Denying in theory the idea that the Irish-British were the problem, the Provisionals recognised it in bloody practice. The nonsensically inadequate explanation that the Protestant-Unionists were all traitors, collaborators, anti-nationalists came in time to amount to a “republican” version of the idea that there were two Irish nations, or peoples.
The Protestants were a bad, non-legitimate, Irish nation; and so the Provisionals, in effect a private army whose war was backed by perhaps a third of the Six-Counties Catholics, could maim and kill as many of the one million Irish Unionists as whim, exigency and military or sectarian logic suggested to them. The “left-wing” INLA could go into a Pentecostal church in Dalkey and open fire with a machine gun on the worshippers; the Provisional IRA could blow up an 11 November commemoration-day Protestant service in Enniskillen (1987).
Backed only by a minority of the six county Catholic minority, acting as if to drive the history-gouged ditch between the Protestants and Catholics deeper and bloodier, yet claiming that their supreme goal was a united Ireland... did they think they could simply overwhelm the Protestants? Surely not.
The Provos go constitutional
By the mid 1990s, after all that had happened in the previous 30 years, it was impossible to pretend that the problem was only or mainly a matter of “British-occupied Ireland”. The keystone of the Provisionals’ entire political strategy was still the idea that the Six Counties was “British-occupied Ireland”, but now they understood it to mean that Britain was to blame for not “persuading” the one million Irish Protestants into a united Ireland.
These “Irish nationalists” and “Irish republicans” self-righteously denounced Britain because Britain would not force one million Irish (or Irish-British) people into an independent Irish Republic for them!
The Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein came to look to not an intra-Irish but a British-imposed settlement. They killed Irish-Unionist people in order to compel the British government to impose a settlement on those Irish Unionists.
The great self-hypnotising lie — British-occupied Ireland — had been twisted in the course of the war into the demand for the demonised British not to get out until they had compelled one million Irish people to do what the Provisional IRA want.
Despite the ideologising, the appeals to history, and the appeals to republican ideals and aspirations, the Provisionals did not believe in an Irish solution. They believed in a British solution to the problem of relations between the two people on the island. The logic of reality had forced the Provisional IRA not only to accept that the root problem was not “British occupied Ireland” but to look to the British military occupying forces to “solve” the real problem, the fact that one million Irish people would fight, guns in hand, against submitting to the Provisionals, and if necessary will carve out their own “self-determination” against Catholic Ireland. The Provisionals had blundered and stumbled on to the ground of traditional Unionism! That is what the talk of the British becoming “persuaders” of the Protestants really meant.
Thus, the Provisional Carbonari-republicans, having donned much of the old clothing of Stalino-populist republicanism, reduced the whole tradition to bloody nonsense. They have become an utterly decadent sect of washed-out republicans concerned not with Wolfe Tone’s goal of uniting the Irish people but with uniting the territory regardless of the people. Their final phase before their move into mainstream bourgeois politics was a pledge to go on bombing and killing — mainly Irish people — until they got the British solution they favour, until they got Britain — the great Satan of Irish history — to compel the Irish minority to “unite.”
Yet that approach was not really new. The demand that the British compel the Protestant-Unionist Irish minority to submit to the Irish Catholic-Nationalist majority is a very old one. It sustained the Home Rule Party in its long tail-to-dog relationship to the Liberal Party in the quarter century before the First World War.
Both Irish peoples were allied to a “great” British party, the Protestant-Unionists to the Tories and the Catholic-Nationalists to the Liberals. Each looked to its ally to gain it complete victory — the Unionists to the Tories to stop Home Rule for any part of Ireland by killing it with coercion and by such “kindness” as distributing the land to the tenants; the Catholic-Nationalists to the Liberals to bestow Home Rule and enforce it on the Irish minority. Corrupted and demoralised by their British alliance, neither side looked to an intra-Irish solution.
In the event, the Tories proved better allies than the Liberals, and a solution was imposed by a British cabinet in which the leaders of the pre-World War One Unionist rebellion against the Liberal government sat as powerful members. Seemingly very favourable to the northern Unionists, the settlement was in fact very short-sighted, because it included so large a Catholic-Nationalist minority in the Northern Ireland state as to make it unviable.
There was no democratic — that is, no republican — case for the attitude to the Protestants of the Provisionals in the last stage of their military campaign. The only case was a Catholic-chauvinist one. If Wolfe Tone’s republicanism started with the call to end sectionalism, the nadir of Carbonari republicanism was reached in the Provisionals’ use of republican catchcries in the pursuit of sectionalism and sectarianism.
A million or so of Ireland’s people — natives of the island of Ireland, and descendants of people who have lived in Ireland for hundreds of years — want British in “occupation” because they consider themselves British. Those million are not loosely sprinkled amongst the Catholic majority population of the island, but the compact majority in north-east Ulster.
