Reviews of the actual Century book are accessible from the public overview area; this page is dedicated to reviews of books which make substantive use of it in their arguments. RJ 27/10/2009.

For Sean Swan's book Official Irish Republicanism 1962 to 1972 see the supplementary hypertext associated with my Century book.

I hope to review here any books which come my way which reference my Century of Endeavour substantively. I have reviewed The Lost Revolution for Books Ireland, and for the Irish Democrat; a further review is in preparation for the Boston Irish Literary Supplement and this will be available in mid-2010. These reviews are in process of being edited into this page, in reverse chronological order.

The following review has been developed for the Irish Democrat from the one published in Books Ireland December 2009 issue; it includes also a 'review of reviews', in an attempt to assess its impact outside those who had been directly concerned. It also goes into more depth in each of the periods identified, as a contribution to the critical analysis of the development of political philosophy. For an additional review see the Dublin Review of Books.

The Lost Revolution; Brian Hanley & Scott Millar; (the story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party); Penguin Ireland 2009; ISBN 978-1-844-88120-8; pb, pp 658, €22.

This book fills an important gap in the record of the Northern troubles and their background, which have tended to have been dominated by analyses of the Provisionals.

For some obscure reason it had an extended 2-page pre-publication blurb in the Sunday Times on 30/08/09 which concentrated on the influence during the 1970s of the Eoghan Harris group on RTE programmes such as 'Today Tonight', mentioning names of various others involved who have since had distinguished careers, such as Charlie Bird and Brian Farrell. The feature was headed 'A Sticky Situation'. The source of influence was said to be the 'Ned Stapleton Cummann' of the Workers Party. Harris was alleged to be have declared the intent of getting rid of the 'green' (ie national-minded, not environmentalist, in the then current usage) leadership and making it a Communist Party.

There was also a 'review' in the form of an unsigned news feature in the Irish Examiner on 31/08/09, with pictures of various official IRA events. This also has selective extracts from the texts, beginning with the August 1967 IRA meeting in Pallas Co Tipperary, where socio-economic issues and tactics were discussed, in the context of Haughey's Taca mafia which generated Fianna Fail funding from developer-led land rezoning. (I understand the minutes of this meeting exist and will eventually emerge in a memoir by a participant.) The persistence of the Fenian tradition of ultimate dependence on arms was highlighted. The extracts go on to consider the Fianna Fail response to the 1969 Northern crisis, and the move to fund and arm the IRA, in a process that led eventually to the emergence of the Provisionals.

Neither of these 'reviews' makes any attempt to go critically into the politics behind this process, largely I think because the book fails to do this; it simply records a series of events and incidents, based on contemporary reports and where possible interviews with some of the people concerned. The book is therefore to be seen as a source book for future critical historians, rather than an actual history. One of the authors, Scott Millar, is an Irish Examiner journalist, and in this context he also contributed a short feature, on the same date, under the heading 'Former IRA members reveals minister's role in armed plot'. In this he highlights a meeting between Bobby McKnight and Charles Haughey, at Dublin Airport, in the context of which weapons were transferred. He also outlines how in the book the Dublin Government developed plans to split the IRA on left-right lines, leading to the development of the Provisionals.

All three of these promotional reviews may help to sell the book, but it will be some time until the full significance of the contents of the book sinks in. The first apparently 'real' review I have seen is by one John-Paul McCarthy, who is a historian in Exeter College Oxford. He assesses the book in the Sunday Independent on 08/11/2009, as '..a blizzard of innuendo, pub-talk and cul-chaint...hours of taped monologues with old-timers..'. He then apparently discovers the index, which is fairly extensive (though perhaps it could be improved in a future edition), and uses it selectively to scratch the surface of some of the underlying issues emerging in the post-split politics: the 'Garland faction' and the 'Smullen group', identifying Eoghan Harris as Smullen's 'formidable lieutenant', and regretting the failure of Harris to contribute input. He suggests that the 'Smullen team' in RTE were '...more interested in supporting Section 31 than supporting socialism..', a position he sees as justified by the civil war threat, seen as a 'Balkan-scale catastrophe'. Very few names are mentioned in the review; he seems to concentrate his attention on the Harris-related episodes. On the whole, we must look forward to a full series of analytical reviews and commentaries, many perhaps from concerned activists (as indeed was the present writer), to get a full critical picture, from which, perhaps eventually, some lessons may be learned.

