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Showing posts with label Pat Sheehan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pat Sheehan. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre ☠ Writing yesterday about the political perspective of Sean Lynch having evolved I was reminded of how another former prisoner had undergone an even more striking departure from the ground he had almost died on.

Pat Sheehan is an old friend who has previously featured on the pages of TPQ. I think because of our once firm friendship, but maybe not, I was sent via Facebook an audio recording of a disputatious exchange between him and pro-Palestinian activists. They were arguing over the heckling of Sinn Fein luminary Declan Kearney when he addressed a rally in support of Gaza earlier this year. Sheehan was annoyed at some in the crowd shouting 'Kearney you are a fuckin wanker.'

Sheehan also drew attention to himself being heckled: 

when I got up to speak at the City Hall, as soon as I got up to speak, as soon as it was announced that I was speaking, part of the crowd started booing.


I don't believe Declan Kearney or Pat Sheehan should have been shouted down. It was denying others their right to hear what either had to say. If people do not approve of the Kearney/Sheehan perspective, to the point that they do not want to listen to them, they can always turn their backs in silent protest. It happened to Sinn Fein speakers during the Iraq war when the party was suspected by many in the anti-war movement of trying to play it both ways. The joke then was that Mitchel McLaughlin would appear at the anti-War rally at Hillsborough while Alex Maskey would attend the war rally outside Belfast City Hall. 

People Before Profit activists, Sheehan's interlocuters, were claiming that the heckling was spontaneous, over which it had no control, whereas Sheehan contested any notion of it being random.

When it was put to Sheehan by a Palestinian woman that perhaps the hostility towards both he and his party colleagues was a result of anger at his meeting with Likud, he responded 'and what?' 

To put some context on this, imagine responding to Jewish people - who had lost friends and colleagues during the Holocaust and complained about others meeting the Nazis -  'and what?’ Is there a more appropriate word than arrogance to describe such an ill-advised rejoinder?

Meeting with Likud is like meeting with the Nazi Party. Perhaps an argument can be made for meeting with Nazis at critical junctures. Back channels are probably essential in the midst of violent political conflict. Norbert Masur and Folke Bernadotte evidently believed so, and in their defence they saved the lives of many Jewish people. But Sinn Fein would be hard pressed to show one Palestinian life saved as a result of the party meeting Likud.  There is not a scintilla of evidence to show that Likud would be swayed in the slightest by Sinn Fein, merely using the meetings to exercise bragging rights over the Palestinians - with taunts of even your allies are now high-fiving it with us. 

Arguably, there was only one reason for Sinn Fein to meet Likud. That was to demonstrate to the establishment that it is a party that has been cured of its radicalism and is now fit for government, trotters suitably attired in polished shoes as it sits at the top table snorting with Farmer Jones.

Sheehan told his detractors that to claim there was no organised heckling, 'you are pissing up my leg and telling me it is raining.' Takes some chutzpah to make that claim given his own party's history in organized lying and handing out brollies to those whose backs it just pissed down.

After listening to the audio, I asked a Belfast activist aligned neither to SF nor People Before Profit for his take. Very familiar with the rallies and protests, he stated that while People Before Profit members might have joined in, the heckling was not organised but was the result of young people in particular being abhorred by what they felt was Sinn Fen's duplicitous stance on the Gaza genocide.

From Pat Sheehan friend of Liberation to Pat Shekel friend of Likud, not the type of epitaph you would want on your headstone.   

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

A Shekel For Your Thoughts

Anthony McIntyre - takes a different view of both the 1981 hunger strike and the end of the IRA's armed struggle from that expressed by an old friend from back in the day.

On the evening of my very first parole from prison after almost 14 years banged up, I was a passenger in a car driven by my brother heading to Ardoyne. I asked him to take the Crumlin Road route rather than the more convenient one via West Circular Road and Twaddell Avenue. I wanted to view the city’s jail which I had previously spent a few spells in.

It was not nostalgia that spurred me. Four months earlier a close friend had been caught on an IRA bombing operation and was now confined within the walls of the foreboding structure. It was one of those gestures that quietly conveyed the sentiment that I had not forgotten: that even in what was a time of joy for me, his travails still figured in my mind.

Sometime later, the H-Blocks well behind me, I was crossing the Mersey by ferry to The Wirall. I was in the city of Liverpool for one of the soccer matches and also to visit the Anfield memorial to the 96 fans unlawfully killed by South Yorkshire Police at Sheffield in 1989. During the crossing I wrote to the imprisoned friend, the undulations of the river currents probably exacerbating my frequently commented upon poor handwriting. He had visited me and kept in touch after his previous release from prison on a number of occasions, and I was reciprocating now that he was back in for a very long stretch.

