Posted by Jim on October 14, 2019
Provisional Sinn Fein has always been dominated by the Marxist politics of Easter Rising icon James Connolly, but in the present Brexit upheaval, could the party swing to the Right-wing in nationalism to re-invent itself politically on both sides of the Irish border? That’s the contentious debate which commentator Dr John Coulter sparks in his Fearless Flying Column today.
Sinn Fein has always been an electorally pragmatic party, but with general elections north and south of the border expected in the not too distant future, as well as the looming centenary of partition, could the surprise tactic for the party be to swing it to the Hard Right and rebrand it as the unassailable heroes of Patriotic Nationalism?
In the current Northern Ireland Assembly (albeit suspended since January 2017), Sinn Fein was already in bed politically in the power-sharing Stormont Executive with what was once perceived to be one of the most hard-line of the Right-wing loyalist movements, the Democratic Unionist Party.
While the DUP was clearly Hard Right on the constitution and Union, it was equally viewed as a quiet soft Left party on bread and butter issues because of its Protestant working class roots. In spite of this supposed ‘soft socialism’ of the DUP, there is no way under Paisley senior’s leadership it could even have been branded a Marxist movement in terms of economic policies.
Any future Assembly poll will more likely see the SF/DUP dominated Executive returned as Sinn Fein finally puts what remains of the socialist-leaning SDLP under boss Colum Eastwood to the electoral sword, and the DUP pulls yet another poll rabbit of its magic hat to fend off both the challenge from a supposedly resurgent Ulster Unionist Party (if the Lisburn and Castlereagh council election is taken as a benchmark and not the European poll disaster) as well as the Alliance ‘bounce’ under Naomi Long.
In the Republic, Sinn Fein urgently needs to reverse both the recent Council and European election slides if it is realistically to become a minority coalition partner in the next Dail, probably with Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael, still known in some circles as ‘The Blueshirts’ because of the party’s past history in the 1930s with the fascist Blueshirt movement which stomped about Southern Ireland.
Some might say – why should Sinn Fein give up its hardline socialist principles simply to climb into bed politically with Fine Gael, when it did not need to perform an ideological U-turn to enter Stormont with the DUP in 2007 following the St Andrews Agreement?
The core problem is not for Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, but in the Republic, where memories of the bitter Irish Civil War of the 1920s still run deep in many republican families.
Again, Sinn Fein spin doctors could box clever, play ‘the red card’ and indulge in some historical revisionism by emphasising that the 1916 Easter Rising was inspired by the openly Leftist Irish Citizens Army, and fanatical socialists, such as James Connolly, the Scottish communist who formed his own Irish Socialist Republican Party – not to be confused with the terror group the INLA’s political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party.
However, an historical hurdle which republican revisionists have to leap is that the failed Dublin Easter Rising came a year before the 1917 Leninist-inspired revolution in Russia. The Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizens Army were active at a time when the core foe was Right-wing imperialism, and particularly the British Empire.
The Rising was a shotgun marriage between the fundamentalist Catholicism of Patrick Pearse and Connolly’s militant socialism.
But the modern Ireland which commemorates the Rising annually is a different political animal from the Ireland which witnessed the failed coup; a coup which saw some Dublin residents spit on the rebels as they were marched into captivity by the British. It was only the uncompromising decision of General ‘Bloody’ Maxwell who insisted on having the Rising leaders executed which turned them from political upstarts and nuisances into republican icons.
If Sinn Fein is now to capitalise on future Rising commemorations, the centenary of partition and the formation of the Northern state, as well as the centenary of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Irish Civil War, it must use them to create a new brand of Right-wing Patriotic Nationalism.
To achieve this rebranding, it must eliminate the view that modern-day Sinn Fein is a communist party under a new banner.
Likewise, while Sinn Fein’s propaganda machine has worked effectively in wiping the political landscape on one hand with the SDLP, and on the other, ensuring dissident republicanism does not become a significant electoral force in the same way as in the Unionist community, the No Camp parties against the Good Friday Agreement – especially the DUP – eventually overtook David Trimble’s Yes Camp UUP.
