Reply to Eamon McCann's article

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis

Saturday August 30, 2003 12:45

by John Martin - IRSP

johnmartins at eircom dot net

392 Falls Road, Belfast BT12

028 90 321 024

A reply to McCann's article in the Belfast Telegraph on our movement

On Eamon McCann
Eamon McCann writing in the Pro-Good Friday Agreement newspaper the Belfast Telegraph had a sideswipe at the IRSP in the course of an attack on a so called republican principle that

“-leads its adherents to believe that the paramilitary group they support has a right to kill people who challenge its authority?

In terms of the Republican tradition as expressed over the past 30 years, it goes back to the "mandate" of 1916 and the notion of the "army" as the legitimate representative of the will of the Irish people.”

McCann has cleverly lumped all republican groups together as a way of denigrating the whole left wing republican tradition. He totally distorts a statement from Terry Harkin in which Harkin was contrasting the principles of the GFA with the actual implementation of it in practice. Efforts by statutory authorities to halt a memorial to dead INLA volunteers contrasted strongly with their failure to deal with offensive flags slogans and murals that incite the murder of Catholics. Large numbers of PSNI moved in force to facilitate the removal of the monument contrasting with their inactivity over UDA flags in Sandy Row 200 yards from Donegall Pass police station

Nowhere is there any indication that the INLA have ever claimed a mandate for their activities. . But the INLA on the 5th Anniversary of the INLA ceasefire said explicitly and this was read out at the Maghera Memorial

“In August 1998 the leadership of the INLA with the full support of the volunteers of the People’s Army called a ceasefire in response to the will of the Irish people as expressed through the Referenda on the Good Friday Agreement. “-The INLA has no interests outside the liberation of the working class and the establishment of a socialist society.”

Yet McCann feels free to distort facts and peddle the big lie,

“Brendan Convery and Gerald Mallon may have been sent out by their INLA bosses. But, to the IRSP, they actually carried a mandate from "the indigenous Irish."
It is mystical nonsense of this sort that the killing of Danny McGurk tells us we need rid of.”

It is a fact that of all the republican left tendencies it has been the Republican Socialist movement alone that has consistently and persistently attacked the notion of “republican legitimacy ‘ from either the 1916 Rising or the First Dail. We have advocated the centrality of the Irish Working class to the struggle in Ireland. We as a movement never gave any credence to mystical concepts such as “Mother Ireland” or peddled any kind of pseudo nationalist claptrap. We are internationalists, socialists and revolutionaries.

Indeed it is ironic that a “revolutionary socialist” such as McCann, a defender not of the 1916 rebellion, but an upholder of the 1917 revolution in Russia which certainly had no mandate from the Russian people and during which the Bolsheviks seized power, should seek to denigrate the only Republican group which explicitly recognised in its ceasefire statement the expressed will of the Irish people while believing that the people had made the wrong choice.