Thursday, November 01, 2007
“While I was of the view that no military solution was possible..”
I don’t intend to comment much on the fulsome apology of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, or the PIRA apology for their “mistakes” he referenced, beyond noting that the man it was directed at, Colin Parry, had already dealt with the possibility that such an apology would be proffered
“I don’t want an apology, I don’t expect an apology. That is not on the agenda, if I got one it wouldn’t mean anything.”
Nor do I intend to comment much on the attempt to usurp the consultation of the Eames/Bradley group, beyond noting that a focus on the perpetrators and what they have to say to their own people might be more beneficial than what Adams is suggesting.
However, he also called for a victim-centred truth process to help Northern Ireland deal with its bloody past. That process, he proposed, should involve all people, including those in England and the Republic of Ireland, bereaved or maimed during the Troubles. “A truth process must reach out to these people,” he argued.
But it is worth noting that his actual speech included his own version of his truth about the past..
On the one side there were nationalists and republicans who were denied basic human and civil rights, including the right to vote, access to housing and work. The north existed under a permanent state of emergency, with special laws, special courts and a range of state armed paramilitary organisations to implement its will. The civil rights campaign of the 1960s was an attempt to initiate reform. The demands were simple—the right to vote, an end to discrimination in jobs and housing, and the repeal of the special laws. On the other side was the unionist government, the unionist establishment and the British government.
Adams goes on to argue that
By the mid to late 1970s it was obvious that there was a military stalemate. The British could not defeat the IRA—the IRA could not militarily defeat the British.
And the violence continued with each side seeking to develop new strategies, new tactics, new and more deadly ways of killing each other.
Within republicanism, armed struggle was the dominating tendency. There was a belief that only the IRA could move the British government. There may have been misgivings or serious concerns about particular military operations but there was no real dissent from armed struggle. It was taken for granted that that was the way of things.
While I was of the view that no military solution was possible I also felt armed struggle was a necessary form of struggle and I defended this position without being dogmatic about it.
But how to break the impasse?
The Sinn Fein leadership carefully considered this and concluded that if the impasse was to be broken then republicans needed to go on a political offensive. And we realised very early on that this would require republicans taking initiatives. At its core it would require Sinn Féin constructing a viable political alternative to armed struggle which could deliver republican goals.
In a letter I wrote in the early 1980s to Catholic Bishop Cahal Daly, who was a vocal opponent of republicans I said: ‘Those republicans who engage in armed struggle, or who defend the legitimacy of armed struggle in pursuance of Irish independence, do so, not through any fixation with physical force, but through a necessity. Those who voice a moral condemnation of this tactic have a responsibility to spell out an alternative course by which Irish independence can be secured. I for one would be pleased to consider such an alternative.’
I have to say it became clear very quickly to me and to others in our leadership that if we were to wait on others providing the alternative it would never happen. They were locked in a mindset.
The quote from the letter dated in the 1980s, however, would not seem to be as conclusive as Adams would appear to believe.
And it ignores other elements of the struggle which were deployed - in a “campaign which drew its lessons from previous such periods in Irish history, as well as from contemporary experience around the world.”
And for an alternative analysis of the outworking of that Process™ see this previous post. Or this one.
After all, it might already be too late..
Pete Baker @ 12:19 AM
“I don’t intend to comment...” GAG.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:07 AM*On the one side there were nationalists and republicans who were denied. . . the right to vote*
Simply not true.
No one was denied any votes because of their political affiliation. There was one man one vote in all elections to Stormont and Westminster, at local election level the vote was on the basis of a rate-payer franchise which operated the same way for everybody and when it was abolished didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to election results.
*The civil rights campaign of the 1960s was an attempt to initiate reform. The demands were simple—the right to vote, an end to discrimination in jobs and housing, and the repeal of the special laws.*
The Civil Rights campaign was ultimately very successful in achieving its aims (with the exception of repealing the emergency legislation which also happened to be on the books in the Irish Republic) after a mere five years or so, peacefully and long before the neanderthals of the Provisional IRA decided to get the pikes out of the thatch “give her one more oul’ lash boys!”
Pathetic attempt at justifying the unjustifiable by Adams, he’s saying “sorry we blew up your wee’ans but it was them’uns that made us do it”.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:09 AMHarry
I am no Sinn Fein supporter and have no time for Adams.
However, you are being pedantic and, frankly, treating people as if they are stupid.
