The ANC, the IRA and the rise of influence of the left within Sinn Fein…
World by Storm has a nice piece up on the IRA’s role in helping MK, the armed wing of the ANC, in the 1980s. In particular he sees a strange alchemy at work there:
…if one can think of a clearly legitimate contemporary struggle it was that against apartheid and it is to the credit of all involved in this latest revelation that Irish people and the IRA played a small part in its overthrow. Furthermore I tend to believe that it was precisely by the establishment of and through such links that the conflict came to a conclusion to be replaced by exclusively political means.
He’s pointing to a contagion from the peace process in South Africa to what was to follow in Northern Ireland, and here’s the critical point, transmitted through strong bonds of trust established established in a period when an internationalist tendency was replacing the more fundamentalist nationalism of the founders of the Provisional movement.
It’s an aspect of the Northern Irish peace process that’s probably been under acknowledged in academic literature, and goes 
some way to explain the sustained interest of the ANC in the small affairs of a far country (or part country).
In his study of Sinn Fein’s peace process strategy, Martyn Frampton ascribes the progressive rhetoric of advancement to the co-option of the South African story into the mainstream Sinn Fein narrative in the early years of the peace process. According to Frampton, the big idea here was ‘transition’:
The obvious attraction of the ANC model for Republicans was the fact that the South African organisation had entered a peace deal, which had paved the way towards its eventual triumph, with achievement of black majority rule. It thus corresponded entirely with the interpretation of the Agreemnt being suggested by the Adams-McGuinness leadership.
What interests World by Storm more than historical matters shaping the peace process in Northern Ireland is the liminal influences in making Sinn Fein such an attractive vehicle for many who came in from the left from the early 80s and after:
…given the coincidence of interests across many metrics, with reference to antagonism to partition, or a shared sense of the failure of capitalism and the manifestations of the state on this island as well as a natural identification with the men and women of no property, small wonder that Republicans and communists and others on the left would find a fair bit of common ground, even while admitting differences. And small wonder too that in terms of the dynamic aspect of Republicanism in the latter quarter of the last century across a range of formations that elements on the left would be attracted to it either in alliance or by joining.
Topic: Books, Politics
Region: Global, Northern Ireland
Dec
One could however say that perhaps given their international contacts, the ANC may have heard of the experience of Northern Ireland.
It’s still interesting, I think, that their experience of minority rule and being completely denied the franchise led the ANC to demand (and win) majority rule rather than what might be seen as the more “conciliatory” power sharing.
The example directly to their north was Zimbabwe: a much smaller white population (around 5%) had operated a minority rule in a fairly less strict counterpart to apartheid. Power-sharing wasn’t part of the settlement there, but 20% of seats in parliament were reserved (for a period) for whites. The South African example, as well as having the fortune not to have been perverted by a despot like Mugabe, is probably better off for having separated race and the franchise completely (I think the one concession was a temporary Deputy President from an opposition party). Though of course there are other mechanisms (a la NI) to ensure power sharing, difficult though that is with a party at over 60% of the vote as the ANC was.
Its not a quiz Mick, its because you only seem to emerge from the Slugger compound to mildly insult me and not engage in debate,
So while I’m reluctant to aid the Slugger regime here is the full exchange of letters to give you a better grasp of the detail!
http://irelandsalternative.blogspot.com/
“We believe majority rule . . . leads to domination and even to the oppression of minorities. Majority rule offers a solution only to whomever might form the majority but holds great dangers for minority rights and values. We are convinced that power sharing based on full participation by everyone, as well as protection against domination, is the only workable answer.”
Who said the above, and in what context?
Look lad, I don’t own the debates here on Slugger, but it is me who has to answer for them in the first place.
If you want to challenge me or anyone else on Slugger then do it firmly civilly, and with references if needed.
Otherwise, sling your hook!
OK Mick, I challenge you on your assertion that Sinn Fein are against the World Police and Fire Games being held in NI in 2013
Here’s an even longer outstanding challenge I made
http://sluggerotoole.com/2011/06/24/mcilroys-victory-there%E2%80%99s-a-time-and-place-for-flags-and-national-celebration-of-identity/
Perhaps if you had had been civil to me a week and a bit ago when I challenged you then I might be a bit nicer to you, its a two way street Mick.
PS
My names not ‘lad’ either
PPS
Not sure how many references you want, but I provided plenty for both. However, in return you have not provided references to back up your arguements.
