Easter oration delivered on Good Friday 2015 by Anthony McIntyre at the Duleek annual Independent Easter commemoration hosted by Duleek 1916-1981 Monument Committee.

Posted by Jim on April 14, 2015

by The Pensive Quill

 

Easter oration delivered on Good Friday 2015 by Anthony McIntyre at the Duleek annual Independent Easter commemoration hosted by Duleek 1916-1981 Monument Committee.

Good Friday might seem an odd choice of day for republicans to gather in memory of the Easter Rising and to reflect on the republican men, women and youth who lost their lives in the service of the republican cause. Odd because of this day’s association with that grave ideologically toxic event in 1998 when so called republicans gathered at the graveside of republicanism and filled it with as much concrete as it was possible to heave into it. What was left over was later used to entomb the weaponry with which the IRA had prosecuted its war against the British.

There was not as much as one British weapon decommissioned. Where British weapons were put beyond use, and masked with the euphemism “bureaucratic bungle”, it was to put them beyond the reach of any court that might consider trying paratroopers for mass murder. There was none of the much vaunted parity of esteem there. British weapons alone were esteemed.

That it was people with a history steeped in republican activism who helped inter republicanism was not perchance. It was purposeful: two sets of interests dovetailed. A republican leadership ravished by the Stick virus, for which the only cure is political office, was highly susceptible to the British prescription. The British are blunt enough to acknowledge this in private conversation: they did not shaft republicanism, republicans shafted republicanism, is how one senior British official retorted to my challenge that they had set out not to secure a just outcome but to screw republicans.

To make this possible the British did not have to abandon any of their core objectives. They merely changed strategic tack. Instead of continuing with its long standing policy of excluding republicans the British state in a recalibration of the old divide and conquer tactic, decided to split the republican project: it calculated that it could include republicans but exclude republicanism. This is why the Good Friday Agreement does not remotely resemble the republican project nor does it contain one core republican precept. It is the inversion, the implosion, the anything but the success of the republican struggle.

Such has been the success of British state strategy that there are two unassailable and perhaps deeply uncomfortable truths that we are confronted with as we pay homage here this evening. And they relate to the volunteers who served and on occasion died in the ranks of the IRA and the INLA. Not one volunteer who lost their life fighting the war is on record as having stated that what exists today is what they were fighting for. They have left us nothing that would allow such a claim to be made on their behalf: not one letter, one interview, one recording – nothing. Everything we know about them indicates that today’s political dispensation was something to be avoided at all costs.

The second unassailable truth is that not one volunteer who fought in the ranks of the IRA will live to see a united Ireland. We can at least spare ourselves the indignity of feigning surprise at Brendan Hughes having said that the Good Friday Agreement acronym, GFA, stood for Got Fuck All. Sinn Fein for all its self-proclaimed negotiating prowess, sold a horse and bought a saddle.

So, while it has been said before, at times like this it is always worth saying again. While two days separate Good Friday from Easter Sunday, light years separate the Good Friday assent perspective from the Easter Sunday dissent perspective. If republicans were as doctrinaire as they are often made out to be we would be holding our commemoration in two days time, Easter Sunday. If Sinn Fein were as honest as they pretend to be, they would have held their commemoration, two days ago: on Spy Wednesday.

At Easter, whatever may divide republicans, we come together for one thing above all others: to commemorate the republican dead. Each of us brings our own particular memory. For me, I would like to pay special tribute to one IRA volunteer who was laid to rest in Belfast today. Toby McMahon was one of the most committed, serious, thinking and industrious activists within the ranks of the IRA, where he stayed through thick and thin. He did not die on active service but he certainly saw a lot of it, and numerous years in prison to boot. With a highly developed bullshit detector he was never destined to secure the much vaunted average industrial wage. He died in poverty. Volunteers like Toby McMahon deserve full recognition for their contribution at this most poignant time in the republican calendar.

We come here with different takes on republicanism and its potential to address the societal inadequacies it speaks out against. We may disagree vigorously, even bitterly about the past, present and the future. But the intellectual and emotional centre of gravity that draws us to a place such as this outstanding monument to human selflessness and unarmed protest, is a dissent from treaties with the British that underwrite and legitimise partition. Fine Gael and its condom, known as the Irish Labour Party, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein are all treaty parties, each buying into the partition principle. They form a very powerful Treatyite bloc, willing to smear, ostracise, censor and ultimately crush those who do not subscribe to their view of the world. It was in the face of such formidable power that the late Dolours Price would assert her preference for the republican way, which she identified as the way of the few and the spat upon.

Michael Collins, prior to signing the Treaty which would later pitch him in a murderous vendetta against republicans, said at the graveside of Thomas Ashe, that the volley of shots “which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian”. Today, we gather in a silence not punctuated by the rattle of gunfire to remember the Fenian dead, the republican fallen. Nor is there a Che Guevera type call “to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory”. We need none of that to prompt our memory of those who lost everything. Guns too often were used as weapons of mass deception to cheat those in the ranks of the IRA, as if the importation of them from Libya and elsewhere somehow equated with fidelity to a republican belief system.

