PRC-UTE
26th July 2008, 17:39
From insurgency to identityWith the deftness of a magician wriggling free
from a straitjacket, Sinn Fein ditched its universalist aspirations and
reinvented itself as a municipal party of victimhood. A brilliant new book
takes the party to task.Kevin Rooney
Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams’ tribute in May to former Irish Republican
Army leader Brian Keenan, in which he described Keenan as a peacemaker,
revealed much about the party’s retrospective redefinition of its long
struggle against British rule in Ireland. Speaking at Keenan’s funeral,
Adams suggested that Keenan lived long enough to see his goals realised:
‘Achieving a power-sharing administration with the Reverend Ian Paisley as
First Minister would not have been possible but for the work of Brian
Keenan.’
I grew up in West Belfast in the next street to Keenan. Before he rose to
relative notoriety in the British press as an ‘IRA hard man’, he was
already well known and respected throughout the Irish republican community
in Northern Ireland – and it certainly wasn’t for his role as a
‘peacemaker’. Keenan was admired for his military ability to strike at the
British state. In West Belfast, Keenan’s association with the Balcombe
Street unit (a group of IRA men who fought in a siege with Metropolitan
police officers in London in 1975), Libyan arms shipments and numerous
other IRA operations were seen as evidence of his determination and
tenacity in prosecuting the war against what we saw as Britain’s
occupation of our country.
Yet to read Adams’ funeral oration is to conjure up images of a man who
struggled all his life for a peace deal which has delivered a
power-sharing administration within a partitioned British state.
Amazingly, the current Sinn Fein leadership has been able to get away with
rewriting the aims and tactics of the republican struggle retrospectively.
As a new generation grows up and the ‘Troubles’ pass from memory to
history, the politics of transformation are being replaced by the politics
of identity, victimhood and the rhetoric of accommodation and compromise.
Sinn Fein’s rhetoric now disavows self-interest and any mention of the
movement’s former commitment to achieving political goals. Instead, the
party has embraced the language of ‘conflict resolution’, ‘parity of
esteem’, ‘healing our wounds’ and ‘victims’ voices’. Such an outlook might
seem preferable to fighting a war, which takes it toll on the community –
but it is a disingenuous and dishonest approach to republican politics and
history.
That a political project could be so decisively redefined in such a
relatively short space of time is quite incredible. What’s even more
incredible is that few if any serious attempts have been made to analyse
and critique this most blatant case of revisionism. The death of Irish
republicanism is not a popular subject for discussion for any side in
Northern Ireland’s divide; all parties have an interest in keeping up the
pretence that republicanism is thriving.
At last, however, an excellent account of these profound developments has
arrived. The New Politics of Sinn Fein by Kevin Bean, a lecturer in Irish
politics at the University of Liverpool, is a seminal account of the
ideological changes that have taken place over the past 10 to 15 years. It
explores how the republican movement was transformed from an anti-state
insurgency to a partner in governing the state. Bean’s book is not only
the book I have been waiting for… it is the book I would like to have
written.
Bean situates Irish republicanism in a global political context and shows
how its politics are comparable to other ideological projects that have
undergone similar decline and redefinition since the late 1980s. The book
considers the tension between the universal and the particular within
republicanism and how this is reflected in specific aspects of republican
politics.
The focus on the international context is particularly topical at the
moment as the world marks the fortieth anniversary of 1968 radicalism. It
is interesting how the numerous commemorations and articles invoking the
uprisings in Paris, protests in London’s Grosvenor Square, fighting in
Vietnam and radicalisation of the black civil rights movement in the USA
have failed to mention Derry 1968 and the struggle for civil rights for
the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. Yet when Bean interviews IRA
volunteers and republican activists, the extent to which they were
inspired by other struggles becomes clear: ‘From its founding moment, the
environment shaping the movement extended beyond the streets of West
Belfast and the villages of East Tyrone to guerrilla campaigns in Latin
America and civil rights activism in the USA’, writes Bean.