PPPS
Any chance that you’ll include the ‘sling your hook’ form of communication as part of the training you offer local government in return for my tax dollars
Harry,
I take what you say about other legitimate struggles in Africa but I do not recall any particular struggle against the UK Foreign Office’s placeman, Idi Amin in Uganda. There were however significant anti-imperialist struggles in Angola, Mozambique,Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde* in which Cuban soldiers played a significant part in countering the South African military who attemted to suppress the revolutionary forces. Mercenaries recruited by the usual British dealers in blood for money also attempted to play a part and came unstuck in an even more ignominious fashion than O’Duffy’s Blueshirts in Spain. You may recall the infamous “Colonel” Callan whose own Greek-Cypriot compatriots, luggage handlers at Heathrow Airpost, kicked and spat at his coffin as it was being unloaded so outraged were they by the shame he had brought upon their community.Wilfre Burchett and Derek Roebuck give a good account of the role of the mercenaries in their 1977 book The Whores of War which is worth picking up if you can find a cheap copy.
But there were no significant struggles against indigieneous African tyrants that I can recall which so touched the public imagination that support was called upon from Western leftists. For the most part in any case these buggers were all placemen and toadies of the former imperial power (Bokassa – France; Amin – Britain) who might have been embarrassed into making ‘harumph-harumph’ noises about their excesses every now and then bur so long as their own intersts were being protected against any attempt by Native African leaders in these former colonies to nationalise their own natural resources (which is why RSM Amin was pushed by the FO into his coup against Milton Obote – “Amin might have been a murderin’ son of a bitch but he was our murderin’ son-of-a-bitch” the Brits might rightly have claimed).
Besides which I have no evidence whatsoever of any resistance movements in these former colonies calling upon any Western leftist allies for support and certainly none who called upon the IRA. Have you?
on a footnote – I happened to introduce to each other, Joe Cahill and Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the PAIGC (the revolutionary independence movement in Guinea Bissau – Cape Verde in Dublin in 1972 (I think it was). The twee pseudo-left were mighty miffed as I recall as they had wanted to keep Cabral all to themselves to boost their status as true drawing room revolutionries and home-grown examples of the real thing like Cahill rather upset them.
I think you’ll find it is not an entirely two way street. Now, behave!
Easy Mick, or we might ask NATO to help.
TBH, I’ve not got a huge issue with anything apart from the Rugby blog, which I know you didn’t write, it is however just a nasty bigoted piece of pure cack and you should remove it or justify it.
Political parties and politicans should expect this rough and tumble but to lie about an Irish rugby player stamping on someone in that manner is going too far
I once met a militant ANC guy in a bar in Harare during apartheid and he told me of his support for the IRA. Unsurprisingly, a short conversation with him revealed he had never even heard of the existence of a British population in Northern Ireland or that we were the majority.
Mainland ulsterman-
Glad you followed your heart and met and talked to a militant A.N.C guy- unlike the british goverment who said at that time when the A.N.C was miltant – that they do not talk with terrorist’s-
Did he renege on his support once you expalined that the Loyalists were receiving weapons from South Afrika?
For anyone who is interested here is a link to the birth of the Civil Rights movement and specifically how the IRA was heavily involved in its inception.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6408256/The-Birth-of-the-Provisionals-Liam-O-Comain
Kadar Asmal gets a mention on page one.
Very good, Limerick.
I hope that puts paid to all those johnny-come-lately opportunists who continually push (not least on this site) the notion that it was the SDLP who were in the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement. The only real role that the SDLP had was in putting the brakes on NICRA’s momentum as they hurriedly scrabbled to gain political advantage out of the struggle and sacrifice of those who were being clubbed on the streets or being gaoled for wilfully flaunting the statute that mandated prison terms for participation in sit-down protests.
Even in the few marches where leading SDLP careerists did participate for the sake of appearance, they were always at pains beforehand behind the scenes to ensure that there would be a body of strong hefty Republicans willing to place their bodies between them and RUC batons or Loyalist brickbats.
Don’t get me started…
Rory,
Ah, but you miss the point. The Northern Ireland Government and the RUC at the time, and unionists since, have pointed out that NICRA was a republican front set up to destabilise the province and create enough disruption to enable them to get another terror campaign going. That article confirms that they were quite correct about that.
Especially quotes like this:
“The clandestine nature of the original Derry meetings as well as others taking place throughout the north was based upon the need for republicans to keep a low profile. This was done precisely so that the Civil Rights movement would attract diverse political tendencies. Not all republicans of the time agreed with the ‘new venture’ for sadly the movement split in due course. Which raises the question of whether those who supported the venture were seeking the mere democratisation of the northern state. There were those who apparently inclined in that direction but to state categorically that was not the objective of republican participation in the civil rights movement.
