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Showing posts with label Declan Kearney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Declan Kearney. Show all posts
The Fenian Way ✍ Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's insightful article,The Provo Paradox, opens up an accessible path of clarity that can rely on straightforward observations to assess events both pre and post ceasefires in the mid-nineties and beyond. 

In the midst of a revisionist onslaught such a path is an indispensable guide to pragmatic engagement.

Analysis at this remove, if to be valid, must first recognise that its primary function is to educate, and not form some semblance of identity comfort to anyone attempting to recreate the past in the here and now.

Nor should it be guided to a given end point, vindicating or repudiating any stances taken within republicanism at the time because to the British, ostensibly, all republican points of view are now dead. What’s done is done, which is all the more remarkable given the loud logic of history imploring us that it should have been done a different way.

The two principle points I would like to address in the article concerns the circumstances surrounding the ceasefires and the politics it conferred on the Six Counties and Provisional Sinn Féin, however strenuously denied or parried by that grouping.

I completely agree with Muiris that anybody who joined the Republican Movement did so with a basic understanding that their involvement was to secure fundamental change to the status quo and that that change had to surpass any previous arrangements put forward as settlements.

There were/are many different view points as to what a ‘United Ireland’ should look like; a Marxist classless society, comely maidens at the crossroads, broad indifference once the Irish people were free to choose. The common denominator however was, and remains, sovereignty, the securing of which was a prerequisite to allow any of the above, or other, to be pursued.

When the first ceasefire was called the joyous cavalcade which streamed down the Falls Road was a clear expression of an expectation that the ceasefire secured terms that were worthy of the struggle which preceded it. Forearmed with the historical experiences of Collins and Sunningdale, and emboldened with the sacrifices of struggle, that expectation was wholly justified.

Muiris argues that the ceasefires were necessary, that the abandonment of armed struggle was right. The true paradox however is that the terms upon which the former was called guaranteed the defeat, not the abandonment, of the latter because the ceasefire was called on British terms.

Robert Barton, one of the plenipotentiaries during the Treaty Negotiations in 1922 observed on the outcome; ‘Once we conceded we were not representatives of the Irish Republic we were on the road to disaster.’ In other words, once they allowed the British to determine their status within the negotiations they did, by default, allow them to determine the parameters of any settlement reached.

And this is precisely what the Provisional leadership allowed to happen in the negotiations which led to Good Friday. Gone was the position of the IRA representing the defence and demand for national sovereignty, replaced by Provisional Sinn Féin demands based on their electoral mandate in the Six Counties.

In other words, the British were dealing with a regional political party who had political gripes within part of the United Kingdom and that’s precisely how they were dealt with. Thus were the parameters of the Good Friday Agreement secured.

And because the issue of sovereignty was not a term for securing the ceasefire it could never be broken on that issue either. The PIRA, now reduced to the role of a militia, truly became what the British, unionists, constitutional nationalists and Irish governments always referred to them as, the armed wing of Provisional Sinn Féin.

The irony of the politics which Provisional Sinn Féin subsequently adopted for electoral gain is cogently mapped out in the article. Muiris makes the following (and widely accepted) observation:

The Provisionals did not defeat constitutional nationalism by demonstrating that it was wrong. They replaced constitutional nationalism and then, gradually, became it.

But they didn’t, they became something much worse. To its credit constitutional nationalism recognised that the issue of sovereignty had to be addressed in any credible settlement with the British. In the New Ireland Forum Report in 1984 three proposals were put forward; a Unitary State, a Confederation/Federal State or Joint Authority.

These were dismissed by Margaret Thatcher in her infamous Out, Out, Out declaration because each option represented a derogation of British sovereignty over the Six Counties. For Thatcher sovereignty was non-negotiable. For their part Provisional Sinn Féin equally rejected the reports proposals because they fell short of a clear call for a complete British withdrawal from Ireland.

The grievous irony is that Provisional Sinn Féin adopted Thatcher’s position in subsequent negotiations because the entry fee into those negotiations was not simply the calling of a ceasefire but a ceasefire on terms that accepted that the issue of sovereignty continued to be non-negotiable.

The obvious follow on question is: where did this place the issue of sovereignty within the so called pan nationalist front, the new alternative strategy? Having rejected the findings of the New Ireland Forum how could Provisional Sinn Féin, credibly, return to constitutional nationalism on the sovereignty question?