Their rights cannot include the right to veto the rights of the Irish majority? No, but there is no democratic — that is, honest republican — or socialist case to be made that the rights of the Irish majority includes the right to the territory where they do not have majority support, that is, to oppress the people of another identity living there.
These accumulating political and social absurdities combined with the impossibility of military victory to change the Provisional IRA. They moved in the 1980s towards using politics to supplement small-scale wear. Thus they coined the slogan, “A ballot paper in one hand, and an Armalite [rifle] in the other” to sum up a two-track approach.
Tentatively they moved away from war, declaring a unilateral ceasefire in August 1994. They resumed attacks in Britain a year later, but their war ended finally in a 1997 ceasefire. They negotiated the Good Friday Agreement, accepting the need for Protestant consent to political change, and agreeing to work a power-sharing Six Counties system with the Protestant Unionists.
It took a decade to get the present Paisleyite-Sinn Fein tandem administration.
At the same time a Council of Ireland was set up, giving an all-Ireland dimension. The pre-slump economic boom in the South seemed likely to knit together North and South economically to an unprecedented degree. After much to-ing and fro-ing, the Provisional IRA first disarmed and then — more or less — disbanded its structures, merging in fact with Sinn Fein.
What the Provisionals did from the mid-1990s amounted to a damning condemnation of everything they had done from 1973 onwards. Everything that the Provisional IRA accepted in the Good Friday Agreement had been there, an in a more flexible system, in the Sunningdale Agreement of November 1973, under which for five months (January to May 1974) a power-sharing government existed in Belfast.
It took a two-decade war to transform the Provisional IRA into constitutional nationalist. The splinters from the Provisionals in the 80s and 90s, the “Real” and “Continuity” IRAs, stood and stand on the old Provisional IRA ground, adopting the attitude to the Adams-McGuinness organisation that the Provisionals in the late 60s and early 70s took to the populist-Stalinist “Official” IRA and Sinn Fein. They have the politics, and the contradictions, of the Provisionals in the 1970s.
The Six Counties, where the Catholic minority is in fact the majority in not much less than half the territory, is not a sane or legitimate arrangement of Irish affairs. From this fact the new IRAs draw their political strength. By the underlying facts also — the fact of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland — they are forced into the position of reactionary utopian nationalists, devotees of a nation that does not exist as they define it.
The appeal to the mystical unity of Ireland, the irrational conception of the sacred unity of the island. The nation is defined as the island — not as people, but as geography and a mystified and myth-ridden history.
About this attitude Connolly long ago said all that needs to be said: “Ireland as distinct from her people is nothing to me”.
The acceptance by many on the left for many years of the activities of the Provisional IRA as a progressive, or possibly progressive, response to the oppressive conditions under which many Six Counties Catholics suffer, meant allowing myth to eclipse politics.
Not to ask what, if anything, the activities of the Provisional IRA had, and those of the “Real” and “Continuity” IRAs have now, to do with the ideals of either Wolfe Tone or with the republican socialism of Connolly; not to measure what they actually did against historic Irish republican ideals; not to ask yourself whether the shards and fragments of “Tone republicanism” or “Connolly republicanism” the Provisionals deployed and their would-be successors now deploy were or are being abused — that is to refuse to think about the issues.
In fact, many left wingers simply bowed down before a fetish: the Provos had guns, the Provos fought, therefore they were revolutionaries against the establishment — therefore they were to be supported. Some of the most fervid of the Provophiles in Britain showed utter indifference to what happened to ordinary Irish people. They submitted themselves to massive depoliticisation on the Irish question. They let the fact of the Provo war run like a tank through their minds, churning to mud political ideals, socialist goals, Marxist assessments, and even elementary class criteria.
They dispensed with almost every single tool of Marxist, or socialist, or plain rational analysis — that is with every means available to us, as socialists, Marxists, workers, Wolfe Tone republicans, or plain human beings, for making sense of the world. Violence took on a mystical significance and assumed an all-transforming quality. Many left-wingers, especially in Britain, became vicarious Carbonari republicans.
Faced with the outright bourgeois Sinn Fein/IRA of the last decade, none of them, as far as I know, has ever drawn up a balance sheet of their time as cheerleaders for “the IRA”. They were what might be called “Fifth Comintern Congress Trotskyists”! Trotsky was not.
The “Fifth Comintern Congress Trotskyists” face reality blindfolded by ideology. Marxist socialists and republicans in Tone’s and Connolly’s tradition look reality straight in the face. That is the only way to change it for the better, not to let it dominate you and impose its own age-old patterns on you even while you struggle against it.
