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.
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!
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!
Joe Graham, Davy Carlin, Malachi O Doherty, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Richard English weigh in on Good Friday. "A fascinating insight into politics in the six north eastern counties of Ireland, some times referred to as "Northern Ireland". There is perhaps no better person to write about the death of republicanism through the post "Good Friday" agreement than Anthony McIntyre, a man who courageously voiced his opinion throughout, and in the face of, many threats directed against him and his family. To not have this book on your "Irish" book shelf is to have an incomplete understanding of The Belfast Agreement, alias, "The Good Friday Agreement"."
- Joe Graham, Rushlight Magazine and author of Show Me The Man
"McIntryre’s writing and vision over the last decade of the Irish Peace process, indeed puts him up there with the likes of Swift, Shaw and Behan, as stated.
In addition to that, McIntyre was key to facilitating debate and discussion at this time when others attempted, and succeeded on many occasions, in closing down any alternative view or dissent from a particular line.
McIntyre’s understanding through his writing of what was to come to pass long before it had happened had made both him a target for those who had shouted Never Never, and those who had wanted a lid kept on the fact that it was actually happening.
And through all of that, he and others had stood their ground on that understanding, while providing and protecting a platform for many alternative views, and those wishing to express them.
And whether he agreed or not with such views, he and The Blanket nevertheless supported the right for them to be aired, discussed and debated.
This book will be essential reading, as had been The Blanket site, for those looking a fuller understanding of the Irish Peace process, and what that had taken it there."
- Davy Carlin
Belfast
"I have been familiar with Anthony McIntyre's journalism for many years. Though I am not a republican I have been struck by the integrity and insight of his writing. Anthony McIntyre was right when many were wrong, for instance when he confidently predicted that the IRA would disarm, even while the IRA leadership was saying it would not.
His own position is that the republican movement has betrayed its historic cause. He is right in that, though this is hardly a matter of great sadness to those who did not endorse that cause.
There is a human aspect to this too, that even an outsider can acknowledge; Anthony was one of those armed by the IRA and urged to kill others in the pursuit of political goals that have proven unattainable. With the political compromises, he is entitled to ask: what was it for? He is entitled to feel that his bloody investment in a Republic has been betrayed. He is entitled to marvel that those who armed him can now deny that they had ever played a part in the IRA campaign and have built political respectability for themselves on that lie.
For historians and other journalists, the writings of Anthony McIntyre are an invaluable resource. Here we have the counter record of republican peace processing, the cynical view from the inside. No future histories of the period and the process will have any credibility if they don't draw on it."
- Malachi O Doherty is the author of four books on Irish political and cultural issues; the latest of which is Empty Pulpits: Ireland's Retreat from Religion (Gill and Macmillan).
"Although Anthony McIntyre and I are poles apart politically, I admire his fine, incisive, honest and brave journalism. Anyone who truly wants to understand the underbelly of the Irish peace process should read Good Friday."
- Ruth Dudley Edwards, journalist
"Highly intelligent, honest and original. McIntyre's book should be read by anyone with an interest in modern Irish republicanism."
- Richard English, author of Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA
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!
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!
Back home a week now, gazing out the living room window at the driving Irish rain I forlornly ponder that different worlds are separated by nothing other than 2 hours flight time. Last Sunday morning as I viewed the mizzle enveloping the street in front of me I was still trying to take it in that less than 48 hours earlier I had been swimming in the Mediterranean with my wife and two children. At such moments I recall Tommy Gorman’s summation of the Irish weather – summer is on a Thursday this year. The Coast of Mallorca is an ideal spot for stepping into warm seas. 8 years ago in the same spot myself and Sav, a friend from Ballymurphy, were being plucked from the Med having failed to land in the designated area while paragliding. We were probably less than sober and indifferent to our bad directional skills. It was he who, in an act of good judgement, introduced me to Mallorca as a holiday destination. Then my wife was around four months pregnant with our daughter. Now to watch the same daughter followed by her younger brother leap into the sea is an experience to be savoured.
Initially booked into apartments in Santa Ponsa, we stayed six days before moving onto Palma Nova. Santa Ponsa is hilly. Its narrow footpaths coupled with the speed of the motorised vehicles keeps parents of younger children constantly on their guard. Where we stayed there was little in the way of shade and the English language seems to be the only officially approved tongue in the resort for holiday makers. The joy of swapping sandy beaches for our four green fields is instantly doused by the sense that there must be no one left back in Ireland. The population of 5 million seems to have been lifted en masse and crammed into Santa Ponsa. Even the Spanish waiters have managed to acquire Dublin accents, having become naturalised denizen of Bally Ponsa.
