Abstract
Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.
Sartre once said that in football, ‘. . . everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team’. This observation can be applied to events in the last decades of 20th-century Northern Ireland. When writing about that period and its principal actors, it is axiomatic that the insurgency was a long time in the making. Indeed, it could be argued that it is at the heart of the matter of these two important assessments of the fate of the long insurgency in the north of Ireland (1969–1998) and that of the leading actor in that insurgency, the Provisional IRA. While both books offer a sympathetic assessment of the origins of the conflict, they provide different orientations in their focus on actor volition and history. Yet, there is a rather large elephant in the room, more evident perhaps in O’Ruairc than Finn, as we shall see.
Daniel Finn is concerned with the lineage and trajectory of the Provisionals in the context of periods of colonial and then imperialist control. By contrast, Liam O’Ruairc addresses the question of the nature of the outcome of the armed struggle judged in relation to the origins of the conflict in the history of the repressive Orange State (Northern Ireland) and the means pursued by the Provisional IRA to end the myriad injustices that characterized that state. For O’ Ruairc, the modus operandi of armed struggle was an ill-chosen means by which the Orange state would be defeated and the outcome, judged from his standpoint, was at best of limited gain if not in the end fruitless. More than this, it leads to the defeat of those who needed most but lost most during the war and the incorporation and subordination of those they fought with, and for, during the insurgency. Because both books, albeit from different intellectual traditions and current political commitments, base their assessments on actor-strategic-motivation and historical context, it is worth remembering the nature of the society out of which the armed struggle arose. The idea that armed conflict was a self-driven choice taken by republican insurgents (the Provisional IRA together with a number of other republican currents) in 1969 is problematical. From our perspective, it was a path-dependent outcome of Orange state repression, critical to the identity of the state since its inception in 1921.
In setting the context for the armed campaign beginning in 1969, one could draw on a range of social and economic aspects of the repressive society that have been well covered in a range of publications, including our own over the past decade. For present purposes, however, we focus on one feature of the state and society of Northern Ireland, which is frequently ignored, or banalized. Specifically, this is the historically disabling sectarian culture of mortal fear. This is especially important because without this particular focus it really is impossible to comprehend why young working-class men and women in their late teens and early twenties in one part of an ostensibly highly developed part of what was constitutionally a region of the United Kingdom, embarked upon a highly effectively armed campaign against one of the most sophisticated armed forces in the world. And we have no problem with describing this as a mass movement, a modern, mostly urban, guerrilla army with volunteer numbers in the region of 10,000 over the course of the conflict. To give some perspective, it would mean that relative to population (Northern Ireland c1.8 million and the United Kingdom c66 million) the Provisionals would have numbered somewhere in the region of 350,000. We can let that figure sink in while we consider the long history of the sectarian culture of mortal fear.
Perhaps the ‘tyranny of fear’ is a better description of a central plank in Orange repression extending at least from the period of the inception of the state in 1920 until the end of the war waged by Britain’s deep state in the late 1990s. It is difficult to understand why so many people engaged in armed struggle without understanding the important psychological import of historically embedded sectarian terror. What was the social and historical character of Northern Ireland, this place characterized by a ‘tyranny of fear’?
Ireland, troubles and the tyranny of fear
Northern Ireland was carved out of Ulster, a nine-county entity until 1921. Three of Ulster’s nine counties, Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal, were abandoned ensuring as far as possible a built-in, significant Protestant majority in what was to become Northern Ireland.
Why therefore did the Unionist leadership also opt for those areas west of the River Bann with a destabilizing number of Catholics/nationalists? Although the six counties that emerged as Northern Ireland had an overall Protestant/Unionist majority, counties west of the Bann, including Tyrone and Fermanagh with nationalist majorities, left Unionist control more precarious than comfortable. The smaller enclave east of the Bann contained the wealth producing heavy engineering industries that contributed the prosperity to the local bourgeoisie. Its small size would not have been the major issue.
