Anyone who found this post about Sean Garland and his recent legal difficulties interesting may also be interested to know that the first full length history of Official Irish Republicanism, from before the Provisional split to the present, is to be published this week.
There’s no shortage of books about their Provisional splinter group, but despite becoming, as the Workers Party, a mainstream political party in the Republic at one point there’s a real dearth of academic work about the Officials. There hasn’t even been a good popular history book covering their whole lifespan. Instead those who are interested have been left with Sean Swan’s interesting but narrowly focused “Official Irish Republicanism: 1962-1972″, some chapters in Henry Patterson’s “The Politics of Illusion” and various other bits and pieces. A recent, and not very useful, addition to the literature was a pair of articles in the Critique journal, under the title “Revisionist Marxism in Ireland” which seem to have relied in large part on interviews with people with a very antagonistic history with the Officials.
Hopefully this new book, “The Lost Revolution: The Official IRA and the Workers Party” by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar will give us a good overall account and fill in some of the many of the gaps. Hanley is a history lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, while Millar is an Irish Examiner journalist. Pre-release media coveragehas already revealed some interesting details.
The Irish edition of the Sunday Times this week contained a lengthy extract dealing with the influence wielded by Sinn Fein – The Workers Party in RTE, the state broadcaster, during the 1980s. Monday’s Irish Examiner has an article by Millar with some interesting claims about the Irish government helping to arm the IRA at the start of the Troubles and details of an Irish cabinet memo from 1969 which talked of plans to encourage a left/right split in the IRA.
Conor McCabe, an Irish Labour historian, has an interesting revew up here:
http://dublinopinion.com/2009/08/31/the-lost-revolution-the-story-of-the-official-ira-and-the-workers-party-by-brian-hanley-scott-millar/#more-2446
Why didn’t the Workers’ Party just fuse with the Irish Communist Party? The views of the two groups seemed the same to me. Were there differences that I just never learned about?
They were quite politically different from each other at most points in their history. There was a period when the CP was a big influence on the Officials, particularly in the early 1970s, but before and after that there wasn’t really much chance of them merging.
When the Republican Movement was moving to the left in the 1960s they were influenced by some people who had themselves been in or around the CPGB or Connolly Association rather than the CPI and at that point they were still more about than the IRA than Sinn Fein and so had structures and conspiratorial attitudes that wouldn’t really have fitted with the CP. Later on, as the Officials continued to evolve into a more traditional Stalinist Party, they would have objected to the CP’s still left nationalist line on the North and I think they had also come to regard them as irrelevant and ineffectual.
Have ordered this, AM – cheers for the heads up.
The Provies have fell into a worse trap than the sticks,they have formed a goverenment with Stormont(remember wreck Stormont) now we have suits instead of donkey jackets representing us.The sticks were naive,for,all their faults they wantede best for the worker.On reflection the provos just want a say,they got the people war weary,otherwise except what they say,then they become part of the establishment,sticks in reverse.Civill rights was not a viable alternative to them,but its nice to say they were involved after so many deaths. Everyone made mistakes but socialism is dead in Ireland everyone is formimg an orderly quehue to join the establishment
When you get a book review from an phoblact your doing something not right