From the 1916 Societies:
John Crawley of the James Connolly Society Monaghan, an IRA ex-POW who served two terms of imprisonment during the recent war in Ireland, exposes the subtle shifts in the language of New Sinn Fein as it readies for further compromise with the British state in Ireland.
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Sinn Fein’s latest overture concerning new transitional models, brought forward by Matt Carthy in the Irish News on 6th June, doesn’t mention republicanism and talks only of a United Ireland. A United Ireland in this context is a deliberate elision that can mean anything. Neither Wolfe Tone nor the 1916 leadership were fighting for a United Ireland per se. Ireland was already united under the Crown, they were fighting for a 32-County Irish Republic.
It is not surprising that the Provisional Movement, who told us the path to Irish Freedom lay through conceding the Unionist Veto, reviving Stormont, endorsing Her Majesty’s Constabulary as lawful authority and internalising British constitutional constraints such as the triple-locked border poll, are attempting to lure us further into a British orbit by suggesting that a so-called ‘Agreed’ Ireland (where Britain stays and the Irish agree to it) can attain some degree of equilibrium, if not moral ascendancy, over the democratic and republican principles inherent to a 32-County Republic.
The Provisionals are attempting to redefine Irish republicanism and modify the concept of Irish Unity to conform to the limitations of its leadership, to their inability to devise a strategy that would bring the republican project to a timely and successful conclusion.
The 1916 Societies believe that genuine republicans don’t reconcile themselves to the UK parliamentary claim to sovereignty in Ireland or its contrived vanguard, the Unionist Veto. Nor do they concede, as the Provisionals have done, the political and moral legitimacy of the ’differences carefully fostered by an alien government’.
Making Ireland British is an English project, keeping Ireland British can never be a republican one. The republican concept of reconciliation lies in reconciling all Irishmen to the democratic ideal of equality and the republican concept of majority rule tempered by a protection of minority rights – rights as Irish citizens, not as wards of a foreign power. The process of genuine national reconciliation can only begin when Britain leaves Ireland and can no longer meddle in our internal affairs.
"a so-called ‘Agreed’ Ireland (where Britain stays and the Irish agree to it)"
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful turn of phrase.