It is a statistical fact that Catholics were disenfranchised by these regulations to a much greater extent than Protestants.
I don’t think that even the Stormont Unionist govt would have been blatent enough to simply say Catholics cannot vote (which would have been illegal anyway). They were bigots - not idiots. They came up with this method which (in conjunction with gerrymandering) ensured they had total control of the state.
The discrimination in jobs, housing etc was widespread and has been well documented and covered in numerous documentaries over the years.
The Civil Rights movement was fully justified and largely successful in it’s aims. I can only agree with you about the IRA as I have never supported violence from any group.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:19 AMBaker,
“his actual speech included his own version of his truth about the past..”
There is no “real” truth, truth and knowledge is merely a human constructions, arrived at through dialogue. Without dialogue we can never agree a truth and we can never develop real knowledge. So get off your high horse, you are annoyingly pompous.Flashman,
You are right....and the holocaust never happened either.Whatever you may think of Adams, his analysis is not without merit. I would say the same of Davy Ervine.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:43 AMSorry for the typo, should read:
“truth and knowledge are merely human constructions”Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:46 AMTo even link the civil rights campaign to the ira is bollox.There were many protestant people involved in the civil rights campaign, and the most basic of all rights is the right to life.that rules out the ra then.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:51 AMBilly,
The rate-payer franchise was in operation long before Northern Ireland existed, to claim it was a Machiavellian scheme to disenfranchise Catholics is nonsense.
As for discrimination in housing being ‘widespread’ I’m afraid that isn’t ‘well documented’. Richard Rose for example, found that most Unionist councils didn’t discriminate against Catholics. In fact they occupied a higher proportion of housing and were wealthier than Protestants living in council housing. That doesn’t excuse the actions of councils like Fermanaghs (or indeed Newry’s against Protestants, of which there has been a collective Nationalist amenesia about), but they were the exception rather than the rule.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:51 AM*and the holocaust never happened either.*
DING, DING, DING, folks we have a winner! Only four posts in and we have the “Northern Unionists were just the same as Nazis” analogy, well done USA, nicely timed there old chum.
Yes indeed having crappy electoral boundaries and voting sytem in local district wards in a back arse unimportant part of the north of Ireland, it really was just the same as Auschwitz and justified a thirty year long campaign of bombing and mayhem long after the electoral system was peacefully reformed.
I mean I’m sure the families of Tim Parry and Johnathon Ball could really understand why their wee boys were blown to pieces in a Warrington High Street because of an electoral anomaly in Derry which had been reformed a mere quarter of a century earlier.
I mean it makes sense to Gerry Adams, why can no one else work it out?
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 02:56 AMGreat, i’m glad I won.
As for your comments, I find them rather trite, specifically as I did not compare unionists to Nazis. Here in the US we use that expression to point our to people how baseless their positon is. But you will read what you want to read.
And in your own words goof ball,
“The Civil Rights campaign was ultimately very successful in achieving its aims… after a mere five years or so”. So by your calculations full Civil Rights were “granted” around 1974. That means then you agree that for 50 years there was a denial of Civil rights. Why should people have to wait 50 years for civil rights, that is a state asking to be overthrown.
“Those that make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable”. John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
I believe there are some unionists who cannot see, or will not see, that they and the state were as equally culpable in the whole mess as the republicans.Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 03:26 AMusa
why did the ira stil keep on murdering people?as i said earlier to link them to civil rights is just pure bolloxPosted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 04:03 AM“At its core it would require Sinn Féin constructing a viable political alternative to armed struggle which could deliver republican goals.” - Gerry Adams
It’s called politics and, contrary to Mr Adams delusion, his party didn’t invent it.
Politics didn’t “deliver republican goals” for PSF. In fact, Northern Ireland is now more integrated into the United Kingdom than at any point in its history since 1949 (when Ireland became a republic and the UK parliment removed the right of unionists to join the south). Articles 2 & 3 of the Irish constitution have been amended by a referendum to remove the south’s territorial claim to the north. The democratic right of both governments to unite north and south at their discretion has been removed, and replaced with two vetoes on unification, with one veto held by the citizens of the south and another veto held by the citizens of the north. An internal solution has been put in place with its own administration that operates on behalf and at the discretion of Her Majesty’s government; and PSF’s only remaining useful function to the British government is to ensure that its supporters are as fully integrated into the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland now is.
