Puddies
12-01-2007, 09:59 PM
Radical Republicanism:
Between Death and Resurrection
Liam O Ruairc Gives His Analysis on the Current State of Radical Republicanism
In a recent article, Kieran Allen – one of the main thinkers of the non-republican left in Ireland – proclaimed “the death of radical republicanism”. (1) At the same time, former IRA lifer Anthony McIntyre wrote that republicanism rather than the Northern state was the failed entity of six county politics, and concluded that: “Republicans facing the cold blast of a post-republican world need to consider what micro contributions they can make to the smatterings of radical politics that battle to survive in a conservative political environment. Expending effort in rebuilding the grand macro republican project will only take radical energy down a cul de sac called futility. To kiss the corpse is not to breathe life into it.” (2) The trajectory of the Provisional Movement certainly gives credence to their thesis. By signing the Belfast and St. Andrews Agreements, the Provisional movement turned republicanism on its head and totally became constitutional nationalism – the political project of which being the reunification of Ireland subject to unionist consent. Eamonn McCann outlines the consequences of this point: “In endorsing the principle of consent contained in the Agreement, accepting that Northern Ireland will as of right, remain part of the United Kingdom until such time as a majority within the six counties decides otherwise, Sinn Féin had ditched the idea that lay at the heart of its own tradition and that had provided the justification in political morality for the campaign, indeed the existence, of the IRA.” (3) Just reading what Danny Morrison was writing about the possibility of the Provisional sharing power with Paisley one year before the restoration of devolution gives a measure of magnitude of the organization’s political and ideological shift: “Increasingly I think we must need our heads examined. Just because he represents the largest party might entitle him to be First Minister – but, in truth, who could work with this one-man Executive? He is ill-mannered, arrogant, pompous and bigoted. … What an advertisement he would be around the world. We would be a laughing stock. We would be building on gas. I thank God that Paisley is terrified of being First Minister, and that the DUP by making the North ungovernable within is demonstrating that the North is a failed political entity. Ironically, that was one of the aims of the IRA’s armed struggle. Goodbye Sinn Féin/IRA, Hello DUP/IRA! Republicans should remember that they wanted to bypass a northern assembly and executive and work macro-politically towards unification. Sinn Féin should go back to the basics and demand the abolition of the failed assembly. Even though Hain rule is misrule and unrepresentative rule, it is better than Paisley rule. We’ve waited 800 years, what’s a few more?” (4)
Some, like the UCD political theorist Jennifer Todd for example, have argued that, rather than republicanism dying or being transformed into constitutional nationalism, its ideological repertoire has simply been extended. Traditional long term goals have been subordinated to an agenda of ‘radical egalitarian democratic transformist principles’ (5) However, her transformist principles “do mark a significant scaling down of republican demands and a redefinition of the scale of the Republican project.” (6) As Eamonn McCann writes: “Both Republicans and Unionists will have to leave a lot of historical baggage behind in order to make the Belfast Agreement work, and it’s the Republicans who’ll have to abandon the more valuable items.” This is because while Unionists have stuck to their philosophy, “the Republican leadership have accepted that the Republican analysis is wrong.” (7) In terms of international comparison Kevin Rafter cannot find any other example of political movements who have gone so far in the dilution of their core principles: “No other political party in Europe has undergone such a radical overhaul of its basic principles, not even the former communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe that transformed themselves into social democratic entities in thee aftermath of the fall of the Soviet bloc.” (8) More significantly, in an Irish context, there are no historical precedents of a Republican organization going so far. Many historians agree that Adams actually outdid de Valera. (9) Eamon Phoenix writes the Provisional movement “has opted for the de Valera path of purely constitutional means but, crucially, it has surpassed the Fianna Fail founder by carrying the IRA with it” (10)
It would be wrong to blame this on leadership “traitors” betraying republican grassroots. This fails to account for the fact that the vast majority supports the Provisional movement while only a numerically insignificant minority oppose it at the present moment. “It has been wiedely remarked that the Sinn Féin leadership has managed to keep the party together and to consolidate its support despite ditching once-cherished beliefs. The daring and skill with which Gerry Adams and his associates managed this manoeuvre have drawn widespread admiration. However the image of the Sinn Féin leadership coaxing an initially reluctant constituency away from violence and intransigence onto the path of compromise and peace may be adjudged by history as, at best, inadequate. …The mass of Northern Catholics have never been republicans in the sense in which Sinn Féin use the word. Commentators frequently refer to the Falls Road as “traditionally republican”. But Gerry Adams was, in 1983 the first republican ever elected in the area. In the December 1918 general