1981 call for a boycott of British Goods from Irish Americans August 23, 2012
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Northern Ireland, US Politics.trackback
From 1981, during the Hunger Strike ,a leaflet from the Manhattan Unit Publicity Committee of Northern Aid calling for Irish Americans to Boycott all British goods and services until “Britain restores full independence to the whole of Ireland”.
The Leaflet also mentions the visit of Prince Charles and The Royal Ballet to New York .
Many thanks to the sender.
I wouldn’t imagine there is much class analysis amongst Irish Americans. They seem to be quite a reactionary bunch and no doubt many of them are of the Paul Ryan/Tea Party persuasion. Its funny that they go on endlessly about what the BRITS did during the famine yet they champion the same free market economic policies which the BRITs were applying during those times.
The famine seems to be a strong part or at least an acknowledged of their collective history and identity alright but isn’t a bit of a presumption to lump them all in together with one persuasion if we are critiquing them for lack of analysis. though for irish names that pop up around the tea party, not sure how much they buy into the concept of irish america but if they do then yeah your point would be an interesting one. don’t have much contact with america lately. is irish america still a big thing. i watch your man conan o brien o tv3 sometimes he seems to get a fair bit of millage out of it. presume theres an audience for it otherwise he wouldn’t do it but would it be more chic than ethnic now i wonder.
“They seem to be quite a reactionary bunch”
Not necessarily. They were (still are?) at the front of trade unionism, and still active in the Democratic party.
The opportunistic asshole demographic from every community join the Republicans, even Irish and African-Americans.
True so true. But I still think it is ironic that the reactionary Tea Party branch of Irish Americanism lambast the Brits for the laissez faire, free market, economic policies that caused the famine.
I don’t really see the relevance of class analysis among Irish-Americans to this leaflet, a leaflet whose stance seems to me infinitely preferable to the one taken on the hunger strike by almost every Irish political party i.e. that the hunger strikers deserved no sympathy or support whatsoever.
Irish-Americans traditionally voted Democrat, something which would have placed them among the less conservative element of the American population. I’d also doubt if they’re disproportionately represented among the Tea Party with its strong base among Evangelicals. The opposite is probably the case.
The notion that it’s hypocritical for anyone who lives in a capitalist state to disapprove of British policy during the Famine seems a questionable one to me too.
I detect, with respect, in Chet’s post an echo of an old trope about naive Irish Americans who have no right to comment on the situation in the North because they know nothing about it. But was their viewpoint really that stupid compared to that of people who boiled down the Northern situation to a problem of IRA violence and claimed it was being prosecuted by ‘psychopaths’ with no political aims whatsoever? Because that was the default position of many people down here, including many people on the Left. And a very foolish position it looks now.
Agree.
Yep Eamonn fair point. My not that considered remark stemmed from checking a couple of online Irish American (IA) forums to get a feel for the upcoming Presidential election. There is a very strong strand of reactionary IA Tea Party support and they tend to be the ones who also champion militant republicanism because of what the Brits did during the famine. But these forums probably attract the blowhards and are not representative of IA opinion. They also comment with dismay that a lot of foreigners now live in Ireland when they go back and visit the emerald isle.
Given the political aims that SF have ended up pursuing, was support for them all that clever?
It was cleverer than supporting Margaret Thatcher’s line that there was nothing going in the North but simple criminality. Are you seriously suggesting that support for the hunger strikers, support which wasn’t confined to members of SF by any means and which in some cases didn’t imply support for the armed struggle, has been somehow proved wrong by the party’s subsequent political turn?
Has support for the hunger strikers been proved right by the `subsequent’ (I’m not convinced it was subsequent) turn? Did the hunger strikes really change anything? If you are against partition, exactly what progress was made by the hunger strikes?
For avoidance of doubt, I don’t think the armed struggle was `simple’ criminality, and I’m not arguing that Thatcher was right: her handling of the hunger strikes, from her own
point of view, was shockingly stupid.
But Michael, the point of the hunger strikes was to protest against the criminalisation of the prisoners by the withdrawal of political status. It had nothing to do with ending partition, something on which I have no particularly strong views one way or the other.