Not being a culture vulture I have no problems with English as a spoken language. I am a creature of convenience: common currency, common language, both a useful foil against the tourist’s nightmare – chaos. But on holiday it is more exotic to hear something other than Dublin or Belfast brogues. Palma Nova fitted the bill. My wife took a taxi up to check the place out before we decided on making the switch.
Before setting out she trawled the net in search of more information. The chief complaint seemed to come from English people who griped that the hotel we were considering moving to had too much shade around the pool. Moreover, the food was served up with a French palate in mind. And, of course, the place was overrun by French and German people. That pointed to one conclusion – all the more reason to go. When we arrived there was only one downside; the apartments across the street from our hotel housed the English and they were only too eager to announce their presence via bullhorn and tuneless football chants accompanied by idiotic roars. The only prompt they needed was an urge to be heard or noticed. Where we stayed, to the polite resonance of merci and bonjour, it was, as the French might say, ‘magnifique’.
We are hardly strangers to Spain, although we are more inclined to locations other than resorts. Children and resorts, however, seem to hit it off so with them in mind choice of location is restricted. Toward the close of 2000 my wife and I spent almost a week in Madrid. It was a beautiful city and by late October the sun god has reclined having sated itself on the burnt skin offerings proffered to it as obeisance during the summer months. Paradoxically, despite all that is said about its heat, Spain also provides me with a memory of my coldest experience. Zaragoza in November was so bitterly cold I kept asking my Spanish friend if he was sure it was part of the same country which housed Madrid and Segovia.
Still, the Spanish weather does not suit me. I don’t do that type of heat well. The humidity is the problem and it always seems to be invigorated rather than suppressed by the quaffing of beer. The weather in Ireland is more to my liking, even with its propensity for rain. When dry the Irish weather is unobtrusive, unlike Spain where its presence cannot be ignored. My daughter’s one complaint about Mallorca was simple – ‘too warm.’ My wife being from California had no bother with it.
Now back home, the place that only two weeks ago we were so eager to escape seems not just as drudging – even with its interminable rain.
The reviews are coming in. Here is Liam Clarke, writing in today's Sunday Times.
Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
From The Sunday Times
August 10, 2008
Liam Clarke: Why the IRA lost its long and futile battle
They weren’t a response to the British being in Ireland, but to how the British behaved there.
Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney must be closet astrologers, as their timing defies explanation. Moloney brought out his updated biography of Ian Paisley just a few days before the big man announced his retirement. Moloney joked at the time: “He called and asked me, ‘When would suit you?’ ”
Last week McIntyre trumped him with a tome entitled The Death of Irish Republicanism, published as the Irish and British governments commissioned a report from the International Monitoring Commission (IMC), designed to ascertain if the IRA army council is still in existence. The fact that they need to ask, and need three weeks to consider the evidence and weigh up the reported sightings, speaks for itself.
A few years ago, the two governments wouldn’t have needed to ponder these things. A steady stream of bombings, shootings and attacks would have reminded them of the continued existence of the organisation — one that for 30 years was the greatest single threat to the security of the British state.
McIntyre, a former IRA commander who served 18 years for murder and then did a PhD in republican history, is right. The Provisional IRA — and the army council that plotted its campaign — is on its death bed. It may thrash around like a headless chicken for a few years, but it is past reviving. If the IRA ever re-emerges, it will be a new organisation with new people.
Nowadays, senior police officers such as assistant chief constable Peter Sheridan, the PSNI officer in charge of intelligence and analysis, believe the council is still around but seldom meets, and is no longer replacing members who leave. As Martin McGuinness put it on Wednesday: “The IRA have clearly gone off the stage since 2005, but attempts are still made by some people to drag them back on, and I think that’s silly.”
Sinn Fein is currently marketing a T-shirt with a rising phoenix symbolising the IRA, and the slogan: “1968-2008 The Struggle Continues”. The message is inescapable: give or take a few months, this marks the lifespan of the Provisional IRA.
Former members such as McIntyre are left to count the cost. He points out that the organisation is shuffling off the stage and into history without achieving any of its objectives. “The public stance was that, in Charlie Haughey’s phrase, Northern Ireland was a ‘failed political entity’, but the Provos proved the Northern Ireland state was, in fact, a viable entity. It was the Provisional project that wasn’t viable,” he says.
McIntyre’s book is a collection of articles he wrote between the signing of the Good Friday Agreement — which he says was fatal to the republican project — and 2007. A fascinating chronicle, it is full of interviews with former prisoners, political insights and aphorisms.
“Republicanism is effectively dead. It is dead as a strategy that can deliver anything. It can’t cope with the principle of consent, it can’t out-manoeuvre it and it can’t overcome it, so it has had to reconcile itself with the British ground rules,” he told me. “Republicanism is just an aspiration — that’s what it has been reduced to. Although there are still republicans, we are just the survivors of the wreck.”
