our understanding of the peace process, in many ways the classic work on that phenomenon was written long before the Provisional IRA ever formed: George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

‘as the animals look from Napoleon to Pilkington, from man to pig and from pig back to man, they find that they are unable to tell the difference.’

Revolutionaries, with a few notable exceptions, it is invariably the same with them. They promise so much, deliver so little, and end up trying to conceal the unbridgeable chasm between destination and terminus. For the Provisional Movement hiding the gap between the destination of Irish unity and the terminus of partition depended on a regime of silence. Against that backcloth the writings that went into Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, were a noisy protest that disturbed the stultifying calm.

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

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