election – which, until recently, the modern manifestation insisted was the last legitimate election held on the island – West Belfast was one of the two constituencies in which Home Rule trounced republicanism: Joe Devlin hammered de Valera. Thus it has been since. One former hunger striker recalled last week: “We were always a small minority on the Falls. Looking back on it, we were a minority in the IRA.” Donegal man Eddie Gallagher, a very senior IRA activist in the 1970s, said: “The fellows from Befast weren’t fighting for a Republic, they were fighting for their streets.” The IRA’s 25-year campaign can meaningfully be seen not as a war to drive Britain out of Ireland, but as a reaction to British and Unionist violence and a continuation of the civil rights campaign by inappropriate means. Viewed in this perspective, the shift in the line of Sinn Féin which culminated in acceptance of the legitimacy of the Northern state – and all else followed from that – appears not as a challenge but as an adaption to the consciousness of its base. It has been Adams’s genius (it’s scarcely too extravagant a word) to have sensed this at an early stage and to have patiently set about drawing and implementing the conclusions.” (11)
Anthony McIntyre is therefore right to conclude that: “Traditional republican ideology did not reflect the essence of northern insurrectionary politics. Rather its discursive from reflected the need to legitimise such politics.” (12) Provisional republicanism was more practical and urban insurrectionary than ideological and traditional. People joined or supported the Provisional movement because they needed to defend their homes and streets and suffered from discrimination and repression; and not because of a strong sense of traditional republican ideology and history. This is why the pejorative label ‘sixty niners’ is applied to the vast amount of militants who joined the IRA in reaction to the loyalist pogroms of 1969. They joined to defend their homes and streets, not the 1916 Republic. They were more ‘armed nationalists’ and ‘Catholic Defenderists’ than Republicans: the difference between Republicanism and Provisionalism is the same nature between the United Irishmen of the 1790’s, inspired by the American and French revolutions and out to overthrow the existing order, and the Defenders, a peasant militia established to protect Catholic land rights. (13) Therefore: “The wider republican tradition cannot be reduced to Provisional republicanism. The latter represented a specifically non-traditional discontinuity.” The Provisional movement was more the product of certain ‘structural factors rather than tradition spawned ideological factors’, and was born out of ‘conjunctural protest’ rather than the ‘reigniting of some long dormant flame’. Provisional Republicanism is for the most part a post 1969 phenomenon; it ‘truly arose from the ashes of Belfast’s Bombay Street in 1969 and not the rubble of Dublin’s O’Connell Street in 1916’. If the grievances of the Nationalist community could be remedied short of the Republic, then there was the basis of a settlement within existing constitutional structures. The conjunctural origins of the Provisionals were such that tradition based ideological factors, while instrumental for the Republican Movement’s own ends, were never going to prevail over more structural and conjunctural factors as a primary determinants in the long term development and direction of that movement: Ultimately, thrown up at a particular juncture primarily by conditions within the northern state, rather than because of the mere existence per se of that state, and because the republican tradition was more of an ‘enabling surface’ factor than a dynamic or primary structural determinant, Provisional republicanism would always be vulnerable to outcomes that did not specifically address the question of the British presence nor the indefinite continuation of partition. In other words, there always existed the structural potential for an outcome that would constitute the outworking of structural processes of grievances regardless of how the latter might be ideologically defined. Subsequently, Provisional republicanism would eventually come to rest within the framework of a solution that would not abolish the movement’s discursive ideological raison d’etre – it would ‘retreat from the high ground of the republic to the practical acceptance of partition,’ and in the course of doing so accept that there was a democratic basis to partition. This in spite of a central Provisional tenet that partition was ‘a non-democratic entity.” (14)
This means that political space for Republicanism is getting significantly restricted. de Valera’s piecemeal reforms (suppression of oath, land annuities etc) gave the 26 counties a status that eventually reconciled the vast majority of citizens to the state, meaning that Republican politics are a low intensity inspiration there, as Provisional Sinn Féin learned to its cost during the 2007 elections. Similarly, the Belfast Agreement addressed most of the material grievances which sustained Provisionalism, resulting in a growing social and political incorporation of the Catholic working clss into the six counties. For example, a new study revealed that only 56 per cent of Catholics actually favor Irish unity. The 2007 Life and Times Survey also showed that 85 per cent of Protestants and 22 per cent of Catholics support Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. Partly for those reasons, senior Irish government sources have stated that they do not expect Northern Ireland’s constitutional position to be raised again for “20 to 25 years”. The Dublin administration opinion comes after Secretary of State Peter Hain told the News Letter: “I think that, in a sense, the constitutional question is parked.” (15)
