The Fenian Way ✒ continues his exchange with Anthony McIntyre on the inferences to be drawn from John Crawley's book which detailed systemic shortcomings within the IRA.

AM: We concluded our last exchange referencing the impossibilist objective. That was a phrase used by myself, grounded in a belief that the goal of a united Ireland was beyond reach and that it was strategically futile to persist with an armed campaign that had no chance of achieving such an outcome. However, there are some who, whether for reasons of narcissism or whatever, take the view that once they have concluded that the goal is unachievable there is no alternative strategy to the one they promote. It is their parade, and nothing is going to be allowed to rain on it. This is symptomatic of what you have described as the Irreplaceable mindset.

Moreover, therein lies the provenance of TINA - There Is No Alternative, a phrase ironically often linked to Margaret Thatcher. The no alternative put-down has long featured in a leadership discourse that seeks to justify the strategic capitulation which was the peace process. Not that the concept of peace was wrong, but the process certainly was. What the process means roughly approximates to: 

the premier anti-establishment revolutionary project defining itself by an unrelenting opposition to an internal solution and the British repressive apparatuses - for which the project was prepared to wage war and take life - accepts that very outcome, becomes a reformist component of the establishment and moves to suffocate any opposition to it while supporting the repressive apparatuses to the point of agreeing to prosecutions of former IRA volunteers in no-jury British courts for their role in the conflict. 

To cite Brian Feeney, the Provisional project undone everything it had ever done and unsaid everything it had ever said. Even the most unsophisticated English soccer supporter does not cheer own goals and would question a process that delivered them.

Rather than explore alternatives, the leadership was determined that none would see the light of day. Moreover, its advocates silence the very point that screams loudest from the TINA perspective - that they themselves had no strategy to achieve a united Ireland other than the British approved position of unity only by consent. Strategically, not as much as O’Faoilean’s sixpence of an idea to fumble for other than the British terms.

TFW: The question ‘what’s your alternative’ was always posed in a binary fashion as a deliberate method to narrow any context within which any possible discussion could be had regarding alternative strategies. Without labouring the irreplaceable mindset, if you have a leadership who are incapable of seeing their own replacement as a strategic alternative in itself, the reception for any potential alternatives not of their making would be very cold indeed. To put it bluntly the leadership’s course, whether all those on it knew it or not, was firmly set and had been for a considerable period of time. They had no interest whatsoever in alternatives, it was a complete red herring.

AM: I found this approach, sometimes pompously intoned as What’s your alternative, as a wet blanket thrown over discussion within the ranks. My experience was that any alternative suggestions and interpretations, even those that fell well short of being alternative strategies, were strangled at birth.

TFW: That complete disinterest in alternatives was quite revealing as regards internal discussion on the direction the Army was taking. By its secretive nature discussion was limited, but whatever discussion was had - and in the broader movement also - discussion was not encouraged, it was policed. And again when you see the flawed loyalty which the irreplaceable mindset created - that is the unquestioning loyalty which was rewarded in order to sell this direction. The argument that there were no alternatives allowed those who had difficulty selling the direction to avoid doing just that whilst at the same time seeking refuge in the red herring.

AM: There is an old observation made by some political philosopher that people are more afraid of being isolated than they are of being wrong. The leadership seemed to place great emphasis on marginalising and ostracising people who spoke out. People with misgivings would keep them to themselves or share them only with people they could trust. I remember being encouraged by the Steve Biko column written under the pseudonym Frank Talk - I Write What I Like. I followed that type of guidance and ignored the leadership’s regime of hush but paid a price for it. It wasn’t just the careerists who took umbrage but often people who were regarded as solid volunteers. People I had been on the blanket with joined in the ostracism and the smearing. The purpose of it all was to allow the leadership to corral volunteers and party members through the use of choke points and control gates any time independent ideas emerged. It wanted the rank and file treated like a herd which a few dogs could snap and snarl into whatever place they wanted it to go.

