New Perspectives on Republicanism in the 1960s – Public Meeting, 26 June, Ireland Institute: Brian Hanley/Matt Treacy June 19, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, Sinn Féin, The Left.trackback
IRELAND INSTITUTE
PUBLIC MEETING
New Perspectives on Republicanism in the 1960s
Brian Hanley
(Historian, author of The IRA, 1926-1936, The IRA – a Documentary History, and (co-author) The Lost Revolution)
Matt Treacy
(Historian, author of The IRA 1956-69: Rethinking the Republic)
7.30pm, Tuesday, 26 June 2012
IONAD AN PHIARSAIGH
THE PEARSE CENTRE
27 PEARSE STREET
DUBLIN 2
Ireland Institute, 27 Pearse Street, Dublin 2.
(01) 6704606 e-mail: irelandinstitute@eircom.net
Institiúid na hÉireann, 27 Sráid an Phiarsaigh, BÁC 2.
(01) 6704606 ríomhphost: irelandinstitute@eircom.net
http://www.theirelandinstitute.com
Unfortunately I cannot make this event. I hope however that Tumbles, Garibaldy and all the others who fought it out over these issues will attend and put their arguments to the floor!
[...] you’re not here, you’d do well to be [...]
Any chance there’ll be a write up on it? I guess it’s unlikely it was recorded given the nature of the topic?
Any posters at this meeting?
I will put up a report in couple of days if no one else does.
That would be great ghandi and really appreciated.
Attendance was low I heard. A few heads went up to Belfast instead to throw stuff at the polis.
Well you heard wrong, venue was full
Thanks ghandi. I must remind myself again not to listen to the voices in my head.
http://www.mixcloud.com/dublincommunitytv/recording-of-talk-on-1960s-republicanism-by-brian-hanley-and-matt-treacy-26-06-12/
Here’s the stream and if you want to download
http://www.dctv.ie/republicantalk.mp3
Thanks seedot for that link. And thanks to whoever (quite possibly seedot again) recorded it and put it online.
All the old Stalinists were there to defend their lies. Hanley will be rewarded with some Moscow gold probably.
You clearly know next to nothing about BH if you think he’s a Stalinist.
Could this be our old friend Tumbles back to delight us once more?
I think you’re too soft on Hanley, Snowball. It has recently emerged that Brian was in fact the evil genius behind the plot to infiltrate the republican movement in the 60s and subordinate it to Moscow. Naive people once credited his claim to have not, in fact, been born at the time, but this was clearly another Stalinist lie.
It has also come to light recently that Brian was, in fact, Stakeknife – his British government handlers set up Denis Donovan and Freddie Scappaticci to cover Hanley’s tracks, but thanks to intrepid souls such as yourself his true record has been exposed.
I have also heard it suggested that ‘Brian Hanley’ is really a pseudonym used by the notorious fugitive Lord Lucan, who came to Ireland after fleeing the UK and adopted a false identity as a historian of Irish republicanism. But we should be cautious about endorsing this admittedly plausible theory before hard evidence is produced.
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of “Brian Hanley”.
Outstanding troll hunting there Ed
The worst thing is that after the British set up Denis Donovan, the former FF TD for Cork South West, the IRA mistakenly shot veteran republican Denis Donaldson instead. Such confusion was of course grist to Hanley’s mill. The role he played in subverting the musical taste of the nation’s youth under the alias of ‘Vincent’ Hanley hasn’t been properly explored yet. But I’m sure Snowball will get round to it.
Donovan, Donaldson what’s in a name?
That’s what Hanley said.
Have gotten as far as the end of Brian Hanley’s talk. I don’t have my copy of The Lost Revolution to hand, but it seems to me that there may be a slight shift in the analysis offered here. I may be picking this up wrong, and if so apologies to Brian Hanley, but it seems to me that there is more space given here to the idea that whatever training and re-arming was going on was being done with a much longer timeframe in mind, as the cutting edge of a popular revolution at some point in the future, rather than for a future campaign in the north in a relatively short space of time.
