Rebel, writer and occasional reconciler: Former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison on his decades of activism, the search for peace and unionism’s decline
The coining of the now infamous phrase “ballot box in one hand... Armalite in the other” wasn’t rehearsed, according to its author Danny Morrison. It came to him just as he reached the podium to speak at Sinn Féin‘s 1981 ard fheis.
Those words came to represent a key juncture in the republican movement’s history. The policy of abstentionism was jettisoned soon after by Sinn Féin – then widely described as the political wing of the IRA – as it sought to emulate the electoral successes witnessed during the Hunger Strike.
For Morrison, then aged 28 and Sinn Féin’s director of publicity, his imprisoned comrades’ campaign for political status, which saw 10 young men die over a two-and-a-half month period in 1981, including three INLA inmates, was “pivotal” and “the most astonishing event of the conflict”.
What he doesn’t countenance, however, is that the end of abstentionism was part of a premeditated strategy, led by Gerry Adams, that aimed to supersede armed struggle with politics.
Continue @ Irish News.
Behind a paywall, could have done with a laugh too!
ReplyDeleteHe makes an interesting point or two. Sent you a copy of it by email.
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