Review: The Lost Revolution: A History of the Official IRA and Workers Party

The Lost Revolution: A History of the Official IRA and Workers Party
By Brian Hanley and Scott Millar
Penguin Ireland
ISBN 9781844881208

For those that don’t know the history of ‘official republicanism’  the Lost Revolution: A History of the Official IRA and Workers Party will be a shocking read.

Little remembered outside of its former strongholds, the Official IRA was ‘founded’ in the 1969 split as the supposedly Marxist wing of the republican movement. It ended-up supporting the partition of Ireland while its political wing operated at highest levels of office in the Republic, including a stint in government.

For those aware of the Workers’ Party and Official IRA the Lost Revolution may not be shocking but the sheer amount of criminal activity its members engaged in remains staggering. Robberies and extortion are pretty much standard fair for armed groups in Ireland but the Officials’ criminal antics are made worse by the longstanding pretence that the organisation did not exist as well as collusion not only with the security forces, but also with loyalist paramilitaries. In addition, the officially non-existent Official IRA not only lied about its critics in the press and attempted to suppress honest journalism through its extensive media links (including virtual control key programmes in RTÉ current affairs output), it also conspired to attempt to murder journalists including Ed Moloney (himself a former Official Sinn Féin member) who had investigated the organisation’s ongoing operations in the early 1980s, in Moloney’s case by telling loyalists, falsely, that he was an intelligence officer for the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).

The rationale for all of this was that Northern Protestants should be courted in order to create a genuinely class-based alternative to the communal politics of the Northern state.

Official Sinn Féin was neither the first nor the last group to come to this conclusion but it was the only one which ended-up supporting loyalists, helping carve-up Belfast and Dublin into criminal empires. People’s Democracy, a more or less Trotskyist organisation that had been at the forefront of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, was destroyed by the emergence of (Provisional) Sinn Féin as a serious force electoral politics in the early 1980s, while the Irish Republican Socialist Party’s links to the INLA meant it would struggle to convert Protestants to the cause. The Communist Party of Ireland, meanwhile, was small, with perhaps a hundred members and though not politically insignificant it generally confined itself to working within the trade union movement. The British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO), meanwhile, took the view that Ireland was in fact home to ‘two nations’ but, while this moved the party into the orbit of loyalists, it had no armed wing. The remnants of the BICO are now, once again, in favour of a united Ireland. The same cannot be said for the various daughters of the putatively revolutionary Workers’ Party.

A whole host of other now forgotten Maoist, Stalinist and Trotskyist groups also vied, largely in vain, for the attention of the working class but most eventually stood aside for the rise of Sinn Féin. There was good reason for this: Sinn Féin, despite its legion of flaws, did become a significant electoral force after the 1981 hunger strikes and it was clear that the party had the support of a majority of working class republicans in the North. What it was unable to do, of course, was attract significant amounts of Protestant support. With the exception of occasional IRA volunteers*, the Provisionals’ support was largely from Catholics, hostile to the British state and fearing attacks from loyalists. The INLA which combined Marxist rhetoric with traditional republican armed struggle also attracted several high-ranking members from Protestant backgrounds but its main support was drawn from the nominally Catholic population.

In some ways the trajectory of official republicanism mirrors the degeneration of the British Communist Party – ideas that were twisted by bad theory, desperate bids to be accepted by the political mainstream, dodgy connections to the Eastern Bloc and, finally, total abandonment of their political ideals. Again, the difference is, of course, no-one was shot dead by the Communist Party.

Today most commentators view the 1969 split in the IRA into Official and Provisional camps as being in simple left-right terms. While this was a significant factor, it was far from being the only one – a fact that is born out by the fact that the ‘right wing’ and supposedly ‘Catholic conservative’ Provisionals drifted to the left during the 1970s and 1980s and are now regularly dismissed by their opponents as ‘Marxists’. In reality the Provos were, like most Irish republican groups, an often tense coalition of people who shared only the desire for a united Ireland. The Officials, initially at least, more coherently combined a kind of deformed Stalinist ‘Marxoidism’ with Irish republicanism but as the Lost Revolution ably demonstrates, the republicanism rapidly declined and disappeared altogether, leaving the Official IRA as so much an armed force as a group of armed criminals with a penchant for thinking of themselves as heroic revolutionaries.

The Lost Revolution does a more than satisfactory job of charting the activities of both the Officials and Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party, from the pre-existence of the organisation as left wing within the IRA to its almost total disintegration in the 1990s. What is not satisfactorily covered, however, is how its “political lobotomy”, as journalist Vincent Browne called it, came about: how did a republican group become a unionist IRA? It is one thing to oppose an armed campaign against the state, but to support that state and collude with it and loyalist paramilitaries is entirely another.