I got a sense of that too, I wonder if that comes from the discussion and debates which have followed the publishing of TLR, and if so that’s a good thing.
Also most people there I feel had not read Treacy’s book, probably because of the cost, it is due out in paperback later this year and that may to some extent why the IWP issue is getting ground as its the only issue that has been in the public domain.
Secondly TLR got a lot more publicity and discussion, I took part in a number of radio programmes on it, but only done one on Tracey’s and don’t recall hearing any others.
Enjoying Treacy’s instant equivalence of communism to nazism
As a compliment?
He may have thought he was being too generous.
On a serious note, I thought a lot of the debate after the main speakers was disappointing. Some people made good points, but there was too much on who was or wasn’t a member of this or that, and not enough focus on the actual issues. The tone of some of it – as Brian Hanley noted repeatedly – could also have been better. Whatever one thinks of aspects of Treacy’s arguments, there’s no doubt there’s some interesting stuff in what he says.
Hanley’s presentation impressed me more than Treacy’s because it was clear what his argument is. Treacy’s presentation was somewhat rambling and unclear. Treacy started with his defense of the rationality of Irish anti-communism and finished with some pretty impassioned remarks about “who was a member of this or that”, to use your term, but the actual substantive content in between was rather less coherent.
I did find myself laughing out loud at his, presumably inadvertently recorded, comments on the first contribution from the floor.
I think Treacy’s start was weakened by trying to respond to Hanley rather than sticking to what he had, and coming back to Hanley’s comments later. I got too the feeling too some of what he said was conditioned by who was in the audience.
In my opinion Treacy held his points very well and it was a very interesting debate/lecture
just as a matter of interest, are the records that Treacy refers to in the CP archives?…or not? Surely that will solve the arguement
I’m sure they’re there. Treacy has clearly done a lot of work in loads of archives. But this is a sideshow to the much bigger arguments about what was going on in the 1960s that he and others raise.
Having seen Tracey’s demeanor on these issues – defensive and crazed – and taking into account that the only other person who claims his interpretations of what are in the CPI archives are correct is the ‘journalist’ Prendiville, I wouldn’t take as read that what he claims is in anyway backed up by any evidence – anyway it’s all a bit of straw man argument to Tracey’s wider hypothesis that commies kill Catholic kids., or something along those lines…
Just posted by Matt Tracey on Facebook
“This is an Irish Workers Party membership list from the 1960s. It contains the names of both Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan. Anyone wishing to verify the authenticity of the list need only see that Michael O’Riordan, George Jeffares, Sam Nolan, Sean Edwards, Sean Nolan, Joe Deasy and others are also on the list. The list is clearly headed ‘Membership’ so it is not a subscription list for the party bulletin. I have that as well! This document and others confirming their membership are in the CPI archive in the Pearse Street library. Some people, including people who hadthese lists under their control for decades! have denied their existence, claimed they are something else, that they may have been forged etc, etc, in order to discredit my book, my reputation as an historical researcher and that I am am telling lies because of some ‘crazed’ anti communism. Leon Trotsky once wrote a book called The Stalin School of Falsification. Plus cá change!!! PS. Before they start ranting about trotskyite spies or some other crap, I am NOT a fkn troy” :-
Can’t seem to remember how to attach the document, have emailed it to you WBS so that you can link it in.
Thanks for this Ghandi. I think this is the right permanent link for it
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=455972314421848&set=a.213402305345518.61240.100000272511837&type=1
Personally, I don’t think whether certain people were or weren’t in the IWP makes any difference to the reasons for the direction the leadership was taking, or why people decided to support it in the main.
Neither do I, its entirely irrelevant at this point and a sideshow.
Do have to wonder how a secret conspiracy kept their infiltrationists on their membership and list and then put it in an archive where it could be read. Was that standard Kremlin practice?
