Barajas

Having used Barajas Airport in Madrid on a number of occasions, on top of having flown to and from Spain in a Spanair McDonnell-Douglas carrier, there was much sympathy on my part along with not a little anguish at the fate of those 154 air travellers, mostly holiday makers, who perished on Wednesday shortly after their plane had taken off from the Spanish capital. A month ago we had travelled as a family from Dublin to Palma Airport on the Spanish island of Mallorca. About to embark on a holiday is a time of relaxation for parents and exuberant anticipation for children. That it should all end in burning wreckage strewn across an airport simply does not compute. When children are involved in such tragedy the sense of loss is infinitely worse. A number of families underwent wipe out in the accident. One mother in a desperate bid to ensure such a fate would not befall her family handed her daughter to firemen for rescue and then died herself. The survival of a mere 3 out of 19 children who had been on board was described as a miracle from god. Why it was not a miracle extended to other children on the plane bafflingly seems never to figure in such illogical deliberations. God, it seems, likes some kids better than others.

Probably my most uncomfortable flight was to Madrid from Amsterdam 10 years ago. Coming in to land the plane shook so violently I feared it might disintegrate in the air. My son Eamonn, sensing my discomfort, at one point asked if I needed him to hold my hand. The response was a gruff brush off. We disembarked safely to a beautiful but blistering Madrid evening.

On a later flight from London to Madrid I was seated alongside Henry Patterson. He looked on me with something resembling horror as I detailed the history of aviation disasters, pointing out in the process that in September 1977 one of the world’s worst air catastrophes occurred on Spanish soil. While he conceded I probably knew more about plane crashes than anyone else he had met, it was the type of morbid knowledge he felt was better vented on the ground and then only after the second leg of a return flight. Even though one of our return flights from Saragossa to Madrid was cancelled due to fog and we had to make the journey by taxi, our travelling was otherwise uneventful.

With Spain in the news this year for its sporting achievements in both soccer and tennis the country’s mood despite its economic woes must have been buoyant. But there was no happy ending and national morale could only have plummeted after Wednesday’s crash. It was the worst aviation disaster to have hit Spain in almost 3 decades. Commuters of a different type however experienced death and destruction a couple of years ago when the Madrid train network was bombed in a racist attack by theocratic fascists intent on massacring men, women and children for no reason other than they were Spanish. It was an experience of an emergency put to good use in rescuing and assisting the survivors of Wednesday’s crash.

There is considerable anger in Spain as a result of the crash, many suspecting that financial considerations trumped safety ones in the decision to let the plane off the ground. Scuffles were reported to have broken out between bereaved relatives and Spanair management officials. As often happens after major ‘industrial accidents’ the question to be asked is if enough was done before hand to protect people from profit. Last year the Spanish pilots' union Sepla wrote to the industry’s boss class at Spanair complaining that ‘the operative chaos is putting passengers at risk.’ According to the Guardian the letter expressed reservations about the quality of ground staff, grounded aircraft not authorized to fly, and scarcity of crew. In another letter it was forewarned ‘unfortunately all this indicates this will end in chaos.’

More complaints from Sepla followed including charges that Spanair was still using old McDonnell-Douglas carriers rather than introduce a new fleet of Airbus A320 planes. Sepla also alleged that a stress on punctuality was undermining both security and safety. Fortunately for one couple, this worked to their advantage. They were barred from boarding the doomed flight on Wednesday because they failed to make the boarding gate on time. Others were not allowed off the plane despite fears that something was amiss. Punctuality before people.

If it does emerge that safety considerations were set aside in pursuit of profit, the Spanair profiteers should be viewed in a light no different from the powerful figures responsible for the crimes of Bhopal and Aberfan, but treated more stringently. People only live once. Their right to do so should be fortified rather than attenuated by economic resources.

Showing The Man

Because Martin Meehan was such a solid republican figure, the acrimonious dispute which followed Joe Graham’s publication of a biography of the late Ardoyne man was a cause for sorrow rather than anger. A review that might try to blame one party or the other would succeed only in taking attention away from the person who deserves it most, Martin Meehan.

Show Me The Man is a folksy biography which seeks to show the man Martin Meehan in a very favourable light. Those of us who knew and liked ‘Mick’ will hardly complain about that. But I suspect if he were to have had a sneak preview before he died he might have said, ‘tone it down a bit, Joe’ to which Joe might have responded with a wink and a whisper, ‘sure I did, Martin.’ Joe Graham to his credit didn’t try to tone down anything. He wanted to write a story about his mate; and that is what he delivered and makes no apologies for it. The book, as the author claims is written ‘from an unashamedly personal point of view.’

Local history is constructed and conveyed in a certain way. It is community based rather than institution centred. It can be as easily read by the pub-goer as the professor. Many do not like it because it lacks analytical or academic rigour. While it may not grace the libraries of universities the product of local history is invaluable in that it fills in the silences that often exist only because it is a silence imposed by a dominant narrative. I have long been impressed by the charge that a historical account succeeds to the extent that it manages to exclude or suppress other accounts. Show Me The Man is a work that other histories will need to take account of when they seek to delve into the formative years of the Belfast Provisional IRA. An interesting vignette on how conflict might have been avoided is provided in the event where Martin Meehan the IRA volunteer safely escorts the senior RUC member Frank Lagan to safety at a time of acute tension in the Lower Falls. Within a short period of time such an action would have been unthinkable; Meehan would quickly come to be identified as a person who shot rather than saved RUC members.