I have previously laid out my views on Pat Sheehan, even though by then we were no longer in touch -  apart from a few chance encounters where we would chew the fat before going our separate ways - or had maintained the friendship we once had. I guess that is politics: his choice rather than mine. Although it remains something for which no explanation was ever forthcoming. C'est La Vie.

Pat had spent 55 days on the 1981 hunger strike before it was ordered to a halt by IRA leaders outside the jail. I was seriously relieved he had made it through although it seemed touch and go as he had contracted a serious liver malady which did not augur well for him. The experience from that dark and dangerous era is what led him to Derry last week where there was a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the end of the hunger strike.

While in the city he spoke to the Derry Journal. Two things struck me. One, a glaring inaccuracy which it is difficult to pass off as an oversight; the other a highly contentious view with little evidence to support it. I am not the corrector of false narratives and these days let much that is inaccurate run past me. But on the 40th anniversary of the deaths of the volunteers described by Pat as 'probably ten of the best men that we had', and in the year when a previously unpublished comm by Bobby Sands came to light, raising serious questions for some leadership figures as to the malign role they played,  I thought it worthwhile to commit to the record.

On the outcome of the IRA campaign Pat Sheehan expressed the following view:   

If you consider that the whole rationale behind the criminalisation policy was to isolate and marginalise republicans and ultimately to defeat the IRA - the outcome was actually the opposite of that … the strategy of the British to defeat the IRA and defeat the republican struggle failed in 1981 and I think we are still feeling the repercussions of that even now.

What is seriously deficient about this statement is the extent to which it ignores the terms on which the IRA campaign was brought to a close. The objective of the IRA campaign was to coerce the British state out of Ireland and coerce the North into a unitary state. The IRA campaign failed on both counts. The objective of the British state was not to remain in Ireland forever and a day but to ensure that the terms on which it would leave Ireland were those of consent by a majority in the North. The British won that hands down. 

Not only were the British successful in having the unity only by consent formula become entrenched as the core political and strategic determinant pertaining to the matter of constitutional change, they also registered a double success in having the Provisional project abandon its position of coercion and in its place accept the British terms of disengagement. Whether we describe that as a failure or a defeat is a matter of choice but a compelling case can be made that the outcome of the IRA campaign as easily fits one description as it does the other.

The republican struggle ended in failure with the advent of the Good Friday Agreement. The political project today is a constitutional nationalist one which was the antithesis of the IRA's armed campaign. The only thing that has shifted the constitutional axis is Brexit, not Sinn Fein’s politicking. 

While that might be described as belonging to the sphere of opinion,  no matter how weak one opinion might be vis a vis the other, Pat Sheehan's other contention is not a matter of opinion but factually wrong. In claiming that the seriously subversive narrative of Richard O'Rawe - that a British offer which could have saved the lives of six hunger strikers was accepted by the prison leadership but overruled by key leaders outside the prison - is implausible, Pat Sheehan contends:

I wasn’t in that wing at the time when this discussion is supposed to have taken place between ‘Bik’ and Richard. If you ask me it would have been impossible to have had a conversation like that and not for everyone else or at least some others to have heard it because the currency at that time in the prison was scéal [news/information - literally story]. Who had a bit of info? Who knew a wee bit here or there? If the leadership were up at the window or down at the pipe having a conversation about the situation someone else would have heard it. That is my view and there is nobody, as far as I’m aware of, backing up what Richard says.


Nobody backing it up?  


The cellmate of Richard O'Rawe at the time of the conversation Pat Sheehan suggests never happened had this to say to Eamonn McCann:


“Richard isn’t a liar. He told the truth in his book. I heard what passed between Richard and Bik (McFarlane). I remember Richard saying, ‘Ta go leor ann,’ and the reply, ‘Aontaim leat.’ There’s just no question that that happened.”

 

Gerard Clarke, who was also on the wing at the time, confirmed at a public event in Derry in 2009 that he too had heard the conversation between O'Rawe and McFarlane and that O'Rawe's account was accurate.


I admire Pat Sheehan's fortitude from the days when he was an IRA volunteer, willing to die on hunger strike. Eschewing a ballot box in one hand and an armalite in somebody else's, he was willing to lead from the front and take part in a war he knew could not be won. All of that makes him courageous, not correct. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.


Hello Old Friend


Pat Sheehan who survived 55 days without food talks about the ending of the 1981 Republican hunger strikes

Pat Sheehan Talking About 55 Days On Hunger Strike

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