That fight for political status is the basis of which many people supported the hunger strikers and which, at this remove, I think they were right to do. That support can’t be retrospectively disparaged because the hunger strikes didn’t succeed.
I’d agree wholeheartedly with your second paragraph and would suggest that anyone who takes that viewpoint might well have supported the hunger strikers.
That the vote which the H Block candidates got in the 1981 general election was hugely in excess of what a Sinn Fein candidate of the time would have got which suggests that most people who supported the hunger strikers weren’t supporters of the party at all. Which renders the question of the party’s policies, subsequent or not, irrelevant.
As I should have added in the first place, I was referring to support for SF, rather than for the hunger strikers, and I think support for SF has been disastrous, even (especially?) for people who would be in favour of a 32 county Ireland.
As for the hunger strikers, if you are talking about support from a humanitarian point of view, I would agree: they should not have been allowed to die, especially since the Thatcher government conceded most of their demands a few months after the hunger strike ended. From a rational, if cynical, political point of view, it made more sense for the Thatcher government to make the concessions immediately, rather than take a propaganda hit *and* make the concessions.
Politically, the net effect of the hunger strikes was to boost the Adams wing of SF (very few people followed O’Bradaigh out in 1986) which has helped to lead to where we are now. Bobby Sands died so that Martin MacGuinness could shake the Queen’s hand.
Now you’re just being glib. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Sorry, should have added that `them’ in my original comment, was SF, and not the hunger strikers.
@EamonnCork I might be glib, but not wrong. We’ll never know what would have happened if the hunger strikes hadn’t, or if Thatcher hadn’t been so thick, but we can see what did happen. Politically, the cause SF said, and say, they espoused, has gone backwards since the hunger strikes. I *think*, though I don’t have the inside knowledge, that the hunger strikes were used by Adams et al. to push SF in the direction it has taken since.
Indeed a quick read of Ed Moloney tells me a couple of things. One is that the SDLP did not run against Bobby Sands or Owen Carron. The other is that SF came out of the hunger strikes well set for electoral politics and Adams and MacGuinness convinced the Army Council to let them run for the Assembly in 1982.
Just on a point Michael; The SDLP did not run against Bobby Sands as Noel Maguire left it to the last minute to withdraw from the election. The SDLP were played by republican South Fermanagh. Fine Gael’s Austin Currie, in the SDLP then, would happily have run. They could not have possibly run in August for the second election after Bobby Sands had died and Tom McElwee IRA was dying. Red Mickey Devine IRSP died on the day Carron was elected if I remember correctly.
I won’t mention the WP and Tom Moore. Oh I did.
My issue with the hunger strike of ’81 is what O’Rawe writes about the prisoners accepting the Mountain Climbers offer and being ignored by the leadership. In other words the hunger strike could have ended a lot earlier and the prisoners got most of what they did get at the end of the year.
Apologies for diversifying.
Just to complicate matters, it was never an SDLP seat because Frank Maguire, whose death caused the by-election had been an IRA member in his youth and was elected in 1974 as an independent Unity candidate. His politics would have been closer to the old Nationalist Party than the SDLP or to the now forgotten Irish Independence Party whose best known member was John Turnley, a leading member of the National H Block Committee and a Protestant, who had been murdered by the UDA the previous year.
The SDLP have never held a seat in the constituency and the only result of their standing in the 1981 by-elections would have been to split the nationalist vote and hand the seat to the Ulster Unionists, which is what happened when they contested the 1983 general election and Ken Maginnis got the seat which he held for another 18 years. I presume Austin Currie knew that and that it was the result he desired in 1981.
For anyone puzzled by RS’s mention of Tom Moore and the WP. In the first by-election it was a straight contest between Bobby Sands and Harry West with the former winning by just 1,447 votes.
The Sands victory was a major propaganda victory for the republican movement which may have been why in the second by-election, after Sands died, both Seamus Close of the Alliance Party and Moore, of the Republican Clubs, the name used by the WP in the North at the time decided to stand. Close took 1,930 votes and Moore1,132 votes but SF’s Owen Carron added almost 800 votes to Sands’ tally and beat Maginnis by 2,300 votes. There was an increased turnout. Not a particularly glorious moment in the history of the WP whose best ever performance in the constituency saw them get 3.2% of the vote in 1987. Had Carron even lost by the narrowest of margins we’d be told today that the hunger strikes had lost support as they went on.