What emerges from this book is that Martin Meehan, unlike many who later joined the Provisional IRA, was an IRA member long before the formation of the Provisionals. There a history of republicanism within the Meehan family. Young Martin was forever aware of the brutality meted out against republican prisoners just a mile down the road from where he was born and bred.

Meehan’s role in the defence of Ardoyne gave him a legendary status. But he felt so let down by the IRA failure to defend its people during the August ‘pogroms’ that during a two month sentence in Crumlin Road Prison he bleakly commented:

that two month’s prison sentence wrecked me – was the worst sentence I have endured. I swore I was finished with everything, was going to forget everything, and get my life back to normal. It was not worth it at all, I found no motivation or a ‘cause’ to be in a cell.

That he bounced back from such adversity is all too evident in the many years he would later spend in prison. Time and again he would return to its clanging environment. A defining moment in the reversal of his sagging morale came in the summer of 1970. He clearly drew great inspiration from the IRA defence of Ardoyne on June the 27th of that year. Although the Short Strand has pride of place in republican folklore arising out of events that particular evening, the Ardoyne IRA inflicted more fatalities on loyalist attackers and sustained fewer losses. Meehan himself believed that the fortunes of the IRA changed irreversibly that night. Never again would IRA stand for I Ran Away.

Within a week the British in response to those armed IRA defensive actions were to make a major strategic error which alienated swathes of working class nationalists – the Falls curfew. From the embers of 1969 the British state conjured against itself a lethal and tenacious armed opponent. Martin Meehan would be at its cutting edge, arguing that ‘it was the men and women of the Irish Republican Army in North Belfast who initiated the actual war against the British forces.’ The first British soldier to be killed by the IRA fell in North Belfast. Meehan went on to command the volunteers who would prove so lethally efficient against the British Regiment the Green Howards.

Meehan’s capacity for absorbing punishment is readily documented by Joe Graham. The brutality that he experienced at the hands of British forces would have claimed the life or at least the spirit of a less determined man. Yet Meehan had the generosity to sit down with one of the people who mercilessly beat him and shake hands in a widely televised event.

In this biography Joe Graham captures the loyalty-to-the-movement side of Martin Meehan. Yet his account is nuanced by the insertion of some doubts Meehan is said to have had about the direction of Sinn Fein’s strategy. More evidence will be required before it can be said with confidence what Meehan felt at the time of his death. For now Show Me The Man has shown the man in all his republican splendour.

Show Me The Man: The Official Biography of Martin Meehan. Rushlight Publications: Belfast. Price £7.50

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken – Christopher Hitchens

My mother first prompted me into reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn. She loved Russian literature. It was through her that I also came while imprisoned to read Dostoyevsky, of whom it is said Solzhenitsyn, conservative and traditionalist, was a modern reincarnation. It was her view that Russian novelists brought characters to life like no other. She felt the beings created by great Russian writers were so brimming with life that the reader actually came to regard some of them as friends. Often in prison I would look forward to the cell door slamming behind me at night, facilitating the voyage into a different world and the company of Solzhenitsyn.

The three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, First Circle, One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch all sent their vital force surging through my mind, crystallising repression and reinforcing the ethical necessity of making a stand against it. Ivan Denisovitch, I read shortly after the end of the 1981 hunger strike when brutal regimes concentrated the mind. How people elsewhere coped with their incarceration had a certain pull for me. I wanted to know if they experienced the same despair and pangs of terror that often visited us or were they some form of far removed, pain-immune creatures. Solzhenitsyn put it right for me. His capturing of suffering and the type of nefarious regime behind its infliction were equally as palpable as I moved through his words. Not much new under the sun in that respect. His words beckoned me back to spend more time with them and often I succumbed in spite of my urge to flick a page, move on and prise open new words that would yield discoveries about the immense potency of this former political prisoner as a writer.

His struggle was against Stalin’s regime of 'breaking the truth.' He survived the ‘meat grinder’, his preferred term to describe Soviet repression. He defiantly refused to yield to the myriad of powers within the Soviet system trying to enforce his silence. Totalitarianism it is said does its dirty work in the dark. In the dark bowels of some Lubyanka it demands a flowing tongue. This contrasts with the darkness of the public sphere which it does not want illuminated by the electrifying power of words. Silence there is a prerequisite for survival. Like a public tramline the only words allowed to travel along the tracks of public discourse belong to the state. And yet, as Christopher Hitchens stressed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

kept on writing. The Communist Party's goons could have torn it up or confiscated or burned it—as they did sometimes—but he continued putting it down on paper and keeping a bottom drawer filled for posterity. This is a kind of fortitude for which we do not have any facile name.

When he was the bane of the Soviet system his work was much admired in the West:

In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion.

But when expelled by the Brezhnev regime the West which had sang his praises as a Russian dissident, grew disenchanted with him. One reason was the influence of Henry Kissinger who felt that in his world of realpolitik pursuing détente with the USSR was more important than giving Whitehouse platforms to dissident writers. Nor could his Harvard lecture of the mid 1970s have endeared Western officialdom to him with his stress on critiquing Western concepts of freedom and secularism. He disliked humanism arguing that it inevitably led to intellectual chaos that could only be addressed through spirituality. He saw in religion a cure rather than a poison. ‘Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.’

