I’d like to thank everyone for coming today to honour the memory of IRA Volunteer George McBrearty, who was killed in action by the British forces of occupation on this day forty-two years ago. We also remember his comrade Volunteer Charles ‘Pop’ Maguire, who died at his side, and all the men and women who sacrificed their lives for the complete freedom of Ireland. I’d also like to thank Danny McBrearty and the McBrearty family for the honour of inviting me to speak today.
What does it mean to be an Irish republican? When George McBrearty was killed in action in May 1981, we all knew what it meant. We may have articulated it differently, but IRA volunteers understood what was meant by ‘the Republic.’ It is Ireland unfettered by foreign control or domestic divisions cultivated by the foreigner. It does not defer to Britain for terms and conditions regarding its unity and independence. The Republic is a thirty-two-county sovereign and secular democracy to which Irish citizens of all traditions give allegiance. It stands for freedom, social justice, and national unity across the sectarian divide.
We knew what it didn’t mean:
🔴 It didn’t mean pretending that the British government supports the principle of consent, a principle they never granted Ireland as a whole.
🔴 It didn’t mean there was a democratic alternative to an artificial statelet gerrymandered specifically to deny Ireland the right to national self-determination.
🔴It didn’t mean recognising that British Crown forces retained a sole monopoly on the right to bear arms and the lawful use of force.
🔴 And it certainly didn’t mean attending the coronation of the Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute Regiment as he was crowned king of Derry, West Belfast, East Tyrone, South Armagh, and other parts of British-occupied Ireland.
🔴 It didn’t mean there was a democratic alternative to an artificial statelet gerrymandered specifically to deny Ireland the right to national self-determination.
🔴It didn’t mean recognising that British Crown forces retained a sole monopoly on the right to bear arms and the lawful use of force.
🔴 And it certainly didn’t mean attending the coronation of the Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute Regiment as he was crowned king of Derry, West Belfast, East Tyrone, South Armagh, and other parts of British-occupied Ireland.
The holy grail of the British conquest of Ireland has always been about achieving democratic title to its authority. As early as 1799, Undersecretary Edward Cooke wrote to British Prime Minister William Pitt regarding concerns about Irish MPs swamping the House of Commons should the Acts of Union be approved:
By giving the Irish a hundred members in an Assembly of six hundred and fifty they will be impotent to operate upon that Assembly, but it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority.
Achieving Irish assent to British authority remains at the core of Britain’s strategy in Ireland. It has dominated their thinking since British Prime Minister William Gladstone first jettisoned his Liberal Party’s hostility toward Irish Home Rule and embraced it as a buffer between Irish independence and British sovereignty. Irish nationalists who will work through British law to implement British strategy can always be found. As James Connolly pointed out in 1915:
When a foreign invader plants himself in a country which he holds by military force his only hope of retaining his grasp is either that he wins the loyalty of the natives, or if he fails to do so that he corrupts enough of them to enable him to disorganise and dishearten the remainder . . . The chief method of corruption is by an appeal to self-interest.
The degree to which Britain succeeded in nurturing a loyal nationalist leadership can be seen in the Irish Parliamentary Party’s policy of harnessing Ireland to England’s war chariot in 1914 and John Redmond’s description of the 1916 rising as treason against the Irish people.
New Sinn Féin has joined the SDLP as an inheritor of this legacy. Both parties fuel the Redmondite renaissance in the Six Counties, which internalises British constitutional constraints and conditions on Irish democracy. More than that, they have rewritten and redefined the very concept of Irish unity to converge with Britain’s analysis of the nature of the conflict and Britain’s strategy to resolve it.
Wolfe Tone, the founding father of Irish republicanism, formed the United Irishmen not to unite Ireland - Ireland wasn’t partitioned at the time - but to unite Irishmen. Tone’s plea to embrace national unity across the sectarian divide was echoed over a century later by the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation calling for us to be . . . ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.’ The signatories were not claiming these differences did not exist, nor were they saying they could be dismissed as irrelevant. They were saying that these differences should not be used to shape the political architecture of Ireland.