Close would later go on to distinguish himself by bringing forward a motion, passed by Lisburn Council, banning gay civil partnership ceremonies from council property.
The seat is, of course, now held by Sean Quinn fan Michelle Gildernew.
I’d say there were a number of reasons for the RCWP decision to stand. I think the main one was a perception that the expectation that other people would withdraw from the field in favour of hunger strike candidates was exacerbating sectarianism. The decision was therefore taken to raise the flag of anti-sectarian, socialist politics at a crucial and difficult time, and to remind people that there was an alternative to the sectarian politics of unionism and nationalism that put class politics first.
AFAIK, the Party position was for comprehensive prison reform that would encompass and improve the conditions of all prisoners (this was also the position of USI), while condemning the fact that the conditions in the prison were being exploited on all sides for political advantage (and the stuff that has come out in recent years from the likes of Richard O’Rawe certainly supports the argument that the real aim of the provisional leadership with the electoral interventions was to broaden the battlefield).
Contrary to what Eamonn thinks, the perception within the WP is that the decision to stand was absolutely the right and principled one in terms of standing up not only against the on-going violence from all sides (and let’s not forget the number of people killed by plastic bullets during this period) and its reactionary effects but also standing up for a socialist alternative to sectarian politics, whether it was violent or peaceful sectarian politics.
People might also like to consider the attitude taken by the organisations involved to those who refused to bow to their agenda within areas where they were prominent. There were a lot of things going on a lot less glorious than putting your politics before the people.
‘Contrary to what EamonnCork thinks.’ Where do I say that the WP didn’t think their decision to stand was the correct one? It’s hardly controversial to suggest that getting a tiny percentage of the vote in a by-election wasn’t a particularly glorious moment in the history of the party. Is it?
I hadn’t meant to given the impression that I thought that you thought that the WP thought that the decision was a mistake [I think I've worded that right]. I was referring to my understanding of the term not a particularly glorious moment. I had taken that to be a value judgement on the decision to stand in the first place, rather than a comment on the result itself. Apologies if I misunderstood you on that.
On reflection I should have worded that differently.
For one thing nothing gets my goat like people jibing small left wing parties for the size of their vote, so I shouldn’t have done that. And secondly I’m so used to thinking of the later WP incarnation on this side of the border and its almost obsessively anti-republican politics, that I think I may have unnecessarily implied base motives on the part of the Republican Clubs here.
Could I just say that I think the WP standing in that by-election was indeed a glorious moment for the WP. And given the situation, over a thousand votes was a triumph. It was actions like that which later inspired me to join the WP.
I don’t think there’s any excuse for the Poland stuff though. Though again this was hardly unique to the SFWP.I remember when the Berlin Wall coming down talking to a couple of Labour, not Communist, Labour people out in Essex who were very regretful about this happening. One of them, as far as I remember, even put out a statement condemning those responsible for being ‘blinded by their greed for the capitalist delights of the West.’
Helena Sheehan, whose work I greatly admire and who writes on CLR sometimes, wrote a very eloquent piece about how the collapse of Communism spelt the end of Utopian hopes.
The problem with that line of thinking, which probably describes how I felt at the time, is that it probably wouldn’t get much sympathy for the dissidents and general population of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland etc. At this remove it seems odd that we thought it perfectly normal that, for example, an Eastern European team playing football in the European Cup would have practically no support because the state wouldn’t let people travel abroad for fear they wouldn’t return home. That we, in our own way, were just as unfree as people who lived under the Stasi is a line which hasn’t worn well. But that’s a different argument for another day. It was a very different world.
Ep Thompson is my favourite historian but his argument that Koslakowski was unfairly biased against Communism because he’d actually lived under it was hardly his finest moment.
I do think that the stuff re Poland and the iron curtain need to be brought up again and again. The idea that an authoritarian state can somehow forward the cause of liberty needs to be shown for the fallacy that it is and those who would either at the time or in memorium try dispel or muddy the waters in regards to crimes of said state and actors should always be reminded of their error.