Moreover, the smaller area would have had such an overwhelming Unionist majority that it would have been unlikely to face an existential threat from future changing demographics. The reasoning behind absorbing land west of the River Bann was strategic. The smaller area was narrow to defend against attack. The problem for Unionism, however, was that this arrangement left them with a more precarious population balance. To ensure an ongoing Unionist majority required the systemic use of discriminatory practices in order to retain the loyalty of the Protestant working class and when and where possible, to encourage Catholic migration through economic adversity.
From the outset, the Unionist regime was characterized by its willingness to employ terrorizing, frequently lethal, force in order to control and intimidate opposition to the state rather than initiate any type of policy to gain consent among the nationalist minority. In 1920, Belfast witnessed expulsion of 7,000 Catholic workers from their employment in the shipyard while across the city, 20,000 Catholics were driven from their homes. More than 450 people were killed in Belfast in the conflict between June 1920 and July 1922. Nearly 60% were Catholic, and the overwhelming majority were civilians. 3
The sovereign Parliament in London did not intervene. In 1920, Britain was still a global superpower and considered itself vulnerable to an enemy using Ireland as a springboard for invasion. It therefore had a strategic interest in maintaining a physical presence in Ireland and therefore saw Ulster Unionism as the vehicle to accomplish this, given the threat to British rule posed by republican resistance to British rule in the rest of Ireland. To do so, the British government armed 32,000 B-Specials (a paramilitary auxiliary of the regular police, the RUC), with an exclusively Protestant affiliation that included members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the Protestant militia set up in 1913 to oppose Irish Home Rule.
By any means necessary: political violence and state repression
As both Finn and O’Ruairc remind us, as all anti-imperialists know, Britain’s long colonial occupation of Ireland, with the inevitable corollary of painful misgovernance, was the underlying cause of republican resort to armed force. There is a tendency sometimes to view this part of Irish history as the action of a specific group, often carried out under the generic name of IRA, acting as if it was one long unbroken chain, a single organization. This analysis needs challenging.
In his introduction to One-man’s Terrorist. A political history of the IRA, Finn writes: ‘the self-image of Irish republicanism has often been profoundly elitist: they saw themselves as a courageous, self-sacrificing vanguard winning freedom for the masses. In practice, it was only when republicans and others were able to mobilise those masses as a force in their own right, that their efforts left a permanent mark on Irish history’ (Page 4 Review copy). While Finn’s observation is to a degree accurate, it is perhaps closer to the mark to say that rather than the IRA mobilizing the masses it is when the masses mobilize the IRA (or any strain of militant Irish republicanism) that it leaves a ‘permanent mark’ on Irish history.
The history of Ireland differs from much of the rest of Western Europe in that it has experienced colonial occupation. However, while Ireland since 1801 was technically part of the United Kingdom, the smaller island was never treated as such. Unlike Britain, a heavily armed paramilitary force policed Ireland, while the regular military stationed in the country acted as a garrison rather than defenders of the nation. The aristocracy controlling the economy saw itself as English and certainly not native Irish, and never speaking Gaelic spent much of their time in what they considered to be the home country.
The profound power imbalance between an impoverished peasantry and a colonial power and its local ruling class resulted on occasion in the employment by the powerless population of violent extra-parliamentary resistance. Options for other forms of resistance were limited. The mass of the population had little economic power and no presence in the rich man’s media. Its vote was lost for when it was not excluded by denial of franchise, it remained permanently, politically a minority. It had a stark choice, it could quietly accept its sorry lot, appeal to the goodwill of the imperial ruling class or it could rebel.
The response to the violence of the British state, and subsequently the Northern Ireland government, has inevitably left a legacy of violent confrontation that at the very least means that on rare occasions it is seen as an option in a way difficult to imagine in many other Western European countries.
It may sometimes be easy to use the relatively great distance in time, politically and culturally, between the 19th century and the mid-20th as a way to forget cultural and community experiences and memories of repression. It can be a deceptive way not to see the evolution in the continuity of state repression. Communities may experience persistent social fear of state repression and civil society exclusion. Until the onset of the insurgency, Catholic communities in Northern Ireland suffered disproportionately in terms of unemployment, working for the most part in low-paid jobs with little scope for industrial action. Their lack of industrial muscle was evident in May 1974 during the Ulster Workers Council strike when Unionist supporters closed the entire economy for nearly 2 weeks.