The equally obvious answer is in the observable facts of the agreement reached. Articles 2 & 3 gone. Stand Alone All Ireland Bodies rejected. A Triple Lock guaranteeing a Unionist Veto agreed to. British Sovereign Authority explicitly recognised in the Good Friday Agreement.

Here now we see the correlation between the terms upon which the IRA ceasefire was based and the counter republican politics which it inevitably spawned. Constitutional nationalism was now off the sovereignty hook. Constitutional imperatives were replaced with fuzzy aspirations. And as our host observed in a commentary on the original article politics was now centred on the manner of British occupation and not the fact of it.

The only obligation on any party to the talks initiated by the ceasefire was to ensure that a prolonged ceasefire would have a withering effect on any leverage that resumption of armed struggle could yield (by anyone). And the net effect of that strategy, once armed struggle as a tactic was neutralised, was the retrospective criminalisation of armed struggle itself. The differences between Sunningdale and Good Friday did not necessitate the taking of one human life to resolve. Paradox and irony combined as one.

Which leads us to addressing the shameful but predictable revisionism from Declan Kearney. Muiris correctly identifies the glaring contradiction in Kearney’s call for a second pan nationalist front as a tacit admission that the first such entity failed to remotely deliver what republicans were promised it would achieve.

But the key point that he observes is that the pan nationalist front did not fail constitutional nationalism nor British strategic interests in Ireland (all of it). Not one single republican demand was secured. Howling in an echo chamber for a border poll only serves to distract internal chin stroking as to the precise nature of the current strategy to move Provisional Sinn Féin forward: Stormont working? Stormont not working? Stormont not existing? Are they flying or falling with style?

Oddly I think this current revisionist thrust is best addressed by the revisionism of Martin McGuinness; “I would gladly give my life for peace.” The paradigm shift.

Gerry Adams once told us that the Good Friday Agreement was not a republican document, the obvious observable conclusion to be drawn is: that’s because republicans didn’t negotiate it! Revisionists abhor simplicity and clarity.

I agree with the conclusion that Muiris reaches:

The less speculative reality may simply be that, after nearly three decades with their snouts in the Stormont trough, the patronage, salaries, status and political infrastructure that come with government have become indispensable to the party itself!

Probably their only remaining All Ireland conviction!

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

Pernicious Paradox & Perfidious Irony

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin ✍ Provisional: arranged or existing for the present, possibly to be changed later.

I always disliked the word Provisional, particularly when it was used to describe the Republican Movement I joined in my teens. It was invariably a term of dismissal, suggesting that we were somehow illegitimate, a lesser republicanism than that which had gone before.

We did not think of ourselves that way.

There was certainly nothing provisional about the commitment expected of those who joined. Stormont was not to be reformed or administered more competently. Partition was not to be made more comfortable. The Northern state, and partition itself, were the problem. We certainly never imagined ourselves becoming their custodians.

As the years have passed, however, I have begun to wonder whether it might be time to resurrect the word.

Our particular brand of republicanism was indeed provisional. Not because the movement itself was temporary, but because almost everything that followed the ceasefire was supposed to be.

The ceasefire was part of a process. The negotiations were part of a process. The Good Friday Agreement was part of a process. Stormont was part of a process. Each accommodation could be justified because none represented the destination. They were stages along a road towards something else: the Irish Republic.

They were provisional.

Almost thirty years later, the institutions remain. The constitutional settlement remains. Partition remains. What has changed most profoundly is Sinn Féin's relationship with them.

Sinn Féin has defeated its constitutional nationalist rivals electorally, first within Northern nationalism and then eventually across much of the island. Yet in doing so it has increasingly occupied the political ground on which those rivals had once stood. Parliamentary politics, ministerial office, power-sharing, consent, cross-border institutions and the gradual persuasion of a Northern majority ceased to be tactical accommodations and became the substance of the strategy itself. Socialism, likewise, has been quietly exchanged for the safer territory of centrist social democracy.

The Provisionals did not defeat constitutional nationalism by demonstrating that it was wrong. They replaced constitutional nationalism and then, gradually, became it.

Perhaps that was the destination for some all along.