This does not mean that Republicanism has to be abandoned for some pure version of socialism. Given its historical weight and progressive content, it is impossible to build a progressive current outside it or independent of it. This is the demarcation criteria between the IRSP and most other socialist organizations in Ireland. The fact that Republicanism is going through a marginalisation squeeze set limits upon and narrows the basis for Republicanism to develop, but opportunities – however minor – will arise. An example of this are recent attempts to build republican unity. These should be used to develop what is best in Republicanism. There clearly are a number of points on which all Republicans will agree. First that Republicanism is in tension with nationalism rather than a version of it. As Bernadette Devlin McAliskey points, what brought Republicanism into being “was not a debate which focused on conflicting national identities”. Republicanism is neither based on ‘territory’ or ‘nationality’ nor on ‘identity’. The core of Republicanism is democracy. (16) This implies self-determination without external impediment, from which flows the rejection of the principle of consent and other parameters are imposed by external power unaccountable to Irish democracy. It is not that Republicanism disregards the issue of Unionist consent to future political arrangements, where it differs with other political forces like constitutional nationalism is that it refuses Unionist consent to be a prerequisite for constitutional change. While arguing that it is undesirable to coerce a ‘minority’, republicanism contends that to give a guarantee to a ‘minority’ in advance against all coercion to put a premium on unreasonableness and to make a settlement impossible. Finally Republicans can agree that the government of the 26 counties retain their legitimacy by denial and circumscription of political democracy. This is why the traditional republican position is to deny legitimacy to the 6 and 26 counties state. For the IRSP, it is clear that democracy is at the heart of the historical tasks facing the working class. Socialism’s lineage is also with democracy. Republicanism and Socialism are like cousins more than two sides of the same coin. It is possible to be a Republican or a democrat without being a Socialist. This is why in relation to other Republican tendencies, it is imperative to emphasize not just the democratic, but also internationalist, popular and egalitarian aspects of Republicanism. The IRSP is best placed to articulate the social content of Republicanism and address the question of what social forces to mobilize in what Connolly called The Reconquest of Ireland.
Liam O RUAIRC
http://www.irsm.org/irsp/starryplough/series12issue01complete.pdf
Between Death and Resurrection
Liam O Ruairc Gives His Analysis on the Current State of Radical Republicanism
In a recent article, Kieran Allen – one of the main thinkers of the non-republican left in Ireland – proclaimed “the death of radical republicanism”. (1) At the same time, former IRA lifer Anthony McIntyre wrote that republicanism rather than the Northern state was the failed entity of six county politics, and concluded that: “Republicans facing the cold blast of a post-republican world need to consider what micro contributions they can make to the smatterings of radical politics that battle to survive in a conservative political environment. Expending effort in rebuilding the grand macro republican project will only take radical energy down a cul de sac called futility. To kiss the corpse is not to breathe life into it.” (2) The trajectory of the Provisional Movement certainly gives credence to their thesis. By signing the Belfast and St. Andrews Agreements, the Provisional movement turned republicanism on its head and totally became constitutional nationalism – the political project of which being the reunification of Ireland subject to unionist consent. Eamonn McCann outlines the consequences of this point: “In endorsing the principle of consent contained in the Agreement, accepting that Northern Ireland will as of right, remain part of the United Kingdom until such time as a majority within the six counties decides otherwise, Sinn Féin had ditched the idea that lay at the heart of its own tradition and that had provided the justification in political morality for the campaign, indeed the existence, of the IRA.” (3) Just reading what Danny Morrison was writing about the possibility of the Provisional sharing power with Paisley one year before the restoration of devolution gives a measure of magnitude of the organization’s political and ideological shift: “Increasingly I think we must need our heads examined. Just because he represents the largest party might entitle him to be First Minister – but, in truth, who could work with this one-man Executive? He is ill-mannered, arrogant, pompous and bigoted. … What an advertisement he would be around the world. We would be a laughing stock. We would be building on gas. I thank God that Paisley is terrified of being First Minister, and that the DUP by making the North ungovernable within is demonstrating that the North is a failed political entity. Ironically, that was one of the aims of the IRA’s armed struggle. Goodbye Sinn Féin/IRA, Hello DUP/IRA! Republicans should remember that they wanted to bypass a northern assembly and executive and work macro-politically towards unification. Sinn Féin should go back to the basics and demand the abolition of the failed assembly. Even though Hain rule is misrule and unrepresentative rule, it is better than Paisley rule. We’ve waited 800 years, what’s a few more?” (4)