In contrast, those who support the Good Friday Agreement are determined that these differences will be permanently embedded in our national fabric. Wolfe Tone sought to unite the many to defeat the few. British policy is to divide the many so they can shape the strategic environment to defend the few who protect their interests.
It is ironic that so many nationalists claim to be republican, yet republicanism has few advocates among nationalist politicians and thought leaders. When reading accounts of the negotiations around the Good Friday Agreement, I am struck by the degree to which Irish government officials recognised the absolute and legitimate right of the British government to rule this part of our country. They endorsed the view that Dublin’s constitutional claim to the Six Counties was archaic and aggressive. It is instructive that transforming this claim from a legal imperative to a notional aspiration was the only binding constitutional change required by the Good Friday Agreement.
The ‘Little Irelanders’ of Dublin’s political establishment who believe Ireland is Ireland without the Six Counties are forced by events beyond their control, such as Brexit and the prospect that the unionist population in the North may one day dwindle to an unsustainable level, to consider the prospect of a political alliance with Ulster unionists whom they perceive as ‘British Irelanders’. In their view, ‘Little Ireland’ plus ‘British Ireland’ equals a ‘Shared Island.’ Of course, we must bear in mind that their state had been legislated into existence and armed by the British to fight the IRA. Its officials are a product of that counter-republican culture and partitionist mindset. The model of a national democracy within an all-Ireland republic is not on their radar.
Ulster Unionists don’t have an issue with a united Ireland per se. They lived in a united Ireland for three hundred years. England treated our country as a single political unit for eight centuries. The Orange Order is an all-Ireland institution. The Presbyterian and Methodist churches are all-Ireland ministries. And, of course, the Church of Ireland is not the Church of Northern Ireland. Their real objection is to the threat posed to their artificial majority by a 32-County electorate. An Irish republic rooted in non-sectarianism and civic equality holds no allure for a mindset devoted to the sectarian dynamic England imposed on Ireland. Recognising that is one thing; pandering to it by forsaking our republican principles is another.
We must not be seduced by the false narrative that the British/Irish cleavage in national loyalties should be embraced for the sake of peace. It must be ended for the sake of peace, and the first step is ending British jurisdiction in Ireland. Until then, we cannot begin to repair the damage done to our national cohesion. In the meantime, Britain will continue to encourage, manipulate, and co-opt as many Irish citizens as possible into becoming willing accomplices in Ireland’s constitutional division along broadly sectarian lines.
Ulster unionists are pro-British for deep historical reasons that cannot be glibly dismissed, but they are not the British presence and must not be made so. The British presence is the presence of Britain’s jurisdictional claim to Ireland and the civil and military apparatus that gives that effect.
When we speak of reaching out to unionists, the republican thing to do is to reach out to them as fellow citizens and not as foreign citizens who happen to live here. Foreigners are born in another country. The vast majority of Ulster Unionists were born in Ireland. They must not be treated as the civil garrison of an alien state. That is not pluralism, that is submitting to the social and political modelling of colonial conquest.
Having had the opportunity to travel around Ireland in the past year, I have spoken to many supporters of New Sinn Féin and have been struck by the sheer scale of mission drift among them. How did a republic of citizens united in equality across the sectarian divide morph into a united Ireland where Ulster unionists are deemed to be the British presence? How did the one-nation Republic of 1798 become the two-nations Agreement of 1998? How has the British counter-insurgency machine so thoroughly changed the narrative and co-opted so many former republicans to its policy of validating and perpetuating the civic disunion of Irishmen and women in the deferred hope of achieving territorial unity in some vague and distant future determined exclusively by Britain?
For many Shinners in the South, the primary motivation behind their policy of any office at any price seems to be to stick it to the Staters and sicken the Blueshirts. I heard this quoted repeatedly. For many in the North, the focus is on putting it up to the DUP. Unfortunately, this has encouraged New Sinn Féin to become mesmerised by a compulsion to become formidable to everyone but the enemy. The principal opponent of northern nationalism may well be unionism, but the enemy of an Irish republican is the union.
