A sticky situation for Labour

Attacking Fianna Fáil is easy – the party has done so many senseless things that lambsting it is like shooting the side of a barn: boom and bust economics, swingeing cuts to social welfare, tax hikes, support for the US military, endless deference to the Catholic Church, cosying-up to developers, bank bailouts, scandal after scandal after scandal involving senior members… Take your pick, Fianna Fáil did it all.

Come the next election, however, Fianna Fáil is likely to be ejected from government and replaced by a Fine Gael and Labour coalition – and you can bet on the fact that whatever criticism any such government comes in for, the establishment won’t spend a lot of time digging into the history of the Official IRA even though the Labour party leadership is composed of figures formerly associated with the Workers’ Party, the political wing of Official Republicanism.

Which is strange, because any time a Sinn Féin TD or spokesperson says anything the response is to guffaw about the Provisional IRA. ‘Your lot were all gunmen and bank robbers so we don’t have to take criticism from you’, is the tone of these exchanges.

The Provisional IRA wasn’t always anathema in Southern politicians. The events surrounding the 1969/70 Arms Crisis are well known. Two Fianna Fáil ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, conspired to send weaponry to the IRA in the North. Allegedly, of course. When discovered, the fallout was huge. For a start it made a significant contribution, eventually, to the formation of the Progressive Democrats, the party that, escaping the lumpen republicanism of Fianna Fáil, reshaped Irish politics in a broadly Thatcherite mould. Secondly, it was a pivotal event in distancing left wing support from the IRA: if Fianna Fáil supported them, went the theory, they really must be awful. It was also a significant event in hardening support for the instituitons of state in the South.

Fianna Fáil’s hypocrisy on the issue of armed republicanism is the stuff of legend. To this day the party regularly denounces the Provisional IRA, especially when an election is on the horizon, and yet many in the party were happy to help arm it. Simultaneously, Fianna Fáil projects itself as a ‘partner in peace’ in the North, a major contributor to the peace process – as if it could do soo without dealing with ‘evil’ Sinn Féin. The bottom line is this: if Sinn Féin is good enough for government in the North then it’s good enough for government in the South. Of course, the three faces of Fianna Fáil can be explained by the fact that the IRA was a useful proxy in 1969 but, after the election of Bobby Sands as an MP in 1981 and, more particularly, Sinn Féin’s dumping of abstentionism in 1986 meant that the party was well on its way to becoming a direct political threat to Fianna Fáil in the Dáil.

Despite the fact that the Provos were certainly the most active armed group, republican or loyalist, in the Northern conflict, they were far from alone. The Provisionals’ war against the British state was only one thread in a multi-faceted conflict that involved other protagonists including loyalist groups, other republicans and the state itself. One does not have to equivocate on the issue of violence to recognise the complexity of the politics that drove the conflict.

One of the players in the Troubles that receives virtually no attention these days is the Official IRA. ‘Founded’ in December 1969 when the group that became the Provisional IRA split off at the IRA convention, the Officials were, broadly speaking, the left wing of the IRA – though this simplistic analysis obscures the subsequent development of the Provisionals under the influence of the left.

Unionists and the odd Southern politician have a penchant for referring to Sinn Féin and the Provos as a single entity: Sinn Féin/IRA. The argument goes that the distinction between the two entities was a political fiction. If this is the case, why did we never hear similar references to ‘the Workers’ Party/IRA’?

This year a book detailing the antics of Official Republicanism as it transformed itself from the IRA into the Official IRA, Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party, the Workers’ Party, Democratic Left and, finally, the current leadership of the Labour Party was published. The book, ‘the Lost Revolution: A History of the Official IRA and Workers Party’ Brian Hanley and Scott Millar was published by Penguin, not a cranky small press with access to a photocopier and enough chips on its shoulder to open a family restaurant. And yet, while generally well received, ‘the Lost Revolution’ has not had the impact on contemporary Irish politics that it deserves.

The Irish establishment is stuffed with ex-Workers’ Party cadre: journalism, the legal profession, trade unions and, of course, politics are all areas in which one’s prior politics would never cause a career to become unstuck.

Witch hunts are an unpleasant business and should have no place in politics. People are entitled to change their minds – in fact, a politician who held identical views for forty years would be a depressingly doctrinaire figure and, arguably, an escapologist from reality. However, as long as Sinn Féin is tarred with the Provo brush then it is legitimate to ask questions about the legacy of the Workers’ Party.

Here is an old, old question that demands an answer to this day:

What, exactly, did Proinsias De Rossa, Eamon Gilmore, Pat Rabbitte and Liz McManus know about the activities of the Official IRA during the 1970s and 1980s?

We are unlikely to ever get an answer to this question. Journalist Vincent Browne has both investigated and commented on the curious history of Official Republicanism at great length. In political terms, what is the result of Browne’s interesting, often vital, reports? Nothing much. The same is, sadly, appears true of the response to Hanley and Millar’s book.

Of course, even if ‘the Lost Revolution’ had rocked the establishment little would have been said by our political leaders – of any stripe.

A longtime fan of Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca has always been on of my favourite films. I wonder is it screened in the Dáil? After all, from the response to the reports into clerical sex abuse, something everyone knew was going on, to the hidden history of the Official IRA, every time something falls out of Ireland’s political closet the entire political class starts to sound like Captain Renault: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Previously on forth Jason Walsh argued that Labour needs to come to terms with Sinn Féin and made a direct comparison between the histories of Sinn Féin and the Workers’ Party

(1) See: Review: The Lost Revolution: A History of the Official IRA and Workers Party, Jason Walsh, forth, November 25, 2009