In retrospect, McIntyre believes that the Provisional IRA, founded in 1969, bore signs of compromise from the start. He found that older republicans, the pre-69ers, were “amazed and disappointed at the people joining”, and said that the Provos were “a completely different phenomenon from anything that was continued from 1916”.
I was reminded of the words of Peadar O’Donnell in the 1920s: “We don’t have an IRA battalion in Belfast, we have a battalion of armed Catholics.” McIntyre argues that the IRA was mainly a northern phenomenon, and not ideologically purist. “They weren’t a response to the British being in Ireland, but a response to how the British behaved there. All the British needed to do to end the campaign was to change their behaviour. But they didn’t have to leave to get a deal.”
This is an analysis borne out by the sales blurb for the T-shirt, which talks of “the struggle from the days of the civil rights movement to the present,” but never mentions British withdrawal.
McIntyre’s analysis of the role of informers and collaborators and their role in steering the republican struggle has a savagely satirical edge. Take the case of Freddie Scappatticci, the IRA’s head of internal security, who was exposed as a British military intelligence agent in 2003. “Did he not hanker after the very things the leadership sought? Affluence, a house in another jurisdiction, divesting the IRA of its guns, and its ultimate dissolution?” McIntyre asks. “Freddie Scappaticci should not be killed; he should be on the Sinn Fein negotiating team,” he suggests.
McIntyre believes Scappattici’s role was to shorten the campaign by making the IRA’s military option redundant. This, he believes, forced the Provisionals back onto Gerry Adams’s political strategy, which was being pushed forward with the help of agents such as Denis Donaldson in Sinn Fein. McIntyre argues convincingly that the British army, MI5 and the RUC Special Branch used their extensive network of agents within the loyalist paramilitaries to protect key republicans. Security from attack or arrest was, he believes, one of several incentives for republicans to “smile” for the intelligence agencies.
“The biggest risk factor for the organisation was ex-prisoners not prepared to return to prison. For others, such as Sinn Fein activists with a public profile, the threat of assassination by loyalists was a constant on their minds. One sure way to retain their profile, minus the risk, was to work for the British.”
It brought to mind the words of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, who wrote key passages of Gerry Adams’s speech for one Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. Powell glowed with pride: “It was a bit like watching your children graduate from college; you thought, ‘fantastic’. Now they’re free, now they’ve done it, and they’re on their own.”
McIntyre paints a picture of a republican leadership who were reformists from the outset, being secretly protected, groomed and eventually steered into Stormont by the British forces they claimed to be fighting. All the while, a supine membership cheered them on from the sidelines, easily fooled by symbolism and rhetoric.
McIntyre’s analysis is acute, and informed by deeply felt republican convictions. But, as he has already observed, republicanism is now dead as a practical strategy and survives only as a critique and an ideal.
In the real world, what would have been the alternative to winding up the IRA and settling for the reform of the northern state, with Irish unity reduced to a long-term aspiration? What would have been the alternative to accepting the principle of consent enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement?
To his credit, McIntyre doesn’t dodge this awkward dilemma: “The major question historians will ask is not why the republicans surrendered, but why they fought such a futile long war,” he writes. “It has not been unconditional surrender. And it has been infinitely better than continuing to fight a futile war for the sake of honouring Ireland’s dead, yet producing only more of them. But let us not labour under any illusions that the conditions were good.”
That may indeed be the verdict of history on the Provisional IRA.
Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism From The Sunday Times
August 10, 2008
Liam Clarke: Why the IRA lost its long and futile battle
They weren’t a response to the British being in Ireland, but to how the British behaved there.
Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney must be closet astrologers, as their timing defies explanation. Moloney brought out his updated biography of Ian Paisley just a few days before the big man announced his retirement. Moloney joked at the time: “He called and asked me, ‘When would suit you?’ ”
Last week McIntyre trumped him with a tome entitled The Death of Irish Republicanism, published as the Irish and British governments commissioned a report from the International Monitoring Commission (IMC), designed to ascertain if the IRA army council is still in existence. The fact that they need to ask, and need three weeks to consider the evidence and weigh up the reported sightings, speaks for itself.
A few years ago, the two governments wouldn’t have needed to ponder these things. A steady stream of bombings, shootings and attacks would have reminded them of the continued existence of the organisation — one that for 30 years was the greatest single threat to the security of the British state.
McIntyre, a former IRA commander who served 18 years for murder and then did a PhD in republican history, is right. The Provisional IRA — and the army council that plotted its campaign — is on its death bed. It may thrash around like a headless chicken for a few years, but it is past reviving. If the IRA ever re-emerges, it will be a new organisation with new people.
