Sometime
in the mid 1980s, imprisoned left wing republicans
reinserted into contemporary republican discourse
the term 'Fenian'. While aware that its usage dated
back to the 1860s through its association with the
Irish Republican Brotherhood, by and large, our
most frequent exposure to the term was when unionists,
cops, UDR or blanket screws were employing it pejoratively
- and always accompanied by the word 'bastard.'
The mid-1980s was a juncture when republicanism
pirouetted on shifting ideological sands. The movement's
long standing opposition to participation in Leinster
House had been discarded and the Sinn Fein president
of three years, Gerry Adams, informed the Irish
Times that socialism was not on the agenda. 'He
is only pretending', our own big Grug assured anyone
daft enough to listen. It seems he has been pretending
ever since and about everything else.
At
that time Sinn Fein was some way off from accepting
its position as a party of the establishment. It
would take a 2001 televised debate between Ruairi
Quinn and Gerry Adams - in which the Labour Party
leader put in a performance worthy of a GCSE politics
student - before the party president would concede
that much. In the mid 1980s, he was very much depicted
by officialdom as a sort of Gerry 'Crazy Horse'
Adams, who was given to making comments to the effect
that if Sinn Fein ever disowned the armed struggle
it would not have him as a member. It has long since
disowned the armed struggle and has him as its leader.
While
many of us failed to understand them and played
no part in their initiatives, what those left republicans
sought to do was chart an alternative path for republican
activists because they perceived that under the
Adams leadership republicanism would end up roughly
where it is today. Such prescience was, of course,
greeted with howls of derision. Anyone apprehensive
at the direction in which Sinn Fein appeared to
be going was marginalised by the republican leadership
within the jail on the false premise that they wanted
to stop the war. But the jail leadership was well
versed in talking nonsense. Outside the prison today
the same characters are to be found amongst the
foremost practitioners of gobbledegook, on occasion
placed in charge of education so that they can clone
people to be just like themselves - wholly uncritical
and totally devoid of any foresight. To them fell
the task of repeating ad nauseum, no return to Stormont,
no acceptance of the consent principle, no decommissioning,
no 'war is over' announcement. Had they been meteorologists
they would be predicting no hurricanes for New Orleans
or Texas. When in prison their opponents simply
paid no heed to them.
Despite
acknowledging the futility and intellectual paucity
of the physical force tradition the prison left
roughly argued that a blending of the Fenian tradition
with that of Connolly's legacy would, at worst,
salvage something from the rocks upon which the
Sinn Fein leadership was determined to beach the
republican project; marooned on a political island
of opportunism sans either physical force or socialism.
Circumstances
at the time made such a blending improbable. Those
most enamoured to the idea were confined within
the prison, rarely a crow's nest from which to gain
a grand strategic overview that would assist a wider
organisational and ideological restructuring. So,
the Connolly and Fenian schools continued in their
separate grooves. The Marxists worked on organisational
and ideological matters in a difficult world increasingly
gripped by neo-liberal economics; their panacea,
a vanguard party. The dynamiters wrestled with problems
which would not yield to the force of their blasts;
their answer invariably 'bigger blasts.' But in
the post-Soviet world the rising tide of liberal
democratic ideology, shielded by the pretence that
it was not ideological, former ideological certainties
were subjected to sustained erosion. The language
used by Hillary Clinton to describe fundamentalists
came to be seen by many as an appropriate way of
characterising both Marxist and Fenian republicans:
'stuck in a time warp, unwilling to concede a new
reality.' Whatever the claims of their respective
positions, class and national liberation struggles
were rendered marginal by the new era, characterised
by Francis Fukuyama as the end of history.
It
is doubtful if an alliance between the Marxists
and the Fenians could have offered a competitive
alternative to the path Sinn Fein were intent on
journeying along. Even were both able to bridge
the chasm that separated them, aggregating the miniscule
resources in the foothills would not in the end
solidify into an entity capable of displacing Sinn
Fein from its commanding height at the top of the
republican mountain.
Consequently,
alternatives to the collapse of Provisionalism as
a republican project were always going to jockey
for position within an infinitesimal contested space.
Much of the success of the Provisional strategy
lies in what the former IRA prisoner Brendan Shannon
describes as its having fought a formidable rearguard
action whereby every bridge to link the past struggle
with any future republican project was successfully
demolished. The Provisional leadership, knowing
its constituency so well and intuiting how little
it would settle for, has effectively closed down
all the space whereby a serious republican alternative
to the peace process could be constructed. That
there are alternatives is indisputable, but they
are ephemeral given that the substance to allow
them strategic form simply does not exist in terms
of public interest within the republican constituency.
While some of the jail Marxists have since prudently
abandoned vanguardism and sought to work productively
on matters of political economy and combating deprivation,
the Fenians showed how little they had forgotten
and how little they had learned. Brutalising a defenceless
Denis Bradley while he sat in a pub with his son
hardly signalled strategic imagination.
For
the time being the peace process can live with the
Marxists. Their confidence in a teleological determinism
has come unstuck. The tide of global events is not
at their back and the left as a project has moved
into a world of rhetoric. There is no demand from
London, Dublin or Washington for them to be wound
up, or certainly not through the Ernst Rohm type
tactics that Sinn Fein would apply. And with many
Irish Trots doing their utmost to ensure that socialism
belongs to the sects, whose members, in the words
of the late John Sullivan 'can continue to believe
nonsense which is continually disproved', the ruling
bloc can twiddle its thumbs at what it views as
the non-threat from a pond of quacking ducks.
For
the Fenians, who have fared much worse, the future
is even bleaker. Those who no longer bother organisationally
hanker after a past which will always remain there.
Those who believe they are fighting a war seem never
to realise that they have killed as many agents
of the British crown as the Alliance Party. Yet
if David Ford were to pronounce himself Alliance
chief of Staff, the laughter would echo from Belfast
to Brisbane.
There
is an expectation that the dynamiters be put out
of business. London and Dublin will pursue them
with a vigour rarely displayed in tackling organised
crime. Armed rebellion against a Northern state
endorsed by Sinn Fein will be as strategically futile
as an armed campaign against the Dublin government.
The physical force tradition bequeathed to the island
of Ireland the Omagh bomb. At that point it should
have been evident to us all that the solution had
grown worse than the problem. George Monbiot in
a different context argued that 'those who would
take us to war must first shut down the public imagination.'
Physical force republicanism, incapable of either
shutting down or winning that imagination, seems
certain to achieve pariah status. While it is correct
for the physical force tradition to claim that no
republican died to ensure what Sinn Fein achieved,
equally so none died so that republicans could become
pariahs.