The bitter feuds with the PIRA and, OIRA splinter the INLA, are covered in detail but even the enmity that arose between the Officials and their more militant rivals does not explain how they came to the point where they condemned ‘terrorism’, supported the RUC, demanded PIRA members were extradited to face trial in Britain and, in some the case of prominent members such as that of Proinsias De Rossa, now a Labour MEP, even called for the reintroduction of internment without trial – all the while maintaining their own secret ‘IRA’. Had the Officials really thought it was possible to unite Catholic and Protestant workers on a class basis against both the British and Irish states, should they not have stood down the OIRA in 1972 rather than going on a phoney ‘ceasefire’ and finding non-political uses for their weaponry?

As blood continued to run down the streets of Belfast the official republican movement did nothing other than feud with the Provisional IRA and INLA and carry on its ‘fundraising’ activities, often in cahoots with loyalists. It’s no accident that wags sometimes called the Workers’ Party the ‘Building Workers’ Party’, such was the Official IRA control of the industry – including, but not limited, to hiring loyalist gunmen to provide ‘security’ and forging tax exemption certificates.

However laudable the Officials’ plan to unite Protestant and Catholic workers, it ignored the facts on the ground. Describing the Provos as ‘fascist’, as the Officials did, is not only a misreading of the Provisional IRA’s politics, it also blinded them to the real reason that Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA prospered despite their many political problems and internal contradictions while the supposedly ‘pure’ Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party faltered: the Provos were a product of the conflict and supported as a result of a genuinely popular public grievance, off the back of which they launched their armed struggle. Once the OIRA had retreated into defending its own members, robbing shops and extorting businesses, both the party and the armed wing lost their connection to the nationalist working class. Protestant workers, meanwhile, largely stuck to unionism so attempting to seek a constituency there was bound to fail: even if there was a vehicle that could raise class consciousness among loyalists the OIRA wasn’t it. As a result the officials turned the other protagonist in the Irish War – the one no-one talks about anymore – the supposedly ‘neutral’ forces of the British state.

In doing this the officials not only betrayed their principles, they betrayed the very working people of Ireland who had been caught in the crossfire of the troubles. By the time I was growing up in west Belfast during the 1980s the officials, or ‘stickies’ as they were called, were a largely phantasmagoric presence, at least in Andersonstown where I lived. I was aware that their ‘politics’ seemed to run along family lines (perhaps appropriately, given that they supported the bizarre North Korean regime) and mostly seemed to run drinking clubs. Some weeks ago, when I was writing a defence of Workers’ Party president Seán Garland, albeit a critical one, arguing he shouldn’t be extradited to the US to face charges of conspiring with the North Koreans to distribute counterfeit ‘superdollars’, a close relative who had been around during the height of the conflict during the 1970s said that at the time he was much more afraid of the Officials than the Provisionals. This from a man whose entire family had no connections whatsoever to any armed group in Ireland (and yet was still, like all Falls Road residents, treated with contempt and harassed by both the unionist establishment of the day and the British security forces).

The book makes a lot of the Workers’ Party’s electoral success during the 1980s, a familiar theme on the Irish left to this day. Nevertheless, whatever achievements the Workers’ Party can claim, each and every one is overshadowed by the horrific legacy of the Official IRA.

The Lost Revolution is being described by some as the definitive history of the Official IRA – they’re almost right. The full story will only come out, if at all, when the current generation of Ireland’s Labour party has moved on, thus making libel a non-issue. The question is, will anyone even care by then? It would be a shame if they didn’t because the hidden history of official republicanism goes a long way toward explaining why Irish politics is in the appalling state it is today.

The authors appear surprised that so many prominent figures in Irish society oppose the extradition of Seán Garland to the United States to face counterfeiting charges – this despite the fact that an entire generation of journalists, politicians, trade union leaders and even business people got their start in the Workers’ Party. Although Garland is unlikely to get a fair trial in the US, much of the opposition to him being extradited seems to be rooted in the unprincipled fear of skeletons falling out of closets rather than concern for either Garland or natural justice.

The best lesson anyone can take from this book is that the leadership of the Workers’ Party, both the liquidationists who now control Labour and the hardliners who continue in the rump party, are a rum lot to say the least.

Buy ‘the Lost Revolution: A History of the OIRA and Workers Party’ from forth‘s Amazon store

Jason Walsh is the editor of forth

* Note: This review originally identified a particular IRA leader as coming from a Protestant background. A reader has disputed this. forth will look into this and see what we can find out. Nevertheless, the point about the Provisional IRA having had some, although few, Protestant members remains correct.