Left politics does not begin with the present writer: JJ in his undergraduate days 1906-10 was supportive of progressive causes, on the evidence of his role in College Historical Society debates(1), and subsequently after 1910 in Oxford(2). When in Oxford he became a member of the Oxford branch of the Gaelic League, of which the President was Cluad a Chabhasa (Claude Chevasse, said to be the original of Monsewer in Brendan Behan's 'Hostage'). This was the Gaelicising landed gentry.

When later in 1913 he became a Fellow of Trinity College he was, more or less discreetly, supportive of various aspects of the national movement, via various journalistic contributions to the post-1916 situation, particularly in support of the 1917 Convention. His main interest however was the introduction of democracy into economics via the co-operative movement(3).

JJ did however make an important contribution to Irish politics, with his Civil War in Ulster, published in 1913, in an attempt to mobilise Protestant support for all-Ireland Home Rule, and pre-empt the process that led to the Larne gun-running and the partitioning of Ireland(4).

By 1922 was giving lectures in economics to working men in TCD, supported by Tom Johnson the leader of the Labour Party, under the auspices of the Barrington Lectures. In his later Albert Kahn correspondence with Garnier he promoted Connolly. His political interests in the 1920s continued to develop; he stood for election to the Seanad in 1926, as a Government candidate, but failed to get in; he served on various economic commissions (agriculture, prices etc), but avoided full-scale party-political commitment, giving priority to the co-operative movement(5).

In the 1930s he was critical of the way the way Russia went in the direction of self-sufficiency, and used Russia as a counter-example in his 1934 Nemesis of Economic Nationalism, which was highly critical of de Valera's economic policies. Despite this he managed to establish some rapport with the Fianna Fail Government, and they asked him to join a Commission of Inquiry into the working of the Civil Service. He also at this time, somewhat discreetly, was adviser to the leadership of the opposition, on economic matters.(6).

In the 1940s(7) however he viewed my incursion into left politics with considerable sympathy, and he kept us on our toes by shrewd questioning.

There exists among JJ's papers a file of signed menus and seating plans of various dinners attended, over the period 1911 to 1960(8). These give some insight into the relationship between the TCD elite and the Free State and later the Republic elite over the decades, with the TCD people evolving into eventual acceptance and indeed celebration of the Republic under McConnell, when they honoured de Valera's Presidency in 1960. They also show the decline of the Plunkett 'improving landlord' and 'co-operative development' movement after the failure of the 1917 Convention. JJ initially identified with the latter, but transferred his support to the Free State when it became established. It is evident, not only from such dinner seating plans as are available, but also from his subsequent Seanad speeches, that JJ played a pioneering role in getting TCD accepted in the Free State context as genuinely part of the emerging nation.

My own development in the 40s and 50s from the student Left was somewhat egregious, as most of its members were eastern-oriented, thereby falling foul of Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, while I was among the few who tried to interface with the local situation in Ireland (Justin Keating was another). A key influence was Desmond Greaves(9). Some of this influence was negative, in that at a time when the post-Curragh republicans were attempting to politicise, he narrowed the scope by acting explicitly on behalf of the British Communist Party. I suspect that this episode, which took place in 1948 and which I witnessed, was instrumental in driving many away from the politicisation process, and into the arms of Gerry McCarthy and the re-emerging 1950s-generation IRA, leading to another cycle of destruction.

The 1950s were dominated by the attempt to make the bridge between the left and the national question, and Greaves(10) played a positive role, perhaps conscious of the negative effect of his earlier intervention. There were attempts to analysis the ownership of the top firms in Ireland. There were also tentative contacts with the republicans via Sean Cronin. There were increasing tensions between the present writer and Marxist orthodoxy, as embodied in the Irish Workers' League; I recollect attempting, without success, to query what was going on in the German Democratic Republic with regard to people like Harich, and in the USSR with regard to Pasternak and others. These queries were brushed aside by the leadership, who considered any critical appraisal of the USSR as a mortal sin. I made my peace with Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, visiting him in hospital on the occasion of his heart attack. I had had prior correspondence, in which we had begun to identify some common ground(11).