TFW: Criticism of alternatives is one thing, ladder climbing is another. There were certainly those who sought advancement through being zealous in attacking critics of the direction but re-phrased it as ‘attacks on the leadership’. The cry ‘we need to trust the leadership’ blocked any semblance of leadership accountability and this played out in a staged way. A good case in point were the so-called Special Conferences held to decide on issues such as the acceptance of policing. The veneer of inclusivity and democratic debate was easily scratched when it was realised that what was actually being ‘debated’ was the leadership’s prior acceptance of British policing in Ireland so any vote against it was a de-facto vote of no-confidence in the leadership. The alternative to rejecting British policing in Ireland was a rejection of the leadership who had already accepted it. Hobson’s choice for the career orientated.

AM: It was perplexing, even galling, for volunteers - some who had spent decades in prison or on the run while simultaneously shunning careers, and undergoing throughout the experience of comrades losing their lives for doing the same thing - to see the rise of the careerists. Back in the jail when I was questioning the efficacy of Sinn Fein, Bobby Storey commented about one prominent Belfast careerist, claiming that if it wasn’t for Sinn Fein that person would not be a member of the Republican Movement. It was Bobby’s way of saying that that particular careerist had refused to touch the IRA after jail so Sinn Fein was the only place for him. They seemed to flock to the movement around the hunger strikes. Placeseekers eager to become irreplaceable functionaries and as you pointed out determined to unquestionably do the bidding of whoever put them in place.  After release, I remember Brian Keenan actively canvassing against one of Adams’ nominees for the Stormont Assembly on the grounds that he was a career politician. I share the view long ago expressed by Bobby Sands that every person has their part to play but it has to be in making republicanism work rather than pursuing their own careers at the expense of republicanism. The careerist culture that was seeping its way into republican pores was never going to be a warm house for alternative ideas, and certainly not military ones.

TFW: It was easier and more appealing to advocate peace rather than address the root cause of the conflict.

AM: That is a criticism at one point thrown the way of the Peace People, and continuously at the SDLP and Dublin, by Gerry Adams.

TFW: The other difficulty alternative military ideas faced was the years of neglect the army suffered at the hands of the leadership. Even if a completely new leadership emerged it wasn’t simply a decision of ending the ceasefire and the negotiations process. It would take considerable time to extricate the Republican Movement from the partitionist morass and the structural stagnation we found ourselves in. It must also be realised that it would be highly doubtful if the Sinn Fein element of the displaced leadership would pledge loyalty to its replacement.

AM: My own view is that the Sinn Fein element would have stayed and hoped for a confluence of circumstances that would have restored them to their dominant position. Waiting in the wings while London and Dublin moved against the obstacles blocking their return. Outside of delivering the head of the IRA on the plate they had no traction on the slippery political surface they hoped to traverse. At its most simple they not only wanted people to buy into the notion that there was no alternative they were also determined that there would be no alternative. Neither they, Dublin nor London were going to sit back and allow a new leadership to set sail. They would have colluded in sinking it before it left port. For all three, there were to be no alternatives. And if considered necessary, the old leadership would have been allowed to figuratively shell the Four Courts.

TFW: But there were alternatives. All that was required was a will to try them. John’s book covers succinctly the operational restrictions brought about by the absence of basic training and understanding of the arsenal at the IRA’s disposal (no pun intended) and also from other insights concerning organisational problems and the complete absence of military strategy.

There are a couple of points I wish to establish before we explore alternatives.

Firstly, we must avoid the binary, false dichotomy of war or no war or the primacy of armed struggle over political tactics. The entire struggle was political.

Secondly, these alternative ideas were not aired to any tangible degree in the run up to the signing of the GFA because to do so would not only be pointless in the face of complete indifference to them by the leadership but any future merit they may have would be negated by prior British knowledge of them.

And thirdly, these ideas, the broad base of them, are not suitable for a copy and paste exercise to any armed group to afford a veneer of legitimacy to armed actions in the current climate.

AM: It is often said that anybody critical of the leadership pursuing an internal solution was a mindless militarist. Omagh was held up as an example of what any alternative to the GFA would lead to. Yet you have not suggested anything that would resemble mindless militarism. Perhaps you might wish to outline how you politically conceptualise the idea of an alternative strategy.

TFW: The issue is sovereignty. The strategic objective is to achieve a derogation of British sovereignty in Ireland to as wide a degree as possible in as many facets which that sovereignty manifests itself. It’s important to understand that from the outset the British moved to protect their sovereignty in Ireland: from Thatcher’s infamous Out Out Out declaration to an early assertion in the GFA that there is no derogation of sovereignty within that pact.