Unionists did not partition Ireland - England did. It did so for deeper and far more strategic reasons than the refusal of a national minority in six Irish counties to become citizens of an independent republic. England’s conquest of Ireland began centuries before the Ulster plantations. It doesn’t care about unionists beyond their utility as a bulwark against the evolution of a united Irish identity. What England does care about is maintaining a significant influence in that substantial landmass on her western flank. The Brits will form alliances and build the political prestige of the leadership of any community who will help them pacify, normalise and stabilise the status quo. Relentlessly claiming to be an Irish republican while on the British government payroll and implementing a British strategy calculated to sustain the sectarian dynamic in any future constitutional arrangement is absurd. There is nothing new in the so-called ‘New’ Ireland. It is predicated on all the old divisions.
Thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, the future of the Northern state rests securely in a political and legal framework of terms and conditions comprehensively safeguarded within an intricate web of constitutional constraints that only Britain can interpret and adjudicate. No Irish citizen, elected or otherwise, can call an Irish unity poll in Ireland. That decision lies firmly in the hands of an English politician who doesn’t have a single vote in Ireland. In court cases taken over the Brexit issue, both the Belfast High Court in October 2016 and the UK Supreme Court in January 2017 confirmed that it is Westminster parliamentary supremacy and not the will of an Irish electorate that reigns supreme in the Six Counties.
Britain may not always be able to rule Ireland directly, but with the help of an enduring civic division, it can prevent us from harmoniously ruling ourselves. The British will retain enormous influence in the internal affairs of this country if given a mandate to represent citizens from the Ulster unionist tradition in the ludicrously named ‘New’ Ireland. London can live with a united Ireland within the British Commonwealth and NATO. It will not tolerate a sovereign Republic immune to its influence. A Republic that places the welfare of the Irish people above the strategic interests of Great Britain.
A devoted republican called Abraham Lincoln said, ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’ The Good Friday Agreement is an attempt to ensure our house remains permanently divided. That unionists remain forever in Ireland but not of it. It guarantees that the political malignancy through which Britain historically manipulated and controlled our country will remain intact in a two-nations Ireland that bears little resemblance to the one-nation republic we fought for.
Some believe that Irish Republicanism is defeated. Beaten from within and routed from without. Republicanism is not defeated. Republican leaderships may be defeated, co-opted, and corrupted, but not republicanism. The Irish Republic, proclaimed in 1916, and ratified by the First Dáil Eireann in 1919, continues to carry immense moral authority with many Irish people. That is why the government in Dublin has an army officer read the Proclamation from the GPO every Easter and not the Downing Street Declaration.
Imagine how disheartened the Proclamation signatory Thomas Clarke must have felt when after years of struggle and imprisonment in England, he and his comrades seemed little more than an insignificant group of irrelevant cranks calling from the margins for a sovereign republic against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people they fought for. An Irish electorate who wanted nothing more than a devolved Home Rule assembly within the British Empire and voting exclusively for candidates who pursued that agenda. How dismayed he must have felt at the visits to Ireland of England’s Queen Victoria in 1900 and King Edward VII in 1903 when they were met by rapturous union jack waving crowds in the streets of Dublin and Irish nationalist politicians falling over themselves to shake their hands and welcome them to Ireland.
One of our greatest sources of inspiration is that men and women like Tom Clarke and his comrades stood their ground, kept their principles, preserved their integrity, and maintained their republican values through dark times when hope shone its farthest light. Their courage never faltered. We must do the same. There is no night so dark it prevents the coming day. Long life and victory to the Irish Republic!
New Sinn Féin has joined the SDLP as an inheritor of this legacy. Both parties fuel the Redmondite renaissance in the Six Counties, which internalises British constitutional constraints and conditions on Irish democracy. More than that, they have rewritten and redefined the very concept of Irish unity to converge with Britain’s analysis of the nature of the conflict and Britain’s strategy to resolve it.