As the status quo improves, people become complacent with the improved status quo and, ergo, the desire to change it (such as by unification) lessons to the point of irrelevance. The dynamic of reunification fizzles out, making nonsense of the claim that “republican goals” are served by this ‘strategy.’ Likewise, no attempt is made by PSF to harmonise with those they claim they wish to unite with. In fact, the opposite of harmonisation is occurring: PSF are pushing their supporters towards socialism, which is a doctrine that is abhorrent to the south, making it highly unlikely that either the south would vote to accept the north in a poll (were one ever to be called) and equally as unlikely that the north would vote to accept the south. If that repugnancy wasn’t enough to ensure that unity is no longer an option and that the mechanism is now in place that ensures the continued integration of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, PSF (supported by the SDLP) would insist that the conditions of the GFA were a mandatory requirement of unity, ensuring that the south would dismiss the notion outright. Indeed, even if the SDLP and PSF didn’t insist on that, the unionists would insist on it, having the same deal breaking outcome.
So, Mr Adams is a very deluded boy if he thinks that PSF have done anything constructive to deliver “republican goals” with either its sectarian murder campaign or its political campaign. However he doesn’t actually think that. He simply expects his party’s supporters to think that. He knows that the deal was that the Shinners kept their sectarian murder campaign going until a deal was offered to them that allowed them to get out of it in a better position that when they started it: a very wealthy mafia who would be lauded as peacemakers rather than mass-murderers. When he talks about “creating the conditions for peace” he simply means that they decided to keep on killing people until they had built their own political party up to the point where they could enjoy a continuance of their power over society by alternative means.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 04:41 AM*So by your calculations full Civil Rights were “granted” around 1974.*
Er, no that would be by your own innumerate calculations, the Civil Rights campaign started around 1965, they achieved 80% of their objectives by November 1968, so my original figure of five years was pessimistic, they achieved their goals peacefully within three years.
What Adams is attempting to do here is to conflate the history of that time in the minds of people like USA whose grasp of historical facts are at best fuzzy.
He is attempting to conflate two very seperate and conflicting campaigns - the peaceful and ultimately successful Civil Rights campaign of the late 1960’s and the extremely violent and failed Provisional IRA campaign which began in the early 1970’s and which finally ran out of steam in 1998 - and present them as one seamless thread, they weren’t, they were polar opposites.
The Civil Rights organisation wished to peacefully reform the state of Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA rejected this instead opting to destroy the state of Northern Ireland using bombs and murder in order to create a united 32 county independent socialist Irish Republic.
The PIRA loathed and despised the Civil Rights’ leaders with a passion and regarded men like John Hume, Austin Currie, Gerry Fitt, Ivan Cooper etc as lower even than the Brits and loyalists. They were later to be sneered at as “stoops” an expression of contempt on the lips of Sinn Fein members.
The fact is that ultimately the IRA accepted that John Hume’s analysis of the propblem and his interpretation of the solution was indeed correct. Therefore after a mere 30 years of chaos the IRA Chief of Staff now sits up in Stormont peacefully administering a reformed Northern Ireland under the benign gaze of Ian Paisley.
That the IRA have now finally agreed to go along with the original Civil Rights programme after bloodily rejecting it for 30 years is I supose a small mercy for which we should all be grateful, but please don’t insult our inteligence by claiming that the IRA campaign was merely an extension of the Civil Rights movement when it was in fact a total rejection of what the Civil Rights movement sought.
Attempts by Adams to claim otherwise is simply bollocks on stilts.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 05:56 AM“...to destroy the state of Northern Ireland using bombs and murder in order to create a united 32 county independent socialist Irish Republic.” Harry Flashman
I wonder if any of them really had that objective? Those who gave the matter any thought must have concluded that the means would have the opposite outcome to the desired end. And if you decide to murder people for a particular end, then you’d need to be certain in your mind that the end was achievable by the means. To do otherwise is to act without conscience or intellect. And how exactly could they have believed that they could force the British government to abandon its obligations under international law to ensure that an ‘occupied’ society is stabilised before withdrawing from it when their murder campaign had the effect of destabilising it, ensuring that the British government could not withdraw? Did they think that the society wouldn’t degenerate into the civil war that was averted by partition? Did they think that the Irish government would accept the north under those conditions? Did they think that they would be in any position, post civil war, to overthrow the sovereign Irish Republic and establish their 32-county socialist republic? I don’t see them as anything other than a militant fascist movement that used violence to serve their own selfish sectarian agenda; and beyond the agenda level, as a group of thugs who used the label of ‘republicanism’ to disguise their hatred of those they murdered and to disguise their own criminal profiteering . They are not republicans. Indeed, their theft of that word along with their theft of the name Sinn Fein and Irish Republican Army had the effect to smear those honourable historical names with the same excrement that they used to smear their cells in Long Kesh.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 06:56 AMHarry,
Local councils had more powers at that time, including powers over the allocation of housing, the unfair allocation of which was a key component of the social unrest here. The retention of the property qualification beyond the rest of the UK did not help deal with the perception that unionists were trying to hold onto control of councils through unfair means. All this aside from the fact that unionists were personating and stealing votes left right and centre.