I remember the local banter about Tom Moore being chased by a man with a hammer when he canvassed him working in Sylvan Hill, Lisnaskea. Republican South Fermanagh didn’t like the WP, and probably still don’t. However Davy Kettles did a lot for the WP in the constituency in the ’80s, getting an admirable vote in numerous elections in Enniskillen. A vote I hope the SP build on with Domnal O’C at the helm in the future. 1981 was an awful year, and emotional. Whether you like it or not the WP did themselves no favours, and are still hated in large parts of the rural community in FST for being against the hungerstrikers. But there is a mood for left politics and the SP should work on that.
I’m not sure I’d entirely agree that “Politically, the cause SF said, and say, they espoused, has gone backwards since the hunger strikes.”
Politically in 1980 SF were nowhere. They exerted, despite (or because of the armed campaign) remarkably little influence – the British felt secure enough to institute securitsation etc. I’d have thought that it was precisely when the move shifted from armed struggle to political (albeit slowly) that their influence increased significantly. It’s difficult not to read the AIA as a direct response to that process in the wake of the Hunger Strikes – after all it wasn’t military prowess that persuaded Thatcher to face down political Unionism. And while I take the point about the cause SF said they espoused I think it’s forgetting that the political experiement of of Sunningdale (which OSF at a time when it was vastly more influential in the North dissented from like PSF) failed. If that was the template then that was one which it was near impossible to implement for a generation, perhaps more (after all the DUP wasn’t prepared until the mid 2000s to ultimately come to terms with power sharing). So while unity might not be on the table today what has been agreed is broadly (though not identical) to what unionism wouldn’t wear in 1972-4. That strikes me as being closer to SF aims than if it hadn’t taken place.
Of course none of this is to dismiss the idea that PIRA actions delayed prospects for agreement. But then again the likelihood of PIRA attaining its goals through military means was close enough to nil and that being the case then the only option was to settle (in the short to medium term) for something less.
So the Hunger Strikes were important.
I’m not convinced by the O’Rawe material, at least in the sense that that’s the ‘correct’ narrative. It seems to me that the very processes involved and negotiations that took place were fraught with the potential for misunderstanding (or if one prefers starkly different interpretations). I also don’t find it plausible that in 1981 the SF leadership had a worked out plan for the future and one which dependened upon ultimately political action. The events subsequent to that seem to me have had too much of a feel of experimentation and ‘lets try this… no that didn’t work… let’s try this… no that didn’t work… let’s try this’ approach in both military and political terms. It also seems to me that as last as 1992 they probably thought they’d get more out of the process than they eventually did. There’s also the point that the 2000s in the South suggest that while astute they’ve been as prey to the vicissitudes of fortune as anyone. 2007 certainly looks like a backward step.
I guess what I’m saying is that if by ‘the cause’ one is talking about an UI then because that was simply not achievable in the way they once wanted even though they didn’t recognise that (or admit to it) it doesn’t mean that a) it will never be achievable or b) that SF are now further away from it. I’d argue that they were in some respects actually closer than tney were during the period where armed conflict was extant. But that’s a whole different argument in terms of how much closer…
Joe and Garibaldy,
Standing in that by-election may well have been a glorious moment if it was motivated solely by a desire to fly the flag of socialist and non sectarian politics. Maybe it was. Moore himself described it as, ‘the best fought election I ever participated in.’
However not every one in SFWP looked at it in such a noble fashion, Tomas McGiolla is quoted in the Lost Revolution as saying that the only point in standing would be if Moore’s candidacy ‘could stop Carron.’ Why a Maginniss victory would have been preferable to a Carron victory for the SFWP leadership, I’m not quite sure.
However, it’s extremely disingenous of Garibaldy to give the impression that prison conditions were a matter of grave concern for the SFWP. In 1979 the party denounced the H Block campaign as being driven by ‘middle-class dilettantes, academics and the supposed left who wanted the Provos to do their dirty work for them,’ a sentence which is so reminiscent of a certain cast of mind I’m amazed the line ‘hush puppy Provos,’ isn’t there. I suppose it is, in spirit. According to the SFWP then, the likes of Matt Merrigan, Miriam Daly and Bernadette McAliskey are ‘the supposed left,’ or else ‘middle class dilettantes.’
