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!

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!

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