That paradox came back to me while reading two recent articles from Comrade Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin's National Chairperson. Read together, they amount to an unintended admission that the Sinn Féin strategy constructed around the Good Friday Agreement has failed to deliver.

That is not the same as saying that the Agreement failed.

From a British, SDLP or unionist perspective, the GFA has largely succeeded in what it was designed to do. It ended an unwinnable conflict, established an agreed system of devolved government and provided constitutional protections for competing identities. Those were considerable achievements.

The peace process succeeded. The provisional Sinn Féin strategy built around it did not.

Republicans were told that the new arrangements were transitional. Stormont could be entered because Stormont would eventually be transcended. Participation did not amount to acceptance of the constitutional status quo because participation itself was the process through which that status quo would be changed.

Kearney's two interventions now expose how difficult that argument has become to sustain.

In one article he describes a North characterised by political instability, chronic underfunding, failing public services, poverty and economic dysfunction. In another he tells us that constitutional change is gathering momentum but requires a new national initiative to advance it.

Sinn Féin has therefore arrived at a peculiar position. The provisional arrangement must be preserved while the transition to the Republic it was supposed to facilitate must apparently be initiated again.

Kearney attributes much of Stormont's dysfunction to the DUP and British government policy. Neither requires a defence from me. They are doing what they have always done. Unionists defend the Union and British governments defend what they perceive to be British interests. Republicans once understood both positions perfectly well.

If Sinn Féin's strategy depended upon the DUP ceasing to behave like the DUP, or upon a British government voluntarily facilitating the end of British sovereignty in Ireland, then the difficulty lies less with either of them than with those who foolishly built a strategy upon such baseless assumptions.

There was a time when republicans pointed to the failure of Stormont as evidence of the failure of partition. Sinn Féin now argues that Stormont must work, that the British government must provide sufficient money to make it work and that unionists must cooperate in making it work.

That is quite a journey for a movement which once regarded Stormont, British sovereignty and unionism not as impediments to the efficient administration of the North but as the political problem itself.

The provisional arrangement has become something Sinn Féin is deeply invested in preserving.

Which leaves a fairly obvious question. What, exactly, remains provisional?

Administering the North

Kearney tells us that constitutional change is on the political horizon, that a paradigm shift has occurred and that momentum for Irish unity is growing.

We have heard versions of this argument for years.

Demographics are changing. Conversations are beginning. Civic nationalism is mobilising. Another roadmap appears. Another commission meets. Another initiative is announced.

Now Kearney proposes a national convention on Irish unity as the next stage of the journey. It might more accurately be described as an attempt to restart a journey that has never really begun.

The constitutional position of the North remains stubbornly where it was in 1922, 1975 and 1998. The North remains within the United Kingdom. Stormont remains a devolved British institution. The British government retains the statutory authority to call a border poll.

Indeed, Kearney acknowledges this difficulty himself. Almost thirty years after the Good Friday Agreement, the Sinn Féin strategy for achieving Irish self-determination still ultimately depends upon a British Secretary of State determining that circumstances exist in which the people of the North may vote to leave the United Kingdom.

Kearney invokes Hume-Adams as a model for what should happen next. But Hume-Adams was the catalyst for a fundamental shift in republican strategy, not British strategy. Nearly four decades later, Sinn Féin is proposing another initiative to begin the constitutional transition which we have repeatedly been assured is already underway.

Advocating for a new initiative is itself an admission that the old provisional initiative has failed.

Holding the office of First Minister represents electoral progress for Sinn Féin. It does not, by itself, represent progress towards an Irish Republic. There is a credible argument that something quite different has happened, Sinn Féin has become increasingly adept at administering the North without becoming demonstrably more successful at ending it.

A movement which once refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Northern state now celebrates occupying its highest political office. Its ministers administer British public policy within the United Kingdom. Its MLAs legislate in institutions established under British law. Its departments depend upon British Treasury funding. Its leadership demands that those institutions be adequately financed.

There is nothing inherently dishonourable about any of this. Government requires compromise, and people are entitled to expect parties seeking office to govern. Pretending though, that it is something else though is dishonourable.

Administering the North is not dismantling it. Making Stormont function is not transcending Stormont. Electoral success within Northern institutions is not constitutional progress towards the Republic.

The Fleadh and the accommodating state

The Fleadh in Belfast offered an almost perfect illustration of that deeper Provo paradox.