The 1960s began with a period in London, working with Greaves and others on the campaign to get the prisoners of the 1950s released. Then when the chance to return came in 1963, with the Aer Lingus real-time project, I got in with the 1960s republican politicising process, initiated by Cathal Goulding via the Wolfe Tone Society.

This was successful, in that it led to rapid growth of what began to look like a real political movement, and people began to see the advantage of avoiding the encumbrance imposed by the need to take care of illegal weapons(12). Friendly relations were established with the Communist Party in Belfast (which was the radicalising road for the Protestant working-class), and the Civil Rights movement for a while looked like being successful, until it met up with armed counter-attack by the B-Specials in August 1969. The destructive role of the 'Peoples Democracy' as a coat-trailing anarchist body, in the lead-up to the 1969 debacle, needs critical analysis. Also the role of Fianna Fail and the Haughey / Blaney / Boland caucus in helping to arm the Provisionals needs to be analysed(13); the politicising left-republicans were perceived as a threat within the Free State by those who were engaged in funding Fianna Fail via a process of corrupt land deals.

How the Sinn Fein leadership reacted to August 1969 can be traced to some extent via its internal newsletter, as well as in the Ard Comhairle minute-book(14).

Predictably the Provisionals emerged as a result of this, and the 'officials' (as they were known) reacted by trying to compete, at which point I pulled out. The process leading to the Provisionals has been described in Derry Kelleher's books(15).

I attended a conference in Moscow in 1973 as part of a 'broad left' group which included several journalists. The objective of the conference was to strengthen the global peace movement(16). I was encouraged by this to think that convergence of the 'old Left' with the 'politicising republican Left' might after all be feasible, and a brief, though somewhat uncomfortable, period with the Communist Party ensued(17). I was eventually expelled for publicly criticising their position on cultural matters in the USSR.

Analysis of this episode gives some insight into the processes of unreconstructed Stalinist thought. A period with the Labour Party followed, with George Jeffares and the International Affairs Committee, which proved to be a complete waste of time and effort, as it had no impact whatever on the policy of the Party. A critical look at how National Conferences are railroaded may be appropriate, but this is for critical Labour historians.

Political work continued in the context of what remained of the Wolfe Tone Society(18); there was a paper in 1974 from my sister Dr Maureen Carmody on Irish politics as seen from the angle of the rural Protestant community, and I contributed a paper which attempted to analyse the way forward in 1978. Tuairisc was revived for a period, in an improved format, and my sister's paper is accessible in this mode. For publishing my own paper however, the WTS being moribund, I had to resort to a fringe-Left periodical which was well produced and was beginning to attract good critical papers: The Ripening of Time.

On the Problem of Democratic Unity

Extracts from the 1978 Ripening of Time Paper

"*1 A parasitic bourgeoisie which makes its money by speculation in land, mergers, asset-stripping, fronting for multinationals and other devices which contribute nothing to the production of real wealth. This group pervades the financial bourgeoisie and is primarily responsible for the stifling of any State initiatives independent of the multinationals; it is influential in top State circles and dominates the formulation of economic and financial policies; its prime aspiration is to strengthen its links with its colleagues in Britain, in the EEC, in the US and elsewhere.

It has since emerged that this group has been busily engaged in ripping off the State via what has come to be known as the Ansbacher process.

"*2 An entrepreneurial bourgeoisie which fulfils a productive function; it usually owns its means of production and gives employment individually; its members have often evolved to this position by fulfilling a management function in a State enterprise, which they use as a starting-point for their own business, or from a self-employed situation. There is therefore a continuous recruitment into this class from the upper strata of salaried workers and from the self-employed; individual success is often registered by doing a deal with a multinational; this can sometimes, depending on the nature of the deal, bring a person out of the entrepreneurial and into the parasitic class....

"...Thus the 'national bourgeoisie' is not a stable group, but a highly unstable phase in the evolution of the entrepreneurial strata from a salaried or self-employed position towards a deal with the multinationals. This group may become stabilised partially, and given class and national cohesion, by direct State support, supplemented possibly by an organised co-operative approach to marketing, purchase of raw materials etc...