Westminster elections would have seemed more or less pointless given that all the power was at Stormont and in the councils.
I would agree that Stormont had successfully fixed many of the civil rights problems (the single biggest improvement being the establishment of the Housing Executive whose legacy lives on), however the unionists split right down the middle on this matter, but the majority of unionists were opposed to these reforms. Look at the results of the 1965 and 1973 elections on Wikipedia to see the effects. In order to see off the danger that unionism would defeat the moderate elements and reverse those rightful changes, powersharing was the only way to proceed. 30 years later, you guys are figuring this out.
I regard the IRA as a group of criminals and psychopaths who had no mandate for their “war” which they waged on the Irish as well as the British people. However, it can’t be denied that it would have been more difficult for their poisonous ideals to take root had unionism stopped to think about the implications of opposing simple reforms over civil rights. Terence O’Neill, and subsequently Brian Faulkner, figured that out but got themselves ridden over like a Mack truck. The IRA’s campaign, along with the security campaign waged largely against it, could never have resulted in anything other than a long-term stalemate but the unionists, unlike the SDLP and the civil rights people, did have the power to stop it.
USA,
Civil rights aren’t that easy to achieve, which, if you are an American you should well know. What are mortality rates like on Indian reservations these days ? And have you got a non-partisan electoral system that people can’t fiddle yet ? Interesting that you quote JFK who was elected partially thanks to votes stolen and rigged by the Mafia.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 10:16 AMThe public aims of the civil rights movement were achieved quite early on in these ‘troubles’, but a street campaign of cross-community mass non-violent resistance and civil disobedience could not co-exist with PIRAs riots bombs and bullets and claims for irish cultural separatism.
What were PIRA about? Not the last gasp of non-sectarian communist revolution, for the officials offered that and were rejected in favour of the traditionalist Provos.
I think the truth was sadder than that. Economically, irish nationalism and ulster localism had failed, to the point where governments north and south were about to embrace multinational industrial capitalism as the engine for revival.
This laid the inequalities in the north bare for sure, but it also exposed the backruptcy of the irish separatist project to its most sincere adherents, northern catholics, who had been interred in a gaelic cultural bubble by the catholic church and a disinterested stormont bureaucracy.
Rather than reject their own political cultural legacy as flawed, PIRA raged against any ould enemy they could target.
As the scale of a modern economy increased to embrace the whole island and beyond, politics would follow.
Did PIRA sense that the northern catholics would switch from being a disadvantaged minority in a small statelet to being that in a capitalist larger one?
An industrial capitalist island would not challenge inherited privilege, protestant or catholic.
Was their only tactical hope to try to ensure that unity was achieved not on rational and republican terms, but on the basis of religious identity and cultural affiliation?
Was their campaign really a campaign to unhitch English overlords, or one to hijack the island for a sectarian bloc?
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 10:40 AMUSA
<<<< The Civil Rights campaign was ultimately very successful in achieving its aims… after a mere five years or so”. So by your calculations full Civil Rights were “granted” around 1974. That means then you agree that for 50 years there was a denial of Civil rights. Why should people have to wait 50 years for civil rights, that is a state asking to be overthrown. >>>>
So when did your African-Americans achieve Civil Rights? 1968? 1974? 1980? even now?
Since your country has existed since 1776, by my calculations this means that for 200 years there was a denial of Civil rights. Why should people have to wait 200 years for civil rights, that is a state asking to be overthrown.
Life comfy in the glass house?
