The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and The Workers’ Party – 1

I guess it’s worth discussing some of the issues that I’ve found most striking as I’ve read the Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and The Workers’ Party over the past two weeks. It’s hardly controversial to say that I’ve found it a fascinating read so far. As noted by Garibaldy this is an history rather than an analytical book, although throughout there is considerable information both newly discovered or reframed in a broader context to provide food for thought. As it is I’m having to get post-its and mark the passages that are of particular relevance.

It’s certainly well written, and easily read which is in no sense a criticism. There is a real vitality to the first third of the book and in particular the description of Sinn Féin in the 1950s and 1960s and through to the very early 1970s. And along the way there are some remarkable political observations.

For example, given the centrality of Sinn Féin, and more particularly the IRA – for the book makes it very clear that it was the IRA which led the way in the radicalisation process of Republicanism – in the Dublin Housing Action Committee, there is a profound irony that the Minister in charge of Housing was Kevin Boland who would be instrumental in assisting the political and military split in Republicanism. It’s those small, seemingly insignificant, details which build up into a compelling overview of the period. Or what of the fact that there were joint OIRA/PIRA events well into the early 1970s?

It also implicitly engages with the mythos of the period. Most striking to me is the manner in which it demonstrates that far from the political diminishing the military, as noted above, it was the military that was leading the way as regards ideology. That that led to a broad range of militant and in some instances paramilitary actions across the island well before the North caught fire has been largely ignored in other histories, but the sheer scale of those actions is impressive. One issue that comes across loud and clear is that far from the retrospective view of a quiescent movement after 1969 and after it until the mid 1970s this was a strongly active movement both on the social front and the military front. That this history has been lost was a function, I’d suspect, of both the WP reworking its history particularly in the 1980s (as it sought to jettison much of its past) and of an essentially complicit reading on the part of its rivals who were keen to play down the very real activism that existed. So we wind up in a position where a very significant element of what was a prolonged armed struggle on a number of fronts was white-washed from effective history.

That issue of arms is a fascinating one. It is now well known that in August 1969 the IRA in Belfast had very limited resources to call upon, and this became a central aspect of the retrospective legitimation of PIRA. Yet the book makes clear just how difficult it was in practical terms to access weaponry prior to those events. Indeed quite some efforts were made.

However, what I find remarkable is that even in the wake of August 1969 and the enormous spasm of Republican sentiment across the island…

…eventually nearly everything the IRA could get their hands on was sent north – about 96 weapons and 12,000 rounds of ammunition in the immediate aftermath of August. IRA members in the North believed that Southern politicians had supplied some of the weapons. Neil Blaney would later claim that up to 25 TDs and Senators had made privately held arms available during 1969. Republicans in Tyrone also received guns from Fine Gael or ‘Blueshirt’ sources. All manner of weaponry was assembled: there were .303s, .22s, shotguns, Webley’s, ‘Peter the Painters’ (Mauser automatics) and a pair of gold-plated automatics, like ‘something out of Patton’….

Yet consider just how minimal such numbers of weapons were, given that spasm of sentiment, and given that the IRA was no longer confronting Stormont but also the military forces of the British state proper. If that was the best that could be done post-August it seems unreasonable to argue that that could be matched or bettered pre-August 1969. And it brings home a point Brian Hanley made at the Desmond Greaves School this weekend that much of the early period of the conflict has been considered through the framework of the struggle as it later developed. This anachronistic view while serving the purposes of all those who indulged in it – and a broader and more politically eclectic group would be hard to find – does the overall history a grave disservice and profoundly distorts the scale and scope of those initial events.

The split itself and the intertwined dynamics that led to it is of considerable interest too (and Hanley addressed this too over the weekend).

In Belfast recruits flooded into the IRA… while the nationalist community now had ‘high expectations’ of the IRA, they had ‘not supported the organization in real terms for 40 years’, and some republicans resented the fact that people who ‘would have spit on you and refused to put [money] in your collection box’ before August 1969 were no expected to be provided with guns. There was also some contempt for the re-emergence of those – such as Drumm, Twomey, McKee and Cahill – who had dropped out of the movement during the 1960s or even earlier; ‘They thought the Republic was going to be got without them… and they were afraid to be left out of it’. Soon these veterans were suggesting that the IRA leadership had failed to defend nationalists. Gerry Adams later recounted that he was ‘perturbed and perplexed to find that extreme criticism of the Belfast leadership was being expressed most of all by republicans whom I didn’t know or had only recently met’.

Reading that one can – of course – see retrospective justifications on all sides, but… contempt and – no doubt – a degree of apprehension at losing control on one side and an arguably self-justificatory reading of actions and events on the other clearly combined in such a way as to hasten the split. The role of those who had been with Sinn Féin throughout the period but then chose to go with the Provisionals is of equal interest. One senses from the book that there was considerable closeness, despite differences, between those within the movement which undoubtedly made the subsequent events all the more bitter. While it is clear that Mac Stiofain had been champing at the bit for years the position of others is less clear (and the necessity to keep the coalition that was Sinn Féin as broad as possible saw the survival of the Rosary in what was becoming a vastly more secular organisation into July 1969 and after).

Beyond that the sheer size of the formations, both Official and Provisional, during the 1970 to 1971 period is something that has also been largely ignored. Later analyses have tended to see the rise of the latter as near inevitable, but one wonders whether had more measured decisions been taken at various points would it have been possible to manage what was clearly a transitional stage in Republicanism in a less bloody and ultimately futile way? That the Officials were vastly more open to other ideological currents during these early years (and in truth in the lead up to 1969) is also something that has been neglected. If later jibes were of ‘Stalinism’ one could make a reasonable case that what we might term a Trotskyist influence was initially much greater than hitherto acknowledged in those early years and to the benefit of the party in some respects.

And it is here that the title begins to make sense, because whatever one thinks of the mid and latter period of the party history, which I’ll return to at a later point, there is a sense that for all the inherent and all too visible flaws there was something during this early history of Official Sinn Féin which, unlike its main rival at that point and for quite some time after, did have a huge societal potential. And this, in part, was due to that openness (and in something of a contradiction a sense that for all the machinations around the OIRA it operated more openly than it would subsequently). The point has been made to me that the book may not engage sufficiently with the political activity in the early 1970s… it’s hard to say for sure…but for that I hope that issues of the United Irishman in the Archive over the next year or two will shed further light on that issue. This was an all-island potential and one that – as we see subsequently – was, to my mind, largely dissipated in the North.

So, perhaps not quite a Lost Revolution then… but something worth reflecting upon even at this remove.

Enormous errors were made. There’s no doubt about that. Reading this it seems possible that the 1969/1970 split while it might not have been averted it could have been minimised. The push towards dropping abstentionism, while understandable, appears to have been far too enthusiastically pursued at points where the purpose of it seemed – at best – aspirational. The souring of OSF in the mid-1970s to the very broad nature of itself comes across as a significant mistake, as does the rather cosmetic (given the number of actions that continued subsequently) ceasefire of 1972. And throughout it all one can see how personality conflicts were masked in supposed ideological trappings in a way which was profoundly destructive to all involved.

Perhaps those errors were near inevitable given the context within which people operated within. But perhaps there were paths away from those contradictions and pressures that might have resulted in more positive outcomes.

There’s so much in this book to think about, not merely in relation to OSF/WP but also as regards other formations operating during the same period. I’m genuinely not surprised that it is eliciting such a large response.