His sense of patriotism curbed any inclination he might have had to allow Russia to shoulder the blame for Marxism. It was a concept imported into Russia from the West where it had been given life by its first thinkers who were German. Not content to leave it at that he went further, displaying incandescent rage towards suggestions that the offspring of Marxism, Stalinism and Leninism, had peculiar roots in Russian history.

Solzhenitsyn distrusted democratic sentiment, even to the point of preferring the regime of Vladimir Putin to Boris Yeltsin. He defended the foreign policy of Putin, laced as it was with crimes against humanity throughout Chechnya. Criticisms were manifold. His inconsistencies left him open to rebuke and he was ravished for criticising NATO bombing of Serbia while remaining silent when Russian forces bombed the civilians of Chechnya and destroyed the capital Groznyy. As ‘Russia’s last conscience’ his conscience fought a battle with his nationalism and lost.

His nationalism led to accusations of distortionism on the grounds that he hankered after a Russian past that never existed, where writers inhabited a literary environment not ravished by the virus of censorship. His twilight two volume work on the role of Jews in Russian history led to charges of anti-Semitism. Perhaps the most cutting comment came from Richard Pipes: ‘Anyone who disagreed with him was not merely wrong but evil. He was constitutionally incapable of tolerating dissent.’ Hardly something any dissident wants to hear said of them.

It is about 25 years since I last read Solzhenitsyn in book form. But his stature as one of the great literary figures of the 20th Century always made his books feel much closer than that. Cancer Ward is the sole work of his that has a place in the library we maintain at home. No particular reason other than the passing of time for that. In his later years the writing is said to have lost much of its critical edge. It comes with the turf. Dissident writers attack much better than they defend. Their ability lies not in glossing over the deficiencies of a regime but in unmasking them. For the writer a potent energy is unleashed when confronting the crimes of megalomaniacs like Stalin which morphs into a limpness when writing apologetics for autocrats like Putin.

All this said, I am pulled to him for his earlier writings rather than repelled by him for the stances he took in later life. A writer who refused to bend the knee to the censor in the most adverse of circumstances is a beacon whose light must shine beyond the darkness of their death.

No Minute Silence

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence - Sylvia Plath

I am deeply honoured that Ausubo Press felt strongly enough about my writings to want to put them out as a book. It is not just an acknowledgement of the effort I put in to writing them against a background of stress, ostracism and intimidation but is also recognition of those republicans who spoke to me and allowed me to bring to public attention their views and concerns.

At those times none of us were remotely concerned with books. Nor had I any desire to write one. Today, after the publication of Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, I don’t claim to have written 'a book'. At different times over the past ten years I wrote articles which evolved into a book. Perhaps it is best described as having put a book together rather than having written one.

For long I had been pressed by many in the academic and journalistic world to publish my doctoral dissertation on the formative years of the Provisional Movement. I suppose it is par for the course with PhDs. While I thought it was probably worthwhile to pursue such a venture, a number of reasons militated against it. Having become a walking footnote in the final months of my PhD in 1999, I have never yet managed to return to it. Even now the thought of having to read it again seems a chore for another day. Ultimately, I had no inclination to put the effort in that would turn it into a book.

Holding it together in a coherent and integrated manner was never the challenge, as was demonstrated by the writing of the PhD. On occasion I would produce chapters for academic publications, providing they did not take up too much of my time and the subject interested me sufficiently. There were other book offers which did appeal to me but time constraints prohibited any serious pursuit of them. On one less than memorable occasion myself and a friend started writing a history of the Northern state for a British publisher only to find that neither of us had the time to complete it within the terms of the contract.

One academic suggested that publication of the thesis would allow me to make the breakthrough into mainstream academia. Even being a close personal friend failed to assist him in understanding me, at least on that. The academic mainstream where I had many friends and colleagues had no attraction for me. Having tutored at Queens in 1994, I gratefully chalked up the experience but declined offers to do any more. Teaching was not what I wanted to do. Occasionally I would guest lecture on a masters course or deliver papers at Irish, British and European universities. Yet overall, I never longed for the conventional academic life and was mildly surprised to read in a 1994 issue of the Guardian that I sought a career in academia! It fitted the narratorial schema of the Guardian piece better than it would ever fit me. Outside of researching and procuring new knowledge which could be placed in the public domain, the centre of gravity in academia had little in the way of drawing power for me.

In a sense the choice was made for me rather than by me. Given the demands of an already pressing work schedule combined with the deep felt need to give attention to my young children, born after the completion of the PhD, I was confronted with decisions that had to be made about my time. I opted not to write books in deference to the regular churning out of short pieces that would explain events as they were happening. I informed my academic friend of this. He did not agree but remained supportive throughout.

With time to reflect I now think the decision was the correct one. While there are some great works analysing the peace process, none better than Ed Moloney’s critically reflective A Secret History of the IRA, there is a drought of critical republican voices speaking in raw event-induced tones irrigating this under-worked field; the outcome of spontaneous heated involvement rather than cold detached reflection. Were it otherwise, the idea for this book would probably not have gestated to the point of delivery. In any event it is now here and readers can make their own minds up.

