A stick? April 18, 2024
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Flicking through the Phoenix recently there was mention of Fintan O’Toole and in the context of Catherine Murphy.
O’Toole has acted to try to change things in the past, and more currently, and has been closely identified with the Social Democrats – in particular with his old comrade from the Workers’ Party, Soc Dems co-founder Catherine Murphy TD. He has assisted in the formations of Soc Dem police and his ideas and impact can be recognised parts of its policy documents.
Am I wrong in reading this as implying he was in the WP?
I can’t recall any such connection but am open to correction.
Meanwhile it suggests that he and Murphy and Shortall hold different views on the national question from the bulk of their members. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was some differences, though perhaps at this point that might be overstated – always thought Murphy was pretty pragmatic. Not sure it would have any impact on future positions the SDs might adopt. What do others think?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
I think I remember this coming up before regarding FO’Ts politics – did someone mention the SLP and Matt Merrigan or am I completely making it up?
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If he was, it was pretty under-the-cover. Can’t guarantee he was never sitting quietly at the back of the room.
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Whatever else we say about FoT, I think we can rule out the idea that he was sitting quietly at the back of the room!
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😉 Laughed out loud reading that! Very true 6to5!
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Matt was a lifelong Republican, O’Tool was and is a neo Unionist so I can’t imagine any connection there.
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I have a memory of a written exchange between FO’T and EH, around the time EH exited the WP. EH accused FO’T of toeing the party line to which O’T retorted that unlike EH he’d never been in a party.
Whatever about being in a party, I’d love to be at a party with EH and FO’T and the Loungers. Next time in BH, WBS?
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I think this may have been in the pages of the Irish Times but can’t recall the detail.
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Not aware of the SDs having any notable opinions on the national questions – the members did vote a few years back to explore becoming an all-island party, but the executive appear to have left that motion gather dust.
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Fintan O’Toole was never a member of the WP or any other section of the official republican movement to the very best of my knowledge, he may, of course, have been such a secret member that he never actually contacted the WP or any aligned group and kept his decision to (mentally) join solely to himself, such an existential or perhaps metaphysical matter would make for interesting, I’d imagine, legal debate if O’Toole was to find offence in yet again being called a ‘stick’.
Because he, on occasion, took positions somewhat in line with the officials’ view (or more often just not in line with nationalism) on some matters I’ve seen this allegation thrown about a bit on several occasions.
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There are still traces of WP thinking–specifically stagism–in FO’T’s recent writing about how Ireland is at once “underdeveloped” and “overdeveloped”.
I strongly suspect that FO’T at the very least viewed the WP favourably during its heyday. Dick Walsh was an important influence on him.
But you wrote the book on it!
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he was very fond of the notion that Ireland went from pre-modern to postmodern without ever having been modern. I’ve spotted it 4 times in his writing. Bollocks of course.
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“Soc Dem police” – quite a scary thought
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Scott Millar is very emphatic that Fintan O’Toole was never a member of the Workers’ Party, so any sensible reader of this blog will accept that the author of “The Lost Revolution” is 100 per cent correct. In the 1970’s and 1980’s I used to read some of Fintan O’Toole’s writings, and considered he was politically close to SFWP, WP, etc. Time has moved on! In the 2020’s the WP has a tankie foreign policy – sympathetic to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – but many ex-members disagree.
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I agree with Scott re O’Toole’s non-membership of the WP. But a few observations re the ‘labelling.’ In the 1980s if you campaigned for the Birmingham Six or raised questions about RUC shoot to kill etc you might be called a ‘provo.’ If you opposed the armed struggle and talked about class, you could be called a ‘stick.’ Sometimes these labels were correct, a lot of the time they were deployed to shut down discussion or put people in boxes. It still happens, usually with different labels.
The Phoenix has a bee in its bonnet about O’Toole, in part because it’s still fighting the culture wars of the 1980s. Sometimes I think O’Toole is wrong, sometimes I can’t be bothered with what he’s writing about, sometimes I agree with him. But I try to judge him on what he’s saying, rather then what I remember him saying in 1985.
An example. Since October 7 O’Toole’s written several articles about Gaza, all of them condemning the Israeli onslaught. He also wrote one article about a far-right publication that came through his letterbox and its blatant anti-Semitism. The Phoenix had a piece that claimed that O’Toole was bigging up an inconsequential anti-Semitism and ignoring genocide in Gaza because he had a lot of gigs in American universities. That accusation simply didn’t stand up if you looked at his output over the last six months. But that’s the logic of deciding someone is a ‘stick’ (or whatever) and denouncing them for views you assume they have, rather than actually bothering to find out what views they might actually have.
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I also agree that FOT was never a member of the WP or of it’s Harris faction, which controlled the secret branches. But he certainly, like many left-liberals in the 1980s, was attracted to the trenchant neo-unionism of the WP, whose most ardent proponents were the Harris grouping.
Apropos Harris and FOT this is my recollection of what happened:
As part of his campaign to swing the WP radically to the right, Harris tried use every means to bring about a fair accompli by effectively making his Necessity of Social Democracy document party policy in practice so that eventually it would be adopted as official policy. He wrote most of De Rossa’s 1989 Ard Fheis speech, to soften up the party membership and he then used his faction to circulate and argue for the NSD across the party branches.
He also tried to convince journalists to promote it, to influence the party from above. This is where FOT comes in: he was obviously given a copy of NSD and leaned on by Harris, so he initially wrote a sympathetic piece in the IT, bigging up Harris’s analysis. However, for whatever reason, he quickly copped on and wrote another article critical of the Harris line – hence arousing Harris’s ire.
Harris had hoped to carry off a similar coup to what he had done in the late 70s when, using the hapless Smullen as his stooge, he pushed his “multi-nationals are progressive line” on the party via the secret circulation of the Irish Industrial Revolution document ( Harris wrote the sexy bits about the useless Irish bourgeoisie etc and Smullen the reams of boring stuff about state paper industries etc.). But this method didn’t work in 1989, because this time the other two other leading factions in the party, the parliamentarians and the army people, for different reasons, had no time for him and the mass membership just weren’t aware of him and his minions, who only held sway in a few Dublin branches. I’ll take a wee bit of credit in that the mini-faction I was in (labelled ultra-leftists) worked really hard to counter Harris including phoning people in every branch in the country to actively counter his attempts to push the NSD. Much credit should go to Fearghal Ross for convincing his father during that year to break with Harris (sadly in light of what happened later).
Anyways that’s my memory of it. Watch out Scott and Brian, one day I’ll write a book of me own. Or maybe a joint one with Banjo. We could call it Stuck in the Past 😆
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fait accompli not “fair accompli”!
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Colm, for your opus with BJ… can I suggest a few more titles.
‘Same Old Shtick’
‘Sticking it Out’
‘The Wrong End Of The Stick’
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😆
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Gwan away outta that. I’ll write me own book.
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Splitter
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