Irish Political News

On foot of discussions about the strangely long-lived impact student life appears to have had on Eoghan Harris, I’m reminded of the 1980s. Now the WP was an organisation which really placed no great interest in third level, probably since its grip on USI was by the mid-1980s but a distant memory (the student princes of OSF, Rabbitte, Gilmore etc having decamped to the unions or the public sector) and subject to a fightback by both PSF, fellow travellers of one stripe or another and the Labour Party (always more radical at the more - ahem - youthful fringes). As it happened I was probably one of the very very few reasonably active members of the party at both constituency and student union level, quite a trick considering the demands of the former and the way in which the party was regarded as the most Machiavellian and negative political operator in the latter. Anyhow, in my attempt to radicalise my fellow comrades in the student body I would bring in speakers from the party or try to organise that they might go to party conferences.

This was a project which met with mixed success, which is to say none at all. A small number from the Womens’ Group went to a WP Womens’ Conference but returned entirely unimpressed by the lack of theoretical enquiry and “boring” (I quote directly) concentration on childcare, housing and health.

On a separate occasion Pat McCartan, as Industrial Spokesman for the party, was dragged into the college to lecture on the Workers’ Party plans for dealing with the economy and unemployment. This too was met with a certain disdain by the more radicalised elements amongst my peers, the Maoists (of which there was one) found it insufficiently revolutionary and too detached from the rural (actually the latter point wasn’t the worst analysis I heard), those who were premature SF supporters had already developed a deep and abiding hatred for the WP, while most others found the ideas of large scale factory fishing ‘dull’.

Another time I brought a member of the party who had achieved some significance in the cultural field in to talk about his politics. The posters around the college made this fairly clear. Or so I thought. Unfortunately, after the visitor had waxed lyrical about his political education and the way in which the party had changed him for the better (I kid you not, there was more than a hint of a religious conversion at work here) it was announced by one tutor who had brought an entire year group to see this dialectical education that he had expected to hear about the cultural achievements, not the man.

I sort of gave up after that and ceded the field to the SWM who held meetings no-one went to and which even pity wouldn’t drive me to attend. The CPI-ML met with greater luck. They had one member on site and their TCD contingent would troop up on a weekly basis to be met with some interest by the more Republican on campus. Mind you none of those Republicans ever joined PSF, so perhaps their support was also more rhetorical…

I was never elected to USI, but spent some time on the fringes as a delegate to conferences. All good stuff. Particularly Portrush one year where I wound up in the bar having to listen to the large SF contingent give voice to that traditional song which contains the lines “Up the Provo’s, down the Sticks”. Still, this was after I’d been harangued for an hour or so by another member of the CPI-ML (who went onto much more exalted things) about the revolutionary necessity of the armed struggle. Not that this sort of discussion was restricted to the margins. The raw hatred during debates between some in the Campaign for Labour Representation and Nationalists and Republicans was remarkable and to some degree inexplicable at that point, although not quite so much in retrospect once one realises that the malign influence of the BICO was there…

I never saw that as a terribly important ’site of struggle’. As a hostage to a perhaps delusional pragmatism I saw the real work as in the constituencies. Now, that view might well be correct although much of that work in retrospect seems to have been about getting certain people elected to a certain democratic institution, and not so much about seeing the ideology implemented.

And this in a sense brings me back to discourse. Because I’m innately suspicious of political parties that centre their activities on students. Or maybe suspicious is overstating it. Perhaps it is that I just don’t believe that it is possible to develop large scale long term political allegiance from such protean material.

And again to refer back to Eoghan Harris, his fears of Ireland slipping into ‘civil war’ seem to me to be akin to the idea that somehow May 68 could be played out on the admittedly smaller canvas of the Republic of Ireland with a students/students alliance spearheading such change, with presumably the SWP or whoever providing the ideological cement. Not that it was ever put in such terms. Both work on the line that you can leverage societal change in the most unlikely of conditions (and this reminds me of a friend of mine who was strongly involved in the bin tax protest who saw it as a means of displaying the true reactionary face of the state and therefore being an exemplar to the working class of the nature of that state. Anyone who has signed on in the dole office around the corner from the Rotunda will already have a fairly good idea as to the nature of the state, for bad and good).

The SWM, later the SWP, seemed to me to be living in a fantasy land (oh yeah, well I remember a certain E. McCann at Portrush bringing a certain star quality to proceedings, or not as the case may be) of mobilising people who didn’t want to be mobilised. This had a specific resonance for me because I was involved in the student administration of the college I went to on anti-Fees campaigns and such like.