Therefore, when confronted in 1968–1969 with a violent, lethal suppression of their demands for democratic rights and equality, non-Unionists first looked to London for amelioration. When this proved elusive, it was hardly surprising that they resorted to the use of extra-parliamentary means and armed insurrection as a means of communal protection against deepening state repression. There was no precedent at that time to give rise to any credible belief that parliamentary activity and persuasion would cause Unionism to introduce significant reform.
Finn recounts not only the paths followed by a number of extra-parliamentary Irish republican organizations from the 19th century onwards but also the calculations they made to effect change. Differences have led to constant splits when it comes to deciding on the efficacy of how best to deploy force and in what circumstances to engage in electoral politics.
Finn not only tells of different Republican organizations over more than two centuries but also shines a light on their make-up and composition. While a resort to armed force to further their objective was common to all, he illustrates the fact that these organizations were rarely if ever homogeneous. To a certain extent, this gave them a greater influence and occasional albeit limited success, but it usually led to a parting of ways. The nascent bourgeoisie abandoned Republican Jacobinism in the aftermath of 1798. Stronger farmers abandoned Fenian radicalism with the securing of their property rights. The Irish business class settled for dominion status in 1922, deserting the struggle for a sovereign republic.
End game for Provisional IRA
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Karl Marx 1859
It is hardly surprising that Liam O’ Ruairc’s book has generated a considerable reaction. Quite apart from its provocative subtitle ‘. . . the defeat of the IRA’, it poses a challenge to a range of revisionist literature. While many revisionists, whether from liberal or socialist traditions, 4 argue that the path to armed struggle was unnecessary, O’ Ruairc’s revisionism is closer to those disenchanted republicans who reject the GFA – the republicans’ Versailles (p. 65) – because it delivered too little at too high a price. That’s to say that while he doesn’t reject the idea of armed struggle per se (p. 150, and of course as he states on p 31, republicanism is not somehow genetically defined by armed struggle), he doesn’t actually endorse it and there is a good reason for this. In exploring the inevitable role played by republican traditions in the ensuing widespread mobilization of the catholic-nationalist community from 1968 onward, it would then be difficult to anticipate where the Marxists would have come from. Would it have been different if revolutionary Marxists had held the guns? (see inter alia, McKearney, 2011). There were few in evidence in north Belfast and Derry, certainly fewer in rural areas but certainly, they had little traction in local communities. It would have been great had the sociology of local politics been different, but it wasn’t.
For O’ Ruairc, not only was there not an ‘honourable compromise’ (p. 62) at the end of the conflict in 1998. On the contrary, the GFA confirmed in situ the role of the British army, a rebranded RUC (PSNI), continuing imprisonment of republicans and a return to Stormont. These tell us all we need to know not simply about the failure of republicans in their rightward shift to Irish nationalism, but more than that, the betrayal of anti-imperialist struggles and the social and economic rights of the Irish people. Not only has the glorious fight against the Brits ended up where it started in 1968 – all those wasted years and lives – even worse it ended in bathos: – all that fighting and hatred so everyone, Protestant and Catholic alike – the middle-class variety of course – could shop together at IKEA (pp. 130–131). All the years of struggle were played out against the context of the state’s struggle for hegemony: Ulsterization, Criminalization and Normalization (p. 82). Republicans died in ditches so that we could all end up in a ‘capitalism of boredom’ (p. 131). Like tired trade unionists and leftists of all hues who have seen too much and forgotten even more.
It is in keeping with a range of contemporary arguments on the left to sneer at supposedly limited gains after long and arduous struggles by the oppressed. Perhaps there is sometimes a thin line between expressions of bathos and patronizing contempt. It’s always the fault of the masses and not the extraordinary, increasingly global, power of capital when things don’t work out the way us revolutionaries felt they should.
What was the elephant in the room we spoke of in our introduction? Well maybe two elephants, and without seeing these it is impossible to understand the trajectory of the war: the Catholic working class and the secret war waged by the British state. At every turn, as we argue elsewhere, the British state sought to corral the republican insurgency and despite its hegemonic strength, nevertheless it was unable, finally, to maintain the Orange state. This was despite its decades-long dirty war involving the use of loyalist-Unionist terror gangs as proxies working hand-in-glove with more visible forms of sate repression (Stewart & McKearney 2019). It is only by ignoring the latter that it is possible to see the errors and lack of judgement that followed the insurgency as being entirely the fault of the insurgents.