In what follows, I try to develop some of the analysis hinted at in the above, and in my December 2009 Books Ireland review.

In my own attempt to cover some of the ground in my Century of Endeavour (Academica 2003, Lilliput 2006) I gave an overview of the 1960s political processes with which we attempted to develop a non-violent political alternative to the classic Fenian tradition. We ran into problems with the latter, and these are documented in the book under review with reasonable accuracy. For me personally the problems became insuperable by early 1972, and I resigned, remaining however in reasonably friendly contact with those activists who retained something of our left-republican politicising agenda, so that I was aware of most subsequent developments, increasingly critically.

The book under review fills in the picture for me, coinciding with my own experience where it overlaps. So my feeling is that it can be taken as a reasonably reliable record of the processes as they evolved, interacting with the the politics of the Republic, interestingly and in some cases constructively, and also interacting with the complex processes on the Continent which were undergone by the Marxist Left in the latter's attempts to deal with the disastrous legacy of Stalin.

The book, in 17 chapters, with preface and epilogue, falls naturally into 4 sections. The first section, chapters 1 to 4, deals with the consequences of the '1950s aftermath' decision in 1963 to try to build broad-based support around the Wolfe Tone bicentenary. (This decision is attributed to Goulding, but perhaps Cronin and others deserve credit? Goulding's long-term strategic thinking in subsequent events left much to be desired! RJ.) This led to the setting up of the Wolfe Tone 'Directories', basically Army Council creations. Subsequently, after the bicentenary events had taken place, some of those concerned set up the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society (WTS), with its own independent constitution, taking on board the present writer and others. My own personal motivation was to attempt to decouple Marxist analysis from the Lenin/Stalin overlay and develop it on the home ground, on a basis wider than the 'proletariat', invoking the Connolly legacy. There was also considerable influence from Anthony Coughlan, who joined the WTS under the new constitution and later became secretary; in this context he was influential in building retpublican support for the development of the Civil Rights movement in the North, with a view to providing an environment where republican democratic political objectives might be pursued legally, via a movement emerging from underground via the Republican Clubs. During this period however the IRA remained in existence, with its own historical Fenian legacy, and this led to events taking place, documented by Hanley & Millar, which to my mind at the time were counterproductive in our politicisation attempt.

Key passages in this period, as seen from my own perspective, were:

1. The attitude of some of the 1950s leadership to Sean Cronin; it seems he was regarded as 'communist' (p24), due to his wife Terry's favourable treatment of Castro in a United Irishman article. I have it on good authority that there was a threat that the US-originating money supply would be dry up if Cronin were to take up a leading position upon his release from Mountjoy (in or about 1961). His subsequent interactions with the Wolfe Tone Society were however positively supportive of our politicisation process. In this context he was inclined to think we underestimated the internal problems in the movement, due to his earlier experience; this in confirmed by the 'US money' reference above. He had met with the present writer in or about 1959 or 1960, when 'on the run' during the 1950s campaign; we had explored tentatively the 'left-republican' development potential, but at the time this was premature.

2. The Mansion House seminars in September 1963 commemorating Wolfe Tone (p30); these had been set up by Goulding via the 'Wolfe Tone Directory' which had earlier been set up in IRA Army Council initiative. The lecturers included Roger McHugh of UCD, who headed the WT Directory, and managed to pull in Hubert Butler and other prominent intellectuals who were able to project an inclusive secular-republican image of the nation to which Tone aspired. This was convincing at the time to the present writer; I had recently returned from London, with a left-politicising republican agenda in mind, as an alternative to the left-sectarian position of the communist 'Irish Workers League' (IWL), which later amalgamated with the CPNI to become the CPI.

3. The outline of my then political position (p38) is a reasonable summary; I wanted to distance myself from the IWL and its quasi-religious regard for Moscow (as a sort of 'infallible Rome'). I must have been a precursor of what subsequently became known as the 'Eurocommunist' trend. I was impressed by Cuba, while realising that the Cuban use of arms was a consequence of their situation, not a 'principle'.