From 1985 through to mid-1989 which was the period of my deepest involvement we (the Union) found it impossible to seriously mobilise the student body to combat a continuing process of fee increases. Not that there was no protest. There were sit-ins that disabled the College administration for weeks on end. There were also larger protests in tandem with other institutions in Dublin and elsewhere across the island.

But the point was that it was short lived and a basic problem was the rapid churn of students as one year arrived just as another left. Events from even three or four years previously achieved a mythic quality. I saw Joe Duffy on the back of a truck outside the GPO during a USI protest - or did I? I genuinely can’t be sure one way or another. The wars against OSF in USI were spoken of in hushed tones, but who could tell what were the details? I got my hands on some of the USI reports of the time and it all seemed curiously innocent to me, the sort of petty manipulation that characterised students politics during the period and ever after.

This ‘churn’ of students meant that campaigns would run into the ground too rapidly, would mean that only those outside of exam years, or what laughably were called ‘mature’ students, were really willing to give it their all, and even they were a minority of a minority (incidentally in my one size fits all paranoia it always struck me that the pressure to cut degree course from five to four, or four to three years was in part motivated by a wish to exacerbate the churn). Which meant that that SU activity tended to revolve around general administration and “ents”. Some years later, in the early 1990s, in UCD while doing a post-graduate course I saw almost the same pattern reiterate itself, albeit in somewhat better economic conditions. Oddly enough, for all the supposed sectarianism of the times on the left I found there was a broader comradeship between many of the different left groups I met there, from those who would later be in Red Action, Labour Youth and whoever.

But consider this. The mid-1980s was arguably the time of greatest prolonged economic crisis the 26-county state ever saw. Unemployment was sky-high, emigration was a constant. Yet it was impossible to motivate students to any sort of sustained activity. If not then, when? And if not, why? I’d argue that the reason was two-fold, firstly although students were more clearly middle-class then than now, the situation was so grim it made no difference - all would emigrate a seemingly failing state. Secondly the essential conservatism of the society rubbed off and lent a passivity to people. Revolution was rhetoric and everyone knew it - even at that point. A third possible reason was the sheer blandness of the alternative - Soviet style communism, in whatever variant was fairly unattractive, perhaps particularly in an Ireland that was just emerging from the permafrost of a mildly culturally and socially repressive state itself, and in any event was also a clearly failing system at that point.

This isn’t to argue that there was no capacity for change driven by students (although I’m also innately suspicious of theoretical models which try to reify their agency in political struggle). The late 1960s and early 1970s had seen student agitations which had specific results. Speaking for the institution I was in, moribund curricula were replaced. Tuition was altered. Staff were replaced and buildings and equipment developed. But these were essentially reformist demands, and as such were conceded when funding was available.

Afterwards, almost inevitably, the funding diminished and with it so did the fabric of the buildings, the number of staff and so on.

And I think it is interesting that political parties, such as the SWP, have recognised the necessity to break away - even slightly - from the college over the past decade or so (ironically at the very point where one could argue Third Level education has become somewhat more widely accessible to those from working class backgrounds - that too tells us something about the changing nature of our society and the intriguing ideological frameworks within which certain parties have operated). Again, I wonder if the emphasis on ‘youth’ sections, and students, has in reality been a minor contributory factor to the almost complete failure for radical left projects both in Ireland and abroad. There is a general cynicism about the left in this society, a sense that it is not entirely serious. I wonder how much of that is driven by the sense that ‘ah, it’s just a bunch of students protesting’. Students, rightly or wrongly - and perhaps wrongly, are considered a fairly cosseted group within the society. That the major visual manifestation of further left projects has rested in the past on such groups to provide much of the muscle is unfortunate. And unfortunate as well, if only because there is no reason why students shouldn’t participate fully in political activities. The process of Third Level can radicalise and inform. But can it do much more than that, and if not is this yet another case of the left looking back to partial victories, say the Russian Revolution, say 1968 and trying to crush all future activity and activism into their template?

If one believes in the generally accepted form of the political party, and I know there are those who with good reason don’t, parties have to organise beyond the academic institution. In a way the recent performance by Richard Boyd-Barrett, which was in all fairness quite good, might exacerbate this trend (although, as has been pointed out here and elsewhere he was flying something of a flag of convenience - but at least a convenience that broke away from the traditional image of the further left). Alternatively they might look at Joe Higgins and the Socialist Party and conclude that it really is a little too much hard work and better to wait until the conditions come right. Problem is conditions often don’t come right unless they’re nudged, or unless there is a serious component willing to step up at the necessary moment.