Yet while republicans drew inspiration from other radical movements, Bean
shows that the movement never really had a clear definition of republican
ideology. In very simple terms, in the late 1960s through to the mid-1980s
the politics of the republican struggle were largely progressive,
universalist and anti-imperialist in character, as they were influenced by
progressive struggles in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
However, since the late 1980s, in a post-Cold War world that has seen the
further decline of the left, republican politics became prey to the
particularist strand that always existed within the movement. The
republican leadership quietly revisited its universalist aspiration for a
United Ireland with a united people, and moved towards embracing the
politics of cultural difference and identity.
A key part of the republican argument was always that it was the British
state that created and sustained a false division between Catholic and
Protestant and nationalist and Unionist in Northern Ireland, using its
tried and tested imperialist policy of Divide and Rule. As such,
struggling against British rule meant struggling against the forces that
were dividing Irish people from each other. However, the republican ideal
of overcoming externally imposed divisions has now also been revised, as
republicans accept – and even celebrate – the existence of ‘two
traditions’ and two peoples in Northern Ireland with separate cultures and
identities. Far from overcoming and dissolving differences, the peace
process has encouraged us to champion them and preserve them into the
future.
Bean rightly flags up the influence of ideological changes in
international politics as a key driver in isolating and eventually
altering the politics of republicanism. He points out that alongside the
impact of the collapse of international anti-imperialist movements on
Irish republicanism, the very notion of Enlightenment universalist values
rooted in the French Revolution and the United Irishmen also declined in
importance. Republican politics ceased to be about grand visions and who
should run society, and instead became about the politics of cultural and
communal recognition. Where once the British state enjoyed no legitimacy
within republican communities in Northern Ireland, it now found itself
called upon by its old adversaries to take responsibility for ensuring
‘parity of esteem’ and ‘recognition’ for both the traditional Unionist and
nationalist communities.
By calling for more funding and recognition for the Irish language, or for
the re-routing of offensive Orange marches, the republican movement
implicitly invited the British government to adjudicate and rule between
two cultural groups, hence strengthening the legitimacy of British rule
and changing the republican struggle from one against division into a game
of one-upmanship underpinned by the politics of grievance. Bean shows how
Sinn Fein’s revisionism not only meant that it started to accept political
divisions as natural or traditional, but started to accept the right of
Britain to rule Northern Ireland. After all, if there really are ‘two
traditions’ in Northern Ireland, distinct, different and with difficulty
getting along, then clearly an external adjudicator is needed to oversee
their interaction.
Bean charts the entry of Sinn Fein into community activism and politics in
great detail. He provides evidence that some republicans, from the 1960s
onwards, jealously guarded their independence and autonomy from the state
and were acutely aware of the dangers of being sucked into a reformist
agenda. The activists took inspiration from the Catholic Housing Action
Groups, direct action and tenants’ associations that emerged from the
radicalism of 1968. The Tory government’s attempts to deny funding and to
stigmatise any groups with republican members served to reinforce their
image as radical, bold and innovative.
However, in a policy u-turn in the 1970s, British governments slowly moved
away from the political vetting of ‘dangerous’ groups towards increasingly
funding and drawing these groups into a relationship with the state. This
changing approach was part of a government counterinsurgency policy known
as ‘normalisation’. British governments began to channel millions of
pounds to radical community groups, which in effect transformed them into
‘gatekeepers’ between the British state and the local community.
In an insightful case study, Bean points to the example of the Upper
Springfield Development Trust (USDT) in the republican Ballymurphy area of
Belfast (Brian Keenan’s estate). Under the guise of tackling deprivation,
the British gave the USDT a grant of £6.9million. With a salaried staff of
around 60 people, it was to become one of the largest employers in West
Belfast. In effect, many autonomous republican activists who had been at
the forefront of the battle against the British in the Ballymurphy area
were being drawn into actually implementing British social and
pacification policies.
Former revolutionaries and radicals who set out to subvert the state were
slowly, but surely, transformed into the new establishment. Of course,
such activists are almost always well intentioned, but as one leading
critic of the peace process quoted in Bean’s book explains, the nature of
the structures, the strings attached and the financial terms of Britain’s
dealings with these community groups have ‘dulled the sharp end of [their]
politics’. The fusion of community and identity politics has moved
republicanism well away from anything radical or revolutionary towards
municipal politics, a political and cultural framework similar to that
used by the former London mayor, Ken Livingstone.