Some, like the UCD political theorist Jennifer Todd for example, have argued that, rather than republicanism dying or being transformed into constitutional nationalism, its ideological repertoire has simply been extended. Traditional long term goals have been subordinated to an agenda of ‘radical egalitarian democratic transformist principles’ (5) However, her transformist principles “do mark a significant scaling down of republican demands and a redefinition of the scale of the Republican project.” (6) As Eamonn McCann writes: “Both Republicans and Unionists will have to leave a lot of historical baggage behind in order to make the Belfast Agreement work, and it’s the Republicans who’ll have to abandon the more valuable items.” This is because while Unionists have stuck to their philosophy, “the Republican leadership have accepted that the Republican analysis is wrong.” (7) In terms of international comparison Kevin Rafter cannot find any other example of political movements who have gone so far in the dilution of their core principles: “No other political party in Europe has undergone such a radical overhaul of its basic principles, not even the former communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe that transformed themselves into social democratic entities in thee aftermath of the fall of the Soviet bloc.” (8) More significantly, in an Irish context, there are no historical precedents of a Republican organization going so far. Many historians agree that Adams actually outdid de Valera. (9) Eamon Phoenix writes the Provisional movement “has opted for the de Valera path of purely constitutional means but, crucially, it has surpassed the Fianna Fail founder by carrying the IRA with it” (10)
It would be wrong to blame this on leadership “traitors” betraying republican grassroots. This fails to account for the fact that the vast majority supports the Provisional movement while only a numerically insignificant minority oppose it at the present moment. “It has been wiedely remarked that the Sinn Féin leadership has managed to keep the party together and to consolidate its support despite ditching once-cherished beliefs. The daring and skill with which Gerry Adams and his associates managed this manoeuvre have drawn widespread admiration. However the image of the Sinn Féin leadership coaxing an initially reluctant constituency away from violence and intransigence onto the path of compromise and peace may be adjudged by history as, at best, inadequate. …The mass of Northern Catholics have never been republicans in the sense in which Sinn Féin use the word. Commentators frequently refer to the Falls Road as “traditionally republican”. But Gerry Adams was, in 1983 the first republican ever elected in the area. In the December 1918 general election – which, until recently, the modern manifestation insisted was the last legitimate election held on the island – West Belfast was one of the two constituencies in which Home Rule trounced republicanism: Joe Devlin hammered de Valera. Thus it has been since. One former hunger striker recalled last week: “We were always a small minority on the Falls. Looking back on it, we were a minority in the IRA.” Donegal man Eddie Gallagher, a very senior IRA activist in the 1970s, said: “The fellows from Befast weren’t fighting for a Republic, they were fighting for their streets.” The IRA’s 25-year campaign can meaningfully be seen not as a war to drive Britain out of Ireland, but as a reaction to British and Unionist violence and a continuation of the civil rights campaign by inappropriate means. Viewed in this perspective, the shift in the line of Sinn Féin which culminated in acceptance of the legitimacy of the Northern state – and all else followed from that – appears not as a challenge but as an adaption to the consciousness of its base. It has been Adams’s genius (it’s scarcely too extravagant a word) to have sensed this at an early stage and to have patiently set about drawing and implementing the conclusions.” (11)
Anthony McIntyre is therefore right to conclude that: “Traditional republican ideology did not reflect the essence of northern insurrectionary politics. Rather its discursive from reflected the need to legitimise such politics.” (12) Provisional republicanism was more practical and urban insurrectionary than ideological and traditional. People joined or supported the Provisional movement because they needed to defend their homes and streets and suffered from discrimination and repression; and not because of a strong sense of traditional republican ideology and history. This is why the pejorative label ‘sixty niners’ is applied to the vast amount of militants who joined the IRA in reaction to the loyalist pogroms of 1969. They joined to defend their homes and streets, not the 1916 Republic. They were more ‘armed nationalists’ and ‘Catholic Defenderists’ than Republicans: the difference between Republicanism and Provisionalism is the same nature between the United Irishmen of the 1790’s, inspired by the American and French revolutions and out to overthrow the existing order, and the Defenders, a peasant militia established to protect Catholic land rights. (13) Therefore: “The wider republican tradition cannot be reduced to Provisional republicanism. The latter represented a specifically non-traditional discontinuity.” The Provisional movement was more the product of certain ‘structural factors rather than tradition spawned ideological factors’, and was born out of ‘conjunctural protest’ rather than the ‘reigniting of some long dormant flame’. Provisional Republicanism is for the most part a post 1969 phenomenon; it ‘truly arose from