That question makes a lot of sense Branno. I also think there’s a lack of appreciation of how fluid, on the left in particular but also generally in Republicanism identity could be. People could sign up for one thing and another and then jettison that. There’s other problems. If Johnston et al were genuine entryists they were surprisingly open about their Marxist ways. Then there’s the issue as to why they eventually bailed out from involvement in the RM.
Then there’s the nature of the CPI during the period. Clearly a CPI which can condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late 60s isn’t a Stalinist monolith (and I didn’t think the point that the CPI in the 70s split on the issue was persuasive, or really helped the broader case of a revanchist CPI. If they split then there was a solid body of people who didn’t take a Moscow line. If they condemned it likewise. Both of which suggest currents even inside the CPI).
Talking about that fluidity I have a close relative who was deeply involved with OSF, the CPI and the Labour Left in the early 1970s and yet managed not to join any of those organisations. They were activist, marched, campaigned, etc.
But then that wasn’t entirely new. My own father was a member of SF in the 1950s before he emigrated to the UK. When he arrived there he got close to the CPGB or at least the CPGB unions. He was no communist, but it sort of indicates a certain commonality of interest etc even then.
This is historical research. It deals with an heated time, but the topic itself is pretty tame in some respects so it’s very difficult to understand some of the antagonistic rhetoric being used around it. And as was admitted the reason SF split wasn’t about communism at all but about abstention. One can easily be anti-Stalinist, as I would be, without seeing the CPI as evil incarnate or even, with all due respect to the comrades in it, taking the idea of it ‘inflitrating’ SF terribly seriously. Seems to me from talking to a broad range of people both in SF pre split and OSF in the early 1970s that the range of strands in it particularly in the latter phase was very broad. Republican socialists, Moscow line socialists, Trotskyists, social democrats etc, etc all bumpbed up against each other in OSF. And there was even a core of people who would be fairly traditionalist Republicans who when the split occurred stuck with ‘the’ SF (and many of whom were still there up to the hunger strikes).
And even if there was infiltration it worked abysmally badly. OSF didn’t evolve into a partner of CPI but became in the WP days a rival to it and arguably an opponent with a distinctly different political analysis on a range of issues. Moreover, and this perhaps is crucial, one can make a good case that far from speeding leftwards the WP in the 1980s was moving in fits and starts rightwards with the consequences we’re all familiar with.
1) Just to clarify something, “Entryism” as traditionally conceived involves being completely open about your Marxist politics, while being “discrete” about your organisational affiliations. The Communist Parties did however sometimes cultivate fellow travelers in other parties, like for instance the British Labour Party, people who they could have recruited but who were considered to be more useful as allies elsewhere.
2) The CPI wasn’t quite monolithic during the period in question, it’s true. And you are right that the relevance of their turn towards retrospective support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia a few years after the event is of dubious relevance to their politics in the late 1960s.
3) I think its fairly clear that broadly CPish politics were a big influence on the evolution of the Republican movement and the Officials after the split. That’s quite different from seeing those politics as the only influence on them, and more different still from seeing a few individuals with broadly CPish compatible politics as puppet masters.
5) What do you mean by “CPGB unions”?
True re ‘entryism’ but isn’t that effectively what Treacy charges RJ et al? And in fairness they werent coy about pushing Marxwards, so to speak (I wonder btw is that a neologism?).
That’s it precisely what you say in 2 and 3.
ETU, he had some good stories about (summer?) camps run by them at the time which were v. Cpgb leaning.
ETU?
Guessed correctly but was too slow off the mark in posting!
Electrical Trades Union, for sparks. Infamous in its day for flipping from CP led to right wing in th 60s and after.
Yep, they’re part of Unite now, via the merger between Amicus and T&G. They came from the Amicus side.
You’ll be happy to know the rank and file sparks have flipped back to their best traditions lately, seeing off an attempted 35% wage cut with a combination of official and unofficial action. Had the privilege of being involved in an invasion and occupation of a site in Farringdon last October. Good times!
I am happy to hear that neilcalf. Good news,
If there was a coherent CP approach to Official SF it in my opinion was something like this.