The articles in it will not constitute a blockbuster but even at my most hesitant I could not deny that they were part of a blockade buster. And the blockade they helped bust was that old anti-intellectual cudgel called censorship. In spite of everything that has happened to republicanism, the element that reviled me most was the brazen censorship employed by Provisional leaders against their own republican kith and kin, equalled only by the ease with which those being led acquiesced in their own silencing. My unassailable belief in the right to express a political opinion had been forged in the crucible of Dublin’s Section 31 and London’s Broadcasting Ban. I could never reconcile myself to the notion that anyone had the right to bully another into withholding expression of their political opinion. I became steely in my determination that it would never work with me. Armed with the unstinting support of my wife and a small band of redoubtable friends, some of whom remained within the Provisional Movement, I would not be moved in the slightest by thought police, street thugs, unsolicited visits from the sinister, hectoring bullies, anonymous maligners, house picketers, ostracism, whisper weasels, vexing editors, enraged columnists, whoever. It simply did not matter. The censor, not I, would skulk away tail buried between legs.

A movement that had been the victim of state and media censorship should never have allowed itself to be become an unrelenting practitioner of the same dark art. But history is replete with examples of former revolutionaries moving from positions of seeking to expand freedom to positions of seeking, often brutally, to curb it. For this reason, although Good Friday, like other books over the past ten years, may add something to our understanding of the peace process, in many ways the classic work on that phenomenon was written long before the Provisional IRA ever formed: George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

‘as the animals look from Napoleon to Pilkington, from man to pig and from pig back to man, they find that they are unable to tell the difference.’

Revolutionaries, with a few notable exceptions, it is invariably the same with them. They promise so much, deliver so little, and end up trying to conceal the unbridgeable chasm between destination and terminus. For the Provisional Movement hiding the gap between the destination of Irish unity and the terminus of partition depended on a regime of silence. Against that backcloth the writings that went into Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, were a noisy protest that disturbed the stultifying calm.

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!

Left Unity - you must be joking

Sitting on board a flight to Spain, I was somewhat amused to read an article in the Irish Times under the headline ‘Talks in progress on forming new Irish left party, says activist.’ My first reaction was 'here we go again'. I read the piece in question to allow myself time for reflection and any second thoughts that might come. Which they duly did - and amounted to 'here we go again, again'.

Richard Boyd Barrett of the People Before Profit Alliance was the man behind the proposal. When not fronting the campaign against the profiteers Boyd Barrett is a member of the Socialist Workers Party, perhaps better known these days for not being better known. In 2006 it surrendered any principle it had previously laid claim to when it opportunistically opted to back theocracy against secularism. Prophet Before People meant falling silent in the face of a racist onslaught against people who were born Danish rather than Saudi.

That is not to demean the solid work Boyd Barrett as an individual activist has carried out on behalf of the most vulnerable sections of Irish society or the stance he has made against the war on Iraq. For long his voice has risen above the clamour shouting censorship. If he ever stands in the constituency where I live he might well get my vote. But if like me, you have attended meetings for left unity, and come away exasperated and firmly convinced that such unity is a chimera, you will be less than confident in the ability of Boyd Barrett to move the squabbling, screaming sectarians along. Despite his combination of articulacy and ability he has failed to learn the lesson that if there is something the comrades hate more than global capitalism it is any design to curb their fondness for the cult-like life, the jealous protection of their own little sect affords them.

Undeterred, Richard Boyd Barrett persists in his hope that a united left body could be formed by next year in advance of the local and European elections. His optimism is based on a belief that ‘the Lisbon Treaty vote clearly demonstrates the need for a new left because the entire political establishment, including the official left in Ireland - the Labour Party - backed an agenda for Europe which was rejected by the majority of Irish people.’

This basis for the latest unity call suggests that the victory against the Lisbon Treaty was secured by the Left and that ‘now is the time to grasp the opportunity.’ Really? But is the current juncture any more favourable than the moment in the immediate aftermath of the Nice referendum? And what became of Left unity then?

Boyd Barrett foresees the body-to-be tackling privatisation, usurping neo-liberalism, vigorously fighting for workers' rights and a democratically planned economic system. Like much else in Irish political life the first hurdle will come up earlier than anticipated. It is called detail. A democratically planned economic system is instantly decoded as a rerun of old style bureaucratic socialism. And the undoubted benefits which it brought for the poor in terms of work, health, housing and education, were outgunned by other sections of society with different priorities against whom it was impossible to hold the line democratically.

There is surely a need for a left strategic response to the currently unfolding economic malaise. The attitude of the employers during the recently collapsed social partnership talks should serve as a reminder to the most vulnerable sections of Irish society just how precarious their situation is. The credit crunch, perhaps a recession, is biting hard and already the state, through its planned cutbacks on the basis of having been in receipt of insufficient revenue returns is developing strategies of displacement whereby the worst effects of the economic downturn will be borne by those least able to resist.

But a left counter culture out of which could perhaps mushroom a strategic alternative capable of making substantial and sustained political interventions on behalf of those experiencing deprivation does not exist. In its place is a left caricature made manifest in the silly spectacle of social oddities selling papers and shouting slogans about the class struggle. Rather than the public being given even the ‘active but fragmented left’ that Boyd Barrett claims is out there at the minute, this sorry shower conjures up imagery of an ineffective and demented left.

