‘Republicanism: Was Violence Inevitable & Necessary?’  by Donal Lavery

“People die for love, for peace, for an idea. And people kill for those reasons too.”
– Old Chinese Proverb

The name of this article is controversial, so let me begin by stating that I do not support violence being used for political ends in the current Irish context – it will neither achieve Irish reunification now nor retain the link with Britain. Violence, in any circumstances, can only be justified where alternative methods of agitation and due process have routinely failed – as accepted under international law. Therefore, I have no sympathy for the blood-thirsty fanatics in Saoradh, who want to restart the conflict to inflate their own egos when most of them never even lived through it all. I deplore them. But in this I merely seek to examine the period when “democratic constitutionalism” failed; failed utterly.

When I was a youngster, I was usually the child who had their hand up in class first to answer questions. Naturally this didn’t go down well with a school-yard bully, who started to pick on me. I asked them several times to stop their intimidatory antics and I even gave them my milk as a sign of goodwill. But it boiled up one day when they pushed me and the Head-Master had to pull me (an otherwise quiet and reserved child) off of him and drag both of us into his office for a lecture. In the end, I got a bloody nose for the day and he had to endure a black eye for a fortnight. He always treated me with respect afterwards and to this day never fails to say hello. I say this because it’s a perfect example of human nature and how respect for others has to sometimes be forced upon some people via the thing they like to threaten others with – force.

Now, there is nothing romantic about war, war is not ideal and it is not pretty. In war, unlike in peace, people generally put their conscience on pause at times and do what they think is necessary for survival. That’s how human beings operate, in ‘fight or flight’ mode. But there is such a thing as a ‘just war’ – like say, the French Resistance against Nazism.  And in any such conflict, there are heroes and villains on all sides. But usually in these circumstances, the methods deployed will be decided by the opposing sides – if an occupying or colonial power wants to act with brutality, they will come up against aggressive resistance. Ultimately, you get out of something what you put in. The theory of ‘creative destruction’ holds that out of the demise of one thing blossoms the development of something better. Or to put it in plain context, with the destruction of the Orange state has come the new Ireland of today – it’s not perfect but better than what we had. Even the bible teaches us that the Lord may destroy the world in order to save it. So we all have the capacity to be violent, if and when necessary.

As you will have noticed, there are people out there who harbour sickening revisionist sentiments concerning the republican campaign in the North. Particularly following Martin McGuinness’s tragic death. They generally don’t apply anywhere near the same scrutiny to the Loyalist or State campaign but that’s just a brief analysis. Some of these people, like right-wing mouthpiece Ms. Dudley Edwards, believe that it wasn’t necessary nor justified; Some of them insist that political means would have produced better results from the late ’60s onwards. And they are entitled to hold those views, but they aren’t entitled to claim to speak for the majority of people who lived under brutal military occupation by the Crown. They aren’t entitled, having never resided in the areas used as hunting grounds by Loyalist death-squads, to preach pacifism from the luxury of suburban security or Oxbridge privilege. For the same people who articulated these pious condemnations are those responsible for the problem in the first place – the British Government, the Unionist politicians and Free State Partitionists. In fact, even some unlikely individuals are stating just how impossible life was for Irish nationalists under that regime – like right wing Tory MEP Daniel Hannan and Republican Congressman Peter King.

During the early 1970s, despite what they were saying in public, several Cabinet members in the Irish Government tried to arm the IRA to defend nationalist areas from Loyalist onslaught. Indeed, Taoiseach Jack Lynch once planned to invade the North. Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil TDs provided refuge in their own homes, as fellow Irish people, to republicans ‘on the run’ in the Free State (including Gerry Kelly). In America, Republican and Democratic Congressional Representatives raised money for the IRA through NORAID. In the North, many SDLP representatives, especially their Belfast Councillors, told Sinn Fein members privately that the IRA should never give up their weapons without a final settlement; as these guns and the propensity to use them were the only bargaining chip the nationalist people had in a sea of conquest – that syntax could not garner the sort of concessions as Semtex could from the British state.

Now the reason I mention those points is simple, those who now lecture on the immorality of armed revolt saw no such problem with it in private when that awful era was going on. Indeed, they were relieved that they could sit in middle-class suburbia and not have to lift a finger to end British militarism while calling themselves “nationalists”. But also, they knew deep down that it was essential to altering the horrific circumstances that Britain imposed on Ireland then – from SAS hit squads to Bloody Sunday; from the legacy of the Famine to the killing fields of France – a long litany of betrayals.

Let’s be clear about something, anytime the Irish people opted for past political means they were drowned in a sea of blood. From the arrival of the Black & Tans after the 1918 election to the cutting to pieces of innocent Catholics by the Lenny Murphy’s of a gangster state; the Irish were lambs to the British slaughter. The political system was designed specifically to thwart any such progress here. Sunningdale, which only came about because of IRA violence, was allowed to collapse to appease Loyalist fascists who refused to share power with Catholics. The British government continued to arm, equip and finance these same Loyalist mercenaries, to terrorise the nationalist people into abandoning their campaign for justice. Ken Livingstone described the last several centuries of it as being ‘worse than the way the Nazis treated the Jews’. Indeed, John Lennon once wrote that “if you had the luck of the Irish, you’d wish you were English instead.”

A renowned priest once remarked that most of the republicans in jail during the conflict would never have seen the inside of a prison at all but for the abnormal political situation in Ireland. So to resist those circumstances was not only reasonable but just. To refuse to sit down and accept your community being slaughtered like “vermin” and the murderers acquitted in Orange courts. To want to correct a situation where men in the area are being interned without trial simply for being Irish. To recognise the illegality surrounding the mutilation of one part of your country, to appease a minority of Orange terrorists opposed to democracy. All of these understandings are actually very understandable, to any right thinking human being the world over; For there are forces in this world mightier than parliamentary majorities. Tory Cabinet Minister, Enoch Powell, infamously stated that “the freedom to be an independent self-governing nation is the highest political priority and one which any price is worth paying.”

I talk about these issues at times with friends, including some of those from the Unionist/Loyalist tradition; Nationalist young people don’t doubt that they owe their living standards and security now to the republican campaign, for the Civil Rights Movement failed against state brutality. Naturally, a few Unionist companions find it difficult to understand the validity of the IRA campaign or nationalist resistance to brutal occupation. To which I often reply, that their own sovereign government in London doesn’t find this difficult at all to comprehend – they are overseeing a process whereby British soldiers are now being tried and prosecuted for their crimes and tyranny in Ireland because the London politicians know what sort of terror they inflicted here. They know the devastation it caused and that any right thinking person was correct to resist that as such, including by force of arms. For who issued the OTR letters at the end of the day? Anytime a conversation about this gets heated I do well to remind them that we can sit and we can fight over everything that happened, from each of the atrocities to the next, but that the facts of history are never going to be on their side. It’s not, by any means, a case that these people don’t understand the necessity of force back then, it’s that they can’t accept it – which is a different thing entirely. Whatever is said about the importance of reconciliation, and it is important, remember one simple thing clearly – the nationalist community were right, and no revisionist coercion will prove otherwise.