The CPI is the Workers Party, the real one.
Official SF is that party of the small farmers and petit bourgeoisie who should follow the lead of the real Workers Party.
Remember in the GDR there were puppet parties as well as the real ruling party. In Greece and Portugal the CPs maintain subordinate allied parties.
And in France one wing of Trotskyism has a front Party which claims to be an alliance of Social Democrats, Communists and Trotskyists.
Now Official SF grew and decided it was the real Workers Party. So rather than being subordinate it became a competitor. it also dropped the national struggle. So on 2 grounds there was a divergence.The competition ranged in the trade unions where they competed for influence and in similar parties abroad. The CPI sent a circular letter denouncing the officials, now the Workers Party.
Mind you the nonsense of a unique single correct (apostolic?) party of the workingclass that cannot tolerate rivals is something shared by many, if not all the Leninists parties of all hues.
“There can be only one” of Highlander fame.
The ETU, where the stalinists rigged the ballots? Perfect. says it all. Now Treacy has put the documents out in public the stickie apologists have no answer.
What ‘all’ does it say? My father was a mild Republicsn Socialist of the 50s sort, which was pretty mild and probably effectively social democrat or a bit left of there. I’ve already noted he was no communist. He was amused by the CPGBs shenanigans in the ETU and didn’t tale it very seriously though enjoyedthe camps. But you miss the point I make entirely in your knee jerk response to anything with a communist association – a young Irish republican gravitated naturally through work and inclination to the left and further left over in the UK during that period because that was the broader environment at least for those not of a very Catholic outlook.
Possible answers – “Tracey forged the document…”
“Its actually eh membership of some associated social club…”
“The people mentioned are Roger Johnston and Alex Coughlan…”
Correct answer – “It doesn’t matter…Tracey/Snowball/Napoleon can’t accept that we’re all Stickies now.”
I must have missed the bit where we all embraced anti-sectarianism and socialism.
It’s gone a bit quiet since that post reiterating the evidence — from
the CPI archives — that proves CPI membership of those
Marxist/Stalinist intellectuals who were laying down the political
line to Sinn Fein and Official Sinn Fein 40 years ago and more.
Suddenly, the apologists say it doesn’t “make any difference”, it is
“entirely irrelevant” etc. So why the original hysteria? Others push
the Hanley line: it’s all too complicated to make sense of. OSF was
very fluid, apparently. We are now presented with the scenario of
social democrats, Trotskyists, traditional Republicans, Oh, and some
Stalinists, dancing round the camp fire at summer schools in
Mornington. Please.
Fact is that from 1970 onwards, there was a OSF leadership and a
leadership line, as in all parties. On the north, that line was the
stages theory, the civil rights strategy, call it what you will. It
stated that the movement in the north should be confined to the demand
for civil rights and that the alternative strategy of the Provos and
Peoples Democracy would provoke sectarian strife, divide the working
class etc. that many members were confused, not fully aware or simply
disagreed with this position, does not alter the fact that this was
the leadership line. Read the literature. Every one of the ex-stickies
and current CPI members contributing to this debate knows full well
this was the line.
And the same people know that this was a policy shared with the CPGB,
CPI and OSF. All the literature of these parties during this period
shows this. It is unsurprising that Brian Hanley chose random
anecdotes about individuals rather than quotes from policy positions
of the parties concerned during the period. If he had chosen to do the
latter he could not have made his case. How did this convergence in
policy position happen? Did the OSF give this policy to the CP in both
countries? In a period, ie the late sixties/early seventies, when the
SF leadership was searching desperately for a strategy that was
different to the traditional Republican one? CPI members have a right
to be embarrassed, as do the brilliant intellectuals who seduced
Goulding et al. They helped to create the Frankenstein monster that
the Stickies became with their support for Unionism, the RUC etc.
Eoghan Harris did not spring from outer space, despite appearances.