At the time Sean Garland said that ‘there could be no question of political status for people involved in acts of sectarianism that disgrace the name of humanity.’ You may stand by that but it’s indistinguishable from the line taken by Margaret Thatcher which sees The Troubles as purely a criminal matter. And it’s a bit rich coming from a party which still had an active armed wing at the time.
Garland also said that most of the media coverage of the strike was driven by ‘Provisional supporters/sympathizers/ultra-left Trotskyists in the media giving it more coverage than was necessary.’ Do you stand over this reading Garibaldy? As someone who signed the petition against the extradition of Garland it strikes me as a piece of red baiting which would have done Fine Gael proud. In fact some of the pieces which Garibaldy picks up in his Sunday Indo round-up seem to owe more than a little to the prose style and political worldview embodied in such gems from Garland and other senior WP party figures of the time.
The Republican Clubs said that ‘there was no such thing as a political crime’ in Ireland. TLR also says that some SFWP members, ‘privately applauded Margaret Thatcher because they felt that the Provos were ‘a criminal gang’ for whom ‘the hatred was overwhelming.’
Four of the hunger strikers, incidentally, were former members of the Official IRA.
You can, I’m sure, employ all kinds of sophistry to argue that SFWP actually were concerned about prison conditions and merely deplored the use SF made of the hunger strikes. But it will ring as hollow as one of those old SF ‘we condemn all violence,’ condemnations.
TLR implies that the Workers Party’s attitude towards the H Blocks was conditioned by the personal rivalries between the two wings of what had once been the republican movement and the violence to which both sides had subjected each other. I think that’s perfectly understandable on a human level but some of the political rhetoric of the time is pretty awful. Were the PIRA really ‘Nazis’, were they in the words of Des O’Hagan, ‘the political descendants of O’Duffy, Hitler, Mosley and Franco.’
Perhaps they were. And perhaps the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland really was made up of ‘social democratic, fascist, anarchist and Trotkskyist elements’ as declared by SFWP at the 1980 Ard Fheis when they supported the introduction of martial law in Poland because ‘the armed forces had to take the action they did in order to stop the country from sliding into anarchy and total chaos and ultimately into the hands of the imperialists.’ Now, that really is what I’d call a not particularly glorious moment.
Two years later the Workers Party described the dear departed Leonid Brezhnev as ‘an outstanding political leader and ardent fighter for peace.’
Ex WP people on this site have an understandable distaste for the SF tactic of trying to whitewash its past . But they don’t seem to apply the same rigour to their own party. After all, if the hunger strikes are rendered meaningless by the fact that Martin McGuinness ended up shaking hands with the queen, what does it say about the history of the SFWP that its final destination was the installation of Eamon Gilmore as Tanaiste in a right wing austerity government.
By the way pointing out to me that people did worse things that standing in elections at the time strikes me as a bit of a ‘what are you? A fellow traveller?’ dig.
I think the WP did a lot of good work in its time but had a blind spot on republicanism. There is a lot of middle ground dividing Gerry Adams and Margaret Thatcher,
I’ll get me coat. And me hush puppies.
Eamonn,
I remain convinced that, as I said, the main reason for the WP standing in that (or indeed any other parliamentary election in NI) was to raise the anti-sectarian socialist alternative and to remind people that there was an alternative to the sectarian dynamic of NI politics, whether in its extreme violent form or in its more moderate form as represented by the main parties. I am sure there were other motivations as well in this particular case, but the decision fit within the long-term strategic approach adopted. It was not some aberration. Far from it. It was, I think, seen as particularly important given the circumstances at the time – as the Tom Moore quote suggests – but it was perfectly in line with party policy.
I had not in the slightest intended anything along the lines of accusing you of being a fellow traveller by referring to what else was going on at that time. What I was suggesting was that whatever decisions were made by SFWP at the time ought to be seen in context of what else was happening (and I’ve already noted that I misinterpreted what was meant by not a particuarly glorious moment). I didn’t even primarily mean the ongoing campaign so much as the attitude towards people who were seen as not backing the H Block campaign. If we want to understand the rhetoric about Nazis and the like, there were a lot of things that had taken place in recent years and during the hunger strikes, and the election campaign, that led to people adopting that. I have said in debates before that I think that sometimes there is a tendency here to find fault with the WP from a perspective that isn’t sufficiently sensitive to what was going on at the time, and that is what I meant. No implication of being a fellow traveller meant in the slightest.