Indeed, as Bean points out, the similarities between the changing Irish
republican movement and the petty political organisation of left
individuals such as Ken Livingstone did not go unnoticed by Ken himself.
Bean quotes Livingstone: ‘I was struck by the similarity in the position
of what you might call the new radical left in the Labour Party and the
radical left in Sinn Fein. I had no doubt that in different circumstances,
if I had been born in West Belfast, I would have ended up in Sinn Fein.
Equally, if Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison had been born in London, I’m
sure they would have ended up supporting some left current in the Labour
Party.’
It would be wrong to characterise the republican leadership’s series of
accommodations to British rule as a ‘sell out’ or ‘treachery’, as some
dissident republicans do. The removal of Irish republicanism from the
stage of history must be understood in its declining sense of agency and
historical subjectivity. Republicans are no different to many former
revolutionaries around the globe, with whom they agree that it is no
longer possible to change the world – hence the politics of transformation
is no longer on the agenda and instead has been replaced by the
cultivation of identity and protection of cultural heritage. The logical
outcome of the process of normalisation, incorporation and decline of
international grand visions described so well by Bean was the peace
process, and an historic accommodation by republicans with Unionism and
British rule. As the republican activist Bernadette McAliskey put it: ‘The
war is over and the good guys lost.’
Such brutal honesty was, however, nowhere to be seen in the republican
movement’s leadership itself. Instead, they presented the peace process as
a successful outcome of their campaign, rather than analysing it as a
logical conclusion to a long process of depoliticisation and
accommodation. With its rhetoric of ‘a new phase of struggle’, ‘new site
of struggle’, ‘transition’, ‘opportunity’, ‘staging post’, ‘not the end
but the beginning’ and ‘historical momentum’, the republican leadership,
aided by the deliberate ambiguity of the peace process, was able to
present a series of unprecedented departures from republican principles as
great steps forward. There is no shame in defeat, of course; it can be an
opportunity to take stock, learn lessons and search for a new form of
politics that can address the continuing reality of British rule and
political and social divisions. Yet there is something shameful about
disguising defeat as ‘a new transitional direction’.
Unfortunately, the current leadership of the Republican movement has
compounded its defeat by its political dishonesty, and its refusal to tell
it like it is. With its constant advocacy of identity politics, pleas for
truth and reconciliation and therapeutic rhetoric, republican leaders
retrospectively undermine all that was positive about the spirit of the
republican struggle. In this process, republicans are recast as something
they were not. In the same way that Brian Keenan has been recast as a man
driven by a vision of sharing power with Ian Paisley, so young men who
sacrificed everything – sometimes even their lives – in what they
considered to be a struggle against British occupation are now rewritten
as ‘wronged victims’.
To illustrate this point, Bean discusses the changing republican reaction
to the Loughgall incident in 1987, when the SAS ambushed and executed
eight IRA volunteers. The following two reports, separated by 17 years,
capture the changed thinking within the republican and nationalist
community in Northern Ireland.
In May 1987, An Phoblacht/Republican News (Sinn Fein’s newspaper) argued:
‘Republicans do not complain about the way in which the British Forces
carried out their operation. Centuries of British terror have taught us to
expect it. The illegitimacy of the forces which carried out the Loughgall
killings is not simply in their actions but in their very presence in our
country. It has always been and always will be illegitimate and
unacceptable.’
Seventeen years on, in August 2004, the Irish News reported that relatives
of one of the IRA members killed at Loughgall had a ‘very useful meeting
with the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) chief constable. One
member of the family commented afterwards, “We are just a family trying to
get the truth about what happened to my brother”. The police spokesperson
described the encounter in similar terms: “It was a useful meeting with an
open two-way discussion. The Kellys [the family in question] raised a
number of issues with the chief constable. He in turn offered his
assessment of the decision to deploy the army against what he feared was a
dangerous gang.”’ As Bean notes, the defiance that characterised the
republican struggle has been replaced by a therapeutic tone and a joint
search for the truth as part of a process of reconciliation.