Otherwise Seamus Costello and myself among many others including people like Joe McCann of
Belfast would not have remained with the so-called Officials.
In fact, in an oration at a special Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown, Co Kildare, I
emphasised the point that republican participation in the civil rightsmovement was for one reason
only: a means for “nurturing a revolutionary consciousness in the Irish people and gaining their
support.”
This oration was delivered during the re-dedication of a new memorial by the National Graves
Association, after loyalists (allegedly) bombed Tone’s grave some months previously.
As a member of the Ard Comhairle of Sinn Fein at the time, I recall writing the oration in the home of the then president, Tomas MacGiolla, who agreed with the contents and endorsed it on behalf of the leadership. “
Richard English’s book “Armed Struggle” is good on this. Most Unionist politicians got it wrong of course: it was not a Republican front as such. But the old received truth that the Republicans piggy-backed on the NICRA campaign is also wrong. English shows how NICRA grew out of Republican seeds, through the Wolfe Tone societies. His take seems to be that it was not a creature of Republicanism, but that they helped get it started, modestly helped it along and thought it could unwittingly help their (sectarian) ends. They were happy to stand back and see where it led. Many unionists I think saw a less subtle relationship between the two, in which too much blame was attributed to NICRA.
But unionists were, it seems, right to suspect there was more going on with the rise of NICRA than just NICRA. Many of the leading unionists of the time were utter absurdities and their politics were appalling. But I do feel the ordinary unionist in the street at that time is wrongly maligned when characterised as unreasonably fearful. They saw genuine civil rights grievances being used to further nationalist agendas that had nothing to do with civil rights and unfortunately that is what happened. It is a great shame because I honestly believe if there were no nationalistic issues attached, the civil rights agenda could have been embraced and shared by all fairly painlessly.
Oh and Michael, re ANC guy, I don’t think he was one of the organisation’s finest, just some angry bloke in a bar. We’ve all met them …
Mainland ulsterman-
‘ some angry bloke in a bar, we’ve all met them ‘
no problem- it could even be said about me- after a few…
That there was involvement by the IRA in the early civil rights movement has never been denied.
What is rejected is the idea that the leaders of what were to become the Provos had any real role in the civil rights struggle. Gerry Adams and others continually push the line that the Provos’ armed struggle was a last desperate stand after Irish Republicans had tried peaceful protest and reform and were batoned off the streets.
Adams and his cohorts had no hand act or part in the original civil rights movement no matter what he might subsequently claim. The Provos sprang from die-hard, traditional, physical force, Republican families who despised the idea of reforming Northern Ireland as the Civil Righters sought, they wanted to destroy Northern Ireland. The Provos blamed the weak, reform minded IRA leadership for leaving the Catholics, and rest assured they meant Catholics, of Belfast undefended.
To deny the huge input of SDLP founding members into pushing the NICRA agenda to the point where in late 1968 they had actually achieved most of their aims is historically absurd.
Maybe some old IRA geezers in smoke filled rooms were involved in the initial stages but they weren’t the ones who got NICRA noticed.
It was Austin Currie, Ivan Cooper, John Hume, Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin who made front page news, who were on the streets and who dragged Northern Ireland into the glare of world publicity. Ask anyone in Northern Ireland who were the faces of NICRA and 95% will mention the names above, the Boys of the Old Brigade don’t feature on anyone’s radar because essentially they didn’t achieve anything.
And which party did most of the NICRA men go on to join?
Hint: it wasn’t Provisional Sinn Fein.
Well Harry, apart from where you say that “It was Austin Currie, Ivan Cooper, John Hume, Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin who made front page news,” that contribution above is just plain wrong.
And anyone who had been a active member of the Civil Rights Assocation, as I was, who participated in its marches and sit downs and housing squats as I did, who risked police batons and Loyalist assaults and arrest and imprisonment as I and so many others, who only ever had their names on the inside pages in the court reports, did would have known just how wrong it was.
The reason that those geezers made front page news was in order to assist their efforts to outflank the Civil Rights activists, to dampen down the protests and to push the SDLP forward as the reasonable, moderate leaders for us all to follow.