AM: The GFA failed to dent British claims to sovereignty in the slightest. When you speak of a derogation of British sovereignty it has the ring of a rolling and irreversible transfer of sovereignty. It might be slow but unlike the internal solution, sovereignty is not blocked by the principle of consent in the North. Since the GFA, there has been no rolling transfer of sovereignty, more - as Suzanne Breen has pointed out - a rolling over by the Sinn Fein leadership: fawning at royalty and supporting Diplock style no-jury courts. Against all this you have not been making some physical force tradition or militarist back to war pitch.

TFW: From an armed perspective there is no knockout punch, no capitulation resulting from attrition, no last straw bombing in England to break the proverbial back. Neither will there be a singular round of negotiations wherein the British will declare their departure in a given time frame. The political objectives of armed struggle had to reflect these realities. The function of armed struggle was to act as a catalyst for the incremental erosion of British sovereignty in Ireland.

AM: What strikes me about this incremental approach is that it had to have some catalyst for it that was not locked in by any internal solution. What the leadership settled for was incrementalism but within a partitionist context and absolutely no derogation of sovereignty. The type of incrementalism you speak of seems to be rooted in a different political context, one where the derogation of sovereignty would have already begun. What has long interested me is not what they got at negotiations but what they didn’t get. And this interest has been stirred by Jonathan Powell’s surprise at how little the leadership settled for, how much they had lowered their price throughout the negotiations. This leaves me to feel that the British had more to give but were never pushed on it. Then was the crucial moment where the derogation of sovereignty, not an internal solution, should have been discussed. Yet sovereignty was not on the table. They went into negotiations accepting the status quo with no inclination towards pushing the boundaries. The military input from the IRA was no longer a factor. The leadership had to rely exclusively on non-military leverage but seemed strategically bereft. They were not good political negotiations but bought into the Brit contrived hype that they were. That space which Powell spotted between what was achieved and what might have been achieved was left untouched. Even without miliary leverage, there seems to have been much more that could have been won. People like you, while recognising the deliberate underdevelopment of the military capacity, still feel that there was space to develop republicanism which did not necessitate a return to war.

TFW: The military input or leverage was already negated by the British terms demanded, and given, for a ceasefire which means the threat of a resumption was equally negated. Your point about what we didn’t get is salient. We didn’t get stand alone All Ireland bodies; we got cross-border bodies. Neither did we get any form of All Ireland ministerial council, we got a North-South council, the point being that regarding the so-called All Ireland architecture of the GFA the border was always the defining factor.

AM: Partition Abu. 

TFW: But what must be equally understood is that the Provisional model of armed struggle and political agitation has been comprehensively defeated. It is beyond pointless to resurrect any semblance of that approach and re-package it as something new.

AM: Which suggests the critique mounted by people like John Crawley cannot be dismissed as some form of militarist adventurism.

TFW: At any time in its existence the principle challenge facing the IRA is a political one. To the broad population the GFA represents a satisfactory peace settlement from a conflict that on the surface offers something to everybody. Decommissioning was seen as the ultimate symbol of the failure of republican armed force. Armed struggle brought about a politics it shouldn’t have been fighting for. A lesser campaign will not alter that fact.

AM: While this discussion is not about the current feeble posturing that seeks to pass itself off as armed resistance, your concerns about copying and pasting ideas in lieu of serious strategic thinking and your view that a lesser campaign is pretty much doomed to failure, would lead to a view that you are not hooked on armed struggle nor are you suggesting any return to one.

TFW: Every generation must bring its own contemporary radicalism to the republican struggle and armed struggle is not always a necessary component of that process. It is worth noting that the history of armed struggle as it manifested itself over the generations was always preceded by revolutionary thinking which set it apart.

Speculation about the outcomes of conventions or votes at an Ard Fheis have no bearing on where Irish republicanism should be at this present time. Correcting the historical narrative is important but, to paraphrase Wolfe Tone, what is done is done. The IRA of that era cannot be resurrected, nor should it be.

