Social Items

TPQ

● Wednesday, 5th of November, 6-8pm ●
Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism will be launched at the Linenhall Library in Belfast.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Guest Speaker: Tommy Gorman
Please confirm attendance: publicity@ausubopress.com




Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!

Tonight: Belfast Launch of Good Friday

V Day

Gerry Moriarty, in today's Irish Times: ANTHONY MCINTYRE'S Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism is an absorbing and provocative book driven by disillusionment and anger.

Blanket Dissent in the Ranks

Gerry Moriarty, Irish Times

Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, by Anthony McIntyre, Ausubo Press (New York), 322pp, $21.95

ANTHONY MCINTYRE'S Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism is an absorbing and provocative book driven by disillusionment and anger. It challenges received mainstream republican opinion. This book is unlikely to feature on the shelves of the Sinn Féin bookshop on the Falls Road in west Belfast. It's a collection of articles that McIntyre, who served 18 years in prison for murder, wrote in newspapers and magazines, but mostly for The Blanket - a now moribund blog "of protest and dissent", as it says on its website. It covers the period from the signing of the Belfast Agreement 10 years ago to shortly before Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley decided to share power in March last year.

In one piece McIntyre writes about former IRA chief of staff Joe Cahill blanking him when they last met in 2002. He notes shortly after Cahill's funeral in the summer of 2004 how the first four chiefs of staff of the Provisional IRA are now dead, "all from natural causes".

"I greeted him but he ignored me," McIntyre recalls. "In that he was no different from others in the leadership coterie: willing to direct but never to answer to those fortunate to have survived with their lives from the debacle the leadership so ineptly oversaw, and who sought to ask those questions dead volunteers never had the chance to." He writes that he is glad that Cahill lived a long life but implicitly asks how dare he or any other Sinn Féin or IRA leader snub him when he did his time for the IRA, and when so many other republicans died in an "unnecessary war".

In many senses this is an Émile Zola-type J'accuse! against the Sinn Féin and IRA leadership, with most opprobrium reserved for Gerry Adams. "We deluded ourselves that we were fighting for Ireland when all we were doing was fighting for Adams." Twice he quotes George Orwell approvingly to reflect his view of his former republican colleagues, some of them now up in Stormont, "Nine times out of ten a revolutionary is just a social climber with a bomb in his pocket".

McIntyre is the most eloquent (and jaundiced) of those on the dissenter wing of republicanism, as distinct from its dissident wing. His New York publishers drew considerable mileage from the fact that he could not promote the book in the US because he is barred from the country.

His antipathy to the current Sinn Féin leadership - which is reciprocated - runs deep. His former home in Ballymurphy was picketed by Sinn Féin supporters after he accused the IRA of murdering dissident republican Joe O'Connor in 2000. Despite the antagonism, McIntyre held out in West Belfast, finally moving South with his partner and children over a year ago, but on his own terms. He doesn't want a return to war but with logic, passion and humour, and a degree of anguish and hurt, asks could it not have stopped sometime in the early to mid-1970s? He's not arguing that the provisional republican campaign was wrong per se, or making personal apologies for the loss of life; rather, he asks, why did the IRA prosecute a campaign of violence whose end result was a shaky administration at Stormont? He believes the revolution, which he and many IRA members saw themselves as fighting, was betrayed.

The acceptance of the consent principle - that a united Ireland can only happen with the blessing of majority opinion in Northern Ireland, hitherto anathema to republicanism - called into question "the usefulness or purpose of the IRA campaign post-1974".

"Morally, how justified was armed opposition to a partition that republicanism now accepts has a democratic validity?" He talks of a "sad denouement to an unnecessary war in which so many suffered needlessly".

Long before the first 1994 ceasefire both the British and the IRA acknowledged that neither side could win, leading to the conclusion that here was a "war" fought to a standstill. This point was enunciated by former Sinn Féin director of publicity Danny Morrison shortly after the signing of the Belfast Agreement. McIntyre challenged the view at the time, writing of a "defeated IRA", a position he has held to and that has put him high up the Sinn Féin and IRA personae non grata list.

