Sean Swan - Official Irish Republicanism, 1962 to 1972

What has made this book, and the thesis on which it is based, possible is the access to the minutes and correspondence of Sinn Fein from 1962 to 1972 kindly granted me by the Ard Comhairle of the Workers Party. Access to the minutes of the Wolfe Tone Society and the diaries of C. Desmond Greaves granted me by Anthony Coughlan were also of tremendous value and greatly appreciated. Seamus Swan is to be thanked for his help with translation. The staff of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, especially Kris Brown, were also very helpful. Amongst those who contribute interviews or opinions to this work are: Eoghan Harris, Tomas MacGiolla, Sean Garland, Mick Ryan, Anthony Coughlan, Mairin de Brca, Roy Johnston, Tony Meade, Ruraigh O Brdaigh, Pat Leddy, Eamon McCann, Fred Heatley and Roy Garland, to name but some. Arthur Aughey, simply by being his implacable unionist self, made a vital, though perhaps unwitting, contribution to the analysis used in this work.

Henry Patterson, supervisor of the original Phd thesis, is to be saluted for his indefatigability, my wife, Paula, for a patience and commitment far above and beyond the call of duty, and our son, Tomas, for being himself despite the disruption caused by his birth in the middle of writing this work. To those whom I may have forgotten, I can only apologise.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past .

T his book is substantially my 2006 PhD thesis and is based on access to important and previously unavailable material, including the minutes and correspondence of the Sinn Fin Ard Comhairle and Coiste Seasta for the years 1962 to 1972, the minutes of the Wolfe Tone Society and the diaries of C Desmond Greaves. The question: Why did the Official IRA call a cease-fire in 1972, when popular support for republicanism was at an all time high, when the IRA ceasefire in 1962 had been called for due to lack of popular support? is used to interrogate this material and the changes within official republicanism between the 1962 and 1972 ceasefires. The answer involves an examination of the reasons for, and consequences of, the failure of the IRAs 1956-62 Border Campaign. This demands an attempted analysis of the concept, republicanism, and the context, Ireland North and South. During the course of the 1960s both the concept, at least as relates to the official republican leadership in Dublin, and the context, Ireland, underwent significant changes. The change in republicanism was that it had moved significantly to the left as a result of the influences both of the Irish communist parties, and related individual communists, and of republicanisms own attempts to end its remoteness from the people. Because Ireland is not a homogeneous society there are pronounced regional variations. These variations are not limited to the north/south existence of the two Irish states, but are also east/west in the South between the urban (primarily Dublin) and rural areas (particularly the west) and, in the North, between majority nationalist (the west) majority unionist (the east) and mixed areas (Belfast). Chronological changes occurred in the form of the changing of the old guard of de Valera and Brookeborough and their replacement with less traditional figures, initially Sean Lemass and Terence ONeill. In London the election of a Labour Government also represented a change in political context.

This new context constituted a period of dtente between North and South and between Britain and the South. In a wider British context this period also witnessed an upsurge in Scottish and Welsh nationalism. On the European level 1968 was the era of the Prague Spring and the Paris riots. Further afield the struggle for civil rights in the US, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, decolonisation and Vatican II, were all indicators of the arrival of a new epoch. But change engendered reaction ONeill/Paisley, Lynch/Blaney, Goulding/MacStiofain. By the end of this period the Republican movement, the Unionist Party and even, though to a more limited degree, Fianna Fil, would have been split by these contradictions.

Official republicanisms belief in the primacy of the common name aspects of Wolfe Tone republicanism, coupled with the more novel faith in the unity of the working-class, left it paralysed by the sectarian conflict in Belfast in August 1969. The divisions in Belfast were entirely ethno-sectarian and devoid of class content. The decision to press on with reforms in the wake of August 1969 exacerbated the divisions within the republican movement which had been brewing between traditionalists and reformists since roughly 1964. But post-August 1969 a new fault line had opened up between many Belfast republicans and the Dublin leadership who had, as they saw it, left nationalist Belfast defenceless. The emergence of the Provisionals, representing, as they did, something closer to what the popular mind understood as republicanism and laying claim to the titles Sinn Fin and IRA, posed a serious problem for the Officials in terms of legitimacy. The Officials response to the existence of the Provisionals and the presence of the British Army was to launch a campaign which attempted to fight the British Army while simultaneously attempting to win over, or, at the very least, not engender the hostility of, northern Protestants. It was a highly contradictory position.

The new departure can, at least initially, be understood as an attempt to re-brand separatism, to solve the problem posed by the fact that the South had as much political separatism as it desired, by recasting separatism, and imperialism, in economic, rather than purely political, terms. The ease with which such an approach dovetails with an understanding of imperialism as the penetration of monopoly capital is obvious. But such an imperialist analysis was still essentially a form of functional separatism. In Northern Ireland, in stark contrast to the South, there still existed a constituency for which traditional political separatism had a strong appeal nationalists. The mid-1960s witnessed a subtle change in northern nationalist attitudes to the northern state from one of sulking to an attempt to engage with it. This manifested itself in a wide variety of forms, from the ONeill/Lemass meeting to the Nationalists agreeing to become the official Opposition to the demand to be treated as citizens of Northern Ireland (a claim that implicitly involved the recognition of the institutions and existence of the northern state). This nationalist mobilisation, almost inevitably, resulted in a Loyalist (Paisleyite/UVF) counter-mobilisation.