Wolfe Tone, the founding father of Irish republicanism, formed the United Irishmen not to unite Ireland - Ireland wasn’t partitioned at the time - but to unite Irishmen. Tone’s plea to embrace national unity across the sectarian divide was echoed over a century later by the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation calling for us to be . . . ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.’ The signatories were not claiming these differences did not exist, nor were they saying they could be dismissed as irrelevant. They were saying that these differences should not be used to shape the political architecture of Ireland.
In contrast, those who support the Good Friday Agreement are determined that these differences will be permanently embedded in our national fabric. Wolfe Tone sought to unite the many to defeat the few. British policy is to divide the many so they can shape the strategic environment to defend the few who protect their interests.
It is ironic that so many nationalists claim to be republican, yet republicanism has few advocates among nationalist politicians and thought leaders. When reading accounts of the negotiations around the Good Friday Agreement, I am struck by the degree to which Irish government officials recognised the absolute and legitimate right of the British government to rule this part of our country. They endorsed the view that Dublin’s constitutional claim to the Six Counties was archaic and aggressive. It is instructive that transforming this claim from a legal imperative to a notional aspiration was the only binding constitutional change required by the Good Friday Agreement.
The ‘Little Irelanders’ of Dublin’s political establishment who believe Ireland is Ireland without the Six Counties are forced by events beyond their control, such as Brexit and the prospect that the unionist population in the North may one day dwindle to an unsustainable level, to consider the prospect of a political alliance with Ulster unionists whom they perceive as ‘British Irelanders’. In their view, ‘Little Ireland’ plus ‘British Ireland’ equals a ‘Shared Island.’ Of course, we must bear in mind that their state had been legislated into existence and armed by the British to fight the IRA. Its officials are a product of that counter-republican culture and partitionist mindset. The model of a national democracy within an all-Ireland republic is not on their radar.
Ulster Unionists don’t have an issue with a united Ireland per se. They lived in a united Ireland for three hundred years. England treated our country as a single political unit for eight centuries. The Orange Order is an all-Ireland institution. The Presbyterian and Methodist churches are all-Ireland ministries. And, of course, the Church of Ireland is not the Church of Northern Ireland. Their real objection is to the threat posed to their artificial majority by a 32-County electorate. An Irish republic rooted in non-sectarianism and civic equality holds no allure for a mindset devoted to the sectarian dynamic England imposed on Ireland. Recognising that is one thing; pandering to it by forsaking our republican principles is another.
We must not be seduced by the false narrative that the British/Irish cleavage in national loyalties should be embraced for the sake of peace. It must be ended for the sake of peace, and the first step is ending British jurisdiction in Ireland. Until then, we cannot begin to repair the damage done to our national cohesion. In the meantime, Britain will continue to encourage, manipulate, and co-opt as many Irish citizens as possible into becoming willing accomplices in Ireland’s constitutional division along broadly sectarian lines.
Ulster unionists are pro-British for deep historical reasons that cannot be glibly dismissed, but they are not the British presence and must not be made so. The British presence is the presence of Britain’s jurisdictional claim to Ireland and the civil and military apparatus that gives that effect.
When we speak of reaching out to unionists, the republican thing to do is to reach out to them as fellow citizens and not as foreign citizens who happen to live here. Foreigners are born in another country. The vast majority of Ulster Unionists were born in Ireland. They must not be treated as the civil garrison of an alien state. That is not pluralism, that is submitting to the social and political modelling of colonial conquest.
Having had the opportunity to travel around Ireland in the past year, I have spoken to many supporters of New Sinn Féin and have been struck by the sheer scale of mission drift among them. How did a republic of citizens united in equality across the sectarian divide morph into a united Ireland where Ulster unionists are deemed to be the British presence? How did the one-nation Republic of 1798 become the two-nations Agreement of 1998? How has the British counter-insurgency machine so thoroughly changed the narrative and co-opted so many former republicans to its policy of validating and perpetuating the civic disunion of Irishmen and women in the deferred hope of achieving territorial unity in some vague and distant future determined exclusively by Britain?
