Radio Free Eireann clip on YouTube

"Typhooone" has kindly recorded and uploaded this weekend's interview with Radio Free Eireann (WBAI). The article Republicanism....Alive or Dying? is under discussion.

YouTube clip: approx. 10 mins.

Borders Exist To Be Crossed: Maryam Namazie

Gallerie, Issue 20, 2007

As I write it is the 26th anniversary of the death of IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands. His tenacity and endurance in the face of ponderous adversity has inspired many souls throughout the globe to make that daunting step into the cauldron of injustice, the heat of which is only ever tempered by the determination of the human psyche to douse it.

It is often tempting to feel that there is nothing that can be done for Bobby Sands other than to remember him. Perhaps cherish the last few seconds of snatched conversation ever shared with him in a freezing and filthy prison cell on the 18th of December 1980; a mere five months before he succumbed on the 65th day of his hunger strike in demand of recognition that he was political prisoner. Yet to leave it at that would be a disservice to one of the modern era’s most iconic symbols against repression. Bobby Sands was an internationalist. Recognising in other activists throughout the globe the sense of purpose that so animated him affords both further meaning and significance to his life and death.

On the 26th anniversary of his prolonged and torturous demise it is fitting to write of the Iranian exile Maryam Namazie whose activism and writing mirror in so many ways the activities of one unbreakable Irishman who in his own words stood trembling but undeterred on the precipice of finality.

What gives people the strength to cope with adversity is a question often posed when the majority would rather sit in silent anonymity and allow others to risk immolation as a consequence of carrying the torch that casts light into dark corners where injustice mushrooms. Maryam Namazie was never content to view the act of sitting as a strategic option. On many occasions she moved lock stock and barrel from one country to another in furtherance of the justice she thinks is lacking in a heartless world. Nor is she any stranger to torch carrying. Frequently she thrusts it into the vampire-like faces of the things of the night that promote religion as a power structure. Her most recent project, promoting the Third Camp as a radical and humane path between US militarism and Islamic fundamentalism, is only the latest in a long line of initiatives which have placed her at the coalface of confrontation armed only with a voice that so audibly speaks truth to power.

In the campaigning crucible for quite some time, she first came to my attention when she lent her name to a manifesto against totalitarianism. The manifesto was drafted in the wake of the racist religious violence directed against the Danes as a means to discourage Danish artists from exploring perceptions of Mohammed. Namazie was uncompromising in her defence of free speech. One of her co-signatories had been a colleague of the late Theo Van Gogh, hacked to death by a religious bigot as he cycled the streets of Amsterdam in November 2004.

"I was appalled as many were by his murder. His ideas and beliefs are not relevant here. He was murdered for expressing them. I think his murder brought home to many the dangers of the political Islamic movement – since assassination has been one of their tools for many decades in the Middle East and also Europe, against, for example, Iranian dissidents."

Her determination in facing down such theocrats and their allies in the totalitarian left has been inspirational to those favouring a broader discussion of the matters that shape their daily lives. When she was profiled in the web journal The Blanket a year ago, her views and activism led to many people professing a better understanding of the issues that so concern her. Seemingly, there had been a pervasive belief that political Islam somehow could be reduced to an anti-imperialist impulse, the dominant strand of which was resistance. Maryam Namazie more than any of the 12 manifesto signatories profiled in The Blanket disabused its readers of that notion. It was uplifting to find amongst their number men who had stood shoulder to naked shoulder with Bobby Sands.

It is this fundamental mischaracterisation of political Islam based on Islam’s own depiction of itself as a resistance force or as a voice for the oppressed and voiceless which annoys her most. ‘I understand the concept that one person's terrorist can be another's freedom fighter but there is no freedom for those the Islamists claim to represent.’ Another bugbear is ‘the somewhat fashionable notion that criticizing Islam and the movement is a form of racism - the deceptive concept of Islamophobia.’