4. On p57 there is a reference to my attempt to get commemorations made into political rather than religious events, pointing out the divisive nature of the practice of saying the rosary, in a movement that wished to unite 'Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter'. This generated some backlash, primarily via Mac Stiofain and Mac Carthaigh in Cork. I stood my ground, but perhaps underestimated the strength of the Catholic-sectarian groundswell. I attempted subsequently to persuade Sean Mac Stiofain of the relevance of early Christian radicalism, with the aid of the Pasolini film on the Gospel of St Matthew. This episode is referenced on p42, by implication earlier; if fact I think it was subsequent to the 'rosary' episode; this is an indication of the problem of dating the many episodes listed.

5. On p75 there is an account of Denis Foley's attempt to get the issue of abstentionism discussed via the United Irishman; this got him into trouble, and he was replaced as editor. This illustrates the complexity of the obstacles in the way of developing the political process.

6. On p82-3 there is an account of the formation of the student Republican Club in TCD, led by Eoin O Murchu, Kevin McCorry, Dalton Kelly and others who subsequently became well-known. The inaugural meeting was addressed by the Quaker historian Theo Moody on 'Wolfe Tone and the Republican Protestant Tradition'. This, for me, gave the right signals, and reassured me that we were on the right track.

7. On p85 there is a reference to the November 1966 seminar in the War memorial Hall, addressed by Kader Asmal, then a TCD law lecturer and South African anti-apartheid activist, which initiated the process leading to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Asmal has recently retired from a Ministerial position in the current South African Government.

8. On p91 there is a brief, and inadequate, outline of how we tried to broaden the scope of internal education to include some understanding of the problems of European Marxist thinking, and its move to decouple from Moscow and the Stalin tradition, in the context of the developing Marxist-Christian dialogue. There is perhaps scope to explore this further.

9. On p95 the impact of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia is mentioned, an event which sterilised the process of the attempt we were making to adapt Marxism to democratic national politics. Hard-core left elements tended to support Moscow, but those of the republican left with whom I was associating tried as best we could to decouple what we were doing from the Soviet position. Yet, according to the authors, Goulding at the time was keeping close to Micheal O Riordain, who headed the Moscow-oriented IWL. Could this perhaps have been a precursor of the subsequent Moscow-orientation of the post-Goulding leadership? I was not aware of this at the time.

10. The pattern of development in 1968 is documented in Chapter 4, with increasing domination of the situation by the student Left, led by Michael Farrell, under the influence of the continental Trotskyist ultra-left. The Belfast-Derry march in January, which the more cautious Civil Rights leadership advised against, was ambushed violently by the loyalist supremacist hard-right at Burntollet, initiating the pathological processes which culminated in the August 1969 armed B-Special provocation. The politicising republican clubs along the route of the march were supportive of the march. Grassroots activity outside the north was scattered, complex, confused and obsessed with the 'political abstention from the Dail' problem. The August '69 B-Specials armed provocation came as a surprise, and the net effect was a call to arms to defend the people. In this context the Blaney wing of Fianna Fail, intent on getting rid of the left-republican influences in the movement, which they saw as a threat, offered to fund the 'arming of the people' process in the North, provided Goulding, Costello, Ryan and Johnston were excluded from the process (p139). This was the trigger for what became the anti-left Provisional process. It seems that there was competition from 'left' and 'right' arms-oriented processes; Goulding and Costello attempted to get arms from the USSR via Micheal O Riordain, as well as from the US via the Irish-American network. In this context, the present writer found himself mostly in the dark and irrelevant.

The second section, chapters 5 and 6, covers the period subsequent to the August 1969 pogrom led by the RUC and the B Specials, when it was considered necessary to prioritise the defence in arms of the Catholic population. This period coincided with the build-up of the Provisional movement, with covert Fianna Fail support, with the objective of directly taking on British rule and getting rid of the Stormont statelet. The 'official IRA' found itself involved in actions on two fronts, the British and the Provisionals, at a time when they were politically trying to keep the Civil Rights issues on the agenda, a contradictory position which led eventually to an 'official IRA' ceasefire, in late 1972.

In this period the events on record (which included bank and payroll heists) were part of a background of which I was to some extent uneasily aware, while attempting to help those trying to keep the political demands for civil rights top of the agenda, countering the drift into civil war. I can endorse the concluding note at the end of Chapter 6, which places on record that the 'official' leadership had begun to realise that the armed campaign was in no sense the makings of a revolutionary situation, and that it such a context any aspiration to working-class unity across the religious boundaries was unrealisable. Distancing themselves from the Provisional armed campaign became the priority, and the subsequent chapters document the varied and sometimes contradictory policies and actions which resulted.