Sinn Fein must now convince the Southern electorate it has the political maturity – in spite of all Sinn Fein’s rantings against austerity and Brexit – that it is a party fit for government in Leinster House. The only way Sinn Fein can achieve this is for party president Mary Lou McDonald to swing her party to the Hard Right to avoid an Ian Paisley senior-style coup within her own ranks.
What Irish republicanism now as an ideology needs is a new radical Right-wing party – not Sinn Fein spinning out more left of centre rhetoric about saving the working class.
For years after the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, the Southern electorate rejected Sinn Féin because it regarded it as the Communist Party under another name. Could that perception of being too Hard Left have been the reason for the party’s poor showings in both the council and European polls in the Republic earlier this year?
Sinn Féin needs to relaunch itself as an ultra Right-wing nationalist party under the banner – Ireland for the Irish and nobody else!
Sinn Fein activists aligning themselves with Left-wing policies might have been cool in 1916 in the days of Connolly and Larkin, but it has become a major millstone in the third millennium.
Irish Labour’s recovery is at a snail’s pace; the Stickies’ agenda (Workers Party) has faded into the dustbin of history, and the new kids on the Left block, Peadar Toibin’s Aontu is viewed as a one-trick pro-life party.
Other leftist republican parties – such as the IRSP, Republican Sinn Fein, Saoradh and the 32 County Sovereignty Movement – will be nothing more than fringe organisations.
Former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams had talked in the past about his admiration for radical Irish Presbyterianism. Could the solution to Sinn Fein’s political migraines following the Southern poll disaster be to turn Sinn Féin into an Irish National Party with the slogan – Be Proud to be a Patriot.
One of Ireland’s greatest Protestant nationalist patriots was the Lisburn journalist Ernest Blythe, who became a leading light in General Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirt movement.
To stop young republicans – for whom the 1994 Provisional IRA ceasefire is merely a date in a history book – becoming Saoradh radicals, Sinn Fein should launch the Greenshirts – a radical Right-wing youth movement which instils disciplined Irish patriotic values, folklore and culture into its ranks.
The Greenshirts could help eliminate the nationalist scourges of joyriding and recreational rioting.
Mary Lou should announce that the ‘Shinners’ are amending their title to Sinn Féin, the Nationalist Patriots Party.
If you want a radical Right-wing Presbyterian to explain this much-needed new Irish Patriotism to the unfaithful, give me a shout at my Twitter account @JohnAHCoulter
As a life-long Rangers fanatic, even I’d be happy to swap my beloved Glasgow blue top to don the shamrock shirt of the Greenshirt movement. Right is might, Mary Lou!
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
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Anthony McIntyre digests the ideas in a book on the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit.
In the first lines of his forward for this book, Richard Humphreys wastes no time in setting out his stall. His purpose was to examine and explain the implications of the Good Friday Agreement in relation to any potential constitutional change in the status of Northern Ireland. By the time I had reached the last page, it seemed beyond dispute that he had made no idle boast.
The author, former a legal advisor to the Fine Gael-Labour-Democratic Left coalition, and currently a High Court Judge, had his interest in the North’s constitutional minefield fired by participation in the opening sessions of the 1996 talks that ultimately came to fruition in the GFA. He did not seek to exaggerate his role, merely saying he was on the margins of the Irish delegation. Back then he was on the periphery of the process, today he is an authority on it.
Much has been penned about the Good Friday Agreement but nothing quite like this. Richard Humphreys writes in clear language and where the narrative becomes unavoidably complex because of the structures, processes and relationships involved, he circumvents anything resembling the legalese and sometimes archaic language of the court where he plies his trade. The concepts he elucidates are always accessible to the reader.
As a judge he might hand out punishment but as an analyst he is something of a glutton for it, setting himself the unenviable task of correcting many of the misunderstandings that exist within the political class about what the GFA means. While many of them like to be politically correct, they do not like being factually corrected and can be quite acerbic in their responses. Yet Humphreys is spot on: at times his targets seem to be learner drivers, in need of an instructor to advise them of the rules of the political highway.