Important as her observation is, there is a strong feeling in particular amongst the left that Islamophobia is the racism of our time. Many Muslims claim to be victims of the phenomenon. Namazie remains to be persuaded:

"It’s deceptive because opposition to or criticism of, or even 'phobias' of ideologies, religions, cultures or political movements are not racism. It is only in the bizarro-world of the New World Order's cultural relativism that Islamophobia has been increasingly given legitimacy as a form of racism. This is an important point and one I have stressed on numerous occasions because I believe the use of the term 'Islamophobia' is in itself an attempt to silence a critique of Islam, political Islam and its oppression by deeming all those who do as racist."

For Namazie it seems Islamophilia, an ailment peculiar to sections of the European left, is the equal and opposite of Islamophobia but it goes unaddressed. Consequently, issues that are in need of public airing go unexplored.

At present, the life of Maryam Namazie strikes observers as pretty packed and hectic. She is a member of the Organisation of Women's Liberation Central Council where she campaigns against stoning, the veiling of children, Sharia law, executions, sexual apartheid, and women's rights abusers. A prolific writer and social commentator she also serves as the Director of the Worker-communist Party of Iran's International Relations Committee, host to TV International English and has worked in Amnesty International.

Since giving birth to her child a year and a half ago she senses that the volume of her political activity has lessened. Holding down a full time job while bringing up a child that is breast fed means long hours and sleepless nights. Quitting however is not a feature to be sketched into the landscape of Maryam Namazie. When asked by her father would she give up political activism with the birth of her son her response was to tell him that she had more incentive to engage politically because it has become even more important to have a better world for her child.

Although an unalloyed secularist she was brought up in a Muslim household by parents who were not overly strict on applying the teachings of Islam. As a result being Muslim never figured as part of her identity. This fortified her emotionally for the intellectual challenge involved in viewing Islam through a critical prism, a path she wandered onto as a result of the Islamic regime being established in Tehran where she had been born and raised as a child. With her family she left Iran in 1980 after the installation of the Islamic regime. Since then her odyssey against oppression has seen her domiciled in the US, Sudan, India and Britain where she currently resides. Her departure from Iran was initially considered only a temporary measure:

"Since the schools had been shut down in order to Islamicise them my mother brought me to India (the only place we could get into at the time because of someone my parents knew) to put me in a school and return but then she never returned. My dad had to leave with my baby sister and joined us a few months later."

Life in India was not a matter of simply settling down. The family could not gain residency in the country and so after sitting her O-Levels it packed suitcases and moved to Bournemouth in the UK where Maryam began studying for her A levels. But acquiring residency in Britain proved no easier than it had been in India. The family was on the trek once more, crossing an ocean and state borders. The US became ‘the place that gave my family a home and a place to belong.’ A two year interregnum from the US was spent in Sudan where she worked assisting Ethiopian refugees. A newly installed Islamic government, however, threatened her for setting up a human rights body. She fled the country and returned to the US where she studied for and obtained a degree.

The major influences in her politically nomadic life have been ‘the Iranian revolution, my family, worker-communism and Mansoor Hekmat.’ Tragically, the life of Hekmat was to be cut short by cancer in 2004. He was part of the leadership of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran which was surviving in exile in London. This ultimately brought her to the British capital. She first heard of Hekmat in Turkey ten years before he died and was impressed by his humanity. In distilling the influences in her life down it is evident Hekmat was the most important:

"The Iranian revolution gave me first hand experience of the power of people to overthrow a dictatorship. Unfortunately, the revolution was expropriated and crushed by the Islamic movement. A revolution gives you hope, reveals the power of human will, and politicizes you. The experience of flight and the seeking of another home as well as starting over for my family and many others we knew was another. So was the reliance on family and loved ones to get through difficult times. Finally, the most important influence on my life was that of worker-communism and Mansoor Hekmat."