the ashes of Belfast’s Bombay Street in 1969 and not the rubble of Dublin’s O’Connell Street in 1916’. If the grievances of the Nationalist community could be remedied short of the Republic, then there was the basis of a settlement within existing constitutional structures. The conjunctural origins of the Provisionals were such that tradition based ideological factors, while instrumental for the Republican Movement’s own ends, were never going to prevail over more structural and conjunctural factors as a primary determinants in the long term development and direction of that movement: Ultimately, thrown up at a particular juncture primarily by conditions within the northern state, rather than because of the mere existence per se of that state, and because the republican tradition was more of an ‘enabling surface’ factor than a dynamic or primary structural determinant, Provisional republicanism would always be vulnerable to outcomes that did not specifically address the question of the British presence nor the indefinite continuation of partition. In other words, there always existed the structural potential for an outcome that would constitute the outworking of structural processes of grievances regardless of how the latter might be ideologically defined. Subsequently, Provisional republicanism would eventually come to rest within the framework of a solution that would not abolish the movement’s discursive ideological raison d’etre – it would ‘retreat from the high ground of the republic to the practical acceptance of partition,’ and in the course of doing so accept that there was a democratic basis to partition. This in spite of a central Provisional tenet that partition was ‘a non-democratic entity.” (14)
This means that political space for Republicanism is getting significantly restricted. de Valera’s piecemeal reforms (suppression of oath, land annuities etc) gave the 26 counties a status that eventually reconciled the vast majority of citizens to the state, meaning that Republican politics are a low intensity inspiration there, as Provisional Sinn Féin learned to its cost during the 2007 elections. Similarly, the Belfast Agreement addressed most of the material grievances which sustained Provisionalism, resulting in a growing social and political incorporation of the Catholic working clss into the six counties. For example, a new study revealed that only 56 per cent of Catholics actually favor Irish unity. The 2007 Life and Times Survey also showed that 85 per cent of Protestants and 22 per cent of Catholics support Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. Partly for those reasons, senior Irish government sources have stated that they do not expect Northern Ireland’s constitutional position to be raised again for “20 to 25 years”. The Dublin administration opinion comes after Secretary of State Peter Hain told the News Letter: “I think that, in a sense, the constitutional question is parked.” (15)
This does not mean that Republicanism has to be abandoned for some pure version of socialism. Given its historical weight and progressive content, it is impossible to build a progressive current outside it or independent of it. This is the demarcation criteria between the IRSP and most other socialist organizations in Ireland. The fact that Republicanism is going through a marginalisation squeeze set limits upon and narrows the basis for Republicanism to develop, but opportunities – however minor – will arise. An example of this are recent attempts to build republican unity. These should be used to develop what is best in Republicanism. There clearly are a number of points on which all Republicans will agree. First that Republicanism is in tension with nationalism rather than a version of it. As Bernadette Devlin McAliskey points, what brought Republicanism into being “was not a debate which focused on conflicting national identities”. Republicanism is neither based on ‘territory’ or ‘nationality’ nor on ‘identity’. The core of Republicanism is democracy. (16) This implies self-determination without external impediment, from which flows the rejection of the principle of consent and other parameters are imposed by external power unaccountable to Irish democracy. It is not that Republicanism disregards the issue of Unionist consent to future political arrangements, where it differs with other political forces like constitutional nationalism is that it refuses Unionist consent to be a prerequisite for constitutional change. While arguing that it is undesirable to coerce a ‘minority’, republicanism contends that to give a guarantee to a ‘minority’ in advance against all coercion to put a premium on unreasonableness and to make a settlement impossible. Finally Republicans can agree that the government of the 26 counties retain their legitimacy by denial and circumscription of political democracy. This is why the traditional republican position is to deny legitimacy to the 6 and 26 counties state. For the IRSP, it is clear that democracy is at the heart of the historical tasks facing the working class. Socialism’s lineage is also with democracy. Republicanism and Socialism are like cousins more than two sides of the same coin. It is possible to be a Republican or a democrat without being a Socialist. This is why in relation to other Republican tendencies, it is imperative to emphasize not just the democratic, but also internationalist, popular and egalitarian aspects of Republicanism. The IRSP is best placed to articulate the social content of Republicanism and address the question of what social forces to mobilize in what Connolly called The Reconquest of Ireland.
Liam O RUAIRC
http://www.irsm.org/irsp/starryplough/series12issue01complete.pdf