From Insurrection To Parliament

By AM Wednesday, February 15, 2012

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Northern Ireland’s ‘Orange State’, a durable term inserted into the political lexicon by the author Michael Farrell, is a core theme of this recent book on the Provisional IRA. Written by one of the guerrilla group’s most astute former members, Tommy McKearney, the work seeks both to explain the origins of the Provisional IRA’s campaign and assess its impact. This is no kid glove appraisal of the subject matter but a bare knuckle analysis conducted with the mind and eye of one who both participated and observed.   

While more than a few veterans of the armed struggle view the IRA campaign as an unmitigated failure in that it achieved nothing of the traditionally stated republican goals, McKearney however is a calibrated evaluator. The collapse of the Orange State, which with analytical significance he dates much later than the 1972 collapse of unionist political rule, he considers a significant strategic achievement of the IRA campaign. It also allows him to explain its longevity, which has baffled other observers given that the IRA ended its war in exchange for terms it had previously rejected in 1974.

Any acknowledgement McKearney might give to the IRA campaign for having dismantled the Orange State is quickly tempered by the assertion that in its place a new sectarian state has emerged which oversees a sectarian society as deeply polarised, if not more so, than previously. The work is scathing of Sinn Fein’s de facto acquiescence in the application of neo liberal economic orthodoxy and its endorsement of establishment politics, describing the Provisional IRA’s move ‘away from the radical anti-establishment world out of which they had arisen.’

Once cited approvingly by a serving Taoiseach for having argued that republicanism must be uncompromisingly democratic, McKearney neither hand-wrings nor absolves himself of responsibility for the IRA’s actions. Self- alienated from all strands of physical force republicanism he maintains his intellectual honesty by identifying, in measured fashion, with the IRA campaign, feeling that it was an unavoidable insurrectionary response to repression for which there was no peaceful remedy. The British state lacked both the structural capacity and political will to compel a just outcome that would have foreclosed the use of nationalist armed violence to redress the North’s democratic deficit. 

Crucially McKearney argues that the rise of the Provisional IRA was by no means inevitable. Alternative British state strategies, available but not given due consideration, that did not include a withdrawal from the North, could have prevented the costly political violence that was to follow direct British military intervention in 1969.

As the book contends, what made the Provisional IRA an appealing option was its arrival on the scene equipped with a readymade plan of action which matched the temper of the time. Given the close alignment between unionism and the British state, nationalists whose horizons expanded no further than the reform of Northern Ireland were susceptible to the IRA logic that such reform could only be achieved through separatism and the total rupturing of British state power which was considered as a life support machine for unionism.

There remains room for the author to make explicit the relationship between dynamics and strategy. McKearney persuasively makes the case that the energy behind the Northern nationalist insurrection, despite being spearheaded by the IRA, was limited to being against repression rather than being for a united Ireland. Analytically, however, the scrutinised should be denied the latitude to fashion virtue from necessity. While the Provisional IRA settled for a reformist internal solution to the problems of the North of Ireland, the bulk of the evidence thus far is that it waged a revolutionary long war to prevent any such outcome. It managed its defeat rather than avoided it, and the dismantling of the Orange State should be assessed in that light.

McKearney’s proposals for a way forward will not be greeted with enthusiasm by many of his former colleagues opposed to Sinn Fein. The Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the national question ‘for most of the island’s population’ and the demise of the Orange State; the constitutional issue has been ‘resolved.’ Armed republicans who persist with political violence are an ‘anachronistic irrelevance.’ McKearney feels that the only strategic space left open to republicanism in the North is to make common cause with progressive tendencies within the Unionist working class. While this remains outside the loop of current oppositional republican thinking, McKearney is determined to argue for real power sharing at grass roots level rather than the power splitting charade that currently operates within the Northern executive.

While maintaining that partition remains an important issue and simultaneously calling for a socialist republic, the Left perspective of McKearney would at the current juncture see greater strategic potential in resisting ‘the City of London’ rather than British rule per se. 

Tommy McKearney, 2011, The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament. Pluto: London.