When asked to detail the purpose of the Third Camp she is clearheaded in her presentation of the crucial issue, the intellectual cataract that fails to see that by focussing on US militarism alone, the problems of oppression and injustice are not addressed in a holistic fashion.

"The third camp is an attempt to provide people with a principled and human way to mobilize against war without falling either for US militarism or Islamic terrorism. Right now, much of the mainstream 'stop the war' coalitions are focused on US militarism alone and are apologetic towards the political Islamic movement. But a vast majority of people across the world are very opposed to political Islam and Islamic terrorism too. On the other hand those who have seen the atrocities of the Islamists and Islamic terrorism sometimes support US militarism. The third camp is the voice of the majority of people who see both as guilty of crimes against humanity and want to defend and represent humanity instead."

It is difficult for many on the left to see an equivalent threat posed by political Islam and US militarism. Some have expressed abhorrence that people claiming to be progressive argue that the greatest threat faced by global civilisation today comes from Islamic totalitarianism. Namazie responds:

"Islamic totalitarianism poses such a great threat because it is spearheading a right-wing restructuring of the ruling class in the Middle East which is in essence anti-Left and inhuman."

Like Professor Fred Halliday she is amazed and appalled at the support the ‘anti-imperialist nationalist left’ has given to this phenomenon. She firmly believes that the West has been instrumental in developing political Islam and fails utterly to comprehend why the anti-imperialist left would therefore want to support something that was deliberately fostered and nurtured by imperialism as a battering ram against the Soviets in Afghanistan and left movements in countries like Iran. There is now an added dimension:

"Since September 11, its reach has moved beyond the Mid East to affect societies across the globe. It has helped pave the way for political religion's revival. Not to forget though that it is a creation of Western governments vis-à-vis the former Soviet Union and has a lot in common with the right wing US administration."

Despite leftist discourse having a long history of opposition to totalitarianism Namazie feels much of it is posturing. Totalitarianism represents a strong current within political Islam.

"Sadly, much of the anti-imperialist nationalist left have fallen for this movement and they see the political Islamic movement as a 'third worldish' resistance force to US militarism; quite ridiculous actually when you think about it because the political Islamic movement is a right wing reactionary movement that has state power and or is vying for power in many places and which has a lot in common with the US right wing administration. It is a great threat because of what it means for human beings and their lives. Anywhere it rules or has power, it means nothing but human suffering in its most medieval forms (including stoning and amputations). But it is also a huge threat for universal human values in places where it is not necessarily a state power but is vying for access like in Europe. It is paving the way for an increase in religion and its influence in society at large."

Unlike others who distinguish between Islam and political Islam Namazie makes no such distinction. But does this not make more difficult the task of winning allies within the Islamic world?

"I am wary of the term Islamic world as it associates millions of people as being represented by the political Islamic movement. But more to the point, the relation between Islam and political Islam is the same as between nationalism and fascism. One provides the feeding ground for the other. Islam is the banner of political Islam. You cannot fight one without also fighting the other. It's important to do so from a left and anti-racist perspective so that in fact those deemed or labelled Muslims or who consider themselves Muslims are supported and defended. As the right to religion is a private affair, criticizing Islam has nothing to do with attacking Muslims. The Islamic movement wants to portray it as such. It is our task to show that this is not the case."

It was the Islamic regimes in both Iran and Sudan that showed her ‘the true role of religion and in particular the inhumane capacity of Islam to violate the most basic of rights.’ But becoming an ‘ardent atheist and secularist’ was far from being an overnight event. Working for eighteen years with refugees and asylum seekers, whom she terms the victims of Islam and political Islam, alienated her from any concept of Islam as a spiritual property. It became clear that religion was a material power structure. Complementing her growth as a human being unfettered by spiritual chains was the thinking and activism of Mansoor Hekmat. He provided a generation of activists in Iran with a framework for developing critical thought and a Marxist humanism. One of her co signatories to the manifesto against totalitarianism, Taslima Nasrin, once asked her how come so many Iranians are such ardent and passionate defenders of secularism and rights. "I would say Mansoor Hekmat had more to do with it than anything else."