Actually I wonder what effect the most recent election will have on those fractions. Sinn Féin appear to be battening down the hatches and getting on with things. Labour seem to be waking up from the dream that was the Mullingar Accord. But beyond them how will the analyses stack up? No element or even relation of the further left was returned (sure, Seamus Healy did relatively well, and on another analysis so did Joe Higgins, but nowhere near well enough). I’ve spoken to one individual who would broadly be in the further left, although not aligned with a party, who told me a couple of weeks after the result that he was giving up on electoral politics. Good on him, but perhaps it gave up on him.

Yet in the face of the hegemonic grip by the centre centre/right on Irish politics that I referred to previously, where now for those groups? Opposition has its own charms, and we’ve seen various groups survive for decades simply by a sort of activism which bends and shapes itself to whatever is the issue of the day. But it’s unappealing surely? And then there is the instructive example of the Greens. A generous (and not necessarily incorrect) analysis of their words and actions since the election would merely serve to underpin the idea that they too had to accept that hegemony - even once they had stepped inside the tent. That they see no way of altering that until they are given time. It’s not the happiest of prospects, now is it?

I hope one of our newer contributors, Damian O’Broin, doesn’t mind being credited with the inspiration behind this post but a comment he made as a Labour member and Wexford supporter of his delight, one shared by all neutrals I can assure you, at their success on Saturday reminded me of something I have been meaning to post on. It might be particularly interesting in light of some of the comments on nationalism, labour and republicanism in Ireland.

For some time there has been a consistent anti-GAA trend in what passes for liberal intellectual circles in Ireland. Rules 21 and 42 were used for many years as sticks with which Irish liberal thought could chastise the reactionary peasant classes of rural Ireland. With rugby teams playing in Croke Park and PSNI hurlers, it seems that some are looking for the next windmill to tilt at.

Last February, Fergus Finlay opened up the new front with a fairly vile attack on our national anthem that I’ve been meaning to get back to. Confessing that he is unable to sing it, a rather curious omission in one’s education for a former Deputy Government Press Secretary, his argument is based on the sort of extremist literalism so beloved of columnists. The anthem, he points out, uses the phrase ‘Soldiers, are we…’, but “I don’t want to be a soldier, never did”. Fair enough Fergus, nor do I, but the song refers to a struggle of national liberation when an entire people arose and all, to one extent or another, were soldiers.

Finlay concludes with this terrifying prospect:

“In the interests of reflecting the modern, open country we have become, for the sake of giving a new generation a chance to find their own voice, and because it has outlived its usefulness, I reckon we should set about finding a new national anthem rather than worrying about anyone else’s.

“The Soldiers’ Song says nothing to us any more. It’s time we retired it with honour.” 

Good grief. Could anyone imagine anything more terrifying than a process of finding a new anthem? We would end up with some monstrosity selected by a committee or, in the worst scenario, a Louis Walsh type “You’re a Star” competition.

Finlay argues that the anthem is out of touch and especially that it is too bloodthirsty and militaristic. Although he does acknowledge that the French Marseillaise is not without some revolutionary imagery. But other countries too take their inspiration from their struggles for independence. The Italian anthem uses the phrase ‘We are ready to die’ four times in its chorus and in one verse accuses Austrians of drinking the blood of Poles, Russians and Italians. Presumably metaphorically.

Greece refers to the ‘dreadful edge of your sword’ while the Mexicans optimistically see a future filled with ‘War, war! Let the national banners be soaked in waves of blood’ in a song that uses the word blood often enough to be genuinely disturbing. The Poles swear to ‘..fight with swords for all that our enemies had taken from us’ and later credit Bonaparte with teaching them how to fight. The Dutch anthem, somewhat bizarrely, contains a reference to an oath of loyalty to the King of Spain. Even that paragon of social democracy, neutral Sweden refers to ‘faith until death will I swear….With God shall I fight for home and for hearth’.

National anthems are not meant to appeal to the intellect or the political correctness wing of Irish life. They are supposed to appeal to the emotions, to one’s patriotism. Despite advancing years I still feel an electricity in Croke Park when the national anthem is sung.  They are products of their time and for most countries celebrate and acknowledge struggles for independence, against tyranny foreign or domestic. Stirring national anthems have not yet led to race wars.  Mexico is unlikely to be going to war with anyone. Italy is not expected to invade Austria anytime soon.

Irish nationalism and republicanism did not begin when Peadar Kearney sat down to write a new patriotic song. It will not, however devoutly some might wish, disappear if the song is changed. The Irish national anthem might mean nothing to Fergus Finlay anymore, but to be honest, I suspect that says more about Fergus than it does the Irish people.