Already Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party has put a dampener on the Boyd Barrett suggestion. And while tempting to say, ‘well he would wouldn’t he’, his position is a lot more grounded than the rush to unity. Higgins not unreasonably claimed that despite the vacuum which his own party has witnessed for the last decade or more, ‘unless the conditions are correct it would be wrong to launch a new left party.’ He proceeded by asking the obvious question of how such a party might come about.

The only answer on offer is that composition of the proposed new body would include activists from the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Independent left TDs and left leaning trade unionists. Nobody from Sinn Fein, the Greens nor the Irish Labour Party seems to figure in Boyd Barrett’s calculations despite each containing left wing activists at grass roots level. Seems that left unity is to be achieved by uniting the comrades alone.

Might as well believe in moving statues.

Good Friday Reviews: What people are saying

Joe Graham, Davy Carlin, Malachi O Doherty, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Richard English weigh in on Good Friday.

"A fascinating insight into politics in the six north eastern counties of Ireland, some times referred to as "Northern Ireland". There is perhaps no better person to write about the death of republicanism through the post "Good Friday" agreement than Anthony McIntyre, a man who courageously voiced his opinion throughout, and in the face of, many threats directed against him and his family. To not have this book on your "Irish" book shelf is to have an incomplete understanding of The Belfast Agreement, alias, "The Good Friday Agreement"."
- Joe Graham, Rushlight Magazine and author of Show Me The Man

*

"McIntryre’s writing and vision over the last decade of the Irish Peace process, indeed puts him up there with the likes of Swift, Shaw and Behan, as stated.

In addition to that, McIntyre was key to facilitating debate and discussion at this time when others attempted, and succeeded on many occasions, in closing down any alternative view or dissent from a particular line.

McIntyre’s understanding through his writing of what was to come to pass long before it had happened had made both him a target for those who had shouted Never Never, and those who had wanted a lid kept on the fact that it was actually happening.

And through all of that, he and others had stood their ground on that understanding, while providing and protecting a platform for many alternative views, and those wishing to express them.

And whether he agreed or not with such views, he and The Blanket nevertheless supported the right for them to be aired, discussed and debated.

This book will be essential reading, as had been The Blanket site, for those looking a fuller understanding of the Irish Peace process, and what that had taken it there."
- Davy Carlin
Belfast

*
"I have been familiar with Anthony McIntyre's journalism for many years. Though I am not a republican I have been struck by the integrity and insight of his writing. Anthony McIntyre was right when many were wrong, for instance when he confidently predicted that the IRA would disarm, even while the IRA leadership was saying it would not.

His own position is that the republican movement has betrayed its historic cause. He is right in that, though this is hardly a matter of great sadness to those who did not endorse that cause.

There is a human aspect to this too, that even an outsider can acknowledge; Anthony was one of those armed by the IRA and urged to kill others in the pursuit of political goals that have proven unattainable. With the political compromises, he is entitled to ask: what was it for? He is entitled to feel that his bloody investment in a Republic has been betrayed. He is entitled to marvel that those who armed him can now deny that they had ever played a part in the IRA campaign and have built political respectability for themselves on that lie.

For historians and other journalists, the writings of Anthony McIntyre are an invaluable resource. Here we have the counter record of republican peace processing, the cynical view from the inside. No future histories of the period and the process will have any credibility if they don't draw on it."
- Malachi O Doherty is the author of four books on Irish political and cultural issues; the latest of which is Empty Pulpits: Ireland's Retreat from Religion (Gill and Macmillan).

*

"Although Anthony McIntyre and I are poles apart politically, I admire his fine, incisive, honest and brave journalism. Anyone who truly wants to understand the underbelly of the Irish peace process should read Good Friday."
- Ruth Dudley Edwards, journalist

*
"Highly intelligent, honest and original. McIntyre's book should be read by anyone with an interest in modern Irish republicanism."
- Richard English, author of Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA

*

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!

Writing Good Friday

All great truths started out as blasphemies - George Bernard Shaw

All thanks to Aoife Rivera Serrano and her indefatigable colleagues at Ausubo Press in New York for publishing in book form a collection of my articles and interviews in the years following the Good Friday Agreement. There is much satisfaction to be derived from the work being published as a book. Up until now much of it has been restricted to the internet. With the publication of Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, more people will have access to writings which sought to join the dots and make sense of those Provisional republican politics occasioned by the last century’s second major treaty between Irish republican forces and the British state.

The difference between those two treaties was one of degree rather than kind, Collins winning much more than Adams and conceding considerably less along the way. Why republicans of the 1990s took so long to hive off from the Treatyites, unlike their predecessors of the 1920s, ultimately leaving it much too late to salvage anything including credibility, remained a brooding thought that haunted my reflections throughout the past decade.

Perhaps because of this I came to see the wider politics of the peace process, in which can be contextualised the treaty of 1998, as a republican dying process. The life force of republicanism was strangled and suffocated by an array of forces including, perhaps surprisingly from the point of view of many, the Sinn Fein leadership. It was this slaying and in particular that leadership’s role in it, that the writings in this book sought to offer running commentary on.