One of her most burning campaign issues concerned the brutal Islamic murder of 16 year old Atefeh Rajabi.

"She was a 16 year old girl who was hung in a city square in Iran for 'crimes against chastity'. The wasted hopes and dreams and life of a sweet 16 girl. I remember being 16 and what I had to look forward to. I think the victims of political Islam are so great - that sometimes people don't understand its scale - otherwise how could they ever excuse it. I think Atefeh for me is the human representation and personification of what it means for people's lives."

Unmitigating in her defence of women against Islam does she fail to see that there are other women in Britain with origins in the Muslim tradition, who claim to be radical yet who sit on the opposite end if the continuum from herself? The Respect activist Salma Yaqoob, for example, has defended the wearing of the veil. How does Namazie explain this?

"I think Yaqoob does so in order to defend the political Islamic movement so she has to justify it. With regards the veil, I couldn't say it better than Salman Rushdie – ‘the veil sucks’. It is a tool for suppression and repression. Defending it is like defending the chastity belt or foot binding. It's an abomination."

Another of her more provocative concepts is her characterisation of cultural relativism as ‘this era's fascism.’ She condemns it on the grounds that it excuses violations of rights and holds culture and religion above the human being.

"The idea of difference has always been the fundamental principle of a racist agenda. The defeat of Nazism and its biological theory of difference largely discredited racial superiority. The racism behind it, however, found another more acceptable form of expression for this era. Instead of expression in racial terms, difference is now portrayed in cultural terms. Cultural relativism is this era's fascism. Cultural relativists are defenders of this era's holocausts."

One of her co-signatories to the manifesto against totalitarianism, Ayaan Hirshi Ali, later moved to the US where she began working for right wing think tank. While in Holland where she was a member of the country’s national parliament Hirshi Ali had become the public face of opposition to multiculturalism and an unyielding public critic of Islam. She won many admirers but has her decision to become part of a right wing think tank not reinforced the left critics who argue that the agenda all along was Islamophobia?

"I don't know Ayaan so well but I have a sense that she is not right wing in the sense that she is critical of Islam and political Islam in order to defend women's rights - not something the right does. I think she has been disillusioned by the pathetic excuse of a left in Europe. I am not willing to write her off yet. It is unfortunate that she has joined a right wing think tank - as I said I find the US right wing has more similarities with the political Islamic movement than it lets on."

For Maryam Namazie, Western societies are under threat from an insidious political Islam. She strongly advocates that the West defends the rights of all political refugees and that no amount of multicultural positioning should ever allow any group within society to claim special privilege for itself in which it is free to pursue its culture over the human rights of others.

Maryam Namazie is nothing if not someone who pushes and probes at the boundaries of life. In ways her writings resonate deeply of those of the anti-fascist Chilean writer Ariel Dorfmann who also explores the imposition of boundaries. Hers has been one of breaking the mould, leaping the barriers that are sometimes called borders, and which delineate and constrain our identities.

"I really feel I have crossed so many of the boundaries - much of them constructed - that restrict people, whether it is that of religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, gender. I have come to understand that none of them are sacred; none of them matter; only human beings do."

Martin Meehan

7/11/2007

The last time I saw Martin Meehan he was at the funeral of John Kelly. We greeted each other in a bar where we had stopped prior to the journey back to Belfast. The Ardoyne man was in the company of other Sinn Fein members one of whom I had known from jail and with whom I exchanged phone numbers.

On learning that the old warhorse had gone off to graze in Valhalla I experienced one of those quiet sombre moments of reflection. He seemed to have been around forever and most of us took for granted that he always would be. He was there at the rise of the Provisional IRA and present at its decline, the alpha and omega of Provisional armed struggle.