The dead volunteer in question was Padraic Kelly. I remember vividly his
father’s tribute the day after the Loughgall ambush, when he described his
son and seven comrades as ‘brave Irish soldiers fighting a war against an
oppressor’. At the time the Royal Ulster Constabulary (Northern Ireland’s
then police force) and the British Army regularly attacked IRA funerals to
prevent any military displays. When asked by a TV reporter about the
prospects of a clash between security forces and mourners at his son’s
funeral, Kelly replied: ‘My son will be buried with full military honours
as befitting an Irish soldier. If they try and prevent Padraic’s coffin
leaving the house with his IRA beret and gloves then we will bury him in
the back garden!’
Such an open spirit of defiance is a far cry from the approach of today’s
republican leadership, which is more comfortable pressing for the creation
of Victims’ Commissions, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and
inquiries into various incidents that took place during the Troubles. The
lexicon of victims, suffering and trauma dominate the republican
movement’s discourse. ‘Securing the peace’, ‘bedding down and keeping the
peace on track’ – this is the republican movement’s neverending mantra.
It’s as if the peace process itself, and not bringing an end to British
rule, had always been its goal.
With a light-footedness that a magician extracting himself from a
straitjacket would be proud of, the republican movement has reinvented
itself around lifestyle issues and victim and identity politics rather
than the National Question. Yet while many former activists feel a sense
of dislocation and disorientation, Sinn Fein’s electoral popularity
remains undiminished as it benefits from people’s growing sense of
impotence and lack of confidence to effect real change.
The Irish republican movement fought for a united Ireland and an end to
the artificial division of Irish people. It lost and instead has helped to
strengthen British rule in which divisions are reinforced and celebrated.
Understanding how republicanism in Northern Ireland has adapted to and
even embraced this defeat is an important part of the history of modern
Ireland – and The New Politics of Sinn Fein is an excellent contribution
to that historical record.
Kevin Rooney teaches government and politics at a London school, and is
co-producing the debate ‘The Troubles, 1968-2008: Revising Irish History?’
at the Battle of Ideas festival in November.
The New Politics of Sinn Féin, by Kevin Bean, is published by Liverpool
University Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
reprinted from:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5515/ (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5515/)
from a straitjacket, Sinn Fein ditched its universalist aspirations and
reinvented itself as a municipal party of victimhood. A brilliant new book
takes the party to task.Kevin Rooney
Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams’ tribute in May to former Irish Republican
Army leader Brian Keenan, in which he described Keenan as a peacemaker,
revealed much about the party’s retrospective redefinition of its long
struggle against British rule in Ireland. Speaking at Keenan’s funeral,
Adams suggested that Keenan lived long enough to see his goals realised:
‘Achieving a power-sharing administration with the Reverend Ian Paisley as
First Minister would not have been possible but for the work of Brian
Keenan.’
I grew up in West Belfast in the next street to Keenan. Before he rose to
relative notoriety in the British press as an ‘IRA hard man’, he was
already well known and respected throughout the Irish republican community
in Northern Ireland – and it certainly wasn’t for his role as a
‘peacemaker’. Keenan was admired for his military ability to strike at the
British state. In West Belfast, Keenan’s association with the Balcombe
Street unit (a group of IRA men who fought in a siege with Metropolitan
police officers in London in 1975), Libyan arms shipments and numerous
other IRA operations were seen as evidence of his determination and
tenacity in prosecuting the war against what we saw as Britain’s
occupation of our country.
Yet to read Adams’ funeral oration is to conjure up images of a man who
struggled all his life for a peace deal which has delivered a
power-sharing administration within a partitioned British state.
Amazingly, the current Sinn Fein leadership has been able to get away with
rewriting the aims and tactics of the republican struggle retrospectively.
As a new generation grows up and the ‘Troubles’ pass from memory to
history, the politics of transformation are being replaced by the politics
of identity, victimhood and the rhetoric of accommodation and compromise.
Sinn Fein’s rhetoric now disavows self-interest and any mention of the
movement’s former commitment to achieving political goals. Instead, the
party has embraced the language of ‘conflict resolution’, ‘parity of
esteem’, ‘healing our wounds’ and ‘victims’ voices’. Such an outlook might
seem preferable to fighting a war, which takes it toll on the community –
but it is a disingenuous and dishonest approach to republican politics and
history.