There was certainly a febrile atmosphere at the time, and undoubtedly that was reflected in the descriptions that you cite about Daly and others. But then again, there was nothing new in referring to the IRSP or members/former members of it as not genuinely left-wing, that was said on its formation. I suspect if we were to look at what was being said by such people about SFWP, you’d probably find similar language about it not being truly left wing, false revolutionaries, former republicans, pro-imperialist etc. It’s perfectly legitimate to pull out statements you disagree with and say what the hell was going on there, but it’s equally legitimate to consider what else was being said and done at the time.
As for the media coverage, I think that of course there was more going on than what was said, and that such comments belong in the context of struggles within RTÉ at the time which saw people running to Charlie Haughey to save it from the evil commies/pro-Brits etc.
As for the handshake thing, I haven’t been making that line of argument, nor do I agree with it, so I’m not going to defend it (and I’m not sure if anyone from the WP at some point has made that argument). What I would say about the changes wrought during the peace process is that it seems to me to demonstrate that the fundamental thing about the provisionals remains the same, namely that the northern ones were and are overwhelmingly not driven by ideology, whether socialist or traditionally republican, but by a communalist impulse.
Fair enough Garibaldy. And I am aware that a lot of the rhetoric about the SFWP is equally hateful and I dislike that equally. For example the notion that all anti-republican comment in RTE or the media in general was driven by an SFWP cabal when in fact it merely mirrored mainstream political discourse.
FF, FG and Labour Party supporters in general were just as unmoved by the claim of the H Block prisoners to political status as the SFWP were and to a large extent have subsequently used the notion of an SFWP conspiracy within Today Tonight as a get out clause. This for one thing accords the likes of Harris an importance which he doesn’t deserve but is very proud of.
You are right about the statements of the time needing to be seen in context, that’s why I mentioned the fact that the awful relationship between Sinn Fein and the Republican Clubs make the comments humanly understandable. But I did think it was worth pointing out that the SFWP’s position on what was going on in the North was not always as simple as flying the flag for a non sectarian socialist politics and did include rhetoric, and also action, which looks questionable at this remove.
As indeed do the rhetoric and the actions of the republican movement. I made the point in the book that ‘no-one made better propaganda against republicanism than the IRA itself,’ with reference to the La Mon bombing.
It’s all tangled stuff which is why I have no patience with sloganeering which puts ‘murderous fascists’ on one side and ‘West Brit revisionists’ on the other. And I know well Garibaldy that you’re not someone who deals in such cliches which ultimately lead only to a dead end.
One of the great strengths of The Lost Revolution is that it is free from agendas and often leaves you confused about who exactly was in the right. In the words of one of the Friel characters in Translations, ‘confusion is not an ignoble condition.’
Hope all is well with you. No disrespect meant.
That’s the best way of putting the reality of the media coverage and the general political attitude that I’ve seen yet.
I take your point above too about the flaws of the eastern European system, and how odd a lot of it looks now. It’s clear that things could and should have been a lot different. I refuse to take EP Thompson as my favourite historian but.
Lads, yis are just too articulate for me. All I can say is “ouch” to Eamonn’s post addressed to Joe and Garibaldy and “what he said” to Garibaldy’s response.
A great few posts from both of yis though. I suppose when I joined the WP in ’85, I believed it was an anti-sectarian, socialist, internationalist workers’ party. But I also went along with the support for “actually existing socialism” – which in hindsight was clearly wrong. And I definitely went along with the visceral anti-Provoism. Which in hindsight… well let’s just say that I am very pleased that the Provos have moved to the position they are in now and that they have brought the great majority of their supporters with them. And that I was definitely wrong in not supporting the peace process early on and going with the WP/Sindo (?) line that no-one should be talking to the Provos till they stopped the violence (or because they are the Provos?).
Like I said, not articulate enough!