He came on our H4 wing during the blanket protest. The author Tim Pat Coogan at one point visited him in his cell by way of research he was conducting for a book on the H-Blocks. The screws held him in a sort of awe. It was ‘Martin this … Martin that.’ Within a fortnight he had organised a wing choir that performed weekly at the Sunday mass. The more irreverent amongst us ungraciously termed it ‘Martin’s Muppets.’

He didn’t stay on the blanket for long, donning the prison uniform and engaging in a lengthy hunger strike in a failed bid to prove his innocence of the charges for which he was serving time. Many of us resented his leaving the protest. He was a leader and in our view should have been amongst his men. We didn’t stop to consider then that given his pressing family problems effective exile to the protest blocks was not an option he could afford to consider. The freedom from responsibility that accompanied our youth made it easy to be judgemental. We came to forgive him his transgressions, as he on many future occasions forgave us ours.

Martin Meehan had a deep compassionate side to his character. He never forgot comrades nor ignored them even when it was the done thing to do. Shortly after the death of Joe O’Connor, a time when the Provisional leadership was proving extremely hostile to myself and my partner, Martin stopped his car in the centre of town, held up traffic and shook hands with us. If he had any identification with our political perspective he did not reveal it, merely telling us to keep the spirit up. It was a humane gesture so in keeping with the character.

On another occasion I was leaving the Royal Victoria Hospital at its Grosvenor Road exit having just visited two former leaders of the IRA in Belfast who were in separate wards. On the way in on foot was Martin. Immaculately kitted out – he looked as if he just left some important business to attend what for him was something of equal if not greater import - he asked if I knew what wards both men were on. It was neither the first nor the last time that he made the journey to see old comrades in hospital.

Martin Meehan operated at the personal level. Some may dismiss what he did as gesture politics such as televised meetings with erstwhile British soldiers or engaging in public arm wrestling contests with former loyalist prisoners. But this would be ungenerous to a man who, whatever his penchant for grand politics, never lost his interest in ordinary people. The broad sweeps of the peace process meant little to ‘Mick’ if they denied him the freedom to lock horns or arms with those individuals who aroused his natural curiosity.

Although he and I took opposite sides in a dispute in Rathenraw in Antrim, it did little to lessen the personal warmth between us. When I got the chance to discuss the matter with him face to face in Castle Street he was irate over his critics in Rathenraw but advised me to proceed cautiously, making his point forcefully that one of his leading antagonists was an informer. Events in recent days would suggest that he is hardly alone in that opinion.

There are so many stories about ‘Mick’ that it would be impossible to even begin recounting them. In prison he was a solid soul always at the heart of mixing and winding. More often than not it was turned around on him but that was part of the game and he revelled in it. His little celebration dance, solely for the purpose of annoying the other team, when he scored a goal on the football park still causes a smile to cross my face. While he acted the fool for the purposes of entertaining others Martin Meehan was not a stupid man. His knowledge of world events and the thought he put into his plays staged in H-Block canteens highlighted a dimension of his character often nudged into the wings by his more emotional side.

He was tough and his reputation for being so preceded him. In 1983 shortly after the big escape from the H-Blocks, he was locked behind a grill in the canteen when some screws thought they would pick on an older prisoner, Liam Ferguson from Fermanagh. The grills rattled, to a lion-like roar. The screws were warned not to lay a hand on ‘Fergy.’ It worked. When he came back from the boards three days later Liam told us that not a hair on his head had been ruffled.

Martin Meehan’s republican odyssey was not a journey from rags to riches. The only huge republican profile from the 1970s still languishing in the jails in the 1990s, republicanism to him was a struggle not a career. An activist who embraced the concept on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, former docker and life long trade unionist, I could never understand why he persisted with the politics of the peace process. Afterall it had swapped Pearse for Paisley and marched incessantly to the right. Like many others imbued with the military ethic I suspect he possessed as Hunter S Thompson once phrased it, ‘a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority” …’

With the passing of both John Kelly and Martin Meehan I paused to consider that here were two men who had been present at the birth of the Provisional IRA yet who died believing completely different things about the organisation. Yet there is no Manichean divide that permits us who knew them to view one man as better than the other.