MCINTYRE VEHEMENTLY ARGUES THAT the republican leadership lied and manipulated its base in achieving the IRA ceasefire, decommissioning, policing, and sharing power with Ian Paisley. Another view is that Adams and McGuinness showed real strategic leadership and courage in finally ending a conflict that couldn't be won, but the author will make no such concessions to them.

Yet he is no ranter. His publishers should have demanded a prologue and epilogue to better round up the book. Nonetheless, there is a coherence, integrity and strength about the collection of articles which deal with subjects such as Good Friday, the hunger strikers, decommissioning, the Colombia Three, the murder of Robert McCartney, the Northern Bank robbery, informers and policing. We hear an alternative view, fiercely argued, well constructed, that sharpens our understanding of the conflict and the peace process, and raises the question thousands have asked: what was it all about?

Gerry Moriarty is Northern Editor of The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times.






Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!

Good Friday Review: Blanket Dissent in the Ranks


● Wednesday, 5th of November, 6-8pm ●
Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism will be launched at the Linenhall Library in Belfast.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Guest Speaker: Tommy Gorman
Please confirm attendance: publicity@ausubopress.com


Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!

Reminder - Save the Date

There will always be a gap between those who take the political goals seriously and those who are drawn to the cause because it offers glamour, violence, money and power – Michael Ignatieff.

The 6 women at the forefront of the campaign to achieve justice for their loved one Robert McCartney, murdered by Belfast thugs in January 2005, along the way pushed levers and pressed buttons in the nerve centres of top political institutions from Europe to the US. Against the odds, and on occasion advice, they followed their instinct wherever it took them. As they viewed it there was little choice: ‘the gang in Market Street had the protection of the political and military organisations … we had no one; and Robert had only us.’ Determined not to be battered into silence or submission by the peace process they pulled out every stop to secure for him the justice he deserved. By the year’s end they had given ‘thousands’ of interviews and had received ten awards in acknowledgement of their campaigning. Ultimately, however, as Catherine McCartney, a sister of the murdered man, protests in her book Walls Of Silence, justice may have danced seductively, pregnant with the promise of delivery, but still not one conviction secured in court. The killers today prowl the streets of Belfast free and the women are no further on in legal terms than they were three years ago.

Cartoon by John Kennedy

Imagine the scene that thrust these women onto the international stage: an IRA/Sinn Fein member with a recognisable psychopathic bent for gratuitous violence, aided and abetted by other IRA and Sinn Fein activists, carved up two men in a street for, in his own words, ‘no reason’ other than the presumably orgasmic-like pleasure he derived from the sensation of cold steel tearing its way through warm flesh. The murder was a brutal one. It conjured up all the imagery of killings by the Shankill Butchers in alley ways and pubs back in the 1970s: defenceless victims knifed and hacked in front of an audience. And like the Butcher killings, out of all those to emerge from the pub at the end of the evening, not a witness in their midst.

I read Walls Of Silence before the Robert McCartney murder trial and then again after it. The anguish of the author read as potently each time. The acquittals did not place Catherine McCartney’s writing in some new light. There was not the slightest possibility of a murder conviction in this case. The evidence was not there and like some other cases in very recent Northern Irish legal history this one should never have been placed before a judge so prematurely. The short term expedient of silencing criticism rather than the longer term one of securing a just result governed the decisions made. The gravest indictment that can be levelled at the authorities in their handling of the McCartney murder is that by the spring of 2005 they had decided this was a case they wanted closed rather than solved.

Catherine McCartney would seem to have put her finger on it when she raises the question of informers being protected. ‘There had been up to thirty Provisionals involved that night and it stood to reason that there were informers amongst them.’ When every other possible explanation as to why a conviction has not been secured has been exhausted in terms of its plausibility little else makes sense.