That a political project could be so decisively redefined in such a
relatively short space of time is quite incredible. What’s even more
incredible is that few if any serious attempts have been made to analyse
and critique this most blatant case of revisionism. The death of Irish
republicanism is not a popular subject for discussion for any side in
Northern Ireland’s divide; all parties have an interest in keeping up the
pretence that republicanism is thriving.
At last, however, an excellent account of these profound developments has
arrived. The New Politics of Sinn Fein by Kevin Bean, a lecturer in Irish
politics at the University of Liverpool, is a seminal account of the
ideological changes that have taken place over the past 10 to 15 years. It
explores how the republican movement was transformed from an anti-state
insurgency to a partner in governing the state. Bean’s book is not only
the book I have been waiting for… it is the book I would like to have
written.
Bean situates Irish republicanism in a global political context and shows
how its politics are comparable to other ideological projects that have
undergone similar decline and redefinition since the late 1980s. The book
considers the tension between the universal and the particular within
republicanism and how this is reflected in specific aspects of republican
politics.
The focus on the international context is particularly topical at the
moment as the world marks the fortieth anniversary of 1968 radicalism. It
is interesting how the numerous commemorations and articles invoking the
uprisings in Paris, protests in London’s Grosvenor Square, fighting in
Vietnam and radicalisation of the black civil rights movement in the USA
have failed to mention Derry 1968 and the struggle for civil rights for
the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. Yet when Bean interviews IRA
volunteers and republican activists, the extent to which they were
inspired by other struggles becomes clear: ‘From its founding moment, the
environment shaping the movement extended beyond the streets of West
Belfast and the villages of East Tyrone to guerrilla campaigns in Latin
America and civil rights activism in the USA’, writes Bean.
Yet while republicans drew inspiration from other radical movements, Bean
shows that the movement never really had a clear definition of republican
ideology. In very simple terms, in the late 1960s through to the mid-1980s
the politics of the republican struggle were largely progressive,
universalist and anti-imperialist in character, as they were influenced by
progressive struggles in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
However, since the late 1980s, in a post-Cold War world that has seen the
further decline of the left, republican politics became prey to the
particularist strand that always existed within the movement. The
republican leadership quietly revisited its universalist aspiration for a
United Ireland with a united people, and moved towards embracing the
politics of cultural difference and identity.
A key part of the republican argument was always that it was the British
state that created and sustained a false division between Catholic and
Protestant and nationalist and Unionist in Northern Ireland, using its
tried and tested imperialist policy of Divide and Rule. As such,
struggling against British rule meant struggling against the forces that
were dividing Irish people from each other. However, the republican ideal
of overcoming externally imposed divisions has now also been revised, as
republicans accept – and even celebrate – the existence of ‘two
traditions’ and two peoples in Northern Ireland with separate cultures and
identities. Far from overcoming and dissolving differences, the peace
process has encouraged us to champion them and preserve them into the
future.
Bean rightly flags up the influence of ideological changes in
international politics as a key driver in isolating and eventually
altering the politics of republicanism. He points out that alongside the
impact of the collapse of international anti-imperialist movements on
Irish republicanism, the very notion of Enlightenment universalist values
rooted in the French Revolution and the United Irishmen also declined in
importance. Republican politics ceased to be about grand visions and who
should run society, and instead became about the politics of cultural and
communal recognition. Where once the British state enjoyed no legitimacy
within republican communities in Northern Ireland, it now found itself
called upon by its old adversaries to take responsibility for ensuring
‘parity of esteem’ and ‘recognition’ for both the traditional Unionist and
nationalist communities.
By calling for more funding and recognition for the Irish language, or for
the re-routing of offensive Orange marches, the republican movement
implicitly invited the British government to adjudicate and rule between
two cultural groups, hence strengthening the legitimacy of British rule
and changing the republican struggle from one against division into a game
of one-upmanship underpinned by the politics of grievance. Bean shows how
Sinn Fein’s revisionism not only meant that it started to accept political
divisions as natural or traditional, but started to accept the right of
Britain to rule Northern Ireland. After all, if there really are ‘two
traditions’ in Northern Ireland, distinct, different and with difficulty
getting along, then clearly an external adjudicator is needed to oversee
their interaction.