Despite his best efforts the Ardoyne IRA leader was not to see the united Ireland that he once thought could be achieved by literally driving the British into the sea. In that sense he is no different from every other volunteer who fought in the IRA. And none can dispute it, Martin Meehan fought.

John Kelly

September 2007

It is of considerable regret on my part that I only met John Kelly for the first time a short number of years ago. It was at a wake of a friend’s father in Tyrone. John was a Sinn Fein MLA at the time and I had established a public reputation as a critic of the party. It caused no sparks between us as he remained unfazed and engaged in political conversation with myself and others of like mind attending the wake. Unlike many of his colleagues who endorsed the 'control dictatorship' he shunned its odious practice of ostracism and was more than capable of embracing a different idea.

At the time I was already aware that if he did not harbour actual reservations about the likely outworking of the peace process he was under no illusions as to what path the Provisional movement was following. When fielding a question at an event in England he famously quipped that ‘we are all Sticks now.’ Ironically, on the weekend of John’s burial, John A Murphy told Martin McGuinness at another event in England that the now British minister was firmly in the ‘Sticky’ mould.

Some time after that first meeting I attended a protest outside Maghaberry Prison with John Kelly. Sinn Fein was enraged that John would, without seeking party approval, lend his support to a campaign for better conditions for republican prisoners. That event was probably the catalyst that saw John part ways with his former colleagues. He appreciated that they were on the power circuit and would abandon all and sundry to stay there.

When a body of opinion, which became known as the No More Lies group, held a number of meetings to discuss ways of combating the increasing degeneracy of the Provisional movement and how best to protect people from its bullying and intimidation, John Kelly was its driving force. If there was no opportunity for republicans to advance they were obligated in his view to prevent repression of the opposition by the Sinn Fein leadership. During the outcry over the murder of Robert McCartney he lent his voice to the McCartney family campaign for justice, asking if the only thing achieved by republican struggle was the exchange of an orange jackboot for a green one.

John was also in the engine room driving opposition to the Sinn Fein stance on policing which he felt could only lead to the party openly advocating the sordid practice of informing on republicans as a means to assist the British police. A frequent contributor to discussions as part of the Concerned Republicans group a crowning moment for him was when he chaired a thunderous packed meeting in Derry city where his passion for the issue led to him abandoning the neutrality of the chair. His oratory animated the audience. With Sinn Fein trying to atomise oppositional voices the fusion of so many strands of republican thought was an uplifting moment for a man so used to addressing ‘the few and the spat upon’ as Dolours Price poignantly describes those who are not fair-weather republicans.

An endearing characteristic of John was his ability to cut through the party guff. When Sinn Fein latched onto Denis Donaldson’s admission that he had been a British agent of twenty years as a pretext for alleging that securocrats had manufactured an artificial crisis in 2002 as a means to bring down the executive John scoffed at the party. On the evening of Donaldson’s exposure, when I was hurriedly writing an opinion piece for the Irish News, John explained to me that far from the spy ring being the odious work of some spooky ne’er do well a Sinn Fein MLA had in fact organised it. He did not see it as a serious threat to the British, being in his view a balm with which some uneasy staffers at Stormont could assuage their conscience as they went about implementing British rule.

John Kelly very much believed in the concept of Tone which stressed Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. He made many friends within the unionist community and resented the sectarianism of some of his fellow party MLA’s who chided him for suggesting that unionism should be offered a poison free chalice and then had the chutzpah to masquerade in public office as the champions of bridge building between the nationalist and unionist communities.