AM: That brings us almost to the end of the current exchange before we move onto the final one which will seek to answer the questions posed in the comments section over the course of our discussion. The obvious question for me is what form could a progressive derogation of sovereignty have taken? The thing about a derogation of sovereignty is, as you have often pointed out to me off the books, that it moves inexorably in one direction. Once started it does not go into reverse mode. Obviously, the Army and party leadership failed to win any derogation. Basically, I am asking what could have been achieved that wasn’t, and which would have served as a catalyst for even a slow but genuine transfer of sovereignty from London to Dublin rather than nonsense about the GFA being a stepping stone to a stepping stone?

TFW: It’s not necessarily from London to Dublin, but from London to an outside agency like the UN. The biggest failure of opportunity was policing. That issue was ripe for an independent, international intervention given its sordid history that could have represented a real and first derogation of British sovereignty in Ireland. One could well argue that such an achievement would credibly merit a ‘dump arms’ order to allow that derogation to be expanded into other areas, the criminal justice system being a prime example. Independent policing, independent courts, an extremely attainable political goal. Derogation of sovereignty is a one-way street.

AM: On that, I think we can pass it over to the commenters for our final exchange.

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

In Quillversation 🎯 IRA Leadership Had No Interest In Alternatives To An Internal Solution

The Fenian Way ✒ continues his exchange with Anthony McIntyre on the inferences to be drawn from John Crawley's book which detailed systemic shortcomings within the IRA.

AM: We concluded our last exchange referencing the impossibilist objective. That was a phrase used by myself, grounded in a belief that the goal of a united Ireland was beyond reach and that it was strategically futile to persist with an armed campaign that had no chance of achieving such an outcome. However, there are some who, whether for reasons of narcissism or whatever, take the view that once they have concluded that the goal is unachievable there is no alternative strategy to the one they promote. It is their parade, and nothing is going to be allowed to rain on it. This is symptomatic of what you have described as the Irreplaceable mindset.

Moreover, therein lies the provenance of TINA - There Is No Alternative, a phrase ironically often linked to Margaret Thatcher. The no alternative put-down has long featured in a leadership discourse that seeks to justify the strategic capitulation which was the peace process. Not that the concept of peace was wrong, but the process certainly was. What the process means roughly approximates to: 

the premier anti-establishment revolutionary project defining itself by an unrelenting opposition to an internal solution and the British repressive apparatuses - for which the project was prepared to wage war and take life - accepts that very outcome, becomes a reformist component of the establishment and moves to suffocate any opposition to it while supporting the repressive apparatuses to the point of agreeing to prosecutions of former IRA volunteers in no-jury British courts for their role in the conflict. 

To cite Brian Feeney, the Provisional project undone everything it had ever done and unsaid everything it had ever said. Even the most unsophisticated English soccer supporter does not cheer own goals and would question a process that delivered them.

Rather than explore alternatives, the leadership was determined that none would see the light of day. Moreover, its advocates silence the very point that screams loudest from the TINA perspective - that they themselves had no strategy to achieve a united Ireland other than the British approved position of unity only by consent. Strategically, not as much as O’Faoilean’s sixpence of an idea to fumble for other than the British terms.

TFW: The question ‘what’s your alternative’ was always posed in a binary fashion as a deliberate method to narrow any context within which any possible discussion could be had regarding alternative strategies. Without labouring the irreplaceable mindset, if you have a leadership who are incapable of seeing their own replacement as a strategic alternative in itself, the reception for any potential alternatives not of their making would be very cold indeed. To put it bluntly the leadership’s course, whether all those on it knew it or not, was firmly set and had been for a considerable period of time. They had no interest whatsoever in alternatives, it was a complete red herring.

AM: I found this approach, sometimes pompously intoned as What’s your alternative, as a wet blanket thrown over discussion within the ranks. My experience was that any alternative suggestions and interpretations, even those that fell well short of being alternative strategies, were strangled at birth.

TFW: That complete disinterest in alternatives was quite revealing as regards internal discussion on the direction the Army was taking. By its secretive nature discussion was limited, but whatever discussion was had - and in the broader movement also - discussion was not encouraged, it was policed. And again when you see the flawed loyalty which the irreplaceable mindset created - that is the unquestioning loyalty which was rewarded in order to sell this direction. The argument that there were no alternatives allowed those who had difficulty selling the direction to avoid doing just that whilst at the same time seeking refuge in the red herring.