Eddie McGrady in Downpatrick was a good case in point. Seeing how the CRA had captured the imagination he organised a meeting in Downpatrick’s main street sharing a platform with Conor Cruise O’Brien and some red-haired woman from Newry named Rogers as though they were the leaders of a movement in any of whose actions they had never participated and indeed to which they did not even hold membership. Shortly afterwards McGrady was approached to support a sit-down in front of the RUC barracks to protest the recent rushed-through law which made sit-down protests subject to mandatory prison sentence. McGrady did not attend. The local CRA squatted a 3 bedroom council house in Ardglass which had been allocated to the single teenage secretary of a local Unionist councilor and placed therein a family of three who had been living in a rat-infested hovel whose walls ran with water and which had no sanitary toliet facilities. McGrady was invited, not to participate in the squat, but merely to turn up, to show support. He did not. Such lack of participation or more often, downright hostility by SDLP leaders and functionaries and even rank and file, to CRA actions was commonplace throughout the campaign.
Given that the CRA had thrown off the influence of the old moribund National Party and it was necessary for the Catholic bourgeoisie to reinvent themselves in a new formation that somehow could take the credit for any reforms that street action might accomplish while at the same time doing its damnedest to ensure that it did not develop into too radical a movement over which they would lose all influence and control.
In meeting after meeting the likes of Aidan Corrigan, Kevin Agnew, Frank Gogarty, Frank McManus M.P., and even Gerry Fitt’s one-time protege, Paddy Kennedy M.P. railed against the attempts to derail the movement by the very ones you claim were the leaders.
In the end internment found them out and they tried to recover ground with the call for a rent and rates strike, little realising that people would take them up on it and that they themselves would then be required to participate. Of course as soon as legal measures began to be employed to thwart the strike, our brave heroes decided that it was now a good idea to abandon the it. However the people did not share their careful concern for their own skins, so the SDLP did what they had always done – they abandoned the people.
Well now the people have abandoned them.
“republican participation in the civil rightsmovement was for one reason
only: a means for “nurturing a revolutionary consciousness in the Irish people and gaining their
support.””
The above was the key reason for republican involvement in the civil rights movement. All the rest of them were simply “useful idiots”.
Like I say Rory, you and your chums in the smoke filled rooms might feel you were the guys who did everything even though no-one’s ever heard of most of you such was the minuscule impact you achieved.
The rest of us remember who we saw on our TV screens and on the streets and it was the men I name above. Furthermore when the troglodytes of the Republican Movement decided that engaging in three decades of sectarian slaughter was more to their liking than peaceful reform, it was the SDLP who steadfastly refused to engage in murdering their neighbours.
Seamus Mallon (must be a bad’un, he was a Stoop after all) called the Good Friday Agreement “Suningdale for slow learners” for a very good reason. You could have had exactly that forty years ago without all the bloodshed but no, time for another heave, to get the pike out of the thatch and to hell with reform and peaceful protest.
“Yerragh me boys fer freedom tis the rising of the sun! Where’s me oul’ Thompson?
I never voted SDLP in my life but it is clear now that they were the rare voice of reason and sanity in the Golgotha created by the trench coat and armalite brigade.
You can stick to your brave revolutionaries, I prefer to salute men of principle and courage who fought a much harder, more constructive campaign.
Oops, “moon” of course, damn where’s the edit function?
Harry
Beware of believing those who appear on our TV screen are the real leaders of mass protests. Iraq and Libya are the best examples of this, I have yet to see a Libyan ‘rebel’ leader talking about wanting sharia law, yet according to newsnight it is likely to be in the new constitution drawn up, no matter what the suits in the TNC might say on TV.
I bet you cannot even remember the names of those whom TV news proclaimed as the new leaders of Iraq post 2003.
The people who lead from the front are often very different folk and a lot less vainglorious I might add.
I remember back in the very earlier 1980s working out of Congress House, helping to organise ‘The peoples March for Jobs’ and receiving phone calls from MPs and others offering their support. To a man/woman when I said great; “I will book you down to march the Liverpool- Manchester leg,” or some such, the phone went silent and the more blatant would reply “I’m fully booked that day, but I was hoping to be able to give a speech to the marchers as they entered the main town in my constituency.”
“I bet you cannot even remember the names of those whom TV news proclaimed as the new leaders of Iraq post 2003.”
Which somewhat confirms my point, Rory and his mates might feel that they were there at the start and that all those johnny-come-latelys came along and stole all their glory but that is beside the point. Rory’s gang achieved diddly-squat, no one was listening to them, it was Fitt, Hume, Cooper et al who got the job done.