It was a magnificent celebration of Irish music and culture, and Belfast's embrace of it demonstrated how immensely Northern society has changed.

But there was an uncomfortable constitutional reality beneath the celebration. The Fleadh took place in the United Kingdom.

Irish identity can now flourish, and the Irish language can flourish in Belfast in much the same way that Scottish and Welsh identities can flourish within the United Kingdom. That may be culturally and politically welcome, but it should not be mistaken for constitutional change.

Culture is not sovereignty. Identity is not constitutional change.

The Fleadh did not demonstrate that the border was disappearing. It demonstrated something potentially more challenging for Sinn Féin strategy: Belfast can become increasingly Irish without becoming any less part of the United Kingdom.

That possibility deserves considerably more attention than Sinn Féin gives it. The Good Friday Agreement may have created a potential route out of the Union. But it may also have made the Union more capable of accommodating Irishness.

That is a profound irony. The republican critique of the old Northern state was that it was inherently hostile to Irish identity.

But the post-Agreement North is different. Irishness has public and legal recognition. Constitutional nationalists dominate the government. North-south institutions exist. The Irish government has an institutionalised relationship with Northern affairs. A constitutional nationalist holds the office of First Minister for the first time.

But the reality remains, the Northern state has not disappeared. It has changed sufficiently to comfortably accommodate much of what constitutional nationalism had demanded of it.

A new Ireland for whom?

There is another absence from Kearney's vision which is equally striking, class politics.

His critique of the North is filled with social concerns, poverty, public services, workers' rights, economic inactivity, housing and the cost of living. These things matter most because they shape people's lives.

Yet when the discussion moves to Irish unity, much of that material analysis disappears. In its place comes the largely undefined promise of a "new Ireland".

A new Ireland for whom?

For a family struggling to pay rent in West Belfast, a pensioner waiting for treatment in Derry or a worker priced out of housing in Dublin, changing the constitutional architecture of the island will not amount to social transformation.

The more important questions concern what that new Ireland would actually be.

Who will own its wealth? Who will be able to afford its houses? What sort of health service will it provide? How will wealth be redistributed? What would prevent a thirty-two-county state from reproducing the inequalities already found on both sides of the border?

These cannot be questions reserved for the day after unity. They determine whether unity offers anything transformative in the first place.

This is where New Sinn Féin has become strangely class blind.

The "new Ireland" conversation is conducted by politicians, academics, business figures, careerists and professional civic campaigners. There are conferences, commissions, reports and carefully managed conversations.

Working-class communities, meanwhile, are viewed as nothing more than secure electoral constituencies rather than the people whose economic interests should define the project itself.

The communities that the peace process has bypassed are being asked whether they support a united Ireland before being told what sort of Ireland they are being asked to support. The constitutional question comes first; its social and economic parameters can apparently be settled afterwards.

For a tradition that once claimed the language of Connolly, that is an extraordinary inversion. The Republic was supposed to be defined by the social and economic interests of its people, not simply by the territory enclosed within its borders.

Connolly's republic was never merely geographical. The purpose was not simply to exchange flags or transfer administrative sovereignty from London to Dublin while leaving existing inequalities intact.

A thirty-two-county state marked by profound inequalities of wealth, housing, aspiration and opportunity would unquestionably constitute a united Ireland.

Whether it would constitute the Republic generations of republicans imagined is another question entirely.

Sinn Féin cannot apply one standard to the North and another to the Ireland it proposes to replace it with. If the North is to be judged according to poverty, wages, housing, health services, economic opportunity and workers' rights, then the proposed new Ireland must face precisely the same test.

It is not enough to tell working-class people that they will live in a different jurisdiction. They are entitled to ask how their lives will be improved.

What remains provisional?

None of this requires a retrospective rejection of the peace process.

The ceasefires were necessary. The abandonment of armed struggle was right. The Good Friday Agreement brought enormous benefits. Participation in the institutions was both inevitable and proper.

But peace and constitutional progress are not the same thing. Accepting the necessity of the peace process does not require us to pretend that everything which followed represents another stage on an inevitable journey towards the Republic.

That is the conversation Sinn Féin appears unable to have with itself.

The question is not whether the peace process was worthwhile. It was. Nor is it whether Irish unity remains desirable. It does.