"*3 A substantial group of working owner-managers and self-employed, including the vast majority of farmers, from which the national bourgeoisie is being continuously replenished, and which replenishes itself continuously from the working class by various part-timing, lumping, moonlighting and other processes. This class, as well as recruiting from the working class, is also being decimated by shedding its failures into the working class, typical being the part-time farmer. This latter phenomenon however is complex, in that in many cases the wage is used as capital to develop the farm, and in such cases the role of part-time farming is to stabilise the role of small property in the economy.

"*4 A working-class which is stratified in a rather complex manner; for example, salaried workers owning their own houses (a numerous elite), wage earners depending on local-authority housing, public service employees ('permanent and pensionable'), etc. There is also a substantial difference between the mix of strata in Dublin and elsewhere; the numerical scale of the Dublin working-class gives it a special character, with greater opportunities for divisive sub-stratification, establishment of ghettos etc by the local authorities under the control of the bourgeoisie. The working-class outside Dublin, being embedded in a sea of petty-bourgeoisie, has greater opportunity for itself evolving into a self-employed or small business situation.

"In the North, the same pattern reproduces itself, but in duplicate, in Protestant and Catholic versions. The difference being that in all cases the Protestants tend to be more numerous in the more favoured strata within each class, this being a consequence of the politics of Partition and the primary means of maintaining British rule.

"The above fluid class structure has reflected itself into a remarkably stable political structure, in which two main bourgeois parties dominate the scene: Fine Gael, representing primarily the parasitic bourgeoisie, Fianna Fail drawing support from most of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie but with a strong parasitic element in key positions; each controls broad swathes of the petty-bourgeoisie by the exercise of patronage, Fianna Fail in addition controlling a large slice of the working-class by a refined mafia-type system with its principal basis in the local authorities.

"The Labour Party, theoretically the political voice of the organised working-class through the Trade Union affiliations, in fact attracts a mixed clientele from the three main classes, and has compromised itself by close political association with Fine Gael, thereby accepting the lead of the most parasitic sections of the bourgeoisie....

"The political structure in the North is similar in that it consists of two main bourgeois Parties and a weak, divided Labour movement. Insofar as the Civil Rights agitations which commenced in 1968 have borne fruit, it is in the weakening of monolithic Unionism of the Brookborough type and the exposure of the historical anachronism of a Protestant ascendancy based on British rule being used as a road-block to stop the march of a nation and its developing Labour movement This process is far from complete. The central problem for the democratic forces in Ireland is how to gather together the forces necessary to remove this road-block, by putting united political pressure on Britain.

"Within the interstices of the above political structure, like small mammals in the undergrowth of the primeval jungles where all eyes were on the battles of the giant reptiles, lurk the political groupings of the Left. In the evolutionary process, the future lay with the mammals, because in their early stages they stuck to the undergrowth (avoiding the mistake of thinking that they had to do like the giant reptiles), and developed improved means of looking after their young. With this analogy I pass on to the statement of the problem, to which the foregoing is the background....

"I include in this (political Left) category the forces that made up the 'Left Alternative' grouping, which was by many regarded as a hopeful trend towards unity when it filled the Mansion House in 1976 and produced some preliminary ideas for concessions to be forced upon the Government in the matter of provision of jobs.

"The three groups concerned, the Communist Party of Ireland, the Liaison Committee of the Labour Left and Sinn Fein the Workers Party, came together for private talks in the previous period, initially at the suggestion of the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society. This coming together was possible because a tradition of mutual non-denunciation had established itself over a period of years, all three groupings being to some extent agreed on the common ground of British responsibility for the Northern crisis, and on the responsibility of the policy of permitting domination of the multinationals for the employment crisis.

"It was round the latter issue that they tried to build their fragile agreement. This fragility was rendered more pronounced by the existence of a school of thought in the SFWP that appeared positively to welcome the multinationals as a 'proletarianising' force. The former area proved more disputatious, particularly from the Labour quarter and no attempt was made to develop it....

"Another grouping subsequently emerged (known as the 'National Alternative') which attempted to develop a common standpoint on the Northern question. This included the CPI, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the Irish Sovereignty Movement, Provisional Sinn Fein, Peoples Democracy and others.