Bean charts the entry of Sinn Fein into community activism and politics in
great detail. He provides evidence that some republicans, from the 1960s
onwards, jealously guarded their independence and autonomy from the state
and were acutely aware of the dangers of being sucked into a reformist
agenda. The activists took inspiration from the Catholic Housing Action
Groups, direct action and tenants’ associations that emerged from the
radicalism of 1968. The Tory government’s attempts to deny funding and to
stigmatise any groups with republican members served to reinforce their
image as radical, bold and innovative.
However, in a policy u-turn in the 1970s, British governments slowly moved
away from the political vetting of ‘dangerous’ groups towards increasingly
funding and drawing these groups into a relationship with the state. This
changing approach was part of a government counterinsurgency policy known
as ‘normalisation’. British governments began to channel millions of
pounds to radical community groups, which in effect transformed them into
‘gatekeepers’ between the British state and the local community.
In an insightful case study, Bean points to the example of the Upper
Springfield Development Trust (USDT) in the republican Ballymurphy area of
Belfast (Brian Keenan’s estate). Under the guise of tackling deprivation,
the British gave the USDT a grant of £6.9million. With a salaried staff of
around 60 people, it was to become one of the largest employers in West
Belfast. In effect, many autonomous republican activists who had been at
the forefront of the battle against the British in the Ballymurphy area
were being drawn into actually implementing British social and
pacification policies.
Former revolutionaries and radicals who set out to subvert the state were
slowly, but surely, transformed into the new establishment. Of course,
such activists are almost always well intentioned, but as one leading
critic of the peace process quoted in Bean’s book explains, the nature of
the structures, the strings attached and the financial terms of Britain’s
dealings with these community groups have ‘dulled the sharp end of [their]
politics’. The fusion of community and identity politics has moved
republicanism well away from anything radical or revolutionary towards
municipal politics, a political and cultural framework similar to that
used by the former London mayor, Ken Livingstone.
Indeed, as Bean points out, the similarities between the changing Irish
republican movement and the petty political organisation of left
individuals such as Ken Livingstone did not go unnoticed by Ken himself.
Bean quotes Livingstone: ‘I was struck by the similarity in the position
of what you might call the new radical left in the Labour Party and the
radical left in Sinn Fein. I had no doubt that in different circumstances,
if I had been born in West Belfast, I would have ended up in Sinn Fein.
Equally, if Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison had been born in London, I’m
sure they would have ended up supporting some left current in the Labour
Party.’
It would be wrong to characterise the republican leadership’s series of
accommodations to British rule as a ‘sell out’ or ‘treachery’, as some
dissident republicans do. The removal of Irish republicanism from the
stage of history must be understood in its declining sense of agency and
historical subjectivity. Republicans are no different to many former
revolutionaries around the globe, with whom they agree that it is no
longer possible to change the world – hence the politics of transformation
is no longer on the agenda and instead has been replaced by the
cultivation of identity and protection of cultural heritage. The logical
outcome of the process of normalisation, incorporation and decline of
international grand visions described so well by Bean was the peace
process, and an historic accommodation by republicans with Unionism and
British rule. As the republican activist Bernadette McAliskey put it: ‘The
war is over and the good guys lost.’
Such brutal honesty was, however, nowhere to be seen in the republican
movement’s leadership itself. Instead, they presented the peace process as
a successful outcome of their campaign, rather than analysing it as a
logical conclusion to a long process of depoliticisation and
accommodation. With its rhetoric of ‘a new phase of struggle’, ‘new site
of struggle’, ‘transition’, ‘opportunity’, ‘staging post’, ‘not the end
but the beginning’ and ‘historical momentum’, the republican leadership,
aided by the deliberate ambiguity of the peace process, was able to
present a series of unprecedented departures from republican principles as
great steps forward. There is no shame in defeat, of course; it can be an
opportunity to take stock, learn lessons and search for a new form of
politics that can address the continuing reality of British rule and
political and social divisions. Yet there is something shameful about
disguising defeat as ‘a new transitional direction’.