At least the ignorance being cross community says something for parity of esteem.
The author was writing after the referendum had paved the way for the British to exit the European Union but had not yet witnessed in full the Monty Pythonesque farce it has degenerated into. Brexit has not only constituted an assault on the logic of the GFA but also has threatened to:
rupture a whole suite of arrangements and presuppositions that have existed on the island in the forty-five years since the UK and Ireland joined together on 1 January 1973.
With so much up in the air as a result of Brexit, there is a tendency in some quarters to spin the GFA as a feast of moving parts: a cynical exercise in political opportunism designed to allow them to escape the parts that constrain them. Hence Arleen Foster, the DUP leader, argues that it is not a sacrosanct agreement. Humphries shows that it very much is.
When I read Seamus Mallon’s A Shared Homeplace and observed how he had evolved to the point of assuming an implacable hostility to the 50 + 1 rule for bringing about Irish unity, I thought to myself how much he would have benefited from reading Beyond The Border, the subtitle of which is The Good Friday Agreement and Irish Unity After Brexit. By the time I reached the closing pages of Mallon’s book where he revealed that he had in fact read it, I was even more amazed that he seemed to have learned so little from it. Humphreys, while acknowledging the 50+1 as a “crude majority test” nevertheless nails the issue concisely, anticipating and dismissing the Mallon argument in favour a super majority.
Generally people who say that one cannot coerce hundreds of thousands of unionists into a united Ireland have no real problem with coercing hundreds of thousands of nationalists into a United Kingdom.
Enter a linked theme: the book also has lessons for those who felt that Mary Lou McDonald walking behind a banner in New York proclaiming England Get Out Of Ireland was somehow a thought crime of grave proportions. Brits Out, to give the banner a more traditional republican inflection, is as valid a position to hold as Brits In, with the overriding stipulation that the Brits in this context is government rather than unionist citizens of the North. Oddly, the author seems to distance himself from the concept suggesting it represents “a certain failure to take on board the right of people of Northern Ireland to regard themselves as British.”
Humphreys approaches his subject in every conceivable way, starting out with chapters on the architecture and evolution of the GFA followed by a chapter on the challenges of Brexit. It then moves on to a discussion of the implications for Irish unity and more, including the St Andrews Agreement, the Stormont House Agreement, the Fresh Start Agreement, and the up-down history of the Assembly and Executive. A cynic might wonder how with so many agreements there is so much disagreement.
I read the book as someone who for long had been immersed in republican activism. I have never been enamoured to the GFA. I can live with it but not with the pretence that it made the IRA’s struggle worth it. The Agreement does nothing to validate the IRA’s armed coercion, championing instead the principle of consent. The Good Friday Agreement was an internal solution to what was framed as an internal problem, a stark rebuttal of the republican analysis of the root cause of the conflict. Arguably it’s most significant achievement lay in bringing the Provisional Movement to embrace a position it had long abhorred and then to persuade many of its members that Good Friday rather than Easter Sunday was really what the armed campaigning was waged for, equality rather than unity. As the late Martin McGuinness said in relation to another matter “total and absolute nonsense and … hooey of the worst kind.”
Beyond The Border reaffirmed for me the absolute failure of the armed Provisional project I had been involved in, the stated aim of which was to expel the British state from Ireland. The Agreement might not ensure partition into perpetuity as Tom King – a 1980s British Secretary of State in the North – once felt was the written in stone predestined future for the North but it certainly guarantees, for as long as people in the North wish it, a role for the British state. The GFA and its British administrative input will outlive partition and coexist with Irish Unity. Even then an internal border could remain while a separate Northern executive would continue to administratively function. “… the British dimension of Northern Ireland is a permanent feature of the constitutional landscape.” Were all the deaths and misery that we, the Loyalists and the British state managed between us to inflict worth that? Not by a long shot. No war was needed to bring us to this point.