"It was convened by a group of concerned individuals, the writer among them, who had long-standing Republican connections. SFWP were invited to participate, but declined because it would have meant sitting down with the Provisionals, to whose bombing campaign they attribute (with some justice) the decline in political development in the North (which showed some promise in the period 1968-70).

"This group produced a 'nearly agreed' document, which however foundered on the Provisionals' insistence of a particular wording describing the attitude to the use of force. Many of the participants had hoped that the politics of a ceasefire might have been explored positively, but these hopes proved illusory. On the negative side, the participation of the CPI in these talks gave rise to some strain in their relationship with the other parties in the original 'Left Alternative' group.

"The political left draws its forces from the working-class, self-employed and entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. The various groupings which make up the elements of the political left are composed of this mixture in varying degrees. They share a common attitude to their own development as organisations which can be described as bourgeois-competitive - in other words they see themselves as organisations or 'firms' competing for the same market (votes) and raw material supply (recruits). They each have a product (a political programme) which they develop in such a way as to be distinctive from competitors, while attempting to appeal to the same market.

"The market, however, is suspicious of this kind of political competition; it prefers on the whole to support the firm which has the largest 'market share' and a record of delivery of the goods.

"In the EEC Referendum, the anti-EEC forces presented themselves competitively, with the result that a credible alternative was in general not presented; in a few places where the political left submerged its competitive identities under the common banner of the Common Market Defence Campaign a reputable 'no' score was obtained (notably 50% in Nenagh town).

"The distinctive political wares of the competitive groups are worked out behind closed doors by leadership groups with varying degrees of informed expert input, and are steered through congresses by a more or less democratic process, rank-and-file members following the voting patterns of leading members who are influential and are good at rhetoric.

"Once the 'line' is adopted, it becomes incumbent on members to accept this as the entrenched position, and to support it against members of other groupings, irrespective of arguments. The strength of the discipline varies between the groupings.

"The fundamental weakness of this situation is that there is no effective means of allowing a freely interactive period of policy development covering common areas of agreement, such as to permit strengthening of inter-group co-operation, ultimately leading to the much sought after 'unity of the democratic forces'.

"...I (now) try to summarise the political objectives and develop a structural concept for a movement to achieve them.

"The key political objectives are:

"(a) the achievement of a negotiated settlement with the British on a secular democratic federal basis, with Britain transferring all financial support towards the promotion of all-Ireland institutions, and with all the Irish people involved in developing the new constitution without interference from the British.

"(b) the isolation of the landed-speculative parasitic element of the bourgeoisie, and the achievement of a democratic independent economic development policy with a leading role played by the State sector rather than the multinationals, based on alliance of the organised working-class, the self-employed and the productive entrepreneurial bourgeoisie.

"The organisation of a movement for achieving this democratic-revolutionary objective on the basis of a multi-class alliance is fraught with many problems, not the least of which is the fear on the part of the small property owners that those who shout for Socialist objectives will take their property from them. Similarly, those who have no property fear that in a democratic-revolutionary class alliance the lead would be taken by propertied elements, this, on the whole, being the historical experience.

"In Ireland at this time we are faced with a historic challenge: can we develop a movement in which there is enough mutual trust between the democratic anti-imperialist forces to permit a credible political alternative to develop? Can the Socialists be persuaded to lower the red flag and to promote a transition to socialism that is acceptable to self-employed and small entrepreneurs? Can the latter be got to believe in a process whereby a small private enterprise expands with the aid of public money to become a socialist enterprise, rather than a capitalist enterprise with the aid of the Stock Exchange, or a subsidiary of a multinational?

"These are the practical issues that must be teased out theoretically, if the 'Co-operative Democratic Federation' is to develop....

"...In the period of development of this movement, it will be necessary for the various groupings forming the federation to delete from the top of their agendas the question of electoral appeal. This will return later, when the spade-work has been done. Recognising that they are a rather small herd of political animals, the groupings composing the movement should consider retiring into the undergrowth and working out in concert how they can influence the battles of the political dinosaurs in the interests of the mammals (returning to the earlier evolutionary analogy).