A diverse range of republican opinion attended the funeral of John Kelly. Some of his old colleagues from Sinn Fein were in attendance but they cut lonely figures, seemingly sensing that they rather than their critics feel isolated at republican funerals these days. That however did not stop conversation and banter between the different shades. One of the last people our travelling party spoke to as we set about getting ready for the journey back to Belfast was Sinn Fein’s Martin Meehan. Like John Kelly, the Ardoyne man has accompanied many republican dead on the last mile of their final journey for more years than most remember.

One of the day’s lighter moments came when my daughter’s curiosity prompted her to ask me to take her inside the church where a funeral mass was being conducted. That she is not brought up in a religious environment or subjected to any religious sentiment was evident in her response to Tommy Gorman asking her what it was like inside the chapel. 'A man in a purple coat was talking' she said in a manner, suggesting she found it anything but interesting. ‘That’s a priest’ Tommy declared, humorously rebuking me for keeping the child in the dark. Clerics and their doctrines are something she might wish to delve into further as she moves through her own life. For now she is too young, her mind too innocent, to allow her psychological character to be skewed by religion.

It would have brought a smile to the face of John Kelly, to whose home my daughter had been a visitor. A man who believed in God he had not the slightest inclination to shove his beliefs down the throats of others resistant to them.

John Kelly is not someone who was laid to rest with the sense that his time had come. He exuded vitality rarely seen in people half his age. Even when he was ill he never relented, always ready to travel or lobby at a moment’s notice. The wise owl of dissenting republicanism, there will be many occasions in the future when his colleagues will rue his vacant perch.

Republicanism ... Alive or Dying?

It has always been the political craft of courtiers and court government to abuse something which they call republicanism but what that republicanism is or was they never attempt to explain – Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man

Where now republicanism in Ireland? Is there life after death? Are those seeking to revive it merely wasting their energy giving the kiss of life to a corpse?

Without giving it much thought it is tempting to say that republicanism in Ireland is in a crisis. But even that is hardly true, being much too sanguine an observation. There is no crisis. This is so because there is no longer any social phenomenon that we may term republicanism. The perennial pockets of the faithful exist here and there, for the most part taking cultural form. But as a social phenomenon of any political import republicanism has ceased to function.

In recent years republicanism has more than anything else been linked to the Provisional project in the north. However, as a result of the peace process the republican dimension to Provisional politics has been effectively routed. The Provos now endorse everything their republican character previously opposed. Their support for the partition principle, politely termed consent, premised as it is on a legitimate British right to be in Ireland, negates any claim on their part to traditional republican credentials. The one time Republican Movement is safely corralled within a right wing British administration in the north and its prospects in the Republic seem decidedly bleak.

The armed dissidents, with or without their informer contingent, are making no comparable impact to their equally informer riddled Provisional forerunners. The unarmed dissidents critique without strategising, showing the rock where the northern republican struggle was beached but without charting a new course away from the debris.

In the south all shades of political opinion lay claim to the republican mantle while at the same time doing little to demonstrate that their republic is in any real sense all that different from the current British monarchy. It is easier to feel that the Republic is a monarchy without a king than to think England is a Republic with one. As is argued by Dorothy Thompson in the second edition of the Republic edited by Finbar Cullen and Aengus O Snodaigh there is in England today virtually no residual trace of the 19th century republicanism that once rummaged there.

Given this state of play it is either the most useless or conversely appropriate time to be perusing this collection of essays on republicanism. Were it a death certificate masquerading as something else its editors would need to beg forgiveness. Too many young people answered previous clarion calls of the republican bugle and ended up committing murder to the sound of trumpets. But the book is more than that. It urges no one to take up a gun so that the shackles of British imperialism preventing Paisley from becoming first minister can be removed. The essays in fact paid little attention to recent republicanism, opting instead for a broader historical sweep, most of which is conceptually rooted in a European and American context.

