It’s forgotten now that leader of Britain’s Labour Party Harold Wilson travelled to Dublin to meet with the IRA’s Army Council in the 1970s. At the time that Army Council claimed to be the lawful government of Ireland, for reasons I’ll not go into here and the government in Taiwan held China’s seat at the United Nations and on its Security Council. But time had moved on and most Chinese people recognised the Government in Peking, most Irish people recognised the Government in Dublin led by Jack Lynch, as did the United Nations.
The United Kingdom recognised the Irish Government led by Jack Lynch whose security forces were anxious to apprehend and imprison IRA personnel and their Army Council in particular. Sinn Fein had last won Parliamentary seats in 1957 when they had won four in Leinster House, which on principle, they would not sit in, and in 1955 they had won two Westminster seats, which they would have refused to sit on, even had they not been serving prison sentences for their patriotic exertions.
So, why would the Right Honourable Harold Wilson MP, Privy Councillor, who had served two terms as Prime Minister, meet with the IRA Army Council in Dublin, and how did he manage it? He went as an emissary of Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath. HIs cover was that of a Socialist on a fraternal visit to those of a similar philosophy in the Irish Labour Party. So both he and Heath were deceiving Ireland’s elected Government and and prospective Government at a time when neither the IRA nor Sinn Fein had a single Councillor nor parliamentary representative in the whole of Ireland.
When the Irish Establishment learned of this snub it was incensed. And the conduct of Wilson,whose youthful academic standing at Oxford had not been equalled since that of Cardinal Wolsey nearly 500 years earlier, made a poor impression on the IRA. It seems Wilson had probably prepared for the meeting with ancient copies of “Punch” and effed and blinded to impress a group of mainly teetotal, carefully spoken, even pedantic separatists, serious about their business,
Today Jeremy Corbyn is being Blackguarded, for meeting public figures elected on Sinn Fein tickets in the 1980s when the political landscape had been changed, changed utterly. He’s been Blackguarded, by amongst others, Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail, which in the 1930s and until Britain declared war on Germany, praised Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, Hitler and his Brownshirts and later his SS, and has for over a century has consistently championed the strong against the weak.
When Corbyn was talking with Sinn Fein he was responding to Sinn Fein’s efforts to bring a conflict to an end as mandated by the voters who supported it. Events have vindicated both Sinn Fein and Corbyn. President Clinton is a rather more impressive witness to this than Dominic Lawson, the Daily Mail, or the Tory Press.
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