‘Bobby Sands died so that Martin MacGuinness could shake the Queen’s hand.’
A tad simplistic. I’m not convinced any of the players at the time had a clue where it was all going to end up.
On NORAID, a point to remember is that at their height they had about 5,000 members. The vast majority of Irish Americans (which of course is a problematic concept in itself) never contributed to a NORAID collection, never went on a march or in many cases never even saw a member of NORAID. The idea that there are ’40 million Irish Americans’ eagerly paying attention to events in the ‘old country’ is nonsense. The last time that anything approaching that interest existed was 1919-21.
As EamonnCork says, it was a bit glib, but that’s the use that was made of the hunger strikes.
There was thirty-one years between the hunger strikes and the McGuinness handshake so that connection is extremely tenuous. You’re not just being glib, you’re being a bit silly.
And I’m puzzled about what point you’re trying to make. You seem to suggest that it was incumbent on SF to continue the armed struggle forever no matter what chances it had of being successful. And also the fact that the party turned towards political activity which eventually ended in an IRA ceasefire was a bad thing. And that somehow it would have been better had O’Bradaigh remained in charge and continued the armed struggle.
It’s not generally like you to make points like this. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that even yet a red mist seems to descend upon quite reasonable people when the subject of the North and what went on there before the ceasefire comes up, no matter which side of the argument they’re on.
Over there, on the WSM thread, people were talking about having to think in terms of fifteen years to change political positions, so I don’t think that the thirty one years between the hunger strikes and the handshakes makes the claim invalid (though other things might).
I am against the armed struggle, and always have been, but I’m trying to see things from a Republican point of view. Simplify a bit: around 1980, say, the SF position was that Irish unity was the only proper aim for Republicans, and it could realistically only be won through armed struggle. That is part of what divided PSF from OSF/SFWP, a split that was not very far in the past at the time. Any participation in political bodies, whether in London or Dublin was out, as a point of pure political principle, because it meant accepting partition, de facto if not de jure.
A year after the hunger strikes, Adams and McGuinness narrowly talked the Army Council into letting them run for the Assembly. In 1986, PSF abandoned abstention in Dublin. As Ruari O’Bradaigh, I think, said, once SF abandoned abstention in Dublin, they had effectively accepted partition. Since then, they have entered government with the DUP in a UK institution, entered Dail Eireann, and run for President, all things which would have been utterly anathema in 1980, because they would, rightly, have been seen as accepting partition. In effect, they have settled for less than the SNP got in Scotland. If I were a traditionally-minded Republican, whatever my view of the armed struggle, that might worry me. If I were told during the hunger strikes, that by 2010, SF would be governing Northern Ireland, but not from Dublin, I would be very worried indeed.
All of this might have happened without the hunger strikes, but I think that they gave one wing of SF an opportunity to use the electoral success of Bobby Sands and Owen Carron to push the movement in a certain direction, which, in the long run, has turned out to be a renunciation of what in 1980 were core principles.
I’m not sure I’m quite clear on this (even to myself), but I think there is a good argument to be made that part of the SF leadership, thinking on a fifteen or twenty year timescale, used the hunger strikes to move in a certain direction that would not have been acceptable to the movement or the membership.
Fair and interesting points all. I’m not quite clear on it either and I’d say very few people are at this stage in the game. And thanks to the sticklers for fact on CLR we don’t even that Zhou Enlai quote about the French Revolution to comfort us about the unknowability of contemporary history.
I think the fact that SF was largely a Southern run organisation at the start of the Troubles and became, post 1980 or so, a Northern one had a lot to do with the change in its viewpoint. To put it bluntly it was easier for people South of the border, and only peripherally affected by what was going on in the North, to insist on the inviolate nature of their core principles. Those in the North had to cope with the reality of the toll the armed struggle was taking on republicans and the communities they belonged to which may explain why they were more pragmatic and settled for what they would get.
In the end there was hardly much point in carrying on a struggle which wasn’t going to succeed just for the sake of carrying on a struggle.