For many Shinners in the South, the primary motivation behind their policy of any office at any price seems to be to stick it to the Staters and sicken the Blueshirts. I heard this quoted repeatedly. For many in the North, the focus is on putting it up to the DUP. Unfortunately, this has encouraged New Sinn Féin to become mesmerised by a compulsion to become formidable to everyone but the enemy. The principal opponent of northern nationalism may well be unionism, but the enemy of an Irish republican is the union.
Unionists did not partition Ireland - England did. It did so for deeper and far more strategic reasons than the refusal of a national minority in six Irish counties to become citizens of an independent republic. England’s conquest of Ireland began centuries before the Ulster plantations. It doesn’t care about unionists beyond their utility as a bulwark against the evolution of a united Irish identity. What England does care about is maintaining a significant influence in that substantial landmass on her western flank. The Brits will form alliances and build the political prestige of the leadership of any community who will help them pacify, normalise and stabilise the status quo. Relentlessly claiming to be an Irish republican while on the British government payroll and implementing a British strategy calculated to sustain the sectarian dynamic in any future constitutional arrangement is absurd. There is nothing new in the so-called ‘New’ Ireland. It is predicated on all the old divisions.
Thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, the future of the Northern state rests securely in a political and legal framework of terms and conditions comprehensively safeguarded within an intricate web of constitutional constraints that only Britain can interpret and adjudicate. No Irish citizen, elected or otherwise, can call an Irish unity poll in Ireland. That decision lies firmly in the hands of an English politician who doesn’t have a single vote in Ireland. In court cases taken over the Brexit issue, both the Belfast High Court in October 2016 and the UK Supreme Court in January 2017 confirmed that it is Westminster parliamentary supremacy and not the will of an Irish electorate that reigns supreme in the Six Counties.
Britain may not always be able to rule Ireland directly, but with the help of an enduring civic division, it can prevent us from harmoniously ruling ourselves. The British will retain enormous influence in the internal affairs of this country if given a mandate to represent citizens from the Ulster unionist tradition in the ludicrously named ‘New’ Ireland. London can live with a united Ireland within the British Commonwealth and NATO. It will not tolerate a sovereign Republic immune to its influence. A Republic that places the welfare of the Irish people above the strategic interests of Great Britain.
A devoted republican called Abraham Lincoln said, ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’ The Good Friday Agreement is an attempt to ensure our house remains permanently divided. That unionists remain forever in Ireland but not of it. It guarantees that the political malignancy through which Britain historically manipulated and controlled our country will remain intact in a two-nations Ireland that bears little resemblance to the one-nation republic we fought for.
Some believe that Irish Republicanism is defeated. Beaten from within and routed from without. Republicanism is not defeated. Republican leaderships may be defeated, co-opted, and corrupted, but not republicanism. The Irish Republic, proclaimed in 1916, and ratified by the First Dáil Eireann in 1919, continues to carry immense moral authority with many Irish people. That is why the government in Dublin has an army officer read the Proclamation from the GPO every Easter and not the Downing Street Declaration.
Imagine how disheartened the Proclamation signatory Thomas Clarke must have felt when after years of struggle and imprisonment in England, he and his comrades seemed little more than an insignificant group of irrelevant cranks calling from the margins for a sovereign republic against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people they fought for. An Irish electorate who wanted nothing more than a devolved Home Rule assembly within the British Empire and voting exclusively for candidates who pursued that agenda. How dismayed he must have felt at the visits to Ireland of England’s Queen Victoria in 1900 and King Edward VII in 1903 when they were met by rapturous union jack waving crowds in the streets of Dublin and Irish nationalist politicians falling over themselves to shake their hands and welcome them to Ireland.
One of our greatest sources of inspiration is that men and women like Tom Clarke and his comrades stood their ground, kept their principles, preserved their integrity, and maintained their republican values through dark times when hope shone its farthest light. Their courage never faltered. We must do the same. There is no night so dark it prevents the coming day. Long life and victory to the Irish Republic!
⏩John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank.