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 10:52 AM“On the one side there were nationalists and republicans who were denied basic human and civil rights”
This would be reasonable only if the aims of the IRA were to reverse any such discrimination and they had stopped when it had been eliminated (about 1973-ish). That was not their aims. Their aims were to annex territory to a state the majority of people living in (70%) did not want to be a part of, on the basis of ethnicity related claims. That was what made the IRA aims immoral. Until the IRA admits that that goal of (literally per dictionary definitions of both words) ethnic conquest was immoral then they have not accepted their guilt in contributing to the violence and the core problem still remains.
If unionists must accept that the indirect discrimination of the past was immoral then nationalists must accept that the aim of ethnic conquest was immoral. In practice they largely have. Let’s see them also do it in terms of principle.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 11:02 AM“There is no “real” truth, truth and knowledge is merely a human constructions, arrived at through dialogue.”
I have read some crap here at times but I think this one takes the biscuit. I was going to write “shades of Orwell’s 1984” but this nonsense actually puts 1984 in the shade. With this approach we could talk the Holocaust out of having ever happened.
Does it ever strike anybody that exactly the same type of local council franchise as applied in NI was in operation in Britain until the late 1950s - they mustn’t have liked catholics there either.
And that, as a local businessman, the likes of Mary McAleese’s father was entitled to multiple votes in council elections but non-business owning protestants (by far and away the vast majority) only had one vote.
Job discrimination in the likes of Mackies, Shorts and H&W;was not the responsibility of the unionist government, they were all private companies. Like everywhere else in europe at that time, an employer could hire or fire at will whoever he liked.
The real discrimination was in housing allocation in SOME unionist controlled council areas and, ergo, as in Derry, gerrymandering.
Adams is old enough to know all of this, he is just a plain liar trying to justify a largely sectarian campaign of butchery.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 12:10 PM“The real discrimination was in housing allocation in SOME unionist controlled council areas and, ergo, as in Derry, gerrymandering.”
Just unionist controlled council areas?
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 12:15 PMAs for the Stormont Parliament favouring Protestants: this is true insofar as it was an oligarchy, you had to be one of the few to take advantage of the club membership’s offers. As for the working classes of both Christian persuasions the only difference was that the parliament discriminated against their own kind whereas Stormont was always perceived to be alien to the other.
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Godwin’s law (also known as Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990:
“ As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law]
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 12:24 PMHarry, the rights campaign had been running from the mid-1950s; there were protests in the South as well as in the North.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 12:31 PMMy personal opinion is that the cultural situation in the world in to late 1970s-early 70s made revolution much more socially acceptable and morally defendable than it is now. The early pIRA in the late 60s-early 70s had a long list of other national revolutionary groups (Cuba, Vietnam) to follow in the path of, never mind the social uprisings going on at the time in Europe. And all this had the heady idealism of Marxism and Communism underpinning it. This was an attempt to have a marxist revolution and at the time that was much more morally defensible than it is now.
We can now look back with the knowledge that the revolution collapsed due to lack of popular support, penetration and in-fighting, descent into base sectrainism, the rise of a loyalist counter-revolution that eventually out-gunned it, and the collapse of communism along with revelations that the far-left wasn’t the ideal that people thought.
So the IRA started as an idealistic to try and overthrow the states, but the above factors doomed it, and the casualties per year show it petering out long before the ceasefires.
Adams is right that a political solution was needed, but wrong in that the IRA were part of civil rights. The IRA never anything more than a revolution inspired by fashion and doomed by time.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 12:33 PM“Job discrimination in the likes of Mackies, Shorts and H&W;was not the responsibility of the unionist government”
= economic liberalism gone mad.
Discrimination in the workplace is the responsibility of all governments. If they refuse to take responsibility, they can expect to be toppled.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 12:34 PMDK you are a million light years off track. The Provos were set up with money from Dublin on the explicit premise that they would oust the supposed Marxists and Communists then in control of the IRA, stay away from social issues, especially in the south, and stick firmly to military operations in the north. The anti-communist line continued well into the eighties, when they started flirting with a few ultra-leftist groups in Europe. Anti-communism was even used to justify the killing of Officials in so-called feuds, for example at Halloween 1975.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 01:42 PM“Discrimination in the workplace is the responsibility of all governments. If they refuse to take responsibility, they can expect to be toppled.”
You’re talking about different times though. At that time there were few governments interfering to any great degree in employment practices of private companies. I’m sure I recall reading a quote somewhere about judging acts of the past by the moral standards of the present that would be quite relevant. Suffice to say it’s rather akin to comparing apples and oranges.
Posted by on Nov 01, 2007 @ 01:48 PM