"This is the period of 'guerrilla politics'; development of influential specialist lobbies with a low political profile on key issues such as civil liberty, neutrality, local democratic reform, land tenure reform, reform of the educational system, industrial democracy, the right to a job, taxation reform etc....

"The role of the leadership of the movement, and of various specialist groups of rank and file, is to co-ordinate and plan the development of policies appropriate to the various specialist lobbies in the light of the real needs (not some ideological imagined needs originating possibly in the Scriptures), with the knowledge that the grass-roots activists will assimilate them, adopt them and promote them in the appropriate broad organisations where their interests lead them to specialise.

"The principal strategic problem is how to isolate the parasitic sector of the bourgeoisie; how to drive a wedge between the parasitic sector of Fianna Fail support and the rest, and how to drive it along with Fine Gael into political isolation on the Right; parallel with this is the problem of how to develop a workable understanding between the Labour Party and the entrepreneurial wing of Fianna Fail.

"It is, perhaps, possible to achieve this by encouraging the development of demands from various democratic lobbies such as to render electorally attractive certain areas of common policy which already exist between Labour and Fianna Fail, such as:

"(a) In the area of management and control of the educational system, where both parties appear to favour a lay-managed system in contrast to the clerical denominational system inherited from the British and favoured by Fine Gael.

"(b) In the area of State enterprise, where all the principal State sponsored bodies owe their existence to Fianna Fail, and where Labour is ideologically committed to support of the principle.

"(c) In the area of foreign affairs, where Fine Gael is pro-NATO and Labour and (most of) Fianna Fail are neutralist....

"There are many obstacles to the 'left alternative', perhaps with or without one or more of the 'national alternative' groups, coming together in a Co-operative Democratic Federation. The principal obstacles are subjective: a type of quasi-religious megalomania, a 'holier than thou' tradition that echoes the sectaries of the 17th century. There are also histories of mutual recrimination, often on the basis of actual wrongs done.

"There are also 'objective' obstacles. The existence of vestigial or shadowy 'armed wings', links with organisations abroad of which the precise nature is not clear (association with an international movement or affiliation to a foreign State power?), the possession of embryonic parliamentary representation (on the part of the Labour Left, now become the Socialist Labour Party).

"The reality and extent of these obstacles is open to question, but there is no doubt that they exist as obstacles for as long as there are doubts in the minds of each group as to the nature of the credentials of the people they deal with in others: who is boss? whose writ runs? Army Council or Ard Comhairle? Administrative Council or Parliamentary Group? Political Committee or Moscow?...

"These obstacles can only be overcome by a process whereby the leaderships of the groupings agree to encourage their members to engage in common theoretical policy development work, along the lines suggested in this paper. There is a precedent for this, in that the Wolfe Tone Society has already hosted inter-group seminars on typical 'guerrilla-political' topics such as unemployment, civil liberties etc, and these seminars have lead to joint actions....

"To cement up this theoretical development, there is needed a reputable theoretical publication which would circulate in all associated groupings, containing printed versions of discussion papers and agreed common educational material.

"Is it too much to hope that some periodical such as 'The Ripening of Time' might make a bid for this market, by associating itself with a consultative editorial committee having standing such as to ensure its general acceptability, but without any dead-hand or veto rights such as to stifle free discussion during common policy development?"

Labour in the 1980s

In this context I wrote a paper(19) which covered the historical background, the development of the Civil Rights movement and its sterilisation by violence, the evolution of Labour policy and its subversion by Conor Cruise O'Brien's two-nationism, the emergence of potential new Labour thinking via meetings of trade union activists, the New Ireland Forum, and so on. I identified the missing ingredient in the latter as the drawing of a proper distinction between Protestantism as a component of Irish culture, and Unionism as an externally-imposed political ideology, an imperial contrivance, with its origins in blood and Tory armed conspiracy. The Forum document, with its talk of 'accommodating the Unionist tradition', fudged this.