In an earlier work, a doctoral dissertation for Queen’s University Belfast, I had traced the formative years of Provisional republicanism which had exploded full of life and vibrancy onto the Irish political scene a quarter of a century earlier. It seemed a natural progression that I should offer some commentary on its regressive descent from a republican Nirvana to a partitionist Hades, all the time beckoned not by MacDonagh’s bony thumb but by the equally fleshless finger of the grim reaper of British state strategy.

The two projects were entirely different ventures not least in methodological terms. On top of that the PhD involved no risk, as in the eyes of the Sinn Fein leadership history could be safely corralled and the peace process securely ring-fenced from its findings. Nor did it prompt the strategies of isolation employed against me by the same leadership which were to come during commentary on its contemporary affairs.

FSL Lyons once wrote that historians need to be somewhat removed from the period in time they are writing about in order to be definitive about the conclusions they come to. Writing in the mid to late 1990s about the Provisionals of the early 1970s was a different exercise from writing about them in the crucible of the present. The 70s could be mulled over, the events dissected and discussed. Drafts of various sections could be written and rewritten endlessly before final submission. The margin for error was reduced. Many of the participants were no longer in the public eye and even when they were there was little inclination on their part to snarl and snap over interpretations of events far removed from the heat of the moment. The PhD may have challenged the standard and taken-for-granted narrative that passed muster as an explanation of the origins of Provisional republicanism but outside of that it was hardly controversial and even less so confrontational.

But these are luxuries not afforded when the bull has to be taken by the horns rather than prodded with a long implement from a safe distance. It is not just a matter of inserting time between writing and its subject in order to allow writers to be more definitive about their findings. It is also a much safer strategy. Live commentary on Provisional republicanism had the capacity to annoy those who felt their judgement was ex cathedra. The notion that there might be someone from the Hans Kung school placing questions marks after the word ‘infallible’ was enough to provoke unremitting hostility and an angry lashing out. Leaders eager to conceal what they are currently doing invariably frown on anyone unmasking that activity and placing it in the public domain.

Unlike writing about events some time past, contemporaneous commentary is denied the comfort of prolonged reflection. On the spot judgements have to be made thus increasing the risk of error and a retaliatory ridiculing. But a fear of erroneous forays can never be allowed to suppress the need for free inquiry. If fear trumps the pen then society is denied a much needed critical faculty which even if untidy and disjointed, can at least capture and contextualise the ambience that generates it. Moreover, as more people come to ask how so many republicans on the ground bought into the jabberwocky dished out in liberal doses by the Sinn Fein leadership, the writings in this book demonstrate that, although numerically small, fewer believed it than were given credit for. In order to quell the audacity to disbelieve, violence and intimidation were weapons frequently employed by the Sinn Fein leadership.

For my part, I chose not to succumb to the maxim of Thomas Sowell: ‘there are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.’ Not to confront events as they were unfolding or to do it behind the shield of anonymity, besides lacking in moral fortitude, would have produced no impact. And once the moment has passed the river will not be stepped in again at the same spot. There are simply times in our lives when nothing can be done other than what must be done. Remaining silent was not an option.

Now that the work is out there in book form, those of a mind to read rather than burn it can reach their own conclusions. For all my refusal to submit to censorship, Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism is a book that would never have seen the light of day were it not for the prompting and persuasiveness of Aoife Rivera Serrano. She has been a stalwart in the struggle for truth against power, memory against forgetting. Those who benefit from reading it are indebted to her.

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!

Viva España

Back home a week now, gazing out the living room window at the driving Irish rain I forlornly ponder that different worlds are separated by nothing other than 2 hours flight time. Last Sunday morning as I viewed the mizzle enveloping the street in front of me I was still trying to take it in that less than 48 hours earlier I had been swimming in the Mediterranean with my wife and two children. At such moments I recall Tommy Gorman’s summation of the Irish weather – summer is on a Thursday this year.

The Coast of Mallorca is an ideal spot for stepping into warm seas. 8 years ago in the same spot myself and Sav, a friend from Ballymurphy, were being plucked from the Med having failed to land in the designated area while paragliding. We were probably less than sober and indifferent to our bad directional skills. It was he who, in an act of good judgement, introduced me to Mallorca as a holiday destination. Then my wife was around four months pregnant with our daughter. Now to watch the same daughter followed by her younger brother leap into the sea is an experience to be savoured.

Initially booked into apartments in Santa Ponsa, we stayed six days before moving onto Palma Nova. Santa Ponsa is hilly. Its narrow footpaths coupled with the speed of the motorised vehicles keeps parents of younger children constantly on their guard. Where we stayed there was little in the way of shade and the English language seems to be the only officially approved tongue in the resort for holiday makers. The joy of swapping sandy beaches for our four green fields is instantly doused by the sense that there must be no one left back in Ireland. The population of 5 million seems to have been lifted en masse and crammed into Santa Ponsa. Even the Spanish waiters have managed to acquire Dublin accents, having become naturalised denizen of Bally Ponsa.

Not being a culture vulture I have no problems with English as a spoken language. I am a creature of convenience: common currency, common language, both a useful foil against the tourist’s nightmare – chaos. But on holiday it is more exotic to hear something other than Dublin or Belfast brogues. Palma Nova fitted the bill. My wife took a taxi up to check the place out before we decided on making the switch.