Nowadays, senior police officers such as assistant chief constable Peter Sheridan, the PSNI officer in charge of intelligence and analysis, believe the council is still around but seldom meets, and is no longer replacing members who leave. As Martin McGuinness put it on Wednesday: “The IRA have clearly gone off the stage since 2005, but attempts are still made by some people to drag them back on, and I think that’s silly.”
Sinn Fein is currently marketing a T-shirt with a rising phoenix symbolising the IRA, and the slogan: “1968-2008 The Struggle Continues”. The message is inescapable: give or take a few months, this marks the lifespan of the Provisional IRA.
Former members such as McIntyre are left to count the cost. He points out that the organisation is shuffling off the stage and into history without achieving any of its objectives. “The public stance was that, in Charlie Haughey’s phrase, Northern Ireland was a ‘failed political entity’, but the Provos proved the Northern Ireland state was, in fact, a viable entity. It was the Provisional project that wasn’t viable,” he says.
McIntyre’s book is a collection of articles he wrote between the signing of the Good Friday Agreement — which he says was fatal to the republican project — and 2007. A fascinating chronicle, it is full of interviews with former prisoners, political insights and aphorisms.
“Republicanism is effectively dead. It is dead as a strategy that can deliver anything. It can’t cope with the principle of consent, it can’t out-manoeuvre it and it can’t overcome it, so it has had to reconcile itself with the British ground rules,” he told me. “Republicanism is just an aspiration — that’s what it has been reduced to. Although there are still republicans, we are just the survivors of the wreck.”
In retrospect, McIntyre believes that the Provisional IRA, founded in 1969, bore signs of compromise from the start. He found that older republicans, the pre-69ers, were “amazed and disappointed at the people joining”, and said that the Provos were “a completely different phenomenon from anything that was continued from 1916”.
I was reminded of the words of Peadar O’Donnell in the 1920s: “We don’t have an IRA battalion in Belfast, we have a battalion of armed Catholics.” McIntyre argues that the IRA was mainly a northern phenomenon, and not ideologically purist. “They weren’t a response to the British being in Ireland, but a response to how the British behaved there. All the British needed to do to end the campaign was to change their behaviour. But they didn’t have to leave to get a deal.”
This is an analysis borne out by the sales blurb for the T-shirt, which talks of “the struggle from the days of the civil rights movement to the present,” but never mentions British withdrawal.
McIntyre’s analysis of the role of informers and collaborators and their role in steering the republican struggle has a savagely satirical edge. Take the case of Freddie Scappatticci, the IRA’s head of internal security, who was exposed as a British military intelligence agent in 2003. “Did he not hanker after the very things the leadership sought? Affluence, a house in another jurisdiction, divesting the IRA of its guns, and its ultimate dissolution?” McIntyre asks. “Freddie Scappaticci should not be killed; he should be on the Sinn Fein negotiating team,” he suggests.
McIntyre believes Scappattici’s role was to shorten the campaign by making the IRA’s military option redundant. This, he believes, forced the Provisionals back onto Gerry Adams’s political strategy, which was being pushed forward with the help of agents such as Denis Donaldson in Sinn Fein. McIntyre argues convincingly that the British army, MI5 and the RUC Special Branch used their extensive network of agents within the loyalist paramilitaries to protect key republicans. Security from attack or arrest was, he believes, one of several incentives for republicans to “smile” for the intelligence agencies.
“The biggest risk factor for the organisation was ex-prisoners not prepared to return to prison. For others, such as Sinn Fein activists with a public profile, the threat of assassination by loyalists was a constant on their minds. One sure way to retain their profile, minus the risk, was to work for the British.”
It brought to mind the words of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, who wrote key passages of Gerry Adams’s speech for one Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. Powell glowed with pride: “It was a bit like watching your children graduate from college; you thought, ‘fantastic’. Now they’re free, now they’ve done it, and they’re on their own.”
McIntyre paints a picture of a republican leadership who were reformists from the outset, being secretly protected, groomed and eventually steered into Stormont by the British forces they claimed to be fighting. All the while, a supine membership cheered them on from the sidelines, easily fooled by symbolism and rhetoric.
McIntyre’s analysis is acute, and informed by deeply felt republican convictions. But, as he has already observed, republicanism is now dead as a practical strategy and survives only as a critique and an ideal.
In the real world, what would have been the alternative to winding up the IRA and settling for the reform of the northern state, with Irish unity reduced to a long-term aspiration? What would have been the alternative to accepting the principle of consent enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement?
To his credit, McIntyre doesn’t dodge this awkward dilemma: “The major question historians will ask is not why the republicans surrendered, but why they fought such a futile long war,” he writes. “It has not been unconditional surrender. And it has been infinitely better than continuing to fight a futile war for the sake of honouring Ireland’s dead, yet producing only more of them. But let us not labour under any illusions that the conditions were good.”
That may indeed be the verdict of history on the Provisional IRA.
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!
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!
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!
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!
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