for lefties too stubborn to quit
As noted in comments, sad news that Roy Johnston passed away late last week. Johnston once of Sinn Féin, later with the Officials, still later with the CPI and the LP and then eventually with the Green Party. But as this wiki page notes prior to joining SF he had already had a long political involvement.
A remarkable life in Irish left politics.
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The Cedar Lounge Revolution
Bearing in mind certain legal actions of the recent past, can anyone direct to a reasonably verifiable account of what was going on with this particular crowd in the last century (one other mentioned quite recently)?
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He was an egomaniac on steroids. He did more harm than good.
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No, Amy. I don’t know about you but I knew the guy and got to like him after our rows in the sixties and early seventies.
Unlike Coughlan, with whom his name has been associated, he followed Marx’ dictum ‘Question everything’ (which was why he was kicked out of the CP, by the way). Sadly, he found too many wrong answers. Still, his heart was in the right (left ) place. he deserves to rest in peace.
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If I remember correctly Rayner, you wrote an interesting article on him round the time that he left the Stickies.
Definitely one for the archives, WbS.
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That would have been 72? I’d really like to read that
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I don’t have a copy myself, but it is in the Plough No.2, 1972, which is in a file in the Peter Graham Memorial Library in the Labour History Library in Beggars Bush.
The article is not one which I would choose for my Selected Works. I expected Roy’s departure would mean that OSF would be better. Just the opposite happened. My excuse is that it was a journeyman work.
Incidentally, there is to be a memorial meeting for Roy Johnston at 12.00 noon on Saturday the 21st at the Friends Meeting House, 82 Lower Churchmen Road.
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Cannot see an obituary or death notice …
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There is a death notice for a Roy Johnston here, at this Dublin funeral home.
https://rip.ie/death-notice/roy-johnston–dublin/407079
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And this tweet says the Roy Johnston associated with the Green Party passed away:
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I met him once at a conference. I don’t remember a particularly egoistical person.
He was one of the first people on the left in Ireland to realise the centrality of the climate emergency to materialist politics.
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I think he did book reviews for Books Ireland back in the 90s. I would have picked up a negative view on RJ based on my father’s view’s on him from the time of the split- my da taking the opposite side of RJ. And initially I viewed him true the prism of the utterisms of the WP leadership from the early 90s- pro internment, etc.
But i was pleasantly surprised to have my prejudices wiped away with his stuff in Books Ireland where I remember him writing favourably on the economics of a united Ireland & where he highlighted the misdeeds of the British state forces in the north.
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He seemed to be as DROC notes above, a questioning person and not hidebound by tradition, inherited or otherwise. Or perhaps he remained a Republican throughout his political journeys which is no bad basis for one’s politics.
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Johnston meant well and had honourable intentions. But a question can be raised on the elitism of parachuting him into a republican movement leadership position without he ever having had a history of republican activism; a little insulting to the movements rank and file.
He resigned in the early 1970s after the Officials killed a unionist politician.
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yes, I’d agree with your criticism there.
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It did lead to certain tensions…
‘Gearoid MacCarthaigh, an IRA volunteer since the 1930s, was a particular opponent of Johnston’s new position…
Although MacCarthaigh was O/C of the IRA in Cork city at the time, he had not been officially informed of the Army Council’s decision to elect Johnston as Director of Education…
According to MacCarthaigh, he and Sean MacStiofain approached Johnston in a public house in Cork city shortly before the June 1966 Bodenstown commemoration. Producing a pistol, he gave Johnston an ultimatum to be out of the city by midnight’- from ‘A Broad Church’ by Gearóid Ó Faoleán,
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He joined the Promethean Society in TCD in the mid-1940s and from there joined the Irish Workers’ League as the CPI in the 26 counties was known between 1948 and 1962. The Prometheans’ minute book still exists in the CPI archives in Pearse Street library, found it a very interesting read
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He gives some background in a paper on his website:
http://rjtechne.org/papers.htm
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I worked with Roy in Comhaontas Glas around the mid-90s. I always found him a real gentleman, not driven by ego but with a genuine concern to do what seemed to him to be right.
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The more I hear about him the more he seems to have been actually very sound
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