I think Adams and McGuinness and their cohorts may have been less vanguardist than your reading of the situation suggests and that the transformation they wrought couldn’t really have been achieved without a great deal of support within the movement. But I’d agree with you that the hunger strikes did make them more powerful within republicanism, not least because as Northerners they were on site to speak whereas O’Bradaigh et al were isolated on the other side of the border. It’s striking how Southern a movement the PIRA and SF were in the early seventies at leadership level, something which was never going to continue.
The one thing I’m sure we do agree on is that it’s a blessing the shooting and bombing have stopped.
@eamonncork I’m not sure I’m sure they were vanguardist: it may well be that they took the opportunity that presented itself, and one thing led to another.
Just on the subject of Irish-Americans. In today’s Irish Times there’s a feature on Notre Dame, which claims in passing that Don Keough, (an major Irish-American businessman) broke the ‘glass ceiling of No Irish Need Apply’. If it was 1912, rather than 2012, there might be some novelty in an Irish American millionaire, (and even then Irish Americans dominated urban political power in dozens of US cities) but the idea that ‘No Irish Need Apply’ has any relevance in modern America is bananas.
http://irishamerica.com/2010/01/donald-r-keough-4/
Irish Americans and the Democrats by the way-not synonymous for a long time. Eisenhower was the first Republican to win a majority of the Irish vote, though it had been slipping in some places, including Boston and New York, was early as the late 30s.
In 1960, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, about 50% of Irish New Yorkers voted for Richard Nixon. (Nixon’s opponent was John F. Kennedy.) In 1965 William F. Buckley of the New York Conservative Party won a majority of the Irish vote in that city. In 1968 and 1972 Nixon won a big chunk of the Irish vote (and even George Wallace picked up some). This was part of the general fracturing of the Democratic coalition, the ‘white backlash’ and also part of a deliberate strategy by the Republicans to win ‘ethnic’ white votes. Reagan certainly won a majority of the Irish American vote in 1984.
Irish Americans were still prominent in US trade unions in the 1960s and 1970s, but some of them like AFL-CIO leader George Meany where strong supporters of US foreign policy and broke from the Democrats to support Nixon in 1972. Teddy Gleason, leader of the Longshoreman’s union, was one of Reagan’s prominent labour supporters.
Not to suggest Irish Americans are uniformly reactionary, or that they are all Republicans, but that the days when Irish Americans could be considered uniformly Democrat are long gone. More importantly, most of them do not vote as Irish Americans, but as Americans.
thats interesting about new york in 1960. if the irish americans don’t vote together what is it that stills makes them a recognizable group? is patricks day the only assertion of their identity, not to dismiss that if it is, or is irish american identity a figment of our imagination this side of the water or maybe more complex than our interpretations. seems to pop up a bit in American media. not sure what to make of it, what there trying to say.
There’s no simple answer that that Shea. ‘Irish American’ is a chosen identity in that you can decide having one Irish grandparent makes you Irish-American even if you also had a German grandparent (or whatever). In the early 1900s nearly every major American city had ‘Irish’ neighbourhoods’; that began to change by the 1950s, as did almost all the ‘white’ ethnic sections of American cities.
To further complicate matters at least half of those who chose Irish as their major form of ancestry in the 1980s were Protestant. The poorest Irish Americans are actually those of Ulster Protestant descent who live in American South.
thats interesting about the 1950′s that the irish in different cities up to that point point maintained an identity but it brakes down around the same time. would WW2 and or the cold war have contributed to the americanisation of the Irish in that time american nationalism or when you say white was it a responce to civil rights campaigns by blacks. in des bishops docomentry about learning irish he went to an irish class in new jersey i think. the teacher. was a 2nd generation who had taught himself the language. his parents came from the gaeltacht they arrived in america around that time. from what i remember him saying the most important thing for them at that time was to fit in, that the culture at the time expected it.
think where going way of topic here, interesting though. irish communities in britain is another one. not as vocal as there american counterparts in that counties national media but in personal experience make their feelings known when there etnic view of themselves isn’t acknowledged.
suppose its to big and spans to much time to wrap up in one sentence. same as being irish here. theres more than one ireland and they all co exist in the same space. same for irish america.
A small point: you will note that the NORAID leaflet refers to ‘Northern Ireland’: a term no Irish republican (in Ireland) would have used in 1981.