Unfortunately, the current leadership of the Republican movement has
compounded its defeat by its political dishonesty, and its refusal to tell
it like it is. With its constant advocacy of identity politics, pleas for
truth and reconciliation and therapeutic rhetoric, republican leaders
retrospectively undermine all that was positive about the spirit of the
republican struggle. In this process, republicans are recast as something
they were not. In the same way that Brian Keenan has been recast as a man
driven by a vision of sharing power with Ian Paisley, so young men who
sacrificed everything – sometimes even their lives – in what they
considered to be a struggle against British occupation are now rewritten
as ‘wronged victims’.
To illustrate this point, Bean discusses the changing republican reaction
to the Loughgall incident in 1987, when the SAS ambushed and executed
eight IRA volunteers. The following two reports, separated by 17 years,
capture the changed thinking within the republican and nationalist
community in Northern Ireland.
In May 1987, An Phoblacht/Republican News (Sinn Fein’s newspaper) argued:
‘Republicans do not complain about the way in which the British Forces
carried out their operation. Centuries of British terror have taught us to
expect it. The illegitimacy of the forces which carried out the Loughgall
killings is not simply in their actions but in their very presence in our
country. It has always been and always will be illegitimate and
unacceptable.’
Seventeen years on, in August 2004, the Irish News reported that relatives
of one of the IRA members killed at Loughgall had a ‘very useful meeting
with the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) chief constable. One
member of the family commented afterwards, “We are just a family trying to
get the truth about what happened to my brother”. The police spokesperson
described the encounter in similar terms: “It was a useful meeting with an
open two-way discussion. The Kellys [the family in question] raised a
number of issues with the chief constable. He in turn offered his
assessment of the decision to deploy the army against what he feared was a
dangerous gang.”’ As Bean notes, the defiance that characterised the
republican struggle has been replaced by a therapeutic tone and a joint
search for the truth as part of a process of reconciliation.
The dead volunteer in question was Padraic Kelly. I remember vividly his
father’s tribute the day after the Loughgall ambush, when he described his
son and seven comrades as ‘brave Irish soldiers fighting a war against an
oppressor’. At the time the Royal Ulster Constabulary (Northern Ireland’s
then police force) and the British Army regularly attacked IRA funerals to
prevent any military displays. When asked by a TV reporter about the
prospects of a clash between security forces and mourners at his son’s
funeral, Kelly replied: ‘My son will be buried with full military honours
as befitting an Irish soldier. If they try and prevent Padraic’s coffin
leaving the house with his IRA beret and gloves then we will bury him in
the back garden!’
Such an open spirit of defiance is a far cry from the approach of today’s
republican leadership, which is more comfortable pressing for the creation
of Victims’ Commissions, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and
inquiries into various incidents that took place during the Troubles. The
lexicon of victims, suffering and trauma dominate the republican
movement’s discourse. ‘Securing the peace’, ‘bedding down and keeping the
peace on track’ – this is the republican movement’s neverending mantra.
It’s as if the peace process itself, and not bringing an end to British
rule, had always been its goal.
With a light-footedness that a magician extracting himself from a
straitjacket would be proud of, the republican movement has reinvented
itself around lifestyle issues and victim and identity politics rather
than the National Question. Yet while many former activists feel a sense
of dislocation and disorientation, Sinn Fein’s electoral popularity
remains undiminished as it benefits from people’s growing sense of
impotence and lack of confidence to effect real change.
The Irish republican movement fought for a united Ireland and an end to
the artificial division of Irish people. It lost and instead has helped to
strengthen British rule in which divisions are reinforced and celebrated.
Understanding how republicanism in Northern Ireland has adapted to and
even embraced this defeat is an important part of the history of modern
Ireland – and The New Politics of Sinn Fein is an excellent contribution
to that historical record.
Kevin Rooney teaches government and politics at a London school, and is
co-producing the debate ‘The Troubles, 1968-2008: Revising Irish History?’
at the Battle of Ideas festival in November.
The New Politics of Sinn Féin, by Kevin Bean, is published by Liverpool
University Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
reprinted from:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5515/ (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5515/)