NORTHERN IRELAND: Good Friday: The Death of Irish RepublicanismBy Anthony McIntyre Ausubo Press (New York), 322pp, $21.95
ANTHONY MCINTYRE'S Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism is an absorbing and provocative book driven by disillusionment and anger. It challenges received mainstream republican opinion. This book is unlikely to feature on the shelves of the Sinn Féin bookshop on the Falls Road in west Belfast. It's a collection of articles that McIntyre, who served 18 years in prison for murder, wrote in newspapers and magazines, but mostly for The Blanket - a now moribund blog "of protest and dissent", as it says on its website. It covers the period from the signing of the Belfast Agreement 10 years ago to shortly before Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley decided to share power in March last year.
In one piece McIntyre writes about former IRA chief of staff Joe Cahill blanking him when they last met in 2002. He notes shortly after Cahill's funeral in the summer of 2004 how the first four chiefs of staff of the Provisional IRA are now dead, "all from natural causes".
"I greeted him but he ignored me," McIntyre recalls. "In that he was no different from others in the leadership coterie: willing to direct but never to answer to those fortunate to have survived with their lives from the debacle the leadership so ineptly oversaw, and who sought to ask those questions dead volunteers never had the chance to." He writes that he is glad that Cahill lived a long life but implicitly asks how dare he or any other Sinn Féin or IRA leader snub him when he did his time for the IRA, and when so many other republicans died in an "unnecessary war".
In many senses this is an Émile Zola-type J'accuse! against the Sinn Féin and IRA leadership, with most opprobrium reserved for Gerry Adams. "We deluded ourselves that we were fighting for Ireland when all we were doing was fighting for Adams." Twice he quotes George Orwell approvingly to reflect his view of his former republican colleagues, some of them now up in Stormont, "Nine times out of ten a revolutionary is just a social climber with a bomb in his pocket".
McIntyre is the most eloquent (and jaundiced) of those on the dissenter wing of republicanism, as distinct from its dissident wing. His New York publishers drew considerable mileage from the fact that he could not promote the book in the US because he is barred from the country.
His antipathy to the current Sinn Féin leadership - which is reciprocated - runs deep. His former home in Ballymurphy was picketed by Sinn Féin supporters after he accused the IRA of murdering dissident republican Joe O'Connor in 2000. Despite the antagonism, McIntyre held out in West Belfast, finally moving South with his partner and children over a year ago, but on his own terms. He doesn't want a return to war but with logic, passion and humour, and a degree of anguish and hurt, asks could it not have stopped sometime in the early to mid-1970s? He's not arguing that the provisional republican campaign was wrong per se, or making personal apologies for the loss of life; rather, he asks, why did the IRA prosecute a campaign of violence whose end result was a shaky administration at Stormont? He believes the revolution, which he and many IRA members saw themselves as fighting, was betrayed.
The acceptance of the consent principle - that a united Ireland can only happen with the blessing of majority opinion in Northern Ireland, hitherto anathema to republicanism - called into question "the usefulness or purpose of the IRA campaign post-1974".
"Morally, how justified was armed opposition to a partition that republicanism now accepts has a democratic validity?" He talks of a "sad denouement to an unnecessary war in which so many suffered needlessly".
Long before the first 1994 ceasefire both the British and the IRA acknowledged that neither side could win, leading to the conclusion that here was a "war" fought to a standstill. This point was enunciated by former Sinn Féin director of publicity Danny Morrison shortly after the signing of the Belfast Agreement. McIntyre challenged the view at the time, writing of a "defeated IRA", a position he has held to and that has put him high up the Sinn Féin and IRA personae non grata list.
MCINTYRE VEHEMENTLY ARGUES THAT the republican leadership lied and manipulated its base in achieving the IRA ceasefire, decommissioning, policing, and sharing power with Ian Paisley. Another view is that Adams and McGuinness showed real strategic leadership and courage in finally ending a conflict that couldn't be won, but the author will make no such concessions to them.
Yet he is no ranter. His publishers should have demanded a prologue and epilogue to better round up the book. Nonetheless, there is a coherence, integrity and strength about the collection of articles which deal with subjects such as Good Friday, the hunger strikers, decommissioning, the Colombia Three, the murder of Robert McCartney, the Northern Bank robbery, informers and policing. We hear an alternative view, fiercely argued, well constructed, that sharpens our understanding of the conflict and the peace process, and raises the question thousands have asked: what was it all about?
Gerry Moriarty is Northern Editor of The Irish Times
