Left Archive: United Irishman 200th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, 1998

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Printed as a 200th Anniversary Commemorative Edition in 1998 it notes in the editorial:

We, the editorial panel, are representatives of a group of people who were highly influenced by a political newspaper entitled ‘The United Irishman’ during the 60s and 70s. Indeed the formative stages of our republican and socialist perspectives were shaped by the content of that journal. The paper we believe influenced the whole of Irish political thinking those years.

Many of us were members of the Official Republican Movement and sought by various means to overthrow the existing social and political order in Ireland. Those were the days of few doubts and political theories written in stone.

Of late we have not been involved in party politics having become disillusioned with existing parties. We have come together to play our part in seeking a way fronds form the present morass of radical thinking.

This paper arose because an event seems to insist that something should be said. That event is the bicentennial celebrations to mark – the 1798 Rebellion.

The document includes a communication from Mikhail Gorbachev on the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, a piece by Mick Ryan on the United Irishman during the 1970s. Another on the same topic by former editor Seamus O Tuathaill. Roy Garland and Danny Morrison contribute their thoughts on the impact of 1798 on their individual political activism. There’s also a large centre spread devoted to the 1998 Agreement with representatives from a variety of formations, both Unionist and Nationalist and Republican, offering their thoughts of that in the context of 1798.

A notable feature is a two page article by Theresa Moriarty on feminism in the context of the years following 1798. As she notes ‘strictly speaking there was no feminism in the 1790s. The word had yet to be invented in the early years of the next century but he French socialist Charles Fourier. Nor was there an women’s movement. But there were women, sometimes isolated from each other who dared to imagine such futures. They spoke of the ‘rights of women’ when they explored the ideas of this emerging feminism, deriving their phrase, not only from the radical/revolutionanry language of natural rights, but from the title of a ‘justly celebrated book’ published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft 1759-1797.