From Insurrection To Parliament

By AM Tuesday, September 6, 2011

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Tonight the Pensive Quill carries a book review of Tommy McKearney’s The Provisional IRA From Insurrection to Parliament. The review is by guest writer Sandy Boyer.

This is the first book to present a comprehensive republican case against the Good Friday Agreement settlement. Tommy McKearney is intimately familiar with the Provisional IRA. He was the Officer Commanding of the East Tyrone Brigade which led him to Long Kesh where he participated in the blanket protest and the 1980 hunger strike.

McKearney argues that the Good Friday Agreement has transformed Northern Ireland from an Orange State into a sectarian state. The Orange State, gave a Protestant elite a monopoly on political power. The Protestant lower classes had the first access to the crumbs that fell from the table.

Under the God Friday Agreement political power is explicitly divided between parties who label themselves “nationalists” or “unionists” – effectively Catholics or Protestants. There is little room for any non-denominational, working class politics. A government run by and for a Protestant elite has been replaced by one where power is divided between Protestant and Catholic elites with working and lower-income people effectively shut out.

Some may see this as progress but, for McKearney, it bears little resemblance to the republican movement’s stated goal of a democratic socialist republic transcending the sectarian divide.

He places much of the responsibility for the Provisional movement’s failure on a top down, conspiratorial leadership style. He says the Provisional leadership had a deep distrust of any popular movement they couldn’t control.

McKearney believes IRA members accepted the cease fire, decommissioning and the Good Friday Agreement in large part because the organization had been weakened and demoralized by loyalist death squads operating with the support of the British security forces. He argues that the solution would have been to arm the nationalist people something the IRA leadership would not contemplate because this would have created a popular armed force beyond their control.

McKearney is convinced that the H-Block/Armagh Committees could have grown into a mass movement to challenge the political and economic establishment North and South. He says the republican leadership never seriously considered that option. Instead they maneuvered behind the scenes to control formally open, democratic local H-Block/Armagh Committees. When the 1981 hunger strike ended, the Provisional leadership disbanded the H-Block/Armagh Committees and recruited a new generation of activists from them to Sinn Fein.

He argues that the Good Friday agreement has made traditional Irish republicanism – “a one plank Republican platform confined to breaking the Union and ending Partition” – obsolete. He says that Irish people North and South are “prepared to tolerate the parameters of the Six and Twenty-six County states. Far fewer Northern Catholics now see an urgent need to change current constitutional arrangements than at the beginning of the 1970’s and for half a century before.”

If this is true, the current attempts to revive the armed struggle against British rule are doomed to failure. As McKearney says “no matter how peeved the unreconstructed ‘physical force’ republican constituency may be, its influence is minimal.”

Critically, McKearney offers an alternative to both Sinn Fein’s parliamentary strategy and the attempt to revive the armed campaign. He argues for creating a new radical republicanism, explicitly socialist and based in the working class North and South.

He says that it should address “unemployment, poverty, access to housing, hospitals, education and protection of citizens” rather than just Irish unity. He calls for reaching out to Protestant workers to “develop cross-sectarian working class solidarities while putting differences on the national question to one side.”

While The Provisional IRA From Insurrection to Parliament is dealing with a very serious subject, it is clearly and popularly written and relatively short at 236 pages. Each chapter starts with a brief anecdote which provides a valuable insight into the thinking and feelings of republican activists.

This book should be read and carefully considered by everyone with any serious interest in republicanism or the future of the left in Ireland. In the unlikely event that supporters of the current Sinn Fein leadership have any intellectual honesty left, they owe it a prompt response.

The Provisional IRA From Insurrection to Parliament should spark a critical debate about the way forward. Many people will disagree with this strategy for building a new republicanism. They should take the book as a challenge to put their ideas in writing as Tommy McKearney has now done.  Without that kind of debate and discussion Irish republicans could be consigned to becoming either agents of the establishment or just increasingly irrelevant.


The Provisional IRA From Insurrection to Parliament, by Tommy McKearney. Publisher - Pluto