Imagine my delight when I turn to the column by Eoghan Harris in the Sunday Independent this morning. Today he is exercised by the photograph I mentioned the other day, the one showing Pat Rabbitte with Alex White. Now, I mentioned briefly that it indicated a certain ownership of at least one good Labour result by the architect of their rather stagnant Election result. But Harris goes to town. On it. Under the heading “A picture that’s worth this thousand words” he lambastes Labour for ‘the spot where the Irish Labour Party became a minor political party of politically correct DCU academics, Law Library lefties and radical chic republican socialists (sic)”. Lest we think that he is referring to some other Labour Party, one that while far from perfect might still approach even distantly the platonic ideal of our collective imagination he rapidly disabuses us of any such notions.

“…what do the four people [in the photo] have in common? And the answer is they are all supporters of the kind of soft republican socialism that can be summed up in the high-profile positions that all four took against Section 31″

Let’s consider what he means by this intriguing elision of characters as diverse as Alex White, his partner Marcy Corcoran, Pat Rabbitte and Joe Costello with … soft republican socialism and er… Section 31. Because make no mistake about it, this is not a political conflict, it’s personal.

Now, there are few, very very few on this planet who would consider that Pat Rabbitte was a ’soft republican socialist’. And if we take that as our bench mark we can perhaps see the absurdity of the following thesis.

“Alex White was one of the leading activists against Section 31 [the rule forbidding members of SF to be broadcast on RTE] when he worked as a radio producer in RTE in the Eighties. Back then there was no talk of peace. Sinn Fein-IRA was still a politico-criminal conspiracy intent on subverting both states on the island”

Let me pause and note that in the old ‘objective’ use of the word ’subvert’ so in many respects was my political home at the time, and that of Eoghan Harris, the Workers’ Party. Certainly the nature of the changes envisaged by the party would have been pretty subversive.

“…as the reality of blood and death recedes, a generation of academics with no feel for how close we came to a civil war are creating a cosy cottage industry around a stand-alone version of Section 31, shorn of historical context and conjuring up a left concept about ‘censoring the media’ when of course we are really speaking of censoring the IRA”

Since most of those academics would be in the 40s and 50s the contention that they have ‘no feel’ seems rather gratuitous. But then let’s consider the claim that we came ‘close to a civil war’. I can’t think of one point in the 30 years of the conflict where there was ever any serious danger to the Republic of Ireland from the North. To put it simply there was never anything close to the support for SF or PIRA which would initiate and maintain a civil war in the South. Indeed Harris conveniently ignores the fact that PIRA was always fairly careful to limit its activities south of the border for the basic reason that they did not wish to see any greater a security response than the one they already had. And if he means the North… well… there is an academic debate as to the nature of the conflict. But again, one of the most cynical attributes of that conflict was the way in which violence on all sides was fairly carefully maintained at revoltingly predictable levels in order that the gestural aspects didn’t tip over into inter-communal slaughter. So, remarkably, in the space of 30 years very very few politicians were targeted on either side bar a number of grim exceptions. But that narrative, cynical as it is and one which reflects appallingly badly on all involved, doesn’t quite fit into the simple manichaean presentation that in some respects is just an inverse of the sort of ‘traditional’ Republicanism peddled by RSF, and SF back in the day, whereby all causes and contexts are swept away in order that the perpetrators can be painted in the worst possible light. And if the intention was simply to censor the IRA, then why censor those who were not members of the IRA…. well we know the answer to that. But to hear it presented in such terms is just like old times.

Mary Corcoran is lashed for editing a book of academic essays on Section 31 which had the temerity to have nine essays against the rule and only one, by Conor Cruise O’Brien, in favour. Okay. Perhaps Harris has a point. Perhaps he, as one of those pivotally involved in pushing for its retention by RTE should have been given the opportunity to write (there is a certain pathos to his point that ‘I…had recorded a role playing exercise called Provo Mortar Bomb to prove how the Provos would run rings around RTE reporters’ - well gee Eoghan, thanks for letting us make up our own minds about those hypnotic masterminds in the Republican Movement, somehow I and most I knew managed). And yet. And yet.

Then it’s on to poor old Pat Rabbitte (words you rarely see typed around here) who is charged with being part of ‘that leadership [of the WP that opposed Section 31], the current leader of the Labour Party, the third person in the picture’.

Finally, as further justification for supporting Section 31, well apart from the one about trying to censor the IRA (not difficult since it was a proscribed organisation), we are treated to his thoughts on the political context of the times as received by his old comrade Gerry Gregg (fair to point out that ‘comrade’ may not be the entirely correct term seeing as Mr. Gregg took a political right turn some while back). Gregg wrote an article in Magill that covered much the same ground as his mentor does in this piece.