Contact during this period with the Labour Party was minimal and led to little in the way of visible achievements. I submitted a memorandum on the national question(20) to a Commission set up to study, in which I outlined the opportunities under the Anglo-Irish Agreement and in the European context. I gave some prominence to the question of sectarian education, and the the problem of local government reform.

The Labour Party had planned its annual conference for December 1986 in Cork, in the City Hall. As a consequence of the Sovereignty Movement Campaign, led by Anthony Coughlan, there was a significant amount of informed opposition to the Single European Act (SEA), especially from the Trade Unions, and from residual elements of the Labour Left. The possibility existed of a conference decision against.

Coincidentally there happened to be an industrial dispute in Cork with the municipal workers, who manned the City Hall. This enabled Dick Spring to call off the Conference, in a pseudo-left act of 'solidarity'. He went on to make a personal television appearance, urging support for the SEA. This piece of political maneuvering I found absolutely sickening. If they had wanted to defend party democracy and run the conference in the City Hall despite the strike, it should have been possible to do a deal with the municipal workers to come in for the necessary few days, to oblige the party, or some suitable agreement could have been made, such as to use the conference as a lever in support of the workers' claims. So in effect the Labour Party went into the ensuing referendum without any agreed policy, and with Dick Spring's TV appearance used as the means of establishing one, by default.

Shortly afterwards I met with Roger Garland and a few others, and became convinced that the banner of non-violent social-reform politics was passing to the Greens, with the addition of long-term sustainability and environmental concern. This was a step in the direction of the type of integration of science with social concern which I had been seeking over the years, and which the traditional European Left, in all its forms, had ignored. So in the end I got around to joining the Green party, attending the local meetings in Rathmines.

The Green Party

In the Green context I retained an interest in Church and State issues, and in the Northern Ireland question, contributing articles, papers and reviews as the occasion arose(22).

Notes and References

2. The Oxford debates show this political position developing further, to include support for women's suffrage. I have summarised what I found in the hypertext version of my introduction to Civil War in Ulster; this material is not in the printed version. The Gaelic League membership card is in the JJ papers archive, folder 71.

3. JJ's work for the Convention gets a mention of JA Gaughan's edited version of James Douglas's memoirs. He probably acted as a Manchester Guardian correspondent during the Convention, and corresponded with Erskine Childers, then the Convention Secretary. This is treated in the 1910s module in the political stream of the hypertext. His work for the co-operative movement I have outlined in Appendix 4; he interacted with Horace Plunkett, George Russell, and probably with Standish O'Grady when the latter was promoting co-operative communes in Jim Larkin's Irish Worker in 1912-13. See his To the Leaders of Our Working People, ed EA Hagan, UCD Press 2002.

4. JJ's Civil War in Ulster, originally published in October 1913 in time for the November Ballymoney rally of the Ulster Liberal Protestant Home Rule supporters, was re-issued by UCD Press in 1999, with an introduction by the present writer. It is available in full in the hypertext. Also, for a scholarly analysis of Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine see a book of that title, by TG Fraser, published by Macmillan, London, 1984. The author adds to the title the phrase Theory and Practice, giving it the status of a 'Partitionists Handbook'. It was sponsored by the University of Ulster and the British Academy. It is a challenge to democratic political scholarship to review this book critically and develop alternative approaches to the colonial to post-colonial transition, avoiding the fuelling of religious fundamentalism, as British partitionist policies have done, in all three situations.

5. See the 1920s module of the political thread of the hypertext, which touches on his Boundary Commission work, and abstracts his 1923 Manchester Guardian articles. See also the 1920s Plunkett thread, where most of his effort seems to have gone, and the 1920s Seanad thread.

6. See the 1930s module of the hypertext political thread; see also The Nemesis of Economic Nationalism.

7. We first get interaction of political ideas across the generation gap in the 1940s and I go into this in some depth in the 1940s module of the hypertext political thread.

8. The 'signed menus and seating plans' are in folder 70 of the JJ papers archive. I have done some analysis of their content and the result is available in the hypertext.