The problem poser here is that republicanism as a concept can be so embracing as to include virtually everyone opposed to monarchical rule. If Bertie Ahern can claim to be a socialist then almost anyone can claim to be a republican. In a post modernist world where all narratives are broken down into the free standing atoms that form them and are allowed to drift into other narratives which are in turn dispersed and fragmented, it is easy to see why such conceptual promiscuity is possible. But if republicanism is viewed as a systematic history of ideas rather than a whatever you’re having yourself philosophy then at its heart are core tenets that it seeks to promote and which distance it from the other perspectives that seek to utilise its insights.

It stands apart from nationalism in that interdependence rather than commonality defines it. What differentiates it from liberalism is that it relies on collective and participatory citizen action to promote the common good rather than on the rule of law to protect individual rights. Nationalism and liberalism in articulating republican elements into their own discourses do little to promote republicanism and everything to reinforce nationalism and liberalism.

Republicanism poses a particular challenge to nationalism in that it is based on citizenship rather than commonality. The point is illuminated in the collection of essays by showing that Germans living in Russia could obtain German citizenship as soon as they arrived on German soil but Turks living for years in Germany were denied citizenship.

Whereas liberalism is concerned, it is given to using rights as an ideological weapon in the battle against republicanism. One of the most exasperating comments in the rights debate is the oft quoted one that people are born free and that rights are somehow natural. A second’s reflection will more than suffice to convince that at the moment of birth we are least free, being totally dependent on others to deal with the unremitting attrition of need. Rights are not given but are socially constructed. Without activism and constant vigilance they can be eroded much easier than they are won.

In this respect Irish republicans of the physical force tradition got one thing right. Like Machiavelli they were republicans for the hard times. The hard times for them however not only see them pitched against the British but also against democratic sentiment. Theirs is an elitist republicanism that values struggle regardless of the wider community rather than struggle as part of it.

This is where a citizen powered republicanism has something to offer modern society. The phrase of Anatole France that the law permits rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of the River Sienne sums up the nature of liberalism and the challenge that republicanism can mount to it. Who but the poor would need to sleep there? Liberalism would recoil at the republican view of Rousseau that ‘no citizen should be so rich as to buy another and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.’

In order to pursue this to its logical conclusion republicanism need not necessarily be socialist. But its emphasis on promoting the common good gives it a strong social character that would see it in a state of perpetual tension with liberalism.

Yet if it is to be truly social republicanism must avoid all that which denies the social. While certain republican ideas predated the enlightenment it is equally indisputable that modern republicanism is a product of the enlightenment. Yet all too frequently republicanism has been associated with the absolutist tendencies that the enlightenment was a reaction against.

Consequently, it is a cause of much regret that anti-intellectualism has featured so strongly within the sphere of Irish republicanism. The current Provos who sometimes like to trace their antecedents to Wolfe Tone seem to practice only his opposition to a free press. The dissidents share with the Provos a dislike of discussion not ordained by them. In their world view censorship is a crime only when practiced by the Provos. The various republican parties of the south including the ‘true’ one hammered home Section 31 with a venom.

If republicanism is to re-emerge and promote the common good then it can ill afford to subvert free inquiry. It is the necessary condition for republicanism to flourish in. It is also the one guarantor against the more totalitarian impulses that have often embedded themselves within a range of international republican tendencies.

Cullen and O’Snodaigh by prising open the clamps that for long shackled intellectual discussion have allowed important questions to be asked. The challenge is for a moribund republicanism not to reinvent itself as something else but to return to the basics from which it was spawned. As we become subsumed within our comprehensively interdependent world the outcome of what seem absolutely rational decisions made at an individual level can be socially catastrophic. Take global warming for example. The potential for burn out is increased by individuals and nations insisting on pursuing their own rights as insular entities. Warmed by their own separate fires they remain oblivious to the conflagration that awaits them. Republicanism by its rejection of the notion that ‘we all in this alone’, through its insights, may offer more light than heat.

Pubished in Fourthwrite, Winter 2007, and The Blanket, January, 2008.