AM: There is an old observation made by some political philosopher that people are more afraid of being isolated than they are of being wrong. The leadership seemed to place great emphasis on marginalising and ostracising people who spoke out. People with misgivings would keep them to themselves or share them only with people they could trust. I remember being encouraged by the Steve Biko column written under the pseudonym Frank Talk - I Write What I Like. I followed that type of guidance and ignored the leadership’s regime of hush but paid a price for it. It wasn’t just the careerists who took umbrage but often people who were regarded as solid volunteers. People I had been on the blanket with joined in the ostracism and the smearing. The purpose of it all was to allow the leadership to corral volunteers and party members through the use of choke points and control gates any time independent ideas emerged. It wanted the rank and file treated like a herd which a few dogs could snap and snarl into whatever place they wanted it to go.

TFW: Criticism of alternatives is one thing, ladder climbing is another. There were certainly those who sought advancement through being zealous in attacking critics of the direction but re-phrased it as ‘attacks on the leadership’. The cry ‘we need to trust the leadership’ blocked any semblance of leadership accountability and this played out in a staged way. A good case in point were the so-called Special Conferences held to decide on issues such as the acceptance of policing. The veneer of inclusivity and democratic debate was easily scratched when it was realised that what was actually being ‘debated’ was the leadership’s prior acceptance of British policing in Ireland so any vote against it was a de-facto vote of no-confidence in the leadership. The alternative to rejecting British policing in Ireland was a rejection of the leadership who had already accepted it. Hobson’s choice for the career orientated.

AM: It was perplexing, even galling, for volunteers - some who had spent decades in prison or on the run while simultaneously shunning careers, and undergoing throughout the experience of comrades losing their lives for doing the same thing - to see the rise of the careerists. Back in the jail when I was questioning the efficacy of Sinn Fein, Bobby Storey commented about one prominent Belfast careerist, claiming that if it wasn’t for Sinn Fein that person would not be a member of the Republican Movement. It was Bobby’s way of saying that that particular careerist had refused to touch the IRA after jail so Sinn Fein was the only place for him. They seemed to flock to the movement around the hunger strikes. Placeseekers eager to become irreplaceable functionaries and as you pointed out determined to unquestionably do the bidding of whoever put them in place.  After release, I remember Brian Keenan actively canvassing against one of Adams’ nominees for the Stormont Assembly on the grounds that he was a career politician. I share the view long ago expressed by Bobby Sands that every person has their part to play but it has to be in making republicanism work rather than pursuing their own careers at the expense of republicanism. The careerist culture that was seeping its way into republican pores was never going to be a warm house for alternative ideas, and certainly not military ones.

TFW: It was easier and more appealing to advocate peace rather than address the root cause of the conflict.

AM: That is a criticism at one point thrown the way of the Peace People, and continuously at the SDLP and Dublin, by Gerry Adams.

TFW: The other difficulty alternative military ideas faced was the years of neglect the army suffered at the hands of the leadership. Even if a completely new leadership emerged it wasn’t simply a decision of ending the ceasefire and the negotiations process. It would take considerable time to extricate the Republican Movement from the partitionist morass and the structural stagnation we found ourselves in. It must also be realised that it would be highly doubtful if the Sinn Fein element of the displaced leadership would pledge loyalty to its replacement.

AM: My own view is that the Sinn Fein element would have stayed and hoped for a confluence of circumstances that would have restored them to their dominant position. Waiting in the wings while London and Dublin moved against the obstacles blocking their return. Outside of delivering the head of the IRA on the plate they had no traction on the slippery political surface they hoped to traverse. At its most simple they not only wanted people to buy into the notion that there was no alternative they were also determined that there would be no alternative. Neither they, Dublin nor London were going to sit back and allow a new leadership to set sail. They would have colluded in sinking it before it left port. For all three, there were to be no alternatives. And if considered necessary, the old leadership would have been allowed to figuratively shell the Four Courts.

TFW: But there were alternatives. All that was required was a will to try them. John’s book covers succinctly the operational restrictions brought about by the absence of basic training and understanding of the arsenal at the IRA’s disposal (no pun intended) and also from other insights concerning organisational problems and the complete absence of military strategy.

There are a couple of points I wish to establish before we explore alternatives.