Before setting out she trawled the net in search of more information. The chief complaint seemed to come from English people who griped that the hotel we were considering moving to had too much shade around the pool. Moreover, the food was served up with a French palate in mind. And, of course, the place was overrun by French and German people. That pointed to one conclusion – all the more reason to go. When we arrived there was only one downside; the apartments across the street from our hotel housed the English and they were only too eager to announce their presence via bullhorn and tuneless football chants accompanied by idiotic roars. The only prompt they needed was an urge to be heard or noticed. Where we stayed, to the polite resonance of merci and bonjour, it was, as the French might say, ‘magnifique’.

We are hardly strangers to Spain, although we are more inclined to locations other than resorts. Children and resorts, however, seem to hit it off so with them in mind choice of location is restricted. Toward the close of 2000 my wife and I spent almost a week in Madrid. It was a beautiful city and by late October the sun god has reclined having sated itself on the burnt skin offerings proffered to it as obeisance during the summer months. Paradoxically, despite all that is said about its heat, Spain also provides me with a memory of my coldest experience. Zaragoza in November was so bitterly cold I kept asking my Spanish friend if he was sure it was part of the same country which housed Madrid and Segovia.

Still, the Spanish weather does not suit me. I don’t do that type of heat well. The humidity is the problem and it always seems to be invigorated rather than suppressed by the quaffing of beer. The weather in Ireland is more to my liking, even with its propensity for rain. When dry the Irish weather is unobtrusive, unlike Spain where its presence cannot be ignored. My daughter’s one complaint about Mallorca was simple – ‘too warm.’ My wife being from California had no bother with it.

Now back home, the place that only two weeks ago we were so eager to escape seems not just as drudging – even with its interminable rain.

Good Friday Review: "Why the IRA lost its long and futile battle"

The reviews are coming in. Here is Liam Clarke, writing in today's Sunday Times.

Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism

From The Sunday Times

August 10, 2008

Liam Clarke: Why the IRA lost its long and futile battle
They weren’t a response to the British being in Ireland, but to how the British behaved there.

Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney must be closet astrologers, as their timing defies explanation. Moloney brought out his updated biography of Ian Paisley just a few days before the big man announced his retirement. Moloney joked at the time: “He called and asked me, ‘When would suit you?’ ”

Last week McIntyre trumped him with a tome entitled The Death of Irish Republicanism, published as the Irish and British governments commissioned a report from the International Monitoring Commission (IMC), designed to ascertain if the IRA army council is still in existence. The fact that they need to ask, and need three weeks to consider the evidence and weigh up the reported sightings, speaks for itself.

A few years ago, the two governments wouldn’t have needed to ponder these things. A steady stream of bombings, shootings and attacks would have reminded them of the continued existence of the organisation — one that for 30 years was the greatest single threat to the security of the British state.

McIntyre, a former IRA commander who served 18 years for murder and then did a PhD in republican history, is right. The Provisional IRA — and the army council that plotted its campaign — is on its death bed. It may thrash around like a headless chicken for a few years, but it is past reviving. If the IRA ever re-emerges, it will be a new organisation with new people.

Nowadays, senior police officers such as assistant chief constable Peter Sheridan, the PSNI officer in charge of intelligence and analysis, believe the council is still around but seldom meets, and is no longer replacing members who leave. As Martin McGuinness put it on Wednesday: “The IRA have clearly gone off the stage since 2005, but attempts are still made by some people to drag them back on, and I think that’s silly.”

Sinn Fein is currently marketing a T-shirt with a rising phoenix symbolising the IRA, and the slogan: “1968-2008 The Struggle Continues”. The message is inescapable: give or take a few months, this marks the lifespan of the Provisional IRA.

Former members such as McIntyre are left to count the cost. He points out that the organisation is shuffling off the stage and into history without achieving any of its objectives. “The public stance was that, in Charlie Haughey’s phrase, Northern Ireland was a ‘failed political entity’, but the Provos proved the Northern Ireland state was, in fact, a viable entity. It was the Provisional project that wasn’t viable,” he says.

McIntyre’s book is a collection of articles he wrote between the signing of the Good Friday Agreement — which he says was fatal to the republican project — and 2007. A fascinating chronicle, it is full of interviews with former prisoners, political insights and aphorisms.

“Republicanism is effectively dead. It is dead as a strategy that can deliver anything. It can’t cope with the principle of consent, it can’t out-manoeuvre it and it can’t overcome it, so it has had to reconcile itself with the British ground rules,” he told me. “Republicanism is just an aspiration — that’s what it has been reduced to. Although there are still republicans, we are just the survivors of the wreck.”

In retrospect, McIntyre believes that the Provisional IRA, founded in 1969, bore signs of compromise from the start. He found that older republicans, the pre-69ers, were “amazed and disappointed at the people joining”, and said that the Provos were “a completely different phenomenon from anything that was continued from 1916”.

I was reminded of the words of Peadar O’Donnell in the 1920s: “We don’t have an IRA battalion in Belfast, we have a battalion of armed Catholics.” McIntyre argues that the IRA was mainly a northern phenomenon, and not ideologically purist. “They weren’t a response to the British being in Ireland, but a response to how the British behaved there. All the British needed to do to end the campaign was to change their behaviour. But they didn’t have to leave to get a deal.”

