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?