Showing posts with label state of Irish Republicanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label state of Irish Republicanism. Show all posts
John Crawley ✍ delivered the address at the recent commemoration in Derry in honour of IRA volunteer George McBrearty and his comrades who lost their lives in the course of the armed struggle to end British rule and create an Irish Republic.


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.

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!
 
John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank.

Office At Any Price

Alex McCrory ✒ As is the case this time of year, I am bemused by the plethora of statements emanating from smaller Republican groupings which are invariably optimistic about the year ahead. 

Claims of activism within working class communities are loudly regurgitated. However, I fail to see any real evidence of this on the ground. No doubt there is a trickle of clientelism in the many hubs, centers and political offices that litter the landscape. But, in legal parlance, none of this amounts to a hill of beans.

Truthfully, the footprint left by 'dissident' Republicanism is negligible in real terms. Optimistic statements about future intentions may help to encourage a dwindling membership, in overall terms, but, to the more objective observer, the King is without attire. 

Another common theme running through many of these self-interested statements is the usual appeal for some form of republican unity. I find this totally frustrating because it is never defined in any tangible form. Oppositional Republicanism is characterised by disunity and factionalism rooted in objective and subjective conditions. It is accused of lacking an alternative to challenge the status quo.

Certainly, Sinn Fein does not feel remotely threatened by anything the 'micro-groups' have to offer at the present time. And why should it? Outworking of the Good Friday Agreement completely altered the political framework of the struggle for national independence. It has transformed the revolutionary nature of the Republican project to one of incremental constitutional reform. All attempts to oppose it have failed thus far. Anti-Good Friday Republicanism, in wherever guise, has run out of steam. 

Politics is unpredictable. In 1998 few could have predicted Brexit on the distant horizon. The United Kingdom is facing a constitutional crisis with each of its parts existing in a state of dynamic tension. National interests are diverging at an increasing rate. The process is fraught with uncertainty as the British state grapples with the internal and external contradictions of leaving the European Union. The impact of Brexit is being felt across the island of Ireland. A material conflict of interests between north and south threatens to destabilise the political consensus that underpinned the Good Friday Agreement. This is grist for the mill for Irish Republicans. Brexit is a British constitutional issue with potential beneficial outcomes for Irish national interests. Are Republicans capable of grasping the nettle? Or will we be left behind once again, watching from the sidelines of history.

Alec McCrory 
is a former blanketman.

Watching From The Sidelines Of History


Cathal Fleming, with a piece observing the malaise evident in contemporary Republicanism

As the cordite settled in Doire on Maundy Thursday, no one could have foreseen that a poorly organised operation would culminate in a potentially monumental shift in opinion within the Nationalist community. News filtered out of the city that a young woman had been shot, a civilian. The repulsion was clear to be seen, vented across social media from across the spectrum. Very few moved to defend the actions, short of sycophantic narcissists scattered across the globe, far removed from the reality “on the ground” as they so often put it.

Footage leaked that showed a “Republican Volunteer” firing blindly, in the direction of several PSNI vehicles, seemingly equally oblivious of the fact that he was seriously ill equipped, dangerously untrained and that he was putting the crowd gathered close to the vehicle in grave danger. Anti-treaty Republicans expressed anger at the fact that this operation was given the green light.

A point of clarity here. Anti-treaty Republicans opposed the Good Friday Agreement and were in opposition long before 2012. Dissident Republicans dissented from the Sinn Féin narrative, as opposed to opposing it, having implemented it for as long as they did. No doubt that the latter will lack the self-awareness to recognise this distinction.

As the dawn broke in Doire, it became clear that the life of a young Belfast woman had been taken away. The piercing screams of a terrified woman in the video previously released almost as shrill as those of the banshee. Lyra McKee, twenty-nine years of age, passed away, dying from a head wound she received. As a stone creates a ripple when thrown into a pond, the death of Lyra had a ripple effect through out the wider nationalist community. Not only was her life gone, her family and partner are ruined. Her friends devastated.

On the other side of this, two young volunteers lives have been destroyed. The responsibility lies with their officer commanding, as much as this might cause rancour. The tragedy spills out still. The pain and suffering that some will feel has yet to manifest, so as a people we need to tread carefully. In a country where the scars of a Civil War are still visible when the protagonists are long dead, some wounds will never heal.

As the unease still settles in Doire after her funeral, one recalls that there is an old Ulster proverb, to paraphrase, “it is easy to sleep on another man’s wound”. It seems almost cliché to use this proverb with relation to the actions of certain sections of the community in the aftermath of Lyra’s passing. To describe her as a rising star seems apt, however many of those clambering to use her death for political advantage had little to no interest in the girl beforehand.

Parties and populists have almost fought to eulogise. It was sickening to see the DUP condemning the men who had taken her life in such a violent and incompetent manner, when the DUP were only too happy to deny Lyra, and many more like her, their human rights to the express of love in a much more professional and competent manner.