“… in the course of a brilliant biographical essay in Magill magazine, Gerry Gregg (available here on Slugger O’Toole), gives a more accurate account of the political culture in the Irish universities from which RTE recruited political activists like Gregg and White in the late 1970s:

“But there were also a host of ultra-left and Trotskyite sects - such as the Revolutionary Marxist Group, Revolutionary Struggle and the League for a Workers’ Republic. These and other groupings gave what they termed ‘critical support’ to the murderous activities of the Provisional IRA. I remember in 1976, when ten Protestant workers had been lined up and mown down by the South Armagh Provos, that one student Trotskyite hailed the slaughter as a ‘progressive massacre’. Four years later, that student was working as a radio producer in RTE.”

Let me hasten to add that Alex White is not the producer to whom Gregg refers. But as an activist against Section 31, Alex White must have been aware of the passsions which blinded some of his fellow RTE radio producers. In particular he must remember a meeting which I have referred to here many times - the meeting of RTE radio producers in 1987 which refused to support a resolution condemning the Enniskillen bombing.”

Now before going any further Enniskillen was an atrocity, the almost unavoidable outcome of any campaign of violence waged within a contested and limited geographical space such as the North. An example of the dangers of engaging in gestural violence, similar in it’s own way to the later atrocity at Omagh. But, to present one group within RTE as being malign, due to their previous activities in student politics (I mean really, IWG, RS and LWR, he took them or any pronouncements by students seriously?) seems odd when one considers the history of Harris himself and the party of which he was a member. To further discuss the Enniskillen meeting in the context here is to do us all a disservice. What was the precise context of that refusal to support a resolution? I don’t know, and I’d like to. But whether it is what he claims it is, further evidence of a malign indifference to human life or placating PSF or PIRA is a different issue. I’ve never much liked loyalty tests of one form or another. Political loyalty tests regarding situations beyond the direct control of those being asked to take them I like even less.

Moreover while it may suit to portray this as a quixotic campaign by some principled WP members plus assorted trade unionist noises off, the reality was very different. The party, united almost as one in loathing PSF and PIRA was fairly clear this was one campaign it wasn’t going to get too exercised by. Any oppostion by the WP was to a large degree cosmetic and as I recall almost never acted on. Whether RTE trade unionists reflected the views of trade unionists more broadly is a further interesting question. And finally there was a broad consensus in the political establishment in favour of Section 31. Hardly tilting against windmills there. More like going with the flow of those who had actual state power.

Then it is on to another unlikely paragon of soft republican socialism, Joe Costello. Lashed for trying to:

‘visit Los Tres Amigos in Columbia until Rabbitte restrained him. But the snob in Rabbitte, which regards Costello as politically common, provides no protection against Costello’s protege, the Dublin South barrister Alex White…[and] as White is the likely future leader of a Costelloish Labour Party, as it was he and Joe Costello who combined to let Pearse Doherty in by the backdoor (when Mary Coughlan of Fianna Fáil and Dinny McGinley of Fine Gael had combined to keep Doherty from the front door) and since I do not want to see his dirty deal with SF rewarded with a Minsterial Mercedes, I want to wish Ahern and John Gormley a long political life…’

Okay, what to say? Rabbitte may well be not my political cup of tea, but I’ve never found him as described. Coughlan and McGinley were fighting an election, not some existential battle confined to our hero’s head. A Costelloish Labour Party? I wish.

So, nothing at all about the sensitivities of naked political censorship in a society which had groaned under the yoke of state and church led censorship of arts, culture and politics for much of the century. Nothing at all about the perception, whether valid or not, that there was a considerable hypocrisy on the part of those who allegedly organised secret branches of WP members and allegedly sought to censor those who were members of another party with connections with a not so secret army. Nothing about the enormous chutzpah in accusing Pat Rabbitte of being a soft ‘republican socialist’.

I’ve mentioned the British and Irish Communist Organisation recently, and I’ll return to them soon, but here is another who took a very similar if not quite parallel journey, albeit breaking with socialism in any form entirely in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Much the same trajectory from Republicanism to Marxism to social democracy and then onto an identification with (or a tolerance of on the part of BICO) Fianna Fáil.

The battles of the past are always so much more satisfying than dealing with a present which confounds expectation. And the answer to every problem is? Why vote Fianna Fáil. The catch-all party catches one whose political journey has been marked by an egregious meandering masked in the language of moral absolutism at whatever point one chooses to examine it. No surprise there then.