(The editing of these chapters leaves a lot to be desired; the story dashes backwards and forwards in time, and no sense of chronology emerges; I was unable to pin down the exact date of the ceasefire, and it is not indexed. It poses the problem for the present writer, however: if I had held out until the ceasefire, would I have been able to influence the subsequent political evolution in the direction of Connolly-based Irish-oriented rationality, in the maelstrom of Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist and other influences which were symptomatic of the global crisis of the Marxist political legacy, leading subsequently to the break-up of the USSR?)

The third section, chapters 7 to 11, deals with the development of SFWP (Sinn Fein the Workers Party), increasingly with nominal decoupling from the OIRA. I had distanced myself from the processes described, being marginally aware of them via various personal contacts, primarily with Derry Kelleher, whose memoirs covering the period deserve to be mined for additional insights,

The 4th section, chapters 12 to 16 deals with the Workers Party and its 'Group B', a sort of conspiratorial industrial group, within which the OIRA maintained a shadowy existence. These later sections deserve further analysis, using this book as source, and other relevant sources, including those concerned with the European Marxist crisis and the break-up of the USSR. Key actors in the process were Eoghan Harris and Eoin O Murchu, both of whom aspired to develop an analysis based on Marxism, but who went off in different directions. If they could be persuaded to contribute memoirs to the record, there might emerge a more complete basis for analysis than is feasible with the record outlined in the book under review. My own 'Century of Endeavour' memoir also contributes perhaps to laying the basis for a Marxist approach to the global environment problem, via some sort of 'green-left convergence', but this is another story.

It becomes evident from the book under review that the processes leading to the formation of the Democratic Left, with 6 of the 7 WP TDs walking out and taking most of the activists with them, was the culmination of a combination of pathological processes rooted in European history and underlying the two world wars of the last century. The Fenian tradition, with its admiration of Stalin's robbing banks for the Bolsheviks, turned out to be deep-rooted and persistent. The final chapter, 17, deals in some detail with this break-up, the eventual outcome of which has been the addition of some competent people to the Labour Party leadership.

One can speculate on what might have happened had the 'Group B / OIRA' undergrowth not poisoned the political development of the WP and its potential for developing effectively a creative Marxist political analysis aimed at democratising economic life in Ireland. Would they have come up with a land tax, and the need to regenerate the co-operative movement, getting away from the doctrinaire straitjackets of 'democratic centralism' and 'proletarian' hegemony?

This book, despite its lack of analytical structure, presents a serious challenge to those concerned with reconstructing politics in Ireland to deal with the current economic crisis.

There are a few minor errors in the text which I feel I should note. On p32 there is a reference to the present writer, said to be living in Ranelagh; it should have been Rathmines. In a reference to the IRA internal newsletter an t-Oglach on pp57,64,94 and in the index the aspiration for some reason gets dropped: an t-Oglac. There probably are quite a few minor errors given the multiplicity of oral sources. Also the publishers Penguin note that on p574 line 22 there is an incorrect reference to New Consensus receiving British funding. In fact it was the Peace Train that got the funding.

Notes and References

For Sean Swan's book Official Irish Republicanism 1962 to 1972 see also the supplementary hypertext associated with my Century book.

Published in Books Ireland December 2009:

The Lost Revolution; Brian Hanley & Scott Millar; (the story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party); Penguin Ireland 2009; ISBN 978-1-844-88120-8; pb, pp 658, €22.

This book fills an important gap in the record of the Northern troubles and their background, which have tended to have been dominated by analyses of the Provisionals.

In my own attempt to cover some of the ground in my Century of Endeavour (Academica 2003, Lilliput 2006) I gave an overview of the 1960s political processes with which we attempted to develop a non-violent political alternative to the classic Fenian tradition. We ran into problems with the latter, and these are documented in the book under review with reasonable accuracy. For me personally the problems became insuperable by early 1972, and I resigned, remaining however in reasonably friendly contact with those activists who retained something of our left-republican politicising agenda, so that I was aware of most subsequent developments, increasingly critically.