Firstly, we must avoid the binary, false dichotomy of war or no war or the primacy of armed struggle over political tactics. The entire struggle was political.

Secondly, these alternative ideas were not aired to any tangible degree in the run up to the signing of the GFA because to do so would not only be pointless in the face of complete indifference to them by the leadership but any future merit they may have would be negated by prior British knowledge of them.

And thirdly, these ideas, the broad base of them, are not suitable for a copy and paste exercise to any armed group to afford a veneer of legitimacy to armed actions in the current climate.

AM: It is often said that anybody critical of the leadership pursuing an internal solution was a mindless militarist. Omagh was held up as an example of what any alternative to the GFA would lead to. Yet you have not suggested anything that would resemble mindless militarism. Perhaps you might wish to outline how you politically conceptualise the idea of an alternative strategy.

TFW: The issue is sovereignty. The strategic objective is to achieve a derogation of British sovereignty in Ireland to as wide a degree as possible in as many facets which that sovereignty manifests itself. It’s important to understand that from the outset the British moved to protect their sovereignty in Ireland: from Thatcher’s infamous Out Out Out declaration to an early assertion in the GFA that there is no derogation of sovereignty within that pact.

AM: The GFA failed to dent British claims to sovereignty in the slightest. When you speak of a derogation of British sovereignty it has the ring of a rolling and irreversible transfer of sovereignty. It might be slow but unlike the internal solution, sovereignty is not blocked by the principle of consent in the North. Since the GFA, there has been no rolling transfer of sovereignty, more - as Suzanne Breen has pointed out - a rolling over by the Sinn Fein leadership: fawning at royalty and supporting Diplock style no-jury courts. Against all this you have not been making some physical force tradition or militarist back to war pitch.

TFW: From an armed perspective there is no knockout punch, no capitulation resulting from attrition, no last straw bombing in England to break the proverbial back. Neither will there be a singular round of negotiations wherein the British will declare their departure in a given time frame. The political objectives of armed struggle had to reflect these realities. The function of armed struggle was to act as a catalyst for the incremental erosion of British sovereignty in Ireland.

AM: What strikes me about this incremental approach is that it had to have some catalyst for it that was not locked in by any internal solution. What the leadership settled for was incrementalism but within a partitionist context and absolutely no derogation of sovereignty. The type of incrementalism you speak of seems to be rooted in a different political context, one where the derogation of sovereignty would have already begun. What has long interested me is not what they got at negotiations but what they didn’t get. And this interest has been stirred by Jonathan Powell’s surprise at how little the leadership settled for, how much they had lowered their price throughout the negotiations. This leaves me to feel that the British had more to give but were never pushed on it. Then was the crucial moment where the derogation of sovereignty, not an internal solution, should have been discussed. Yet sovereignty was not on the table. They went into negotiations accepting the status quo with no inclination towards pushing the boundaries. The military input from the IRA was no longer a factor. The leadership had to rely exclusively on non-military leverage but seemed strategically bereft. They were not good political negotiations but bought into the Brit contrived hype that they were. That space which Powell spotted between what was achieved and what might have been achieved was left untouched. Even without miliary leverage, there seems to have been much more that could have been won. People like you, while recognising the deliberate underdevelopment of the military capacity, still feel that there was space to develop republicanism which did not necessitate a return to war.

TFW: The military input or leverage was already negated by the British terms demanded, and given, for a ceasefire which means the threat of a resumption was equally negated. Your point about what we didn’t get is salient. We didn’t get stand alone All Ireland bodies; we got cross-border bodies. Neither did we get any form of All Ireland ministerial council, we got a North-South council, the point being that regarding the so-called All Ireland architecture of the GFA the border was always the defining factor.

AM: Partition Abu. 

TFW: But what must be equally understood is that the Provisional model of armed struggle and political agitation has been comprehensively defeated. It is beyond pointless to resurrect any semblance of that approach and re-package it as something new.

AM: Which suggests the critique mounted by people like John Crawley cannot be dismissed as some form of militarist adventurism.

TFW: At any time in its existence the principle challenge facing the IRA is a political one. To the broad population the GFA represents a satisfactory peace settlement from a conflict that on the surface offers something to everybody. Decommissioning was seen as the ultimate symbol of the failure of republican armed force. Armed struggle brought about a politics it shouldn’t have been fighting for. A lesser campaign will not alter that fact.