9. Desmond Greaves (CDG) left a journal, which I have had the chance to scan, thanks to Anthony Coughlan of TCD. I have abstracted and overviewed most of his key references to Irish political developments, insofar as they relate to his interactions with the emergent Irish left. The detail is accessible from the overview, in separate modules, initially one per decade, but then more as the situation becomes more acute. The contact begins during our student period in the 1940s.

10. In the 1950s the Greaves journals give insights into how the more perceptive elements of the Western Marxist intellectuals reacted to the disastrous development in Eastern Europe. The need for the Left to understand the national question in the Irish context became more acute. The 1950s political module overviews and abstracts from all accessible relevant sources.

11. I have reproduced some of this correspondence, along with some notes on Owen Sheehy-Skeffington's widow's biography Skeff (Lilliput, Dublin 1991).

12. I have abstracted the Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle minutes from about 1960 onwards, indicating an increasing level of politicising activity. See also the Greaves journals for the early 1960s, and the Wolfe Tone Society's archive, which I have abstracted in the hypertext, a key document being the 'Open Letter to Jack Lynch', August 9 1971. Also I am indebted to Mick Ryan for drawing my attention to a special 1998 bicentenary publication United Irishman to which he contributed a memoir of his period as organiser of the movement and managing editor of the 1960s United Irishman. This commemorative publication was produced by Harry Donaghy, 24 Polard St, Belfast, BT12 7EX, and I understand is accessible in the Linen Hall Library. It is evident from Mick Ryan's memoir that the effective politicisation process, centred around the United Irishman under the editorship of Seamus O Tuathail, did not effectively begin until 1968. See also the Greaves journals, for the periods beginning 1966 and 1968.

13. The role of Fianna Fail in helping to create almost a Civil War situation in the North, in order to marginalise the role of the left-republicans in developing the political road via Civil Rights, has been treated in The Arms Trial by Justin O'Brien (Gill & Macmillan 2000), in a manner which gives some credit to the roles of Cathal Goulding and the present writer, though not without some significant misunderstandings, on which I have commented in the hypertext. See also my commentary on the memoirs of Mac Stiofain.

14. The Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle and Coisde Seasda minutes books are much richer for this period, as well as the files of Nuacht Naisiunta the internal newsletter which began in September 1969. See also the Greaves journal from 1969 overview; also Anthony Coughlan's Batherwick Memorandum and his Obituary Essay (added post-publication 2006).

15. Derry Kelleher's books cover his experience of attempted politicisation of the republicanism from the 1940s onwards, and his attempts to swim against the tide of emigration, somewhat similarly to the present writer. His Buried Alive in Ireland: a Story of a 20th Century Inquisition and his 'Irish Republicanism: the Authentic Perspective are essential reading for the understanding of this process.

16. I give some details about the agenda of, and participation in, the 1973 Moscow peace conference in the 1970s political module of the hypertext.

17. Some documentation relating to some work I began on all-Ireland economics, but did not finish for lack of good sources, and to the CPI's role in the 'Left alternative' grouping, is also given in the 1970s political module.

18. My sister's paper is in the Wolfe Tone Society newsletter Tuairisc #2 (new series) May 1974, and my paper 'On the Problem of Democratic Unity' is accessible in full in Ripening of Time Issue #9, March 1978. Both are referenced from the 1970s political module of the hypertext.

19. I have reproduced this paper in full in the 1980s political module of the hypertext; it may have been published in Links Europa, the British Labour Left newsletter which networks with the European Left. The paper is dated November 28, 1984.

20. This memorandum, dated January 1986, is available in full in the hypertext. Although it had little or no impact at the time, I am making it available here as an indication of my then current thinking on the North.

21. I go into this further in the 1980s political module, where I describe how I managed to get the 1989 Green Manifesto published on the GreenNet. The Links Europa Green-Left paper is also available in the hypertext. Green, Left and Northern Ireland concerns continue actively into the 1990s and beyond.

22. I had a correspondence with Brendan Clifford in August 1990 which summarised well my then concerns; it arose out of my review of his book on 1798 and Belfast. I had earlier on 13/2/88 contributed a paper to the AGM of the Ulster Quaker Peace Committee: Violence and the Nation-Building Process - Some Reflections on Irish National Identity.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2002