I am no more receptive to the Good Friday Agreement having read the book, but I cannot deny that my understanding of it has been enhanced exponentially. For that reason, those republicans who continue to think armed campaigning is a productive means of tackling what they perceive as Ireland’s British problem could, if they possessed a modicum of politically savvy, see just how comprehensive the defeat of coercive republicanism has been, how it was nailed to the cross on Good Friday 1998 and has no chance of being resurrected no matter how many Easter Sundays come to pass. The author while favouring Irish unity, shows that while not unattainable it is certainly a much more complex and layered phenomenon than the one dimensional militaristic minds of armed republicanism seem to believe.
Humphreys has been rebuked in some quarters, notably former Taoiseach John Bruton, for serving up a limited purely legalistic approach. It is far from certain that Bruton has restored balance, but has instead allowed his own political preference get in the way of vertical thinking. Humphreys, did bring a legal mind to his task but to suggest he might have been short on political savvy highlights the dangers of lateral thinking shaped by a skewed political perspective.
It is hard to lavish enough praise on this work. Thematic and structured, each theme is developed in a linear fashion to assist the reader avoid the loss of their soul to the devil of detail. Erudite, methodical tightly reasoned and crystal clear in layout and presentation, it is an indispensable thread to guide intellectual travellers through the labyrinthine processes of the Good Friday Agreement in a time when Brexit bandits have shaken the tree in a hope that if they cannot uproot it, they can benefit from the shakedown. There is even something in the book for those conspiracy theorists who believe that Britain’s role in Ireland has been the working out of a long religious Jihad against Irish Catholicism. Humphreys refers to the “blatantly anti-Catholic pieces of legislation still on the Westminster Statue book” before going on to list them.
I have recommended Richard Humphreys’ book to people with polar opposite views such as Jamie Bryson and Sean Bresnahan. Students of Northern politics and its practitioners, who make little or no effort to familiarise themselves with the arguments laid out in Beyond The Border will ultimately short change their supporters. Arleen Foster might well be a recipient of dubious turkey but that hardly means she will be able to talk turkey at the key moment.
Richard Humphreys, 2018. Beyond The Border: The Good Friday Agreement and Irish Unity After Brexit. Merrion Press. ISBN 978-1-78537-205-6
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Anthony McIntyre on the extradition of John Downey.
It is a political and judicial travesty that John Downey has been extradited by the Dublin judiciary to stand trial in the North for military actions he is alleged to have been involved in back in 1972 and from which resulted the deaths of two British state security personnel.
His extradition comes in a week when the excellent BBC Spotlight series suggested that as many as fifty million documents are still in possession of the security services, and withheld from the public, which are likely to contain information vital to a fuller understanding of the role of the British state in commissioning what it labelled terrorism. Hands on British involvement in the direction of terrorism is matched only by a cover up of immense proportions.
Why Dublin continues to afford any legitimacy to how London conducted its war in the North, rather than pursue it through the international courts, while not surprising, is something it has not yet offered an honest explanation for. It prefers, instead, to hide behind legalese, citing the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit. Rather than offering up Downey to a Diplock court, it should be seeking to place Britain in the Hague.
Downey’s extradition is also a result of the party of which he is a member having bombastically undertaken to put manners on the PSNI so that it could bamboozle its capitulation over the line and secure the party’s backing for British policing. It said nothing about extradition being on the new policing tin. Truth is, its careerist leaders had no intention of doing anything remotely like putting manners on anyone other than those foolish enough within the party to believe them. Now, and not for the first time, the PSNI has repaid in truly bad manners, letting Sinn Fein know who is daddy on the block. To the victor the spoils.
It is so easy to envisage the swarms of Agents of Influence drawn like flies to the odour of the leadership, urging that the party not protest too much, it might upset the peace process. Tell the grassroots it is all part of a grand design, John Downey is really going up to Maghaberry as a covert plot to put manners on the prison service.
