Irish Left Archive: Official Sinn Féin: Imperialism and the Irish Nation, Repsol No. 9, c. early 1970s

To download please click on following link: OSF IMPER&IRISH

This document – donated by Jim Monaghan, for which many thanks – is part of the Repsol (Republican Socialist) series of pamphlets issued by Official Sinn Féin in the early 1970s (date unfortunately unknown). It lays out its theoretical framework from the start.

The main conflict which affects the lives and destinies of the Irish people today is that between English imperialism and the Irish nation.

It continues:

The character of conflicts within the nation can be of vital importance in affecting the struggle between the nation and Britain, primarily because the divisions within the nation affect the character of the national independence movement: they give rise to the existence of compromising sections who may seek to do a deal with imperialism in certain conditions.

It notes…

The most important conflicts within the nation are those between employers and employees, between British and foreign-owned business and Irish-owned business, and between the pro-imperialist section of the population, mainly the Unionists and the Fine Gael Castle Catholics in the South, and the rest of the nation.

The document also notes … ‘the existence of potential allies among the ‘democracy’ of Britain – the common people – and particularly in the Labour and trade union movement in that country. There has always been a tradition of support – though frequently a very slender one, for Irish national aspirations among the most progressive and anti-imperialist sections of the British people, and particularly the British workers who numerically predominate in that country.’

And it is useful to see that the outline of ‘the main elements of British imperialist domination’ are primarily…

Political union with the Six Counties, and military occupation of that area by British forces…[…] Economic domination of the Six counties…

There is more to the analysis contained within the pamphlet, but it indicates a clear emphasis on the economic nature of imperialism military, at least as it impacts upon Ireland, in the approach of Official Sinn Féin albeit one which is encapsulated within a familiar rhetoric of contextualising it in relation to England or Britain.