The hilarity of the crocodile tears was matched only by the humour of the shock on the collective faces of the great and the good as the presiding Sagart turned on them as opposed to the masked men of the Creggan. It put in memory to me when a sagart I had the misfortune of knowing would use any grievance to attack myself in the school room, on one occasion throwing a chair. The berating they took, I'd suggest they got off lightly.

So as the sun rises again in Doire, what is the future for Republicanism? Well, its dead in its current form. The New IRA have clearly set out their stall to attempt to do what the provisional IRA did on a smaller scale, with less volunteers, less equipment and completely outstripped technologically, bereft of support “on the ground”, depending on pseudo-support online from sycophants from Glasgow to New Jersey.

Our own people here are seemingly more impressed with self-aggrandising bodhráns and gaudy wedding cakes as opposed to developing a real potential change within the Republican dialectic. Tacky tattoos depicting our martyr dead show a complete and utter lack of understanding of our struggle.

Dissident Republicanism continues to rely on a Celtic centric culture, turning a blind eye to the rampart sub-culture of cocaine abuse brought here by unvetted Scottish flute bands. It pushes women to the front yet fails to tackle the inherently flawed patriarchal structure that Republican groups have followed for the last century, a throw back to when the likes of Dev were air brushing women out of existence. Such was the desperation that one prisoner group clung to the case of a mentally ill woman, an attempt to have a female Republican prisoner. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.

The operation in Doire was the militaristic manifestation of the current malaise that exists within the Republican community. The reason for this is because there has yet to be a chance for the Republican community to recover and rebuild. The devastation of thirty years of war is seen in the general apathy of the districts to general Republicanism. The suicide rate in North Belfast alone is a stark indication that the community there is trying to rationalise the struggle.

Republicans point to the community constantly, failing to realise that the community barely exists anymore, due in no small part to capitalism, globalism and the development of technology. The reasons for the death of communities and the apathy towards Republicanism are numerous, but one thing is completely sure is that we, as a people, can not tackle them whilst a certain section fights a pseudo war.

The nationalist community has turned on Republicanism. For the Real IRA, the water shed was Danny McGurk. For the Continuity IRA, it was the double murder in Belfast in 2009. Both limped on after, both never recovering a foothold in Belfast. The New IRA continues to limp on in such a fashion. The death of a journalist, at the hands of the dissidents, has turned the nationalist community against Anti-treaty Republicanism. The only question I can see to ask, is this their purpose?

⏩Cathal Fleming is a Belfast republican

Republican Repulsion

Sean Bresnahan writing over week ago thinks the republican struggle is in a quandary.


Acceptance of the status quo, and with it the political means and mechanisms allowed for by the status quo to alter the status quo, has never been more deeply rooted in Ireland, both north and south — an imposing strategic conundrum for those whose object is to restore the Irish Republic.

The reason for this, in the main, is that the Irish Republic has been ruled out in advance as an outcome of the established political process — of the means it provides for to effect ‘Irish Unity’ (or more accurately what it is prepared to countenance as Irish Unity).

Coupled with widespread acceptance of that process, among those who Republicanism needs to support its intended process of change — which rivals that of the status quo — the Republican struggle is in a quandary, from which there are no obvious means at hand to escape the difficulties faced.

It is for this reason that Republicans are being pulled away from our core ideological function and purpose — which is to uphold the sovereignty and unity of the Republic and its right to proceed unfettered — towards all of the campaigns and initiatives now surrounding the struggle but which, of themselves, are outside of that core function and purpose.

Involvement in such initiatives, while worthy ventures in their own right often — and not necessarily, then, to be dismissed or not partaken in — absent an acute focus on the Republican object are symptomatic of our political failure and point towards the ultimate collapse of the Republican struggle.

It is there where lies the ‘defeat’ of Republicanism, not in the failure to secure outright military victory as pointed to by many in the fold — ‘defeat’ in inverted commas because, while the struggle for the Republic is upheld by even a respectable minority, we are merely down and not out.

Given that the Army — recognising that in winning the political war lay the path to ultimate victory — stood aside to make way for the required ‘new phase’, so long as there are those still set towards the Republic, as their intended political object, then we have not been defeated.

As Brexit and demographic change in the North speed new and unheralded political opportunities, it is on building that ‘new phase’ and process — towards arriving at the Irish Republic — where the Republican lens must concentrate. Fail to focus accordingly and our defeat, long heralded, might just be sealed. A moment of reckoning is upon us.


Sean Bresnahan, Chair, Thomas Ashe Society Omagh blogs at An Claidheamh Soluis


Follow Sean Bresnahan on Twitter @bres79


‘Moment Of Reckoning’ Upon Us

Tarlach MacDhónaill outlines how he felt on viewing a mural in The Bogside.

A Mural In Derry’s Bogside

Sean Bresnahan writes that Irish Republicanism is going forward.  

And What Of The Irish Republic?

Developing his theme on new opportunities towards the realising of a United Ireland, Sean Bresnahan, reflecting on the announcement that Gerry Adams is to stand down as Sinn Féin leader, argues that Republicans must countenance emerging realities.

One Era Ends As Another Begins – Where To For Irish Republicanism?