At the same time let us not delude ourselves about the men of 1916 or those who would later follow in the path blazed by them. We are not standing here in honour of peace promoting hippies, as worthy as such types may well be. Easter 1916 was an armed uprising against the British state, just as the armed struggle of the post 1969 IRA was. But it was not just that. It embodied a spirit of dissent from the nefarious machinations of the British Empire and British rule in Ireland. It is vital that the spirit of critical dissent is retained in a world where the strategic usefulness of armed struggle has been exhausted. Republicanism otherwise is finished.

Armed campaigning, because of its dependence on a culture of secrecy and the exclusion of the many from the secrets of the few, will invariably conjure into existence that most inegalitarian of military hierarchies, characterised by cabals and caudillos all too eager to use the blood of those at the bottom as a lubricant to grease the wheels of the political careers of those at the top. Despite the claim by George Orwell that it is a struggle to see what is in front of our nose, it is not that difficult to work out where this will end up. The power cartel, although not society, in this country has been well served by Fianna Fail. And if it concludes that Official Fianna Fail is in terminal decline it will as readily embrace Provisional Fianna Fail.

It is sometimes asked how you supposed to see something when your political career depends on you not seeing it? I don’t have a political career and can take a leaf out of Steve Biko’s book, seeing what I want and writing what I like. What I see and what I write about is this: the history of the Northern conflict is being reframed. At times it is done so bizarrely that we could be excused for thinking that the script writers of Monty Python have been stirring their creative juices with frenetic energy. There is something horribly satirical conjured up in the image of the IRA chief of staff during the 1981 hunger strikes sporting bowtie and tails to toast the British queen, while she permits him to splice quail’s eggs and dine on halibut. How the British establishment must have rollicked with mirth and glee as they observed the once “greatest threat” to them ape them in all their monarchical finery and spiffing splendour.

In these times the British are more sophisticated than they were back in the day. They don’t force you to paint your face, wear a grass skirt and shake a rain stick for their merriment: they just have you assume the posture of Homi Bhabha’s mimic man. They teach you to think like them, talk like them, stand like them, act like them, and even to condemn and criminalise like them. They get you to suppress what you once were and to express what they have got you to become. They don’t wear what you wear. You wear what they wear. They remould you in their image. The discerning critique contained in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has lost none of its analytical potency.

With one former chief of staff celebrating victory to the banquet men and another embroiled in more sex abuse scandals than the average bishop, a damning distortion-inducing prism is now firmly in place through which history is truly constructed from the perspective of the present: the character of republicanism is projected as caricature, like some sort of seedy play acted out by grotesque gothic-like characters all trying to out-Pinocchio each other. Each of us old enough probably feels tainted by our collective failure to have prevented it.

Quails eggs and halibut are far removed from the dietary regime of erstwhile H Block prisoner Christy Walsh who is now on his 19th day of hunger strike. This morning, as he does every morning, he wrote to the former IRA chief of staff who sampled the fine foods of royalty. Christy appeals to him to put the promised manners on David Ford, the so called Justice Minister. Christy Walsh is the victim of a British state stitch up, which in turn is given cover by the Stormont political class. We do not need to ask ourselves about the nature of the squalid political arrangement that prioritises the political career of David Ford over the suffering of a victim of a grave British miscarriage of justice. While we remember the dead we must never forget the living. Leave here today determined to do something on behalf of Christy Walsh, a current victim of British injustice.

We may lack the power to prevent what is unfolding before our very eyes. But we can bear witness to it by refusing to acquiesce in the organised lying that protects the peace process and the political expansionism of one party to the detriment of the rest. We can honour the republican dead by speaking fearlessly and truthfully about them: that they did not die so that some caudillo could scream traitors at people for carrying out the type of orders he once issued or to enable another to become Europe’s first Minister for the Disappeared.

I have no idea what thoughts people will leave here with today. Some may even leave disgusted that they heard what they didn’t want to hear. Tough it out. There is no right to be protected from ideas that offend you.

But there are a few ideas that as republicans we may wish to consider. Republicanism is always about the rule of the people, not rule by oligarchies, monarchies or hierarchies. If republicanism it is to function as a movement it must do so as a movement of the people not a movement over the people. It must constructively engage with the wishes of the people, even where it finds those wishes wrong, rather than prescribe in tablets of stone what those wishes are. Republicanism, if it is to make something of the sacrifices of the activists we honour from every generation, must integrate their deaths into an ongoing critique of power within this society, North and South.

We inhabit a deeply inegalitarian society where power is organised hierarchically and dispersed unevenly. It is a society which will be well served by a republican project willing to speak truth to power, willing to say not in our name or in the name of those we commemorate today.