Agreed Ireland Revisionism

By AM Tuesday, June 4, 2013

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Sean Bresnahan guest writes a piece that examines the thinking behind the 'agreed Ireland' concept that has reemerged in Sinn Fein discourse.

Seanna Walsh stated just the other night on the BBC's 'The View' that the Hunger strikers died for an 'agreed Ireland', the phraseology here being reminiscent of the vagary of language used to coax the republican rank and file down the road that eventually led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and used to present this Agreement itself as some form of successful outcome to the long war that preceded it.


As someone who was involved in the Blanket Protest and endured all the hardship of H-Block then to the casual observer his would be an authoritative voice here. But the question surely arises did Bobby Sands and his nine comrades really die for this agreed Ireland Seanna speaks of, presumably represented by the negotiated, agreed settlement best known as the Good Friday Agreement, or is this a revisionist attempt by Sinn Fein to paint out the reality that what they do and represent today has little semblance to what they stood for all through the course of the Troubles and indeed at the time of the 1981 Hunger strikes?

In essence we're asking then just what was the Provisional campaign all about and to what extent can the current political process to which its leadership now subscribes in any way be described as a victory for that same campaign? It's fair to say that the republican movement in its most recent guise drew much of its political dynamic and sustenance from the grievances of the northern Catholic community, even though the movement itself was the profession of a higher, historical purpose deriving from the ideal of national liberation? But was the Provisional campaign then about achieving rights denied or were we striving to achieve a wholly different and new republic?

Republicanism has historically been about breaking the political connection with Britain, held to be an occupying colonial power, in order to establish a democratic and radical republic on this island. It has always been considered that the prerequisite of any such a republic would be national liberation and it is to both of these objects that republicans, both historically and in the context of the Provisionals in the most recent stage of the Irish struggle, set about the pursuit of their aims and goals.

The sine qua non for establishing the Republic then has always been held as the expulsion of the foreign, colonial, imperial, monarchistic power. As Tommy McKearney once told me many years ago you can't build from the ground up without demolishing the old building, you can only renovate and refurbish what's already there. In layman's terms the Brits had to go and this was the starting point of all that we hoped to achieve. Although the dynamic was not purely 'Brits Out' a British withdrawal was still held to be the determining, transformative action required for the establishment of true social and economic justice consistent with the ideals of Irish republicanism as historically understood and held to be the guiding principles of the Democratic Republic itself.

The politics of the Provisional movement today stand in complete contradiction to almost everything it represented prior to the ceasefires.The entire thrust of the movement, while yes addressing the socio-economic discrimination ranged against the Catholic community in the north, was about abolishing the partition system and replacing it with the Democratic Republic. It was only in this context that social and economic injustice could be overcome and not by acceptance and reform of the northern state, the latter position long being that of the SDLP who indeed were demonised for this very assertion.

Fundamental to Provisional thinking was the notion that a minority on the island who formed a majority within the occupied state should not be allowed to dictate the constitutional arrangements for all of the country, this was held to be anathema in terms of what the Provisionals were all about and indeed this was one of the defining arguments used to rationalise the war. Calls today for a border poll, a mechanism internal to the six-counties which does not consider the legitimate opinion of all on the island of Ireland, are inconsistent with the republican struggle and indeed Mitchell McLaughlin's canny acknowledgement that Sinn Fein would accept the legitimacy of the result of any such internal border poll demonstrates clearly how far Sinn Fein have moved from their original position. For the Provo's just such a move on republicanism's part was held as heresy, indeed in some quarters it was considered as treachery. Yet Sinn Fein in the cold light of day has now come to accept and to operate a policy that holds a once artificial majority now as legitimate and has at its crux the notion that they can transform the status quo by reforming it. Their presence at the heart of the Northern Ireland administration at Stormont demonstrates that unequivocally.

They have come to accept the legitimacy of the status quo, albeit are formed, 'agreed' version of that status quo, and believe that by recognising it and participating in it, indeed by propping it up, that they can somehow bring about its demise.

It's fair to say that Seanna Walsh and the party he represents are attempting to subvert the historical narrative of the armed struggle to suit their own purposes, tailoring that history to provide some form of positive outcome for the Provisional campaign by placing it in the context of a struggle related primarily to the position and empowerment of the minority Catholic community within the six-counties as opposed to an uprising against and for the ending of the very occupation itself. This revisionism helps disguise the ultimate defeat of the Provisional movement and how it came to accept what amounts to an internal settlement, accommodating themselves to the parliamentary status quo - albeit as we hear it referred to now as an agreed settlement, an agreed Ireland. Agreed Ireland or not it remains the status quo and as such is contrary to republican principles.

In truth now the Sinn Fein party is no longer working to a republican agenda, they are basically constitutional nationalists, an establishment party ultimately no different to SDLP, Fianna Fáil or even Fine Gael, firmly within the constitutional consensus. All this amounts to not only a strategic aberration but more importantly a complete ideological break with the past. Britain has largely achieved its aims in Ireland with this settlement, that this necessitated co-opting their sworn enemy is inconsequential to them. Ireland - north and south - is nothing but that same province of the British empire that it has been for centuries. This was certainly not what those who gave their life's blood in the cause of Ireland set out to achieve, the Hunger strikers did not die for an agreed Ireland in which Britain remains boss and sovereignty remains denied.

All-in-all, while Seanna Walsh and the movement to which he belongs once spearheaded what we can define as the republican struggle, it's fair to say that they do so no longer. The goals they set out to achieve have been abandoned to compromise, to a place within the enemy British system they set out to destroy. There can be no consistency between what Irish republicanism has stood for down through the years and what we witness up at Stormont today - administering British rule can in no way be dressed up as a victory and the attainment of what the Hunger strikers, and yes indeed Seanna Walsh himself, set out to achieve, to what they dedicated their hearts and minds to when they joined the Republican Movement and set about the freedom of their land. As far as I'm concerned that's not up for debate, that history, try as they may, can never be re-written.

Bobby Sands famously declared:

there can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign, oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically. 

We have a long way to go before this man's ideals, aims and objectives can be said to have been achieved, for such things can only be found in the sovereign, democratic, and re-unified republic he fought and died for.