I am a Dissident

By AM Saturday, November 20, 2010

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I am a dissident and long have been. As such, I felt Gerry McGeough displayed too much sensitivity when he took umbrage at being described in that manner by Mairtin O Muilleoir. In a widely quoted blog piece the Andersonstown Newsgroup mogul hit out at the prosecution of McGeough.

the vindictive efforts to railroad dissident republican Gerry McGeough into jail for an IRA attack carried out a lifetime ago smacks of the worst actions of securocrats. How strange that anyone who raises the slaughter of civilians by the British Army is dismissed as living in the past while enormous resources are deployed to put Gerry McGeough behind bars in connection with an incident from those same dark days. When Mr McGeough's trial starts on 1 November, don't be surprised if it collapses swiftly. All the evidence is that while paper-thin cases were sufficient to imprison republicans in the seventies along the conveyor belt of Castlereagh and courts, things have tightened up considerably since then. Let's see.

It was a gracious enough comment from O Muilleoir who had previously been mauled by McGeough during a televised debate on the policing question and who in a fit of pique may well have been tempted to let his adversary stew in a juice brewed by the forces of political policing in the North.

McGeough is hardly alone in feeling aggrieved by having the term ‘dissident’ appended to them. Marian Price, recently interviewed by Steven Nolan, said she neither understood nor welcomed the term.

The reason for McGeough being irritated – the same for Price - while generally welcoming the O Muilleoir intervention is that post-Omagh the process of marginalising any alternative republican thought acquired a new dynamic. All oppositional republicans, those implacably opposed to armed campaigning included, were lumped into one camp against which a very focused and voluble discourse developed. At its core was the term ‘dissident’ which acquired an inflection all of its own, one immersed in political violence. No longer was the dissident the heroic figure of international folklore armed only with his voice which would make itself heard above the howling winds that swirled throughout the Gulag. That image was displaced by the inarticulate disciple of violence whose only word was ‘bang.’ Disagree with Sinn Fein and you suddenly became an Omagh bomber or fellow traveller as the Sinn Fein leader once took to describing those who challenged his version of events in his own West Belfast constituency.

Sinn Fein, who encouraged such a depiction of its republican critics were not without company. The media played a substantial role, the effects of which are still with us today and which have set Gerry McGeough’s defence radar pulsating. Dissident came to be indivisible from deviant.

Yet, if someone wanted to get into a terminological war they could plausibly contend that the deviants from republicanism are to be found in Sinn Fein and not within the ranks of the dissidents. As we have seen, there is no rush in the media to refer to Sinn Fein as deviant republicans. They have been strategic in their terminological separation of good republican from bad republican.

And it has worked. But it can also be undone. On one occasion having just debated republicanism at Oxford University with Danny Morrison, I was approached by an Israeli from the audience who made the point that up until then he had no idea that that there were republican dissidents who not only dissented from the peace process but also from the use of force as a means of dealing with the problems of the peace process.

The O Muilleoir comment did not strike me as specifically designed to label McGeough an advocate of armed force. Now, it may well be that O Muilleoir didn't have to explicitly associate Gerry McGeough with republican political violence. Because there is an unspoken assumption flowing from the term 'dissident' the damage can be inflicted by mere dint of its usage. One word instantly leads to word association without the need to mention another word: dissident equates with armed republicanism.

The framing of the issue shows how words and terms are fought over in the same way that territory is in a physical battle. Language is used to position and confer or deny legitimacy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with dissenting from the political arrangements in the North. Republicans were long dissidents in that respect.

A republican in Ireland today is by definition dissident. Republicans dissent from British rule rather than seek to bolster up its administration. Dissident republican – wear it like a badge.