In the days after the murder of her brother Robert, Catherine describes how a rearguard action was fought by the Provisional movement. Rather than immediately move to put clear blue sea between itself and the knife gang, ‘the movement’ dallied and parried, retreating behind a protective shield of a whisper campaign, hissing out allegations that the slain man had been a scumbag, a dissident or drug dealer. The execrable Alex Maskey, a Sinn Fein MLA, some of whose party colleagues were involved in the violence and subsequent cover up, decided to hit out at the PSNI pursuit of the killers. Maskey did nothing that we are aware of to proactively assist the gang but his preferences in the immediate aftermath of the murder suggest a politician motivated primarily by the need to divert any political flak likely to come his party’s way. His demands of British officials the day after the killing were that they curb PSNI raids, not that they throw more resources and manpower into finding the killers.

Later when Catherine McCartney confronted Gerry Kelly about the stance of Maskey and other party representatives the response she got was that they were unaware of all the events. Really? In this book the author is unrelenting in giving absolutely no credence to such an unspirited defence. Time and again she returns to the theme of cover up and post-event complicity. The senior IRA commander that both the McCartney women and the PSNI believe ordered the alleyway attack on Robert McCartney and his drinking partner Brendan Devine, emerges throughout the book as having the patronage of senior IRA figures long after he was supposed to have been expelled from the organisation and sent to Coventry. In the book Catherine McCartney gives vent to a sentiment that taxed the minds of many observing events as they unfolded:

We couldn’t understand why Adams would put the Republican Movement through hell to protect the likes of Davison and co … the IRA and Sinn Fein were taking a stance of protection for some reason no one seemed able to understand … Sinn Fein was adopting a dual strategy, showing public support but working hard on the ground to ensure impunity and operating a whispering campaign against the family.

While Martin McGuinness would later describe the assailants as ‘low life’ a central charge in this book is that his party did next to nothing to turn them in.

Once the campaign had kicked in and Sinn Fein began to feel the heat the same whisper weasels that were set on the murdered man’s reputation were unleashed against the McCartney women.

At grassroots level we found ourselves at the receiving end of a well oiled rumour mill and ostracism exercise … some in the community treated us as if we were the guilty party, and we found ourselves shunned, vilified and demonised, accused of being attention seekers or drama queens. Anonymous messengers who claimed to know us well declared that we were harlots, thieves and prostitutes … ‘You’re not the only one this happened to’ became a familiar mantra. An illogical resentment set in. Such people forgot about the sick act of murder and our campaign came to be the bigger crime …

As the campaign wore on graffiti appeared on the walls where the murdered man had lived, his home now housing his partner and children was picketed by a mob. While originally a means of community protest, the picket had evolved into a party political weapon of intimidation. ‘Women who had once been welcomed into our home now stood outside it demanding the exile of Robert’s children.’ Death threats arrived and the editor of a local West Belfast newspaper labelled the campaigning women as ‘unionism on tour’ after their visit to the White House. Obviously incensed by the shunning of Gerry Adams and the public gutting the Sinn Fein leader received from current presidential candidate John McCain, he lashed out in a bid to discredit those he blamed for causing the discomfort. The great leader would not be embarrassed by mere mortals, particularly female ones.

In the course of their campaign the McCartney women found themselves in clandestine meetings with the IRA in Belfast, well publicised meetings with the president of the USA, surreal ‘guests’ at the Sinn Fein ard fheis where the party president unsuccessfully sought to depict party and women as being on the same side. It also gave them face to face access with the Irish Taoiseach and British Prime Minister as well as carrying them into the heart of the European parliament.

And yet, as this poignant book distressingly shows there was no happy ending. Although written from the perspective of a family seeking answers, explanations, honesty and ultimately justice, Walls Of Silence atmospherically conveys the odour of decay emitted from the decadence creeping into the crevices and gaps exposed by the withdrawal from the Provisional project of a more ideological republicanism. It has been said that it is really only when the tide goes out can we see who is naked. When the tide of republicanism ebbed away some of those submersed in it were left without any cover. From active service unit to the ‘do you know who I am gang?’ the order of things had been reversed. The butterfly, to borrow a term, had morphed into a slug. Robert McCartney lies cold in his grave and his family have not obtained justice. The slug slithers the streets of Belfast impervious to the humanity it leeches onto.

Walls Of Silence by Catherine McCartney, 2007. Gill & McMillan. Dublin

The Walls of Silence Still Stand

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)