AM: While this discussion is not about the current feeble posturing that seeks to pass itself off as armed resistance, your concerns about copying and pasting ideas in lieu of serious strategic thinking and your view that a lesser campaign is pretty much doomed to failure, would lead to a view that you are not hooked on armed struggle nor are you suggesting any return to one.

TFW: Every generation must bring its own contemporary radicalism to the republican struggle and armed struggle is not always a necessary component of that process. It is worth noting that the history of armed struggle as it manifested itself over the generations was always preceded by revolutionary thinking which set it apart.

Speculation about the outcomes of conventions or votes at an Ard Fheis have no bearing on where Irish republicanism should be at this present time. Correcting the historical narrative is important but, to paraphrase Wolfe Tone, what is done is done. The IRA of that era cannot be resurrected, nor should it be.

AM: That brings us almost to the end of the current exchange before we move onto the final one which will seek to answer the questions posed in the comments section over the course of our discussion. The obvious question for me is what form could a progressive derogation of sovereignty have taken? The thing about a derogation of sovereignty is, as you have often pointed out to me off the books, that it moves inexorably in one direction. Once started it does not go into reverse mode. Obviously, the Army and party leadership failed to win any derogation. Basically, I am asking what could have been achieved that wasn’t, and which would have served as a catalyst for even a slow but genuine transfer of sovereignty from London to Dublin rather than nonsense about the GFA being a stepping stone to a stepping stone?

TFW: It’s not necessarily from London to Dublin, but from London to an outside agency like the UN. The biggest failure of opportunity was policing. That issue was ripe for an independent, international intervention given its sordid history that could have represented a real and first derogation of British sovereignty in Ireland. One could well argue that such an achievement would credibly merit a ‘dump arms’ order to allow that derogation to be expanded into other areas, the criminal justice system being a prime example. Independent policing, independent courts, an extremely attainable political goal. Derogation of sovereignty is a one-way street.

AM: On that, I think we can pass it over to the commenters for our final exchange.

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

5 comments:

  1. Anthony, this dialogue is fascinating and will provide useful source material for future historians of and commentators on the Northern Ireland conflict; specifically on the evolution of the Provisional Republican movement. Happy Christmas to you and to all Quillers and enjoy (or not) the return of the Premiership from Boxing Day onwards.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Barry, I am pleased you find the discussion useful. It would be a quill in the cap of TPQ (!!!) if it was to become an addition to useful source material.
      Merry Christmas to you, all the Quillers and our readers.

      Delete
  2. Mick Hall Comments

    I have been following the Quillversation.

    Sovereignty has been mentioned many times, understandably so.

    My question is why did the army council etc gradually seep north from Dublin until almost all of the departments were based and controlled in the six counties by northerners. Was this a fatal flaw as far as sovereignty was concerned?

    It seems to me the Adams crew didn’t give sovereignty a thought when the British government plonked what became the GFA on their table.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mick - I doubt sovereignty was ever a factor in their minds. Possibly Adams felt it was unachievable. But that raises the question of why volunteers were being asked to take life for it and risk their own.
      Your question basically asks if a different form of sovereignty - that over the IRA - was rolling North and away from the South. I think that is something we can touch on in the concluding exchange.

      Delete
  3. I have been following this discussion with great interest and have found it fascinating. I agree with previous comments that it is a discussion that needs to be archived and shared widely .

    As you know I resigned from Republican Sinn FΓ©in when it was made clear to me that my view that continuing to support a l.argely non-existent armed campaign was serving only to continue to fill jails and possibly worse was not open to any debate and if I continued as a member I would have to remain silent on this issue. That I could not in conscience do.

    Unfortunately while some privately supported my view people through bonds of friendship etc feel unable to speak out. As somebody involved in republican activism for over 30 years I understand this dilemma. However, I believe the gravity of the issues at stake are too grave to remain silent.

    I welcome a discussion to that underlines the point to that acknowledging the fact an armed campaign in the present circumstances is not only unsustainable but counterproductive. It doesn't lessen your republicanism in any way to do so. My traditional republicanism is no different to previous republicans who came came to similar conclusions in the past as I pointed out in an article for Village magazine last year.

    ReplyDelete