The book under review fills in the picture for me, coinciding with my own experience where it overlaps. So my feeling is that it can be taken as a reasonably reliable record of the processes as they evolved, interacting with the the politics of the Republic, interestingly and in some cases constructively, and also interacting with the complex processes on the Continent which were undergone by the Marxist Left in the latter's attempts to deal with the disastrous legacy of Stalin.

The book, in 17 chapters, with preface and epilogue, falls naturally into 4 sections. The first section, chapters 1 to 4, deals with the consequences of the '1950s aftermath' decision by Goulding in 1963 to try to build broad-based support around the Wolfe Tone bicentenary, which led to the setting up of the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society, and taking on board the present writer, whose motivation was to attempt to decouple Marxist analysis from the Lenin/Stalin overlay and develop it on the home ground, on a basis wider than the 'proletariat', invoking the Connolly legacy. This led to the development of the Civil Rights movement in the North, with a view to providing an environment where republican democratic political objectives might be pursued legally, via a movement emerging from underground via the Republican Clubs. During this period however the IRA remained in existence, with its own historical Fenian legacy, and this led to events taking place, documented by Hanley & Millar, which to my mind at the time were counterproductive in our politicisation attempt.

The second section, chapters 5 and 6, covers the period subsequent to the August 1969 pogrom led by the RUC and the B Specials, when it was considered necessary to prioritise the defence in arms of the Catholic population. This period coincided with the build-up of the Provisional movement, with covert Fianna Fail support, with the objective of directly taking on British rule and getting rid of the Stormont statelet. The OIRA found itself involved in actions on two fronts, the British and the Provisionals, at a time when they were politically trying to keep the Civil Rights issues on the agenda, a contradictory position which led eventually to the ceasefire, in late 1972.

(The editing of these chapters leaves a lot to be desired; the story dashes backwards and forwards in time, and no sense of chronology emerges; I was unable to pin down the exact date of the ceasefire, and it is not indexed. It poses the problem for the present writer, however: if I had held out until the ceasefire, would I have been able to influence the subsequent political evolution in the direction of Connolly-based Irish-oriented rationality, in the maelstrom of Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist and other influences which were symptomatic of the global crisis of the Marxist political legacy, leading subsequently to the break-up of the USSR?)

The third section, chapters 7 to 11, deals with the development of SFWP (Sinn Fein the Workers Party), increasingly with nominal decoupling from the OIRA, and then the 4th section, chapters 12 to 16 deals with the Workers Party and its 'Group B', a sort of conspiratorial industrial group, within which the OIRA maintained a shadowy existence. These later sections deserve further analysis, using this book as source, and other relevant sources, including those concerned with the European Marxist crisis and the break-up of the USSR.

It becomes evident from this book that the processes leading to the formation of the Democratic Left, with 6 of the 7 WP TDs walking out and taking most of the activists with them, was the culmination of a combination of pathological processes rooted in European history and underlying the two world wars of the last century. The Fenian tradition, with its admiration of Stalin's robbing banks for the Bolsheviks, turned out to be deep-rooted and persistent. The final chapter, 17, deals in some detail with this break-up, the eventual outcome of which has been the addition of some competent people to the Labour Party leadership.

One can speculate on what might have happened had the 'Group B / OIRA' undergrowth not poisoned the political development of the WP and its potential for developing effectively a creative Marxist political analysis aimed at democratising economic life in Ireland. Would they have come up with a land tax, and the need to regenerate the co-operative movement, getting away from the doctrinaire straitjackets of 'democratic centralism' and 'proletarian' hegemony?

This book, despite its lack of analytical structure, presents a serious challenge to those concerned with reconstructing politics in Ireland to deal with the current economic crisis. I hope shortly to do a review in more depth, in the Irish Democrat website http://www.irishdemocrat.co.uk/book-reviews/, in which it is suggested how some of the political lessons might be learned.

There are a few minor errors in the text which I feel I should note. On p32 there is a reference to the present writer, said to be living in Ranelagh; it should have been Rathmines. In a reference to the IRA internal newsletter an t-Oglach on pp57,64,94 and in the index the aspiration for some reason gets dropped: an t-Oglac. There probably are quite a few minor errors given the multiplicity of oral sources. Also the publishers Penguin note that on p574 line 22 there is an incorrect reference to New Consensus receiving British funding. In fact it was the Peace Train that got the funding.

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