This is an analysis borne out by the sales blurb for the T-shirt, which talks of “the struggle from the days of the civil rights movement to the present,” but never mentions British withdrawal.

McIntyre’s analysis of the role of informers and collaborators and their role in steering the republican struggle has a savagely satirical edge. Take the case of Freddie Scappatticci, the IRA’s head of internal security, who was exposed as a British military intelligence agent in 2003. “Did he not hanker after the very things the leadership sought? Affluence, a house in another jurisdiction, divesting the IRA of its guns, and its ultimate dissolution?” McIntyre asks. “Freddie Scappaticci should not be killed; he should be on the Sinn Fein negotiating team,” he suggests.

McIntyre believes Scappattici’s role was to shorten the campaign by making the IRA’s military option redundant. This, he believes, forced the Provisionals back onto Gerry Adams’s political strategy, which was being pushed forward with the help of agents such as Denis Donaldson in Sinn Fein. McIntyre argues convincingly that the British army, MI5 and the RUC Special Branch used their extensive network of agents within the loyalist paramilitaries to protect key republicans. Security from attack or arrest was, he believes, one of several incentives for republicans to “smile” for the intelligence agencies.

“The biggest risk factor for the organisation was ex-prisoners not prepared to return to prison. For others, such as Sinn Fein activists with a public profile, the threat of assassination by loyalists was a constant on their minds. One sure way to retain their profile, minus the risk, was to work for the British.”

It brought to mind the words of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, who wrote key passages of Gerry Adams’s speech for one Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. Powell glowed with pride: “It was a bit like watching your children graduate from college; you thought, ‘fantastic’. Now they’re free, now they’ve done it, and they’re on their own.”

McIntyre paints a picture of a republican leadership who were reformists from the outset, being secretly protected, groomed and eventually steered into Stormont by the British forces they claimed to be fighting. All the while, a supine membership cheered them on from the sidelines, easily fooled by symbolism and rhetoric.

McIntyre’s analysis is acute, and informed by deeply felt republican convictions. But, as he has already observed, republicanism is now dead as a practical strategy and survives only as a critique and an ideal.

In the real world, what would have been the alternative to winding up the IRA and settling for the reform of the northern state, with Irish unity reduced to a long-term aspiration? What would have been the alternative to accepting the principle of consent enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement?

To his credit, McIntyre doesn’t dodge this awkward dilemma: “The major question historians will ask is not why the republicans surrendered, but why they fought such a futile long war,” he writes. “It has not been unconditional surrender. And it has been infinitely better than continuing to fight a futile war for the sake of honouring Ireland’s dead, yet producing only more of them. But let us not labour under any illusions that the conditions were good.”

That may indeed be the verdict of history on the Provisional IRA.

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!

New Book: Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism

Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism is released this week. It will be available at the Queen's University bookshop, as well as online via the publisher, Ausubo Press, and other online outlets: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes and Noble, Borders.com. In the coming days The Pensive Quill will feature reviews of the book. Today we feature Tommy McKearney's review.

Tommy McKearney, journalist, editor and organizer comments on Good Friday and its author.

Over the past decade, Anthony McIntyre has been one of the most consistent and insightful of Sinn Fein’s critics. As a historian, a former member of the IRA and a onetime party activist with extensive contacts in the organisation, few have been better placed than McIntyre to examine and evaluate the transformation of a political movement from armed insurrectionists to tame reformists. That he regularly published these observations on his website or in the press ensured his uninhibited opinions were routinely available to the public and just as routinely annoying to his former comrades.

That the Provos and Sinn Fein found the McIntyre commentary irritating was due in part to his undeniable analytical skills and in part to his outrageously flamboyant and provocative writing style. Unrestrained by ambition for a media career or held back, as were so many able journalists, by an Establishment leaning editorial policy, he told the story as he saw it.

As a former and long serving activist, he was shocked and then angered by the disingenuousness of those leading the Sinn Fein movement. McIntyre did not disagree with ending armed struggle nor did he deny his old friends the right to plot a new course albeit one he did not support. It outraged him, however, when he realised that the republican grass roots was not being told what was happening. And what infuriated him most was the pressure, usually discrete but often forceful, placed upon those who insisted on pointing out the inconsistencies involved in setting out to smash a state and eventually settling for a part in its administration.

Whatever else may be said about him, Anthony McIntyre never succumbed to any pressure to desist from airing his views. He often cut a lonely figure as he held to frequently unpopular positions. Time after time, when no one else was prepared to challenge the received wisdom, McIntyre took his pen to make a case for the alternative. His biggest achievement may lie in the fact that he now feels sufficient work had been done that he can retire from this arena.

This collection of McIntyre’s writings should not be read as an academic analysis of the last ten years. The author was too close to the events he commented on and too committed to his subject for these essays and articles to be dispassionate or balanced, and yet this book benefits from that. The reader is getting an informed and honest view from the centre of the action at all times. There is too an intensity and a passion mixed with an amusing irreverence in McIntyre’s writing that places some of his best pieces in the rascally company of other Irish enragés such as Swift and Shaw and Behan. Some of his Sinn Fein readers probably wish that he would also join them.

— Tommy McKearney, 22 May 2008

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!