When first served with extradition papers last year Downey told An Garda “I’d say it was the DUP and not the DPP” who drove the request.
I’d say it was both. In his observation at the time Downey failed to acknowledge the vindictive role of the British state and its prosecutors in Ireland. Yes, the DUP was demanding his arrest but the Public Prosecution Service in the North, wholly sensitive to the hurt hubris of its political masters caused by Downey having earlier walked free from a London court due to an abuse of process, was determined to exact revenge.
This morning in an Omagh court Downey was refused bail. Sheer vindictiveness on the part of the PSNI. Everybody without exception has been granted bail in legacy cases. The bias of the PSNI can be gleaned from its policy of never opposing bail for former members of the security forces who have been charged with conflict related activity. Soldier F, who indisputably slaughtered people on Bloody Sunday, was not even required to appear in court. No objections by the PSNI to bail for this mass killer.
Downey handed himself over to the Gardaí, Had he have been a flight risk, he would have flown the coop rather than risk being grounded in the North. Also when on bail for the Hyde Park bombings, he honoured his bail conditions. The spineless toady hearing the case, Michael Ranaghan, deferred to the PSNI falsehoods. Whatever changes have taken place in the North, and there have been a few, one change has eluded every attempt to introduce it: the establishment will hold firm against the disestablished.
According to the Irish Times:
Mr Downey arrived for his hearing on Saturday morning at Omagh Magistrates’ Court, where a large crowd had gathered outside, among it Sinn Féin MPs, MLAs and councillors.
Why Sinn Fein turned up for is anybody’s guess. Cheering Downey as a party member who made some invaluable, if invisible, contribution to the peace process, or applauding the PSNI for having taken Sinn Fein’s recommendation that where there is evidence the British should prosecute? They even went through the charade of jostling in court with the cops and pulling faux angry faces outside it.
The dance of deceit continues.
Posted by Jim on October 11, 2019
FDNY VOLLEYBALL TEAM
The FDNY Volleyball Team is beginning the 2019-2020 season. FDNY volleyball teams compete in international, national, and local tournaments. Practices are held at Maspeth HS in Queens. Any member interested in playing should contact FF David Hayes E-23 at 718-757-6519 or email FDNYVolleyball@gmail.com.
COLUMBUS DAY PARADE
On Monday, October 14, 2019, the Columbia Association will march up 5th Avenue to participate in the annual Columbus Day Parade. All off-duty members and their families are invited to march in the parade. The assembly point for members is at West 44th Street and 5th Avenue by 1030 hours. There will be a pre-parade breakfast at 0900 hours, and an after parade gathering at the conclusion of the parade. Members are requested to attend in dress uniform. For further information and location of breakfast and lunch, please visit www.fdnycolumbia.com or contact Joseph DePaola, L-27, Parade Chairman at 845-558-4410.
FRIENDS OF FIREFIGHTERS 12TH ANNUAL FALL GALA
The Friends of Firefighters 12th Annual Fall Gala will be held on October 17, from 6:30 – 10:30 PM at The Prince George Ballroom, 15 East 27th Street, NYC. Join Friends of Firefighters and co-chair Gary Sinise Foundation and their 2019 Honorees, including Man of the Year Tony Catapano, Retired FF Eng 202; Honor Roll Inductee Amy Freeze; Public Service Award Winner Kia Carbone; Step Up Award winners John Fuchs, FF Lad 101, and Edward Howard, FF Lad 4; and Humanitarian Award winner Jimmy Carbone. Visit https://friendsoffirefighters.org/gala2019 for tickets and more info.
RANGERS FIRST RESPONDERS NIGHT
The UFA has partnered with Madison Square Garden once again to provide special access to discounted tickets for the upcoming Rangers First Responders Night on October 29 vs Tampa Bay at 7:30 PM. All attendees will receive a limited edition First Responders Night t-shirt with their ticket purchase. For every ticket purchased through the link https://tinyurl.com/Rangers1stRespondersUFAOct29, $10 will be donated to the UFA Widows & Children’s Fund.