By O’ Ruairc’s yardstick, it would be hard to disagree with the view that the IRA lost the war, that it betrayed Irish republicanism, that it has assumed the mantle of Irish nationalism and that it has ‘betrayed’ the Irish working class. That the Belfast Agreement in 1998 merely confirmed that the IRA, qua Sinn Fein, has advanced the British imperialist state agenda of excluding those who lost most in the conflict in what passes for peace. His yardstick is clarified first on p. 33 insofar as the conflict was an exemplar of the struggle against imperialism in the period from the end of the second world war until the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Yet, there is surely a problem at the heart of this analysis. While we would agree with him about the defining nature of the period, the mistake is surely to read-off from the nature of the period to the nature of the people and their forms of struggle, some chosen by them, others inherited from memories of political struggles in the not-so-distant past.
While both books tell a story and make a useful contribution to the wider discussion about the decades of insurrection, there is more that needs exploring. In terms of defeat and the futility of the years of struggle, the outcome of the situation requires context. It is beyond contradiction that the insurrection ended with the Union still in place and capitalism triumphant. Yet does that mean that nothing has changed and the years of struggle were in vain?
Just one point. By rendering Northern Ireland a place apart for the final decades of the 20th century, the British electorate and its ruling class no longer look upon the area as an integral part of the United Kingdom. Read what former Chancellor George Osborne or the Financial Times had to say. See what the current Prime Minister’s former adviser Dominic Cummings thought about the relationship. It is difficult to deny that 30 years of armed struggle had no impact in bringing this about.
As for the anti-imperialist, socialist agenda, consider the wider context. Would India be better off under the British Raj? Was the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa a failure because it didn’t deliver socialism? The examples are endless. In terms of rejecting the claim of abject surrender, it is worth listing just what has changed in the 50 years since Northern Ireland celebrated its first half-century.
There has been an end to Orange hegemony: the ability to practice systemic discrimination in local government, housing and employment to Catholics has ended;
A fracturing of Unionism with the emergence of constitutionally agnostic elements;
By ending the Orange reign of terror, the Provisional IRA campaign emboldened Catholics sufficiently to make demands upon the state, many even now calling for its abolition;
The end of the Union is now realistically on the agenda. British establishment figure Max Hastings, recently forecasting the end of partition within a generation. (Max Hasting’s There Will Always Be an England, But Not a U.K. (https://bloom.bg/2OWyCGq));
A firm conviction backed by evidence of the final three decades of the 20th century that extra-parliamentary action can effect change.
These are all by way of saying that in the place known as Northern Ireland, the tyranny of fear has ended.
The Northern Irish conflict, has led to change in southern Irish politics.
The recent rise of Sinn Fein has undermined a century-old political mould. While not leading directly to revolutionary transformation, it destabilizes the political establishment.
Consequently, this has led to a loss of confidence within sections of the southern Irish ruling class.
Thanks in no small part to the Provisional IRA campaign the ending of partition is now a matter of when, not if.
A new and very different situation will then have arisen. How will Ireland deal with this new development? Will the Irish draw on the legacy of their history to challenge their tormentors with extra-parliamentary activity? Alternatively, will they listen to those Jeremiahs preaching the gospel of futility, promoting a message that resistance and revolution cannot succeed because a risen people did not read the Communist Manifesto before trying to defend themselves against the violence of some or other sectarian state? The struggle for independence let alone for social freedom is long and arduous and the forms, the shape, of that struggle it is true, are not random but for sure, they will engender already existing histories of opposition to exclusion and state repression. They will most likely, ‘. . . anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language’. 5
We haven’t yet lost the war in an Irish town. In its myriad forms the organized left sometimes displays a fear of freedom that oppressed people cannot afford, while nevertheless being content to enjoy their gains – ‘Is furasta codladh ar chréacht fear eile’. 6
Footnotes
Notes
Author biographies
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