The question is whether the provisional strategy adopted by the Provisional movement is actually delivering.

Kearney's own arguments bring that contradiction into unusually sharp focus. In one account, functioning power-sharing is "the way forward". In another, the transition to Irish unity must now begin.

If Stormont is the way forward, we are entitled to ask where it is taking us. If the institutions are structurally incapable of delivering for people, we are entitled to ask why their preservation has become a strategic Sinn Féin priority. And if constitutional transition has already acquired the momentum we are repeatedly told it has, we are entitled to wonder why another convention is required to initiate it.

These are the genuine questions republicans should be asking. The answers should concern anyone who still believes that republicanism was supposed to mean something more than acquiring political office within the Northern state.

The less speculative reality may simply be that, after nearly three decades with their snouts in the Stormont trough, the patronage, salaries, status and political infrastructure that come with government have become indispensable to the party itself. What began as a provisional accommodation has become an institution in which Sinn Féin is deeply invested and from which it can no longer easily withdraw. Perhaps that is the real Provo paradox. Somewhere along the journey, the comfort of managing The North quietly replaced the transformation of Ireland as Sinn Féin's real project.

⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.

The Provo Paradox

Frankie Quinn ★ Kearney alluded to everyone being permitted to commemorate their dead. 

While this, of course, is true, there is a distinct difference between a volunteer of the Irish Republican Army and soldiers of the British imperialist forces who are paid killers and are employed by governments to terrorise, brutalise, maim and murder the occupied population of their invaded target country, all in the interests of their imperialist conquests.

A lot of the working-class lads and lassies who join this barbaric army are of course unaware of this fact. Hence the youthful age at which one can join the British army - 18 years old. The conduct of British imperialist forces is widely held as the worst in history, the world over; perhaps only surpassed by the cowardly murderers and rapists of the monstrous IDF.

In 1920, the British Empire ruled over a quarter of the world – 26 percent of it, with a population of over 449 million people. Their bloodthirsty rule by all manner of murderous methods and barbarism is well documented and even as early as last year, here in Ireland, they were found guilty of the torture of Irish republicans, namely the hooded men. Additionally, there are still political prisoners being held in Irish prisons; this is, in effect, internment without trial.

Even more far-reaching draconian laws are being introduced to crush any intention of rebellion. It is not a matter of agreeing with some of the strategies these people adopt, but the principal of states undermining, breaking and manipulating the law to serve their own warped purpose. When those who make the law, break the law, then there is no law.

So, with that said, we return to the insult of comparison of our resistance fighters, who SF placed in the same category, next to hired killers and mercenaries. By far and away, most Irish republican freedom fighters, who were involved with different organisations, were decent, normal people placed in an abnormal situation, against their will.

They found themselves involved in a revolutionary movement, in resisting the occupation and invasion of their country by brutal foreign forces in a reign of terror. These were ordinary working-class people, men and women trying to survive and etch out a living for themselves and their families. This, in itself, was extremely difficult amidst a unionist dominated country, deliberately created by its invasion and partitioning by the British, at the point of a gun, to control their own imperialist interests, and to this day, still maintained at the point of a gun.

The soldiers and volunteers of the Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army were of the people, for the people. Supported and covered by the people. They were volunteers - no wage, no financial gain involved. When a person became a member of the movement, as a volunteer, they were told there was only three ways this could end; imprisonment, death, or life on the run, and all three for some.

This is about dignity, pride and a thirst for freedom, sovereignty and a 32-county socialist republic. We were not even given the dignity by the oppressor to bury our dead - comrades who gave their lives so we, the Irish people, might be free and independent, running our own affairs without British interference.

So, as a comrade of mine pointed out the other day, under the hustle and bustle of the Remembrance Day rubbish, the Shinners slipped in another conformist betrayal by attempting to lump our fallen resistance fighters into the same category as British mercenaries and paid killers.

Our volunteer soldiers invaded no one’s country and stole no one’s land; they fought for a free and independent socialist republic. This, to benefit all the people of Ireland. And, of course, everyone can commemorate their dead. But, for a once revolutionary party to give full military honours to our oppressor and the most brutal imperialist forces in the world is totally wrong and we will not accept it.

We Remember Our Fallen Resistance Fighters With Dignity And Pride.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Declan Kearney 🪶 Edentubber Commemoration

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