CPI apologists could (and some privately do) claim that the stages
theory would have been fine if the OSF had not gone over board in
their reaction to Provo nationalism; that the CPI broke with OSF when
they became so anti-national (and began to compete with the CPI for
Moscow patronage). But pretending that the two movements, CP and OSF,
did not share the same policies on the north for at least half a
decade is revisionist in the extreme. And if people don’t believe this
they only have to read Tony Coughlan’s lengthy political tract written
in response to Matt Treacy’s book last year. BTW. Branno: The
explanation for the CPI yielding up their secrets with such alacrity
is that they got €40,000 for the material which was collated by a
professional archivist with no ideological filter to assist her.
I think there is an incorrect equivalence being drawn here between the positions of one or two individuals about these questions, and the attitude of a lot of other people for whom the putative membership of this or that has always been a side issue.
I don’t know where the idea that people are adopting a position that it doesn’t matter about the putative membership is a sudden thing comes from, when this is the attitude taken by several commentators here and elsewhere over a period of months (including myself, especially over on P.ie). You can find the position repeatedly stated here and elsewhere that the leadership of Goulding, Mac Giolla et al had decided on a path and that people were invited to help move things along that path after that decision had been taken here from the very off. The creation of the Wolfe Tone Societies, the focus on trade union involvement etc are concrete evidence for this. The notion that there was a line being handed to these people by people from a CP background simply does not hold water, as the chronology of the events shows. The rethink and move to the left was well under way, and people were invited in by the leadership, especially Goulding. This makes a nonsense of the idea that they were seduced by outsiders.
One of the interesting things about Hanley’s talk was the discussion of the 1967 document, where it is clear that the plan for the IRA in future was as a small backbone of trained men with special technical skills for the future. This fits very well with the material from 1964 discussed by Swan. And with the account of their aims given by Goulding et al in later years.
The characterisation that the struggle should be limited to a demand for civil rights is a mischaracterisation of what was going on. There was a demand that the civil rights movement was the most important immediate political issue, and that the civil rights movement should not take on board the national question, but as the same documents you cite show, this was never, nor was it intended to be, the sole focus of political activity. I would agree with you though that the leadership line can be clearly discerned from statements at the time, even though obviously there were things going on that were pulling in different directions, hence the calling of the ceasefire.
This is an actively misleading comment, in that you quite deliberately conflate different points of view and different objections to the crude conspiracy theory that a handful of CP secret agents “seduced” the Republican Movement leadership and “laid down the line” to them.
Many people here would agree with you that the IRA then OIRA leadership were at least in part influenced by people with CPish politics and that they adopted, for a period, politics which were close to those of the CP. It’s a very far jump from there though to peddling the idea that this can be explained by a secret CP plot fooling the poor gullible republicans.
“CPI members have a right to be embarrassed, as do the brilliant intellectuals who seduced Goulding et al.”
Ironically this is the same attitude to Goulding we find in Coughlan’s article:
“By then Roy Johnston had resigned from the Republican Movement and Eoghan Harris became political guru to the Officials in his stead. Harris developed a unique ideological mishmash of his own, which he termed “class politics”. This exalted foreign big capital as “progressive”, denigrated the small Irish business class as reactionary and played down the political relevance of Partition. He succeeded in foisting this on poor Goulding and his colleagues as a form of “socialism”.”
http://www.irishdemocrat.co.uk/book-reviews/the-ira-1956-69-rethinking-the-republic/
The idea of Cathal Goulding as a naive soul incapable of thinking for himself seems very appealing to some people. At least Adams never gets this – if someone wants to call him a sell-out, they call him a sell-out, they don’t say he was a dacent skin until he was led the wrong way by Jim Gibney and Tom Hartley.
Yeah, but was the CP and Official strategy the correct one? Or not? Please outline the correctness of the “1972/73/74/75… year of victory strategy to us please…I suppose it got Tracey a job so that’s a kind of victory.
Why should we listen to you stickie as you seem to be illiterate as you cannot even spell Treacys name right or are you just plain ignorant
Give us a break you two.